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About Angus Fletcher
Kenneth Gross
21-26 minutes
Let me start with something that I wrote about Angus soon after he died this past
November, at age 87:
Angus Fletcher wanted people to feel what is most blunt and strange in the life
of literature, in how literature gives form to life.He wrote about the abstractions
of allegorical fiction as visceral things, shapes of human compulsion, or as
“daemons,” wild but embodied spirits—talking as if he knew such creatures well,
knew how they lived and how they lost their lives. He described how literature
shows us the world as both ordered temple and chaotic labyrinth, and made you feel
how each could be both a home and a place of exile, and then the power of living
just at the threshold between temple and maze.
I remember talking with him once about the ghost in Hamlet, that creature who
describes a listener’s hair standing up fearfully, “like quills upon the fretful
porpentine.” Only a ghost would talk that way, Angus smilingly insisted. Such
uncanny words were the “natural language of ghosts.” He spoke as if he himself had
talked with such creatures in the natural course of his life, and knew the sound of
them. He wrote once about “the ghostly operations of thought, whose source, as
thought, appears to be lodged in the tissue of individual life.”
I remember a late night phone call in which he talked about laying down the
coiled lines of a drip system under the earth of his garden in the high desert of
New Mexico, a work he did with his own hands. That system became, as he described
it, its own kind of wonder, also an image of thought. I pictured the buried water-
lines as a nourishing, labyrinthine script, like that page of twisted plot lines
offered up in Tristram Shandy (a book he loved). Angus fed the minds of friends and
students in unpredictable ways, often by pointing out unpredictable words and
objects around us, wonders hidden in plain sight.
I remember his talking about the Highland Scots from whom he was descended,
women and men who made their home in that stark, always changing landscape. He
liked pointing out that Robert Louis Stevenson, great romancer and traveler, came
from a family of Scottish engineers who specialized in building lighthouses on the
most dangerous, storm-ridden coast-lines.
In later work, thinking about how we imagine earth, and our earthly fate, he
grew fascinated with another edge or threshold: the horizon. It is a line that we
both find and make, a living thing. It helped him describe how, in poets like Clare
and Whitman, the mind tries to compass its own limits, to compass both its own
world and a world outside of which it is yet a part, the world of other creatures,
voices, landscapes, and weathers. He saw these poets—indeed, all of us—always
making, bending, and breaking circles, drawing and redrawing the horizons our minds
pursue, the circumference of our fears and dreams.
Marking horizons, he wrote, “is sometimes a hard business, calling the ship to
reach the impossible edge of a dull, leaden shadow line.” But the horizon is also
“always only a phenomenon of beckoning promise, reminding us that we are encircled
by our own ignorance, even as we are protected by the circle of our tentative
knowing. Finally, horizon carries us outside of ourselves, yet keeps our feet on
the ground.”
Angus was himself a horizon, always in motion, yet stopped somewhere waiting
for you.
This piece appeared as part of a gathering of homages to Angus published in the Los
Angeles Review of Books. It catches a little of what I’d want to say about him
here, though I could never really convey his quicksilver mind, his deep geniality
and sense of play, his candor, sympathy, and curiosity, his present-ness to the
world, his sharp anger at stupidity and cruelty. Whatever question engaged him, he
spoke about as if from a depth of old reflection, even as he kept the lightness of
a thought suddenly improvised and open to change. Angus was a bit of a spellbinder
as a talker, partly because he was himself bound by the spell of things he was
thinking about, and offered to you to think about—often when he was helping you
probe your own thoughts about a new or ongoing piece of work, to help you find out
your own most urgent questions, intuitions, obsessions.
Angus’s first and still best known book is Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode,
published in 1964 when he was 35, and still in print, still a powerful tool for
making sense of this ancient mode. For me it was a crucial guide in my first
investigations of Spenser. What has stayed with me most about this complex, madly
learned book is its way of conveying the dynamic feel of allegorical fictions,
their almost bodily life, the kind of shape and energy they give to ideas. (Angus
was often less interested in the particular ideas themselves, or the interpretive
labor that it takes to unpack ideas in allegory—he often held himself aloof from
the work of “interpretation,” as if something else had to happen first). It is
characteristic of Angus’s mind that he would haul into use the archaic, magical
idea of the daemon—the name for a mediating or middle spirit, deeply ambivalent and
often dangerous in its being—to characterize the mode of an allegorical agent’s
life, and then further join that idea to the analogy of living humans caught by
compulsions, obsessions, an idée fixe. This way of speaking catches the visceral,
psychic appeal of what can often seem an abstract, impersonal mode of writing, as
well as its tendency, as Angus wrote, to become an armored, robotic form of fiction
in the service of power and ideology, a mechanized dream of sense-making. This
breadth of analogy was part of what allowed Angus’s “theory” (a charged and often
mysterious word for him) its wide historical scope: “I wanted my work,” he wrote in
2012, “to apply to foxes in Aesop, knights in Tasso, the nose and portrait in
Gogol, the detective in Poe, the fallen woman in Hawthorne, Big Brother and Winston
Smith in Orwell, the plague in Camus.”
It’s not just the theoretical terms but the odd immediacy of encounter in his
writing that counts: “If we were to meet an allegorical character in real life, we
would say of him that he was obsessed with only one idea or that he had an
absolutely one-track mind … . It would seem that he was driven by some hidden,
private force; or viewing him from another angle, it would appear that he did not
control his own destiny, but appeared to be controlled by some foreign force,
something outside the sphere of his own ego” (my emphasis). This is a description
of “behavior manifested by people who are thought (however unscientifically) to be
possessed by a daemon … . And since there is no practical difference between being
possessed by a daemon and being one,” there is nothing to prevent our “equating
daemonic and allegorical agency” (again, my emphasis). This is a very strange way
of speaking. To say that “there is no practical difference between being possessed
by a daemon and being one” is wild—you want to ask, what sense of the word
“practical” is at work here? You also feel as if the writer has met just such
daemons. As perhaps we all have. The idea of the daemon becomes in a passage like
this as immediate, as present, as it is archaic.
Angus’s next book took almost twenty years to emerge. Colors of the Mind:
Conjectures on Thinking in Literature, published in 1991, gathers together essays
on a vast range of texts, from pre-Socratic fragments, Don Quixote, and Paradise
Lost to the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Wallace Stevens, the later
philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the films of Lucchino Visconti. One central
theme is that “thinking in literature” comes to us only through metaphor, through
intensely, mysteriously shaped gestures of language, what he calls an “iconography
of mind.” This book returns to reflecting on thresholds and labyrinths as aspects
of such an iconography (for instance, in a great essay titled “The Image of Lost
Direction”). Even more crucial is the book’s preoccupation with the idea of the
“gnome,” or the “gnomic.” That archaic word for an aphorism or maxim (from the
Greek for “thought,” “opinion”) helps Angus to name particularly urgent shapes of
thought, things at once luminous and opaque, impersonal and inward. The true gnome,
he implies, is resistant to mere interpretation and also (unlike the “daemonic
agent”) resistant to the appropriations of ideology. Inescapably an artifact of
language, the gnome yet speaks its own silence, its own loss of sense, speaks of
what language can only name or know by indirection, telling the truth “slant,” as
Emily Dickinson says one must. Essentially literary, the gnome puts our definitions
of literature to the test. Angus’s own examples of the gnome, “listed in no special
order,” include these:
You get in such a list a kind of wit, a kind of waiting and watching, a holding of
himself open to thought, that is very much Angus’s own. It evokes an apprehension
of the strange in the commonplace, the immediate in the ancient. They are forms of
what he called, in a phrase borrowed from Husserl, “immanent transcendence.” These
are words that might help you survive in the world, partly in the ways that the
words reflect on themselves, on how we trust or turn them.
Colors of the Mind (shepherded into print, as were all of the subsequent books, by
his devoted editor at Harvard University Press, Lindsay Waters) heralded a kind of
Renaissance in Angus’s writing, though that would take more than a decade to
crystallize. If I gallop through his last three books here it is just because the
scope of them, their ambition and freedom of thought, makes summary more than
usually difficult.
A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of the
Imagination, from 2004, brought together his lifelong preoccupation with American
poetry with a growing interest in absorbing to the work of criticism the languages
of science and mathematics, here especially the work of quantum and particle
theory, chaos theory and the study of “emergent orders,” as well as aspects of
ecological and environmental thinking. The book focuses on the poetry of John
Clare, Walt Whitman, and John Ashbery—Clare being included as a crucial British
precursor for the kind of poetry the two American poets come to write. It asks us
to think about the radical-ness of a poetry of what seems mere “description,” alive
to the stark presence and opacity of what is given in the world. Wonder, the
negotiation of wonder, is of the essence. Angus evokes a poetry that places our
thought—also the stops, leaps, waves, wanderings, and massings of our words—within
the world, makes them part of “the surround,” the always moving “horizon” of our
experience, the threshold of desire, discovery, limit, renewal, anxiety, entrapment
and freedom. It is a poetry that traces the sense of an “almost genetic connection
between poetry and natural fact,” the truth of the feeling “that the sky may be at
the back of someone’s mind.” Such poetry becomes the chief register of a kind of
“diurnal knowledge” without which both human imagination and the earth which that
imagination finds and creates are in danger of death, of self-destruction.
The Topological Imagination: Edges, Spheres, and Islands was published in April of
2016, just half a year before Angus died. Topology is, in his view, principally “a
theory of edges”—the edge being, like the horizon, something the mind invents and
plays with, translates, dissolves, and hardens, rather than something merely found
in nature. It is centrally a book about the shape of our imagining, especially our
imagining of the earth and our own life on earth, the radicality of our place here.
It is in this “an essay in praise of the most unusual sphere ever imagined,” as he
says at the close. Indeed, the book asks us to reimagine our imagining, to see
better its shape and stakes. Angus wants to consider how the imagination takes in
the nature of change and stability in change, also the imagination’s ambitions
toward wholeness. He wants to educate our imaginations in the need to embrace
adaptive, emergent patterns of thought that yet honor the “bass note” of
terrestrial existence, our ties to diurnal cycles.
Old preoccupations come into play throughout the book: Giambattista Vico on the
poetics of law, history, and culture, Coleridge on thresholds, I. A. Richards
(Angus’s cherished thesis advisor at Harvard) on the “disparity action” of
metaphor. But there is an ever-deepening engagement with scientific and
mathematical thought. He dwells at length, for instance, on the eighteenth-century
mathematician Leopold Euler’s invention of “the edge,” basic to his founding of
what was only later named “topology”; on Rachel Carson’s dark reflections about
life and death at the shore; on the quantum theorist David Bohm’s discussions of
the “implicate order” of the physical and mental world; on James Lovelock’s
controversial “Gaia hypothesis”; and on Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky’s posit of the
“biosphere.” In trying to build bridges between realms of thought too often
separated, the book broods on what it means for us to be inside a world that is
also inside us, a paradox that marks “the mysterious dimensionality of our
existence.” It is a book which includes a complex meditation on the many
boundaries, edges, cuts, walls, thresholds, and horizons that shape our experience.
Fiercely skeptical as it is, the book also asks us to take seriously a model for a
kind of idealism that doesn’t slander time, or the life of earth, by banking on
violent, rigid models of truth, narrowly framed (and hence destructive)
explanations or maps of cause.
A coda to this late work might be found in an unpublished essay from 2010: “We are
born into a world that we must imagine, if we are to understand the staging of our
lives in terms no less complex than the twisting strands of life process, so rich
with promise and yet so burdened with fear in all its tragicomedy. Perhaps
Shakespeare’s play The Tempest tells a story very close to our earthly fate.
Perhaps we should begin with the idea of a storm survived.”
Kenneth Gross
University of Rochester
Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. Reprinted with a preface by Harold Bloom
and a new Afterword by the author, Princeton UP, 2012.
A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of the
Imagination. Harvard UP, 1991.
Time, Space, and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare. Harvard UP, 2007.
The Topological Imagination: Edges, Spheres, and Islands. Harvard UP, 2016.
“Northrop Frye: The Critical Passion.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 1, no. 4, 1975, pp.
741-756.
“On Two Words in the Libretto of The Magic Flute.” The Georgia Review, vol. 29, no.
1, 1975, pp. 128-53.
“The Place of Despair and Hope.” Social Research, vol. 66, no. 2, 1999, pp. 521-29.
“Complicity and the Genesis of Shakespearean Dramatic Discourse” [on Harry Berger
Jr.]. Shakespeare Studies, vol. 27, 1999, pp. 37-41.
“Words for Music, Perhaps.” The Hopkins Review, vol. 1, no. 4, 2008, New Series,
pp. 559-592.
“Poetic Wisdom and the Barbarism of Reflection.” The Hopkins Review, vol. 5, no. 1,
2012, New Series, pp. 50-67.
Note: In the 1970s especially, Fletcher also published probing reviews of books by
his major contemporaries in the field of literary criticism and theory, including
Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and Edward Said.