"Orpheus’ desire is the desire to precipitate something out of the obscurity of inspiration. The obscure impulse that is inspiration isn’t something that can remain hidden and unrealized but rather, like Eurydice, has to be brought up from the darkness in which it originates and gestates and made self-aware, through the self-awareness the artist gains by approaching it through consciousness and reflection." |
Carl Goos, Orpheus and Eurydice (1826)
As we read in Apollodorus’ Library, Orpheus was the son of the muse Calliope and the river god Oeagrus “or, nominally,” of Apollo. Orpheus was a musician whose songs were of such power that they could move inanimate objects like stones and trees. When his wife Eurydice died of a snakebite he was inconsolable and went down to the underworld, where he persuaded Hades to let Eurydice return to earth with him. Hades agreed on condition that Orpheus not look back until he returned home. Orpheus broke the agreement and turned around to look at Eurydice as they were making their way up; as a result, she had to return to the underworld and he was left without her.
The story of Orpheus’ fatal gaze backward has inspired a number of creative interpretations. In The Space of Literature, Maurice Blanchot presents Orpheus’ descent to the underworld to retrieve Eurydice as a kind of allegory representing the artist’s leap into the darkness in order to reach “that profoundly obscure point toward which art and desire, death and night, seem to tend.” Eurydice represents that point – that point at which inspiration arises and which it inhabits, and through which we can – to the extent that we can – know it. This darkness is something Orpheus has to “bring...to the light of day” and through the work, “give it form, shape, and reality in the day.” But in attempting to do so, he can’t confront it directly: “[h]e can descend toward it, he can...draw it to him and lead it with him upward, but only by turning away from it.” Consequently, this “profoundly obscure point” doesn’t “reveal itself directly; it is only disclosed hidden in the work” (p. 171). But through impatience, Orpheus looks directly into the darkness that is Eurydice and attempts to “put a term to the interminable.” Blanchot calls this his “error.” But it is a necessary error; it represents his obedience to “the deep demand of the work” (p. 173) – the demand that it should exist. Even in its self-subverting consequence, Orpheus’ impatience is, in effect, the work’s willing itself into existence.
Blanchot’s reimagining of the Orpheus myth is more suggestive than explicit. It is couched in condensed, figurative language and paradoxical images, and consequently implies more than it says; it invites unpacking and elaboration.
The story of Orpheus’ fatal gaze backward has inspired a number of creative interpretations. In The Space of Literature, Maurice Blanchot presents Orpheus’ descent to the underworld to retrieve Eurydice as a kind of allegory representing the artist’s leap into the darkness in order to reach “that profoundly obscure point toward which art and desire, death and night, seem to tend.” Eurydice represents that point – that point at which inspiration arises and which it inhabits, and through which we can – to the extent that we can – know it. This darkness is something Orpheus has to “bring...to the light of day” and through the work, “give it form, shape, and reality in the day.” But in attempting to do so, he can’t confront it directly: “[h]e can descend toward it, he can...draw it to him and lead it with him upward, but only by turning away from it.” Consequently, this “profoundly obscure point” doesn’t “reveal itself directly; it is only disclosed hidden in the work” (p. 171). But through impatience, Orpheus looks directly into the darkness that is Eurydice and attempts to “put a term to the interminable.” Blanchot calls this his “error.” But it is a necessary error; it represents his obedience to “the deep demand of the work” (p. 173) – the demand that it should exist. Even in its self-subverting consequence, Orpheus’ impatience is, in effect, the work’s willing itself into existence.
Blanchot’s reimagining of the Orpheus myth is more suggestive than explicit. It is couched in condensed, figurative language and paradoxical images, and consequently implies more than it says; it invites unpacking and elaboration.
***
The main actors in Blanchot’s Orpheus are, in addition to Orpheus himself and Eurydice, the underworld itself as well as the night it contains and the day that stands against it.
As I read it, the underworld is that liminal region within us – to use a spatial metaphor tentatively, and with the caveat that it only gets us so far – in which what the conscious mind of day would identify as non-sense makes sense and in which affective force and alogical associations provide the basis of its logic. It is a domain in which the common language of the group – the koiné of the collective life to which one belongs – becomes pure idiolect. The underworld is the unconscious of the Surrealist misreading of Freud, which is to say a matrix of the associations and correspondences encoded in words’ secret affinities: a place where images speak and words communicate by mime, where words’ shapes overshadow their dictionary meanings and subvert their grammar. None of these associations and correspondences are permanent or particularly stable; they may change over time with changes in experience, the retrieval of hitherto forgotten memories, and above all with their being brought to self-consciousness in the daylight of reflective awareness. The landscape of the underworld has a certain dynamism; its features have a tendency to come into and go out of existence and to rearrange themselves. The underworld is the night within us, a darkness of at least semi-indeterminacy. Not a chaos, exactly, but rather the nebulous precondition for the structured world of day and its furniture of known things and ideas.
Eurydice, in turn, is the enigmatic impulse giving rise to the work. Like the liminal darkness in which she is kept, she is something unknowable in their native form, hence the prohibition against Orpheus’ looking at her. She exists in the underworld and retains something of the night about her, which would be taken away if exposed to the daylight of reflective consciousness, which Orpheus’ gaze brings. As a vehicle for the underworld’s obscure, associative dynamics, Eurydice has the function of mediating between the two worlds of day and night, of consciousness on the one hand, and the inarticulate sense of the pre-sensible on the other, and bringing them into contact with each other. If Orpheus’ task is to bring Eurydice, and with her what’s hidden in night, into the daylight, then it’s Eurydice’s complementary task to bring night into Orpheus’ day. To put it more directly, the kind of inspiration that Eurydice represents aims toward breaking into the logic of the everyday and disrupting it with its own logic of the obscure association and surprising connection. She is able to fulfill her task through her surrogate – the work that she inspires.
Orpheus, in this scheme, is the artist. Blanchot’s account is concerned with writing and the written work, and thus in his reading the figure of Orpheus would be limited to represent the writer, but I believe we can generalize him to encompass artists of other kinds as well, since the position each occupies within the structure under consideration here is the same. In his capacity as an artist of whatever kind, Orpheus’ compulsion to bring Eurydice up into the daylight is the product of his desire to create the work – a work, any work – and hence to translate and transform the secret affinities she conveys into something whose objectification gives those affinities a particular material and aesthetic form. That is the point of his gaze – to look directly at the inchoate images and associations harbored in the darkness that Eurydice represents and to bring them to the light of reflection and conscious intent. Blanchot sees this attempt on Orpheus’ part as his “error,” but understands his gaze – his compulsion – as the moment in which the work, which through Orpheus’ “error,” asserts its will-to-be, ultimately to transcend him. If the work is to be, Orpheus’ looking back at Eurydice is inevitable.
As I read it, the underworld is that liminal region within us – to use a spatial metaphor tentatively, and with the caveat that it only gets us so far – in which what the conscious mind of day would identify as non-sense makes sense and in which affective force and alogical associations provide the basis of its logic. It is a domain in which the common language of the group – the koiné of the collective life to which one belongs – becomes pure idiolect. The underworld is the unconscious of the Surrealist misreading of Freud, which is to say a matrix of the associations and correspondences encoded in words’ secret affinities: a place where images speak and words communicate by mime, where words’ shapes overshadow their dictionary meanings and subvert their grammar. None of these associations and correspondences are permanent or particularly stable; they may change over time with changes in experience, the retrieval of hitherto forgotten memories, and above all with their being brought to self-consciousness in the daylight of reflective awareness. The landscape of the underworld has a certain dynamism; its features have a tendency to come into and go out of existence and to rearrange themselves. The underworld is the night within us, a darkness of at least semi-indeterminacy. Not a chaos, exactly, but rather the nebulous precondition for the structured world of day and its furniture of known things and ideas.
Eurydice, in turn, is the enigmatic impulse giving rise to the work. Like the liminal darkness in which she is kept, she is something unknowable in their native form, hence the prohibition against Orpheus’ looking at her. She exists in the underworld and retains something of the night about her, which would be taken away if exposed to the daylight of reflective consciousness, which Orpheus’ gaze brings. As a vehicle for the underworld’s obscure, associative dynamics, Eurydice has the function of mediating between the two worlds of day and night, of consciousness on the one hand, and the inarticulate sense of the pre-sensible on the other, and bringing them into contact with each other. If Orpheus’ task is to bring Eurydice, and with her what’s hidden in night, into the daylight, then it’s Eurydice’s complementary task to bring night into Orpheus’ day. To put it more directly, the kind of inspiration that Eurydice represents aims toward breaking into the logic of the everyday and disrupting it with its own logic of the obscure association and surprising connection. She is able to fulfill her task through her surrogate – the work that she inspires.
Orpheus, in this scheme, is the artist. Blanchot’s account is concerned with writing and the written work, and thus in his reading the figure of Orpheus would be limited to represent the writer, but I believe we can generalize him to encompass artists of other kinds as well, since the position each occupies within the structure under consideration here is the same. In his capacity as an artist of whatever kind, Orpheus’ compulsion to bring Eurydice up into the daylight is the product of his desire to create the work – a work, any work – and hence to translate and transform the secret affinities she conveys into something whose objectification gives those affinities a particular material and aesthetic form. That is the point of his gaze – to look directly at the inchoate images and associations harbored in the darkness that Eurydice represents and to bring them to the light of reflection and conscious intent. Blanchot sees this attempt on Orpheus’ part as his “error,” but understands his gaze – his compulsion – as the moment in which the work, which through Orpheus’ “error,” asserts its will-to-be, ultimately to transcend him. If the work is to be, Orpheus’ looking back at Eurydice is inevitable.
***
I want to suggest that Orpheus is compelled to look because he is driven by what Breton in “Crisis of the Object” described as the “will to objectification” (volonté d’objectivisation). Or, as Blanchot puts it, Orpheus’ gaze “links inspiration to desire” (p. 175, emphasis in the original). Orpheus’ desire is the desire to precipitate something out of the obscurity of inspiration. The obscure impulse that is inspiration isn’t something that can remain hidden and unrealized but rather, like Eurydice, has to be brought up from the darkness in which it originates and gestates and made self-aware, through the self-awareness the artist gains by approaching it through consciousness and reflection (or, to put it in the language of the myth, by gazing at Eurydice). The work can’t remain in an unrealized state and be a work; it must be brought out and given material embodiment and formal definition. Does this kill the impulse that inspired it? No, but it does transform it. The original impulse – the unconscious inspiration – is reconfigured and, through the will to objectify, is given (or perhaps better, recognized as) a meaning that has to be embodied in the material and formal language of the work. Orpheus must shape the emerging work and determine its limits and in doing so, discover where it ends and where he qua Orpheus, the intending creator of the work, begins. Hence, the necessity of the gaze.
***
For Blanchot, Orpheus’ gaze is “the extreme moment of liberty, the moment when he frees himself from himself and still more important, frees the work from his concern” (p. 175). There are two aspects at play here: the first consists of the eclipse of the self and what it recognizes as its own in the moment in which the unconscious sense of inspiration seizes one; and the second, of the inspired will to objectification giving rise to a work whose meaning is beyond the reach of the artist’s concern.
In "The Creative Act," Marcel Duchamp referred to the moment in which the will to objectify makes itself felt – as the moment in which the artist becomes a mediumistic being channeling something of which he or she is unconscious. What he describes is the manifestation or upsurge of a presubjective impulse, something the artist isn't conscious of because it is something he or she doesn't recognize as properly belonging to him- or herself. Inspiration in this pure state is a catalyst rather than a content per se, an impulse-to-mean rather than a meaning, an opening rather than what it is that shows itself in that opening. Still, the content or meaning is liable to emerge at first as an inchoate something existing liminally – a sensation below the threshold of formulation, understanding, and articulation. The moment one gives oneself up to this presubjective impulse corresponds to the moment Blanchot describes as the moment one frees oneself from oneself. As he puts it elsewhere, “[t]he work requires of the writer that he lose everything...which makes him an ‘I,’ he becomes the empty place where the impersonal affirmative emerges” (p. 55) We can generalize this beyond writing to say that as the work withdraws itself from the artist, the artist as a subjectivity, that is, as a person with determinate qualities, withdraws from him- or herself in the inspired moment from which the work emerges. How long this moment of withdrawal is supposed to last Blanchot doesn’t say. Perhaps only long enough for the unsolicited upsurge of inspiration, the moment when the idea or sensation or inchoate feeling that guides the work bursts seemingly out of nowhere, at least nowhere recognizable within oneself as something of one’s one.
In becoming this empty place, in freeing oneself from oneself, one momentarily erases the threshold separating the I from the not-I.
In "The Creative Act," Marcel Duchamp referred to the moment in which the will to objectify makes itself felt – as the moment in which the artist becomes a mediumistic being channeling something of which he or she is unconscious. What he describes is the manifestation or upsurge of a presubjective impulse, something the artist isn't conscious of because it is something he or she doesn't recognize as properly belonging to him- or herself. Inspiration in this pure state is a catalyst rather than a content per se, an impulse-to-mean rather than a meaning, an opening rather than what it is that shows itself in that opening. Still, the content or meaning is liable to emerge at first as an inchoate something existing liminally – a sensation below the threshold of formulation, understanding, and articulation. The moment one gives oneself up to this presubjective impulse corresponds to the moment Blanchot describes as the moment one frees oneself from oneself. As he puts it elsewhere, “[t]he work requires of the writer that he lose everything...which makes him an ‘I,’ he becomes the empty place where the impersonal affirmative emerges” (p. 55) We can generalize this beyond writing to say that as the work withdraws itself from the artist, the artist as a subjectivity, that is, as a person with determinate qualities, withdraws from him- or herself in the inspired moment from which the work emerges. How long this moment of withdrawal is supposed to last Blanchot doesn’t say. Perhaps only long enough for the unsolicited upsurge of inspiration, the moment when the idea or sensation or inchoate feeling that guides the work bursts seemingly out of nowhere, at least nowhere recognizable within oneself as something of one’s one.
In becoming this empty place, in freeing oneself from oneself, one momentarily erases the threshold separating the I from the not-I.
***
In the will to objectify the not-I of the presubjective meets the I of subjectivity, whose drive is to objectify the not-I and to exteriorize it in the material and formal choices through which subjectivity asserts itself and makes itself known as itself and no other. This I believe is the ultimate meaning of the moment at which Orpheus' gaze frees himself from himself. In gazing at Eurydice he faces the not-I that paradoxically is his and frees himself of the determinations, preferences, aversions, and already-knowns of the subjective. Only to will that this freedom express itself in an objective form drawing on the determinations of the subjective. But, crucially, not only on those.
***
Once the will to objectify is put in motion and the initial inspiration is shaped and translated into the material and formal language of the work-in-progress, we run into another transformation, one in which the artist’s original, intended meaning – a meaning that can be consciously conceived or unconsciously channeled, as in the case of automatic writing – is transformed by the work. (I take it as given that even in cases where a specific meaning intention is lacking some kind of meaning – call it unconscious or unintended – will manage to convey itself through the will to objectification. It’s possible, in other words, to have a work that isn’t intended to signify anything other than an otherwise unspecific will to objectify.) This intended meaning is complicated by virtue of the emanation of meanings suggested by certain features of the work, meanings made possible by the associative suggestiveness of the work’s material and formal languages which, in addition to the purely subjective associations they may trigger in one receiving the work, necessarily refer back to other works no matter how obliquely or parodically. In its objectification, the work transcends the subjectivity that shaped it even as it embodies, through its transformations, what that subjectivity intended it to embody.
When the will to objectify emerges it necessarily takes up a position within a tradition, a position which helps to define the way it embodies its meaning and thus helps to determine its limits. And yet these limits are always to an extent open, since the evolution of the tradition within which it is positioned, as well as the interpretive possibilities brought to it by those who encounter and interpret it over time, will uncover new dimensions of significance of which the creator was originally unaware. Are these uncovered meanings legacies of the underworld, meanings brought up without the creator’s being aware that they were being brought up? That’s a possibility. Also possible is that the work has something like a meaning intention of its own, what Umberto Eco called an intentio operis in which properties of the work – necessary to it, because it has to take material form in order to exist, and yet whose meaning-implications are unanticipated – mean in their own right, over and above what the artist originally meant them to mean.
When the will to objectify emerges it necessarily takes up a position within a tradition, a position which helps to define the way it embodies its meaning and thus helps to determine its limits. And yet these limits are always to an extent open, since the evolution of the tradition within which it is positioned, as well as the interpretive possibilities brought to it by those who encounter and interpret it over time, will uncover new dimensions of significance of which the creator was originally unaware. Are these uncovered meanings legacies of the underworld, meanings brought up without the creator’s being aware that they were being brought up? That’s a possibility. Also possible is that the work has something like a meaning intention of its own, what Umberto Eco called an intentio operis in which properties of the work – necessary to it, because it has to take material form in order to exist, and yet whose meaning-implications are unanticipated – mean in their own right, over and above what the artist originally meant them to mean.
***
The will to objectification illuminates one region of the underworld and, through the object it gives rise to (the work) lets us grasp something of that region, albeit indirectly, in terms of the material and formal properties of the work into which we’ve translated our encounter with it. As with any translation, objectification inevitably involves compromises and a transformation of what is being translated. But if the supposition is correct that the work can have a meaning intention of its own, we can see that unlike in virtually all cases of translation, in which something is lost, in this case something is gained as well. What’s gained is the possibility of the work acquiring the capacity to become a source of inspiration to the artist who originally was inspired to create it. This at any rate is how I interpret Blanchot’s claim that the work-in-progress is somehow its own source – that “[t]he central point of the work is the work as origin” (p. 54). What I think this means is that to the extent that its material and formal properties endow it with a meaning intention of its own, the work sheds an unexpected light on what the artist meant to mean with it and through a kind of feedback loop provokes (or better, “inspires”) him or her to extend the work into previously unintended, and unimagined, areas. Duchamp’s transference, in which the artist projects meaning into the work, reverses itself as the work now projects meaning back to the artist, in a kind of countertransference. In effect, the artist becomes the outside interpreter of his or her own work.
***
Inspiration can come from outside, from the given of the material, of formal precedent, and practical tradition, not because this given represents the inertia of the already-done, but because it in fact represents the possibility of transformation. It solicits us to do something with it, something only we can do with it, and to disclose ourselves in the doing. “Inspiration” in this instance just is the recognition of this solicitation and the agreement to take it up. What this means, though, is that while the work, through the semi-independence of its objecthood, frees itself from our concern, our concern isn’t reciprocally freed from the work. The work solicits our involvement with it because it is already implicated in a project. It’s a matter of concern to us; we have an affective stake in it even when its meaning apparently escapes from us. It isn’t a neutral thing to which we are indifferent. If it were, it would be powerless to inspire us. Just the fact that we were inspired to create it guarantees its mattering to us, no matter how opaque it may seem to become to our attempt to grasp its complete meaning.
***
The artist’s interpretive encounter with the work – his or her attempt to grasp the full meaning of what apparently has freed itself from his or her intention – is key to his or her encountering the original inspiration that made its creation necessary. The work as object plays an essential, mediating role here. We know the darkness of the unconscious inspiration as such – to the degree that we can know a liminal region – only to the extent that we approach it through the will to objectification and the desire to give its vaguely grasped phenomena determinate form in an actual object or an object of consciousness. In the language of the myth, Eurydice can’t be looked at directly, but only indirectly. It’s at this point of objectification that we can recognize the original inspiration as something that’s both ours, i.e., something constituted by the contingencies of our particular way of being-in-the-world, and not ours, which is to say something that originated beneath the threshold of awareness and just out of reach. (We might describe this latter as consisting in our particular way of being-in-the-underworld of the liminal, as our way of being not-ourselves in the only way that we have to be it.) To recognize oneself in this darkness is to recognize the darkness as oneself and to acknowledge our own position within the underworld.
In the myth, Eurydice has the function of providing the occasion for Orpheus to come to that recognition. The darkness that she brings from the underworld is that part of the underworld that is Orpheus’ own. No wonder he shows the impatience Blanchot charges him with. He’s compelled to try to look directly at Eurydice and to grasp what she brings because he’s compelled to uncover and grasp that part of himself which ordinarily evades him, but which finds expression in the work that emerges from this moment of inspiration. In this allegory of blindness and insight Eurydice is really Orpheus in the guise of another.
In the myth, Eurydice has the function of providing the occasion for Orpheus to come to that recognition. The darkness that she brings from the underworld is that part of the underworld that is Orpheus’ own. No wonder he shows the impatience Blanchot charges him with. He’s compelled to try to look directly at Eurydice and to grasp what she brings because he’s compelled to uncover and grasp that part of himself which ordinarily evades him, but which finds expression in the work that emerges from this moment of inspiration. In this allegory of blindness and insight Eurydice is really Orpheus in the guise of another.
Reference:
Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, tr. Ann Smock (Lincoln NE: U of Nebraska Press, 1989)
Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, tr. Ann Smock (Lincoln NE: U of Nebraska Press, 1989)
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Daniel Barbiero is a writer, double bassist, and composer in the Washington DC area. He writes about the art, music, and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century as well as on contemporary work; his essays and reviews have appeared in Arteidolia, Heavy Feather Review, periodicities, Rain Taxi, Word for/Word, Otoliths, Offcourse, Utriculi, London Grip, and elsewhere. He is the author of As Within, So Without, a collection of essays published by Arteidolia Press; his score Boundary Conditions III appears in A Year of Deep Listening (Terra Nova Press).
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