Volume 1, Number 1
Robinson Jeffers and the California Sublime
by Robert Zaller
Volume 1, Number 1
Robinson Jeffers and the California Sublime
by Robert Zaller
1. The elements of landscape, Robinson Jeffers commentedin a late poem--"Mountain and ocean, rock, water and beasts and trees"--were the real protagonists of his narratives; the human agents only "symbolic interpreters."1 Like any strong apothegm this remark begs qualification, for the passionate humanity of Jeffers' best poems has a manifestly tragic sweep, and the complex process of mediation they enact within what is ultimately perceived as a divine manifold precludes a reductive account of any of their elements. If, moreover, one employs the dramatic schema so often suggested by Jeffers himself--human actors performing on a natural stage before a divine audience--it might well be argued that the middle term is actually the exiguous one. In "Evening Ebb" Jeffers glimpses
Through rifts in the screen of the world pale gold gleams and the
evening
Star suddenly glid[ing] like a flying torch.
As if we had not been meant to see her; rehearsing behind
The screen of the world for another audience. (CP 2: 4)
2. Here the natural world, or at least our local view of it, appears as a mere transparency that discloses yet another stage, larger perhaps but no more definitive. It is--Jeffers says it twice--a screen, a backdrop. Yet if it is from this perspective only the anteroom of reality, it is from another our full and sufficient surround, not merely the setting but the instigation of human passion:
This coast crying out for tragedy like all beautiful places,
(The quiet ones ask for quieter suffering: but here the granite
cliff the gaunt cypresses crown
Demands what victim? The dykes of red lava and black what Titan?
The hills like pointed flames
Beyond Soberanes, the terrible peaks of the bare hills under the
sun, what immolation?)
This coast crying out for tragedy like all beautiful places: and
like the passionate spirit of humanity
Pain for its bread . . .
("Apology for Bad Dreams," CP 1: 209)
3. We are closer here to Jeffers' suggestion of landscape as the protagonist, or at least the source of tragic action, both "demanding" and "crying out" for human completion. The natural energy represented by the polarities of granite and lava flows through both the greatest and smallest units of terrestrial matter, both imbued with and aspiring toward divine presence:
. . . who feels what God feels
Knows the straining flesh, the aching desires,
The enormous water straining its bounds, the electric
Strain in the cloud, the strain of the oil in the oil-tanks
At Monterey aching to burn, the strain of the spinning
Demons that make an atom, straining to fly asunder,
Straining to rest at the center,
The strain in the skull, blind strains, force and counterforce
Nothing prevails . . .
("The Prelude," CP 1: 244)
4. In this passage, Godhead, the material world, and the human skull are all implicated in one vast action, one common condition of "strain." Later in "The Women at Point Sur" the poem's chief human protagonist, the Rev. Barclay, muses that "God thinks through action"; this activity, as natural process, binds both the animate and inanimate worlds. What is posited then in the mature Jeffers is a continuum of being which partakes of divinity at every point, however differentiated it may appear on the phenomenal level. This continuum includes what is called "nature" and what is called "humanity," both of which, insofar as they are differentiable, exhibit characteristic and specific value, and both of which, insofar as they are dynamic, participate in the divine agon.
5. From this it can be seen that any radical division--between animate and inanimate, between person and place--represents a second-order manifestation of being only. Thus it is that Jeffers can speak of the landscape as a protagonist and of human agents as its mere "interpreters" without paradox; in the theater of being, mass and duration take precedence over articulation, concentrated striving over febrile sensation. What counts is the drama of the whole, which no single element can adequately represent; as Jeffers urges the characters of "Point Sur," "stammer the tragedy you crackled vessels."
6. If what is primary in our experience is the continuum, the manifold, we are nonetheless incapable of grasping it except in moments of mystical rapture (which, as the case of Barclay himself reminds us, are often suspect and dangerous), nor of expressing it except by suggestion and nuance. Accordingly, we must break up experience into units of perception, which alone can make it accessible to thought and action. The very conditions of our existence, therefore, require us to segment reality; that is, to reduce, rationalize, and represent it. The result, however, is to alienate ourselves from the divine ground, to become, as Jeffers suggests in "The Answer," a thing "apart." Jeffers likens humanity in such condition to "a severed hand," an image that suggests the very mechanism of our evolutionary adaptability and success as the symbol of our final incapacity and dispossession. What is required, then, is a means of reconnecting us to divine "integrity" and "wholeness." This has been the problematic of Western aesthetics for the past three centuries, or more precisely the question of the sublime.
7. The sublime appeared as a problem in Baroque painting and philosophy long before Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful posited it as a subject of analysis. Burke defined the sublime as that which compelled our admiration and wonder, whereas the beautiful was merely that which pleased us, in short that which we condescended to notice. He thereby identified aesthetic response crucially with power; as Frances Ferguson neatly epitomizes the case, "The sublime is the realm of estrangement, of power seen as greater than our own; the beautiful, the realm of familiarity, of power seen as lesser than our own" (Ferguson 44).
8. On such a view, aesthetic response is a wholly subjective affair, and the sublime perpetually tends toward the beautiful as familiarity lessens awe and breeds complacency. Kant's far more probing account of the sublime in The Critique of Judgment, however, distanced it from the merely subjective in two ways. He restricted it to the perception of natural scenes, forces, and objects alone, and he accounted for it in terms of our apprehension of the noumenal frontier that we could intuit but not cross--that is, our sense of a reality beyond our ken, let alone our control. As Kant remarks, "Nature is . . . sublime in those of its phenomena whose intuition brings with it the idea of infinity," which forces us beyond series and differentiation and compels us to recognize the unknowable one within the knowable many. This redounds back on the sequential construction of reality that orders phenomenal experience; thus, "the comprehension of the manifold in the unity . . . is a regress which annihilates the condition of time" (Ferguson 44), and forces upon us the notion of an eternal, that is a perpetually copresent reality. Let us compare this formulation with Orestes' description of his transfiguring experience in Jeffers' "The Tower Beyond Tragedy":
. . . they have not made words for it, to
go beyond things, beyond hours and ages,
And be all things in all time, in their returns and passages,
in the motionless and timeless centre,
In the white of the fire . . . how can I express the excellence I
have found, that has no color but clearness . . .
no time but spheral eternity. (CP 1: 177)
9. Jeffers' debt to the Kantian sublime is particularly evident in this passage, but it pervades his mature work as a whole. In this he is both typical and singular; typical as a representative (though belated) Romantic poet, singular as an American one. Emerson apart, sublimity scarcely figures in nineteenth-century American verse, or when it does is propounded in Burkean terms as an exercise in domestication and self-empowerment: sentimentalizing the wild or weight-lifting for manifest destiny. When William Cullen Bryant describes himself as "Almost annihilated" beside a "mighty oak," we feel certain he will recover his sangfroid soon enough, just as from an opposed perspective we are equally confident that our poet of the egotistical sublime, Walt Whitman, will never meet a cosmos he is unequal to.
10. Sublimity is more apparent a theme in nineteenth-century American painting, though on very much the same terms. Thomas Cole's gargantuan landscapes--already celebrated by Bryant in the 1820s--depict the sublime being assimilated to the picturesque. The painting process itself, its stroke by stroke accretion foreshadowing the appropriation of the land by an army of settlers, enacts a conquest that, squared off by the frame, confines the wilderness within borders. Not that the American painter was so confined: Frederic Church's "The Heart of the Andes" (1859), perhaps the most self-conscious artistic gesture of manifest destiny, not merely appropriated but reconfigured the Andes, superimposing several different climatic and geological zones to create a composite landscape.
11. By the end of the century the American frontier had closed, and the pockets of wilderness that remained had been enclosed in a national park system. Again in Burkean terms, the sublime had become the beautiful, the threatening vastness of an unclaimed continent the preserve of backpackers and daytrippers. The sublime could exist now only as nostalgia. Exploring the Sierra, the future director of the U. S. Geological Survey admonished himself in his journal, "You Clarence King never dare to look or speak of nature save with respect and the admiration you are capable of" (Smith 86). The willed experience of sublimity, as Burke would have noted, was an exercise in contradiction, but the new custodians of the land presumably found self-exhortation not amiss in fending off the fatigue of grandeur no less than the onslaughts of developers.
12. The second-order literature of sublimity produced by the conservation movement is best sampled in the writings of John Muir. Muir's description of a day in Yosemite epitomizes the genre:
The rose light of the dawn, creeping higher among the stars,
changes to daffodil yellow; then come the level enthusiastic
sunbeams pouring across the feathery ridges, touching pine
after pine, spruce and fir, libocedrus and lordly sequoia,
searching every recess, until all are awakened and warmed.
In the white noon they shine in silvery splendor, every needle
and cell in bole and branch thrilling and tingling with ardent
life; and the whole landscape glows with consciousness, like
the face of a god. The hours go by uncounted. The evening
flames with purple and gold. The breeze that has been blowing
from the lowlands dies away, and far and near the mighty host
of trees baptized in the purple flood stand hushed and
thoughtful, awaiting the sun's blessing and farewell,--as
impressive a ceremony as if it were never to rise again. When
the daylight fades, the night breeze from the snowy summits
begins to blow, and the trees, waving and rustling beneath the
stars, breathe free again. (Muir 82)
Much of this sort of thing, recast in meter, appears in Jeffers' Californians:
. . . with cloud
The hill's vast head was often bowed
As by a weight too great to bear;
The sun was gone, the sky was black;
It seemed the heights must groan, must break . . . ("Dorothy Atwell," CA 75)
Then are these pinetrees great; they stand
Self-authorized, unshifting,
From the lone verge of sea and land
Their sunlit spires uplifting. ("A Westward Beach," CA 108)
13. We need not belabor the point. Half anthropomorphized, half divinized, the landscape is a natural cathedral, an organism that thrills and tingles, a sensibility that suffers and exults. There seems nothing left either of Burke or of Kant in this decadent sublime. It speaks of nature's majesty but is covertly imperial, annexing landscape not to economic utility but Romantic afflatus, subjecting it not to axe and plow but pathetic fallacy. Jeffers carries this process to its culmination in a brief narrative, "At Lindsay's Cabin," which concludes:
This man, as others love a woman, he
His chosen valley. Look! For I believe
His love hath made it the more beautiful. (CA 96)
14. In this inversion of the sublime, human emotion is not merely reflected in landscape but materially alters it, enhancing its aesthetic value as development might enhance its value as real estate. No matter that these values might, and for Muir or Jeffers certainly would be antithetical; the process of appropriation, of making what Jeffers would later call subjected earth (CP 2: 128-29), is the same.
15. The poems in Californians were the fruit of Jeffers' first two years in Carmel, where he settled in 1914 as a young man of twenty-seven, founded a family, and remained for the rest of his life. Jeffers looked back on this moment as seminal nearly a quarter of a century later in the preface to his Selected Poems:
A . . . piece of pure accident brought us to the Monterey
coast mountains, where for the first time in my life I could
see people living--amid magnificent unspoiled scenery--
essentially as they did in the Idyls or the Sagas, or in
Homer's Ithaca. Here was life purged of its ephemeral
accretions. Men were riding after cattle, or plowing the
headland, hovered by white sea-gulls, as they have done for
thousands of years, and will for thousands of years to come.
Here was contemporary life that was also permanent life; and
not shut from the modern world but conscious of it and related
to it; capable of expressing its spirit, but unencumbered by
the mass of poetically irrelevant details and complexities
that make a civilization. (SP xv-xvi)
16. This passage, written from Jeffers' mature perspective, is highly suggestive. Jeffers does not describe the California coast as virgin or desolate, but pastoral. He screens it through literary references, but although the references are heroic, the images are idyllic. Instead of appropriating the coast to the Romantic or transcendental sublime, he annexes it to history, or more properly saga--contemporary life that is also "permanent" life. This move not only elides a real piece of history, the dispossession of the indigenous coastal tribes by white settlers, but connives at a successor myth that views the conquerors as aboriginal and expunges the victims even from memory. Jeffers had of course acknowledged the settler conquest in "Tamar," and his sympathies showed clearly in the judgment he passed on the conquerors in "A Redeemer" ("Oh as a rich man eats a forest for profit and a field for vanity, so you came west and raped/ The continent and brushed its people to death," CP 1: 407). Similarly, the cozy picture of a pastoral Eden exempt from change for "thousands of years to come" is belied by Jeffers' contemplation of the coast's "obscene [i.e., civilized] future" ("The Broken Balance," CP 1: 375). The seeming contradiction is resolved, I think, by considering the prose passage as not merely a heavily worked rescension of Jeffers' first impression of the central California coast but as also a strategic idealization, a means of suggesting the proper human relation to landscape (let us not forget that this is the poet who says, "I can tell lies in prose"). In any case, the pastoral image remained important to him, not merely as an antidote to civilized excess but also as a ballast to the sublime. In "The Wind-Struck Music," a poem contemporary with the prose passage, he eulogized the countryman's life:
This old man died last winter, having lived
eighty-one years under open sky,
Concerned with cattle, horses and hunting, no thought nor emotion
that all his ancestors since the ice-age
Could not have comprehended. I call that a good life; narrow, but
vastly better than most
Men's lives, and beyond comparison more beautiful; the wind-struck
music men's bones were molded to be the harp for. (CP 2: 521)
He returned to the same point in a late, untitled poem:
What's the best life for a man? To ride in the wind. To ride
horses and herd cattle
In solitary places above the ocean on the beautiful mountain, and
come home hungry in the evening
And eat and sleep. He will live in the wild wind and quick rain,
he will not ruin his eyes with reading,
Nor think too much. (CP 3: 424)
Thus far the poem merely recapitulates the theme of "The Wind-Struck Music." But Jeffers proceeds to expand his cast of characters:
However, we must have philosophers.
I will have shepherds for my philosophers,
Tall dreary men lying on the hills all night
Watching the stars, let their dogs watch the sheep. And I'll have
lunatics
For my poets, strolling from farm to farm, wild liars distorting
The country news into supernaturalism--
For all men to such minds are devils or gods--and that increases
Man's dignity, man's importance, necessary lies
Best told by fools.
To this company we must add a fourth character, from "A Little Scraping":
. . . a woman with jade-pale eyes, hiding a knife in her hand,
[who] Goes through cold rain over gray grass. (CP 2: 282)
17. Together, these figures embody the tragic economy of Jeffers' narratives. The herdsman represents the norm of human life, desirable in itself but without spiritual dimension, a complacency that in the nature of things (formed for tragic action) cannot endure. The shepherd is the silent visionary who sees "truth" but cannot make it intelligible. Cassandra in "The Tower Beyond Tragedy," Onorio Vasquez in the middle period narratives, and the old man in "The Double Axe" exemplify this type. The "wild liars" deform the truth in speaking it; their prototype is the Rev. Barclay, but the great religious founders too, as Jeffers suggests in "Theory of Truth," embody this paradox at a higher level. The woman with the knife is the tragic protagonist whose bloody act purges and clarifies--one recalls Barclay's dictum that "God thinks through action" (CP 1: 259).
18. Each of these figures, then, has a specific function, and each performs that function against a landscape in which divine purpose is starkly immanent. Jeffers suggests this praxis in the poem from which we have previously quoted, "A Little Scraping":
This mountain sea-coast is real,
For it reaches out far into past and future;
It is part of the great and timeless excellence of things. A few
Lean cows drift high up the bronze hill;
The heavy-necked plow-team furrows the foreland, gulls tread the
furrow;
Time ebbs and flows but the rock remains.
Two riders of tired horses canter on the cloudy ridge;
Topaz-eyed hawks have the white air;
Or a woman with jade-pale eyes, hiding a knife in her hand,
Goes through cold rain over gray grass.
God is here too, secretly smiling, the beautiful power
That piles up cities for the poem of their fall
And gathers multitude like game to be hunted when the season comes. (CP 2: 282)
19. The action in this passage is incipient, the characters ambivalent or interchangeable: the two riders who may be herdsmen but also witnesses; the hawks and the woman, each figuring the other, who move with silent purpose against the "drift" of the cows. It is a splendid example of Jeffers' poetic economy, and of his ability to bring opposites into dialectical relation: act and essence, transience and permanence, the foreboding that precedes tragic irruption and the great calm that harmonizes and enfolds it. And God is here "too," as Jeffers says strategically, meaning fully present but never localized; here but no less present in the cities that are being prepared for their own tragic action, the poem of their fall--Homer's other poem, not the Ithacan but the Trojan one. Again let us recall Jeffers' prose comment on his coast: "Here was contemporary life that was also permanent life; and not shut from the modern world but conscious of it and related to it." It is this relation--the tragic relation--that Jeffers evokes in the last three lines of "A Little Scraping."
20. The conjuncture of tragic imminence and divine immanence thus constitutes Jeffers' mature enactment of the sublime. The landscape is built up out of sharply observed particulars, each drawing its predecessor into a net of dynamic relation: the gulls foraging where the oxen have plowed, the hawks quartering the air above the stalking woman. The paired colors and muted palette--white and gray, jade and topaz--perform a similar function; one remembers Jeffers' preference for clouded skies and his aversion to direct sunlight. The scenic depiction validates the declarative passages that precede and punctuate it; the conclusion extends the implication of the scene. The strategy, in short, is Kantian. The lyric diction instates a phenomenal world that evokes and manifests the sublime without ever collapsing into it--the pathetic fallacy of the decadent sublime and of Jeffers' own apprentice work. He is thus able to insist on the integrity of this world, the actual, durable reality of the rock that "remains." The declarative diction that alternates with it makes statements about a primary order of value that inheres in the phenomenal realm but is not directly accessible through it. That is the point of the screen imagery in "Evening Ebb," as well as the description of the rockface in the campfire in "Oh Lovely Rock," a poem of the late Thirties:
. . . as if I were
Seeing rock for the first time. As if I were seeing through the
flame-lit surface into the real and bodily
And living rock. Nothing strange . . . I cannot
Tell you how strange . . . (CP 2: 546)
21. The sudden illumination, the deeper penetration of substance that loses nothing of its phenomenal character while disclosing more of its unsuspected essence--strange and not-strange, a something-more without being anything less--here is a paradigmatic evocation of the sublime, rooted in the phenomenal world yet permeable to that which lies beyond direct perception.
22. "Oh Lovely Rock" has been praised by critics who contrast it as a poetically realized experience with the declarative diction found in other Jeffers poems of the period. Such criticism, it seems to me, is wide of the mark. The experience in "Oh Lovely Rock" is still grounded in phenomenal perception; that is to say, it results in description. The ineffable experience of Orestes in "The Tower Beyond Tragedy," on the other hand, results only in paradox--it has no color but clearness, no time but eternity, etc. Orestes says finally that "they have not made words for it," and no words will make no poems. The ineffable, in short, cannot be depicted, and the sublime, though capable of being articulated, does not bear much insistence in lyric verse, and is unsuited for narrative as such.
23. Jeffers' solution to representing the sublime, in both lyric and narrative, is divided diction. We have already observed this in "A Little Scraping"; "The Place For No Story," a poem that deploys similar imagery, makes the point even more concisely:
The coast hills at Sovranes Creek;
No trees, but dark scant pasture drawn thin
Over rock shaped like flame;
The old ocean at the land's foot, the vast
Gray extension beyond the long white violence;
A herd of cows and the bull
Far distant, hardly apparent up the dark slope;
And the gray air haunted with hawks:
This place is the noblest thing I have ever seen. No imaginable
Human presence here could do anything
But dilute the lonely self-watchful passion. (CP 2: 157)
24. The grazing cattle, the gray sea and white foam, the hawks "haunting" rather than taking the gray air--the scene is similar to (though also subtly different from) that of "A Little Scraping"; the diction, until the last lines, purely lyric. The poem concludes with two declarative statements, the first of which summarizes and baldly restates the preceding verses as value while the second addresses both what is constitutive of the scene and what is deliberately omitted from it. That omission is the human presence that plays such a crucial role in "A Little Scraping"; what is stipulated is "the lonely self-watchful passion," the fullness of divinity that, as both subject and predicate of the poem, rests from "story," needing no tragic extension of itself. The second statement thus revises the apparent pathetic fallacy of the first one, explaining the perceived "nobility" of the landscape as the sense of a constitutive divine presence--that is, the intimation of the sublime--to which it gives rise.
25. "The Place For No Story" seems to enact the nearly impossible, that is, an evocation of the sublime without a human subject. But--apart from the fact that the pastoral setting itself bespeaks a human presence, albeit one temporarily offstage--there is of course an experiencing agent in the poem, namely the speaker who emerges abruptly in the ninth line and end-stops the long verse sentence with: "This place is the noblest thing I have ever seen." This speaker no sooner appears than he attempts to efface himself: "No imaginable/ Human presence here could do anything/ But dilute the lonely self-watchful passion." The logic of this statement is that the speaker must withdraw himself, but instead he makes a further and far more defining comment on the scene. This comment, with its predecessor, is in fact the speaker's construction of the sublime, the posited "self-watchful passion."
26. What do the poem's declarative statements add to it as a whole? Let us imagine a poem composed of the first eight lines alone:
The coast hills at Sovranes Creek;
No trees, but dark scant pasture drawn thin
Over rock shaped like flame;
The old ocean at the land's foot, the vast
Gray extension beyond the long white violence;
A herd of cows and the bull
Far distant, hardly apparent up the dark slope;
And the gray air haunted with hawks.
27. This could stand as a poem, and not a bad one. But when these lines are captured and revealed as the interjected speaker's own, what has been at most an intimation of the sublime becomes a direct assertion of it. The assertion works because the description backs it up, is so to speak the empirical evidence on which it rests. But it redounds upon the description as well, making it denser and more value-laden. It is possible to prefer the truncated lyric passage as a "poem" to the one constituted by the declarative pendant, but it would not be (though all the lines are still Jeffers' own) a Jeffers poem. Jeffers himself suggests inadequacy of purely lyric diction in "On an Anthology of Chinese Poems":
Beautiful the hanging cliff and the wind-thrown cedars, but they have no weight.
Beautiful the fantastically
Small farmhouse and the ribbon of rice-fields a mile below; and
billows of mist
Blow through the gorge. These men were better
Artists than any of ours, and far better observers. They loved
landscape
And put man in his place. But why
Do their rocks have no weight? They loved rice-wine and peace and
friendship.
Above all they loved landscape and solitude.
--Like Wordsworth. But Wordsworth's mountains have weight and
mass, dull though the song be.
Is it a moral difference perhaps? (CP 3: 449)
28. For "Wordsworth" we may not implausibly read "Jeffers," and for "moral difference" the absence of the sublime. The Chinese poets are good ecologists, and they win Jeffers' highest praise: "They loved landscape/ And put man in his place." But they go no further than the picturesque, that is to say the decorative and fantastic; their mountains are beautiful but lack severity. They are good companions, too, because they love "rice-wine and peace and friendship," but their stories, though wise and rueful, fall short of tragic consciousness.
29. The declarative speaker in Jeffers' shorter poems--sometimes a subject, sometimes an observer, sometimes not personified at all--is paralleled in the narratives by the device of apostrophe: passages which suspend or comment on the progress of the action, or extend it in a different dimension. These passages have been likened to the choral interludes in Greek tragedy, but the differences are more evident than the similarities. The Greek chorus proclaims the normative law, the nomos to which the tragic actors are exhorted to adhere; in Jeffers, a solitary voice muses on the action from outside the frame of events. As in the shorter poems, this voice disclaims agency even as it predicates meaning. Its final word suggests the creative silence--or void--beyond it.
30. We may provisionally call this exoteric speaker "the authorial voice," understanding it not as the voice of the author but as a persona within the poem whose function is mediational rather than editorial2. The locus classicus of this voice is the twelfth chapter of "The Women at Point Sur," a single long stanza which forms a caesura in the narrative:
Here were new idols made to praise him;
I made them alive; but when they looked up at the face before they had seen it they were drunken and fell down. I have seen and not fallen, I am stronger than the idols,
But my tongue is stone how could I speak him? My blood in my veins is seawater how could it catch fire? . . . I sometime
Shall fashion images great enough to face him
A moment and speak while they die. These here have gone mad: but
stammer the tragedy you crackled vessels. (CP 1: 288-89)
31. The authorial voice speaks here as a priestly artificer who invokes a tragic agon in praise of divine force. The speaker is situated at the threshold of the sublime; he beholds the "face" of majesty but cannot describe it except through the second-order utterance of his "idols," who are consumed in the act of praise. A radical disjunction is thus posited between the speaker's perception of divine form and his ability to articulate it. Perception is struck dumb in the face of the mysterium tremendum3, and articulation is only possible in phenomenal terms: as lyric evocation or tragic enactment. But the world of ordinary sense perception itself is defamiliarized and alienated in the presence of the sublime, so that phenomenal representation becomes itself problematic. As Thomas Weiskel observes, "When the significance of things is no longer 'natural' or immediate, when making sense requires the mediating intervention--as opposed to the assumed immanence--of a transcendent idea, the world is being understood rhetorically, at second remove" (36). The authorial voice in Jeffers is the voice of this process, the voice that tells us that what is being described is not only real but strange. The sublime lurks in the uncanny. Jeffers makes this point in one of his earliest mature lyrics, "Point Joe":
. . . we wandered
Through a weird country where the light beat up from earthward,
and was golden.
One other moved there, an old Chinaman gathering seaweed from the
sea-rocks,
He brought it in his basket and spread it flat to dry on the edge
of the meadow.Permanent things are what is needful in a poem, things temporally
Of great dimension, things continually renewed or always present.Grass that is made each year equals the mountains in her past and
future;
Fashionable and momentary things we need not see nor speak of.Man gleaning food between the solemn presences of land and ocean,
On dunes where better men had shipwrecked, under fog and among
flowers,Equals the mountains in his past and future; that glow from the
earth was only
A trick of nature's, one must forgive nature a thousand graceful
subtleties. (CP 1: 90-91)
32. The powerful assertion about "permanent things," uttered in Jeffers' most commandingly authorial voice, is bracketed by the apparition of light rising from the ground, a "trick" that seems to reverse the order of things but turns out to be only one of nature's "thousand graceful subtleties." One might read the poem as contrasting the permanent elements in nature such as grass and stone with transient and illusory effects; one might even assimilate the latter to the "Fashionable and momentary things we need not see nor speak of." But Jeffers does see and speak of the refracted light, and in his final comment seems at once to subvert the notion of "permanence" and to enlarge it to contain its apparent opposite. On this, I believe the more persuasive reading, what Jeffers alerts us to are the glimpses of process that nature affords, in this case the processes of temporal renewal by which "permanence" is sustained. We cannot see the grass grow, still less the mountains erode; we can observe (as in "Evening Ebb," where another sunset effect reveals process behind the screen of appearance) the optical "tricks" that serve as a metaphor for the more hidden and substantive processes of change. We may also note not only the dialectical nature of Jeffers' construction of the sublime, in which permanence and change are formulations of the same underlying reality, but the dialogic temper of his authorial voice, in which earnest assertion ("Permanent things are what is needful") is qualified by ironic aside ("one must forgive nature a thousand graceful subtleties").
33. Yet the very inability to express the sublime except through paradox validates the experience of it as such. Unlike delusional or dream states, it occupies the full continuum of consciousness--we cannot, in its presence, imagine ourselves as dreaming--and, unlike the projects of the will, it occurs outside our intention, however vividly it stamps itself on the imagination. It imposes itself on us (whatever phenomenal shapes it assumes) as the perdurably real.
34. Jeffers' most sustained effort to pierce the Kantian barrier of the sublime and to disclose the transcendental unity beyond it is the great apostrophe in Cawdor which he titled "The Caged Eagle's Death Dream" when reprinting it a decade later in The Selected Poetry. It begins with a matter-of-fact narrative description of Cawdor's son George dispatching a helplessly wounded eagle with a revolver, itself a minor episode in Cawdor's unfolding tragedy. At once though it switches into the impersonal authorial voice to describe the synoptic vision of the eagle at the moment of its death. At a strategic moment however the voice enters the first person to enter a disclaimer similar not only in tone but imagery to the speaker of Chapter 12 of "The Women at Point Sur":
Oh cage-hoarded desire,
Like the blade of a breaking wave reaped by the wind, or flame
rising from fire, or cloud-coiled lightning
Suddenly unfurled in the cave of heaven: I that am stationed, and
cold at heart, incapable of burning,
My blood like standing sea-water lapped in a stone pool, my desire
to the rock, how can I speak of you?
Mine will go down to the deep rock. (CP 1: 510-11)
35. The oppositional image of the bird's spirit rising toward the empyrean while the speaker's remains with the elements of water and rock is itself a metaphorical representation of Kant's mathematical sublime, with its intimations of infinity in the gradient of ascending sequence. The bird's imagined flight beyond earth's boundaries begins from the degre zero of human entrapment in the phenomenal; indeed, the speaker's own "desire" is not for an empyreal consummation but for immurement in rock, a sentiment expressed as well in such poems as "Post Mortem" (CP 1: 204-05). We shall consider the ramifications of this oppositional movement in due course; for the present it will suffice to note the rhetorical thrust it gives to the eagle's ascent. The contrast between the earthbound speaker and his soaring fantasy would seem, in classic Romantic style, to valorize the poetic imagination, but the speaker disclaims both kinship with the eagle ("The unsocial birds are a greater race") and imaginative power: the eagle's "blood burns" while the speaker is "incapable of burning." The result is a foredoomed project: "how can I speak of you?"
36. This strategy has the obvious effect of whetting the reader's anticipation, but we would be much amiss in regarding the contrast Jeffers draws between the speaker and the eagle as merely disingenuous, one of the author's own "tricks." We have noted the resemblance between the speakers' self-presentation in Cawdor and "The Women at Point Sur," but there is a significant distinction to be drawn as well. In "Point Sur," the speaker's incapacity is not toward the "idols" of his imagination but toward the deity ("him") they are fashioned to praise; in Cawdor the eagle is valorized as a phenomenal reality apart from and radically superior to any imaginative representation. By insisting on the eagle not as a figure of the imagination but as an independent entity who by imaginative extension embraces all of life, Jeffers empowers it for its flight across the sublime and its ultimate, self-annihilating union with transcendent being:
It saw, according to the sight of its kind, the archetype
Body of life a beaked carnivorous desire
Self-upheld on storm-broad wings: but the eyes
Were spouts of blood; the eyes were gashed out; dark blood
Ran from the ruinous eye-pits to the hook of the beak
And rained on the waste spaces of empty heaven. . . .
Pouring itself on fulfilment the eagle's passion
Left life behind and flew at the sun, its father.
The great unreal talons took peace for prey
Exultantly, their death beyond death; stooped upward, and struck
Peace like a white fawn in a dell of fire. (CP 1: 511-13)
37. The eagle's flight is, of course, an imaginative one, but its aptness for the journey is its very distance from human consciousness. Even in its last, apotheotic gesture, it falls on peace as a prey, and is consumed in the splendid posture of assaulting divinity. There is nothing of Miltonic rebellion in this gesture, however; the eagle merely fulfills the dictate of instinct to the end, its "steep singleness" of purpose, as Jeffers puts it elsewhere, paralleling rather than opposing divine will. In contrast, ordinary human consciousness, with its conflicting and evanescent desires, is incapable of transcendence. Jeffers emphasizes this in Cawdor by juxtaposing the eagle's heroic flight with the post-mortem extinction of consciousness in Fera Martial's father, a passage published side by side with "The Caged Eagle's Death Dream" in The Selected Poetry as "The Old Man's Dream When He Died" (and together constituting the only verse from Cawdor reprinted in it)4.
38. The eagle's death is an immediate release into the sublime ("What leaped up to death,/ The extension of one storm-dark wing filling its world,/ Was more than the soft garment that fell"); the old man's occasions only decay, a terminal act of self-consummation:
Gently with delicate mindless fingers
Decomposition began to pick and caress the unstable chemistry
Of the cells of the brain . . .
So gently the dead man's brain
Glowing by itself made and enjoyed its dream. (CP 1: 450)
39. The eagle's dream raises it above the earth and gives it a synoptic view not only of space but of time as, "abstracted from being," it sees the succession of generations and eons, "Growth and decay alternat[ing] forever and the tides returning." Old Martial's brain rests "in the starless/ Darkness under the dead bone sky" of the skull, and it sees not the future but ecstatically consumes its past:
Whatever he had wanted
To do or become was now accomplished, each bud that had been nipped
and fallen grew out to a branch,
>Sparks of desire forty years quenched flamed up fulfilment.
Out of time, undistracted by the nudging pulse-beat, perfectly real
to itself being insulated
From all touch of reality the dream triumphed, building from past
experience present paradise
More intense as the decay quickened, but ever more primitive as it
proceeded, until the ecstasy
Soared through a flighty carnival of wines and women to the simple
delight of eating flesh, and tended
Even higher, to an unconditional delight. (CP 1: 450)
40. The "unconditional delight" beyond the "simple" eating of flesh to which Martial tends would seem to imply cannibalism, but it is a self-cannibalism in which the mind in devouring its phantoms consumes itself until "the altered cells bec[o]me unfit to express/ Any human or at all describable form of consciousness" (451). The contrast with the eagle, which retains its integrity as a raptor and in its final gesture swoops on an exteriorized prey, could not be more complete. Both old Martial and the eagle are "dreaming," to be sure, and both dreams end in annihilation. But the eagle's fusion with "peace" after its visionary journey through the sublime suggests a loss of self into higher being, perhaps even godhood, while Martial's remains, spent on orgy, merely dissolve into the slime of matter.
41. Old Martial and the eagle are aligned only once in the actual text of Cawdor, but the moment is a telling one. Martial is deserted at his burial by his daughter Fera, leaving him to be interred by strangers: "All was done awkwardly/ By shame-faced people, and the [wounded] eagle watched from the cage." The setting sun is reflected from the sea-rim, as in "Point Joe" seeming to shine from below:
The shadows of the still people
Lay like a bundle of rods, over the shallow grave, up the red mound
of earth, and upward
The mass of the oak; behind them another shadow,
Broad, startling and rectilinear, was laid from the eagle's cage;
nine slender human shadows and one
Of another nature. (CP 1: 467)
42. As the eagle's shadow lays athwart the burial party, its alien presence emphasizing the shabbiness and insufficiency of the rite, so the splendor of the dusk provides a final commentary on the scene:
The sun was gone under the wine-colored ocean, then the
deep west fountained
Unanticipated magnificences of soaring rose and heavy purple,
atmospheres of flame-shot
Color played like a mountain surf, over the abrupt coast, up the
austere hills,
On the women talking, on the men's bent forms filling the grave,
on the oak, on the eagle's prison, one glory
Without significance pervaded the world.
43. Unlike the eagle's invasive shadow (itself now swallowed up), the evening light that envelops the burial party does not isolate but integrates it with the landscape, dissolving its transient purpose
44. in a "glory/ Without significance." The phrase strikes us by its apparent contradiction, for glory would seem by definition to entail significant display. This moment, quasi-epiphanal as so many others in Jeffers, engages a dialectic of the sublime that both suggests and retracts meaning at the same time. "Significance" itself is an ambivalent term in the context of the scene. The burial party is conscious of its inability to endow its poor shift with dignity, while for the reader, who has already been made privy to Martial's death-dream, edification is clearly out of the question. If significance (at least on any level other than a symbolic one) be imputed to any particular life, the result can only be bathetic. In this sense the unindividuated glory of the sunset ("one glory") represents a triumph over significance, that is over human perspective. Transcendent meaning is ineffable, and only from a perspective that refuses to privilege any phenomenal manifestation can it be discerned. "Glory" is expressive of that meaning without constituting it, a sign that withholds significance, and sublimity is in that sense precisely the condition of the "glory/ Without significance" that pervades the sensible world.
45. Such a conception poses obvious problems for the construction of narrative. If human action is not to be privileged in the cosmic scheme of things, if the sublime precludes the significant, then how is tragedy to be recuperated? The problem, as Jeffers notes concisely in "The World's Wonders" (CP 3: 371) is to make Lear "as tall as the storm he crawls in," but, as the image implies, such an effect can never be more than an illusion, and the issue of significance remains: if the tragic protagonist is sufficiently foregrounded to assume significance, he risks seeming a caricature or impostor when weighed in the cosmic balance; if the proper scale is kept, how are human agents to seem other than "emotional mechanisms, lewd and twitching conglomerations of plexi," in Yvor Winters' phrase (Everson 114)? Jeffers himself likened tragic action to "build[ing] up a strain for the sake of the explosion of its release--like winding up a ballista" (SL 196), a formulation certainly susceptible to the charge of reductive mechanism.
46. The problem of tragic action--of human signification--thus lies at the heart of Jeffers' project, for narrative was the chief vehicle of his poetry and forms the bulk of his oeuvre. If we are to understand the Jeffersian sublime, therefore, we must understand the tragic scene of narrative in which it is principally set. This requires us to bear in mind the integration of figure and ground, character and place, that is the primary act by which Jeffers' sublime is constituted.
47. Both narrative and the narrational or enfigured sublime provided Jeffers with a means of ego-projection beyond the limits of lyric or meditative form. We have seen how the authorial voice which grounds his lyric verse represents not a fixed point of reference and identity but a shifting ground, a migration of perspective that implies, ultimately, a plurality of selves. The tension in Jeffers between the solitary speaking voice and its ventriloquized personae points toward a dramatic resolution. As Weiskel notes a propos Jeffers' Romantic precursors, "It would seem that only an ironic or dramatic form can takes us beyond [singular] identity . . . . The "I" must become a character viewed
ironically, or in relation; the meaning of the poem a tacit construction not available to the protagonist" (162).
48 In Romantic forms the "I" persona, often a representation of the imaginative faculty itself, is too hegemonic to permit true dramatic differentiation; the phantom selves or interlocutors it projects are, as in narcissistic fantasy, reabsorbed in a totalizing subjectivity. Jeffers' lyric poetry programmatically rejects the Romantic primacy of imagination ("Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch/ One color, one glinting flash of the splendor of things" ["Love the Wild Swan," CP 2: 410), and valorizes external reality with blunt, not to say combative assertion ("Here is reality" ["Hooded Night," CP 2: 3]). What the authorial voice proclaims most emphatically and insistently in these poems is its own inadequate powers of representation.
49. Jeffers thereby reinstates the Kantian sublime against its Romantic revisions. Like Kant, he locates "sublimity" in subjective consciousness, but like him, too, he conceives it as a response to an intuited reality beyond the threshold of sense. For the philosopher this is the noumena, deduced by rational intelligence; for the poet it is "glory," the ineffable and perdurable value perceived (not created) by the aesthetic faculty in a state of religious exaltation:
The beauty of things means virtue and value in them.
It is in the beholders's eye, not the world? Certainly.
It is the human mind's translation of the transhuman
Intrinsic glory. ("De Rerum Virtute," CP 3: 403)
50. Jeffers thus reverses the Romantic order, which gives creative primacy to the imagination even when (as so often under its burden) it falters or despairs. In Jeffers, the imagination cannot dower the world but at best feelingly apprehends it. It is not, however, to be trusted far; it is never a source of value. The entire passage from "De Rerum Virtute" is as clear a rejection of Romantic subjectivity as Jeffers ever made:
One light is left us: the beauty of things, not men;
The immense beauty of the world, not the human world.
Look--and without imagination, desire nor dream--directly
At the mountains and sea. Are they not beautiful?
These plunging promontories and flame-shaped peaks
Stopping the somber stupendous glory, the storm-fed ocean?
Look at the Lobos Rocks off the shore,
With foam flying at their flanks, and the long sea-lions
Couching on them. Look at the gulls on the cliff-wind,
And the soaring hawk under the cloud-stream--
But in the sagebrush desert, all one sun-stricken
Color of dust, or in the reeking tropical rain-forest,
Or in the intolerant north and high thrones of ice--is the earth
not beautiful?
Nor the great skies over the earth?
The beauty of things means virtue and value in them.
It is in the beholder's eye, not the world? Certainly.
It is the human mind's translation of the transhuman
Intrinsic glory. It means that the world is sound,
Whatever the sick microbe does. But he too is part of it.
51. Jeffers valorizes a world without humanity, seeing the "virtue of things" not merely as independent of humankind but even as ontologically preferable without it. It is only as a grudging afterthought that he readmits it, not as the world's master but as its "microbe." If there is any hint of a positive function for humanity in the poem it is as the "beholder" of the world's glory, which it is implicitly suited to admire as its least admirable element. The contrast with Romantic afflatus could not be greater. For the Romantics, the natural world is a terrifying abstraction, a noumenal void, until inspirited by the imagination whose rapture is sublimity and whose product (most lastingly its poetic product) is beauty. For Jeffers, beauty is not a product but a "translation" of objective value, and sublimity not a state of rapture (the creative trance) but of awe (religious attention).
52. The mature Jeffers is insistent that human experience cannot add value to the world, let alone constitute value for it. But his rigorous monism will not permit him to segregate man from the cosmos, the tendency he decries in "The Answer" and the temptation he renounces in "Meditation on Saviors," a poem we will consider in greater detail below. If humanity cannot create value it does participate in it, and its mode of participation, necessitated by the very qualities of "imagination and desire" that characterize it, is tragic action. Jeffers is thus led by the effort to resituate humanity in the ontological field of value vacated by Romanticism to adopt dramatic forms. Weiskel is again helpful in pointing up the basic conceptual difference between Jeffers and the Romantics, and in suggesting why Romantic dramaturgy remained ultimately undeveloped. As he notes a propos Wordsworth:
Nature hovers in the background [of The Prelude] as the sum
or ground of the intermediary personifications ("Powers,"
"genii," "Presences," "Visions," "Souls") who are supposed as
actual agents of articulation. Nature is thus the guarantor
of the dialogue, at once the principle assumed to cover and
redeem its discontinuities and a kind of screen on which the
multiplicity of representation is projected. When "forms"
begin to assume the shape and function of "characters,"
Nature's significant absence (or "negative presence") is
already presupposed, for characters are symbols standing in
for something no longer immediately there. Behind every
symbol is an absence, the death of the thing (form or image)
whose place the symbol takes. (172)
53. In Wordsworth (but no less for Shelley and Keats), character is the crystallization of those shadowy powers and presences that are the most immediate projection of the imagination on a plastic Nature which simultaneously takes shape as the ground or "screen" against which they are enfigured. On such a presupposition the only genuine Romantic protagonist is the poet himself, who whether retained as an ambient I-persona, cast as a character, or figured in a hero, is at once the subject and the animating intelligence of the poem. All other representations in Romantic epic remain essentially projections of the poet-protagonist and his quest, and are thus unable to develop the contrapuntal relationships characteristic of drama.
54. In Jeffers, nature is divine enfigurement, natural process subsumes human purpose, and human imagination, far from sovereign, can at best faintly reflect a reality that transcends it at every point. The world thus appears as value-laden, which is the sign of divine immanence in it, and is experienced as pure potentiation, unconstrained efficacy--in aesthetic terms, as beauty. In short, nature exhibits for Jeffers the same creative power and intelligence that imagination does for the Romantic poets. With this in mind we can better understand Jeffers' claim that the natural world is his true protagonist, and with it both the strengths and the self-imposed limitations of his art. If Romantic art could never escape the bounds of imagination, which projected the ego of the poet and conceived other figures only as extensions of itself, Jeffers posed for himself the opposite problem: how to give dramatic significance to characters who in the final analysis were "symbolic interpreters" of a divine agon that utterly contained and absorbed them.
II
55. Jeffers' earliest efforts at narrative and verse drama wrestle vainly with this problem. The male protagonists of "An Alpine Christ" and "The Coast-Range Christ," both of whom play out Jeffers' deeply conflicted response to his father's death in December 1914 in terms of the archetypal father-son relationship, face ego-annihilating confrontations with the sublime. The "Young Man Who Is Mourning His Father" in "The Alpine Christ" wanders "three days . . . foodless" (AC 81)5 among the Swiss Alps, the scene of Jeffers' own early schooling, a pilgrimage which, like that of the Christ, ends in an assumption and a transformative reincarnation. The Young Man discovers himself a "spirit" and holds converse with Manuel Ruegg, the young Swiss peasant in whose figure Christ has returned:
THE YOUNG MAN'S SPIRIT:. . . I am dead?
I am free now, and may follow and seek and find him?
Was it you that did this thing? O wanderer,
Whether or no you did this thing, you brought
The rosy tidings, and a dead man's voice
Blesses you.MANUEL: There are not many who cry joy
As you, at the one sure and general gift.
. . .THE YOUNG MAN'S SPIRIT:
O beautiful free happy birds, I also
Am happy and free. I will fly up with you,
And find though in the furthermost of heaven
His spirit whom I love. (AC 105)
56. We are here at the primal scene of Jeffers' tragic vision, as the spirit of The Young Man ascends toward ecstatic, i.e., annihilative union with the father, only to meet an Oedipally chastened double on his way toward an equally fatal consummation on earth. Jeffers' inability to posit an autonomous hero is painfully evident as the Young Man atones for his guilty survival of the father by renouncing his right to individuation while the Christ figure of Manuel, who bears a message not of redemption but supersession, is incarnated only to offer a second, existentially hopeless sacrifice. It was scarce wonder that Jeffers was unable to complete the poem, or to regard it subsequently as other than an embarrassment6.
57. A similar assumption scene is played out as David Carrow, the hero of "The Coast-Range Christ," is engulfed in a sublime mountaintop epiphany. Jeffers rehearses the scene twice, deliberately underlining its Oedipal significance:
David Carrow stood on the height and there were six came up the
hill.
Three were men and two were women, the sixth was neither man nor
woman,
He was higher and lovelier than the pine-tops, and human and not
human.
He was a shining out of the east before the star that kills the
night,
Like a walking tower on the ridge between the hilltops, a tower of
light.
Peace O'Farrell believed he was the dawn, and by the light of him
saw
David kneel on the lonely hilltop, waving his arms with wonder and
awe. . . .
David wept, his weakness and tears and pain were the servants of
delight,
In the sudden apocalypse of love, the splitting asunder of night.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
There were five on the hill-slope crying for death or love, and one
on the height.
Terrible radiations of intense desire streamed up the night.
While the fierce old anger David's father cut through the swell and
flow
Of the waves of vision deaf and blind. "You coward, I'd have let
you go.
Couldn't leave the women alone, you dirty coward?" He fired, and
the breath
Dove-shaped burned at David's mouth to nest in the bosom of the
splendor of death.
"Father, it doesn't hurt. Love, love, we are mixed in the fire,
the fire of the world
Ending, heaven beginning, spirits set free, the seas burned, the
stars hurled.
All the promises have come true. I love you, I love you, Lord." He saw
The great vision leaning to kiss his eyes, and cried with delight
and awe. (RS 213, 217)
58. In this apocalpyptic sublime--a vision to which Jeffers returned under the aegis of scientific description in "Nova" and under the threat of nuclear holocaust in "The Double Axe," and which he repeatedly invoked in the poems of his last decade--what waits at the end of experience is the terrible father to whose edict of annihilation one must make loving submission7. As I have argued elsewhere, it was only with the creation of the unrepentantly transgressive character of Tamar, who perishes not in a paternal holocaust but in one of her own making, that Jeffers was able to fully realize and integrate his powers of both dramatic and scenic description, and so establish his mature conception of the sublime. (Cliffs 1-36)
59. Tamar is a Romantic rebel, or more properly a Miltonic one, in an antiromantic world. Like Satan, she is obsessed with the problem of origin, and determined to reconstitute herself through transgression. The act she proposes, however--the symbolic reversal of the temporal order through incest--is devalued when she discovers that she herself is the product of an incestuous union. Her rebellion has been mere reenactment, "My darling sin a shadow and me a doll on wires" (CP 1: 30). In terms of our discussion, Tamar's defeat is the failure of Romantic imagination to impose its terms on the world, to constitute nature as value under the auspices of the sublime. We contest the natural order, we see it as chaotic or inert, formless or passive, awaiting the signification that gives it meaning or the appropriation that turns it to use, because it affronts our sensibility at its most vulnerable point: it is that which is given, that which precedes us, that which we have not made but from which we ourselves have been made. When nature had been identified with paternal divinity, and in the satisfying myth of Genesis made manifest in the instant of our own creation, the problem of origin was bracketed: "origin" was "God," "God" was love, and by infusing us, God's love annulled the temporal order and united us with the divine ground. There was thus no (rational) reason for rebellion, and though rebellion had nonetheless ensued, paternal forgiveness was still available. Milton had retold this myth, anxiously, for the last time; in Gothic sensibility, it is visibly in retreat; with Shelley, particularly the Shelley of "Prometheus," it is gone. The early Jeffers recapitulates this process. The loving and threatening father who lurks behind the face of nature in "The Alpine Christ" and "The Coast-Range Christ" gives way to the anxiety of supersession (Jeffers himself, through Una, described the former poem as written under the aegis of "Prometheus," Alberts 229). "Tamar" propounds a world devoid of divine judgment, but not thereby made amenable to human reconstruction; in this, his most crucial poem, Jeffers rejects the Romantic gambit, and with it the modernist aesthetic that rewrites the hypostatized imagination of the Romantic hero as the collective worldmaking of the social whole. Divinity has, for Jeffers, ceased to be paternal; but the world has not ceased to be divine.
60. The protagonists of Jeffers' first mature phase follow the model of Tamar, challenging natural limits and questing for origin. Clytemnestra in "The Tower Beyond Tragedy" seeks a new "foundation" for the world through parricide and filicide; the eponymous California of "Roan Stallion" ecstatic union with natural power; Barclay in "The Women at Point Sur" the usurpation of godhead itself. All conduct raids on the sublime, forcing the barriers that separate them from divine potency and authority. Aegisthus depicts the dangers of this in conventional colors:
O strongest spirit in the world. We have
dared enough, there is an end to it.
We may pass nature a little, an arrow flight,
But two shots over the wall you come in a cloud upon the feasting
Gods, lightning and madness. (CP 1: 140)
It is not Clytemnestra however but her foe Cassandra who has actually experienced the "lightning and madness" of epiphany. In a passage which foreshadows the passionate climax of "Roan Stallion," she describes her seduction by Apollo:
. . . he hates me, the God, he will never
Take home the gift of the bridleless horse,
The stallion, the unbitted stallion: the bed
Naked to the sky on Mount Ida . . .
where the God
Come golden from the sun
Gave me for a bride-gift prophecy and I took it for a treasure:
I a fool, I a maiden,
I would not let him touch me though love of him maddened me
Till he fed me that poison, till he planted that fire in me,
The girdle flew loose then. (CP 1: 145)
61. The poisoned gift of prophecy is knowledge without power, knowledge that is forced on Cassandra by unmediated power in an image of bestial rape and possession. What is left is only a ravaged consciousness, "permitted to live because [it is] crying to die." Jeffers revises the scene in "Roan Stallion," revising as well the annihilative assumption scene in "The Coast-Range Christ." California mounts her stallion, daring a wild ride since she can satisfy her desire for possession by him in no other way:
He
had been ridden before; he did not
Fight the weight but ran like a stone falling;
Broke down the slope into the moon-glass of the stream,
and flattened to his neck
She felt the branches of a buck-eye tree fly over her, saw the wall
of the oak-scrub
End her world: but he turned there, the matted branches
Scraped her right knee, the great slant shoulders
Laboring the hill-slope, up, up, the clear hill. Desire had died
in her
At the first rush, the falling like death, but now it revived,
She feeling between her thighs the labor of the great engine, the
running muscles, the hard swiftness,
She riding the savage and exultant strength of the world. Having
topped the thicket he turned eastward
Running less wildly; and now at length he felt the halter when she
drew on it; she guided him upward;
He stopped and gazed on the great arch and pride of the hill, the
silent calvary. A dwarfish oakwood
Climbed the other slope out of the dark of the unknown canyon
beyond; the last wind-beaten bush of it
Crawled up to the height, and California slipping from her mount
tethered him to it. She stood then,
Shaking. Enormous films of moonlight
Trailed down from the height. Space, anxious whiteness, vastness.
Distant beyond conception the shining ocean
Lay like a haze along the ledge and doubtful world's end. Little
vapors gleaming, and little
Darknesses on the far chart underfoot symbolized wood and valley;
but the air was the element, the moon-
Saturate arcs and spires of the air. (CP 1: 192-93)
62. California's ride brings her as close to natural power, "the savage and exultant strength of the world," as she can endure, even if less than she desires. At the same time the landscape takes on sublime perspective, cannily anchored in such details as the buckeye branch that scratches California and the oakwood to which she tethers the stallion but stretching out to the phenomenal limit of the "doubtful world," in which the ocean becomes haze and the moonlit sky gives out on "Space, anxious whiteness, vastness." No god will appear, no retributive (or salvific) hand be raised, but the sacramental character of the scene, stipulated by "the silent calvary" of the hill and further suggested by the adjectives "doubtful" and "anxious," is evident. Jeffers reinforces the sense of a charged but at the same time purposively withheld divine presence in the lines which follow:
Here is solitude, here on the calvary,
nothing conscious
But the possible God and the cropped grass, no witness, no eye but
that misformed one, the moon's past fullness.
63. The reference to calvary is repeated, but despite this and other Christian references in the poem God remains merely "possible," not specifiable; immanent rather than incarnate. If California identifies him with the stallion, Jeffers reminds us that he is no less "conscious" in "the cropped grass." The sublime is thus for the mature Jeffers a field charged with divine presence, but a presence that indicates itself as amplitude ("vastness," "solitude") rather than plenitude, a winnowing away of the attributes that define incarnation ("no witness," "no eye"). Jeffers' reductions are significant; his earliest attempt at the sublime in "The Alpine Christ" was part of a projected poem to have been called "Witnesses," and the Emersonian eye figures prominently in his postwar sonnet cycle, "The Truce and the Peace."8 The witty displacement of this Transcendentalist cliche into the image of the "misformed" moon, besides adding to the slightly sinister cast of the scene, makes the point that neither idealist nor materialist personifications can capture the essence of deity, which is manifest in nature without being defined by it.
64. It is not, however, the atmosphere of the scene but the silent drama between the horse and the woman that signifies the divine agon. California kneels before the tethered animal, "brokenly adoring," and finally lays her head within reach of his hooves. She is Mary, willing the divine visitation, and Jesus too, suffering "the unendurable violation" to be united with Godhead. This intolerable longing is the human essence, the Oedipal figuration raised to a sublimity of vision that "fools" man "out of his limits":
Humanity is the start
of the race; I say
Humanity is the mould to break away from, the crust to break
through, the coal to break into fire,
The atom to be split. (189)
65. The vision which yields finally the prospect of an unattainable divinity is the product of desire, the unwitting desire of transcendence that must express itself as transgression, the breaking of natural bounds and the forcing of limits. What leads us into the space of sublimity is thus the inarticulate need to know God, not the Romantic urge to thrust the creative panic of the self into the void. That need dashes itself against the impossibility of sustaining a divine encounter or comprehending the divine presence; as in the Kantian sublime, it leaves us cognizant only of the threshold we cannot cross.
66. Jeffers is not content however with merely reinstating the Kantian sublime, which rests ultimately on a philosophical acceptance of the mind's limits and posits nothing of what lies beyond them. Kant's radical agnosticism was an attempt to save epistemology from skepticism or pure subjectivity; by asserting a space beyond the known or knowable--the space beyond sublimity--he suggested a relationship between the mind's construction of reality and the "real" itself. About that relationship nothing could be stipulated except that it existed, but the corollary this entailed was crucial: that the mind's construction of reality was not an act of creation but of interpretation, for which the constructedness of the mind itself (and therefore its necessary constraints) was the most evident proof. Were we truly gods, Kant argued, we would each dream a separate universe; that we all inhabited the same consensual one indicated that our "dream" had a common origin. One could call this origin divine if one wished, though always with the understanding that the language of theology, like all other languages, was figurative.
67. Kant's argument was a powerful response to the skeptical temper of eighteenth-century thought, but it conceded much. Denied access to the transphenomenal world, the Romantics widened and valorized the space of sublimity. The consensual world constructed by the ordinary operations of the mind became a mere baseline against which to measure the creative flights of the imagination, whose transformative powers became not only the criterion of value but value itself. In place of the conception of a noumenal void of which nothing could be predicated (and which was therefore ultimately insipid) the Romantics put the teeming world of fancy; in place of God, the poet. God himself was, of course, still one of the poet's possible fancies, and so resulted the sentimental fiction of nineteenth-century theology with its false towers and Gothic facades, until Freud appeared to replace the figurative language of theology with that of psychology, and the twentieth century resumed the hard labor of skepticism.
68. It was at this crossroads that Jeffers stood. Deeply imbued with both the Romantic and Freudian revolutions, he rejected the consequences of both; cast back on the premises of the Kantian sublime, he undertook, with the most sharpened skills of Romantic imagination and Freudian sophistication, to make pervious the boundary between human conception and transhuman reality. Theology had lost the capacity for doing this, and philosophy (pace Heidegger) had thrown up its hands at the task; it remained for poetry, a poetry purged of Romantic pretension while retaining the Romantic power of intuition, to make the attempt.
69. As Jeffers' Orestes had indicated in "The Tower Beyond Tragedy," the phenomenal veil could be pierced by rapture, but the experience was incommunicable. To show the substance of both worlds the integrity of each had to be maintained; to show how they interpenetrated their boundaries had to be affirmed. This is what occurs in the scene on the hill in "Roan Stallion," which must now be quoted in full:
Here is solitude, here on the calvary,
nothing conscious
But the possible God and the cropped grass, no witness, no eye but
that misformed one, the moon's past fullness.
Two figures on the shining hill, woman and stallion, she kneeling
to him, brokenly adoring,
He cropping the grass, shifting his hooves, or lifting the long
head to gaze over the world
Tranquil and powerful. She prayed aloud "O God I am not good
enough, O fear, O strength, I am draggled.
Johnny and other men have had me, and O clean power! Here am I,"
she said, falling before him,
And crawled to his hooves. She lay a long while, as if asleep, in
reach of the fore-hooves, weeping. He avoided
Her head and the prone body. He backed at first, but later plucked
the grass that grew by her shoulder.The small dark head under his nostrils: a small round stone, that
smelt human, black hair growing from it:
The skull shut the light in: it was not possible for any eyes
To know what throbbed and shone under the sutures of the skull, or
a shell full of lightning
Had scared the roan strength, and he'd have broken tether,
screaming, and run for the valley. (CP 1: 193-94)
70. California lays her head deliberately within reach of the stallion's hooves, as if not only physical but mortal proximity must be dared to enter the ambit of divinity. The stallion draws away, reasserting the species barrier but also the phenomenal border between human and divine. For Jeffers, of course, the phenomenal world as such is a manifestation of divinity--"things are the God"--and California herself is no less an aspect of divinity than the stallion. It is, however, because no aspect of divinity is complete of itself that each particular entity seeks complement in its like, which is what Jeffers means by "desire." On the material level this produces the phenomenal world, whose harmony is perceived as beauty; on the creaturely one, it is the process of life. In human consciousness, however, desire becomes heroic; it exceeds the requirements of natural process; it hazards sublimity in quest of a more unmediated experience of the divine. To achieve this, power and desire must be brought into the closest proximity, made "perchmates" as Jeffers puts it in "The Excesses of God" (CP 1: 4), but fulfillment is suspended--a courting of epiphany whose consummation is impossible. This occurs where love is blocked--forbidden, as in the case of Tamar's incest, or physically inhibited, as with California. "Power," in the form of the stallion, is lured toward the shamming California. The stallion sees only a dark "stone" that smells human, a curiosity that at first mildly repels and then mildly attracts. What shines within, however, is the "shell full of lightning" which, if glimpsed, would cause the stallion to break tether and run "screaming" down the valley.
71. Jeffers' misnomer is deliberate. The stallion would "scream" if he could apprehend the passion contained "under the sutures of the skull"; that is, he would cross the barrier of desire and so be partly humanized. This cannot occur, of course. The sutures hold, and at the poem's end California, moved not by concern for the vindictive husband who has been crushed under the stallion's hooves but by "some obscure human fidelity," shoots the horse.
72. California's final act seems to be a reassertion of limits, but--apart from the role reversal implied by the shooting and the sexual connotation of the rifle she fires--it is deeply transgressive too, for when she turns afterward to face her small daughter (and us) it is with "the mask of a woman/ Who has killed God" (198). The stallion remains a divine proxy, and his death a sacrificial act that destroys the equilibrium between power and desire that is briefly but unsustainably established in the scene on the hill.
73. California thus joins Tamar and Clytemnestra as a transgressive hero who seeks to force the boundaries between the phenomenal and the divine through an enactment of the sublime. This enactment is not an Oedipally guilty submission to annihilative assumption as in Jeffers' earlier versions of the sublime, but a defiance of limits and a challenge to divine prerogative. Tamar and Clytemnestra both seek to "burn the standing world/ . . . and begin anew," thus revoking the temporal order and usurping authority. California, refashioning divinity in the image of her own desire, creates an idol which can ultimately be sacrificed to it.
74. The Rev. Arthur Barclay is the logical culmination of this series. Half-inspired, half-demented, Barclay neither contests nor simulates the Godhead; he engrosses it, claiming divine powers and attributes for his own ("I am inexhaustible") as he leads a band of followers to disaster. In Barclay, Jeffers approaches the Romantic impasse, creating a character who wholly substitutes his will and imagination for the transhuman reality. Not coincidentally, he is also a Saturn figure who devours his young: a dead son, Edward, who appears as a feeble revenant; a daughter, April, whom he rapes. Jeffers does not deny Barclay tragic stature and even partial illumination; but, like the Lear he ponders in "The World's Wonders," his vision is twisted by madness and purchased by ruin.9
III
75 With "The Women at Point Sur" Jeffers had come to a turning-point in his career, and a crisis in his art. Reflecting on his work in a letter to his publisher, Donald Friede, he observed that "Tamar" had "seemed to my later thought to romanticize unmoral freedom," while he characterized "Point Sur" as, at least in part, "a satire on human self-importance" (SL 115, 117). Though all revelation, in Jeffers' view, rested on violation, the aggressive quest of the transgressive hero ultimately produced a severely distorted and one-sided perspective.
76. Jeffers deliberated this problem in a poem written shortly after "Point Sur," "Meditation on Saviors." In this poem, he presents the savior as a transgressive hero whose aggrandizing ego conflates power and desire, the latter sublimated as a love that masks its origins in dominance. The savior can be a sacred figure or a secular one, depending on whether it is love or power that his public responds to. In either case, however, the relationship between savior and people is "incestuous" because the savior becomes an inappropriate object of adoration. The result is that he is ultimately cast as a scapegoat as well:
Out of incestuous love power and then ruin. A man forcing the
imaginations of men,
Possessing with love and power the people: a man defiling his own
household with impious desire.King Oedipus reeling blinded from the palace doorway, red tears
pouring from the torn pits
Under the forehead; and the young Jew writhing on the domed hill
in the earthquake, against the eclipseFrightfully uplifted for having turned inward to love the people:
--that root was so sweet O dreadful agonist?--
I saw the same pierced feet, that walked in the same crime to its
expiation; I heard the same cry. (CP 1: 397-98)
77. The "people" in Jeffers often seem an inert, doughy mass, waiting to be stirred and molded by a leader. But Jeffers is no aristocrat; his social ideal, as we have seen in the pastoral lyrics, is a free Jeffersonian community. Men and women become "people" when they forsake their true natures and enter civilized dependency; it is then that they become receptive to the savior, who is both the symptom and the product of their condition. In galvanizing them as followers and binding them to himself, the savior completes the transformation of free individuals into subject people:
Broad wagons before sunrise bring food into the city from the open
farms, and the people are fed.
They import and they consume reality. Before sunrise a hawk in the
desert made them their thoughts. (399)
78. The savior is the Hobbesian "hawk," the only free individual among those who have renounced freedom for themselves. But his freedom too is illusory, for he is bound to the multitude, and will reap in the end their "daggers of gratitude." The religious savior promises transcendence, but in monopolizing access to the sublime he mars it for himself. The love turned "inward" to catch the people--that is, concentrated as will--is partially trapped as narcissism, and distorts his vision. This, as Jeffers says, is "the mote in the eye that makes its object/ Shine the sun black," the flaw that reveals not "the inhuman God" but the beholder's own image (CP 1: 401).
79. The savior who undergoes sparagmos--sacrificial rending--on behalf of his followers is, for Jeffers, an "ape of that God" who brings the world into being by an act of self-mutilation. This is the ultimate consequence of afflatus, in which the presumption of embodying deific consciousness results in a "participation" in the divine agon that is at once parody and punishment. Transgression and retribution are here combined in a single event, a tragic economy as parsimonious as one could wish.
80. The Oedipal implications of this conception need hardly be emphasized. The problem for the mature Jeffers, however, was to maintain sublimity as a charged field of vision in which the power of divinity might be contemplated, aesthetically as "glory" and ontologically as value, without courting hallucination through sensory transport and madness (the classic vehicle of divine wrath) through encroachment and presumption. If Jeffers' heroes of transgression had vitalized the space of the sublime for him through quest and violation, they also contracted it in their falls. Ultimately, they could sustain neither an integrative nor a tragic vision; after "Point Sur," they risked outright melodrama.
81. At this juncture Jeffers began to develop a new kind of tragic hero, based not on transgression but on suffering and endurance. This hero, invariably male, was typically exposed to punishment through an act triggered by sexual jealousy and sustained by self-judgment. The exemplars of this hero are Cawdor (Cawdor [1928]), Reave Thurso (Thurso's Landing [1932]), and Lance Fraser (Give Your Heart to the Hawks [1933]), although the series is properly completed by the verse drama At the Birth of an Age (1935).
82. Superficially, these figures bear little resemblance to the heroes of transgression. Stolid and unimaginative, their minds and wills absorbed in daily affairs, they seek no wider domain than a ranch or a farm, no rule beyond a domestic hearth. Far from defying conventional morality, they embody its dictates; unchallenged in their authority, they equate justice with their own sense of rectitude. Cawdor, having pushed his son to his death from a cliff in the belief that he had committed adultery with his wife, reflects grimly, "He needed killing"; Lance Fraser, who kills his brother in similar fashion, decides to bear the weight of his crime "unhelped" (CP 1: 478; 2: 333). Reave Thurso's act of violence is symbolic--the cutting of the cable built by his father across Bixby Landing--but his punishment is instant with his deed: the severed cable whips back and, striking him from behind, leaves him crippled from the waist.
83. The acts which bring tragic retribution upon these heroes of endurance--two crimes of passion and a gesture of Oedipal defiance--assert no moral autonomy and make no transcendent claim. Cawdor and Fraser act essentially without premeditation, in a trance of the will, while Thurso mistakes his true intention and misjudges his peril. Jeffers, in the authorial voice that plays a subtler but no less strategic role in these middle-period narratives, questions whether the filicide in "Give Your Heart to the Hawks," and by inference any act, is sufficient cause for "anguish":
To be drunk is a folly, to kill may call judgment down.
But these are not enormous evils,
And as for your brother, he has not been hurt.
For all the delights he has lost, pain has been saved him;
and the balance is strangely perfect. . . .
Surely it is nothing worse to be slain in the overflowing
Than to fall in the emptiness. (CP 2: 329)
84. The ambivalent phrase, "may call judgment down," suggests a possible if inexplicit moral order. This suppositional order is scarcely comprehensible in human terms, however; it neither commands nor forbids, and seems all but indifferent to what occurs. The suggestion is clear: if even the most transgressive assaults on the sublime can yield no more than megalomaniacal delusions or animal sacrifice, how can any human act command God's attention, let alone challenge his prerogatives? Jeffers puts the matter concisely in Thurso's Landing:
No life
Ought to be thought important in the weave of the world, whatever
it may show of courage or endured pain;
It owns no other manner of shining, in the broad gray eye of the
ocean, at the foot of the beauty of the mountains
And skies, but to bear pain; for pleasure is too little, our
inhuman God is too great, thought is too lost. (CP 2: 242)
85. Again it is the authorial voice that insists, as in "Roan Stallion" and "Point Sur," on the inhuman, unattainable God. But if the heroes of transgression try to usurp divine authority in the earlier narratives, the heroes of endurance assume a God-abandoned or more simply a godless world in which there is nothing beyond themselves. "We know nothing of God," Cawdor says as he stands at old Martial's gravesite, and, after pausing impatiently for others' prayers, eschews further speculation: "Let us fill in" (CP 1: 467). Reave Thurso's rejection is more explicit:
> I'll tell you
What the world's like: like a stone for no reason falling in the
night from a cliff in the hills, that makes a lonely
Noise and a spark in the hollow darkness, and nobody seesand
nobody cares. There's nothing good in it
Except the courage in us not to be beaten. It can't make us
Cringe or say please. (CP 2: 260-61)
86. Reduced to helpless dependency and ravaged by unremitting pain, Reave is finally liberated: he has taken the full force of the castrating blow and refused to acknowledge paternal authority, the existence of a power that can make him "Cringe and say please." He chooses to remain in deadlock, rejecting both the opiates that dull his pain and the suicide his father had chosen. With nothing to hope for and nothing to lose, he rules a kingdom of agony in which he is simultaneously torturer and victim: "I have no power and no use/ And no comfort left and I cannot sleep. I have my own law/ That I will keep, and not die despising myself" (248).
87. Thurso is professedly agnostic, but his revolt against the absent father has theistic as well as Oedipal overtones. Old Thurso's unexplained suicide represents a failure of meaning just as his rusted cable signifies the failure of authority, and Reave's attempt to cut it down suggests an unwitting encounter with the sublime:
He had work to do; and now the sea-wind began, the wool-white fog
on the ocean detached clouds
Flying up the gorge of the gulf underfoot, so Thurso felt for a
moment a little laughably godlike,
Above the cloud-stream, hewing an old failure from the face of
nature. (233-34)
88. Standing above the white fogline that makes the Sur hills resemble mountains breaching above high cloud (a not uncommon meteorological event at Bixby Canyon), "a little laughably godlike" as he prepares to cut at the root of temporal priority, Reave exhibits the hubris of the overreaching hero at the moment of his fall. Unlike the heroes of transgression, however, he is only confirmed in his agnostic antagonism to the father by his maiming. When his wife Helen tempts him with suicide, he answers that "The old dog/ Stinks in that alley." Thereafter he refers to his father almost solely by this taunt: "the dead dog" (258, 264), "the black dog" (261), "the dog's ditch" (263). Asked about God, he replies scoffingly, "Another dead dog to bite us" (260).
89. The dog image is developed climactically in "Give Your Heart to the Hawks," where Lance Fraser relentlessly pursues his father, a Scots fundamentalist whose faith has wavered under "the godless hills" of America:
Once, dad, you whipped Mikey
For spelling the name of God backward
Until the red crucifixion ran down his legs.
Do you remember the brave little brown legs
All smeared and welted? (CP 2: 350)
90. The childhood blasphemy of Lance's slain brother connects with Reave Thurso's dismissive comment ("Another dead dog to bite us"), thus fully extending the metaphor of dog/father/god. "God" in fact replaces the father as the central adversary in "Give Your Heart to the Hawks," despised not because he exists but because he does not (or perhaps, like old Thurso, because he exists no longer). If there were a God, he would mete out punishment where it was deserved (on Lance himself); instead, there is mere pain, senselessly and randomly suffered:
I rode by the Abbeys' line-fence along the steep
Over Wreck Beach, and there's a young deer, a spike-buck
Hanging dead on the wire, made a bad jump
From the low side. The barbs caught him by the loins,
Across the belly at the spring of the haunches, the top wire.
So there he hangs with his head down, the fore-hooves
Reaching the ground: they dug two trenches in it
Under his suspended nose. That's when he dragged at the barbs
Caught in his belly, his hind legs hacking the air.
No doubt he lived for a week: nothing has touched him: a young
spike-buck:
A week of torture. What was that for, ah?
D'you think God couldn't see him? The place is very naked and
open, and the sea glittering below;
He hangs like a sign on the earth's forehead, y'could see him from
China . . . But keep the wind side.
For a loving God, a stinking monument. (351-52)
91. Old Fraser, accepting the taunt of Lance's metaphor, warns him to beware of the God people "have backed into a snarling corner,/ And laugh off like a dirty story.'" Lance responds, picking up the metaphor again, "'That's it. . . ./ Dogs. We all are" (353). The metaphor that arises in Reave Thurso's hatred of the father who visits punishment on him even in death comes full circle in the appositely named Lance, whose self-lacerating torment springs from his inability to find the judgment he requires. Where all men act with impunity and find no judgment, as Lance has, all are gods; and where all are gods, none is other than a dog. Lance's agnostic sublime opens on a vast emptiness ("'The place is very naked and open, and the sea glittering below'") in which God can no longer be conceived, but no human value enters the void.
92. The agnostic sublime in Jeffers' mid-period narratives represents the trial of his theism, the challenge to his testimony of presence. The heroes of transgression had tried to usurp or supplant deity (Tamar, Clytemnestra) or to incorporate its powers (California, Barclay), but Cawdor, Thurso, and Fraser invest a terrain which no god claims and no ego can fill, except by agony. Lance's wife Fayne points to the possibility of signifying oneself in a vacuum in which, like the spiked buck, nothing can refer to anything but itself:
"We've sailed away I think past the narrows of
common faithfulness. Then care for this:
To be able to live, in spite of pain and that horror and the dear
blood on your hands, and your father's God,
To be able to go on in pure silence
In your own power, not panting for people's judgment, nor the
pitiful consolation of punishing yourself
Because an old man filled you with dreams of sin
When you were little: you are not one of the sparrows, you are not
a flock-bird: but alone in your nature,
Separate as a gray hawk." "The very thing I was thinking," he
answered.
"If you'd take your red hair and spindly face
Out of my lamplight I'd like to be alone: it's like a burst blood-
vessel
In the eye of thought." (353-54)
93. Fayne, like Cawdor's wife Fera and, to a lesser extent, Helen Thurso, echoes the heroes of trangression; indeed, one might say that they represent the earlier prototype cast in a supporting role, as agents rather than actors of tragedy. Their function is to lead the hero of endurance to the transgressive act for which they have the passion but not the strength: thus, Fera provokes Cawdor into killing his son by claiming to have been raped by him, while Helen's sexual taunting goads Reave Thurso toward the act of symbolic castration that actually unmans him. In Fayne's case the provocation is more reckless than deliberate, but the embrace of transgression is also more explicit: "I am holding the made world by the throat/ Until I can make it change," she declares (362).
94. The role that Fayne offers Lance, "to go on in pure silence/ In your own power," is Promethean: to bear the agony of transgression proudly and live in defiance of sin. Lance embraces the punishment but not the act. He thus affirms a moral judgment whose authority must lie outside himself but whose source he cannot stipulate. It is not, as Fayne points out, "your father's God"; nor is it human justice, for where all are "dogs," as Lance would have it, none can give judgment.
95. Lance's guilt would thus seem to be unmotivated, his suffering absurd. Fayne's argument too seems flawed, for if, as she asserts, Lance is morally independent, "alone" in his nature, no valid reason exists for self-condemnation. The logic of her position would rather suggest Romanticism's last gambit, the Nietzschean reconstruction of the sublime as humanly created value. The Nietzschean Prometheus appropriates power without guilt, guilt being the mark of decadent theism and the herd mentality. If anything torments him, it is the consciousness of his own self-constituting (and therefore self-isolating) freedom; but that consciousness is also his identity and pride. Granted that Lance has performed an act he must permanently regret: yet the Nietzschean hero must pardon himself, for pardon can come from nowhere else, and the alternative is a state of wilful unforgivingness that is tantamount to madness and must lead to self-destruction. From Fayne's perspective, therefore, Lance's persistence in degrading self-condemnation must ultimately be proof not of the hero alone in his power but of the weakling unable to take responsibility for his own conduct. On her own terms, she should not encourage him to bear guilt or sustain unnatural grief, but despise him for doing so.
96. In short, Lance's behavior cannot stem from a unitary conception of the self in either an agnostic or a Nietzschean sublime, for neither provides a purchase for guilt. What occurs instead is a deliberate division of consciousness, an act of self-bifurcation in which Lance is both the source and object of judgment, simultaneously the tribunal and the condemned. Judgment, that is, is created, and created, like every feature of the agnostic sublime, as a response to contingency. In Lance's case, the exposure to contingency--and the unbounded pain it brings--arises not only from the act of filicide but its circumstances. Lance kills his brother in a moment of spontaneous passion, of velleity; what makes his world intolerable is that he has changed it irrevocably without intention.10 He cannot claim his act as Fayne wishes him to because it is not, volitionally, his own; yet it is no one else's. He can make it his own only by a continual striving for it, a willing toward that which has already occurred. Since this requires him to perpetually will what he most agonizingly regrets, it leaves him in an unassuageable condition of pain; yet the still more intolerable alternative to assuming responsibility for his deed is to acknowledge umediated contingency--the world of the spike-buck impaled by the happenstance of the barbed-wire fence. It is Lance himself who is now caught on that fence, and who cannot twist in any direction without torment11; judgment thus becomes the mere catchment of his pain.
97. Lance Fraser is not alone in stumbling unawares into his moment of transgression. Cawdor, in the act of killing his son, strikes blindly: "There had been no choice,/ Nor from the first any form of intention" (CP 1: 476). Reave Thurso too experiences an instant of distraction that diverts his mind from the cable as it swings back toward him ("'Must 'a' been holes in my mind'", 2: 238). The contrast between these "accidental" moments of tragic crisis and the wilful transgression of Jeffers' earlier protagonists is patent. The hero of endurance encounters the agnostic sublime only through an unguarded velleity; he is duped into tragic vision. What that vision discloses, as to the eagle in Cawdor, is a world in which "All that lives [is] maimed and bleeding, caged or in blindness,/ Lopped at the ends with death and conception, and shrewd/ Cautery of pain . . ." (CP 1: 513). Whereas the eagle sees that world as it soars beyond it, however, the hero of endurance is immersed in it; its agony has become his own. This agony is not merely the condition but the content of natural process, element and aliment in one: "the passionate spirit of humanity," Jeffers notes in "Apology for Bad Dreams," demands "Pain for its bread," and Cawdor, echoing this, says, "People take pain like bread/ When their life needs it" (CP 1: 209; 474). Similarly, Reave Thurso discovers that
Pain is the solidest thing in the world, it has hard edges,
I think it has a shape and might be handled,
Like a rock worn with flat sides and edges, harder than rock
. . .
(CD 2: 259)
98. Reave's objectification of his pain is not only an attempt to master it but to make it an agent of value. Paralyzed and dependent, with neither "power" nor "use," he finds in pain the final project of the will. Though his torment is unceasing even in sleep, he insists that he "can bear twice as much" and "much more than anything yet," and declares that if his pains ever ceased he would "have to lie and burn my fingers with matches" (263, 268, 240). Pain is the sole challenge and therefore the sole content of his world; it is the only thing he can master, and the engagement it requires is complete.
99. Helen, left to watch Reave's agony, pleads with him that real "Strength would refuse to suffer for nothing" and "perfect courage might call death like a servant at the proper time" (261, 241), but, though his struggle can end only in madness, he rejects suicide. Reave has narratively cogent reasons for this; Helen's plea is self-interested, and to embrace his father's hated act would, in his eyes, give him final victory ("the old dog stinks in that alley"). Nonetheless, the final significance of his gesture is not dramatic but transpersonal, for, as Jeffers declares in an apostrophe:
No life
Ought to be thought important in the weave of the world, whatever
it may show of courage or endured pain;
It owns no other manner of shining, in the broad gray eye of the
ocean, at the foot of the beauty of the mountains
And skies, but to bear pain; for pleasure is too little, our
inhuman God is too great, thought is too lost. (242)
100. Once again the authorial voice opens on a wider sublime, ending in the affirmation of the inhuman God. It is a prospect denied Reave, reduced, as he says, to fighting on his "last inch," but the one to which his suffering finally testifies. At the poem's end, moved by obscure impulse, he asks to be brought back to the scene of his maiming. Here, under a "racing sky," Helen slays him and kills herself as the authorial sublime enfolds them both:
The platform is like a rough plank theatre-stage
Built on the brow of the promontory: as if our blood had labored
all around the earth from Asia
To play its mystery before strict judges at last, the final ocean
and sky, to prove our nature
More shining than that of the other animals. It is rather ignoble
in its quiet times, mean in its pleasures,
Slavish in the mass; but at stricken moments it can shine terribly
against the dark magnificence of things. (278)
101. The principle of "strain," as Jeffers had noted in "Point Sur," is built into all of matter; in the higher organisms it becomes sentient as pain; in humanity it reaches its apex. This principle is, in physical terms, the condition of natural process, the perpetual resistance of being to becoming;12 in human consciousness, it is felt as metaphysical privation as well--the condition Jeffers explores, under the pressure of extreme moral or bodily pain, in the agnostic sublime. Pain, as such, is mere negation, but it gives access to a cardinal value, endurance; it is endured pain, as Jeffers says, that gives importance to life, which "owns no other manner of shining."13
102. Endured pain, to be morally significant, must be both involuntary and assumed. This, in Jeffers' reading, is the tragic process itself. In effect, Jeffers' mid-period narratives begin where Greek tragedy climaxes, with the moment of anagnorisis or tragic recognition that precedes retribution. It is at this moment--when the hero of endurance perceives inabsolvable guilt in his action, or, in the case of Reave Thurso, suffers unmerited injury that calls the moral order into doubt--that pain arises as a question. In each case the hero experiences pain, even when induced by his own act, as a Heideggerian thrownness--the immersion in an alien totality that usurps all former being and allows no honorable escape. In this sense it is involuntary, overwhelming, a condition which could not have been willed or foreseen. Yet for this very reason it must be embraced, for it can be borne in no other way.
103. This condition is clearest in the case of Reave, who attempts to master pain by giving it a "shape," but it is no less true for Cawdor and Lance Fraser. For both these latter, pain precedes moral recognition; they begin to suffer before they recognize their guilt, which alone can make it intelligible. Self-judgment gives shape to their pain as self-discipline does to Reave's, functioning as both consolation and goad. Pain is thereby made an end, and it is at last impossible to distinguish in its experience justified punishment from brute suffering, cause from effect. Guilt is the raison d'etre of a pain that engulfs the world, and is existentially intolerable without it.
104. The cycle of punishment and guilt thus becomes self-perpetuating, a world in which remorse is craven and expiation absurd. As dire and immitigable as the pain may be, it can never be commensurate with the crime; agony must be stoked ever higher, for justice can never be done. Cawdor and Lance conceal their acts not to avoid the law's penalties but its insipidity; no prison can rival the immurement of conscience, no pillory the castigation of self-contempt. There is nothing to be done, as Cawdor says, but to "Strain the iron forever," and when, at last betrayed, he puts his eyes out in an attempt to preempt civil punishment, this too seems mere "pitiful indulgence./ I'd not the strength to do nothing" (CP 1: 492, 521).
105. Jeffers' Calvinist hell, in which the heroes of endurance must invent the God of their own punishment, would seem to rival Dante's circle of atheists. The agnostic sublime, however, leads toward rather than away from divinity, for vision must be tricked and man must be duped, "fooled" as Jeffers says in "Roan Stallion," into the tragedy that aligns him with divine intent:
He brays humanity in a mortar to bring the savor
From the bruised root: a man having bad dreams, who invents
victims, is only the ape of that God.
He washes it out with tears and many waters, calcines it with fire
in the red crucible,
Deforms it, makes it horrible to itself: the spirit flies out and
stands naked, he sees the spirit,
He takes it in the naked ecstasy; it breaks in his hand, the atom
is broken, the power that massed it
Cries to the power that moves the stars, "I have come home to myself, behold me.
I bruised myself in the flint mortar and burnt me
In the red shell, I tortured myself, I flew forth,
Stood naked of myself and broke me in fragments,
And here I am moving the stars that are me."
("Apology for Bad Dreams," CP 1: 210-11)
106. In this passage, the cosmos is described as a divine sparagmos in which God manifests creation through an act of self-rending and man--the only creature capable both of conceiving and denying him--reenacts the divine agon as tragic experience. Man is thus at once closest to and farthest from the source of divinity, the "ape" of God and "the last/ Least taint of a trace in the dregs of the solution" (CP 1: 189-190). In Jeffers' earlier versions of the sublime the former aspect is emphasized in the hero of transgression, who tries to conflate ego and godhead; in his later ones, the hero of endurance paradoxically achieves a divine similitude even as he rejects a God-ordered universe, for in willing his own pain he replicates the godhead's primordial self-immolation.
107. The analogy between divine agon and the hero's assumption of pain is implicit in the mid-period narratives. Cawdor rejects his self-blinding as an act of weakness, but the gesture clearly links him with Oedipus and, through him, with the tradition of sacrificial substitutes who enact the divine sparagmos in Dionysian ritual.14 At this point the divine analogy is still based on the metaphor of dispersion expressed in "Apology for Bad Dreams," but with "Thurso's Landing" and "Give Your Heart to the Hawks" the mythopoeic sources are Nordic and Christian. The mediating texts are "Dear Judas," the verse drama in which Jeffers at last treats the legend of Jesus explicitly, and "Descent to the Dead," the poetic sequence in which he explores his own ancestral heritage. In Jesus, the hero of transgression and the hero of endurance are united in one figure, for Jesus is at once the culture hero who most daringly asserts the godhead in himself and the sacrificial year-god who voluntarily submits to the sparagmos of the cross.
108. In "Descent to the Dead," Jeffers meditates on the ancient heroes and plunderers of Scotland and Ireland where death is swift and fierce and "the tortured torturer" Christ "is too long dying," while the poet "plot[s] the agony of resurrection" (CP 2: 117, 118).15
109. These themes and imagery recur insistently in "Thurso's Landing" and "Give Your Heart to the Hawks." In "Thurso's Landing," Reave's final journey to the landing is likened to the voyage of a Viking death ship, and when Helen has killed him a Christological image appears in the shape of a hawk:
The wind had sagged toward the southwest and somewhat declined in
violence, so that a wide-winged hawk
That had been hungry all day had been able to hang in the birdless
air of the rock head when they came up,
Probing with her eyes wild buckwheat bushes and sage and the
polished leaves of the barren strawberry; she looked
Nailed to the firmament, her twitching wings like the spread hands
of a crucified man fighting the nails;
But Helen imagined her a vulture and was screaming at her. (CP 2: 275)
110. Similarly, Lance Fraser in "Give Your Heart to the Hawks" crucifies his hands on barbed wire in a despairing imitatio Christi (2: 386), and when the wet exudate of the wound seems to glimmer in the dark Fayne wonders, in a passage reminiscent of the coda of "Thurso's Landing," whether pain can "shine" (399).
111. These strands of imagery are pulled together at last in the verse drama "At the Birth of an Age," in which Jeffers, borrowing from Greek, Nordic, and Christian mythology, offers a prototypic representation of the divine agon in the figure of the Hanged God. Here is the vision at the end of Jeffers' reinstatement of the Kantian sublime, insofar as the "mind's translation of the transhuman/ Intrinsic glory" can render it:
. . . without strain there is nothing. Without pressure,
without conditions, without pain
Is peace; that's nothing, not-being; the pure night, the perfect
freedom, the black crystal. I have chosen
Being; therefore wounds, bonds, limits and pain; the crowded mind
and the anguished nerves, experience and ecstasy.Whatever electron or atom or flesh or star or universe cries to me,
Or endures in shut silence: it is my cry, my silence; I am the
nerve, I am the agony,
I am the endurance. I torture myself
To discover myself; trying with a little or extreme experiment each
nerve and fibril, all forms
Of being, of life, of cold substance; all motions and netted
complications of event,
All poisons of desire, love, hatred, joy, partial peace, partial
vision. Discovery is deep and endless,
Each moment of being is new: therefore I still refrain my burning
thirst from the crystal-black
Water of an end.
My lips crack with their longing for it,
My wounds are fires, the white bones glitter in my iron-eaten
wrists, blood slowly falls, blinding white bands
Of fire flow through the strained shoulder-blades, so that I groan
for an enemy to kill: there is none: I alone.
. . . . . . . .I have not chosen
To endure eternally; I know not that I shall choose to cease; I
have long strength and can bear much.
I have also my peace; it is in this mountain. I am this mountain
that I am hanged on, and I am the flesh
That suffers on it, I am tortured against the summit of my own
peace and hanged on the face of quietness.
I am also the outer nothing and the wandering infinite night.
These are my mercy and my goodness, these
My peace. Without the pain, no knowledge of peace, nothing.
Without the peace,
No value in the pain. I have long strength.16 (CP 2: 482, 483-84)
112. In "The Women at Point Sur" Jeffers had promised to "fashion images great enough to face [the inhuman God]/ A moment and speak while they die." In the heroes of endurance, asserting final integrity by self-judgment and final identity through self-punishment, that promise had been redeemed. In the despair of unbelief they affirmed value; through passion and folly they brokenly embodied it. In creating them, Jeffers had seen to the end of his own vision of the sublime, and to the God-informed cosmos it revealed to him. "I have seen these ways of God," he wrote in "Apology for Bad Dreams":
I know of no reason
For fire and change and torture and the old returnings.
He being sufficient might be still. I think they admit no reason;
they are the ways of my love.17
1. "Old Age Hath Clawed Me," The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, 4 vols., ed. Tim Hunt (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1988- ), 3: 484. Cited henceforth as CP.
2. As Thomas Weiskel notes, the question of voice is crucial to the Romantic problematic: "It is widely admitted that it is difficult to specify the formal status of the 'I' in Romantic lyric poems . . . . The problem is that the lyric 'I' so often seems to escape from its contained, dramatic determination and become itself a container. It is as if the 'I' were aware of its own presentation in the poem; its progress becomes the successive assimilation or rejection of its former states, so that in the end only a purely theoretical line, not any differential of consciousness, separates it from the present of the maker. Poet, speaker, and reader are merged into one adventure of progressive consciousness," 55-56. Jeffers' deployment of authorial voice, as I will argue, is both more direct and more oblique than in Emerson and Jeffers' other Romantic predecessors, and accounts for both the schematic resolution and the persisting tension in his work.
3. Rudolf Otto's term, used foundationally for Jeffers in William Everson's The Excesses of God: Robinson Jeffers as a Religious Figure (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1988).
4. Jeffers explained in the Foreword to The Selected Poetry that "The omission of Cawdor is purely arbitrary and accidental; I had finally to choose between this and Thurso's Landing; and there was no ground for choice; I simply drew lots in my mind." It may be, however, that his decision was also partly dictated by the fact that the two dream sequences in Cawdor could be more viably excerpted than any comparable passages in Thurso, and could make a more programmatic statement printed side by side than separated, as in the original, by sixty-odd pages of narrative. They are immediately preceded in the volume by the twelfth chapter of "The Women at Point Sur" (the only material reprinted from that work), thus forming a unit (pp. 182-87). Cawdor followed immediately upon "Point Sur" in Jeffers' sequence of narratives, and The Selected Poetry hews closely to the chronology of composition in its order of presentation, but it seems highly unlikely that the juxtaposition of texts in this unit reflects no other intention.
5. Compare the similar Christological overtones at the end of "The Women at Point Sur," where Barclay, "After three days,/ Having not tasted water," lies dying (CP 1: 367).
6. Selected Letters, 63, 107; S. S. Alberts, A Bibliography, 229-30; The Alpine Christ, xv-xxi, reprinted in Robert Zaller, ed., Centennial Essays, 141-147.
7. Jean-Francois Lyotard's comment on the despotic and filicidal nature of the sublime encounter is a propos here: "The sublime is the child of an unhappy encounter, the encounter of the Idea with form. This encounter is unhappy because the Idea reveals itself to be so unwilling to make concessions, the law (the father) so authoritarian and so unconditional, the respect that it commands so exclusive, that this father will undertake nothing to arouse the consent of the imagination, not even a delicious rivalry. He scatters all forms, or forms scatter themselves, tear themselves asunder, and become unmeasured in his presence. He fertilizes the virginal devotee of forms with no regard for her favor. He demands that all have regard only for himself, the law, and its realization. He has no need whatsoever of a beautiful nature. He needs imperatively a violated, exceeded, exhausted imagination. She will die in giving birth to the sublime, or at least she will think she is dying. Jean-Francois Lyotard, "The Interest of the Sublime," in Jean-Francois Courtine, Of the Sublime, 1993, 109-132, at 124).
8. At this writing, the completest edition of the cycle is to be found in William Everson, ed., Brides of the South Wind (Cayucos, Cal.: Cayucos Books, 1974): 69-82; see also SP 72-76, and for discussion of the eye imagery The Cliffs of Solitude, 73-75.
9. Cf. Jeffers' later comment on Barclay in "Theory of Truth": "[H]e touched his answers . . ./ But presently lost them again in the glimmer of insanity" (CP 2: 608).
10. See my earlier discussion of this point in The Cliffs of Solitude, 55, which suggests Orestes as the precursor of Jeffers' heroes of endurance.
11. It will be no accident that Lance later rakes his palms open against barbed wire.
12. The resemblance of these categories to those of Heidegger will be remarked; for a Heideggerian account of Jeffers, see Tadeusz Slawek's Robinson Jeffers.
13. See Jeffers' statement in a late poem, "The World's Wonders" (CP 3: 371), that "pain gives importance" (italics in the original)
14. Cf. Robert J. Brophy, Robinson Jeffers, ch. 4, especially 162-63, 199-201, 206-09.
15. See the late poem "Ode to Hengist and Horsa" (CP 3: 423), in which Jeffers describes a Saxon chieftain whose bones were broken before burial to keep him from coming back from the dead; here the efficacy of the old blood-sacrifice is remembered in the fear of the slaughtered god's return.
16. In an earlier passage, Jeffers likens the divine power to a blinded eagle, an image that particularly recalls the blinded Cawdor:
Peace, and the vast
Expanse of the soaring storms, the peace of the eagle
Forever circling
Perfectly forever alone, no prey and no mate,
What peace but pain?
His eyes are put out, he has fountains of blood for eyes,
He endures the anguish.
But if he had eyes there is nothing for him to see
But his own blood falling,
He is all that exists . . . (CP 1: 474)
17. I have found the word "sublime" in Jeffers' writing only once, at the conclusion of his late lyric, "Vulture" (the term is also absent in Heidegger). The poem encapsulates in ten lines the themes of divine immanence, sacrificial rending, and material transformation that inform his work as a whole, and may stand as a coda to his lifelong attempt to express the possibilities of transcendence in a modernist epoch:
I had walked since dawn and lay down to rest on a bare hillside
Above the ocean. I saw through half-shut eyelids a vulture
wheeling high up in heaven,
And presently it passed again, but lower and nearer, its orbit
narrowing, I understood then
That I was under inspection. I lay death-still and heard the
flight-feathers
Whistle above me and make their circle and come nearer.
I could see the naked red head between the great wings
Bear downward staring. I said "My dear bird we are wasting time here.
These old bones still work; they are not for you." But how
beautiful he'd looked, gliding down
hose great sails; how beautiful he looked, veering away in the sea-light over the precipice. I tell you solemnly
That I was sorry to have disappointed him. To be eaten by that beak and become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes--
What a sublime end of one's body, what an enskyment; what a life
after death. [CP 3: 462]
Alberts, S.S. A Bibliography of the Works of Robinson Jeffers. New York: Random House, 1933.
Brophy, Robert. Robinson Jeffers: Myth, Ritual, and Symbol in His Narrative Poems Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1976.
Courtine, Jean-Francois, et al. Of the Sublime: Presence in Question. Trans. Jeffrey S. Librett. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993.
Everson, William.