Scott DeShong

Department of English
Quinebaug Valley Community-Technical College
spdes@conncoll.edu

 

In the following essay, I will read certain poems by Sylvia Plath to demonstrate a way of reading that derives from the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas. According to Levinas, ethics requires one to face others in such a way that the incommensurable weight of the other’s lived existence is primary: the affective dimension of the other is primary to discernible contours or articulable characteristics of the other. This basic move–to apprehension prior to comprehension of the other–provides a new basis for philosophy, Levinas says, as ethics becomes first philosophy, prior even to ontology. To put Levinas’s move in the language of literary criticism and rhetoric, pathos (apprehension of feeling) comes prior to ethos (judgment of character) in a reader’s or audience’s apprehension of alterity. With this connection, I imply an aesthetic aspect to Levinas’s ethics, while at the same time I suggest that the way of reading I will demonstrate has an ethical dimension. But I do not claim that my reading involves an approach to the good. Indeed, insofar as it involves ethics, my essay deals with the difficulty of being ethical.

 

Considering Levinas’s focus on the affect of the other as an aesthetic move provides a way of handling a key problem that various critics have found in his work: a genuine move to the affective ruptures any determination of the move as ethical. To say this involves recognizing ethics as philosophical discourse, metaphysically centered on the objective of what is defined to be good. Levinas is correct in showing that the affect of the other must be the primary emphasis of ethics, for without it ethics remains an abstract totality; it follows that his emphasis on affect deconstructs ethics. But in retaining the word “ethics,” Levinas obscures the deconstruction. Focusing on a desire to approach the other’s affect, he focuses on desire that in philosophical terms would have been called ethical, but a desire that by its own application–by exceeding the metaphysics of the good–invalidates the name of ethics.¹

 

My emphasis on affect can work within aesthetics in a way that Levinas’s emphasis cannot work in ethics, because aesthetics may be decentered as ethics cannot be. By reading in such a way that the affective dimensions of texts disrupt the intellectual activity of judgment in aesthetics, I develop an untotalized, denatured aesthetics. One may argue that like ethics, aesthetics must be centered and develop a sense of the good; the argument would be long, and I will simply indicate that I follow Georges Bataille and others who claim an untotalized aesthetics. As my readings emphasize a desire to face the affect of the other, they emphasize that desire which Levinas shows to be mandatory for ethics but which disrupts ethics as such. The desire I emphasize lacks naturalization and totalization, falling outside anthropology as well as philosophy, driving an aesthetics of the feeling of the other which–following literary and rhetorical traditions, albeit loosely–I call the aesthetics of pathos.² Levinas writes of the “restlessness” of consciousness that is open to the other, thus capturing the insecurity of moving outside philosophy; this restlessness should extend into the instability of determining a name for the act of encountering the other (Otherwise than Being 153-62).

 

The emphasis on an untotalizing approach to the other’s affect, for Levinas, includes focusing on the singularity of the encounter with the other. Reading provides an appropriate occasion for exploring such an encounter, and what follows in this essay–although it will iterate theoretical concerns of the introduction–is not a philosophical treatise, but a performative work of criticism. The first-person voice of the essay (even in its plural manifestations) is a phenomenon of subjectivity, not a voice of definitive truth. Similarly, the reading does not definitively impute characteristics to Sylvia Plath or to an oeuvre, style, or technique that is attributable to her (although my references to other critics are suggestive in this respect, beginning to knit a fabric of literary-critical conversation).³ Although the following readings say more about aesthetics than ethics, they say more about Levinas’s work than Plath’s, more about reading than either, and more about a specific encounter with particular texts than about reading in general or about a particular type of discourse (the essay focuses mainly on poems, but neither exclusively nor necessarily). With the deconstruction of ethics and philosophical aesthetics foregone, my reading primarily develops a singular exposition of desire and judgment in dialogue, amid an aesthetics whose desired focus is affective alterity.

 

Imagery as a Locus of Pathos

 

My attraction to the poetry of Sylvia Plath is based in the feeling I find in reading many of her poems, the kind of access to feeling I achieve. In the poems, I read feeling I cannot name, and which seems masked, although I read feeling I am compelled to recognize. There is substantial feeling in “Apprehensions,” for instance, that I find indissociable from the images in which moments of feeling emerge.⁴ The persona faces a wall that is, through metamorphosing descriptions, the main locus of feeling in the poem: changing from “this white wall” to “A gray wall now, clawed and bloody” and then “This red wall” which “winces continually,” it becomes finally a “black wall” on which “unidentifiable birds / Swivel their heads and cry” (195-96). There is more here, and indeed less, than an association of images with particular emotions; the words contain, represent, or transmit feelings less than they serve as a dwelling place for them. In considering uncontained feeling in imagery, we may recognize how poetry may fundamentally concern what is felt as living: an apprehension of substantial experience can occur at a level more fundamental than articulation or communication.

 

When I confront affective material in “Apprehensions,” I do not find myself engaging with a persona who contains emotions or whose feelings I can accurately articulate in terms of the persona’s situation, thoughts, or actions (although it is possible to make conjectures about such matters). Although I am little tempted to construe details as integrated moments of a psychology, I find palpable the feelings per se. Feelings appear as substantial moments, which as such do not automatically integrate into personality or subjectivity. I do attribute feeling to a voice, which is how I mark the feeling’s otherness: the notion of the voice mediates my apprehension of feeling, raising a disjunction that marks what is not my own feeling. Yet the voice’s otherness does not in itself bring a person present, seeming rather to dwell prior to any notion of a consistent humanity. I do not obtain a sense of naturalized humanity when confronted in such a way by the affective dimensions of a voice, while I may recognize something undeniably living and compelling in the voice’s feelings, particularly in the suffering to which the voice seems subject. Through the recognition of its suffering, a voice’s feeling can register for a reader as affective substance.

 

What mainly attracts me to Plath’s voices is their pathos; what makes her voices compelling is their apprehensible capacity for suffering. This would appear to be an ethical compulsion, involving attention that is commonly considered an essential component of ethics. This point can help explain a reader’s attraction to the voice of Plath’s “Morning Song,” the voice of a disaffected mother for whom her newborn is “like a fat gold watch,” opaque and inhuman. This is a mother for whom the baby’s mouth, “clean as a cat’s,” in the unfolding of the imagery opens and transforms into the “window square” that “Whitens and swallows its dull stars”: the baby’s organ of nourishment and expression turns, for the mother, into an empty, unsympathetic eternity, revealing the blankness of one of an endless series of mornings (156-57). There is pathos in the mother’s voice that evokes solicitude, however counter this pathos may be to an ethos of motherhood that might be normalized as productive and healthy.⁵ Yet the feeling in the voice is largely opaque, too much so for me to say I can share it. What predominates is the inescapability of the voice’s suffering.

 

I focus here on the moment of affect’s compulsion, on an aesthetic moment in which affect may be for a reader a substantiality that is excessive of subjectivity, character, ethos, or any similar idea that entails human consistency or integrity. In the vagueness of what we perceive to be an imagistic moment that yet feels substantial–in the incomprehensibility of something tangible–we may recognize an unmanageable excess that convinces us that another’s feeling is real. As Levinas details in the first section of Totality and Infinity, we apprehend moments of affect before comprehension. Levinas’s thought engages us to dwell on the affect as such: as the affect stands out, not drawn into determinate relations that reduce it. Thus, we may apprehend what Levinas refers to as the “infinity” of feeling, which I see as an excess that disrupts the idea of the human as a natural totality. A glimpse of infinite affect in imagery may make that imagery our dwelling place with concrete feeling. Dwelling so with what we recognize as another life, we take the other’s existence even prior to understanding what it is. Levinas thus brackets the trappings of subjectivity and intersubjective communication in a phenomenological reduction upon the affective existence of the other. By this approach to feeling, there can be no knowing an other without dwelling with the other on the terms of the other’s unreduced affect; anything like knowing remains something beyond epistemology, something more tactile.

 

In Plath’s voices, there is suffering with which I must dwell or which I must dismiss, suffering I must apprehend or reject–which I must take, if I take it, with its obscurity. In “Little Fugue,” for example, images of clouds and other opacities gather in a nebulous blankness, a whiteness in which the affect of the persona largely resides amid the events of its life. A pathos emerges in and as the blankness, dwelling there with the “deafness” and “silence” that interrelate in a “fugue” of imagistic feeling, as the blankness overwhelms the colors of the poem. Imagery comes somewhat at the expense of syntax in this fugal playing of feeling into blank space. The blankness may be among other things the absence of the father, of the law or logos, of the object of love, or the self (I present this poem unbroken, as much as possible to avoid mediating the experience of it):

 

The yew's black fingers wag;
Cold clouds go over.
So the deaf and dumb
Signal the blind, and are ignored.

I like black statements.
The featurelessness of that cloud, now!
White as an eye all over!
The eye of the blind pianist

At my table on the ship.
He felt for his food.
His fingers had the noses of weasels.
I couldn't stop looking.

He could hear Beethoven:
Black yew, white cloud,
The horrific complications.
Finger-traps--a tumult of keys.

Empty and silly as plates,
So the blind smile.
I envy the big noises,
The yew hedge of the Grosse Fuge.

Deafness is something else.
Such a dark funnel, my father!
I see your voice
Black and leafy, as in my childhood,

A yew hedge of orders,
Gothic and barbarous, pure German.
Dead men cry from it.
I am guilty of nothing.

The yew my Christ, then.
Is it not as tortured?
And you, during the Great War
In the California delicatessen

Lopping the sausages!
They color my sleep,
Red, mottled, like cut necks.
There was a silence!

Great silence of another order.
I was seven, I knew nothing.
The world occurred.
You had one leg, and a Prussian mind.

Now similar clouds
Are spreading their vacuous sheets.
Do you say nothing?
I am lame in the memory.

I remember a blue eye,
A briefcase of tangerines.
This was a man, then!
Death opened, like a black tree, blackly.

I survive the while,
Arranging my morning.
These are my fingers, this my baby.
The clouds are a marriage dress, of that pallor. 
                                     (187-89)

 

Similarly, the whiteness of the hospital room in “Tulips” becomes a repository for pathos, a space for the suffering of a voice that recognizes itself as stripped of the trappings of character, that at one level desires to be so stripped. As in “Little Fugue,” the deictics “this” and “these” emphasize anemic features of the flesh and of the world, making blankness what is most directly and centrally indicated:

 

The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how 
   snowed-in.
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, 
   these hands.
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the   
   nurses
And my history to the anesthetist and my body to   
   surgeons.

They have propped my head between the pillow and 
   the sheet-cuff
Like an eye between two white lids that will not 
   shut.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The tulips are too red in the first place, they 
   hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them 
   breathe
Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an 
   awful baby.
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.
The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me
Where once a day the light slowly widens and 
   slowly thins,
And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper 
   shadow
Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the 
   tulips,
And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.
                                          (160-61)

 

An opaque pathos persists in the whiteness of “Tulips,” in contrast to the encroaching redness of a gift of red flowers, which is an additional otherness and also a new locus of pathos (marking an affective shift as occurs in the images of the wall in “Apprehensions”), a new locus that struggles with the voice’s preference to suffer only the vacuous pathos of the whiteness.⁶ Later in “Tulips,” the air “snags and eddies round” the flowers. Read as the voice’s feeling–or perhaps as self, or as language or meaning that would bring the presence of character–the air is a liquid that is equivalent to absence in terms of any possibility of coherence or centrality: the whiteness synesthetically merges with the tactile indeterminacy of air.

 

I find the whiteness in these poems and others among the most abject and most terrifying imagery in Plath’s writing.⁷ The whiteness is a palpable presence of absence, so I sense in it the force of absence, including the absence of cause, effect, and correlations of psychological elements. But as it marks the absence of determinations, it is also whiteness as a trace of other whiteness elsewhere. It is not only aesthetic but anesthetic, and the lack in it seems never quite chosen; if the poem articulates a death-wish, it seems death suffered to take place, although without determinable reasons: there is not mere annihilation but suffered annihilation. It is indeed the obscurity of this imagery of whiteness that makes the voice’s vulnerability concrete. Through the whiteness I touch the suffered existence of the voice, and thereby I know what I can of the vulnerability of that existence.

 

Such vacuous pathos in images of whiteness is pathos not only nearer to me than the character or subjectivity of the other, but nearer than the question of being, the question of the nature of the other.⁸ It is nearer, indeed, than even the famous ontological question of Heidegger: “The other person is closer to me than is knowledge or ontology,” says Charles William Reed in summarizing Levinas’s critique of Heidegger (80). Levinas says Heidegger’s radical question still assumes too much concerning living existence, or in other words accounts for too much, by focusing on being and putting the question in such a way that being itself remains at the center of the question, such that we would expect nothing to exceed being (Totality and Infinity 42-48). For Levinas, as we face what we recognize as the substance of otherness, we move to a moment prior to the question of what is (and prior to the question of this question), moving to the moment that we are affected. Only in recognition of the radical alterity of living otherness, Levinas says, might we try to get beyond the tyranny of ontology, beyond the centripetal force that will obtain for any thinking that fails to move anterior to ontology. Thus we move prior to philosophy–and indeed ethics–in an aesthetics that seeks the infinite excess of alterity, that seeks the proximate, palpable excess of otherness through imagery.

 

Alterity, Infinity, and Abjection in Pathos

 

I have discussed how reading the pathos of the other leads us toward an infinity of affect; such reading leads into an infinity of complexity in the excess that is affect. We can follow Plath’s poems into such complexity. Most notably, amid the unreduced affective dimensions of her work, voices often reveal their own others, sometimes as alterity internal to themselves. The imagery of the wall in “Apprehensions,” simultaneously with the internal shifts that yield dimensions of feeling (as discussed above), depicts the wall in its more literal role of incarcerating the persona, as the wall is “clawed and bloody,” an insurmountable otherness for the voice. And the image of the wall becomes an explicit psychological figure, as the voice presents the image of the bloody wall and asks, “Is there no way out of the mind?” (195). Thus the alterity and multiple dimensions of the wall emerge as part of the “mind” the voice appears to inhabit, implicating the externality of the wall with the interior of the voice. The imagery suggests a splitting by which alterity begins to proliferate among figural and imagistic renderings of the voice’s feeling.

 

As a further example, alterity emerges in the voice’s depiction of its feelings in “The Great Carbuncle.” The poem reflects an experience shared by a group of people walking at night. Describing a landscape revealed by “light neither of dawn / Nor nightfall,” light “Other than noon, than moon, stars,” the persona speaks of altered vision, a sort of dream-vision in which familiar details, such as “The once-known way,” become “Wholly other, and ourselves / Estranged, changed.” The persona’s first-person plurality indicates, first, a unity in the ethereal altered light. The result of this early imagery is exhilaration, as the voice observes

 

              ...our hands, faces
Lucent as porcelain, the earth's
Claim and weight gone out of them.

 

But upon reaching a destination–as “nearing means distancing”–the “Light withdraws” and “the body weighs like stone” (72-73). The pathos of the poem emerges at the end as a suffering of the weight of the body’s alterity, a weight against the feel of the vision. Indeed, the ethereal vision has an imagistic palpability, and both the opposing moments of “light” and “stone” transcend any restriction into determinate contours of human being. That is, while both moments are irreducibly substantial in the poem, both are transcendent for the voice, as for each other. The irreducibility of these alterities thwarts any sublimation that would bear them toward totality. These moments of transcendence remain incommensurate with each other and, as complex moments felt in and by the voice, they emphasize the incommensurability of the affectively revealed existence of the persona.

 

To return to “Apprehensions,” images of alterity internal to affect emerge in the “Cold blanks” that “approach us.” The blanks suggest a multiplication of the apprehensiveness embodied in the wall, an unending multiplication as “They move in a hurry” (196). The proliferation of and in alterity occurs in various moments of repetition and recursivity in Plath’s imagery. An example is the image in “Little Fugue” of the cloud “White as an eye all over!”–white as the eye of the blind pianist (187). The white, imagistic locus of pathos becomes the feeling of the other in the simile, the feeling of the blind eye that is other, the tactility of which (itself multiple: the other’s tactile mode of apprehending as well as the perceiver’s tactile apprehension of the other) is palpable in the image of the non-transparent and non-seeing organ. It is the absence of vision that emphasizes the tactility, the multiple bareness of the eye that suffers a lack of vision. In this image, I feel the living eye more in the absence of vision than I would in a depiction of vision’s presence. This tactility of the eye’s suffering depends on my awareness of vision’s recursive trace, as I glimpse a trace that makes present the pathos of its own lack.

 

There is further recursivity in the punning of “I” and “eye” in “Little Fugue,” by which the complexity of the fleshy imagery of the eye crosses into the domain of the pronoun, inscribing its substantial alterity within the more abstract problematic of the subject’s attempted self-establishment through its own, figural vision. A correlative pun concerns the other that the persona apostrophizes: “you” becomes the black yew tree. As “you” is the voice’s “father,” his voice is visible, “Black and leafy,… A yew hedge of orders” standing against the whiteness of the persona’s pathos. Yet the black/white contrast itself is so vague, dark, and tangled–in the literal images, and by suggestions of sleep, silence, and memory–that the supposed opposites interpenetrate (187-89).⁹ The “you” in “Little Fugue” is similar to the absent loved/hated other of “Daddy,” an other apostrophized and incantatorily referred to as “you” and associated with images of blackness (222-24). As the voices of both “Daddy” and “Little Fugue” engage the absent presence of the other they suffer under, they suffer their uncertain incorporation of the other. At a physiological level, the voiced “you” merges with the persona as it gains palpability when its sound tends to draw the open mouth into a curved space, a fleshed absence at the heart of the poems’ sounds–particularly in “Daddy,” with the help of the German du and other assonant syllables. The voices of both poems suffer a transcending absence that becomes partially absorbed by the voice, emerging in the curved mouth: in speaking flesh, my own voice apprehends these others as recursive parts of itself.¹⁰

 

Some of Plath’s images of flesh yield affect that similarly emerges as recursive trace. When imagery presents flesh as mundane or denatured, there can persist a recursivity in the absent tactility that is like the pathetic trace of absent vision in the all-white eye. Plath’s poems contain a number of such instances of ostensibly inert flesh. Many of the images relate to the topic of birth, suggesting subtensive dimensions of affect that exceed naturalized maternal intimacy, as noted above in the description of the baby in “Morning Song.” For the second voice in “Three Women”–the most bitter of three would-be mothers, the one who has miscarried–affect lingers as an absence in her own opaque flesh: “I am bled white as wax, I have no attachments. / I am flat and virginal” (184). Opening affective dimensions in a similar way, through the trace of a touch that is pathetically absent in the presentation of its own lack, the voice of “The Disquieting Muses” develops a sense of the inertia of the flesh it has touched in its own infancy, becoming the baby of “Morning Song”: the voice remarks that its “traveling companions,” who “stand their vigil in gowns of stone,” have “Faces blank as the day I was born” (74-76).

 

Plath’s Holocaust imagery concerns the issue of denatured tactility. Arguably, such imagery could be exemplary for yielding a sense of infinite pathos through the logic of the recursive trace of touch. But as many critics have discussed, Plath’s use of Holocaust imagery problematically determines and manages the pathos of that imagery. Among various examples of her Holocaust imagery is that of flesh as equipment in “Lady Lazarus,” including the images of “my skin / Bright as a Nazi lampshade” and the “cake of soap” made of ash following cremation, plus references to “Herr Doktor,” for whom the persona comes to “turn and burn” (244-47). Among instances in other poems, there is the apocalyptic imagery of “Mary’s Song”:

 

The Sunday lamb cracks in its fat.
The fat
Sacrifices its opacity....

A window, holy gold.
The fire makes it precious,
The same fire

Melting the tallow heretics,
Ousting the Jews.
Their thick palls float

Over the cicatrix of Poland, burnt-out
Germany.
They do not die.

Gray birds obsess my heart,
Mouth-ash, ash of eye.
They settle.  On the high

Precipice
That emptied one man into space
The ovens glowed like heavens, incandescent.

It is a heart,
This holocaust I walk in,
O golden child the world will kill and eat. (257)

 

The affect in such Holocaust imagery could lie in the trace of touch I read in the body’s reduction in death, like the pathos of vision as trace in the all-white eye. In “Mary’s Song,” the image of the body as “tallow”–in the manufacture of wax or soap–could lead toward the excess of pathos through the trace of life of what is now flat and mundane substance. But the imagery of denatured flesh in these poems fails to approach the infinity of affect insofar as the poems appropriate their imagery for the ethos of the voice. The pathos in imagery of flesh made ash and equipment recedes as the imagery helps articulate an ethos that establishes the voice’s character.¹¹

 

Adapting the pathos of its Holocaust images, “Lady Lazarus” stages a phoenix-like resurrection for the persona, in a quest for what Steven Gould Axelrod calls “self-legitimation” (159-61). Similarly, “Mary’s Song” sublimates the pathos of its historical images for the sake of the character of its voice. The poem neglects the abject pathos of the flesh in favor of a relatively simple affective presence, a moment of sublime, clarifying pathos, figurally that of the mother of god or of sacrifice (quite in contrast to the pathos of the mother in “Morning Song”). With its contemplation of the “incandescence” of the scene, from a level above the “Precipice” of civilization (where space exploration and the Holocaust are co-implicated, with “The same fire” as sacrifice), “Mary’s Song” subsumes the images’ pathetic trace of touch in a manipulation of pathos that functions to establish the power of the persona’s ethos. James E. Young notes that this use of Holocaust imagery submits the images to typology, in Aristotelian fashion, wherein an emphasis on categories of use takes over the substance of affect and overpowers the more complex dimensions of the discourse of suffering (139-40).¹² Indeed, as ethos ascends in such an aesthetic operation, it tends to govern a reader’s relationship to a characterized voice and draw the pathos of the images toward catharsis. Insofar as Plath succeeds in reducing the excessiveness of affect in the images by submitting them to ethos, she reiterates the abuse of affect that the historical images reflect. Her management of feeling works to disengage the weight of otherness and to obliterate the palpable sense of vulnerability that the images of the Holocaust yield.

 

Yet, in the aesthetics of concrete pain and vulnerability that I have been developing, I must attend to the otherness in the images that persists in, and is recognizable primarily through the desperation of, Plath’s own alterity to the material she takes from history. Her voices remain rich with affect that I need to address per se, beyond the ways she tries to subsume, erase, or sublimate the excess and alterity of pathos. Even as they appear managed in a pathos tethered to character, Plath’s references to the Holocaust resonate at another level of incommensurate, imagistic rendering of affect. The challenge here is to dwell with the affect of another otherness, also closer to me than my comprehension of ethos, character, or subjectivity. That is, the otherness of Plath’s Holocaust imagery involves various moments of alterity I must take care not to manage with an ontological aesthetics of ethos, so that I do not abuse the suffering of the other, both the suffering Plath has aesthetically manipulated and the suffering that obtains for Plath herself (which she herself manipulates). It is key for an aesthetics of pathos that we seek in textuality the proliferation of moments of affective alterity, so that instead of subsuming pathos under any ethos, we allow pathos to retain its always excessive pressure on any moment of ethos and thereby keep us dwelling, ever incompletely, on substantial feeling. Indeed, suffering in Plath’s poems usually leads only to more suffering, without catharsis–as Jon Rosenblatt notes (163)–without bringing the infinite alterity of substantial suffering under control. Her imagery usually lends itself to reading that finds affect so complex and weighty it averts any resolution, so that irresolvable affect can persist–as it does for Levinas–prior to being.

 

Authorial Ethos and the Pathos of Voice

 

Concerning the poems of Plath, an aesthetics of pathos might be liable to take the name of an aesthetics of the abject.¹³ Indeed, her imagery opens onto feeling in a way that challenges me to find an aesthetics that is not at some level manipulative. That is, there may be slim odds in favor of my avoiding the trap of an ontological aesthetics at some level when reading her poetry. Plath’s public comments could take me off the track of an aesthetics of abjection and indeed away from the aesthetics of pathos. In a BBC interview, she tries to bring the feeling of her poems under the management of ethos, where she claims to be:

 

I think my poems come immediately out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say I cannot sympathize with these "cries from the heart" that are informed by nothing except, you know, a needle or knife, or whatever it is. I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying, like madness, being tortured, this sort of experience; and one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and intelligent mind.

 

By such remarks, I can see how she favors an aesthetic manipulation of imagery that would involve a sublimating aesthetics and a sublimating ethics, even as she continues by noting that she means to turn felt experience to “larger” issues:

 

I think that personal experience is very important, but certainly it shouldn't be a kind of shut box, and sort of mirror-looking, narcissistic experience. I believe it should be relevant, and relevant to the larger things, the bigger things, such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on.¹⁴

 

Reading this excerpt for its pathos takes me quickly beyond the surface of Plath’s claim for a “larger” aesthetic and ethical emphasis. Various affective tensions emerge in the passage: for example, between the callousness of manipulating “these experiences with an informed and intelligent mind”–experiences such as “being tortured”–and the more heated, perhaps defensive tone of her “I cannot sympathize.” Plath indicates a suffering beneath the surface of her own ethos particularly in her trivialization of “needle or the knife,” examples of what may inform what she calls “cries from the heart”: her “you know” and “whatever it is” are not only belittling but flippant, revealing an acting out in the ethos, an excess of the establishment of ethos that thus does not help stabilize ethos but rather exposes affect that disrupts the attempted constitution of ethos. In short, rather than presenting ethos, control, or agency, the passage tends to reveal vulnerability and powerlessness. It is in Plath’s taking the position of the manipulative aesthete that she most presents victimhood, albeit a victimhood for which there is no clear sense of any perpetrator. In this, the passage is similar to “Daddy,” with its postulated perpetrator, the poem revealing its voice’s desperation to locate some language, imagery, or agency by which to articulate a logic of pathos, by which in turn to claim she is “through” with suffering (224). The result is the same for the passage as for “Daddy,” as many readers of the poem have found: the claim of resolution is weak beside the reading that the voice dwells in pathos it cannot escape.

 

Thus despite Plath’s apparent effort to consolidate ethos, feeling in her poems tends to emerge disruptively in the affective dimensions of the image, as affect retains its alterity to reading and exceeds attempts to determine articulations of ethos or character. In her poems, I find no character to comprehend, but rather an inassimilable substance of affect that always exceeds contours of personality. Indeed, I cannot exactly achieve compassion with Plath’s voices, because I lack specific articulations of their affect–articulations that would organize feeling in comprehensible structures of character: her voices do not provide me with objective determinations of feeling, so they ultimately fail to establish communication or even emotions I can share. Thus I cannot have sympathy, properly, but empathy: I cannot achieve a synthesis of feelings whose parameters can be determined. I dwell with the problematics of empathy, wherein the excess of alterity merges with my own feeling, and determinate ethical motivations and goals do not materialize.

 

The indeterminacy of empathy is at the heart of the aesthetic problematics of Levinasian ethics, where ethos does not rule over pathos, but rather lives implicated with the force of pathos. In the aesthetic experience of reading, we may meet the tactile challenge to dwell with the unmitigated affect of the other, to stay with what Levinas describes as the infinite alterity of affect. This engagement of poetry and philosophy prompts the realization that the compulsion to meet such a challenge is as close as we can come to a motive for ethics–a motive, it seems, that can only be articulated without the sense of hope or even goodness with which the name of ethics is habitually invoked.

 

Notes

 

1. See John D. Caputo, Against Ethics (1-19), Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction, and Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics.”

 

2. Although some blurring between the meanings of “pathos” and “affect” may be unavoidable and even appropriate for my topic, the distinction between the terms remains important. “Affect” usually refers to felt material that is not definable or representable, that resists typology or systemization (see Campbell or Laplanche and Pontalis). So it is the more appropriate term for what Levinas emphasizes as substantial feeling, although a claim to practice an “aesthetics of affect” would imply that one could directly get at the substantiality. To approach pathos instead–which, as conceived in aesthetics, is more patent and determinate than affect–is to approach the problem of seeking affect: a problem of seeking substantial feeling amid the inevitable making and suppression of judgments and naturalizations that the more determinate term tends to entail. An aesthetics of pathos, then, for which affect remains the desired emphasis, avoids making the extravagant promise of an “aesthetics of affect.”

 

3. Along with disrupting any ethical totalization of reading, my approach to aesthetics is meant to disrupt totalizing tendencies that may emerge in historicism, insofar as historicization may reify anthropological categories and, indeed, may depend on naturalizations inherited from a dependence on philosophical ethics. Following Levinas, I seek to maintain a “restlessness” regarding the privileging of categories and regarding the motives and goals of any desire toward otherness.

 

4. There is not much published commentary on “Apprehensions.” Mary Lynn Broe draws connections between the poem and the emotional focus of others in the same collection (Winter Trees) and some of Plath’s later poetry (128-29).

 

5. A feminist reading emphasizing affect would focus on the mother’s postpartum feeling in order to put in question the ethos by which the mother would be adversely judged.

 

6. Also, the flowers may represent the mouth, the vulva, and explicitly the “wound,” in any case creating resonance between a pair of edges or lips and the pair of “eyelids” or pillows cradling the dulled head of the persona, an eye “that will not shut,” similar to the “eyes” of the tulips and the sun. The organ of vision is tactile, while the sense of effacement and incoherence persists: disorganized palpability replaces psychic or visual organization. See also my remarks below on the eye in “Little Fugue” and the mouth in “Little Fugue” and “Daddy.”

 

7. Such an effect occurs in many of the more than two hundred references to whiteness in The Collected Poems (Matovich s.v. “white” ff). For comparison of color imagery in Plath–perhaps suggesting the importance of contrasts in her work–according to Matovich, “black” or a version thereof appears about 190 times in The Collected Poems, “red,” “green,” and “blue” each a little over a hundred, “yellow,” “gray” (or “grey”), and “orange” about 30 each, and “violet” and “purple” combined about fifteen.

 

8. In Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence, David Holbrook develops in psychoanalytic and existentialist terms the point that Plath’s work functions at a level prior to being: he notes that “being has not come first to Sylvia Plath” (156).

 

9. Jacqueline Rose notes a corresponding moment of recursivity involving images of black and white in Plath’s novel: “On the back of the first draft [of ‘Little Fugue’] is the passage from The Bell Jar in which Esther Greenwood is almost raped. The typescript has this line–‘In that light, the blood looked black’–crossed out and replaced with this one written by hand: ‘Blackness, like ink, spread over the white handkerchief.’ Underneath the poem to the father, a violence of writing–the poem’s writing (the ink on the page), but equally his own” (231).

 

10. Plath’s poems alluding to her father have often been read as elegies. Jahan Ramazani maintains that these poems belong to a tradition of the emotionally ambivalent elegy, wherein anger and other emotions challenge the pathos that is proper to a tradition of the more refined elegy; the ambivalent elegy shows the truly “irresolvable” nature of “bereavement” (1143-44). The refined tradition manages pathos, whereas the emotional material emphasized in the ambivalent tradition resembles the unregulated material that I, drawing upon Levinas, discuss as infinite affect.

 

11. My uses of “ethos” and “character” tend to distinguish between the terms by emphasizing “character” as the delineation of a specific, subjective voice and freighting “ethos” with the sense of “character” that emphasizes a subject’s or voice’s cultural or moral power. Each term is of course complex, as is their relationship, which involves the substitution of “character” for the Greek ethos in English translations since the Renaissance of relevant works such as Aristotle’s Poetics. The ancient meaning of ethos involves “use,” “habit,” or “custom.” Besides the Oxford English Dictionary, see Kittel and Friedrich, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (2:372-73).

 

12. Young notes that the resulting typology might serve an articulation of ethos for the Holocaust, beyond the ethos that emerges for the personae of Plath’s poems. But the significant question for him is whether the poems are indeed “about the Holocaust,” and he decides that essentially they are not (133). Since Plath wrote the poems when the Eichmann trial had brought the Holocaust to public awareness in greater detail than ever before, Young considers how her use of the images represents her way of dealing with the historical Holocaust; he speculates about the extent to which such imagery produced for her a trauma with which she was forced to deal and which led to an intensification of her personal suffering. He concludes his essay, “Better abused memory in this case, which might then be critically qualified, than no memory at all” (146).

 

13. See Rose for a discussion of Plath as a “writer of abjection” (37). On the theory of abjection and differences between the abject and the sublime, see Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Insofar as the issue of form is significant for aesthetic sublimation, we may consider how Plath fails to control formally the affective material of her works; on this, see Mutlu Konuk Blasing, American Poetry: The Rhetoric of Its Forms (55-56) and Hugh Kenner, “Sincerity Kills.”

 

14. This is my own transcription of the recorded interview from The Poet Speaks.

Works Cited

 

• Axelrod, Steven Gould. Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990.
• Blasing, Mutlu Konuk. American Poetry: The Rhetoric of Its Forms. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987.
• Broe, Mary Lynn. Protean Poetic: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1980.
• Campbell, Robert Jean. Psychiatric Dictionary. 5th ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1981.
• Caputo, John D. Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993.
• Critchley, Simon. The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.
• Derrida, Jacques. “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas.” Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. 79-153.
• Holbrook, David. Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence. N.p.: Humanities 1979.
• Kenner, Hugh. “Sincerity Kills.” Sylvia Plath: New Views on the Poetry. Ed. Gary Lane. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979. 33-44.
• Kittel, Gerhard and Gerhard Friedrich, eds. Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. Trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley. 10 vols. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1964.
• Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.
• Laplanche, J[ean]. and J.-B. Pontalis. The Language of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Norton, 1973.
• Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise than Being: Or, Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1981.
• —. Totality and Infinity: An Essay in Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969.
• Matovich, Richard M. A Concordance to the Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath. New York: Garland, 1986.
• Plath, Sylvia. The Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. New York: Perennial-Harper, 1981.
• —. Interview. The Poet Speaks. Ed. Peter Orr. Argo, RG455, 1965. Record Five.
• Ramazani, Jahan. “‘Daddy, I Have Had to Kill You’: Plath, Rage, and the Modern Elegy.” PMLA 108.5 (Oct. 1993): 1142-56.
• Reed, Charles William. “Levinas’ Question.” Face to Face with Levinas. Ed. Richard A. Cohen. Albany: SUNY P, 1986. 73-82.
• Rose, Jacqueline. The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.
• Rosenblatt, Jon. Sylvia Plath: The Poetry of Initiation. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1979.
• Young, James E. “‘I may be a bit of a Jew”: The Holocaust Confessions of Sylvia Plath.” Philological Quarterly 66.1 (1987): 127-47.