Inspiration: there is a puzzle from the first. Why did the Muses, who, as gods, were witness to everything, want to hear stories of the world told to them again? Was it to hear the changes wrought by the poet, to experience the surprise of the events as they happened anew in the song? Perhaps it was this: the gods, all-powerful, receive, through the song, something over which they can exert no power. They learn once again of the wars of Troy from Homer’s Iliad and, with Hesiod’s Theogony, of their own birth. What else do they learn? That there is something in the song which escapes and threatens to destroy the gods themselves.
There is a revealing anxiety in the recasting of the theogony of the Muses. Initially, they were said to be daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne. But how, if this were the case, could the poet could call upon the Muses as eyewitnesses of what happened before the birth of Zeus? Inventive poets gave another genealogy for the Muses, claiming they were born from Uranos and Gaia, gods from an earlier stage in the theogony. The Muses would have to come first of all, else how could a singer like Hesiod compose his epic? But then the theogony can only reach back to the Muses, recounting their birth and their progeny. Before them, only darkness, the forgotten, the hidden origin.
This strange regression of the origin marks the enigma of inspiration, which is never a matter of simple receptivity. Inspiration involves a kind of receptiveness, but also an answering desire to suspend reason or wilful deliberation: a willingness to admit an empowering spirit into the work, to render it productive. The artist must embrace dispossession, acknowledging the authority of a possessing voice, but it also necessary to assume responsibility for the work, to shape and realise what has been received such that it might inspire others in turn.
The scene of inspiration can be found long before the poem had been separated from other forms of making, when the poet was a singer [aidos] and not a poet [poietes]. For the Greeks, enthusiasmos named the way in which the individual voice was possessed by a higher authority. Language is, as it were, received: but the locus of this reception is not the poet alone with a quill. Reception occurs in what Russo and Simon call ‘a kind of common “field” in which poet, audience and the characters within the poems are all defined, with some blurring of the boundaries that normally separate the three’.
It is thus a gathering or assembling that, for the Greeks, marked the recitative event; the separation between text and reader that will lead to an interruptive unraveling of the self-presence of the recitation, the sundering of poet and audience, is as yet unmarked. With the birth of poetry, of literature, the Muse, the figure of inspiration, is given over to the disseminative effects of history. When literature becomes a delimitable body of writings, the scene of inspiration shifts; it is no longer the Muse who would allow human beings to reveal and receive the truth through the song, nor the God of whom the author would be the scriptor. Is it, then, the authorial authority, the creator-genius, who would to be able to secure the origin of inspiration?
This would seem to be the path Feuerbach clears when he argues that the idea of God springs from the human being alienated its powers and capacities. The human being receives the power to overcome this alienation and to begin to write, to speak in the name of humanity, delimiting a place from which it would be possible to call a halt to the infinite regress of the origin. Thus it is possible to speak of the era of humanism, whose faith lies in the power of the human being to work and transform the world, and in the faith that the regress of the origin can be mastered by the power which belongs to us as human beings.
This allows inspiration to be understood as part of a battery of artistic techniques, allowing the writer, for example, to draw upon a deeper level of self-expression, an enhanced fluency. God is now revealed as a pseudonym of the human being; the way is cleared for the Promethean artist and the total artwork (Wagner). But a profound transformation has occurred, for this is to isolate the power to create as the most important trait of God. It is not that the human being wants to supplant God, but that the human being can only understand God as a great producer, as a source of power. Feuerbach is wrong to argue that God was merely the product of the alienation of the human being; it is the human being who is born from an alienation which occurs at the heart of God. Art, now, is seen to be a matter of the powers of human creativity – but here the human creator is only an imitation of a delimited God. At one stroke the human being is lost to itself and God is lost to the sacred. And art? What of art?
Humanism is present not only in the creator-God like Wagner for whom Feuerbach seems to prepare, but in the most basic experience of the novelist. Listen to a novelist recounting the vicissitudes of composition: ‘I wanted to say something about …’; ‘I write to express myself’: this innocuous statement reflects the hubris of supposing that it would be possible to lay hold of the regress of the origin. Would Beckett or Sarraute ever speak of themselves in this way? Did Blanchot or Duras ever lay claim to that regress in their own name?
This is the age of a humanism: the piece in the Sunday paper about Beckett or Sarraute reveals only a hysterical desire to have done with desire, a fear of fear. Is this what one finds in the works of those writers devoted to representing the world, flashing it back to itself and obscuring, in this redoubling of daylight, the obscure paths which others authors are compelled to take? Or in the profiles, interviews and biographies where the power of the novelist is celebrated? Or in the fat book in which the biographer can display a masterful virtuosity over a life? It is a question, in each case, of a reactive desire to bind creative inspiration to the will of the human being. But perhaps what we call the human is only an adjective and one which is always at the service of a certain determination of culture. Perhaps there is another way of thinking the humanitas of the human being which might pass by way of a reflection on art, on literature. Perhaps this is part of a larger reflection neither on human beings or gods, literature or art, but on the way in which the origin retreats from us.
We know today the successful author is a brandname. Publicity surrounds the work as it surrounds everything. The ‘public’ it reaches is a phantasm of the publicity industry itself – a kind of dream or hallucination of a ‘target audience’, an audience constituted around certain demographics, ‘markers’ which indicate the kind of taste they ‘ought’ to have. This phantasmal public, the marketeer’s dream, are the ones who are already familiar with everything written. They are both insatiable and satisfied; nothing will surprise them and they will always want more. Beyond the ‘public’ of the great machines of publicity, there are readers the demographers cannot reach, the ones whose strange tastes deform the predictions of the market researchers. The secret reader each of us is or could be – each of us, any of us is already more than a denumerable consumer whose purchases would make up the great lists of bestsellers printed in the Sunday papers. True, publicity calls to the ‘public’ and this ‘public’ to publicity, but somewhere, still, there are encounters with works of art.
What are they these works? What do they become when they are unbound from culture, from the forces of culture. Broken from the museum and the Sunday supplement. Turning their face away from the great machines of publicity. But to what do they turn their faces? To the readers who might still be gathered by the experience of the origin. To an experience which no longer falls within the measure of the human. Reviving that old word, inspiration, may seem to lead us back to the vocabulary of the divine or the sacred. But this is only a way of safeguarding an experience with no determinable source.
Wasn’t the chance of this experience there from the first? The Delphic oracle, placed at the centre of Hellas, and perhaps at the centre of the inhabited world, is formed at the lips of a cave which reached into the depths of the earth. Who spoke through these lips? The gods? Or the priestess whom the gods appointed so they could hear the peculiar song whose gift belonged to human beings alone? Or was it the depths themselves, reverberating in the songs of those who would sing in the competitions held at Delphi?
The depths themselves: before the gods there was the rumbling of the earth, the resonance of a song that still resounds in Heraclitus and Xenophanes. A song of the earth, of an inhuman origin: is this the sacred from which the gods and born are born and into which they must return? The sacred, the origin: it is the whirlwind which refuses all names.
Lars Iyer's Blog 