Roberto Calasso - Literature and the Gods

Whoever calls forth the copy performs the most momentous of gestures, in the heavens. Which then resonates on earth. Why did they do it? We are not told. When their friend Agni asked them, the answered: “We did not profane the cup, which is of noble origin. We only spoke of the way the wood is shaped, brother Agni.” They seem to be saying: we were mostly interested in the technical aspects. It is the reply by which one recognizes the artist.

But the gods didn’t forgive them. Even their friends, even Agni together with the Vasus, even Indra with the Rudras, even the Viśvedevas, excluded them from the three pressings of the soma , at morning, noon, and dusk: “Here you shall not drink, not here.” Aloof as ever, Prajāpati looked on. He turned to Sav : “You taught them, you drink with them!” did so, and he in turn invited Prajāpati to drink with the . Alone with those left alone. As for the gods, they said “the made them nauseous because of their human smell.” One never becomes immortal enough.

Absolute Literature

What are writers talking about when they name the gods? If those names are not part of a cult — not even the metaphorical cult that is rhetoric — what is their mode of being? “The gods have become diseases,” wrote Jung with illuminating brutality. Like so many refugees from time, they have all taken shelter together in the amorphous psychic mass. But does this diminish them? Mightn’t it rather be considered a return to the original state of things — or at least a withdrawal to that enclosed space, to that témenos . whence the gods have always sprung? For whatever they may be, the gods manifest themselves above all as mental events. Yet, contrary to the modern illusion, it is the psychic powers that are fragments of the gods, not the gods that are fragments of the psychic powers. If they are thought of as no more than that, the impact can be violent, something we don’t know how to speak about except by resorting to the degrading lexicon of pathology. And that’s precisely the moment when literature can become an effective stratagem for sneaking the gods out of the universal clinic and getting them back into the world, scattered across its surface where they have always dwelt, since, as the Neoplatonist Salustius wrote, “the world itself can be considered a myth.” In these circumstances they may even travel incognito, indistinguishable from anyone else entering or leaving a cosmic Hôtel du Libre Échange: or they may show themselves in their ancient robes in hyper-real decal images. But one way or another the world will go on being the place of epiphanies. And, to travel among them, literature will be the last surviving Pausanias. But are we quite sure we know what “literature” means? When we pronounce the word today, we are immediately aware that it is immeasurably distant from anything an eighteenth-century writer might have meant by it, while at the beginning of the nineteenth century it was already taking on connotations we quickly recognize: notably the most audacious and demanding, those that leave the ancient pattern of genres and prescribed styles far behind, like some kind of kindergarten forever abandoned in a flight towards a knowledge grounded only in itself and expanding everywhere like a cloud, cloaking every shape, overstepping every boundary. This new creature that appeared we don’t know quite when and that still lives among us may be defined as “absolute literature.” “Literature” because it is a knowledge that claims to be accessible only and exclusively by way of literary composition; “absolute” because it is a knowledge that one assimilates while in search of an absolute, and that thus draws in no less than everything; and at the same time it is something absolution , unbound, freed from any duty or common cause, from any social utility. Sometimes proclaimed with arrogance, elsewhere practiced in secret and with subtle cunning, this knowledge first becomes perceptible in literature, as presence or premonition, in the early days of German Romanticism, and seems destined never to leave it. Like a sort of irreversible mutation, you can celebrate it, you can loathe it, but either way it now belongs to the very physiology of writing.

Resorting to the useful superstition of dates, we could say that the heroic age of absolute literature begins in 1798 with a review, the Athenaeum , mostly put together anonymously by a few young men in their early twenties—“proud seraphs,” Wieland called them — among whom the names of Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis catch the eye, and ends in 1898 with the death of Mallarmé in Valvins. A century to the year, during which all the decisive traits of absolute literature had occasion to manifest themselves. Which is to say that what came afterwards — embarrassingly labeled as “modernism” or “the avant-garde”—had already lost its auroral brightness, a fact that partly explains why it was so fond of aggressive, disruptive forms, first and foremost of which was the manifesto. By the end of the nineteenth century the essential features of the obscure process were in place. Then came the ramifications, the interfacings, a century of innumerable hybrids, repercussions, invasions of new territories. But how to explain the origins of the process? Certainly not via some historical or sociological approach. For one can’t help feeling that the entire phenomenon amounts to the most radical apostasy from history and society. It’s as if, exactly as the mesh of society tightened, so as to block out the whole sky, exactly as it clamored ever more loudly for a cult of its own, so the recruitment of a band of recalcitrants began, some of them discreet, some rowdy, some quite unassailable in their rejection — not because they felt duty-bound to other cults, but because possessed by a sense of divinity so intense it had no need to give itself a name, and at the same time so precise as to impose immediate rejection of that poisonous counterfeit that the Great Animal of society (the definition is Plato’s) was putting together with such tremendous power and zeal. From Hölderlin to the present day, nothing essential has changed in this regard, except perhaps that society’s dominion has become so pervasive as to coincide with the obvious. And this is its supreme triumph, as the supreme aspiration of the Devil is to convince everyone that he doesn’t exist.

In a century as wracked by upheavals as was the nineteenth, the event that in fact summed up all the others was to pass unobserved: the pseudomorphism between religious and social. It all came together not so much in Durkheim’s claim that “the religious is the social,” but in the fact that suddenly such a claim sounded natural . And as the century grew old, it certainly wasn’t religion that was conquering new territories, beyond liturgy and cult, as Victor Hugo and many who followed him imagined, but the social that was gradually invading and annexing vast tracts of the religious, first by superimposing itself on it, then by infiltrating it in an unhealthy amalgamation until finally it had incorporated the whole of the religious in itself. What was left in the end was naked society, but invested now with all the powers inherited, or rather burgled, from religion. The twentieth century would see its triumph. The theology of society severed every tie, renounced all dependence, and flaunted its distinguishing feature: the tautological, the self-advertising. The power and impact of totalitarian regimes cannot be explained unless we accept that the very notion of society has appropriated an unprecedented power, one previously the preserve of religion. The results were not long in coming: the liturgies in the stadiums, the positive heroes, the fecund women, the massacres. Being antisocial would become the equivalent of sinning against the Holy Ghost. Whether the pretexts spoke of race or class, the one sufficient reason for killing your enemies was always the same: these people were harmful to society. Society becomes the subject above all subjects, for whose sake everything is justified. At first with recourse to a grandiloquent rhetoric brutally wrenched from religion (the sacrifice for the fatherland), but later in the name of the mere functioning of society itself, which demands the removal of every obstacle.