La seule liberté, le seul état de liberté que j'ai éprouvé sans réserve, c'est dans la poésie que je l'ai atteint, dans ses larmes et dans l'éclat de quelques êtres venus à moi de trois lointains, celui de l'amour me multipliant.
Riding and Stein, we might say that the reason for reading and writing poetry must be the same (Riding) and derive from enjoyment (Stein).
— René Char
In the above lyrical excerpt, René Char expresses a belief commonly held among poets (albeit uncommonly expressed): poetry represents the only unrestrained freedom the speaker has ever known. But what is it about writing poetry that sets one free? Further, is the poet’s freedom reducible to an individualistic, romantic inner freedom or does its intensity extend beyond the event of making and beyond the isolation of the lyric subject?
Surely, one is not entirely free when writing for another, and more specifically, one is not free when writing according to another’s rules, if another has prescribed a purpose to the task of writing. Is one condition of freedom that one has designed the purpose of a work? Or is one only truly free in conditions of purposelessness, to which condition poetry lends itself readily?
It is evident that one must not be fulfilling another’s purpose to be free when writing, as much as in any field of experience where freedom to choose is only encumbered by the law of necessity, in turn governed by external economical conditions or legislation. Freedom therefore is connected to the capacity to design one’s own formal rules for the architecture of creation. In The Poet’s Freedom, American poet Susan Stewart follows a line of reasoning proposed by Kant that relates freedom to self-legislation in this way: “Freedom lies thereby in giving one’s self one’s own law out of one’s own essence. Analogously, as the maker or genius gives the rules to art, he or she is enjoying positive freedom in conditions of unusual
intensity.”154 The domain of freedom is drawn in chalk-lines of intensity that fluctuate and that are ephemeral. These intensities flower. They correspond to the maker’s capacity to invent the very laws of making, but also to the freedom to circumvent their own laws, to disabuse themself of the law and its containment. Freedom therefore is only connected to the capacity to design one’s own formal rules for the architecture of creation if it also entails the capacity to write with a lawlessness that continually reinvents its rules or rejects the notion of intent entirely. The freedom in making thus corresponds to freedom from the constraints of an end- goal or purpose.
Susan Stewart’s arguments about poetic and artistic freedom hinge on the premise of an internal field of action, which renders artistic activity distinct from labour and from forces that are in turn external to the worker. She compares Kant’s views on self-legislation to a passage in Marx explaining the workers’ sense of alienation from their products as a result of their incapacity to self-legislate, their obligation to another’s rule, intent and purpose. Stewart points to this comparison despite the differences between labour and work: Whereas labour is monotonous and based on external rules, poiesis corresponds to the capacity of the ‘genius,’ governed by the conditions of inner freedom. She argues that since making (poiesis) is not a means to serve some other end and is free to be made according to conditions determined in a situation of freedom and self-legislation, it does not result in the maker’s alienation, unlike the commodity.
154 Susan Stewart, The Poet’s Freedom: A Notebook on Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 11.
While the production of poetry is surely self-governed, does poetry never belong to another? Despite its relative obscurity, is poetry free of the demands of reception? The charge of ‘difficulty’ would suggest not. While the neutral may be the cornerstone of freedom, readerly insistence on intelligibility as a form of superficial transparency is its most serious antagonist (recall Stein’s words: the common readerly demand for so-called ‘intelligibility’ is in fact a demand for a text that can be paraphrased, a text that the laws of language have legitimized, an utterance considered meaningful because it can be represented in another way).
However, the capacity to form one’s own rules is only the first step in achieving the conditions of freedom; the capacity to exceed the limits of self-legislation by writing for no purpose (not even to abide the law one has made except insofar as it conditions freedom from purpose) is the complement to this argument. In “What is Freedom?” Hannah Arendt moves beyond the discussion of freedom in terms of the will and intellect — beyond the realm of judgment — to the very principles of inspiration and creation that are at the heart of the poetic endeavour as a free action. Arendt writes about “the freedom to call something into being which did not exist before, which was not given, not even as an object of cognition or imagination, and which therefore, strictly speaking, could not be known. Action, to be free, must be free from motive on one side, from its intended goal as a predictable effect on the other.”155 Such an action, she explains, originates in a principle, which operates independently of goals and motives. This principle does not come before or after the action, but emerges with the action itself: “… unlike the judgment of the intellect which precedes action, and unlike the
155 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking, 1961), 151. Emphasis mine.
command of the will which initiates it, the inspiring principle becomes fully manifest only in the performing act itself.”156 As such, the principle of inspiration is unrivalled and unique as it coalesces with poetic invention, neither before nor after the act of writing, but in the very performance of writing itself. In adopting this view, we depart from the common notion of inspiration that ties it to hierarchies elaborated in religious thought. According to Arendt’s principle, considering what inspiration means for the poet leads us not to the image of the writer subdued by and heeding a greater voice, inscribing dictation received from an otherworldly source — not the dual struggle for mastery and the split between internal and external — instead, the notion of inspiration derives from a creative force that is inextricable from the issuance of performance, the freedom of performance itself, and which begins with the smallest unit, an incomparable and unique principle. Accordingly, freedom arises with the act; there is no freedom without action and one is free as long as one acts. Consequently, the poet does not have freedom, as freedom is not something the poet can possess; neither is it a quality to be bequeathed, loaned, given, stolen or purchased. As long as the conditions of writing can be met, the poet is free in the event of writing and the event of writing is the poet’s freedom. Further, the conditions of the poet’s existence are those of writing, and therefore without the conditions of freedom, the poet does not exist. Freedom is not the instigator to action but it is the beginning of action insofar as action is always a beginning and insofar as writing is the poet’s beginning.
Significantly, Arendt’s description of the creative act as the freedom to create something original supports Stein’s claim of poetry’s irreducibility to something that has
already existed. Arendt defines creation as the freedom to call into being something that has not already existed and therefore could not be known. To reiterate, Stein suggests that pleasure and desire form the domain of intelligibility rather than a text’s communicability or capacity for paraphrase: “Being intelligible is not what it seems. You mean by understanding that you can talk about it in a way that you have a habit of talking […] but I mean by understanding enjoyment.”157 What has not been previously known cannot be paraphrased in language, cannot be conventionally ‘understood’ if it cannot be known, if it is not familiar and cannot be represented according to patterns of common language usage. If poetic creation produces something that could not otherwise be known, how could it be represented in any other way? The freedom of the act of poiesis is an articulation of the freedom from anterior knowledge of what one is doing or to what end, and it finds its correlate in the act of reading.