On Simone Weil

Simone Weil, the Jewish writer, mystic, and activist who converted to Catholicism and starved to death at the age of 33 by insisting she eat no more than the rations allotted to her countryman in Occupied France, is one of those polarizing figures who attract almost equal degrees of cult-like devotion and awe on the one hand, and barbed accusations of fuzzy-headed idealism and anti-Semitism on the other.

T.S. Eliot gave her a strong, if somewhat guarded, endorsement, noting that “a potential saint can be a very difficult person: I suspect that Simone Weil could be at times insupportable.” But he also thought her possessed of “a kind of genius akin to that of the saints.” Leslie Fiedler, Robert Coles, and Francine du Plessix Gray, among others, have been drawn to her work, while Albert Camus, perhaps moved by her efforts with De Gaulle for the French Resistance, called her "the only great spirit of our times.”

On the other hand, De Gaulle responded to her plan to parachute untrained women into France to serve as field nurses by saying "she's crazy."

Among her detractors, Kenneth Rexroth disparaged the political program advanced in The Need for Roots as “egregious nonsense,” accused her of a “sick kind of agonized frivolity,” and pointedly wondered if “she was ever aware of the smell of her own armpits.” Susan Sontag, in a somewhat similar vein, held her up as the exemplar of “an age that only believes in the reality of sickness,” finding in her “fanatical asceticism … and contempt for pleasure” a morbid and hysterical spiritual imagination. “No one who loves life would wish to imitate her,” she wrote. Yet she found something to admire in Weil all the same: “in the respect we pay to such lives we acknowledge the presence of mystery in the world.”

That sense of mystery which Weil both projected and inhabited has compelled several prominent American women poets to write about her work. Stephanie Strickland’s Red Virgin is a sensitively rendered suite of lyrics that incorporate substantial details from her life to give us a vivid sense of her difficult and thorny personality and the cost of her struggle to articulate her astringent, uncompromising philosophy.

More recently Fanny Howe has written movingly about Weil’s life and work in prose poem pieces like “Doubt” (from Gone) and “Love and Work” from The Wedding Dress. Howe acknowledges Weil’s intransigence, her fierce, even quixotic, commitment to an austerity that bordered on annihilation. What draws Howe to Weil – what draws anyone who has found sustenance in her work – is her willingness to risk, her gnostic abandonment to abjection, an absolutist faith in negative theology bordering on the histrionic.

In Gravity and Grace, Weil writes: “God can only be present in the creation under the form of absence.” This apophatic posture, which recalls the self-erasing work of Edmond Jabés, can be found in many medieval mystics, as Anne Carson draws attention to in her own Weil-inspired work, Decreation, a book that is a bit of a dog’s breakfast, like so many of Carson’s works. Carson invokes the medieval mystic and martyr Marguerete Porete, whose radical treatise, The Mirror of Simple Souls, promoted union with God through the annihilation of the self, a theme that resonates with Weil’s mysticism. Porete was condemned by the Church as a heretic and burned at the stake.

Gravity is Weil’s term for matter, which she holds in contempt, rather as the Gnostics were alleged to have done, and very much like the Cathars, from what we know, who placed an inhuman bounty on the mortification of the flesh. Yet the final expression of her devotion was to deliberately starve herself to death in a British hospital, in protest of the meager rations allotted her countrymen under Nazi occupation. Hysterical? Or heroic?

Weil’s tactics sharply divide and unite both her detractors and her advocates. Her gift may really have been to blur such stodgy binaries, to overturn or undermine accepted categories for how spiritual commitment might mean, of what it might demands of us.

“The self,” Weil wrote, “is only a shadow projected by sin and error which blocks God’s light.” Grace, then, becomes in her gnostic a-theophany, that which obliterates the self, thereby rendering it porous to the ultimate Other. As Carson observes, “like Marguerite Porete, she feels herself to be an obstacle to herself inwardly. The process of decreation is for her a dislodging of herself from a center where she cannot stay because staying there blocks God.”

Weil herself declares: “I must love being nothing. How horrible it would be if I were something! I must love my nothingness, love being a nothingness.”

The will to self-abnegation, the invitation to the abyss of Unknowing, repelled Sontag, who was rightly frightened to gaze into it. So would anyone desirous of a normal, i.e. more repressed, life. Sontag was writing at the height of the neo-Freudian moment in America, when so much of the intellectual discourse was concerned with fomenting models of healthy interiority and combating the perceived plague of postwar neurosis. Weil’s extremism was simply too much for her. It’s too much for most people. But for some, it offers a way out – which is to say a way further in.

N.B. Weil’s attitude toward her own Judaism is just as extreme as her other beliefs. In her essay on The Iliad she writes scathingly of the Old Testament, condemning its idolatry and its representation of the deity as a figure of power rather than one of mercy and compassion. “Everything,” she writes, “is of a polluted atrocious character … beginning with Abraham, right down through all his descendants.” She does make some exceptions for the O.T.: The Song of Solomon, Job, The Psalms. Her contempt for the O.T. led her to feel close to Catholicism as Judith Thruman notes in her excellent essay on Weil in The New Yorker.

Speaking the Estranged -- book release

My book of reviews and essays, Speaking the Estranged, is now available from Asterism Books.

Speaking the Estranged

Published by the great team at Three Count Pour in Chicago (Ken Taylor, J. Peter Moore) it collects 30 years of work. Highlights include pieces on Michael Palmer, Jorie Graham, Raul Zurita, William Corbett, Norman Finkelstein, Mark Scroggins, Lee Ann Brown, Rachel Blau Du Plessis, Elizabeth Robinson, Peter Gizzi, and Nathaniel Mackey.

“All things/speak if they speak the estranged,” wrote George Oppen. The reviews gathered here represent thirty years of attention to a poetics of estrangement. For the most part I’ve sought to champion the work of poets who operate outside the well-policed boundaries of mainstream critical practice and as such might receive no attention at all. These reviews look mostly at small press poets working on the vital edge of the literary economy, who are committed to an aesthetic of restless and promiscuous invention. Their poetry is oblique, dissonant, and fractured; it both undermines and upholds traditional poetic imperatives, impatient with received notions of form. By and large these poets reject the naïve idea of the poem as a tidy report on subjective experience, focusing instead on the experience of language as such. To write a poetry of estrangement means recognizing that the world is broken and requires a broken kind of language to engage it. It means building small, lyric incursions – little negentropic engines – that create a difficult, disjointed beauty. Poetry is a language inside of language.

"You've marked out a kind of original canon (I'm delighted to be within its precincts) grounded in the world and in language yet sublime and mysterious and, in a way, none of the more mechanical disrupters of language conventions achieve. And of course, your sentences are as 'poetic' as the subjects you examine (reveal, even beyond themselves). A delight and a deep accomplishment."

Michael Heller

Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels

N.B. from 2004 -- a response paper from my Holocaust Studies grad seminar

Is it possible for a novel about the Holocaust to be too beautiful? Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces is a kind of fantasia on the Holocaust, almost, one wants to say, a valentine to it, a tale so awash in richly lyrical prose that it seems more enamored of the gorgeous effects it produces than in articulating the historical depth of its troubling subject. Like many virtuoso turns, the book is drenched in a technique that all but strangles the pathos it aims for. The darkness of the Nazi terror and the ethical responsibility which it imposes on a writer is airbrushed to a self-serving burnished, lapidary glow, as if beautiful sentences alone were sufficient to counter the apocalypse.

The question at stake here is whether or not such writing constitutes an abuse of history. Probably not, since the writer’s motives seem sincere. On the other hand, sentimentalism abuses both literature and the reader. The unintended irony of the text within a text’s title, “Bearing False Witness,” seeps into and taints the entire novel. The deeper currents of the book, however, offer tantalizing, if intermittent, reflections on language and translation, memory and identity, and how the awful pressures history exerts warps and reshapes them. When not waxing nostalgic or merely self-indulgent, Michaels can be quite compelling on this point. As the protagonist Jakob observes early on, language has both the power to destroy and to restore. However, Michaels never focuses her heady prose on this theme in a sustained way and the result is that the novel comes off as precious, mannered, and attenuated, in love with the sound of its own voice.

Perhaps the most problematic aspect of the novel is the way it valorizes the idea of an earthy, primal Hellenic ur-world as the antidote to the terrors of the Holocaust. This return to a putative origin of the West, more chthonic than classical, is presented with a gushing and feckless transparence that verges on the deeply cynical. Michaels’ treatment of this theme calls to mind Derrida’s remarks, in his essay on Levinas (“Violence and Metaphysics”) that “we live in the difference between the Jew and the Greek, which is perhaps the unity of what is called history” (153). Yet despite the novel’s provocative meditations on this Joycean dialectic of jewgreek/greekjew, the idea that ethics is best promulgated by the syntactical switch from “they” to “we” never receives a fully embodied or clarified treatment.

The play of historical tensions, represented most fully in the often seemingly capricious accumulation of cultural details like Athos’s reading interests, never amounts to more than an outline for a theme. The bricoleur method founders in the book’s prolonged dalliance with spectrality. Its real failure however is that the Holocaust is simply fodder for a lyrical brutalism that reduces it to a merely literary tragedy.