As in a vivid sleep

Here’s an amazing, haunting poem by L.S. Bevington, from 1876:

Twilight

Grey the sky, and growing dimmer,
And the twilight lulls the sea;
Half in vagueness, half in glimmer,
Nature shrouds her mystery.

What have all the hours been spent for?
Why the on and on of things?
Why eternity’s procession
Of the days and evenings?

Hours of sunshine, hours of gleaming,
Wing their unexplaining flight,
With a measured punctuation
Of unconsciousness, at night.

Just at sunset, was translucence,
When the west was all aflame;
So I asked the sea a question,
And an answer nearly came.

Is there nothing but Occurrence?
Though each detail seem an Act,
Is that whole we deem so pregnant
But unemphasizèd Fact?

Or, when dusk is in the hollows
Of the hill-side and the wave,
Are things just so much in earnest
That they cannot but be grave?

Nay, the lesson of the Twilight
Is as simple as ’tis deep;
Acquiescence, acquiescence,
And the coming on of sleep.

It’s one in a set of four – “Morning,” “Afternoon,” “Twilight,” and “Midnight” – and I think the best of those though they are all good. Louisa Bevington was an anarchist (Kropotkin came to her funeral, as did the Rossettis) and atheist poet, well versed (so to speak) in Darwin’s theory of evolution. For Tennyson, for the Tractarians, for many others, evolution by natural selection was an unspeakably depressing idea, but Bevington could think about it in a way looking forward to Wallace Stevens’s “Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu”: “In a world without heaven to follow, the stops / Would be endings, more poignant than partings, profounder, / And that would be saying farewell, repeating farewell, / Just to be there and just to behold.”

A world without heaven to follow is one in which the present moment, if it signifies anything at all, can only signify repetition, can only mean its own meaning as a present moment. The possibility of temporary repetition is all it offers. Stevens’s repetition is like Bevington’s “Occurrence.” Things happen and the world is a series (hence the idea of repetition) of things happening. What we, empirical, limited, biological people do is acquiesce, as the penultimate line repeats.

What I find so hauntingly perfect about this poem is what that acquiescence is to. On a first reading it looks allegorical: the coming on of sleep is a harbinger of death, which is always coming on (as in Ashbery’s tonally similar poem “Fear of Death,” with its allusion to Hamlet's very last words). But I think what makes this poem so good is that it doesn’t make sleep a figure for death. It’s not about how we Darwinians have to to acquiesce to our own mortality. Rather our experience as biological beings is the experience of acquiescing to our own experience as natural beings. There is a sort of unmeditated kindness in nature, as simple as it’s deep: the kindness that means we fall asleep every night, as mammals do.

We acquiesce, without any sort of decision, to the part of our nature that is the everyday part of nature. I think what’s most amazing about this is the way that the moment in reading the poem that you realize that it’s about sleep, not about death, is the moment you repeat the experience that it describes. Sleep is real, death is notional. There’s no decision there but simply the fact that we do fall asleep, no working through to a resolution of some ontological anxiety but just a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep. We're fundamentally like all other mammals: we acquiesce as they do to living in the natural world -- the world whose existence we contribute to by being natural beings. The poem doesn’t solve the problem it sets up: it is (as Wittgenstein will say (Tractatus 6.251) about the vanishing of the problem.

Costly signaling in Balzac

Costly signaling is a term being used a lot in recent literary criticism of an evolutionary cast. But the idea is a biological analogue to what you find in anthropology, in accounts of gift-giving and in particular of completely destructive expenditure, as in the potlatch. Georges Bataille was the first person to see the relevance of dépense, of waste and destructive expenditure, of practices like that of the potlatch, to understanding not only the literature of excess but literature as excess. It's just this latter idea that most literary Darwinists are very intent to oppose, in all its manifestations (read: Freud, Lacan, Bloom, Kristeva, Irigaray, Derrida, Deleuze, u.s.w.) To take a particularly egregious example, one anti-psychonalytic literary Darwinist thinks that Oedipal analyses of literature and of human behavior are wrong because evolution is too parsimonious to get us all hot and bothered about stuff that it would be bad for us to do (like incest with our parents). Much easier for us just not to care. That's how she'd engineer it, so that's how evolution must be doing it. (All this is on my mind because Science had an article last week on literary Darwinism, considering some of these issues).

The anthropological idea is that generosity, gift-giving, expenditure, prestation, conspicious consumption, conspicuous destruction, is a signal of what the spending hand that always poureth out can afford to waste or destroy. If you don't have to ask (or to pay attention), that proves you can afford it.

Why advertise your studied indifference to cost? Because (as Veblen said) such an advertisement announces status. But status-seekers in gift economies originally and logically also seek the benefits of status: the tribute of those below them. So gift-givers expected returns on their gifts, expected those they benefited to repay them with interest. (Marcel Mauss explicitly saw credit and interest as prior to barter and equivalent exchange.) And yet such an expectation immediately blights the idea that the gift is a gift. It becomes a loan instead, one perhaps unwilllingly accepted (though the unwillingness would be part of the point the lender seeks to make).

So what do the truly great do, those who don't want to blight the generosity of the gift? They don't give gifts - they give metagifts. They destroy their wealth instead of putting others under an obligation of gratitude or return by giving them that wealth. We don't owe the truly great anything, because they didn't transfer their wealth to us: they didn't want to oppress us with their largesse. That's how great they are: they didn't need to buy our loyalty, at terms however generous.

I make this point to show one version of the recursive aspect of human mind-reading, of assigning motives to others, including their motivation to assign motives to you, toggling back and forth in an endless rock, paper, scissors or Dupinian whirlpool.

Part of what's interesting about costly signaling, when humans do it, is its recursive quality. You won't really find that among any other animal; the human version says a lot about how central are nested levels of mind-reading to how we interact. This is particularly true when it comes (as with the potlatch) to self-reflexive signaling, that is to say to signaling our attitudes toward our own signaling.

A neat paragraph in Balzac makes this point: La Cousine Bette describes a certain kind of competition, occuring at a party, where the beautiful courtesanes try to outdo each other:

Une partie est toujours pour ces dames un Longchamp de toilettes, où chacune d'elles veut faire obtenir le prix à son millionnaire, en disant ainsi à ses rivales: - Voilà le prix que je vaux!

This is pretty straightforward but deserves a second look. Each woman is dressed expensively, to set off her costly beauty. Each therefore is declaring herself simultaneously both the prize and the quality for which the prize is given (the French "prix" covers both prize and price, which is the point). The way to understand this is that each woman is a prize her erotic partner displays to advertise his value (his status and power), the value thus established then redounding upon the value of the woman who's been chosen by so high-valued a man.

She thus becomes a sign of her own value, because the millionaire she's with values her, and her beauty signals that he matters and so his valuation of her matters. He's only there as a toggle (well Balzac's a realist, so he has to supply the diamonds and pearls too, but they're only there as toggles as well) so that she can become a signal of herself, can become her own signal.

Variations and further complications of such situations (sexist though Balzac's scenario is) exists passim in human societies, making it impossible to disentangle signals and what they signal, "until we cannot tell apart / The idea and the bearer-being of the idea." Thus the Derridean idea of the sign, suitably understood, is not very far from what you'll find in evolutionary game theory.

It also makes possible certain ways of understanding the systematic manipulation of the interpretation of signals: Marx says capitalism depends on the carefully established confusion of labor and labor power. Let's say that labor power signifies labor (I sell my labor power to you, but you obtain my labor and the surplus value of their difference: you get my labor but pay only for my labor power): the fact that things can signal or signify themselves, with the circuit of signification routed through a second or third party, opens up a gap, an internal difference where the meanings are, and where they can be argued about.

I think this is what de Man and Benjamin mean by allegory: a thing that exists only as its representation. Turns out this idea is in Marx and in Darwin (in germ, in his theory of sexual selection) as well. But you won't find it in the Literary Darwinists.