"Reflection on the right to will": Auden's "Canzone" and Arendt's notes on willing

Comparative Literature, Spring 2001 by Gottlieb, Susannah Young-Ah

The concern with learning, the peculiarity of the lyric "we," and the paradoxical character of the question it poses place these opening lines within the philosophical tradition of reflection on the legitimacy of the will, a tradition which Auden, like Arendt, seeks to reignite. If we cannot choose what we are free to love, then love must be distinguished from choice so that the inability to choose the object of love does not imply that love is not free. We must therefore learn how to distinguish love from the desire of the will to possess its object; that is, we must learn a love that will not be modeled on the structure of desire.24 A clear answer to the question-"when shall we learn"-should be available "today," because presumably it is contained in the only activity the poem has so far mentioned: the free act of loving. But the opening question receives no answer, and in place of the free act of loving-in which love would be the intimation of a day when there is clarity about love-the poem presents a series of animal imagery, in which the will, not yet transformed into the delight of loving, threatens to be reduced to sheer appetite. As appetite, the hungry and frustrated will is available for "baiting" (in every sense): "Faces, orations, battles, bait our will/As questionable forms and noises will." That which baits "our will" would lure it out of its freedom (and, thus, away from love and toward the "outskirts" of the day). The allure of such things-faces, orations, battles-is that they have the hue of resolution in an atmosphere of chaos: expressions of resoluteness, glorifications of national resolve, and the resolution of conflict through violence. Each of these things is an example of what has a tendency to lure the will away from its freedom and (drawing on the other sense of bait) harasses and incites it to violence, namely "questionable forms and noises."25

If, however, the same line is read so that the as indicates simultaneous action, then the subject of volition changes: while certain things bait our will, questionable forms and noises exert their will. Among these questionable forms is, of course, the poem, which has been set into motion by a question and whose form -indeed whose very title-begs to be questioned: What is a canzone? Canzone about what? By subtly indicating that "we" are not the only possible subject of volition, the poem thus keeps alive, as it were, the possibility that there is another sense of willing, especially since it is difficult to imagine that any answer to the question "what does the poem will?" would involve the possession or consumption of an object, even itself. And keeping alive this possibility is particularly important as the poem enters into the second stanza, which, although dominated by the rhyme word world, allows only "we"-or "our claim"-to be grammatical subjects and issues into the knowledge that "our" appetite is "dreadful" because it demands that present, past, and future (that is, "order, origin, and purpose") not deviate at any point from the "fluent satisfaction of our will." Regardless of how successful "we" may be in establishing a world that satisfies our will-regardless, therefore, of whether we have devised a perfectly mechanized world "of solid measurements" or a perfectly animated, magical world "of swans and gold"-our world must nevertheless house otherwise homeless objects"objects," of course, because they cannot function as subjects, not even as subjects of the stanza's fluent sentences. "We" are required to love these objects, which at the very least means to allow them to inhabit our world. But if love has the potential to reveal its object as independent of our will, then it also has the potential to dispossess us of our world, and if love can dispossess us of our world, it can also displace us from the site through which our will becomes worldly, namely our bodies. If, finally, neither the world nor the will can be said to belong to us, then the only thing that can be claimed as ours is "catastrophe"; with this word, which marks a caesura that prepares the way for "utter hesitation" in the next stanza, the world of the will takes a turn for the worse (kata strophein) and is no longer described in terms of mechanical perfection or mythopoetic dream, but in terms of "panic," "caprice," and dread.