Thank you, fog: W. H. Auden as presiding genius

Renascence, Summer 1997 by Cappeluti, Jo-Anne

-Is there . . . any figure traditionally associated with the stage who could be made to stand for this imaginative faculty? Yes, there is: the actor. "Genius & Apostle" Grown used to New York weather, all too familiar with Smog, You, Her unsullied Sister, I'd quite forgotten and what You bring to British winters

now native knowledge returns. (Collected Poems 886) H. Auden's apostrophe to the fog might be taken as a willful demonstration of all that is self-consciously poetic about poetry. If, as Jonathan Culler argues, any use of apostrophe demonstrates a "fiction which knows its own fictive nature" (146), then it seems as if Auden is deliberately writing a poem that foregrounds its fictional devices in order to undermine the experience presented in the poem, thus achieving what Lucy McDiarmid has called his deliberate undermining of poetry's "frivolity, vanity, and guilt" (x). Accentuating the apostrophe with an ongoing capitalization of, among other words, every pronoun referring to the fog, Auden writes a poem that seemingly reflects Paul de Man's argument that the loss of the representational function in poetry goes hand in hand with the loss of self, the poet-as a resultbeing left to explore only "irreality" (156).

Auden's apostrophe to the fog employs what Geoffrey Hartman has called one of poetry's most self-conscious, founding superstitions, the belief in the spirit of place, the genius loci (311). Focusing on the time period between Gray and Wordsworth, Hartman explores the revaluation of this phenomenon and finds that in their effort to challenge their vocation's "darker graces," poets in this period continue Milton's "grand march of intellect," thus contributing to the "humanization of the mind" (335). The predominant sign of the success of such a de-sublimation process is the mute epiphany: the transcendent, presiding genius or Other not speaking in response to the poet's appeal to it for renewed vision. As a result of becoming familiar with this silence, the poet's address-or apostrophe-to the presiding genius becomes "purely rhetorical" (313, 316). Rather than insist on simply a linear progression of such revaluating, however, Hartman observes a cyclical progression: that is, there are also times during which poets return to their vocation's "superstitious" roots, to the "allegorical or mythological" mode. Such times are characterized by the self-consciousness of persona (when "self-identification becomes a more than personal, indeed a prophetic decision"), which happens "when the poet feels himself alien to the genius of country or age and destined to assume an adversary role" (335). As the ages become increasingly secular, the poet who sees the sacred would feel himself or herself at odds with the age and assume this role of adversary. Cyclical or not, however, Hartman argues that moments in which the "burden of the mystery" is lifted are short-lived, and eventually, in spite of these returns to vocational roots, the span between Wordsworth and Wallace Stevens demonstrates a progressive demystification, a de-evolution of the imagination that reflects the imagination's dwindling ability to experience the sublime: as Thomas Weiskel tests it, that epiphanic experience in which by encountering some transcendent entity, human beings transcend, in feeling and in speech, their culturally and biologically determined human existence (3).

Thus, even though Hartman argues that the road to demystification takes occasional circuits back to superstitious belief, that belief is only superstitious. His theory, focused as it is on explaining the genesis of the Romantics, assumes that the poet's relationship to any "Other" is always the same: that the poet's task is always to represent such an encounter, which, given poets' increasing awareness of even the fictional aspects of language, is doomed to fail.

To return to the idea that Auden is willfully demonstrative about all that is self-conscious in poetry, then, it is possible to see that his talking to the fog is a sign of one who feels at odds with his age and, as a result, selfconscious about his persona-one, who, as the age's adversary, confronts it with what his age would feel is a complete fiction: in this case a "ThouThou" relationship to nature as if it were a second self.' Auden compounds this adversarial role, however, by using fictional devices in a way that undermines the fictionality. That is, he writes in the quiet tone of one who is supremely at home with such fictionality-with no self-consciousness about his persona at all.

There is nothing in Hartman's argument to explain this anomalous variation: Auden is not simply returning to superstitious belief (that is, using an abundance of devices only to draw attention to the fictionality of such belief); nor is he struggling to represent what the Romantics find out is impossible to represent without undermining it. As I will argue, Auden's poem attests to a movement from Wordsworth to Auden that shows us not a demystification and not a mute epiphany but a re-sublimation in the vocation of poetry: by enacting the role of the "Other," the poet speaks for the "Other," thus breaking its silence.