Auden's O: The Loss of One's Sovereignty in the Making of Nothing

Another Epicycle

Another Epicycle The Truest O Is the Most Feigning This book could have been written so differently. The O takes many forms by definition, and we could have rendered a very different scenario, a very different story line, a very different set of players and a very different pro‑ tagonist. We might have reshaped the argument as a phenomenology of O, at which point the consummation of our discussion would have been Hegel, our central reading, say, his Phenomenology. We might have worked out a will to O, a deliberation of recurrent nothing, at which point our main focus would have been Nietzsche. We might have presented a being‑toward‑O, at which point Heidegger. A solely theatrical O would have given Shakespeare titular honours. Other twentieth‑century artists, as we have seen, could have taken center stage, and maybe deserved to—e.g., Beckett, Celan. If we had followed Altizer, it would have been, if not Blake’s O, then Joyce’s O—or better yet, Finnegans O. And of course the French have lined up in an elongate queue: Bataille, Blanchot, Derrida, Irigaray, and others less mentioned—Mallarmé, Lacan, Deleuze. But we have chosen a less expected figure, Auden, precisely because he was less expected. The contraction of One’s sovereignty was not abrupt, nor was the dilation of O immediate, stimulated by a radical few. Auden was not the insurgent, not the marginal experimenter or prophetic outcast of modern, or modernist, upheaval. An early socialist, a later Chris‑ tian, a muted homosexual, a poet’s poet—a man of tremendous talent and literary breadth, but not an artistic renegade, nor an intellectual extremist, nor any other subversive categories we might enlist (a revolutionary, an anarchist, a nihilist—a rogue, even). He was a public school Englishman who moved to America’s artistic and academic circles, leaving us a literary oeuvre expansive yet not definitive, falling between the heightened experi‑ mentations of modernism and the lavish disruptions of postmodernism. For that very reason, his figuration of the O seems all that more extraordinary: it announced itself sotto voce as if from the sides of the stage, neither spot‑ light performance, nor audience, nor critic—an understudy, we might say, under those before him and those to follow. And yet in this role he made manifest a self‑consciousness that had not been seen since Nietzsche, but 267 268 AUDEN’S O now in purely poetic terms—the self‑consciousness of “Auden’s O,” a trope, expletive, apostrophe, ellipsis that calls attention to itself only to show its own internal absence and negation. The truest O is the most feigning. It feigns to be “Auden,” or any other name we might place before it. And in the end this understudy can only lend itself to a false study, a pseudonym and a pseudo‑identity, whose very negated truth leads us, through a refiguration of what it means to bear a name and an existence, to a negating truth. Truth by means of nothing. The hard lesson of Lear, Hamlet, and Prospero, the truest studies of the false role. And the hard lesson of Romeo and Juliet, the truest study of the absent role. The truth of nothing. “Signifying Nothing” But what finally of this hard lesson? We could say that modernity offers us two possibilities: we either rehabilitate the One, and purge it of its total‑ izing and tyrannical tendencies; or we turn the O into a responsible gesture toward something that might approximate “the just.” But the two cannot be mutually exclusive: any rehabilitation of the One must now include its internal O, and any responsibility of the O must rehabilitate the One. For the One will not go away, this is certain. What we cannot do is confuse the role of the O for that of the One. We began with a king who tried to retain his sovereignty, only to be reduced by his own powers to nothing. We saw the son of a murdered king catch out illicit sovereignty through the play of nothing. We centralized a king who had his sovereignty taken from him, and who regained that sovereignty by his own powers, only to realize it was never his. We moved to an heir for whom disenfranchised sovereignty was the very means of his legitimation. There is now yet another who arrogated sovereignty to himself and became king, through means premeditated and bloody, only to admit that his sad and fatal role signifies...