On Inventing Unknownness: The Poetry of Disenchanted Reenchantment (Leopardi, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Justice)

Les inventions d'inconnu réclament des formes nouvelles.

Arthur Rimbaud

Rimbaud's phrase comes near the end of a famous letter he wrote in May 1871 to Paul Demeny, one of two that are called "les lettres du Voyant."¹ "Inventions d'inconnu" is a remarkable phrase, implying as it does that the unknown is not something pre-existing that poetry might "discover," but an outcome, something that can exist only as a consequence of its having been poetically "invented," in apparently a number of different ways. Not a source of poetry then but a product requiring as its precondition new formal modes that are themselves, presumably, to be either discovered or invented—i.e. found ("trouver une langue" is another famous phrase from the same letter). To find "a" language would result, then, in an invention of "de l'inconnu," something having the quality of unknownness; it would not bring about the discovery of "the" unknown, "l'inconnu." So the earlier phrases in the letter to Demeny about the poet's "arriving" at "the" unknown have to be reinterpreted in light of this final phrase about its invention. Writing to Edmund Gosse in January 1893, Mallarmé a bit unexpectedly echoes Rimbaud, referring to "the beyond magically produced by certain dispositions of speech" ("l'au-delà magiquement produit par certaines dispositions de la parole").²

A wonderful essay by the anthropologist Michael Taussig describes the healing "magic" of shamans as an invention of unknownness, and does so in terms that resonate with Rimbaud and Mallarmé on poetry.³ Magical practices bring about healing to the extent that the shaman's tricks are appropriately performed, an art that Taussig describes as the "skilled revelation of skilled concealment." The shaman may trick openly, but only so long as the trick is performed smoothly, in a dégagé manner, and he does not either bungle it or otherwise let on that he is performing a trick. For "exposure of the trick is no less necessary to the magic of magic than is its concealment." In the way that a show of secrecy can produce belief in a secret that may or may not be actual, so the artful display of shamanistic sleight-of-hand can produce effective therapeutic outcomes. So, to summarize, a certain form of shaman hypocrisy and not-knowing (agnosticism) goes into a subterfuge that, says Taussig, "highlights natural mysteries as well as those that are inherent in social institutions and personal relations" (155). The lighting, in other words, is artificial; but the illumination is real. Shamanism's "invention of unknownness" concerns real relations, and it has genuine outcomes.

I want to suggest, then, that such an understanding of magical healing as a product of the skilled revelation of skilled concealment also offers us a definition of modern art, as another practice in which we—both the practitioners and the users of art—have faith even "while suspecting it is a lot of hooey" (Taussig, 123). There is, in other words, a category of practices, of which art is one and shamanism another, that amount to forms of trickery or fraudulence but whose efficacy arises from the fact that, at the same time as they deceive, they are up-front, honest about their facticity. In this they differ from lying, which works only if the deception remains concealed. A century ago the Russian Formalists enduringly defined the twin tenets of aesthetic modernism as (a) "defamiliarization," or estrangement (making the world wonderful) and (b) "laying bare the device." It turns out, then, that, if Taussig and I are right, these practices are in fact co-dependent; and that the aesthetic invention of unknownness depends on and demonstrates their inseparability. But I will be modifying Shklovsky's formula slightly and redefining his "making strange" as making the world wonderful again.⁴

In the arts, especially the language arts, we have a name for upfront trickery, deceit, fraudulence or other recourse to tricks of the trade; that name is figurality, or troping. All language is figural, of course, in respect of its referent; but second-degree...