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Chapter 11 - Mere Being

Imagination at the End of the Mind

from Part II - On Literary History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 October 2024

Peter Boxall
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

To think about the limits (of a text, of a being, of a place) is to think about adulteration. It is to recognise that, at their limits, things merge with other things.

This essay proposes that such thinking has taken on a particular urgency in our own time, an urgency that is at once biopolitical and geopolitical. The spread of a virus has forced us to examine our individual biopolitical limits, as the collapse of a geopolitical ideology – one which allied US capital to progressive democratisation – has forced us to examine the boundaries, between east and west, between north and south, that have shaped the global distribution of wealth and force.

Under these conditions there is a tendency to immerse ourselves in our own person, to withdraw from the porous limits of self, of household, of nation, to some ground zero of being. We look to the imagined grounds of a minimal life that is self-directed and self-sufficient, that is proof against contamination by whatever lies beyond its pale.

We might call this contracted state a condition of mere being – the mere being that remains when our political life, our being in relation to others, is attenuated or forsaken. But this essay suggests that close attention to literary accounts of mere being, from Henry James to Wallace Stevens to Samuel Beckett, helps us to see that poetic mereness is not a denial of shared being, but a particular means of imagining it, a means of approaching that place where we are conjoined with others. In tracing a poetic tradition of mere being, the essay argues that what we find in the dramatically denuded self is not a retreat from limits, but an encounter with them – an encounter which grants us a new way of imagining what Densher calls, in The Wings of the Dove, ‘our being as we are’.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Possibility of Literature
The Novel and the Politics of Form
, pp. 227 - 252
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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  • Mere Being
  • Peter Boxall, University of Oxford
  • Book: The Possibility of Literature
  • Online publication: 10 October 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009314305.014
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  • Mere Being
  • Peter Boxall, University of Oxford
  • Book: The Possibility of Literature
  • Online publication: 10 October 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009314305.014
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Mere Being
  • Peter Boxall, University of Oxford
  • Book: The Possibility of Literature
  • Online publication: 10 October 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009314305.014
Available formats
×