Poiesis and the Withdrawal: The Garden-Motive in Henry James, Wallace Stevens, and David Mamet

Abstract

In the expression of the pastoral instinct there is an impulse toward regaining a world lost, toward recapturing the “good old days. ” It often seems to be a self-indulgent imagining of wish-fulfillment. As manifest in literature and art, however, invoking the pastoral raises questions about human beings and our world, and it is a particular expression of something that Martin Heidegger sees as essential to our nature. The longing for an idealized place has to do with the sense of temporality and loss, the ephemerality of all things in time. “The event of withdrawal,” as an action, is equally our response to our world and the world’s speaking to us; it is “what is most present in all our present” (Thinking 9). Inverting our usual way of thinking about this relationship (performing his “kehre”),¹ Heidegger argues that it is “not we who play with words, but the nature of language plays with us” (118); we are “called” by it. “What is called appears as what is present, and in its presence it is brought into the keeping, it is commanded, called into the calling word. So called by name, called into a presence, it in turn calls. … What calls us to think, and thus commands, that is, brings our essential nature into the keeping of thought, needs thinking because what calls us wants itself to be thought about according to its nature” (120-21). Our tenuous hold on reality, then, entails thinking about the condition that in the very presence of our “present” there is the withdrawal that reminds us of absence, loss, disappearance and the call to these.