“I Speak with a Throb”: Reading Adélia Prado’s Use of Figure in Response to Niklaus Largier

Figure, Niklaus Largier says in Figures of Possibility: Aesthetic Experience, Mysticism, and the Play of the Senses, refers to “what strikes us and makes us part of it” (5). Responding to Largier, I will briefly investigate how this process of striking and partaking works in some of 20^th century Brazilian poet Adélia Prado’s writing, involving her reader by shaping perception prior to the analytical recognition of meaning. My reading of Prado’s poem “Neopelican” (Ex Voto, 2013) is guided by Largier’s emphasis on the disruption, asymmetry, and “meaningless” force of figures or their effect prior to meaning; and the shaping work that figures perform on the reader’s affective, perceptive, and sensory experience, resisting allegory and provoking participation. Working with examples from Figures of Possibility including Henry Suso’s use of imitatio and speculatio; physicist and theorist Karen Barad’s thunderstorm from “Transmaterialities”; and, finally, the apostle Paul’s words (offered by Largier as a paradigmatic instance of figuration) from Galatians 2:20, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me”; I will attend to Prado’s deft, intentional movement between a logical or discursive proposal and the irresistible emergence of figural image, enabling her reader to partake of the displacement and transformation of perception that Largier describes.

The modification of perception that occurs in contemplative practices formed by and with texts like those of fourteenth century mystic Henry Suso is what, Largier claims, turns “all things” into sacramental reality and into figures (140). Suso’s rhetoric achieves this convergence through a literary realism that transfigures encounter with the concrete particular into the site of participation in divine grace. Largier proposes that for Suso, the processes of imitatio and speculatio produce a state of the “supernatural” convergence of affect, thought, love, and intellect in the human response to nature. This state is a response of prayer, praise, and jubilation that modifies perception and “makes all things sacramental.” The objects of perception—especially the natural world—are thereby transfigured into “agents of grace” (138). In this experiential shift from object to agent, Largier contends, a sacramental experience of the created world is effected by receiving “words and things as figures,” and by a “poetics of creation” relying on participation rather than conceptual form (139).

 Here I want to attend to the use of the term “agent” above. In chapter four, when Largier claims that the sacramental modification of perception and of created things, working through figures, transforms these things into “agents of grace,” he means that in and through them, divine grace works and is manifest. This is not a claim about the inherent agency of things in themselves. In chapter six, however, this claim about agency shifts. Largier uses an excerpt from Barad’s “Transmaterialities” to relate their (Barad’s) idea of agential realism to Jacob Böhme’s idea of the emergence of figures from the ground of the soul. Barad uses a thunderstorm to illustrate what they call the “imagining” going on in nature:

Desire builds, as the air crackles with anticipation. Lightning bolts are born of such charged yearnings. Branching expressions of prolonged longing, barely visible filamentary gestures, disjointed tentative luminous doodlings––each faint excitation of this desiring field is a contingent and suggestive inkling of the light show yet to come. No continuous path from sky to ground can satisfy its wild imaginings, its insistence on experimenting with different possible ways to connect…

Matter is promiscuous and inventive in its agential wanderings: one might even dare say, imaginative.

Barad in Largier, 186-187

What strikes Largier about this passage is its emphasis on imaginings, reminding him of Böhme’s emergence of figures from the ground of the soul. What strikes me about this passage is Barad’s inversion of Figures of Possibility’s prior use of the term “agent,” and the sudden departure from the concrete and re-immersion in the conceptual. Through use of the pathetic fallacy, sensory information in this passage quickly gives way to anthropomorphizing: “Lightning bolts are born of such charged yearnings,” or “no continuous path from sky to ground can satisfy its wild imaginings”. I can’t speak to how this language functions in Barad’s larger argument, but while it does here conjure the image or memory of lightning, it does not do so through the figural. This passage is a record of what occurs just after figure “strikes us and makes us part of it.” Barad, struck by the sensory and aesthetic experience of the storm, reacts, conceptualizes, and produces an excess of language that delights in and interprets the experience just had. Largier identifies the same process in his introduction, his own mind rushing to apply meaning to a Berlin dance rehearsal. That the meaning is applied after the fact is crucial.

Rather than figuration, Barad’s record of the thunderstorm is what Largier calls mimetic assimilation, in which the figure is translated into the imaginary world of comparisons and similes when fitting a pattern or mode of resemblance that structures our recognition (Largier, 5). As an alternative record of the interaction between figure and mimetic assimilation, I will now turn to Adélia Prado’s poem “Neopelican,” looking briefly at how the poem moves consciously between the two processes:

Neopelican

One day,

just as I’d seen a ship once,

unforgettable,

I saw a lion, close up.

He was reclining,

a raw individual soul.

A strong smell, not sweet,

mix of blood and vinegar.

I was exultant, because I had no words

and not having them would prolong my delight:

a lion!

Only a god is like this, I thought.

I superimposed over the lion

a whole new animal

radiating the aura

of his ripe color.

Have mercy on me, I prayed to him,

constricted, grateful

to be small once more.

This super-human faith lasted a minute.

I speak with a throb:

I saw no lion,

I saw the Lord!

Ex Voto, 113

Prado starts with simile, but moves easily into spatial sense with words like “close up” and “reclining.” “Raw individual soul” is concept, but we quickly return to the sensible: how, exactly, did the lion smell? Blood and vinegar serve allegorical functions, yes, but without calling attention to themselves, and without, strictly speaking, departing from the experiential report of the senses. Aware now of her inability to recreate the figural experience of the lion beyond the already recreated sense-data, Prado steps back and consciously describes the experience of being figurally struck: an exultation that exceeds words, an experience prior to words and meaning that she wishes, in delight, to prolong. Trying to prolong it temporarily reduces words to bare exclamation: “a lion!” Then, promptly, the impulse toward the divine, the possibility of the divine in the very excess of lion: “Only a god is like this, I thought.” But here Prado is careful to show that she is still conceptualizing, reasoning. This is the mind’s swift attempt to fill the void of meaning in the experience of the figural, consciously admitted. Now comes the superimposition of new image over the figure––barely noticeable as different from it, but still reported as a reaction to the figure’s force, a report of Prado’s own transformed vision serving as preparation for the final transfiguration that closes the poem.

Barad’s thunderstorm passage conflates the conceptual meaning of the lightning—and the allegory of desire—with the event itself­­. Prado, on the other hand, steps back from her own reaction to the initial figure of the lion, reflecting on her own devotional impulse as it rapidly turns into conceptual meaning-making, aware of the projection that results while still attempting to communicate her own transformed vision and instinct toward submission and praise. At this point she reports on the facts of the process, beginning a return to the concrete: “This super-human faith lasted a minute.” Then we move to the present tense, relying on the meanings and concepts already evoked in the middle of the poem to shift once more into the concrete, the devotional, and the figural: “I speak with a throb: / I saw no lion, / I saw the Lord!”  This displacement of the lion with the Lord is neither metaphorical nor allegorical. We know, because Prado tells us, that she sees a lion. But if we believe in Prado’s lion, then we must also believe her when she disrupts that vision, opening it up onto a vision of God. She has already illustrated for us the prior process of transformed vision that superimposes another radiating form onto the lion; the final shift into the vision of the divine must be read, then, as something else. The lion is presented as a pre-conceptual—and originally pre-verbal—annunciation of himself, and something in the cognitive and sensory displacement of that figural experience, that transformed perception, opens onto a vision of the divine. Prado’s conscious movements between the processes of figuration, conceptualization, and mimetic assimilation do not recreate for us the same figural experience that she herself had, but rather enable us to participate in and partake of the experience of her divine vision in a complex and different process of figuration and meaning on the page. I offer “Neopelican” as a counter to Barad’s thunderstorm––which, rather than allowing the reader to partake in figural experience, invites them into the subsequent creative process of conceptualizing and allegorizing imagination and desire.

I am left asking: is the new materialist language of agential realism really an instance of figuration? How did we transition from a use of the term “agent,” meaning conduit or receptive tool, an actor moved by an other, to the term “agential,” meaning immanent to itself, meaning matter that has its own imagination, even its own desire? “Agents of grace” as used in chapter four implies that the agent acts only insofar as God moves it to act. The term “agential matter” uses “agent” to mean precisely the opposite: that matter moves, desires, and imagines from the ground of its own immanence (Largier, 188).

Figures, Largier insists, “do not mean and do not speak. They act; they circulate; they affect” (39).I don’t disagree, but I propose that figures are actors in the same sense that the things of the world transformed by the effects of figure are “agents” of divine grace. Both “agent” and “actor” can be used as Largier uses “agent” in chapter four: meaning a receptive vehicle for that grace. Grace transforms the vehicle—figure, saint, sacrament—and makes it in some sense active; but that vehicle’s role as actor or agent is not inherent to itself as matter, and its active “force” does not mean that it subsequently imagines or desires. Figures do act, but they act without being immanent to themselves.

This contemporary shift in the use of the word “agency,” inverts Largier’s use of “agents of grace” qua Suso. When we say “my agency” in casual conversation, When we say “my agency,” what we say could really be, “not me, but something through me.” We don’t mean this, of course; we mean the opposite. We mean to assert our own control, authority, and discrete sense of being. But what if, in discussing our own “agency,” we actually meant to displace the sovereignty of our selfhood and disrupt the control of the will? This would be akin to the radical transformation effected by the figural encounter, when we are struck by figure and made part of it; or the moments of displacement and defamiliarization opened up by mystical writings meant to modulate and reform perception.

Halfway through “Absence of Poetry,” Adélia Prado declares, “once more I delude myself that I will make the poem” (The Alphabet in the Park , 34). The emphasis here is not on will, make, or poem, but on I. Prado repeatedly abdicates and reclaims the sovereign I, speaking from her desiring, incarnate, human body while also claiming that if she writes a poem, it is God who writes. This is part of a method of disrupting language with figure, desire, and displacement. It is not metaphor, nor obligatory humility topos. Prado’s abdication of the I and her claim of God’s work in her poems is a participation, in the tradition of the mystics, of the radical dispossession that Largier identifies in his paradigmatic example of figure at the beginning of Figures of Possibility’s introduction: the apostle Paul’s words, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me” (Largier, 1).