Criticism, or, the Unrequited — Rebecca Ariel Porte

for Miriam Shoshanah

Hidden Things

From all I did and all I said
let no one try to find out who I was.
An obstacle was there that changed the pattern
of my actions and the manner of my life.
An obstacle was often there
to stop me when I’d begin to speak.
From my most unnoticed actions,
my most veiled writing—
from these alone will I be understood.
But maybe it isn’t worth so much concern,
so much effort to discover who I really am.
Later, in a more perfect society,
someone else made just like me
is certain to appear and act freely.

--C.P. Cavafy (trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard) (Note 1)

The day before his last birthday, which was the day before he died, he lay in the Greek Hospital in Alexandria, asking, without words, for the historian to come near, which is generally how poetry relates to history—by gestures of appeal. For some time now, the occupant of the bed had been silent, because of the throat cancer and because he had refused, last summer, to allow his doctors to embed a metal larynx, a prospect more awful, he thought, even than dying mute. To the south, maybe wind was shaking the reeds at the fringes of Lake Mariout. If reeds were quivering, then, to the north, white spangles would be glittering on the surface of the Abu Qir Bay. On the nightstand, there were probably two sheaves of his own poetry and a few detective stories by Simenon or someone like that—mysteries were the only reading he could swallow after his throat closed up. As the historian approached, the poet conjured a napkin from somewhere in the bedclothes. Taking up a pencil, he drew a circle. It might have been a whim of idle geometry or a portrait of a life that ended where it began or an abstract Shield of Achilles or a joke about Archimedes (“don’t disturb my circles!”) or the Third Circle of Hell (where excessive appetites are punished), or the Third Circle of Irrigation in colonial Alexandria’s Ministry of Public Works, which employed him for thirty years during which he malingered assiduously and stole time for poetry between bouts of malingering. (Note 2)

It may not even be true. If true, it may not be precise. A Cavafy scholar had it long after the fact from Andreas Nomikos, a set designer, who had it from his father, the historian Cristoforos Nomikos, a close friend of Constantin Cavafy. (Note 3) The poet may or may not have placed a single dot at the center of the circle he did or didn’t draw. Whether it happened or whether it didn’t, the act possesses the fabulist truth of poetry, which is, occasionally, a matter of how a stopped mouth says anything to the equivocal claims of a world that demands responses on its own terms. This feat of communication is particularly impressive when the person addressed by such a claim feels unable to address the demand directly, unable to react according to expectations, unable or unwilling to fulfill the request or carry out the order, unable or unwilling to counterdemand, unable or unwilling to pay in kind—very ordinary situations in unrequited life, and some of them tragic. 

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Still, some things are better unrequited. One of criticism’s tasks is to explain this. 

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So much goes unrequited: wrongs, aggressions, kindnesses, services, courtesies, trickeries, slights, desires, debts, suppositions, hypotheses, hopes, love, labor. The unrequited, in any of these senses, means the lack of a return suited to your wants and needs: the job that didn’t pay, the false friend who will never get her comeuppance, the worldview that failed you, the one who doesn’t love you back—or, in a more generous direction, the self-canceling debt, which we are less likely to call “unrequited,” even though it qualifies. We remember better the feeling of having been denied than any generosity in the denial. Desire has a habit of convincing us that justice would mean getting what we want, regardless of the rational truth of the matter, which is why a return that doesn’t seem to address your demands directly—or actively thwarts them—can also seem like unrequital. 

Unrequited life operates on a simple fallacy from which no one is exempt, though not everyone suffers equally: causes should produce reliable effects and effects should come with a legible provenance of causes. Repeated demonstrations to the contrary prove that this clarity is, in most spheres of activity, the exception rather than the rule. The sum of these lessons, at scale, is equivalent to unrequited life.  

Still, the desire at the root of unrequited life is misapplied rather than misbegotten. Causes must return effects in order to be causes. Effects can return us to their causes and sometimes it’s even worth the effort of looking—overdetermination may be fate but it comes with an appeals process. Occasional successes in producing a good result or tracing a conclusion to its premise supply the false conviction that the failures are the betrayals. Order restores itself in the long stretches of time when intent doesn’t bring about a hoped-for end, when desire, will, and action can’t even amount to causes. The marvelous ruse of unrequited life is its insistence that it’s the other way around—it’s not “that things are “status quo” is the catastrophe,” it’s simply that the status quo hasn’t yet revealed itself as the deviation you know it must be. (Note 4) This illusion enables dissent, because bad transactions might suggest better alternatives or deliver surprising compensations—but also despair, because, for the most part, things do just go on like this. The gods are hard to reconcile, let alone requite.   

In unrequited life, the sense of interruption between causes and effects could be as intimate as a relationship no amount of work will save or as grand as the burden of an incomprehensible totality: the obscure connections between the daily grind of the gig economy and the abstract flux of capital or between a run on a necessary medication and the politics of climate change. Experiences of going unrequited or being unwilling or unable to requite always take a little color from incidental facts like this, facts about the material horizon of possibility. 

It’s almost too easy to find examples of unrequital at scale in organizations of life that generate promises, ceaselessly unfulfilled, and imbalanced returns. Unrequited labor, to take one at random, is how English translations often render Marx’s unbezahlte Arbeit, which feels like a cause without effect and appears as an effect without cause. (Note 5) It’s the enchanted commodity with its imperceptible cargo of congealed labor and it’s the hidden work of social reproduction, which keeps all engines running. This magic trick also shows up in the false promises of popular mysticisms like “manifesting,” which assures us that the dream accomplishes the reality. 

Unrequited labor describes the situation of the ghostworker in the machine, charged with making technological processes seem fully automated. Frequently taxed with screening out violent sexual, and illegal images from endless streams of content, sometimes culling irrelevant material from data sets meant to optimize facial recognition technologies (which will then be fed to surveillance software), ghostworkers haunt every major digital platform. Repetitive, psychologically painful, and dramatically undercompensated, these jobs are doled out as piecework, largely to people in vulnerable populations worldwide. (Note 6)

Sometimes ghostworkers are called “microworkers” or “turks,” after Amazon’s Mechanical Turking platform. This last alias summons up the chess-playing, eighteenth-century automaton, secretly operated by a man concealed in its casing. Walter Benjamin began his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” by analogizing the Mechanical Turk’s rigged chess game to the theological view of progress that blights Marx’s account of history. (Note 7) If the original Mechanical Turk was like a story of triumphal history marching through a series of scripted victories whenever the master’s invisible hand tugged at the strings, then contemporary mechanical turking dismisses the chess-master and subcontracts the string-pulling to ghostworkers at the mercy of the technoutopian illusion their work maintains. Games like this are, by design, so strenuous that they leave few resources to educate desire differently: to learn how to force a requital, if it can be done, or to want something else, maybe even something you can have. In chess, they call this dilemma Zugzwang—a “compulsion to move” that can only harm the mover. 

Concerned with navigating the snares of forced moves, a criticism of the unrequited hangs in Zugzwang from the beginning. In unrequited life, even the chains of causality you can actually piece together usually tell you that all your options involve an element of damage. By comparison, when causes come unyoked from effects, the uneasiness of random hazard can almost feel like a relief. As characteristic vibes of the unrequited, the melancholy of lost causes and the mingled fear and euphoria of the gambling hell, grim prospects, are still less grim than the kind of magical thinking that reduces the world to possession, that believes it can have by romanticizing not-having. 

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Historically, poetry—and especially love poetry—tends to side with the unrequited over the unrequiters, who, because they deny, are typically denied language to describe their experience. Dramas of not-having can go either way, ethically or politically speaking, though the aesthetic possibilities are obvious: lacking is more obviously sympathetic, more provocative, than having or refusing. If you want to understand how projection works, where better than the dizzy letterlocking of a Donne elegy, in which desire’s pleasure in its own inventions makes its object an arbitrary occasion? Lacan described the poetry of courtly love as a witness to the mismatch between reality’s asceticism and the demands we can’t, nonetheless, resist making of it, which resulted, he thought, in the longing poet’s need to posit an object the psychoanalyst can only describe as “terrifying, an inhuman partner”: 

The Lady is never characterized for any of her real, concrete virtues, for her wisdom, her prudence, or even her competence. If she is described as wise, it is not because she embodies an immaterial wisdom or because she represents its functions more than she exercises them. On the contrary, she is as arbitrary as possible in the tests she imposes on her servant. (Note 8)

For Proust, whose idea of love works on the same consuming, solipsistic model as a Petrarchan sonnet’s, the object of one’s affections is an “almost unknown object. Our love becomes immense and we never dream how small a place in it the real woman occupies.” (Note 9) In courtly love and Proustian love alike, mutual passion isn’t an option. The more powerful an attachment is, the more it must displace the actuality of the person on whom it fixes with the lover’s desire, transforming alien subject into the Beloved—the “terrifying, inhuman partner,” the “unknown object.” One of psychoanalysis’s most profound and unsettling lessons is that all love involves some degree of aggression, however we might wish to exempt our own loves or to disqualify some loves from the category of love because aggression predominates in them. Accepting this proposition means acknowledging that love that causes harm to the self or to others isn’t necessarily some other motive in disguise and that harms committed in the name of love can neither justify themselves with love’s name nor acquit themselves of it. 

And yet, however powerfully psychoanalytic concepts might explain the glorious impurities of desire, they spare less time, as a rule, for the target of desire, who, regardless of how she receives this attention, must find a way of inhabiting a heightened awareness of being subject and object at the same time. Everyone is always both. But the mind, a desiring machine, generally privileges a sense of agency—its own wishes, projections, transferences—over one of being acted upon. (Note 10) For this reason, courtly love’s idealization may induce confusion for the love-object about how to carry another’s desire (which might reflect her, unrecognizably, as a terrifying, inhuman partner) and, at the same time, hold fast to her own identification as one of the desirers. Broadly speaking, this bind recommends itself neither to great and general legibility, nor to poets who delight in an unknown object: Zugzwang. Paradoxically, no one wants an unrequiter. 

The stuff of poetry is far more likely to be the misapprehension that your own love is so deep, so heady, so right that it can’t fail to elicit a response in kind: a proposition that resembles Kant’s “subjective universality.” This principle of aesthetic judgement says that in order to judge something beautiful, you must feel your conviction so powerfully that you believe, in the moment of encounter, that your judgement of beauty is based on logic—“all rational people ought to find, with me, that this is beautiful”—rather than on conceptless emotions. (Note 11) In a subjectively universal experience of love or desire, feeling wants so badly to be a fact approved of by reality that it justifies itself in rational forms and moral persuasions. This impulse can become so pervasive that desire grows to encompass more and more of your experiences, blotting out other possibilities of relating to the world beyond their inflection on unrequited love. This can be a terrible condition to inhabit or to experience in another; to fail in compassion for it is also, frequently, terrible. 

Many stories of obsessive love revolve on this strong theory of desire—one of its most eloquent statements comes from Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. Recalling his dead lover close to the end of his life, he exclaims, “The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her!” (Note 12) When Nietzsche exalts the philosopher’s “restless discovering and divining . . . which he would at no price relinquish for a state of indifference,” he compares this indispensable curiosity to the lover’s unrequited love, which “fears nothing but its own extinction.” (Note 13) For Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff and for Nietzsche’s philosopher, unrequited desires hold existential terror at bay by eating the world lest they be eaten. Unrequital may be painful but to give up this mania for universalizing the subjective would also be to relinquish the shape and the purpose it imposes on life, which might not be survivable. Not that you can dispel this mirage for good—but sometimes, when you’re confronted with a reality desire can’t absorb—loss, the indifference of the stars, or the way the one you love can become unignorably real to you and separate from you. You have no choice but to hover in cruel optimism or detach and live through it: Zugzwang again. 

Among the range of human activities, a criticism of the unrequited has few but necessary virtues. One of the most salient is its ability to take the part of the pursuer and the quarry at the same time—the subject who desires and the object divided against itself. Unrequited and unrequiting at once, this form of criticism seeks what can be had from a fundamentally unsatisfying existence and acknowledges that, sometimes, criticism does its best and most thankless work in securing the escape of those things that can’t be had, those things that would be killed or damaged by possession. 

Poems that speak for the unrequited are critical in sensibility when they don’t attempt to solve their problems by forcing a return, when they can’t ignore how the desire that animates them has justified itself and what the consequences are. They ask what happens when, for whatever reason, requital in kind is unavailable and desire has come to seem more like entrapment. 

While the poems of the unrequited are common, the poems of the unrequiters are comparatively rare. In them, the feeling of entrapment comes from the call to bear the desires of others or the recognition that you have to turn away from your own. The unrequiters usually can’t forgo knowledge of the hostility in every attachment—they are, if anything, too aware—often to the point of helplessness—of the ambiguity of their own desires. And they know that rejection can be perceived as an act of war, regardless of whether it’s meant that way. 

Poems of unrequiting emphasize the experience of refusing the pressure of longing—your own or someone else’s—or they offer a reciprocity that doesn’t realize the hopes of the lover, doesn’t accommodate the claims of ideology or validate the source of desire. They claim the rights of refusal, recusal, and renunciation. They ask what unrequital looks like as a strategy of evading capture. This rather uningratiating way of dealing with the world isn’t, despite appearances, particularly less generous than the surrender of the unrequited to the blandishments of their own desires—but it’s not more generous, either. The questionable wisdom of unrequiting lies in the knowledge that, for some acts of generosity—and for some transgressions—no requital could possibly be enough. In extremes where the unrequited pursuer has less power than the object of pursuit, unrequiting may be a form of sadism; in those where the unrequiter has less agency, unrequiting may be a way of topping from below. For many linked by the unrequited, the case is less extreme: when agency is more or less equal, the balance of power variable, roles may switch from time to time and, every so often, someone will find a door in the wall that leads somewhere new.

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Hidden Things

From all I did and all I said
let no one try to find out who I was.
An obstacle was there that changed the pattern
of my actions and the manner of my life.
An obstacle was often there
to stop me when I’d begin to speak.
From my most unnoticed actions,
my most veiled writing—
from these alone will I be understood.
But maybe it isn’t worth so much concern,
so much effort to discover who I really am.
Later, in a more perfect society,
someone else made just like me
is certain to appear and act freely.

Cavafy drew his mute circle in 1933, decades after he wrote “Hidden Things,” around 1908. At the age of 48, he was still relatively young in poetry. A poem he would not publish during his lifetime, “Hidden Things” explores the uses of unreturn and strange return. Written from an unrequiting perspective, this poem works out a question of hidden labor: how do you suffer the claim of a world that has no place for you or your own unrequited needs? When there are obstacles to speech and action that can’t be overcome, what’s the next best thing? Or at least the next possible thing? The poem begins with a prohibition: “From all I did and all I said / let no one try to find out who I was.” But the prohibition is also a lure: “From my most unnoticed actions, / my most veiled writing— / from these alone will I be understood.” “Hidden Things” is nothing if not Cavafy’s “most veiled writing.” And what’s more like an “unnoticed action,” than an uncirculated poem? “If you want to understand me,” it seems to say, “this riddle I’m muttering to myself is the closest you’ll ever get.” Someone teases us with his obscurity—his speech is balked and only the least of his actions and the vaguest of his writing seem to him to have left his print in the world. 

And then comes the volta—the turn—because most good sonnets have them and Cavafy, who had studied in England, could not have been unaware of the formal resonances of a fourteen-line poem. “Hidden Things” withdraws the invitation: “But maybe it isn’t worth so much concern, / so much effort to discover who I really am.” Or, rather, it replaces the invitation to understand an individual life with the invitation to imagine a new form of life: “Later, in a more perfect society, / someone else made just like me / is certain to appear and act freely.” The particular details of the unrequited life recounted by the poem turn out to matter less than the record of a kind of life, a kind of life many have led and, under other circumstances, a life that might have made them known to one another. Many “obstacles” shape this life, the word or the gesture checked, the block that pushes the real substance of action and expression into subtlest acts and shadowed corners. And the sketch of this kind of life—how it was, that it was—makes it possible to imagine “a more perfect society” where “someone else made just like me / is certain to appear and act freely.” If these lines are ironic, they are bitter. If they are not, that certainty is utopian naivete, which may be forgiven for what it has almost redeemed from choked chances. Someone else will have to make good on this confidence if anyone does; or someone else will have to drown the missed opportunities with scorn.

On one hand, this gesture is generous, urging attention away from the narrowly personal and towards the possibility of transformations that would grant freedom of action to people “made just like me.” On the other, the poem gives no sign of expecting a “more perfect” society to arrive in time to save the riddler from a stymied existence—hope, as Kafka reportedly said, but not for us. 

No wonder it deflects. How unbearable, to be known for what you are—and then to have no recourse when it undoes you. What can be recovered from a present like that? In answer, the poem changes a stopped mouth to a defensive silence, which speaks in favor of its right to reserve. The sleight of hand makes the difference, almost, between an enforced loneliness and a chosen solitude. This is a way of refusing to be caught, though, of course, it’s not quite satisfying. But the choreography—from forbidding to tempting to recanting to hoping without hope—is an edifying bait and switch. The poem says—yes, you thought you were here for catharsis, to revel in a full confession. But all I have is a stopped mouth, which I’ll call, instead, a right to withhold, to tell by not telling. I’ll draw you a circle, because, for myself, I expect, only, to begin where I end. The only help I have for you is a question: “are you like me?” If you’re like me, then, for our lives, we have to look elsewhere. (Note 14) A hint to look elsewhere is a sort of yield—but the greater gift is the suggestion that there is, elsewhere, something to see in the first place: neither desire, nor its objects are the closed loop they often seem to be. And when desire no longer exhausts the world, it may just be possible to get things out of it that desire hid from view. 

The poem cautions against reading its “obstacle” too literally or autobiographically. But “Hidden Things” seems, quite clearly, to reflect on the glass closet of Cavafy’s erotic life, which was populated with other men “like me” and the antique ghosts of Alexandria. Unlike so many of Cavafy’s poems about ancient kings, amorous encounters with gorgeous youths, and missed opportunities for amorous encounters with gorgeous youths, this one makes no pretense of veiling the first-person perspective with Cavafy’s usual feints of plausible deniability: mythological or historical anecdote, the flâneur’s observation—wistful or forensic—of someone else’s problems. The riddling poem may be only one more of Cavafy’s many masks but it disguises by abstraction rather than sensuous detail or fabulations of the deep past. The voice in the poem may speak in personal pronouns but it uses them the way the epitaphs and riddles of the Greek Anthology do, as petitions for the living to think about the dead in a certain way or the cues that arrange an enigma and allow it to be solved at the same time. 

One of Cavafy’s favored sources, the Greek Anthology gathers epigrammatic texts from Greek and Hellenized parts of the ancient world—some authored, some anonymous. Many of its epitaphs—specially influential for twentieth-century modernists—are literary exercises rather than inscriptions drawn from real tombs, so that there are multiple entries for luminaries like Sappho and the heroes of the Trojan War. These epitaphs are often written as if their tombs were eulogizing the deceased (“I am the stone that rests on Cretho and makes known his name, but Cretho is ashes underground…”) or the deceased were memorializing themselves (“Here I thrice unfortunate was slain by an armed robber, and here I lie bewept by none.”). (Note 15) Frequently, the epitaphs sound like riddles and vice versa. The stone that rests on Cretho seems like it could be a set-up to a puzzle, while the following riddle, about a mirror, might have been labeled as one of the epitaphs on the anonymous dead that appear in the Anthology: 

If you look at me I look at you too. You look with eyes, but I not with eyes, for I have no eyes. And if you like, I speak without a voice, for you have a voice, but I only have lips that open in vain. (Note 16)

Like the riddling mirror and Cretho’s tomb, “Hidden Things” splits the difference between the epitaph’s instructions about how to recognize its significance and the riddle’s ventriloquism of a mute object. Cavafy’s poem might be a vehicle for personal expression but its “I” is enough like prosopopoeia—“face-making,” speaking for a silent or absent object—to plead its excuses.

Some of Cavafy’s “Notes on Poetics and Ethics” shed light on the circuitous mode of “Hidden Things.” In a note from 1910, he writes that “my erotic life does not get declared – obscure only to the ignorant. Were it declared more extensively, it might not leave enough artistic ground to hold me.” Another, jotted down in 1905, prefigures the phrasing in “Hidden Things.” Cavafy bemoans the “miserable conventions of society” that have “diminished my work . . . hampered my expression, prevented my giving light and emotional nourishment to others who are made like me.” Given this constraint, “I shall be understood most fully by what I have left out.” The poet goes on to wish that he were more fluent in French (which he knew quite well, by most standards), because things would be “made easier for me by its pronouns, which both declare, and conceal.” (Note 17) To shore up the artistic ground that held him, he sought a language that let him hide in plain sight. 

Greek has many elegant economies, which Cavafy made use of in this exercise. The title, “Hidden Things,” as it’s often translated, demonstrates one. κρυμμένα (Krymména) in the original, is a descriptor, “hidden,” that leaves the noun it’s describing implicit but precise. So there’s no doubt that “hidden” encompasses the meaning “hidden things” but the trespass of speaking the referent doesn’t have to be risked. It would be better to live in a version of the world in which direct speech didn’t entail danger but, so long as that world is out of reach, accuracy requires going through the motions, at least, of discretion, even if no one is going to be fooled. 

But “Hidden Things” goes even further than strategic elision in order to secure an exact obscurity. Overwhelmingly, its tactic is paralipsis, from the Greek verb παραλείπω (paraleípo), “I pass over,” which the anonymously authored Rhetorica ad Herennium describes as a way of saying “that we are passing by, or do not know, or refuse to say that which precisely we are now saying.” (Note 18) The most obvious examples of paralipsis come from political posturing. The Rhetorica gives this example: “I do not concern myself with your having despoiled the cities, kingdoms, and homes of them all. I pass by your thieveries and robberies, all of them.” (Note 19) While Cavafy’s version of paralipsis is a subtler form of irony than any cited in the Rhetorica, it takes advantage of how this device allows you to speak by indirection “because the direct reference would be tedious or undignified, or cannot be made clear, or can easily be refuted.” (Note 20) The idea, ultimately, is to create suspicion while disclaiming responsibility and, in Cavafy, to elicit and then thwart an expectation. (Note 21) “Hidden Things” flirts with confession—and teases a potentially solvable riddle—but the poem gives satisfaction, in both cases, by denying it. It raises the question of the personal by dismissing it. Then, it draws attention to an ambiguous obstacle, which it then specifies by refusing to name names. These are classic gambits of unrequited life. In this way, the poem is a portrait of an effect: the conveyance of the particular under the sign of plausible deniability. But the cause of this effect (the obstacle to speech and action) can’t be revealed without obliterating consequences. 

E.M. Forster, who knew and admired Cavafy, described him as a poet standing “at a slight angle to the universe,” whose conversation was replete with “reservations that really do reserve.” (Note 22) The result of a reservation that really does reserve might be nothing. It might also be a way of slipping a signal through the noise while the sender escapes out the back door. Experiments in highly charged acts of linguistic subterfuge were rife in gay culture in the first part of the twentieth century, the British slang-language of Polari, for example, however exaggerated ideas about its widespread use; Proust’s simultaneous defense of homosexuality (in Sodom and Gomorrah’s opening tour de force) and his self-conscious portrayal of his narrator as a heterosexual observer of queer quiddities. Cavafy’s paralipsis—“I don’t concern myself with what I really concern myself”—grew up beside these attempts to navigate the unrequited life imposed by sexuality beyond social approval. 

Even political speech was comparatively easy for the poet, who wrote, in 1902, that he spoke out against the death penalty in Egypt at “every available opportunity,” not because he was convinced of the efficacy of his words, but because he knew himself incapable of action beyond speech. “Someone else will act,” he wrote, “[b]ut my many words—those of my cowardly self—will facilitate his deed. They clear the ground.” (Note 23) The sentiment is very like the one in the last few lines of “Hidden Things,” which hopes for someone else to appear and “act freely.” It’s one of the things for which criticism and theory try to clear the ground. In the present of the poem, however, neither actions nor open acts of criticism appear to be possible. So “Hidden Things” resorts to covert acts, which have to be said by what the poem revokes. These paralipses are tributes to criticism’s bracing negativity, whose repeated “no!” can seem so bitter and ungrateful exactly because its refusal to requite is bound up with a difficult mandate—to approach the world as if it could be redeemed. Cavafy’s free actor in a more perfect society (the phrase in Greek is “τελειοτέρα κοινωονία”) comes from that recuperable world.

In “Impossible Things,” a poem drafted about eleven years before “Hidden Things,” Cavafy thinks of the unheard melodies of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: 

A poet has said: “The loveliest
music is the one that cannot be played.”
And I, I daresay that by far the best 
life is the one that cannot be lived.

To speak in praise of music that can’t be played and lives that can’t be lived might have the nihilistic flavor of Sophocles’s “not to be born is best” but another reading is possible. Paralipsis’s evocation and revocation—holding forth the image of a “best life” that lies beyond touch—refuses the awful optimism that says that the world as-is is the best of all possible worlds. Something else, is, at least imaginable, which means unrequited life should suffer by comparison to what escapes us. This is a way of “clearing the ground,” recuperating something, in negative, from the positive reality of disaster in a life whose terms you can’t accept. It’s the sly intransigence of a circle drawn by a dying man. This slant form of criticism, which exists because unrequited life demands it by demanding everything else, is a form of loyalty to impossible things and, in a minor way, the utopia of the unrequiters.  

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1 C.P. Cavafy, “Hidden Things” in C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems, Revised Edition, trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1992), 195.

2 Robert Liddell, Cavafy: A Biography (Schocken Books: New York, 1976), 54 and 204 – 206. 

3 Willis Barnstone, “Real and Imaginary History in Borges and Cavafy” in Comparative Literature, vol. 29 (Winter 1977) and The Poetics of Ecstasy: Varieties of Ekstasis from Sappho to Borges (Holmes & Meier: 1983), 82.

4 Walter Benjamin, “Central Park” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938 – 1940, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al., eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, 2003), 184.

5 See, for example, Karl Marx, Theorien über den Mehrwert (J.H.W. Dies Nachf: Stuttgart, 1905). 

6 Hito Steyerl, “Mean Images” in New Left Review, 140/141 March – June 2023, https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii140/articles/hito-steyerl-mean-images Accessed 05/11/23.

7 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (Schocken Books: New York, 2007), 253.

8 Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Pscyhoanalysis, 1959 – 1960 The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book VII, trans. Dennis Porter, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Norton: New York, 1992), 150.

9 Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, Andreas Mayor, rev. D.J. Enright, (Modern Library: New York, 1981), 597.

10 See Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (Columbia University Press: New York, 2017). 

11 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement (trans. James Creed Meredith, ed. Nicholas Walker), Second Book, Analytic of the Sublime, §31 “Of the method of the deduction of judgements of taste” (Oxford World’s Classics: New York, 2008), 110 – 111. 

12 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, ed. Pauline Nestor, Volume II, Ch. XIX (Penguin Books: New York, 2003), 324.

13 Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, eds. Maudmarie Clark and Brian Leiter, §429 The New Passion (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2003), 184.

14 In Looking Away: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction, Kant to Adorno (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, 2009), Rei Terada investigates “looking away” (after Nietzsche’s “looking away shall be my only negation) as a strategy for resisting the pressure to affirm the world as-is. The poems of the unrequited look away in this fashion—but they also tend to look towards some other possibility, even if they can’t name it.

15 The Greek Anthology, trans. W.R. Paton, Volume II, Book VII, “Sepulchral Epigrams,” 740, Leonidas of Tarentum and 737, Anonymous (Harvard University Press: Cambridge), 393 and 391.

16 The Greek Anthology, Volume V, Book. XIV, “Arithmetical Problems, Riddles, Oracles,” 56.—On a Mirror, 55.

17 “Notes on Poetics and Ethics,” trans. Martin McKinsey, “Note 6, December 15th, 1905” and “Note 14, June 20th, 1910,” in Ploughshares, Vol. 11, No. 4, International Writing (1985), 22 and 26.

18 Rhetorica ad Herennium, reproduced from the Loeb Classical Library Edition, trans. Harry Caplan (Harvard UniversityPress:Cambridge,1954) https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Rhetorica_ad_Herennium/4B*.html Accessed 05/11/23. A rhetorical device that overlaps with apophasis and praeteritio, paralipsis is sometimes used interchangeably with these terms. 

19 Rhetorica.

20 Rhetorica.

21 In “Cavafy, Proust, and the Queer Little Gods” (The Weather in Proust, ed. Jonathan Goldberg [Duke University Press: Durham, 2011], 42 – 68) Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick conceives of Cavafy’s refusals as “periperformative,” drawing on J.L. Austin’s theory of performative utterances. “That’s how the closet works,” she writes, “it can be constructed of nothing more active than a series of silences, and the surrounding world of presumptions does the rest of the work,” 56. This is accurate but maybe not quite sufficient in the case of “Hidden Things,” where refusals of return depend less on speaking “around” the performative and more on active invitations to discover something or solve something, invitations which are then withdrawn rather than elaborated. 

22 E.M. Forster, “The Poery of C.P. Cavafy” in Pharos and Pharillon (Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1923), 110. 

23 “Note of October 1902,” qtd. C.P. Cavafy: Complete Poems, Cavafy trans. Daniel Mendelsohn (Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 2012), n568 – 569. 

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Rebecca Ariel Porte is a member of the Core Faculty at Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. She is at work on two books: a philosophy of paradise, Arcadia, and the Golden Age called On Earthly Delights and a book of essays about poems called Impossible to Take Alive, after Pliny the Elder's description of the unicorn. The latter is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press.