Sherod Santos and Jean-Louis Chrétien on Redeeming the Unredeemable

“Her face appeared, puffed and up–
Ended through a shock of curls, and smiled,
Who knows, to forgive us all, men and boys, fathers
And sons, all silently looking…”

— “Gypsy Carnival”, Sherod Santos

In “Of Modern Poetry,” Wallace Stevens claims “[modern poetry] has to be living, to learn the speech of the place. / It has to face the men of the time and to meet / The women of the time. It has to think about war / And it has to find what will suffice.” Another way to think about this is “modern poetry has to deal with the age.” There’s something to this line of thinking that seems to be in conflict with the heart of poetry. Poetry, a subject often used to glimpse the coattails of the divine, to nurse the heartache brought on by nostalgia’s pricks, must wrestle with the ugliness of war and give an account of it? Stevens certainly thinks so, and on the other hand, of course, he’s right. Poems deal with the depth of human beings through their ability to set the scene not to resolve it. That scene might be one of disgust or horror, but if set expertly, then that scene can inform what we should feel and inspire us to respond to it.

Sherod Santos, an admirer of Wallace Stevens, takes up this question in his poem “Gypsy Carnival.” In this poem, Santos paints a sweaty carnival tent full of men of all ages waiting to watch a gypsy stripper perform. Right from the very beginning, Santos verbally accesses the alluring charms of the stripper; the working men here to distract themselves are transfixed, almost magically, by the dancer— “her smile like a skipped stone.” These rough men can sit and, I might even say wonder, at the vision before them. This scene set for us makes the reader’s eye twitch and want to look away, but patience for Santos does not abandon us. This poem is one that speaks to the “men of the time.” It pulls no punches and lets the gaggle of grimy gawkers be the repulsive bunch that they are. One hates the stripper but can’t avoid the deep sympathy for her mindless act. In the end, Santos harnesses all of the poem’s filth and turns it into a poem about forgiveness through his chosen words. This final act is the fulfillment of Stevens’ “Of Modern Poetry”.

How then does Santos go about with this act of redemption? First, Santos reduces every character in the poem to rubble. The men are only identified as ‘working men.’ They are not given names or features, and even the one qualifier we’re given—that of a father and son—is upended by the feeling that this relationship is unnatural in this place. Then, at the entrance of the gypsy, we know her only through body parts: eyes, lips, tongue. All of these reduce her, as Santos says, in a pile of rubble. Second is the distance. Once the act begins, the men might as well be stones or trees; Santos gives them no life or agency during the dance. When he does finally address them, they are ‘pathetic pink flowers.’ She performs her entire act with the skilled precision of a professional that morphs into the measured rhythm of a machine. Because Santos does not give us anything about her person except for her body parts, we simply see cogs in motion towards the completion of a task. This complete and utter destruction of the human form is heartbreaking. Stripping, the revealing of one’s most intimate self, becomes the avenue for the total reduction of personal and spiritual self. The gypsy is without clothes while the men are still wearing theirs. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. Sexual intimacy only occurs when both parties are together in their nudity. Failure in this regard voids the experience of any intimacy causing an imbalance between the two sides, which creates the awkwardness that leads to embarrassment and ultimately despair. The gypsy and the audience of men become static characters.

Yet Santos takes this moment of dehumanization and lifelessness, and he inflicts on it the act of forgiveness. After the act is over, the gypsy stands and departs, but at the last moment she looks back and the narrator speculates, “Who knows, to forgive us all, men and boys, fathers / And sons, all silently looking / Away from her.” This line changes the entire perspective of the poem; Santos gives the reader the potential for forgiveness after dragging the reader through the uncomfortableness of the poem’s first portion, and that potential for forgiveness is something that the reader, or at least me, is desperate to grab on to. After placing this thought into the gaze of the dancer, Santos retreats and we see the audience embarrassedly file out of the tent. There is no more explanation, and I suspect that neither the dancer nor the audience contemplates the forgiveness of her gaze.

Where does that leave us then? Do we walk away from the poem in embarrassment? Do we forget that the entire thing ever happened and move on? Both of these, I believe, are grave failures in both spirit and perspective. This poem dares us to ask the question: can there be forgiveness in this situation? And, how would that forgiveness look? Santos doesn’t answer the question, but he introduces the idea that leaves the reader no choice but to face forgiveness and contend with it. The Catholic philosopher Jean-Louis Chrétien writes extensively on the human body and its physical relationship with language, and in his book Call and Response he states,

In conformity with the Phaedrus, the call of the origin back to the origin, the call of what is first back to what is first, can only be a re-call, insofar as the soul is called to remember an intelligible beauty that it has always already witnessed in an absolute past, and has always already forgotten in its terrestrial life, according to the two dimensions, inseparable but distinct, of the Platonic always/already.

Beauty is that which calls to someone that recognizes and responds to it. Santos’ poem takes an utterly destructive situation, and he introduces something beautiful, forgiveness, and this should inspire a response in the reader. Beauty is not a passive force—Chrétien argues that it is the call that always elicits a response from us. This means beauty operates as an inherently active and powerful force; beauty is that which merits a response, and not a passive object that strikes bluntly upon the eyes and ears of the reader.

Chrétien takes his phenomenology of ‘call and response’ and then draws on his Catholic background. He argues that in Christianity the call and the good must be understood as the same thing. If we adopt this thinking here, then we understand that Santos’ poem, which he has constructed beautifully, calls to us in the form of the word ‘forgive,’ even though the poem does not provide the forgiveness, the mere presence of the word contains enough power to carry an entire world of meaning and import. Forgiveness is an inherently Christian ideal; we recognize that we humans, as sinners, are the unredeemable, and that it is only through the grace of God in Jesus Christ on the cross that we are redeemed and made right with God. Santos’ poem takes an utterly unredeemable situation and he introduces forgiveness into the poem. The beauty of forgiveness is what calls us. Despite the vulgarity and the uncomfortableness of reading about a stripper, we must see the beauty in the forgiveness at hand. Chrétien follows his previous quote with this: “The meaning of the call and response is radically transformed when the call actually creates the respondent.” As Christians, as poets, it is our job to heed the call of the poem—that through all of the ugliness and destruction present here, we peer past the words dotting the page to see the poem full of life and the possibility of new life. Santos says in an essay, “I’ve come to feel that, like Eliot’s rose garden in ‘Little Gidding,’ poetry flourishes at ‘the intersection of the timeless moment,’ a moment Eliot describes, not as an absence, but as a confluence of all the rivers of time: ‘Never and always.’” It is in the timeless that poetry is able to create in its reader; the timeless draws from universals so the past, present, and future. Forgiveness is an inherent idea to humans. Conscience wrestles with guilt, and regardless of whether it’s named, the solution that they are always looking for is forgiveness. With everything within its scope, the poem is able to play on the greater meaning of the word to paint a fuller picture, and then to make use of both good and bad to serve its end.

In another Chrétien essay titled “How to Wrestle with the Irresistible,” he discusses Jacob’s wrestling match with God. He examines this scene as a way into his discussion of wounding and the inherently physical nature of Divine doings, not simply the spirituality of religion, but he makes an interesting side point. He brings up Delacroix’s painting of the struggle and points out how the painter, who did not consider himself to be a Christian, captures the same feeling in his painting as Scripture does in word. This likeness of mind is representative of the call that Chrétien sees in this scene. The call that Delacroix feels is what he puts into his painting—his artwork is an attempt to wrestle with the themes of the scene and therefore with the Divine. This is what Santos is trying to capture through his poem; he wants the reader to see the stripper and the men as unredeemable, and then he introduces the theme of forgiveness into the poem to force the reader to undergo a struggle within themselves. Can this woman truly find redemption? Can the men? How does that happen? Santos does not claim a rigorous Christian faith, but he begins a discussion about the fundamental realities of Christianity: Christ on the cross. Through this wrestling, the poet is able to inspire and inform.

Stevens challenges poets to write about men and women “of the time,” and to do this requires the honesty and subtlety that Santos cultivates in his poem “Gypsy Carnival.” He portrays men as they are in real life—he pulls no punches about the despair and tragedy of his current society, yet he does not leave them in that position. He appeals to the imagination of the reader through his introduction of forgiveness: he is, in this instance, like a farmer who sows his seeds hoping that they will grow, but he has shrewdly sown them with the utmost intentionality. Despite his reluctance to show forgiveness played out in the poem, he plays on Chrétien’s idea of the call—the water and nourishing sun. The seeds, which were sown in a way that their growth might be successful, are recipients of this call. Forgiveness, as a virtue, calls to the reader and leads him to think about the poem on a deeper level instead of a tragic poem about an embarrassing stripper scene. Chrétien goes so far as to say that this should inspire the creation of beauty in the reader. The rest of Stevens’ poem talks about the creation of a ‘new stage’ where the poem speaks of “emotions becoming one.” There is a unity here that the poem creates and ultimately finds satisfaction in the wholeness left. Santos does not ignore the sin and destruction of our current world, but he also does not leave the world in its destruction. His poem makes use of the fullness of language to build a poem worthy of Stevens’ “Of Modern Poetry.” It is through his grounding of the poem in the physical world that he manages this—things do not stay conceptual, if forgiveness is to succeed then the poem needs to lean into the reality of the characters and their situations.   

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