292 67 8MB
English Pages 261 [360] Year 2007
COMPLICITIES British Poetry 1945‐2007 edited by ROBIN PURVES & SAM LADKIN
þ Litteraria Pragensia Prague 2007
Copyright © Robin Purves & Sam Ladkin, 2007 Copyright © of individual works remains with the authors Published 2007 by Litteraria Pragensia an imprint of Charles University Faculty of Philosophy, Náměstí Jana Palacha 2, 116 38 Praha 1 Czech Republic www.litterariapragensia.com All rights reserved. This book is copyright under international copyright conventions. Except for provisions made under “fair use,” no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the copyright holders. Requests to publish work from this book should be directed to the publishers. The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the British Academy in the funding of this project. Cataloguing in Publication Data Complicities: British Poetry 1945‐2007, edited by Robin Purves and Sam Ladkin.—1st ed. p. cm. ISBN 978‐80‐7308‐194‐2 (pb) 1. British Poetry. 2. Contemporary Poetics. 3. Literary Studies. I. Purves, Robin. II. Ladkin, Sam. III. Title Printed in the Czech Republic by PB Tisk Typesetting, cover & design by lazarus
Contents
Introduction Robin Purves and Sam Ladkin
1
Robin Purves W.S. Graham and the Heidegger Question
4
Thomas Day “This Foolish Body”: Comedy and Contexture in Geoffrey Hill’s Scenes from Comus
30
Keston Sutherland XL Prynne
43
Alizon Brunning “The mere and cunning front”: The Sovereignty of Man in J.H. Prynne’s “Crown”
74
Robin Purves The Hymen Song: A Note on Iphigenia and J.H. Prynne’s “Letter To John Wilkinson”
91
J.H. Prynne Letter to John Wilkinson
97
Bruce Stewart Quincunx: Seamus Heaney and the Ulster Regionalists
102
D.S. Marriott Veil, No.2
145
Stephen Thomson The Forlorn Ear of Jeff Hilson
153
Craig Dworkin Poetry Without Organs
168
Sophie Read “say Smile”: Peter Manson’s Faces
194
Sara Crangle The Art of Exhalation in Poetry: Chris Goode’s Bathos
201
Malcolm Phillips “Loss Format”: Liminality and Incorporation in Chris Goode’s Poetry
222
Tom Jones Andrea Brady’S Elections
238
Josh Robinson “Abject self on patrol”: Immaterial Labour, Affect, and Subjectivity in Andrea Brady’s Cold Calling
253
Sam Ladkin Problems for Lyric Poetry
271
Jennifer Cooke The Laughter of Narcissism: Loving Hot White Andy and the Troubling Chain of Equivalence
323
Ian Patterson Born Again, Born Better: Text Generation and Reading Strategies in Michael Kindellan and Reitha Pattison, Word is Born Notes on Contributors
341 352
Introduction This book aims at combining a set of various but compatible approaches to the work of poets writing in Britain (and Ireland too, we suppose, given Bruce Stewart’s essay on Seamus Heaney, though it focuses mainly on work written while the poet was resident in Belfast). One of its tasks is to cause very different poets and different approaches to the work of those poets to come into association socially, though the proportions in this combination are somewhat contingent on our own enthusiasms as well as a host of other considerations, some pragmatic and some relatively idealistic. The mix, therefore, is not arrived at in a spirit, say, of modish inclusiveness or polemical ‘subversion’; we do not think of ourselves as permitting the socially marginal to co‐exist in a monitored space with more established or popularly disputed reputations such as those of W.S. Graham, Geoffrey Hill, J.H. Prynne and Seamus Heaney. Discussion of the poetry of Chris Goode or Jeff Hilson or Peter Manson is not being included here as part of a new conservatory, bolted on to the main building of a recognised canon: the ‘non‐mainstream’ as new category in and of the ‘mainstream.’ This is partly because there is not much sense that some of the younger or less well‐ known writers whose poems are analysed in these pages are deliberately writing themselves out of a margin of deprivation. There are reasons, noble as well as self‐serving, for considering particular kinds of margin as a privileged vantage point from which to look out on the world, and the notion of the avant garde as a shelter for poets of all ages who, for example, disrupt [1]
syntax as a substitute for having an idea, or as an excuse for not having one, is a corkscrew to the watchful hearts of the most syntactically disruptive poets in these pages. It is on the whole the editors’ ideas of utility and interest which govern the issues of inclusion and exclusion and which conspire to make the book what it is. This extends as much to the approaches of the authors of individual essays as it does to the poets whose work they interpret. Attention is paid throughout to the importance of intractable details in the particulars of a poem as well as the social conditions from which the poems emerge. The editor, publisher and important poet, Andrew Crozier (see D.S. Marriott’s essay on Crozier’s “The Veil Poem” in this volume), in his introduction to the poetry anthology A Various Art edited with Tim Longville, warned against reading their selection as an attempt at national representation, “as though the prestige of national origin constituted a claim on the world’s attention”:
[In such anthologies] inclusiveness of national poetry, in the possessive embrace of a sectional view of change and difference, takes on the exclusivity of fashion. The longer this show runs the less it exhibits the organicism implicit in the notion of a national poetry (however complex and dividedly other the nation has become) and the more it bespeaks new Imperial suitings. Pre‐war anthologies, for some reason, had no need of such clothes, and maintained a less complacent style of polemic, as though some cultural positions still remained to be stormed.
This collection of essays does not seek to fashion a bespoke Albion from the remnants of Britain’s various poetic traditions. The poetry considered here, and its criticism too, is by and large critical of the “new Imperial suitings” beneath which the old and new networks of power run. Much of the work gathered here knows language, consciousness and culture to be profoundly complicit across the board in the extension of acts of [2]
domination, from the preparation for and execution of war to the composition of the suicide note, from the overt corruption of the democratic franchise to cold calling’s interpellation of the human subject as consumer‐in‐waiting. The label most likely to be fashionable for the next little while, used to capture and devalue the poetry of the second half of the twentieth century is the “British Poetry Revival.” Watch it creep across the internet and into the book‐stacks. The sad negativity of that title performs what it was designed to resist, treating poetry like a giant in the woods, out there, back then, down on its luck, struggling for breath. All of the work examined in the course of this book is representative of other networks not represented here, and is partly defined by those relations; so the book does not aim at the exhaustive portrayal of British Poetry 1945‐2007; no book realistically could. Robin Purves Sam Ladkin The editors would like to thank Professor Michael Parker of the University of Central Lancashire for his invaluable help in the realization of this project.
[3]
Robin Purves
W.S. Graham and the Heidegger Question A discrepancy exists between the two existing monographs on Sidney Graham’s poetry. Each straightforwardly contradicts the other concerning the relevance or otherwise of Heidegger’s philosophical writings for the poet and for a properly attentive reading of his poems. Tony Lopez’s The Poetry of W.S. Graham,1 published in 1989, makes the claim that “Heidegger’s entire project, the strategies of his composition, the examples that he uses to explain himself, and the extreme reflexive mode of expression, are all very relevant to Graham’s work”2 and he goes on to demonstrate, as he sees it, the special affinity of some of these ingredients for Graham’s late poem “Implements In Their Places.” His argument proposes that there is a substantial thematic overlap between Graham’s poems and certain passages in Heidegger’s Being and Time, as well as some of the philosopher’s later essays on Hölderlin, and it marshals another kind of evidence when it cites a reading list of philosophy titles, in Graham’s hand‐writing, which includes Being and Time and a volume by Martha King called Heidegger’s Philosophy. Even if
1 Tony Lopez, The Poetry of W.S. Graham (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989). 2 Lopez, W.S. Graham, 106.
[4]
no‐one can prove definitively that Graham ever got round to reading both or either of these two books, Lopez concludes that “Heidegger is clearly a source of certain lay ideas”3 in “Implements In Their Places,” which the poem “takes up and develops” since it has been assembled “to realise and prove the formula which Heidegger developed in his writings on Hölderlin.”4 It appears to be possible that the title of “Implements In Their Places,” and not just some of its themes, was derived from early sections of Being and Time. As Lopez points out, John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, the English translators of Being and Time, provide a footnote which gives the word ‘implement’ as one possible translation of the German ‘das Zeug,’5 although they also communicate a preference to interpret the word in terms of ‘gear,’ ‘paraphernalia’ or ‘equipment.’ After his mention of the footnote, Lopez gives an account of Heidegger’s concept of ‘Being‐in‐the‐world’ in two sentences which introduce longer quotations from Heidegger himself. These quotations receive no further exposition but appear to have been chosen because they declare the significance of ‘equipment’ (which Lopez reads as “Implements”) for the experience of ‘Being‐in‐the‐world,’ especially in terms of how our active making‐use of ‘equipment’ and, in particular, our awareness at particular moments of its ‘unusability,’ makes us newly aware of ‘places.’ 3 Lopez, W.S. Graham, 107. 4 Lopez, W.S. Graham, 101. 5 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962) 97, n.1. “‘das Zeug.’ The word ‘Zeug’ has no precise English equivalent. While it may mean any implement, instrument, or tool, Heidegger uses it for the most part as a collective noun which is analogous to our relatively specific ‘gear’ (as in ‘gear for fishing’) or the more elaborate ‘paraphernalia,’ or the still more general ‘equipment,’ which we shall employ throughout this translation.” It should be noted that Lopez’s quotation of this passage contains a small but potentially misleading typographical error: the ‘i’ in ‘implement’ is rendered in upper case, which may give the unfortunate impression that this particular word is given a special significance in (this translation of) Being and Time.
[5]
These ‘places’ must therefore be defined according to Heidegger “as the place of this equipment.” Once the juxtaposition of ‘implements,’ as a synonym for equipment, with the word ‘places’ has been achieved, Lopez concentrates on establishing a connection between Heidegger’s engagement with the Pre‐Socratics, and with Heraclitus in particular, and what looks to him like Graham’s use of similar materials in Implements 68 and 70.6 For the record, I find Lopez’s account of Heidegger’s influence on Graham almost convincing; that is, I find the readings that result both useful and interesting but not so persuasive as finally to persuade me that Graham was as straightforwardly, programmatically Heideggerian as Lopez claims. The nature of the Heidegger question, and the quality of the evidence as it pertains to Graham’s writings, means that a serious critical assessment of the plausibility of Lopez’s case, made in an analysis of only two short poems, will not be able to provide a definitive answer. It would be reasonably easy to demonstrate that, working outwards from the same point as Lopez, a similar procedure to his could be followed, to produce a different set of connections between the poet and the philosopher, connections which might strike the reader as plausible but which do not necessarily prove that an important encounter did occur which had significant consequences for the direction of Graham’s poetry. Being and Time opens with the announcement that it eventually will aim at “the Interpretation of time as the possible horizon for any understanding whatsoever of Being”7 but begins with its analysis of equipment in order to distinguish various reputedly minor or secondary modes of ‘Being’ from Dasein, the privileged and prior mode that discloses a ‘world’ in which the other modes take a place of significance. Equipment’s mode of being is named Being‐present‐at‐hand, and equipment, Heidegger says, “always is in terms of [aus] its 6 Lopez, W.S. Graham, 106‐8. 7 Heidegger, Being and Time, 1.
[6]
belonging to other equipment: ink‐stand, pen, ink, paper, blotting pad, table, lamp, furniture, windows, doors, room.”8 Though Heidegger lists these specific things as mere examples and of no particular significance at this stage in themselves, these modest furnishings and the dwelling‐space that they open and divide are also the familiar mise‐en‐scène for many of Graham’s poems: their special significance for the poet inheres in their being encountered as objects which together amount to being equipment‐in‐order‐to‐write. Heidegger goes on to claim that what he calls a “concernful absorption in using ink in a pen to write on paper, seated in a chair, at a table illuminated by a lamp, in a room”—the act of writing, in other words—is a primordial and unveiled encounter with equipment as equipment. The unselfconscious sitting and grasping of the pen, and its movement across the page, constitutes a true encounter with those things as just that which they are. On the other hand and in Heidegger’s terms, Graham’s late‐night dramas dwell in those moments when equipment is conspicuous, when the human subject meets the presentation of what is ready‐to‐hand as a certain unreadiness‐to‐hand. The pen and the page, the table; the proximity of the lamp‐light which makes the rest of the room more dark; the room and its window, intrude into the poem when they ought to be elided from it, that is, when they ought to be being made use of without explicitly being noticed. It is only the normative “concernful absorption” which can be brought up short by the unreadiness‐to‐hand when “the constitutive assignment of the “in‐order‐to” to a “towards‐this” has been disturbed.”9 This moment is just that point, Heidegger claims, when the “context of equipment is lit up, not as something never seen before, but as a totality constantly sighted beforehand in circumspection. With this totality, however, the world announces itself.”10
8 Heidegger, Being and Time, 97. 9 Heidegger, Being and Time, 105. 10 Heidegger, Being and Time, 105.
[7]
Illumination of the poet’s equipment opens a world for Graham, just above or below or to the side of this one: a world of language, with all of its illusory freedoms and liberating constraints. This, however, is as much, if not more, a Heideggerian interpretation of what Graham does as it is a speculative attempt to gauge how much Graham might owe to Heidegger in terms of what he conceivably borrows for his poems. Matthew Francis’s monograph on W.S. Graham11 casts a much more sceptical eye than that of Lopez over the anecdotal evidence for Graham’s engagement with the thought of Heidegger. Although he mentions at the beginning of the book that “some of [Graham’s] friends have told me that he used to speak at times of Heidegger and the pre‐Socratic philosophers”12, Francis proposes, for example, that Graham’s jotted‐down titles of Heideggeriana are likely to be a dutiful memo to himself of books Graham will never have got round to reading, in which case, an important part of Lopez’s evidence that Graham probably did read Heidegger is used in Francis’s case as evidence that he probably never did.13 When Francis says that “the poems do not feel—to me, at any rate—like the products of a trained philosophical mind”14 the cautious articulation of his admittedly indistinct conviction nevertheless rules out the possibility that, even if Graham did not have the systematic education of the professional philosopher or perhaps even of the serious student of philosophy, he could have read Heidegger with interest and picked up elements of his work which fed into the poetry in unsystematic and productively delinquent ways. The rebuttal of Lopez’s Heideggerian 11 Matthew Francis, Where the People Are: Language and Community in the Poetry of W.S. Graham (Cambridge: Salt, 2004). 12 Francis, Where the People Are, 2. 13 Francis, Where the People Are, 2‐3: “Graham’s notes on philosophy are largely lists of texts and authors for future reading, and they seem to me like the fantasies of a man day dreaming about a systematic education he is never likely to get round to.” 14 Francis, Where the People Are, 2.
[8]
interpretation of parts of “Implements In Their Places,” the demonstration, based on internal evidence provided by the poems, that might clinch Francis’s case does not make an appearance in his book and the poem itself, perhaps symptomatically, is not given much critical attention. Francis tends only to quote from the poem in support of his own over‐ arching thesis concerning Graham’s supposed logocentrism: namely the privileging in his poetry of certain perceived qualities of speech (immediacy, presence, life) over opposed (supposed) characteristics of writing (alienation, absence, death), and Graham’s efforts to overcome the debilitating features inherent in writing in order to reconstitute something like a community. One important strand of Francis’s argument stems from the analysis of what he calls, borrowing from Michael J. Reddy and Lakoff and Johnson, the “conduit” metaphor, which is summarised thus: IDEAS (or MEANINGS) ARE OBJECTS. LINGUISTIC EXPRESSIONS ARE CONTAINERS. COMMUNICATION IS SENDING. The speaker puts ideas (objects) into words (containers) and sends them (along a conduit) to a hearer who takes the ideas/objects out of the word/containers.15
The conduit metaphor is described as overwhelmingly pervasive throughout literate cultures and also as having a special significance in Graham’s poetry. Graham is said to be stubbornly attached to the metaphor, despite the fact that the idea is a strange one. Clearly words are not receptacles with an outside and an inside, even though we habitually speak of them as if they were. Nor are thoughts themselves passed 15 Lakoff and Johnson, cited in Francis, Where the People Are, 4.
[9]
across space, ‘since these are locked within the skull and life process of each of us.’16
This is not the place to worry too much about the dubiety of these assertions, and particularly the notion that ideas can enjoy an apparently pre‐linguistic existence “locked within the skull” before being embodied in their proxy words and concepts which are “passed across” in their stead. From this perspective Francis argues that Graham has a partly irrational attachment to the conduit metaphor, an attachment which involves the poetic effort to “remake” the metaphor by incorporating all of the difficulties which interfere with and distort the possibility of communication. These difficulties are represented by the distance between speaker and hearer “symbolically identified with wildernesses of various kinds,”17 and the presence of threatening animals and physical impediments in that intervening space. Because the poet only revises the conduit metaphor and does not reject it completely, he is actually engaged, therefore, in an incomplete or insincere rejection of its characterisations of language, and this is said to cause difficulties for the coherence of Graham’s project as a whole, or at least for that part of it which takes language as its central focus. The problems arise most clearly, says Francis, when contradictions emerge in Graham’s metaphorical economy: “If the poem is a space, how can it also be an ‘obstacle’—empty and full at the same time? If it is a lifeless waste, why is it so full of inhabitants?”18 There is, however, a good case for considering that Graham’s contradictions are deliberate and made for the best of reasons. The overtly distracting pile‐up of identifications in the following passage from Graham’s early prose statement of his poetics “Notes On A Poetry Of Release” suggests as much: 16 Francis, Where the People Are, 4. 17 Francis, Where the People Are, 8. 18 Francis, Where the People Are, 10.
[10]
All the poet’s knowledge and experience…is contained in the language which is obstacle and vehicle at the same time. […] For the language is a changing creature continually being killed‐off, added‐to and changed like a river over its changing speakers. The language changes along with all of us and is headline litmus record wreckage pyramid shame and accomplishment of all we do and have done and (through Poetry) might do.19
These ‘problems,’ therefore, are, I would argue, largely of Francis’s own making. For example, he states that Graham constantly complains of the distance contained within the poem; Malcolm Mooney’s Land is governed ‘by the laws of distance,’ the reader is a ‘Dear Pen / Pal in the distance’ (the line break emphasizes the spacing between them), and the words contain ‘a great greedy space / Ready to engulf the traveller.’20
But an examination of the context for each of the fragments from poems cited in this quotation complicates the thesis in significant ways. The first quotation is from the last sentence in the second part of “Malcolm Mooney’s Land,” which reads in its entirety as follows: I have reached the edge of earshot here And by the laws of distance My words go through the smoking air Changing their tune on silence.21
The half‐rhymes here skilfully perform the sense of the passage as echoes only faintly heard, but that sense to my ear invokes “the laws of distance” as precondition and legislation for 19 W.S. Graham, “Notes on a Poetry of Release,” The Nightfisherman: Selected Letters of W.S. Graham, ed. Michael and Margaret Snow (Manchester: Carcanet, 1999) 380. 20 Francis, Where the People Are, 8. 21 W.S. Graham, “Malcolm Mooney’s Land,” New Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 2004) 154.
[11]
Graham’s utterance and any other. This means giving the word ‘by’ the sense of ‘via / because of’ and giving the line break after “air” the force of a comma so that the words’ going and not just their “Changing their tune” are the responsibility of those “laws of distance.” With the extended quotation this reading seems at least as plausible as the one given by Francis and further examples from Graham’s poetry will show that my reading is consistent across his work as a whole. Returning to those provided by Francis, however, the quotation from “Yours Truly” when re‐installed in its full sentence is Dear Pen Pal in the distance, beyond My means, why do you bring Your face down so near To affront me here again With a new expression out Of not indifferent eyes?22
Francis suggests that this is a complaint against distance and his parenthesis insists that “the line break emphasizes the spacing between” poet and reader but another reading could quite easily point out that one function of the line break here is to bifurcate the address between a correspondent (the “Pen / Pal”) and the pen held in the hand of the writing poet (his “Pal in the distance”). Francis’s interpretation focuses only on the former possibility and fails to explain just how the line break transforms the recognition of distance into a complaint against it; his reading compounds the error by not providing the rest of the quotation which first of all works to shrink the distance mentioned to an arm’s crooked length and turns quite rapidly into a complaint against proximity. The speaker is offended or confronted by both the transformation wrought by his imagined reader’s imagined response (a common trope in Graham) and the defiant stare back at him of ‘his’ ‘own’ 22 Graham, New Collected Poems, 159.
[12]
suddenly unfamiliar words. The last citation provided by Francis is from “A Private Poem To Norman Macleod.” When it is re‐instated in its own complete sentence it reads: “In the words there is always / A great greedy space / Ready to engulf the traveller.”23 Graham’s alleged “complaint” is based, by Francis, on the idea that “it is language that must be moved across”24 distant spaces, and Francis’s own complaint is that Graham mixes his metaphors so that language is both “space and object.”25 If, however, we sanction Graham’s alleged “contradictions” on the grounds, perhaps, that there are peculiar difficulties inherent in the problem of finding a figure of speech for the linguistic manifold which encompasses speech and writing; or that language just does both inhabit and incorporate space and spacing and can also stand against the traversal of its own reading‐space in ways which can be both poetically indispensable and prosaically obstructive, then the quotation from “A Private Poem To Norman Macleod” is, once again, less a complaint than an honest registering of a fact about language and about poetic language in particular. “A Private Poem To Norman Macleod” is in fact the admission and demonstration of the impossibility of a ‘private poem’: the section quoted above concludes that “Norman, you were not there.” The final section of the poem ends with the words this poem Is private with me speaking to Norman Macleod, as private as any poem is private with spaces between the words. The spaces in the poem are yours. They are the place where you Can enter as yourself alone And think anything in. Macleod. Macleod, say 23 Graham, New Collected Poems, 227. 24 Francis, Where the People Are, 8. 25 Francis, Where the People Are, 8.
[13]
Hello before we both Go down the manhole.26
The impossibility of confining that “yours” and “you” to the specific personage of “Norman Macleod” admits the figure of any reader whatsoever as addressee, and admits the necessity of that admission. Both kinds of admission are not something Graham has struggled to forbid; in fact, it is my contention, contra Francis, that the spaces between words, as distance and obstacle and opportunity, are just what constitutes poetry for Graham, an assertion that can be supported by examples from most periods of his career. As a novel way into Graham’s notion of the origin of poetry, I propose to look at, and take seriously, another habitually and deliberately mixed metaphor in his work, the confusion of ‘ear’ with ‘mouth’ and ‘eye.’ This feature runs at least as far back as his 2ND POEMS, published in 1945, and as far forward as his “To My Wife At Midnight,” which was published in his first Collected Poems in 1979, and includes both inherently trivial usages as well as moments which count as important statements of his idiosyncratic poetics. As an instance of the former, the speaker in “The Name Like A River” offers the overtly erotic encouragement to Let the young of her tasted and tongued Ear bite on the voice of her knuckled alarum Making loud the wrecked lad on her rippling door Making sure and sharing the lad I am.27
The ear of the beloved has been “tasted and tongued” as the erogenous target of her lover’s mouth, and it also owns the attributes of a mouth, a tongue and teeth to bite and, apparently, the means to “[make] loud” her lad in the throes of sexual passion. The agency of the ear is put specifically to 26 Graham, New Collected Poems, 227‐8. 27 Graham, New Collected Poems, 38.
[14]
poetic good use in “Listen. Put On Morning” from The White Threshold (1949): Yes listen. It carries away The second and the years Till the heart’s in a jacket of snow And the head’s in a helmet white And the song sleeps to be wakened By the morning ear bright. Listen. Put on morning. Waken into falling light.28
But the same collection’s “The Hill of Intrusion” goes further than this acknowledgement of the dependence of the song for its existence and renewal on attentive new listeners when it asserts that The ear says more Than any tongue. The ear sings better Than any sound It hears on earth Or waters perfect.29
The measure of poetry, according to this passage, will be the yield it can provide from interpretation of its semi‐autonomous language by careful reading; it ought to, in other words, and in the same words, give more than is given. As a demonstration, it can be noted that the word ‘ear’ is embedded in the quotation from “Listen. Put On Morning” in the words “years” and “heart’s,” and in “hears” and “earth” in “The Hill of Intrusion.” If the aural attention of composition and reading “carries away”
28 Graham, New Collected Poems, 60. “Listen. Put On Morning” was sent to John Minton as part of a letter written on 24 April 1945, with the heading “THE EAR SPEAKS MORE THAN THE TONGUE LISTEN—” See Graham, Nightfisherman, 37. 29 Graham, New Collected Poems, 63.
[15]
our time “on earth” the ears in years and in the heart are each themselves the means for a revivifying transformation. ‘Ear’ is at the centre of ‘heart,’ which also contains ‘hear’ and ‘art’ and is an anagram of ‘earth’ whose first three letters spell ‘ear’ and which could, therefore, be counted a synonym for “the listening world” inhabited in the third part of the title poem of the same collection.30 “The White Threshold” in its third section seems to riff on the heart as seat of life and emotional core, in order to replace a homeliness lost but fondly remembered with a hearth (hear/earth = “listening world”) located in “imagination’s room,” an attempt which founders as heart, ear and earth are chopped and transposed into the “breath” of “the breath of the dead.” “To My Wife At Midnight,” in its third part, displays a similarly affecting kind of play thirty years later when it asks: Are you asleep? I hear Your heart under the pillow Saying my dear my dear My dear for all it’s worth31
The heart of his wife speaks insistently in his ear especially, or perhaps only, when his wife is asleep, just as the ear insists on its own presence through ‘hear’ and ‘heart’ and the repetitions of ‘dear.’ The conjoining of heart and ear in the marriage‐bed is the presence of love felt in the heart’s utmost iambic pulsating, and the ear’s registering it as both alarming and reassuring at once. A voice which is an ear, and an ear which can speak are encountered in different sections of “Seven Letters”32, the latter example confirming the notion that Graham believed the ‘author’ and ‘reader’ of poetry to be spoken/read by the poems they believe themselves speaking or reading, with each new
30 Graham, New Collected Poems, 96. 31 Graham, New Collected Poems, 264. 32 Graham, New Collected Poems, 123, 136.
[16]
encounter between words and the portals through which they can be said to pass, mouth, ear and eye, amounting to an originary invention of each part in the formula. In the third of “The Dark Dialogues,” mouth and ear and eye combine as follows: I speak as well as I can Trying to teach my ears To learn to use their eyes33
Matthew Francis cites this passage as part of an argument about Graham’s supposedly “logocentric position”34, the idea that the poet’s touchstone is the primacy and purity of speech, as opposed to the derived and therefore suspect status of writing. Although Francis does not hold the lack of a serious engagement with Heidegger against Graham, there is a sense that Graham disappoints the critic by failing to be sufficiently Derridean. This means that Francis can incorporate a segment from “What Is The Language Using Us For?” as one of Graham’s allegedly self‐refuting fragments: “Writing must always fail in its attempt to emulate speech because: […] we want to be telling Each other alive about each other Alive.”35
If, however, we again provide a more comprehensive quotation, the emphasis in the passage changes considerably. What are Communication’s Mistakes in the magic medium doing To us? It matters only in 33 Graham, New Collected Poems, 171. 34 Francis, Where the People Are, 15. 35 Francis, Where the People Are, 13‐14.
[17]
So far as we want to be telling Each other alive about each other Alive. I want to be able to speak And sing and make my soul occur In front of the best and be respected For that and even be understood By the ones I like who are dead. I would like to speak in front Of myself with all my ears alive And find out what it is I want.36
This passage diverts the force of the opening question away from the pressing need to appreciate what poetic language is “using us for” or “doing / To us” because an answer only has significance in terms of a personal desire, in terms of what “we want”; the subsequent listing, of what we want or I want or I would like, is composed of things we or I cannot have. In which case, to “want to be telling / Each other alive about each other / Alive” is as unrealistic a wish as Graham being “understood” by his illustrious pantheon of dead poets. The propositional content of the whole passage is complicated further when the last line confesses that for all of these apparent expressions of a keen desire, the speaker remains ignorant of “what it is I want.” Graham habitually conflates speech and writing in his work, which means we cannot finally decide that he attributes one set of qualities to speech and another, lesser set to writing. So when Francis glosses the passage quoted above from “The Dark Dialogues” thus: “Writing is a kind of speech (‘I speak as well as I can’) which never quite manages to fulfil the role of speech, so that the silence it tries to break is ultimately unmarked by it”37 we need to ask why speaking here is considered to be a metaphor for writing, but in the extract from “What Is The 36 Graham, New Collected Poems, 200. 37 Francis, Where the People Are, 14.
[18]
Language Using Us For?” we find that “telling” seems to be identified solely with speech. One useful paraphrase of the passage from “The Dark Dialogues” could run as follows: I speak/write to the best of my ability, insofar as anyone can, given the possibilities and limitations inherent in speaking/writing, and in so doing strive to be attentive to the constitutive roles of silence (in speech) and spacing (in writing). It could even be argued that the ears mentioned in the poem must be trained to appreciate the graphic possibilities of writing as they “learn to use their eyes.” When Francis assures us that “[Graham] would no doubt have been surprised by Jacques Derrida’s refusal to accept conventional distinctions between speech and writing”38 I think he underestimates the extent to which this refusal is already in operation in the poetry, overtly in the sense that when speaking and telling are mentioned in the poems they already include writing as one of their meanings, and implicitly in the deliberate failure to distinguish properly between the ear and the mouth and the eye, as organs or in their normally separate (but linked) functions. The general
38 Francis, Where the People Are, 14. Although Graham is excused from knowing Heidegger’s work, he is criticised for not anticipating or engaging with deconstruction, whose complex debts to and critique of Heidegger’s philosophy have been the subject of much comment. Elsewhere, curiously, Francis does extend to Graham the credit for some philosophical knowledge when he mentions the allusion to a Heraclitean axiom in “Notes on a Poetry of Release” and when, in explaining the prevalence of the word “Other” in Graham’s poetry, he suggests that “Graham probably took it from his youthful study of Greek philosophy” (47), mentioning Plato’s Timaeus as one potential source. It is not clear why Graham’s apparent lack of a “trained philosophical mind” should disqualify him from the reading of Heidegger but not stand in the way of a serious engagement with ancient Greek philosophy. My own best guess at the reason for “Other” cropping up so often in the poetry is that Graham borrows it from the translation of Rimbaud’s over‐determined formulation, “JE est un autre,” since Rimbaud is a presiding influence in so much of Graham’s work, from the Illuminations‐derived poems in Cage Without Grievance to no.28 in “Implements In Their Places,” “Rimbaud / Knew what to do.” New Collected Poems, 246. For more on the relationships between Rimbaud, Graham and Heidegger, see my “Names For Children,” Yearbook of English Studies 32 (2002): 229‐243.
[19]
and productive confusion between the eye and the ear especially, for example in what has usually been taken as a fairly straightforward love lyric like “I Leave This At Your Ear” can, if its implications are followed through, turn the poem into a complex meditation on address, authority, composition and reception. The object/poem which is, we are asked to suppose, left at the ear, our ears as well as the ear of the loved one, is presumably to be read, not heard, or at least read to be heard. If left, it must be written, to be read using our eyes, even if the act of reading is aloud or as sub‐vocal ‘speech’ in the mind. The poem counts a series of sounds: the hoot of an owl, sea‐noise, the ticking of a clock, the cry of gulls, but the only sound the speaker says he hears is the silence of the beloved’s house at the centre of the poem. In accordance with one of Graham’s most persistent motifs, which assumes that the poetic text is constituted by social and historical aspects of a language system39 whose effects cannot be mastered by an individual designated as ‘author,’ ‘I,’ the first person, leaves the poem at ‘your’ ear, the first person departing at this threshold or portal (not quite open in the sleeping woman, and yet not capable of being closed, according to a well‐known dictum of Freud’s) before it is heard, that is, in advance of its reception, whether that amounts to acceptance or rejection.40 The governing assumption effectively extends the significance of the literary signifier beyond the immediately available notions of authorial intention and familiar real‐world reference towards the
39 Graham, “Notes on a Poetry of Release,” 379: “Time and again I am scored by the others and their words and the diseases and cures [of those fictional problems of Morality (involving Politics and our each illusion of a Liberty)] war and change in their part of me. First I’ll put them aside for my poem is to be a successful construction of words, a construction in which anyhow those cures will act whether the poem is about a pinhead or Lanarkshire.” 40 A similar formulation is given in no.48 from “Implements In Their Places,” Graham, New Collected Poems, 251. “It is only when the tenant is gone / The shell speaks of the sea.”
[20]
unknown41, figured by Graham as the wilderness, waste or jungle, scenes of utterance beyond what is intelligible even to that sidelined figure we still do call ‘the poet’42. I believe that Francis misreads Graham’s attitude to writing as logocentric principally by interpreting Graham’s use of clashing metaphors in his poetry and his prose as confusion instead of as part of an idiosyncratic poetic practice which, in just that so‐called confusion, guarantees that there is no stable and essential difference between speech and writing in the poems. As a result, Graham is needlessly criticised in terms which have the most unfortunate consequences for the arguments of Francis’s book as a concerted whole.43 One of these consequences is that Graham is continually represented as self‐condemned, engaged in a hopeless and frustrating task which can goad the speaker of his poems into cries of rage or despair: 41 Graham, “Notes on a Poetry of Release,” 380: “The poet does not write what he knows but what he does not know.” 42 The situation would not be foreign to Heidegger’s sense of poetry’s role, particularly concerning a foundational autonomy of language. See Heidegger, “…Poetically Man Dwells…,” Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971) 267: “…strictly, it is language that speaks. Man first speaks when, and only when, he responds to language by listening to its appeal.” 43 For example, to counter the anticipated charge that he presents “a depressing picture of Graham’s life’s work,” Francis presents that work as “an attempt to overcome” the problems inherent in any writing whose primary goal is communication. Francis’s own thesis encounters considerable difficulties when it has to admit that the “organic community” it sees Graham as trying to reconstitute is, for Graham, “manifest in language” and not the extra‐linguistic ‘reality’ that his readers might expect. Since Francis has portrayed Graham’s postulated ideal throughout the book as a spontaneous, voice‐centred logocentrism dedicated to the effacement of the linguistic signifier, he first acknowledges that there is an inconsistency and lays the blame for it squarely on the unphilosophical tenor of Graham’s mind, figured as either untrained or unconscious: “This assertion is an apparent contradiction of the beliefs which I attributed to Graham in Chapter 1. To make sense of it we have to accept that his writing is not the exposition of a settled philosophy, but a battleground; like a Freudian dream or neurotic symptom, it attempts to reconcile conflicting forces.” (47)
[21]
At the end of one of his meditations on the nature of writing, he becomes so oppressed by its silence that he feels the urge to shout: […] Hello Hello I shout but that silence Floats steady, will not be marked By an off‐hand shout.44
The verse is taken from the poem “Approaches To How They Behave” and is part of the final section, which concerns the preparations for poetic composition. In a calm spirit of curiosity and bafflement, far from the anguish and oppression diagnosed by Francis, the speaker becomes aware that the “silence,” pre‐ writing, he must “construct” to “speak out on,” and which he does convert into actuality, will not let itself be greeted directly in terms dictated to it by the poet. As this silence of his immediate environment is not conducive to the act of writing poetry, he then sets out, undaunted, to “construct / A new silence I hope to break.”45 A recent contribution to this particular strand of criticism, an essay principally on the use Graham makes of line‐breaks, by Adam Piette, develops Tony Lopez’s case in a number of curious ways. Piette, for example, suggests that early on Graham was “in Heideggerian territory,” having attended a term of philosophy lectures “concentrating on the pre‐ Socratics”46 at Newbattle Abbey College in his early twenties. He also cites Lopez approvingly on the topic of the contested philosophy reading list dismissed by Matthew Francis,47 and
44 Francis, Where the People Are, 16. 45 Graham, New Collected Poems, 182. 46 Adam Piette, “‘Roaring between the lines’: W.S. Graham and the White Threshold of Line‐Breaks,” W.S. Graham: Speaking Towards You, ed. Ralph Pite and Hester Jones. (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 2004) 47. 47 Piette, “Roaring between the lines,” 47: “As Tony Lopez notes of the reading Graham did at this time, specifically in relation to the coherence of subjectivity ‘as a problem requiring examination through performance in language’: ‘He
[22]
lists books in which Graham could potentially have come across Heidegger’s ideas in English translation. The more concerted effort to establish a connection between the writings of the poet and the philosopher involves an account of concerns in Graham’s work which are “remarkably Heideggerian,”48 and which seem sometimes to be more Heideggerian than Heidegger himself since he is often taken to be writing Heidegger avant la lettre, before, that is, the texts which will belatedly confirm the philosophical import of Graham’s poetry. In the hands of Piette Graham’s poems become less like Lopez’s programmatic application of Heideggerian concepts than a roughly contemporaneous investigation into the nature of language which complements and is complemented by Heidegger’s work across a set of profound affinities: “the common ground between Graham’s phenomenological poetics and late Heidegger shows how deeply and intuitively Graham had understood and anticipated the linguistic turn implicit in Heidegger’s earlier practice.”49 It is only ‘roughly contemporaneous’ because it seems to inhabit a curiously configured countertime in which Graham can understand what is “implicit” in Heidegger’s philosophy and draw it out in his work before Heidegger does the same in his own. According to Piette it is just this ability to pre‐empt the philosopher which distinguishes Graham’s oeuvre and the main task of his essay is to discern the role of the line‐break in “Graham’s phenomenological poetics” in order to “demonstrate the common ground between” the poet and “late Heidegger.”50 The demonstration begins with a series of claims:
read the Pre‐Socratics, the Existentialists, Sartre and Heidegger, and no doubt much more.’” 48 Piette, “Roaring between the lines,” 47. 49 Piette, “Roaring between the lines,” 47. 50 Piette, “Roaring between the lines,” 47.
[23]
For Graham, the page becomes a terrain shared by two time zones, the time of creation by the poet, and the time of reading, the strangeness being that the poet, by inscribing her voice upon the white space, enters into a space between, a threshold liminal both to her own real surroundings and to the readers’ imagined environment. This liminal terrain is a space of Language for Graham, necessarily, and is therefore constructed. It is where a radical ‘turn’ takes place. It is this emphasis on the turn that rhymes so remarkably well with Heidegger’s theory of Kehre, the moment of Ursprung that transforms Dasein, at once a turning back (Rückkehr) and a turning into (Einkehr). As Joseph Fell puts it in his remarks on Heidegger’s 1957 Der Satz vom Grund (The Principle of Reason), ‘the turn is the movement through apparent nothingness to a “forgotten” and “cancelled fullness.”‘ The turn takes place at a juncture, for Heidegger, a juncture of sensing, thinking and naming, ‘a juncture (Fuge) of the imperceptible and the perceptible […] in naming, language accomplishes this juncture.’51
The notion that a single terrain can share two imbricated time zones is a strange one but it is usefully reminiscent of the uncanny time‐lag in Graham’s poetics, where it is always possible that it is the ear of the recipient or reader which will have dictated what was read and, therefore, written. Useful, that is, if it can be shown that in Piette’s formulation “the time of creation by the poet” and “the time of reading” do not preserve their separate integrities along a conventional chronology. The link to Kehre is more sophisticated and is given its fullest exposition in the following passage which comments on a fragment of verse punctuating Graham’s prose text, “Notes on a Poetry of Release”: For ever as the seeker turns His worshipping eyes on prophetic patterns Of shape arising from all men He changes through, he shall remain
51 Piette, “Roaring between the lines,” 47.
[24]
Continually stripped and clothed again. (Nightfisherman, 382)
Graham mimes the change of first word by position, and the searcher’s change ‘at every step’ with the quotation’s turn at the line‐break: ‘as the seeker turns / his worshipping eyes.’ This change is Heidegger’s Kehre, the double‐natured break that is both radically a break and a transformative turning into, creating what Stephen Cushman calls phenomenological prosody. The turn across the line‐break anticipates Heidegger on the tearing break that occurs at the threshold of Dif‐férence in his 1950 Bühlerhöhe lecture, ‘Die Sprache’: ‘the tearing is the hyphen which, like a first trace suddenly opening up space, signs and joins together that which has been held apart in Dis‐ junction.’ Heidegger does not openly talk about line‐breaks, which raises the question as to the influences colouring Graham’s identification of Heideggerian Kehre with line‐ending white space.52
Heidegger’s commentators tend to discuss his Kehre principally in terms of two modes, different in scale but indubitably linked. Michael Inwood summarises the double‐reference thus: Heidegger often spoke of ‘the turn,’ die Kehre. He used it to refer to the turn, at the end of [Being and Time], from ‘Being and Time’ to ‘Time and Being,’ and later for the turn he hoped for from the ‘oblivion of being’ to the remembrance of it.53
The Kehre, therefore, is both a switch of emphasis in Heidegger’s own writing,54 said to have occurred at some point 52 Piette, “Roaring between the lines,” 47. 53 Michael Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary, (Oxford, England and Massachusetts, USA: Blackwell, 1999) 8. 54 Most critics appear to agree that this mode of the Kehre does not mean anything like a recanting of a previous position. As Inwood declares: “what Heidegger himself calls a Kehre in his thought involves, as he says, no change of standpoint.” Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary, 232. Even authors who postulate that this Kehre occurs as a result of Heidegger’s disgraceful concord with National Socialism testify to “the unity of his thought through the “turning” or
[25]
in the 1930s, and a future, meta‐ontological anamnesis in the world. When Piette argues that the line‐break at the centre of “the seeker turns / His worshipping eyes” echoes the transpositions in syntax as we proceed along each line and re‐ presents the transformations announced in the passage, he is on relatively safe ground; but when he goes on to declare that “[t]his change is Heidegger’s Kehre, the double‐natured break that is both radically a break and a transformative turning into”55, he appears to go too far. No doubt Heidegger’s idea of the Kehre is, in the broadest terms, similar to Graham’s use of the line‐break here, since both involve a turn which is a re‐turn (to the left‐hand margin for Graham and his readers, and to the forgotten but original disclosure of being for Heidegger) and a change (the retrospective and prospective modification of meaning across the words of Graham’s poem, and for Heidegger the “initiation of a new epoch in the history of being”56). But the notion that the terms inside each of my parentheses here are in some way the same thing appears far‐ fetched. The fact becomes even more obvious when we study the next part of Piette’s argument. He states that Graham’s line‐ break “anticipates Heidegger on the tearing break that occurs at the threshold of Dif‐férence in…’Die Sprache’” and gives a quotation which appears to be from Heidegger’s lecture. In fact, an endnote to Piette’s essay identifies the quotation as his own rendering into English from a French translation of what originally, of course, was a German text. Piette’s version runs: “‘the tearing is the hyphen which, like a first trace suddenly opening up space, signs and joins together that which has been held apart in Dis‐junction.’”57 Heidegger’s original German text, at the point Piette purports to be translating, is engaged in an Kehre, that is usually supposed to separate the thought of the later period from that of Being and Time.” Frederick A. Olafson, “The Unity of Heidegger’s Thought,” The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles Guignon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 97. 55 Piette, “Roaring between the lines,” 49. 56 Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary, 233. 57 Piette, “Roaring between the lines,” 49.
[26]
interpretation of Georg Trakl’s poem “Ein Winterabend” and in particular the line: “Schmerz versteinerte die Schwelle.”58 (“Pain has turned the threshold to stone.”) The sentence, referring to “Schmerz” or “Pain,” reads in full as follows: “Sein Reißen ist als das versammelnde Scheiden zugleich jenes Ziehen, das wie der Vorriß und Aufriß das im Schied Auseinandergehaltene zeichnet und fügt.”59 The most widely available translation in English gives this part of the text as: “Its rending, as a separating that gathers, is at the same time that drawing which, like the pen‐drawing of a plan or sketch, draws and joins together what is held apart in separation.”60 Piette’s version, perhaps following a misdirection in the French translation, imports some obviously Derridean elements that do not figure in Heidegger’s lecture61, and also omits features which ought to have been included. The most important omission, however, is that the quotation he gives refers to Schmerz and not to Kehre (indeed the latter concept is never mentioned at any point in Heidegger’s lecture); in addition, the commentary has no bearing on Trakl’s use of the line‐break. Piette’s case, here and, to an extent, throughout his essay, amounts to an imaginative exercise in bricolage, layering and gathering what ought, for the most part, to have been held apart in disjunction, in order to provide what is nevertheless and often an illuminating and suggestive account of Graham’s poetics. However, the dangers inherent in such an approach are evident when it comes to the over‐enthusiastic conclusion to the passage, as Piette “raises the question as to the influences
58 Georg Trakl, Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974) 59. 59 Martin Heidegger, “Die Sprache,” Unterwegs Zur Sprache. Gesamtausgabe I. Abteilung Veröffentlichte Schriften 1919‐1976. Band 12. (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1985) 24. 60 Martin Heidegger, “Language,” Poetry, Language, Thought, 204. 61 ‘Trace’ seems to conflate both Vorriß (an outline drawn on tamped earth, suggesting where the foundations of a building should be laid) and Aufriß (a scale drawing of the external face of a building) in a way that could seem opportunistic in terms of its familiar Derridean usage as well as being reasonably insensitive to the sense of the original text.
[27]
colouring Graham’s identification of Heideggerian Kehre with line‐ending white space.”62 In the previous sentence, Graham has, with his use of the line‐break, only been said to have anticipated Heidegger’s Kehre; in this one, he is said to know and understand the Kehre and to ‘identify’ it with the bleached void at the end of a line, although there is absolutely no mention of the word Kehre in Graham’s work, published or unpublished. It is interesting to note that at important points in his case Piette invokes ‘rhyme’ as a kind of solder to join Graham to Heidegger. “It is this emphasis on the turn that rhymes so remarkably with Heidegger’s theory of Kehre…”63; “Graham’s ‘Notes on a Poetry of Release’…rhymes astonishingly with Heidegger’s poetics”; and when he cites a passage in which Graham asserts that “You cannot twice bring the same word into sound,” Piette states that “[t]his rhymes with Heidegger’s reading of the early Greeks, in particular his 1951 paper on Heraclitus and Logos…” The decision to use the concept of rhyme to join the poet’s and the philosopher’s key ideas is revealing, since we can infer that, like words which rhyme, ideas can sound quite similar while meaning very different things; the juxtaposition throughout Piette’s text of the line‐ break and die Kehre works to make an almost entirely arbitrary coincidence (that the word ‘turn’ can refer to enjambement, metamorphosis, and sophisticated developments in conceptualisation)64 into a motivated semantic connection. Of the three attempts to answer the Heidegger question in relation to Graham’s work, the most convincing to me remains the account given in Tony Lopez’s book, even if I happily admit that I do not find it completely convincing. A study which made
62 Piette, “Roaring between the lines,” 49. 63 Piette, “Roaring between the lines,” 47. 64 Piette, “Roaring between the lines,” 55: “…enjambement (a turning out of the voice into the next line) becomes that other turn, the turn of trope, or transformation (the self, in the turn from line to line, is transformed into its next manifestation).”
[28]
a completely convincing case for Graham as a Heideggerian poet would, in any case, prove self‐defeating since Heidegger makes an absolute distinction between the task of the thinker and the task of the poet, so that a writer who merely incorporated and adapted a slew of Heidegger’s concepts would be viewed, from Heidegger’s own perspective at least, as the least Heideggerian poet of all.
[29]
Thomas Day
“This Foolish Body”: Comedy and Contexture in Geoffrey Hill’s Scenes from Comus “I turned 70 in June,” Geoffrey Hill wrote in The Guardian a few years ago,1 “and have been cheered by a Blake quotation received from a well‐wisher: ‘In [the Imagination] I am stronger & stronger as this Foolish Body decays.’”2 Hill’s poetic imagination has indeed gone from strength to strength in his latter years, evidenced by the creative burst that has seen him publish seven books of verse in quick succession since 1996—a remarkable departure from the prolonged silences that punctuated his earlier collections. Yet this is a body of work which also recognises the place of this foolish body, a poetry attuned to its own frailties and failures. Written in to these is the Christian poet’s awareness that “We are fools for Christ’s sake” (I Corinthians 4:10), and that “God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise […] and the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty” (I Corinthians 1: 27)—an awareness of this body as that of the Incarnation.
1 Geoffrey Hill, “A Matter of Timing,” The Guardian. 21 Sep. 2002. 2 William Blake, Letter to George Cumberland. 12 Apr. 1827.
[30]
That fooling and foolishness take the form of comedy in Hill’s work is not immediately obvious from his 2005 book‐ length poem Scenes from Comus,3 in spite of the etymological clue contained in its title. In his 1998 poem The Triumph of Love4 Hill addressed what he has called “that element of clownishness […] that obtuseness that is the dark side of [one’s] own selfhood”5 through a series of semi‐autobiographical but nevertheless lightly worn personae, from a schoolboy self prone to playing the class clown, to the poem’s fictional editor, whose obtuse intrusions litter the text, to an irascible old man gone “deaf in the right ear,” whose mishearings are a frequent source of comedy in the poem, not least, we are to understand, because they often miss the joke. The foolish body, moreover, is at work in the pie‐in‐the‐face, whoopsie‐daisy slapstick humour that the poem employs, which takes its cue, or its miscue, from the circus clown: The nerve required to keep standing, pedaling, grinning inanely, strikes me (splat!) as more than temperamental luck. It is a formal self‐distancing, but like choreography. You could clog to some late Haydn without injuring either tradition. Please—my foot— ta‐Rah ta‐Rah ta‐rarara Rah6
But the poet of Scenes from Comus doesn’t have the nerve for such “formal / self‐distancing,” preferring to play it a little more straight‐faced, taking himself rather seriously: “That I mean 3 Geoffrey Hill, Scenes from Comus (London: Penguin, 2005). The poem is divided into three parts, “The Argument of the Masque,” “Courtly Masquing Dances” and “A Description of the Antimasque”; and into numbered subsections within each part: references are given accordingly. 4 Geoffrey Hill, The Triumph of Love: A Poem, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999). The American edition was published in 1998. References to the poem are by section number. 5 Geoffrey Hill, “‘The Conscious Mind’s Intelligible Structure’: A Debate,” Agenda 9.4/10.1 (1971‐2): 14‐23, 20‐1. 6 Hill, The Triumph of Love, CXXXIII.
[31]
what I say,” he says, “saying it obscurely.”7 The masks seem thinner here, the many voices of the earlier poem lying closer to the one voice, that of the poet. Hill still lets us hear not of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly, assuming the voice of the harrumphing old fart, dispossessed of his autumnal serenity, though with the unruffled cultural superiority of one occupying a comfortable armchair at the Garrick club: “And they talk about Heavy Metal! They don’t know / these kids, what weight of the word is.”8 But any hint of comic irony or bathos is counteracted by the lyric intensity of the following section of the poem, a masterly meditation on what weight of the word is: That weight of the world, weight of the word, is. Not wholly irreconcilable. Almost, Almost we can pull free; almost we escape the leadenness of things. Almost I have walked the first step upon water. Nothing beyond.9
It’s as if Hill, or his speaker, is trying to show these kids what’s what, to show them who’s the daddy, the master. In doing so, though, those petty‐minded and self‐opinionated motives are seemingly left behind by what strikes no less an ear for poetry than Christopher Ricks’s as Hill at his breathtaking best,10 for once giving us the authentic voice, the true note superseding the false, as it were. Almost he can pull free of the dark side of selfhood, almost escape the leadenness of this foolish body, almost unconfound the wise and the mighty. Yet not quite. 7 Hill, “The Argument of the Masque,” Scenes from Comus, 13. 8 Hill, “The Argument of the Masque,” Scenes from Comus, 19. 9 Hill, “The Argument of the Masque,” Scenes from Comus, 20. 10 In a lecture at the University of York Christopher Ricks described this section of Scenes from Comus as an “extremely beautiful poem,” citing it as a “test case” in the critical debates about Hill’s recent poetry: “if this poem does not reach you,” he contended, “then nothing in the recent volumes will reach you.” Christopher Ricks, The Jacques Berthoud Lecture in Modern Studies: “True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill and T.S. Eliot,” University of York. 21 Jun. 2006.
[32]
There is no true note, and no purification of the motive, for “The truth of poetry,” as Hill has written, “is in part corruption and in part contamination”:11 parts supplied here by the context of the utterance, or its ‘contexture’ to use Hill’s preferred word (taken from Hobbes), which predicates the relation of the part to the whole. This is the weight of the word that drags the long poem’s high‐flown lyric moment back down to earth,12 the impulse towards transcendence revoked by the revelation of “Nothing beyond.” Such instances of the corruption of poetic mastery imitate the divine condescension of the Incarnation, of the Christ who, in the words of Paul’s kenotic hymn, “made himself of no reputation, and took upon himself the form of a servant” (Philippians 2.7); though the kinds of condescension presented by the poem are themselves corrupt, judging from that patronizing remark about “these kids.” Elsewhere in the poem Hill takes upon himself the form of one of those kids, but the impression is hardly one of Christ‐like humility; he harks back to a youthful self—the undergraduate poet of ‘Genesis,’ the first poem in his Collected Poems13—ambitiously intent on making himself a reputation, the apprentice with his sights already set on becoming the master: Rewriting his own deepest reading: thát fair comment on the wiped out fifty years
11 Geoffrey Hill, “R.S. Thomas’s Welsh Pastoral,” Echoes to the Amen: Essays after R.S. Thomas, ed. Damian Walford Davies (Cardiff: University of Wales, 2003) 44‐ 59, 56. 12 Peter McDonald puts this point eloquently in his review of Scenes from Comus: “Hill’s style never rests: no phrase is allowed to settle back on itself without being upset by what succeeds it; no isolated effect, however brilliant, is allowed to remain unshadowed.” “Truly Apart,” Times Literary Supplement 1 Apr. 2005, 13. 13 Geoffrey Hill, Collected Poems (London: Penguin, 1985). “Genesis” was originally published in a pamphlet entitled Geoffrey Hill (Oxford: Fantasy Press, 1952), and then in For the Unfallen: Poems 1952‐1958 (London: André Deutsch, 1959).
[33]
from genesis to this?14
There is, it is true, a self‐critical tone to this, a despair that his writing should ever have come “to this,” which is tinged with something of Sidney’s admonitory ‘“Fool” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart and write”‘; but “Rewriting his own deepest reading” also has a shallowness about it, which is more complacently self‐assured. “[T]he wiped out fifty years” rewrites, I take it, the “Twenty years largely wasted” of Eliot’s “East Coker,” though without the same reverence for “men whom one cannot hope / To emulate.” Not only does Hill hope, he means to go one better than Eliot, trumping his twenty with a fifty. And for all the sense of wasted time and unfulfilled potential, there is an attendant unity of purpose, the single‐ mindedness of a poet who knew where he was going all along, “from genesis to this”—the contextual relation of the part to the whole œuvre rather taken for granted here. Furthermore, this is someone who likes to think that he’s not yet past it, that he can still cut it with the kids: he talks the talk, “wiped out” drawing on the verbal resources—or lack thereof—of the Californian surf dude, but he doesn’t really walk the walk, sounding rather like the fusty lecturer desperately trying to spice up his material by peppering it with references to “The Blur” or “The Oasis,” when in fact The Beach Boys are about the extent of his pop cultural knowledge. “[T]he hollow mill that turns / always full of itself”15 described several sections earlier also pertains to the way the poet turns and returns on himself, and on his earlier self, in this section of the poem, the vacancy left by the wiped out years not so much testimony to a kenotic self‐emptying, but to the fullness of hubris. The speaker—another, or the same—sounds similarly full of himself in section 8 of “Courtly Masquing Dances,” the second and longest of the poem’s three movements: “But bring on music, sonorous, releasing.” The graceful cadence of this line 14 Hill, “Courtly Masquing Dances,” Scenes from Comus, 39. 15 Hill, “Courtly Masquing Dances,” Scenes from Comus, 34.
[34]
contributes to its air of propriety and gentility, as might become a king calling for his courtly entertainments, or the Earl of Bridgewater calling for Milton’s Ludlow Masque, which Scenes from Comus discourses upon: these courtly masquing dances are, we imagine, a world away from the clownish clogging to late Haydn in The Triumph of Love. But “bring on music” contains the strain of a not so well‐to‐do, brasher order of speech, which sounds discordantly against the tenor of the line; not so to create the “grand and crabby music”16 brought on by the poet in defiance of the youthful penchant for Heavy Metal, but a music less crabbedly crepuscular, more likely to be listened to, and rehearsed, by those kids. “[B]ring on music” resonates with the phrase “bring it on,” the clarion cry of the cocky kid scrapping for a fight: a voice in keeping with Hill’s attitude to poets past, including Marvell, who is compared unfavourably with “Bayed Milton” in this section, written off as “that wit‐bibber from Hull”; Larkin, whom Hill has been polemically dismissive of in his prose,17 whose “Church Going” he irreverently, and rather ungratefully, plunders in his derogation of Marvell;18 and even Milton, who despite his elevated status as the presiding genius of Scenes from Comus, is spoken of somewhat familiarly throughout the poem, with just the suggestion that he is being “bayed” in the other sense of the word. Hill’s poetry has often been associated with a ‘masculine’ tradition in English verse, a quality attributed to the stress‐ based metrics he favours, which emphasize the weight of the word and the sinuous strength of the poetic line.19 And Hill
16 Hill, “The Argument of the Masque,” Scenes from Comus, 19. 17 See the final footnote of Hill’s most recent collection of essays, Style and Faith (New York: Counterpoint, 2003) 203‐4. 18 “Some ruin‐bibber, randy for antique, / Or Christmas‐addict, counting on a whiff / Of gown‐and‐bands and organ‐pipes and myrrh?” 19 Robert MacFarlane, in an as yet unpublished essay entitled “Gravity and Grace: Geoffrey Hill’s Unreasonable Prosody,” discusses this aspect of Hill’s writing, adducing Ted Hughes’s identification of a “masculine movement” in English poetry, which prizes the “primary life of stress”; Seamus Heaney’s sense of poetry’s “masculine mode,” whereby “words are…athletic, capable, displaying
[35]
himself frequently adopts analogies between the act of poetic composition and feats of physical strength and attrition, variously comparing the poet’s task to that of the weightlifter, the marathon runner, the unicyclist. But the machismo of this moment in Scenes from Comus serves as a debased parody of the muscular masculinity that typifies Hill’s work, portraying him as a mere pretender attempting to punch above his weight. It may be that that itself is a strength of the poetry, that parody, or self‐parody, cast a critical eye on the inherent elements of clownishness and obtuseness, functioning as a mode of what Hill likes to call “self‐laceration.” On the other hand, self‐parody may constitute those elements themselves unredeemed by such self‐knowledge. Laceration, it is fair to assume, has to hurt, but self‐parody entails, if not self‐love, then at least a good‐natured affection, predicating the perception of a self worth parodying. “Combative in theory, I hate drawing / my own blood,”20 Hill writes in the final part of the poem, squeamishly shying away from self‐laceration. He opts instead for a comfortable kind of comedy that does not cut too close to the bone, a quintessentially English self‐deprecating humour which makes him, and potentially us, feel quite at home. The cocky kid scrapping for a fight, then, is not necessarily the poet’s way of beating himself up; the effect is more consistent with one of the “young noble clones safely beset by clowns”21 cited as players in the masque, a way of playing it safe, which may imply (as bravado usually does) a certain vulnerability or timidity, lacking in the nerve required for clowning. Yet in its way this enacts an even more daring surrender, since playing it safe can be an extremely dangerous thing to do: especially for someone so concerned with moving on in the world, one who the muscle of sense”; and Hopkins’s remark that Dryden ‘is the most masculine of our poets; his style and his rhythms lay the strongest stress of all our literature on the naked thew and sinew of the English language.’ David Trotter also discusses “the physique and punch‐on‐the‐nose vivacity of Hill’s verse.” Trotter, The Making of the Reader (London: Macmillan, 1984) 210. 20 Hill, “A Description of the Antimasque,” Scenes from Comus, 9. 21 Hill, “Courtly Masquing Dances,” Scenes from Comus, 6.
[36]
could easily end up looking as though he hasn’t moved on, as though his poetic powers have stagnated, a foolish old man mindlessly repeating himself. What appears to be the strength of Hill’s work often turns out to be its weakness, its weaknesses, by the same token, proving to be its strengths, the Blakean conceptions of innocence and experience, as these condition states of knowledge and self‐knowledge, thus shown to be indistinct. This makes for the “intrinsic quality of style” that Hill describes in The Enemy’s Country as “the simultaneous recognition of strength and impediment which, as it declares itself triumphantly possessed of such knowledge, suffers the ignominious consequences of that possession”22—a suffering judged and justified by Christ’s. Judgement in this world is just as weighty a matter for Hill. “Criticism,” he contends, is “part of the body of circumstance out of which and against which the single voice of creative intelligence must be made articulate.”23 The critical contexts and readerly reception of the poem, in other words, are part of the poem’s very make‐up, the poet having to speak over the background noise of his audience, hecklers and cheer‐leaders alike. If this has sometimes seemed like Hill wanting to pre‐ empt and/or forestall criticism as a defensive measure this is probably because he has felt himself under attack, primarily from the popular poetry lobby, for his uncompromising ways of saying it obscurely. In recent times, however, he has enjoyed—or resented all the more—an upturn in the popularity stakes, so much so that in his latest collection, Without Title, he speaks of “the push‐and‐pull of predicate acclaim,”24 a wry comment on the critical fanfare that now greets each new Geoffrey Hill publication; though one wonders to what extent he is being cloth‐eared here, since there is also no shortage of mutterings about “the shortcomings of Hill’s recent work,” to 22 Geoffrey Hill, The Enemy’s Country: Words, Contexture, and other Circumstances of Language (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991) 25. 23 Hill, The Enemy’s Country, 84. 24 Geoffrey Hill, “Pindarics,” Without Title (London: Penguin, 2006) 5.
[37]
quote one reviewer.25 To what extent can you “predicate” the nature of the poem’s reception? Isn’t the reader the unknowable other whose mind the writer can never really read, not without looking like a false poet‐prophet at any rate? That Hill has a specific reader in mind—his friend (and exact contemporary) the composer Hugh Wood, whose 70th birthday Scenes from Comus celebrates in its dedication, and whose 1969 symphony of the same title Hill’s poem recalls—might suggest otherwise, as might the knowing references to the view that Hill is over the hill, that he is not the poet he used to be, that his powers are failing, which amount to him showing that he’s still several steps ahead of the game, that he’s nobody’s fool. But in the body of critical circumstance surrounding the poem there are also signs of the “contextual ‘otherness’” that he has spoken of in relation to seventeenth‐century religious prose in an essay entitled “The Weight of the Word,”26 an otherness that eludes the poet’s control, deriving as it does from forces of contingency (crucial to Hill’s Hobbesian understanding of ‘contexture’),27 as opposed to the necessity which governs the injunction that “the single voice of creative intelligence must be made articulate”; it is, nevertheless, an otherness to be accessed via the “flawed self” that Hill believes “must […] be embodied in some way in the finished work.”28 The compromising pull of predicate acclaim is to be felt, for instance, in the lashings of “Praise for Geoffrey Hill” (as the Penguin marketing men put it) that adorn the back cover of Scenes from Comus, among them Harold Bloom’s portentous proclamation that “Strong poetry is always difficult, and Geoffrey Hill is the strongest poet now active.” 25 Clive Wilmer, “Winter’s Tale,” New Statesman 27 Feb. 2006. 26 In Hill, Style and Faith, 117‐139, 122. 27 ‘“Words, contexture, and other circumstances of language,” Hill wrote in his “A Note on the Title” to The Enemy’s Country, “I take to signify the relation of word to word and of the body of words to those contingencies and accommodations marginally glossed among the ‘Lawes of Nature’ in Leviathan: ‘covenants of mutuall trust,’ ‘covenants extorted by feare,’ ‘justice of manners and justice of actions,’ ‘submission to arbitrement,’ etc.” The Enemy’s Country, xi‐xii, xii. 28 Hill, “Acceptance Speech for the T.S. Eliot Prize,” Image 28 (2000): 72‐6, 75.
[38]
Ironically, such bland expressions of assent, though purportedly endorsing Hill’s aspirations towards poetic ‘strength,’ detract from his poetry more than any detractor, attenuating that pugnacious, combative streak on which he prides himself by rendering it passive rather than ‘active.’ “Critics queue up to say, unequivocally, that [Hill] is the best poet working in English” writes Tom Payne in the Telegraph, quoted a little further down. Again, these queue‐formers sound more like sheep than critics, and accordingly Hill begins to sound like a cameo in The Dunciad. And there is a further strain of contextual otherness in Payne’s claim that Hill is the best poet working “in English,” which inadvertently stumbles upon the fact that to be a poet writing in English is different from being an English poet, a label that no longer fits Hill as neatly as it once did, as the occasional Americanisms to be heard in Scenes from Comus attest. The ‘quintessentially English’ comedy of the poem is also subject to the otherness of the body of circumstance comprised by criticism and audience. ‘Body’ of circumstance is no accident of expression, and has a particular resonance in the context of comedy, which for Hill is intimately bound up with this foolish body, as he makes clear in his piece in The Guardian when discussing some of his comedic influences: I think that I’ve learnt as much from Daumier, Hylda Baker and Frankie Howerd as I have from John Donne or Gerard Manley Hopkins. In the end it is a matter of timing and facial gesture— especially gestures with the mouth—and finesse of silences. If I’m asked how you get bodily gesture into the rhythm and syntax of poetic speech, I answer that we can hear and see it in poets as diverse as Wyatt, Donne, Dryden and Hopkins.
We can hear and see the role of the body in Hill, in a section from the first part of the poem, where its carnal connotations are contemplated, though the bodily functions of comedy and contexture are equally pertinent here: [39]
Sexual love—instinctively alchemical: early sexual love. Or is the dying recreation of it the real mystery? I say that each is true: words troth‐plight to both of us, equal with her, truer now, than I wás or ever could be, but knowing myself in her. I said ask me to explain—they won’t remember, forty‐six lines back and already buried with the short day.29
This isn’t obviously funny, and certainly isn’t the physical comedy of the clown falling over, grinning inanely. But it may incorporate some of the mannerisms of the stand‐up comedian joking with his audience, or telling his audience that this is no joking matter, his ‘Titter ye not’s and ‘I mean what I say’s said not with a nod and a wink, but with the deadpan expression of the straight man. The last sentence of the section is a sort of joke, but a joke about an audience who didn’t get the joke, who needed it explaining to them—a joke lost in translation perhaps, or said too obscurely. As everybody knows, there’s nothing more likely to kill a joke (let alone a poem) than having to explain it, an eventuality intuited by the deathly silence after “buried,” which asks us to imagine the comedian dying on his feet in front of an audience on the verge of voting with their feet; the final half‐line registers as a punch line that has backfired, preceded by an unnecessarily painful dramatic pause. At the same time, the line break brings the finesse of silence, and with it an immaculately timed gallows humour which alleviates the weight of the word, resurrecting the joke that has gone down like a lead balloon by making the speaker the butt of it. That line of silence, which is also the background 29 Hill, “The Argument of the Masque,” Scenes from Comus, 11
[40]
noise of the audience, represents the fine line between the comedian, and the poet, knowing what he’s doing here, and not knowing, at once triumphantly possessed of such knowledge and suffering the ignominious consequences of that possession. Knowing himself in her, he becomes the unwitting stooge of someone other, us, the audience. Yet we, in our contextual otherness, also have difficulty knowing ourselves in this section, since the speaker doesn’t quite know who he is speaking to. Insofar as it is a joke, the final sentence of the section is a bit of an in‐joke, a humorous anecdote told amongst friends along the lines of “so I said…and then he replied”; though the way the in‐joke concomitantly excludes is less than friendly, bearing out Freud’s point, in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, that jokes sometimes function “in the service of a hostile purpose.”30 We laugh secure in the knowledge that the joke is on them, that while it goes above their heads, we get it. But it may be that the political incorrectness of the joke misses its mark, since the ‘them and us’ runs the risk of alienating those among us who sympathise with them. And it may be that the joke is on us after all, that we are the ‘they’ who are not intended to overhear this, which is what makes it hard for us to see the funny side. Our presence here has the effect of turning the signal phrase, “I said,” back into the “I say” employed earlier in the section, which adds insult to the injury of the patronising comment about our ignorance of the poem’s context—an ignorance of which the speaker is himself guilty— he seeming to talk down to us like a comedian telling a joke to an audience of children: “I say I say I say” (I might have said like a clown, but do clowns tell jokes?) The real punch line, the coup de grâce, is that the joke is not even on us, but on me, or you, for it is the critic of Hill’s poetry who ends up doing the
30 Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Srachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1960), Vol. 8. Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), 102.
[41]
explaining, though one gets the impression that Hill is asking for it, inviting the critic to bring it on.
[42]
Keston Sutherland
XL Prynne …the ques‐ tion is really what size we’re in, how much of it is the measure, at one time.1 On the march. Simmer down…2
What is radical thinking? Is there radical thinking in J.H. Prynne’s poems? What is anyone looking for? There is no one person to ask. There is not even one Marx. “Man,” wrote one of them (the twenty‐five year old Marx of 1843‐4) “is the world of man.” Then, several steps later in the adventure of his manuscript, this same Marx tried out a still more poetical and now famous phrase: “To be radical is to grasp things by the root. But for man the root is man himself.”3 Radikal sein, to be radical—is to grasp. What kind of act is this grasp, this fassen urged in the infinitive that resembles a state of 1 J.H. Prynne, “First Notes on Daylight,” Poems (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre, and Highgreen: Bloodaxe, 2005) 69. 2 “Shortly delude berries in a pot,” Red D Gypsum, Poems, 441. 3 Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction,” Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (New York: Vintage, 1975) 244, 251. “Mensch, das ist kein abstraktes, außer der Welt hockendes Wesen. Der Mensch, das ist die Welt des Menschen, Staat, Sozietät.” “Radikal sein ist die Sache an der Wurzel fassen. Die Wurzel für den Menschen ist aber der Mensch selbst.” Die Frühschriften, ed. Siegfried Landshut (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 1971) 208, 216.
[43]
being? It is understanding transformed by recognition, recognition transformed by understanding. The radical grasp, for Marx, is not the mere use of a recognition and an understanding that are fixed “faculties” imperturbable by their objects. To be radical, the grasp must be the act in which each transforms both. This reciprocal transformation of recognition and understanding is one thing that distinguishes radical thinking from its real and imagined alternatives.4 Radical thinking, for this Marx, is thus an activity different from religious or conservative thinking not merely in temperament but in kind. It must itself produce the person capable of it. It does this through its passion and through its relationship with its object. Radical thinking must understand the world by understanding the root of it, and it must recognise that this root is man; recognition and understanding here transform and illuminate each other; but what is it that they grasp in this transforming act? The root, says Marx, which is man himself. Man as the root is however a difficult object to grasp. Far from being “outside the world” or even distinguishable from it, man is the world, or at least, he is the world that belongs to and is intelligible to him, what Marx called das Diesseits: “this” world.5 He is not a root that thinking can clip off.6 Is all the world, then,
4 One real alternative is Kant. Kant’s term translated as “cognitive faculties” is Erkenntnisvermögen. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood point out that Vermögen “implies activity,” and that, for Kant, even “our senses are acted upon by external objects”; but the activity and passivity of cognitive faculties in Kant is transcendentally determined, fixedly systematic and not reciprocally transformative. “Introduction.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 39. 5 Marx, Early Writings, 244; Frühschriften, 209. 6 Examine in homeopathic isolation Prynne’s poem “Select an object with no predecessors,” For The Monogram, Poems, 420. Could this be what Hans Thill and Ulf Stolterfoht call “Prynne’s language of Paradise,” the “complete dehierarchization of the structure of syntax” that would presumably outlaw bathos from sentence structure? See their “Nachwort,” J.H. Prynne, Poems | Gedichte, trans. Ulf Stolterfoht and Hans Thill (Heidelberg: Wunderhorn, 2007) 73.
[44]
its own root? The world must be grasped by the root, but this root by which the world must be grasped is man, and man is the world. Is radical thinking then deliverance into one of those hermeneutic circles that Heidegger believed thinking must be intrepid enough to remain inside? Is it a “closed circle” that we must “get to grips with,” as Prynne’s words order us to and threaten that we will, pathogenically echoing Heidegger?7 Man is the root | man is the world. If we want to read these two moments of poetic arguing by Marx as coordinated insights into “the truth of this world,” “die Wahrheit des Diesseits,” as he earlier distinguishes the truth that interests him, rather than to read them as two differential, passionate expressions of the same creative impulse “to unmask…the holy form of self‐ estrangement” practiced under the name of religion;8 if, that is, we want to read Marx fairly strictly as an author of philosophical propositions, in whose work the ambivalence of propositions is to be understood as a failure of cognitive consistency rather than as art; if we want to read Marx that way, then what he is saying here is that das Diesseits is die Wurzel: the root is this whole. In our best possible grasp of it, all the world we truly need is radical.9 Is radical thinking then capable of grasping—and must it by extension always implicitly grasp—any and every object, no matter what its function or substance, no matter what its size?
7 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962) 195: “What is decisive is not to get out of the circle but to come into it in the right way…In the circle is hidden a positive possibility of the most primordial kind of knowing.” Prynne, “We inserted our names would we sing,” Word Order, Poems, 360. Cf. Unanswering Rational Shore, 527: “indistinctly invited into the loop.” 8 Marx, Early Writings, 244; Frühschriften, 209. 9 The modicum of Leibnizian theodicy in the raw in this thinking from 1843‐4 is later cooked up, in a highly literary footnote in Capital, into an outright satire on “the trite ideas held by the self‐complacent bourgeoisie with regard to their own world, to them the best of all possible worlds.” Karl Marx, Capital, ed. Friedrich Engels, rev. Ernest Untermann, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: Modern Library, 1936) 93.
[45]
Marx, like many other thinkers, names as “radical” an act of thinking that, besides being the kind of transforming reciprocation between “faculties” already described, at once both increases and diminishes its proper object of inquiry. Radical thinking has at once both a greater and a smaller object than religious thinking. Both sorts of thinking count as their object both man and the world. But the object of radical thinking is greater, because man is no longer merely the narrow creature who suffers in a pinching and oppressive universe, inquiring if he dare disturb it, or, more smartly, ventriloquising that question and laughing at it in vers libre; he is the world. His lyricism is not a petition. Man then is a greater object for radical thinking. The object of radical thinking is at the same time smaller, because “this world,” the world of man, is established in its truth only “once the other‐world of truth,” that is, the illusory world of religious thinking, “has vanished.”10 In other words, the object of radical thinking is just one world and not two (or more). To call on people “to give up their illusions about their condition,” Marx writes, “is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.”11 There is no more need of a counter‐earth, no inspiration point from which to toss a “backward | glance at the planet.”12 I am greater by the measure of what I lose. For radical thinking, then, man is greater, because he is the world; but for the same thinking, the world is smaller, because it is man; and together in their single identity, world and man are the root that must be grasped, greater and smaller at once.13
10 Marx, Early Writings, 244; Frühschriften, 209. 11 Marx, Early Writings, 244; Frühschriften, 209. 12 Prynne, “The Ideal Star‐Fighter,” Poems, 166. 13 This relationship of radical thinking to its object was identified and condemned by John Dryden in his preface to Religio Laici. Dryden concludes the preface, which is a conservative attack on Deists and other recusants who dare “offend Infinity,” by denouncing precisely this “fanatique” habit of arguing: “The Expressions of a Poem, design’d purely for Instruction, ought to be Plain and Natural, and yet Majestick: for here the Poet is presum’d to be a kind of Law‐ giver, and those three qualities which I have nam’d are proper to the Legislative
[46]
Marx calls on us to abandon that life which self‐ estrangement and illusions have reduced to exorbitance. Prynne’s poem “The Numbers,” the first formal lesson of Kitchen Poems, makes a parallel demand: “We must shrink.” Why must we? “That” life, the poem tells us, is too diffuse and must yield to this, to Marx’s Diesseits: “There is no other | beginning on power.”14 Not just any thinking will issue this “call,” as Marx describes it, or so imperatively determine “the first essential,” in Prynne’s phrase.15 It is radical thinking that issues this call. In other words, radical thinking makes our condition, our Zustand, life or world, smaller by the discipline of cognitive restriction and the relinquishment of “illusions” about it, leaving us with this life alone; and at the same time it aggrandizes that restricted condition by immensely increasing its sufficiency, its independent viability and its adequateness, what in some theoretical lexicons would be called its autonomy, and by making life or the world more truthful, beautiful or liveable.16 I am smaller by the measure of what I gain. style. The Florid, Elevated and Figurative way is for the Passions; for Love and Hatred, Fear and Anger, are begotten in the Soul by shewing their Objects out of their true proportion; either greater than the Life, or less; but Instruction is to be given by shewing them what they naturally are. A Man is to be cheated into Passion, but to be reason’d into Truth.” See ll.92‐98 for a grotesque sketch of the “rebell” thinker as a “poor Worm” who thinks he himself is justice. The Poems and Fables of John Dryden, ed. James Kinsley (London: Oxford University Press, 1962) 282, 284. 14 Prynne, Poems, 10‐11. 15 From the second formal lesson of Kitchen Poems, “Die A Millionaire,” Poems, 13. Kitchen Poems might usefully be compared with W.S. Graham’s “Johann Joachim Quantz’s Five Lessons” from his 1977 collection Implements In Their Places. The poems are not similar, but the contrast points up how much of the quality of thinking in Prynne’s 1968 book is owed to his early strong antipathy to “dramatic monologue.” W.S. Graham, New Collected Poems, ed. Matthew Francis (London: Faber, 2004) 228‐31. There is almost a parody of dramatic monologue and the tedious virtue it makes of “mimesis” in Prynne’s “One Way At Any Time,” Poems, 110: “The girl | leans over to clear off my plate, hey I’ve not | finished yet, the man opposite without think‐ | ing says must be on piecework and” etc. 16 Compare Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971) 256: “All self‐sufficiency is
[47]
Neither this nor any Marx will preside over the thoughts that follow in this essay. My subject is radical thinking in Prynne. I begin with these ambivalently propositional, ambivalently poetic moments of arguing17 from the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right not because they are original or particularly influential within the tradition of thinking I will discuss; I begin with them because they are one example, among numberless others ranging at least from Parmenides to Judith Butler, of how “man,” or subjectivity, or woman, or the person, is represented or made available as an object for “radical thinking” through either the implicit or the directly presented question of what size he is and what size his world is.18 radical, is original, and all originality is moral, is originality of the whole man. Without originality, there is no energy of reason and no beauty of disposition.” For an immensely thorough and penetrating examination of the concept of autonomy (especially in psychoanalytic thinking), see Matthew Ffytche, “‘The Most Obscure Problem Of All’: Autonomy and its Vicissitudes in The Interpretation of Dreams,” Psychoanalysis and History 9.1 (2007): 39‐70. 17 In other words, to borrow Etienne Balibar’s phrase, Marx is a philosopher and “philosophy is a practice of writing.” Eva L. Corredor, Lukács After Communism. Interviews With Contemporary Intellectuals (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997) 116. Not just fundamentalists but literary critics, too, persist in regarding Marx as something other than a writer. See for example Mutlu Konuk Blasing, Lyric Poetry. The Pain and the Pleasure of Words (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007) 3‐4, where everything Marx wrote after his juvenile poems is discovered to be “disciplinary discourse” which “must rule out and/or censor poetry” and which “inaugurates itself as ‘not poetry.’” Friedrich Schlegel overruled this finicality a couple of centuries in advance in Literary Notebooks, 1797‐1801, ed. Hans Eichner (London: Athlone, 1957) 21: “All prose is poetic.” 18 For Judith Butler, Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 2006) we will often find that what we unthinkingly hold to be facts impervious to epistemic regime change are nothing but “regulatory fiction” disciplining thought (33), and that even the features of a person’s identity most compellingly recognised by intuition are not truly foundations but are “foundational illusions of identity” that need imperatively to be cut back, diminished in authority, deflated by critique (46). Butler’s radical feminist criticism of the discourses of identity is in this respect like Marx’s critique of religion, in that, like Marx, she makes the object of radical thinking, in this case not der Mensch but “identity,” both smaller and greater than it is for the
[48]
This may seem a position of inordinate or even surplus abstraction from which to begin a discussion of radical thinking. If we are looking for radical thinking in Prynne, should we not start with the realities of injustice and the material distribution of power, and ask what is in fact thought about them by this poetry? Would that not be a study more likely to yield an account of Prynne’s “materialism?”19 Prynne does sometimes have graphic designs on the realities of injustice, staging a confrontation between real suffering and the compound mechanisms of our appetite for it. “Refuse Collection” is in part a grotesquely frictionless skid through numerous reports of sexual torture and mutilation in Abu Ghraib, its anger as flushed and crude as its knowledge is syndicated; and Prynne’s latest book, To Pollen, includes in its portfolio of exotic noumena “a father racked | in misery and bearing like a gift his crushed and | bloodied son,” the anonymous human footage of any number of massacres in Iraq.20 If there is radical thinking in Prynne, must not its basis be these points of explicit contact with social injustice? Is there not somewhere in all of Prynne’s poetry a realist text, however compressed or deviantly rationed, on which the long passages of obscure circumscript are a kind of darkly aberrant or negative commentary? It may be tempting to think so.21 The
thinking she means to oppose. Smaller because stripped of its great aegis of heteronormative presuppositions and illusions, greater because thereby liberated into the dimension of performativity unconstricted by foundationalist ontology. 19 As asserted by, amongst others, John Wilkinson, The Lyric Touch (Great Wilbraham: Salt, 2007) 121. 20 Prynne, “Refuse Collection,” Quid 13: IRA QUID (2004): n.p.; To Pollen, (London: Barque, 2006) 21. The skid of “Refuse Collection” is punctuated by blank lines separating apparently discrete sections of lyric. The visual reference (another layer of crudity and grotesque) is to Wordsworth whose typographical practice this was, and whose “self‐possession felt in every pause,” The Prelude (1805) IV. 398, is reuptaken at the end of Prynne’s poem and replaced by “the wanton ambit of self possession.” 21 Jennifer Cooke, “Warring Inscriptions: J.H. Prynne’s To Pollen” describes how this text teaches readers “to be suspicious of the desire for translucency” roused
[49]
proof and guarantee of radical thinking could then be realism, the disruptive jutting in of illuminated social fact. Her Weasels Wild Returning, I could then say, is about the return to action of F‐4G SAM hunter jets in the Gulf War of 1990‐91: this is the text, and whatever the sentence “Dart laps French too” may mean later, for now at least it can be sorted into the category of comment.22 But Prynne’s poetry is not easily rescheduled into realism as radical illumination shadowed by a paradoxical and anti‐realist exegesis; and one reason for this is of course that realism is violently and intensely distrusted by this poetry. Flashes of what seems like documentary realism in Prynne’s late work are impossible to accept simply as “flashes of where we are,” to lift a phrase from “The Ideal Star‐Fighter,” however brute their mimicry or unprettified their transcription. A poem from Triodes spells this out, stencilling realism and its alternatives into a moral diagram that reduces them both to parallel channels whose switching device is bathos: Meet and make a match on the pedigree as follows. Imagine any triode as being replaced by an equivalent diode, mapping out the anode potential on tender factored to Mozambique sugar rehab, total funded in package per pro: 1. The Kuwait Fund for Arab Economic Development; 2. The Opec Fund for International Development; 3. The Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa; 4. Nedcor Bank Limited; 5. Acucareira de Xinavane S.A.R.L. The anode potential produces the same effect in the region near the cathode as the combined effects of anode and grid in the corresponding triode. by its own complexity. See http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/ 2007/04/warring‐inscriptions‐j‐h‐prynnes‐to.html 22 Prynne, Poems, 414. On the Gulf War as the subject of Weasels, see Keston Sutherland, “Ethica Nullius,” Avant‐Post: The Avant‐Garde Under “post‐” Conditions, ed. Louis Armand (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2006) 239‐55.
[50]
Oil to sugar the map beds out, open and shut, doves fall out of the sky.23
In a moral universe that runs on replacement by equivalents, distinction is alternation. Farce is everything and nothing, smaller is the new greater, every line‐break is a surplus mandating vice‐versa: “everything titillates to the contrary.”24 The numbers here stacked up as a list are no longer those of Prynne’s much earlier poem, “L’Extase de M. Poher.”25 They are not the refractories of a scientific realism rubbishing the lyricism on which they trespass, Steroid Metaphrast vs. Fondling, since “lyricism” is here already held at implicit bullet point throughout. They are not the moments of truth, they are its banners and competition entry codes. Scratch off “Nedcor Bank Limited,” what is underneath? Congratulations, you have won one free recognition. To upgrade from inert to transforming, send off now for the whole brochure. What then do we do with our “father racked | in misery” if we cannot take his appearance in the poem for the radical illumination of suffering? He is not just a “familiar || whipping toy” that “forms as a habit” in the mind condemned to extort pathos from its own projections; there is real pathos in this figure whom we do know to be real.26 But what does the pathos mean if the realism that grants it to us is radically indistinguishable from alternative uses of language that point at and describe nothing real? If we read this father and bloodied son as suffering truly voiced, we might say that their appearance in the poem fulfills what Adorno called the “condition of all truth.” 23 Prynne, Poems, 498. 24 Prynne, “Foaming metal sits not far in front,” Not‐You, Poems, 385. This poem is another of Prynne’s tractates on what Samuel Beckett, Watt (London: John Calder, 1976) 156 called the “hideous…semi‐colon.” 25 Prynne, Poems, 162. 26 Prynne, “What then hunger to a first date peckish on ready,” Biting The Air, Poems, 555.
[51]
Das Bedürfnis, Leiden beredt werden zu lassen, ist Bedingung aller Wahrheit. The need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth.27
Not realism, then, but the release of real suffering into eloquence, in this case by realistic means, would be the radical illumination and the justified promise of its pathos. But the truthfulness of this voice given to suffering is itself the problem in Prynne’s poetry from Brass downward. The problem is not that the voice given to suffering is in fact untruthful, so that we disbelieve it; that would be a problem simply of weak imitation, of insincerity, of propaganda or of scepticism concerning the truth content of poetic verisimilitude (the scapegoat signifier and its vicissitudes). For Prynne’s poetry, the problem is more deeply intractable. It is that “we are immune to disbelief.”28 Once realism is discounted as radical illumination, the voice given to suffering is believed to be truthful both if it is successful on the terms of realism and if it is unsuccessful on those terms; and that is both what makes possible a moral anthropology untied from realism as its foundation and terminal emphasis, and what makes pathos so treacherous. The condition of all truth is unavoidably rigged up so as to be met in advance by a proleptic assent posing as “instinct,” because our belief in this truth is not a radical act, it is our definition of health. We cannot live without believing that some voice we know (and own) has been given to the suffering of others, and that this voice is truthful; and so what Adorno calls a “need” and a “condition” are worn through by us to a bare necessity, in the sense that food is a necessity: it is what we always buy. Or it is what someone else always buys for us. This was not always a problem for Prynne, and his poetry was not from its beginning condemned to be the moral
27 Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialektik. Jargon der Eigentlichkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003) 29; Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1990) 17‐18. 28 Prynne, “The Ideal Star‐Fighter,” Poems, 165.
[52]
anthropology of the consumerism of suffering. The “arab takeaway larder” of Pearls That Were comes after the founding of Ierusalem, when, as the vertically dissected epigraph to The Oval Window tells us, “AFTER is normalized.”29 In Kitchen Poems and The White Stones this immunity to disbelief, insofar as it is even partly recognised, is a simple fact about who we are and as such a contribution to the panegyric of being, as “Against Hurt” unconvincingly makes plain, despite its awkward homage to Olson’s syntax of cognitive intersections: Endowed with so much suffering, they should be / and that they are so—the pain in the head which applies to me 30
Appliance of pain, acquisition of love. It will go on because it is “in the head,” and if we are the head, we are also the crown. The suffering of “the others” is, in the human universe of the mid‐1960s, part of our own ontological constitution: “quality is their presence,” Prynne insists in “Concerning Quality, Again.” But that poem is the last of Prynne’s in which a passage of autobiographical realism is presented as the radical illumination of someone else’s suffering, the last to fashion from the poet’s own tranquil recollection of his own belief a brotherly antiphon summoning pathos and light (the sky and its “pathic glow,” the “bright | thread of colour across the dashboard”—or as “A Dream of Retained Colour” later puts it, with overdue but also with duly bitter sardony, “Lucifer, with‐ | out any street lamps or TV.”).31 Prynne’s moral anthropology
29 Prynne, “Slick film so crested in white reward,” Pearls That Were, Poems, 456. The epigraph is Poems, 311. 30 Prynne, Poems, 52. 31 Prynne, Poems, 82‐3, 103. The White Stones would not accept the name “autobiography.” Its alternative is mounted at the conclusion of “The Common Gain, Reverted,” “As I walked up the hill this evening and felt | the rise bend up gently against me I knew | that the void was gripped with concentration. |
[53]
of the consumerism of suffering, initiated in earnest and in violent burlesque with Brass, begins flickeringly to be tested out in the second half of The White Stones. As early as “Song in Sight of the World,” Prynne mimics a narrator who diagnoses our cannibalism, and even in this early poem it is because “we shall eat them” that the people of realist narrative, the “grey | people walking towards the restaurant,” are not real for any radical grasp;32 but if the unilluminated grey person is the only one on the menu in The White Stones, this is not a problem that leaves us biting the air, since there is another person who is not on this or any other menu, who is alive and who lives not in the restaurant but in the world, and this is who we are. I diminish the world by disowning the exorbitance of realist illumination. I am greater by the measure of us whom I do not eat but am. Is the question of size then a simple question of economy? Can we, as “A Gold Ring Called Reluctance” counsels, avoid eating each other simply by eating slowly and, with good autonomous manners, refusing the extra helping?33 We must shrink, demanded “The Numbers”; “we should | shrink,” echoes “The Ideal Star‐Fighter” from across the fracture of Brass; but the smaller person, greater by the measure of what he loses, is by this later poem identified as the person who knows that he must shrink not just from the luxuriations of realism but from “lethal cupidity.”34 We cannot grasp man as the root just by loving him over and beyond his cameos in realism. Pathos is lethal to the object by the measure of the distance from the object that it both invents and commands, regardless of whether the object is painted in Realistic Grey or Pathic Glow Yellow.35 If there is radical thinking in Prynne’s Not mine indeed but the sequence of fact, | the lives spread out…” Poems, 89. The use of traditional metre here thickens the claim to impersonality. 32 Prynne, Poems, 77. 33 Prynne, Poems, 23. 34 Prynne, Poems, 166. 35 See Prynne, Pearls That Were, Poems, 464: “As to go for a dancer in yellow, | for to dance to the far brim, | all in yellow, all in yellow sliding | and ready to come in.”
[54]
poetry it will not be explained simply by pointing at illustrations of trauma, nor by deciding that the victims of illustrated trauma are loveable. The poetry itself repeatedly tells us this and it is right. Implicit in each of those illustrations is the prodding catechistical line break that commences the fourth stanzaic procedure of “Nothing Like Examples”: “why not | believe this?” I choose not to believe it, the poem itself dutifully answers, because it is an example, and in radical truth inhabited by singularities there is nothing like examples. But you do believe it, the poem then replies to itself with satanic paternosterical calm, because you are immune to disbelief. “Then his spirits declined…”36 What then is the radical thinking in Prynne, if its basis is neither realism and the mimesis of suffering and power, nor the rejection of realism and mimesis in pursuit of a more radical love? Prynne of course never defines radical thinking, nor does his poetry from Brass downward express much anxiety to be assimilated into any of the traditions of radical thinking on offer. Prynne’s is not a partisan poetry and it is not an encrypted manifesto. John Wilkinson without fuss counts it as “radical poetry,” but in several respects it appears to be plainly anti‐radical.37 The later poetry is split up with mockery of indistinct, hollow figures miming out a ventriloquism of the revolutionary phrase: prophetic souls at the garden party convention pressing forward to the barrier, as Unanswering Rational Shore singles them out in its doppelganger’s non‐ identity parade.38 This farce in the kodak gantry began in Brass and has not yet reached its credits. As early as the end of The White Stones, in “As It Were An Attendant,” Prynne dismisses a “march | on the pentagon” as just another spin in “the
36 Prynne, Poems, 167. 37 John Wilkinson, The Lyric Touch, 26. Elsewhere (115) Wilkinson fits the phrase with scare quotes, but again without specifying what it means or why it doesn’t. 38 Prynne, Poems, 530. Hollow humanity in Prynne is of course not the target for brunts of lamentation that it is for Eliot. It is zero pathos.
[55]
prodigious cycle of ages.” The revolutionary événement in this poem, a popular protest against American military power, flits by as data for a rhapsodic and inert structuralist anthropology, an academicism that pompously sees our contemporary proceedings and goings on—our “temporary nothing”—as evidently the modern guise of cyclical or sacred time.39 The poem is more weary with structuralist anthropology and with phrases like “the cycle of ages” than it is interested in the march itself. Historical materialism, and its concept of developmental necessity in particular, are mocked as a crude résumé of authentic human historicity in the early poem “Numbers in Time of Trouble.”40 Alienation in Lukács’s sense is scornfully abjured throughout Prynne’s poetry, and most bluntly of all in the early poem “Questions for the Time Being” as an extortionate sentimental contrivance. Almost everything, snaps Prynne in hot reprimand of some projected subculturalist interlocutor, is surface; there is no “underground” for you to skulk into, the whole social plane is just “…the | mirror of a would‐be alien who won’t see how | much he is at home.”41 In a letter to Ed Dorn written during the period when he was at work on The White Stones, Prynne describes communism as “a sort of primal nostalgia,” “a prelapsarian dialect, to describe the
39 Prynne, Poems, 124. The “temporary nothing in which life goes on” is the last twist of “Questions for the Time Being,” Poems, 113. On sacred time, see Mircea Eliade, Le mythe de l’éternel retour (Paris: Gallimard, 1949). Prynne mentioned reading Eliade in a letter to Olson, 17 April 1964. Prynne’s letters are quoted throughout this article by permission of The University of Connecticut at Storrs. 40 Prynne, Poems, 17. Prynne dislikes the idea of “entailment,” on grounds that seem to have as much to do with etymology as with politics. “[W]rong,” so the poem tells us, “follows into the glowing tail of “history” as | for example the Marxist comet burns with | such lovely, flaring destruction.” 41 Prynne, Poems, 112. To reject the Lukács of History and Class Consciousness so summarily is, as Axel Honneth and many others have implied, more or less to reject at its root the whole tradition of “Western Marxism.” Axel Honneth, Verdinglichung. Eine anerkennungstheoretische Studie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005) 11‐12. Of course, how much we are at home is a question to which The White Stones makes no definite answer: the would‐be alien won’t see, but we ought‐to‐be domestics very often can’t see.
[56]
unattainable.”42 If Prynne’s poetry is radical, it is not radical “Marxism.”43 But then, neither exactly is the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Prynne’s poetry, like that text, asks what size we are; it sometimes focuses attention on to its composition of that question, and at other times it thinks about what that question is and how to compose it without yet asking it or composing it.44 Radical thinking takes the size, measure or extent of the person as something that it alone must imperatively decide. To decide may mean to emphasise with new strength, to know by 42 Letter to Dorn, 26 July 1964. The previous month Prynne had asked, in revolted response to pro‐Vietnam war U.S. journalism, “emotionally how can anyone help being a near‐Marxist.” Letter to Olson, 25 June 1964. Whatever Prynne at this point thought anyone ought to be, he clearly did not think that he ought to be it “emotionally.” 43 As David Marriott, An Introduction to the Poetry of J.H. Prynne (1962‐1977), unpublished DPhil dissertation (University of Sussex, 1993) 157 observed: “for Prynne, historical shifts in substance are based on the ruptural effects of qualitative process and not on the Marxian crux of technologies and historical materialism.” 44 Unlike Marx’s text, however, Prynne’s poetry does not state at all clearly that, in Marx’s words, “the weapon of criticism cannot replace the criticism of weapons, and material force must be overthrown by material force,” though “The Ideal Star‐Fighter,” Poems, 166 does ridicule mere “moral stand‐by” as “no substitute for 24‐inch | reinforced concrete.” Marx’s early obsession with chiasmus and rhetorical inversion in this instance muddies the argument it makes, as “Kritik der Waffen” might be misunderstood by pacifistically gentle readers to mean only “criticism directed against weapons,” whereas of course it also (and primarily) means “criticism carried out with the use of weapons.” Early Writings, 251; Frühschriften, 216. For a commentary on “the idea of measure” in one early poem by Prynne, see Alizon Brunning and Robin Purves, “Smaller Than The Radius Of The Planet,” Quid 17: For J.H. Prynne (Summer, 2006): 15‐ 18. N.H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge, Nearly Too Much: The Poetry of J.H. Prynne (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995) 1‐36 discuss “questions of scale,” but these are questions to do with the perception and description of large and small physical processes and the effect of language switching between them, not with the size of the person and the world. These switchings can be “radically disruptive of the self,” Reeve and Kerridge argue; but they do not say what makes this disruption “radical,” what “the self” is that is vulnerable to radical disruption, what happens to the self thus radically disrupted or, perhaps most importantly, why Prynne should want to inflict radical disruption on a self vulnerable to it.
[57]
looking more closely or intently, or to restrict or aggrandize. It may mean representing subjectivity or persons in realistic terms, as it did for Lukács but not for Prynne. The question of size, in any case, is not just missing data for radical thinking. It is, in every case, a controversy.45 Sometimes the question of size is the more or less formal, sometimes allegorical controversy that helps organise for radical thinking other seemingly less metaphysical and more political controversies, such as controversies to do with suffering, right or wealth. This is more or less what it is for Whitman, whose entire work is a radical, endless recomposition of the question of size answerable by song, by rhapsody and by the glorious contumacies of sexual passion. You are just as “immense and interminable” as these immense meadows and interminable rivers, sings Whitman to you; and—not therefore (“Down with causation” rejoins Olson) but at the same time—you are “Master or mistress in your own right over Nature.”46 But the question need not be in this way
45 Hume describes the “dispute, concerning the dignity or meanness of human nature” as a “controversy” that is often more “verbal” than “real.” I borrow his term “controversy” in homage to this observation, but would add, as Hume does not, that the elimination of so‐called verbal controversy by reduction of the terms of argument to a common language is itself politically controversial. What Hume calls “verbal controversy” capable of an agreeable restatement might really be a disagreement in consciously and conspicuously prejudicial terms. There are problems that would lose their imperative form and so be deradicalised if the language in which they are stated were agreeable and capable of determination by common consensus. The fact that thought can be deradicalised by language does not strike Hume as a cause for anxiety, nor does it seem to him to have anything really to do with thought. The reason for this is of course that Hume wants to have language at his disposal as a means to deradicalise thought whose radicalism he dislikes. David Hume, “Of the Dignity or Meanness of Human Nature,” Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985) 81. 46 Walt Whitman, “To You,” ll.41 and 43, The Complete Poems, ed. Francis Murphy (London: Penguin, 1996) 263‐4. Charles Olson, “The Present is Prologue,” Collected Prose, ed. Donald Allen and Ben Friedlander (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) 205. Notice that Whitman here writes “meadows and rivers” and not, say, “continents and oceans.” This is not bathos. There is no bathos in Whitman’s universe, first, because every object is cosmic and
[58]
roughly allegorical, allowing the poet for example to commensurate personal amplitude and indivisibility with the political vindication of natural right. “Social architecture,” wrote Mandelstam, “is measured against the scale of man.”47 What kind of measurement is this? For radical thinking, this common scale is not an idea, static and optional, nor is it simply a means of satire or the material for exhortation and panegyric, as it was for conservative thinkers like Dryden and Pound. The common scale is an act of radical recognition and understanding whose vocabulary of existential coordination is remade by every different measurement it yields; not, then, a “metaphor,” but a work of difficult commensuration, the commensuration of person and world. What is “human,” in Charles Tomlinson’s words, “stands clarified | By all that accompanies and bounds.”48 This is a specific commensuration. To be bounded is to be illuminated and erect: I am a greater object because known more clearly and so more known. For the younger Prynne, as for the Tomlinson who influenced him, radical knowledge is always ontological augmentation: if I am more known, I know myself to be more.49 I at the same time gain a world smaller by the measure of my augmentation, since the world must be intimate enough with my own single
cosmogenic, and second, because there is no neoclassicism to reduplicate the distinctions of class. 47 Osip Mandelstam, “Humanism and the Present,” The Collected Critical Prose and Letters, ed. Jane Gary Harris, trans. Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link (London: Collins Harvill, 1991) 181. 48 Charles Tomlinson, “At Delft,” Collected Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) 32. 49 On the influence of Tomlinson on Prynne (via Donald Davie) in the early 1960s, see Keston Sutherland, J.H. Prynne and Philology, 115‐125. Prynne admired Tomlinson’s Seeing is Believing (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), but criticised it in terms of the question of size, arguing that it is open only “to certain narrowly specific features of the known world” and incapable of meeting “the pressure of a personal or social milieu.” Letter to Ed Dorn, 9 July 1962.
[59]
dimension to be the boundary of it.50 To limit and bound, to be the extent, to be the term and definite resistance: this is the lexicon of the world’s roles in Prynne’s early poems and essays. When I know the world to be this small, we too are small: as Olson succinctly put it, and as Prynne certainly also believed before he wrote Brass, “It is not the many but the few who care | who keep alive what you set out to do.”51 We are small in ourselves (“We are | small / in the rain,” says “The Numbers”), and we who are small are small in number. We are small in number because through passion and intensity of insight we know that we must imperatively be what everyone truly is, though everyone may go on in this temporary nothing believing that he is something else, merely eating everyone instead of becoming their universal brother.52 “The public,” declares “A Gold Ring Called Reluctance,” “is no more than a sign on the outside of the | shopping‐bag; we are what it entails and | we remain its precondition.”53 We who are small through the loss of illusion and the loss of self‐estrangement are small in number: the few who care. This, as Prynne himself once said of the idea of unfixable performative self‐fashioning in Frank O’Hara’s “In Memory of My Feelings,” is an American idea.54 It is many other things besides, of course. The White Stones is a richly philological book,
50 Olson tried to literalise this thought in “Human Universe,” Collected Prose, 161: “the skin itself, the meeting edge of man and external reality, is where all that matters does happen, that man and external reality are so involved with one another that, for man’s purposes, they had better be taken as one.” Prynne tries to repeat this literalisation in “The Numbers,” Poems, 10, but is already a good enough poet to mangle the idea, without meaning to, through decorative and inert syntactic disruption. 51 Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems, ed. George F. Butterick (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983) 22. 52 Prynne, Poems, 10. 53 Prynne, Poems, 22. 54 “Poetry and Language” lecture series, University of Cambridge, 25 February 2003. Prynne concluded his discussion of “In Memory of My Feelings” with the remark: “if I were living in Baghdad now I would not be prepared to read a poem like this.”
[60]
crammed and layered with knowledge often highly arcane and difficult of access (even in the new dawn of Google), with Biblical lamentation, Renaissance syncretistic cosmogony and a kind of sceptical, depsychologised Wordsworthian autobiography making up together the preponderance of literary allusion and influence. These are the traditions of thinking, text and utterance that Prynne acknowledges and keeps alive in his early poetry; but he keeps them alive so that he can bring their authority and their still living voices of anguish and exaltation to bear on the question of human size as lately reconstructed and propounded by Charles Olson. Olson’s reconstruction is easy enough to dismiss as the atavistic persistence of “myth,” or even as “gibberish,” from the perspective of a latter‐day criticism alert to all the gains to be made through sceptical deconstruction of the tropes, signifiers and image banks of enlightenment.55 This work of critical exposure is important as well as easy enough. But just as important for an account of Prynne’s writing is to understand how impressive and beautiful Olson’s ideas were to him, and how those ideas commanded the thinking and imagination of someone who was, already in the late 1960s, at the very beginning of his writing life, a much greater poet than Olson ever was himself. I emphasise that these ideas were beautiful to Prynne; I think even that he loved them, and that he loved Olson for being the person who expressed them with such force as he did. I read Prynne’s Fire Lizard, of which there is a hand made copy among Olson’s letters from Prynne held at the University of Connecticut, bearing the inscription “For Charles, across the water, with love, New Year’s Day 1970, Jeremy,” as a last confession of that love—consciously the last Prynne would make. Unless we can understand this, we will not see quite how difficult Brass was for Prynne, or be able to judge at what an immense and grievous expense of spirit he accomplished it; and 55 On “myth,” Anthony Mellors, Late Modernist Poetics from Pound to Prynne (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). On “gibberish,” David Marriott, An Introduction to the Poetry of J.H. Prynne, 143.
[61]
if we underestimate that first and primary expense, we will mistake the whole course of Prynne’s later work. Rather, then, than pointing out again, as has often been done, that Prynne broke with Olson in Brass and that this break was to be the onset of his mature work, we need first of all to follow what Olson said and what Prynne understood him to say. A longer account of that understanding will need to be offered elsewhere, but here at least is an outline. From here we can round on the question of Americanness. Olson said that we must “find ways to stay in the human universe, and not to be led to partition reality at any point, in any way.”56 To stay in the largest world, in das Diesseits unsegregated into little lots and fates and unexpropriated of its native mythopoesis; to be the human immense enough to be that world and all its history; we must, imperatively, find ways to do this. We will find ways only if the human and the universal are held together in radical commensuration, and poetry is the language capable of making that bond of care. It may be and probably is the only language capable of it. Who then will be the person who makes this bond? In what figure of myself am I radically commensurable with the universe as a whole, and how within that figure must I begin to speak the poetic bond that commensurates us and that prepares us to be one and the same thing? Only man in his most immense figure, the figure whose suffering and whose exaltation are given a voice in Maximus, will make the universal human. He is, in Prynne’s words, the cosmogenitor of “a lingual and temporal syncretism, poised to make a new order.”57 How are we, how is any one of us, to become this figure, the figure of maximum human amplitude? How is man to become the greatest object, the limit of the world and of history? He will become this figure first of all by being in the right place. The right place is the centre. From the centre of the world, I and the world are 56 Charles Olson, “Human Universe,” Collected Prose, 157. 57 J.H. Prynne, “Charles Olson, Maximus Poems IV, V, VI,” The Park 4/5 (Summer 1969): 64‐66. Reprinted in Io 16 (Winter 1972‐73): 89‐92.
[62]
commensurable. In that commensuration achieved from the centre of the world, each of us, the world and I, will both magnify the other to its greatest dimension and diminish the other to the intimacy of truth. This will amount to more even than the “redefinition of the real” that was Melville’s magnificent achievement; it will make for us a real world transformed by “a secularization which…loses nothing of the divine.” This world is the “size man can once more be capable of.”58 The intimacy of truth will be the intimacy of this immense man’s knowledge of any and every object. He will grasp every object by the root. He will know in radical illumination that quality of any particular thing or event which comes in any one of our consciousnesses; how it comes in on us as a force peculiar to itself and to ourself in any of those instants which do hit us & of which our lives are made up. We call it size…59
Much of this thinking about what life in the world must be, and what humans must do with language, given here only in the slightest outline and so not yet fairly identifiable as “Olson’s,” is radical thinking. It is, unquestionably, more “idealist” than “materialist,” and it is, also unquestionably, “ideology” in the sense given to that term by Marx’s and Engels’s The German Ideology. It is also radical thinking. It is an extremely rhapsodic radical thinking, spellbound in its own bravura of utterance, perhaps incapable of conceiving any objects but the greatest and the most infinitesimally particular; but for all its cognitive paralyses it is what it describes objects to be, “a force peculiar to itself,” compelling transformation of recognition by understanding and of understanding by recognition, binding person and world together into what Prynne in homage called
58 Charles Olson, “Equal, That Is, to the Real Itself,” Collected Prose, 120; “Proprioception,” Collected Prose, 190; “The Gate and the Center,” Collected Prose, 172. 59 Charles Olson, “The Materials and Weights of Herman Melville,” Collected Prose, 117.
[63]
“a width to be gauged | by the most | specific & | hopeful | eye.”60 For radical thinking, my life and the world, the life of any person and the ensemble of social relations that Marx says she “is” in essence,61 must be commensurable here and now, whether or not my presence in this world is central to it, and whether or not my knowledge and perception of the world are creative of it, as Merleau‐Ponty believed, or, as Debord spectacularly urged, merely faced and fenced off by it. Person and world are for radical thinking imperatively commensurable, whether the object be the most alienated and diminutive onlooker or the primogenitor of the whole universe: Gregor Samsa cringing in an abyssally ordinary panic half under his bed, or Maximus of Gloucester, the fundament all his own. In The White Stones Prynne acknowledges both possibilities, each now flickering into view to confound the other by inflating or diminishing it. We are small and large, and the world is small and large; but this doubleness is not hailed by The White Stones with cosmic, Whitmaniacal indifference, it is mistrusted as a duplicity that cannot simply be confuted or ignored but must be outdone in a “prolonged action | of worked self‐transcendence.”62 After that work, we are, because we must be, the “size [we] can once more be capable of.” The world could then be “how far we | go, the practical limits of daylight,” identical with our own movement in and through it and in that sense radically owned by us; it could be the great human “condition of landscape,” described in “First Notes on Daylight,” that spreads out from its centre in my own body, in all directions equally and at once, “like spokes from the nave of a wheel” whose distant “rim” is at once the visible horizon and
60 Prynne, “Fri 13,” Poems, 50. 61 Marx, sixth thesis on Feuerbach, Early Writings, 423. 62 Prynne, Poems, 113. Kevin Nolan, “Capital Calves: Undertaking an Overview,” Jacket 24 (2003) http://jacketmagazine.com/24/nolan.html mistakes this for “an Eliotic dream,” but for Prynne self‐transcendence was emphatically not deliverance into any climacteric that passeth understanding.
[64]
the horizon of my knowledge, to use an image from Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes that Prynne also uses in his poem “Of Movement Towards a Natural Place.”63 This central and immense body is our true size. A version of this body is described as in fact inalienable from us by Merleau‐Ponty in “Eye and Mind,” an article that Prynne described in a letter to Olson as “brilliant and marvellous.” The immense body at the centre, Merleau‐Ponty writes, “holds things in a circle round itself.”64 It is and I am—because it and I must be—as large as the circle that I hold. The circle is my tenacity. It is, in Prynne’s phrase, my “own maximum.”65 The maximum is, if we open our eyes and grasp the world by the root, “the gauge of a life turning on the SINGLE CENTER.”66 The White Stones tells us that we could be this man, that he is there for us in potential, if we will grasp him, that we might be (because we must be) the centre of the earth.67 But it tells us also, even in its most hopefully rhapsodic poem, “In Cimmerian Darkness,” that we have “long ignored” this man and
63 “Only at the rim does the day tremble and shine.” Poems, 223. This line is quoted by Ed Dorn, verbatim except for a rather dazzlingly illustrative line break after “rim” and a still‐Olsonian ampersand in place of the word “and,” in Book IV of Gunslinger (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989) 147. William Wordsworth, Guide to the Lakes, ed. Ernest de Sélincourt (London: Frances Lincoln, 2004) 42. 64 Maurice Merleau‐Ponty, L’Œil et l’Esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964) 19; “Eye and Mind,” trans. Carleton Dallery, The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press) 163. Merleau‐Ponty’s phrase is highly metrical, virtually an iambic pentameter: “il tient les choses en cercle autour de soi.” This must have sharpened its impact on Prynne, who urged Olson to read the article in a letter dated 6 March, 1964. 65 Prynne, “The Corn Burned by Syrius,” Poems, 126. 66 Charles Olson, “The Gate and the Center,” Collected Prose, 171. 67 The importance of cosmogenic centrality in Prynne’s work is discussed at length in Keston Sutherland, “Ethica Nullius.” The radical thinking of Pico della Mirandola discussed in that essay is echoed across the centuries by Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Schriften und Fragmente, ed. Ernst Behler and Hans Eichner (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1988) vol.2, 230: “We will know man when we know the centre of the earth.”
[65]
“fervently refused” to be him, despite all our devout wishing;68 and later still, in “Crown,” nearer to the emphatic end of The White Stones, the book tells us, as though in extorted deference to some distastefully generic account of modern alienation, that our potentially transforming and radical trust is constricted “in the throat, in | the market‐place,” where Wordsworth’s and Merleau‐Ponty’s great human wheel is pressed into work—by bathos—as a car steering wheel, an indifferent detail tossed into the dustbin of realism: “the faces dis‐ | owned by the shoes & overcoat settling in | behind the wheel and pulling the door shut.”69 This, writes Prynne, grimly lapsing from his usual sophistication with a stumping colon in “Starvation / Dream,” “is not our planet: we have come | to the wrong place.”70
68 Prynne, Poems, 75. Wishing is invariably an inadequate or misguided act in the existential lexicon of Prynne’s early work. The wish expressed in “Charm Against Too Many Apples” is faintly petulant, or in any case it is a hurried form of desiring. Brass batters the wish in caustics and serves it with newspaper and no chips in “A New Tax on the Counter‐Earth,” “A dream in sepia and eau‐de‐ nil ascends | from the ground as a great wish for calm.” In the wake of May 1968 and the Israeli‐Egyptian war of 1967‐70, wishing is Nile water puffed through the vaporizer of the unconscious. Poems, 68, 172. Prynne’s hostility to wishing is part of his early and persistent distrust of Freudian theory, which begins to emerge as adamant creed and stricture in “Star Damage at Home” (“I will not be led | by the mean‐ | ing of my | tinsel past or | this fecund hint | I merely live in”) and comes fully into the open as sarcastic dismissal in “L’Extase de M. Poher” (“what person could be generalised | on a basis of ‘specifically’ sexual damage, | the townscape of that question.” This is “Freudian history,” the bathos of ontology). Poems: 109, 161. For an extended commentary on “L’Extase de M. Poher” see Keston Sutherland, J.H. Prynne and Philology, unpublished PhD dissertation (Cambridge: 2004) Ch.5. 69 Prynne, Poems, 116. I say that the The White Stones has an emphatic end, and this is true especially of the run of poems from “Starvation / Dream” onward, all of which are bitterly self‐terminating (with the exception of “Smaller than the Radius of the Planet,” which belongs at the end of the book mainly on the strength of its two virgules and the gritted medial hiatus in its 11th line); but the most terminal end on offer to Prynne was not chosen by him: he did not end with the grievous mostlys and faded retrograde ampersands of “As It Were An Attendant,” but instead with the still‐working, intractable intellectual pathos of “The Corn Burned by Syrius.” 70 Prynne, Poems, 114.
[66]
That is of course not the end of it. Prynne does not abandon the question of size at the end of The White Stones, he says that we are the wrong size. He does not abandon it in Brass, he mocks his own former confidence in diagnosis of wrong from a still fiercer moral perspective.71 He never abandoned the question of size and it never became for him any less imperative. What happens in Prynne’s poetry, besides many other things, is that the question of size is again and again recomposed, typically in compressed, elliptical forms, presented indirectly and as connotation, or in one angle of a phrasal cluster, disintegrated from any shape of utterance that would allow us to acknowledge the question as such. The question will flash across the surface of a sentence that seems pointedly uninquisitive; or it will jut out as the unstable aggregate of words scattered across different points of a page whose echoes seem gripped into a semiotic concentration that is however unvoiceable. “[W]hy,” Prynne asked in The White Stones, “should | the direct question not be put.”72 The direct question disappears from Prynne’s poetry with Brass. Its last outing is in “The Ideal Star‐Fighter,” a masterpiece in every sense that is now unrepeatable in any of them: Yet how can we dream of the hope to continue, how can the vectors of digression not swing into that curve bounding the translocal, and slip over, so that the image of suffered love is scaled off, shattered to a granulated pathos like the dotted pigments of cygnus?73 71 I have avoided using the word “dialectic” in this essay, partly because I fear that its appearance here would have encouraged a lazy reading of my argument by anyone who thinks that he already knows what the word means (which of course anyone very well may), and more importantly because I hope to make readers feel the necessity of dialectical thinking by feeling how problematic is the absence of any direct treatment of it. In any case, if I had used the word, I would have used it at this moment. 72 Prynne, “Questions for the Time Being,” Poems, 112. 73 Prynne, Poems, 166.
[67]
This is the last direct question of size. There is almost another, but there is not one, one hundred and fifty‐nine pages and twelve years later in The Oval Window: “You’re flat out?”74 The poem that asks this question, a question too diminutive and too blatantly an imported colloquialism to be what we know it is, ends with these lines: What else null else just else if before out into the garden with overshoot, the moon is bright as snowy day. In broad strip neon it ranks as a perfect crime.75
This is what I mean by a question asked in aggregate, gripped into an unvoiceable semiotic concentration: it is the question of size, flaring in the absent italics of overshoot and broad, bouncing across the petty metrical compression of What else etc, towing the compliant lines home to their bathos. Radical illumination? Broad daylight—“how far we | go, the practical limits” of our human life in the truth of this world—is denied by enjambment belittled to a crude prank: not broad strip neon, even, but “broad | strip neon,” even this insulting reality partitioned by its own poetic turn, the suspended adjective not really abused by what comes after it but confirmed in its uselessness for any other end. You’re flat out? Want a raise? Hold one before leasing forage behaviour; wash the novice wrist, finger‐tight. Do you already know this or yet allocate sufficiency.76
Do you already know it. If you do not know it yet, you may yet never know it; but if you do not yet “allocate sufficiency,” that act by you is yet to come; and even in this obligatorily finical, 74 Prynne, Poems, 325. 75 Prynne, Poems, 325. 76 Prynne, Poems, 554.
[68]
discomposing summary of what the adverb “yet” presages, left as it is to the suspended last instant of a so‐far direct question about to be broken off, the question of size is there as a frustration and a prevented hazard, the monosyllables too many and too crowded and in themselves too small, just as these clauses are too many and yet do not say enough: if you do not know it yet, you may yet never know it. What is this frustration of eloquence by its own particles for? Compression, distortion and aggregation of the question of size in Prynne’s late work is not the textual equivalent of Freud’s dream work, with some text or meaning in every case primed for interpretive recovery by a procedure of Deutung specially devised for it. The question is not a dream, it is a question in and about this world; it is not a question first for me as primary reader and then for me or someone else as later, technical reader, it is a question for us in the largest sense at our most wakeful, asked now and at any time with the same force and at all times equally intractable; and if the question cannot be understood in the form in which it is manifested in this poetry, that is because— well, why is that? Do you yet—because if you do not now, you for sure will at some time—allocate even to this incomplete and frustrated invocation of the question of size a sufficiency fit at least to snap the question shut and end it, ignoring for a moment, perhaps, in the remission of interpretive agitation granted by the full‐stop, the complaint of your grammatical sense against the treatment of this too word‐like “sufficiency” not as a quality of what has been allocated but as the direct object of allocation. Allocation then is malappropriation of the object; but grammar alone testifies to this, and grammar is everywhere else in this poem tensed and flouted (though never freely abandoned), so why should its distortion here count as a testimony of untruth or, at the very least, compel us into a routine of disbelief? Not, surely, for the simple reason that here
[69]
is where we now are, and our grammar is still right? “Front match slides in tight…”77 Everywhere in Prynne’s later poetry the question of size is again recomposed. Its compositions are such that it is difficult to understand what is being asked; but typically the force of the question will register no less strongly or injuriously for that. We can, if we like, back off slightly from the close reading of that one sentence from Biting the Air just attempted, “admit a little air now”78 and remember our normal ways of talking about motive and interpretation. Do you already know this or yet—and then the discoordinating shift, the question cut and merged abruptly into an imperative: allocate sufficiency. In the face of this confrontation, why should the direct question not be put by a reader: why did Prynne do this? If he means to ask what size a person is, or what size I am, and also what size the world is, why should he compose these questions in forms that make them unaskable and leave them so strangely and improperly asked? One answer, not the only one but an important one, runs as follows. After Brass, and because of it, the figure of Maximus grew for Prynne into a more and more diminutive answer to the question of size, more and more grisly with bathos. The figure of our “own maximum” is locked, most openly in Wound Response and The Oval Window, back into what Emerson called the “custody” of the private body and the “jail‐yard of individual [political] relations” from which Olson had liberated him.79 He becomes a joke figure, Gargantua of the homily and
77 Prynne, “We’ll mark them out,” Poems 448. Peter Middleton, Distant Reading. Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005) 176, prejudges the question I’m setting up here by referring to “excess semantic complexity” in Prynne’s late poetry. Excess to what measure of requirement, for what extent of person, in how large a world? “[E]xcessive for a slide in brief”? Her Weasels Wild Returning, Poems, 411. 78 Prynne, “We’ll mark them out,” Poems, 448. 79 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures (New York: The Library of America, 1983) 460.
[70]
lectern, disowned by Prynne repetitively and with extreme semiotic, rhetorical, grammatical and satirical violence. We want him only with “lethal cupidity” and “limitless greed,” and the love we are bribed into as consolation by his absence— realism—is “granulated pathos.” “Do not love this man,” barks the public health warning in “The Bee Target on his Shoulder.” OK, the poem itself replies, I will match the definition of health, I will not love him; but, it then later says, “Love him, in le silence des nuits, l’horreur des cimetieres.”80 I will make of him the dreamy object of a gothic prurience, not truly cutting off my greed for him altogether, but telling myself that the thin array and merely pleasant guise I fit him into is fantastical enough to guarantee venereal benignity. This is nothing but bathetic love as eupepsia, defecting regularly to pathos by the back door; and Brass despises whoever will grasp the maximum of man in this way merely by eating him. But the simple question remains: why is this gothic dream object what he becomes, why is this all that I can make of him, why must I therefore try forever and again and again to kill him by making the question unanswerable, once I know that he is not what I am? At least since Her Weasels Wild Returning, Prynne’s poetry has replied to this question with one answer which, though it might not often be direct and comprehensible, is nonetheless consistent. When I radically grasp this man who is, or who was once, or who must in truth be my “own maximum,” he is not the root of the world. What is he then? In a word, he is imperialism. More specifically, he is American imperialism. Only a few will be, in Melville’s words, “the man who, like Russia or the British Empire, declares himself a sovereign nature (in himself) amid the powers of heaven, hell, and earth.”81 The “size [we] can once more be capable of” ceases to be for Prynne the amplitude of the person pervading and in magnificent harmony with the amplitude of the world. That 80 Prynne, Poems, 150‐2. 81 Herman Melville, Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851. Correspondence, ed. Lynn Harth (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993) 186.
[71]
idea is abruptly torn down by Brass, at the painful and perhaps even traumatic expense of real love for it, to reveal a wretched tangle of deceit and confabulation posing as radical commensuration; and “sovereign nature,” that for Melville was so casually and proudly to be compared with imperialism, is discovered suddenly by Prynne in the deadlock of exactly that unbreakable connection, just at the moment when his poetry had drawn on all its most valuable resources of knowledge and passion to create the lyric song pledging our centrality to the world. To what world then has Prynne already pledged us as the centre? “Chemins de Fer” turns this lyric song to bitter recantation: Even the thinnest breath of wind wraps round the intense lassitude, that an undeniably political centre keeps watch; the switch of light and shadow is packed with foreign tongues. I shall not know my own conjecture.82
Undeniability is not yet believability in The White Stones; but it will be yet. It will be more: we will be immune to disbelief, such that, perversely, and only perversely, denial is the stronger negation. No polis, but politics—and the grimness of that transition is that for Prynne, unlike for Pope, there is precisely nothing bathetic in what it leads to, but it makes bathos the superordinate linguistic mode of our continuity, the life of the language community then backwardly redefined as an ever‐ enlarged space for the retrogression of political and erotic emotion. What lies beyond that? “Without threat to its borders America was extending its empire,” writes Robert von Hallberg. “Olson wanted a culture that could extend its power of explanation just as securely, effectively, and covertly.”83 And
82 Prynne, Poems, 123. 83 Robert von Hallberg, Charles Olson. The Scholar’s Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978) 28.
[72]
so it did. For us, now, this may be the easiest of observations both to make and to scorn. The imperialism of culture, the culture of imperialism, these are phrases we live with, the two words are just tied up, and Prynne’s recent poetry knows better than any other poetry yet written that this kind of observation is easy for us and that these phrases are easy to live with. We do live with them. We live with them in fact so intelligently that the struggle to kill their ideological ancestors is not left to us. We know that the radical commensuration of man and world is a language game, or is ideology, or is the persistence as metaphor and cadential residue of the figurative language of religion, or is one aspect of the twisting mask of class and gender politics, just as Prynne knows it and says so; and we are right. Many poets know all this. But Prynne is the only poet in English whose language is permanently impacted not only by the truth of this intellectual disinheritance, but also by the trauma of its necessity. We all now rightly know enough not to be capable of radical love for ourselves and for the world grasped in one common bond together as the truth of intimacy and illimitability, and we are rightly eloquent enough not to be capable of speaking that bond as lyric poetry. Whoever might be the person capable of that act would be someone who did not live under capitalism, someone for whom the extension of economic ownership through imperial violence is not and cannot be the most radical form of self‐extension; and as we know, since we know enough, and since we eat enough, living under capitalism is not itself an act anyone can desist from, terminate, or even pause in. Try doing it now.
[73]
Alizon Brunning
“The mere and cunning front”: The Sovereignty of Man in J.H. Prynne’s “Crown” The title of J.H. Prynne’s “Crown”1 is absolutely central to an understanding of the poem’s content, its structure and its relationship to a particular genre of poetry. In the physical landscape a crown is the topmost point, the absolute summit of a mountain, ridge, furrow or road. In human terms the crown is the top of the skull and, by extension, the head itself. Since the head represents the higher order of human faculties, the intellectual, rational part, ‘crown’ also means the pinnacle of achievement in human endeavour. The crown is both the physical dimension of height, and a marker of the utmost abilities of the human being. A crown is also a circular wreath used to adorn the head, conferring status and the sign of excellence upon a person. Such a headdress might be made of gold or silver or precious stones, but might equally be made of leaves, flowers or bays, and used
1 J.H. Prynne, Poems (Fremantle and Newcastle Upon Tyne: Fremantle Arts Centre Press/Bloodaxe Books, 1999) 116‐7. Keston Sutherland’s essay “Ethica Nullius” argues that the syncretistic cosmogony of Pico della Mirandola is echoed in Prynne’s The White Stones. Sutherland’s argument was a starting point for this essay. See Keston Sutherland, “Ethica Nullius,” Avant Post (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2006) 239‐55.
[74]
to indicate artistic, civic or martial honour. The use of a crown as a mark of human excellence is superseded by the crown of glory given by God to the apex of his creation: as in Hebrews 2:7 “Thou madest him a little lower than the angels; thou crownedst him with glory and honour, and didst set him over the works of thy hands.” (KJV) To receive such a crown also implies a sense of being filled with the light of God’s love, to be in the presence of the divine. In Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man he tells of God’s words to Adam: I have placed thee at the very center of the world, that from there thou mayest more conveniently look around and see whatever is in the world. Neither heavenly nor earthly, neither mortal nor immortal have We made thee. Thou, like a judge appointed for being honourable, art the molder and maker of thyself; thou mayest sculpt thyself into whatever shape thou dost prefer. Thou canst grow downward into the lower natures which are brutes. Thou canst again grow upward from thy soul’s reason into the higher natures which are divine.2
In the descent to the lowest orders humankind also is crowned, but this time the crown has negative connotations, as cited in Isaiah 28:1/4: Woe to the crown of pride, to the drunkards of Ephraim, whose glorious beauty is a fading flower, which are on the head of the fat valleys of them that are overcome with wine! …And the glorious beauty, which is on the head of the fat valley, shall be a fading flower, and as the hasty fruit before the summer; which when he that looketh upon it seeth, while it is yet in his hand he eateth it up. (KJV)
2 Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man, trans. Charles Glenn Wallis, Paul J.W. Miller, and Douglas Carmichael (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1998) 1‐35, 5.
[75]
God’s divine creation has the potential to have dominion over the created world, but at the same time pride and vanity threatens to displace the human from his position at the top of the world and to cause him to fall. The heavenly crowns of glory are replaced with withering garlands of flowers. The conflict between worldly achievement and its accompanying pride and the obligation to achieve the potential given by God to his greatest creation is articulated by Sidney in his Defense of Poetry: Neither let it be deemed too saucy a comparison to balance the highest point of man’s wit with the efficacy of Nature; but rather give right honor to the heavenly Maker of that maker, who having made man to his own likeness, set him beyond and over all the works of that second nature: which in nothing he showeth so much as in Poetry, when with the force of a divine breath he bringeth things forth far surpassing her doings, with no small argument to the incredulous of that first accursed fall of Adam: since our erected wit maketh us know what perfection is, and yet our infected will keepeth us from reaching unto it.3
Such a falling short in one’s potential is expressed in a number of devotional poems by Renaissance poets such as Marvell, Donne and Herbert. These poems grapple with the concept of using an elected and God‐given wit to write a prayer of praise for God and thus be crowned with immortal glory while being aware of the “wreaths of fame and interest” that create duplicity and pride and thus undermine the enterprise.4 Marvell’s poem “The Coronet,” Donne’s “Corona” and Herbert’s “Wreath” all have titles that suggest a
3 Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology For Poetry or The Defence of Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd, rev. R.W. Maslen (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1965; 2002) 85‐86. 4 See Judy Kronenfeld’s essay “Herbert’s ‘A Wreath’ and Devotional Aesthetics: Imperfect Efforts Redeemed by Grace” for a full discussion of the use of garlands and crowns in devotional verse, in ELH 48:2 (Summer 1981): 290‐309.
[76]
correspondence between their formal structure and their performance as vehicles of praise and prayer. As Christina Sandhaug says in a discussion of Mary Sidney’s translation of Psalm 55: The circle is the figure most apt to represent eternity and God, because it too lacks beginning and end, has no edges, and is all‐ encompassing. A poem, however, being a product of the physical world of particulars, must be begun and ended, and the best way to achieve unity in a poem is to end with the beginning, thus creating such a circle. 5
That they are circular and thus writhing and contrived suggests an element of duplicity, but, at the same time, their circularity implies an idea of return and possible redemption as promised in the Book of Revelation 2:10: “Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee the crown of life.” (KJV) There is one final definition of the word ‘crown’ that is significant for the poem: a coin. A ‘Gold Crown of the Rose,’ worth five shillings was issued by Henry VIII in imitation of the French ‘Crown of the Sun.’ Its value was not declared on the coin but the King’s stamp, his sovereignty, gave it face value. In the same way as a gold coin is validated by the authority of the sovereign, so humankind receives its stamp in God’s image and can be conceived in terms of a coin. In an essay on Donne’s use of figures drawn from currency, for example, Haruo Takiguchi states that: God imprinted his own image on man in his creation. To describe this, the most representative is the coin metaphor, which the Fathers have used repetitively; Augustine, for example, says ʺso you too are a coin of God; and even better since you are God’s coin with reason and life, so that you know
5 Christina Sandhaug, “Conceit beyond expectation: Mary Sidney’s Rhyming Rhetoric in Psalm 55,” Exaudi, Deus’ Nordlit 6 (1999): 105‐18.
[77]
whose image you bear and according to whose image you are made.”6
The Puritan physician John Bulwer’s Anthropometamorphosis (1654) refers to the human body as a coin and warns us against committing “high Treason, in Abasing, Counterfeiting, Defacing, and Clipping her Coine, instampt with her Image and Superscription on the Body of Man.”7 The danger for Bulwer was that through self‐fashioning humanity would debase what was given by God. Pico, on the other hand, argues that Adam was told that he had “no form of thy very own,” no innate qualities, but instead was a protean figure with free will to choose whether to imitate the beasts or “pant after the highest things.”8 So the title of Prynne’s poem suggests a topological summit, the height of God’s creation, a physical and spiritual marker of human achievement, a poem of prayer and praise, and a coin. The spatial orientations of the poem can therefore be plotted as up and down, rising and falling, and circular, and further dimensions are added by the notion of intrinsic worth related to concepts of spiritual and inner value: substantial purity in opposition to an external superficiality, the surface which may be an expression of what is within, or simply decorative, or counterfeit. Every definition here is part of the poem and forms its content, its structure and its context. Furthermore the different meanings, the spatial, spiritual, poetic and the monetary, the up and down, the surface and the depth, the pure 6 Haruo Takiguchi, “Impress and Wax: the Imprint Imagery in Donne’s Writings,” Yomi no Kiseki [Readings in English and American Literature], ed. Y. Tsukui, M. Ota and J. Tagiguchi (Tokyo: Yumi Press, 1988) 129‐158. Takiguchi gives Winfried Schleiner’s translation from Winfried Schleiner, The Imagery of John Donne’s Sermons (Providence: Brown University Press, 1970) from Augustine, Sermones de scripturis, 9, 8 (Patrologia Latina) 38, 82 quoted by Schleiner, 113. 7 John Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis or the Artificial Changeling, (1653) cited in John Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo American Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 92. 8 Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man, 4.
[78]
and the ornamental, and the inside and outside are all gathered in man and in humanity’s place at the centre and the limit of the whole world. Keston Sutherland’s essay on Prynne’s development of Pico’s syncretist cosmogony begins by re‐stating Pico’s argument that “Man is the centre and he is also the end…the centrality and finality of man, together with his binding of the world into a whole, make up what Pico call his dignity.”9 Man in Prynne’s poem, and the human reader of the poem, is positioned in the landscape, in time and in place; not at the top or crown of the world, but looking up or down and thus at the centre of things and yet, by the end of the poem, waiting to climb, looking forward and aspiring to the journey upwards. The placing of the human subject and reader at the centre of the perceived world focuses not only on the world itself but on man as a microcosm of that world, beginning, as Marvell’s poem does, with the titular crown or head and ending with the feet. The rising and falling images throughout the poem are chiefly those connected to water. It begins with its ascension: “a rising fountain.” This upward movement is followed by a reference to cliffs “pale under frost,” suggesting height in relation to the physical presence of cliffs, but also in the frozen water which is a marker of altitude. Then, “sounds fall | quickly into the gutters” only to “thin into their | ascendant vapour, the pillar of cloud” and finally condense into “clear water.” The motion of rising and falling is then, within the natural water cycle, a circular and endless movement. As water is symbolically central to human life and its rites of passage there is a suggestion of baptism implied by the fount or font and by the notion of ascension or rising. There is also a sense of the significance of return in the poem: water returns to water and the question asked halfway through the poem is “returned upon itself.” The circularity of the poem binds it to the circular
9 Sutherland, “Ethica Nullius,” 239.
[79]
form of the crown and to other poems that use the same format to address the problematic nature of human achievement. The correlation between the circulation of water and human life introduces the element of time to the poem, not just in relation to the natural cycles, but here specifically to the passing of time during one particular day. In the beginning there is “pale sunlight” and this later changes to “the afternoon already half‐ | dark.” Water is not simply a metaphor for time but is a means of measuring or counting it through man‐made devices: The hours are taken slowly out of the city and its upturned faces—a rising fountain quite slim and unflowering as it is drawn off.[…]
The use of water for telling time goes back to the ancients; for example in Athens, the oldest, the Clepsydra, and the later octagonal marble design known as the ‘Tower of Winds’ in the Roman agora. That humans have the skill and understanding to harness the natural world for their own use is only fitting for what Pico calls “the interpreter of nature, set midway between the timeless unchanging and the flux of time.”10 And yet dividing the day into hours regulates and controls human activity. The organisation of prayer into set times of the day, or hours, marks out the pattern of the sacred and the profane; the actions or sessions of the courts are fixed in time, and people are turned into machines of time, by time. The poem’s ambiguous, upturned faces, might be the faces of the clock, but also those of unspecified and anonymous human beings: both have labouring ‘hands’ that work and count the time. Pico states that Plato thought the science of number to be “supreme and most divine,” and that man is the wisest of animals “because he knows how to count.” However, he goes on to argue that this would be “devoid of the truth if by the art of number they intend that art in which today merchants excel 10 Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man, 2.
[80]
all other men.”11 Some things count more than others and, in the early part of the poem, the knowledge of man seems to be that of the merchants and the market place; there is little evidence of that “great miracle worthy of all admiration.”12 The human, while the centre of the poem is, at the same time, dismembered and dispersed into faces, hands, throat, feet, shoulders, shoes and overcoats. At one point there is a gesture towards significant human action: the reconciliation of the face and hands following on from the reference to the “holy place” might suggest praying. ‘To reconcile’ can mean to bring estranged things, ideas or people together and might be used in terms of the restoration of a person back into a church or their coming to terms with a doctrine. A church can be reconciled if it is purified. The hands could be washing the face, in a cleansing action before prayer. Given, however, that this act is a reaction to the sound of “false shouts” and that the holy place is comprised of “the silver police station” and “the golden shops” and accompanied by “con | strictions of trust in the throat,” it is more likely to imply despair or at least a covering over or hiding of the face so as to shut out the threatening interpellations. Furthermore, the aspirations in the early part of the poem seem altogether unfulfilled or difficult to know. “The arrangements of work | swell obscurely round the base of the | Interior Mountain” and the pale house has only “a parody of stairs” suggesting a staircase that can be climbed up but not ascended, physical steps, but not the means to higher things. Sometimes lack of knowledge or foresight proves dangerous and destructive: “the slopes | rise unseen with the week and can still | burn a man up.” This upward orientation, aspiring to but not reaching any height, crown, or mountain top, is matched by a concomitant sense of falling and of instability: “cash slides | and crashes into the registers,” “Shoulders break, down to their possessions,” and “the sounds fall | quickly into the gutters.” The movement 11 Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man, 28. 12 Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man, 2.
[81]
from fountain to gutter is a falling short, a failure or decline in human achievement or a wilful descent to Pico’s “lower natures which are brutes.”13 However, “font” and “gutter” also relate to printing and therefore to poetry and even, perhaps, to this poem itself. The descriptive terms “slim and unflowering” suggest something that is lacking in substance, like a slim volume of verse, insignificant and inconsequential. Into this sense of lack, or ambition frustrated, comes a voice that asks a question: […] oh why as the hours pass and are drawn off, do the shoulders break, down to their possessions, when at moments and for days the city is achieved as a glance—inwards, across, the Interior Mountain with its cliffs pale under frost.[…]
This question then “rises,” it is “”not held down | by any hands,” clock hands or those labouring or grasping. The passage appears to argue that to reach the pinnacle of human potential beyond the market place it is necessary to look inwards, and achieve ‘the city,’ a secularised version, perhaps, of Bunyan’s Celestial City or the new Jerusalem described in Revelation 21:6 “And he carried me away in the Spirit to a great and high mountain, and showed me the great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God.” (KJV). To achieve something is not only to be successful, but to bring to fruition, to a head, to end a process, whereas a ‘glance’ might be taken as something brief, hurried; on the other hand ‘glance’ could mean ‘to catch a glimpse of,’ to see something hidden, mysterious, perhaps even sublime. To achieve the city at a glance is to crown it in its entirety, whole and complete, as Pico
13 Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man, 5.
[82]
says man is told he is placed at the centre of the world so that he may “glance round about you on all the world contains.”14 In the poem so far, things have been hidden from view or obscure, there has been a strong sense of not knowing; where there is knowledge it is incomplete or partial and fractured. The breaking of the line at “con | striction” alludes to the problem of knowledge. To ‘con’ can mean to know or learn but carries with it a freight of falsity, the false knowledge found in the market place, the police station or the shops, not true knowledge which is only to be found in the interior, read as the human mind and the landscape together. 15 The imbrication of the exterior world and the interiority of the human mind is made manifest here by the interjection of the exclamatory “oh” in the question. In a lecture on “English Poetry and Emphatical Language” Prynne himself examines the use of the exclamation as a central part of the lyrical expression of passion “locked unconstruably into the interiority of the uttering subject.”16 The lecture suggests at one point that the “oh” of apostrophe, can be assigned the more inward‐facing or solitary figure of exclamation, in which sorrow or wondering admiration are expressed in elevated contemplation but not addressed directly either towards surrogate recipients inside the poem or towards an acknowledged reader outside it.17
Such exclamatory interjections are commonplace in sacred discourse and might take different forms; these have been outlined, Prynne notes, in Thomas Wilson’s Christian Dictionarie as 14 Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man, 5. 15 The Interior Mountain is the title of a book by Simon Iredale about Christian spirituality based on the wisdom of the Desert Saints of the third and fourth centuries. 16 J.H. Prynne, “English Poetry and Emphatical Language,” Proceedings of the British Academy 74 (1988) 135—69, 140. 17 Prynne, “English Poetry and Emphatical Language,” 142.
[83]
first, ‘the voice of one lamenting’; second, ‘the voice of one praying, and calling vpon another’; third, ‘the voice of one wondering, & exclaiming with admiration, as at some strange thing’; fourth, ‘the voice of one chiding or speaking to another, in way of reprehension’; and fifth, ‘the voice of one exhorting and encouraging to dutie.’18
In his own poem the interjection introduces a speaker, a sense of personal utterance and a passion into what so far has been a rather dehumanised account of human activity. The move to the interiority of the speaker enacts the necessity for the dispossessed man to look inwards, inside him or herself, but also across, inland. The speaker seems to have superior insight, displaying possible foreknowledge and the glimpsed possibility of resolution. There is also a suggestion of frustration with or lament for the ignorance of the anonymous people who cannot see what this Mosaic figure sees. The interjection of this passionate speaking voice asking and answering the question shifts us to an interior world and adds another dimension to the poem. The “oh” forms a centre between inside and outside, between the interior of the human being and the world he or she must inhabit. In addition to this inside | outside dimension, the “oh” brings to the poem an elevated tone at a point where it is in decline both in terms of spatial orientation and the lack of fulfilment in human endeavour. The circularity of the letter ‘o’ also functions as a graphic representation of the crown, and of the poem itself, which seeks to encompass all spatial dimensions in its sphere. The uttering voice of the speaker prepares us for a move to a more lyrical form of expression and this is marked by a change in layout separating the central part of the poem into two four‐ line indented stanzas. The outward affairs of the market place, the city, the actions of the hands and feet, are left behind for the innermost parts of our humanity: “the soul’s discursive fire” and the “love of any man.” These abstractions do not float free, 18 Prynne, “English Poetry and Emphatical Language,” 147.
[84]
however, they are held down still by connection to the material world of the early part of the poem. The “soul’s discursive fire” might veer “with the wind” suggesting an untrammelled and exhilarating freedom, but it carries with it the potential instability of the market place and the fluctuation of values. The blowing of the wind drives the direction of the soul, indicating inconstancy and fickleness, and in the same way the love of any man seems subject to sudden change as it is “turned | by the mere and cunning front.” Yet the word ‘veer’ can also have the sense of a managed and careful changing of direction; in nautical terms ‘veer’ might mean to let out cable or sail so as to control the ship by working with the wind: a wilful course of action. In the same way the “mere and cunning front” can lead the reader towards both a negative and a positive interpretation: it denotes the basest deception and at the same time points to the sovereignty and dignity of man. The phrase faces both up and down, since ‘mere’ can mean insignificant, ordinary,’[h]aving no greater extent, range, value, power, or importance than the designation implies; that is barely or only what it is said to be.’ (OED) ‘Cunning’ in its modern sense is generally taken to mean ‘guileful’ or clever in a sly way, and ‘front’ hints strongly at the superficial—’he is all front,’ a duplicitous façade. That something as precious as love can be turned, seems to align it with the falseness implied in the first part of the poem, but the phrase does not only point downwards to the baseness of humanity but upwards towards its supreme ability. ‘Mere’ can also mean ‘pure’ and ‘unadulterated,’ ‘illustrious; beautiful, splendid, noble, excellent.’ (OED), for example, in the poem “Whose dust did you say” Prynne exults in “the mere | & lovely centre, of the earth.”19 Similarly, ‘cunning,’ a word that now only has negative connotations, once meant knowledge, skill, wisdom and artistry. In Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre the
19 Prynne, Poems, 102.
[85]
charitable Cerimon explains why, despite being rich, he reckons the social and financial world to be of little value: I hold it ever; Virtue and cunning were endowments greater Than nobleness and riches: Careless heirs May the two latter darken and expend; But immortality attends the former. Making man a god.20
Love that changes and revolves on this axis of cunning and virtue is a love in, and as, full knowledge of the world, just as Cerimon’s love is based on his understanding of the natural world and his skill in the interpretation of it. As Pico puts it, before God created man “[t]he Divine Artificer still longed for some creature which might comprehend the meaning of so vast an achievement, which might be moved with love at its beauty and smitten with awe at its grandeur.”21 The love of any man and thus perhaps ‘Everyman,’ is turned by this axis, the knowledge of the beauty and grandeur of the world. After the turn towards the higher state of knowledge and purity suggested by the “mere and cunning front” the second indented stanza returns, surprisingly, to what appears to be the superficial and dehumanized activity of the early part of the poem, and to the metonymic face and hands. The tone could appear to be despairing: “No hand then but to coin, no | face further than | needs be.” This sounds like a mocking of the artistry and potentiality of the human being, as if all that ability had gone only into making money and putting on appearances. There appears again to be a lack of fulfilment which is an echo of Herbert’s “The Collar”: Have I no harvest but a thorn … Have I no bayes to crown it? 20 William Shakespeare, “Pericles, Prince of Tyre,” The Norton Shakespeare (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company: 1997) Scene 12: 2748: lines 24‐29. 21 Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man, 9.
[86]
No flowers, no garlands gay?
While Herbert laments the lack of reward his devotion gives him, until, at the end of the poem, he hears the voice of God humbling him and binding him in their relationship, father to son, in this part of Prynne’s poem there does seem to be material or monetary reward in the shape of what the hand might coin. Furthermore, “no | face further than | needs be” appears to reinforce this possibility, suggesting a Machiavellian control of gesture and expression that can best fit the occasion as required. This might refer back to the face as “a purging of | venom,” the concealment of strong feeling, in the face which becomes “an absent coin,” showing no expression of its valuation.22 But ‘to coin’ doesn’t necessarily mean to make money, it also means to invent words or ideas, to create, in the sense of being an artificer. The ‘coin,’ then, seems to have two sides: on one, something with face value but no intrinsic worth and, on the other, the imprint of sovereignty. Something that can be counterfeit, and something validated, like the Gold Crown of Henry VIII, by the mark or crown of authority. “[N]o | face further than | needs be” also might mean then, that humankind imprinted with God’s seal has the prerogative simply to be. As a human being, man does not need any more than he or she is: his or her needs are met sufficiently in their being. The sovereignty of man might be put in doubt by the completion of the stanza: “No hand then but to coin, no | face further than | needs be, the sounds fall | quickly into the gutters,” this downward movement reinforcing man’s base nature; but a gutter need not be a place of filth or waste, but any brook or channel or watercourse, a cistern that feeds a fountain or a water clock. It can be a place from where some of us can look at the stars, as Oscar Wilde reminds us, so that falling into 22 For an analysis of the word “face” in this context, see Prynne’s extended analysis of Shakespeare’s sonnet 94, They That Haue Power to Hurte (Cambridge: privately published: 2001) 48.
[87]
the gutter might be a return to where we are at the beginning of the poem only for the sounds that fall to be transformed: they “thin into their | ascendant vapour, the pillar of cloud” which stands over the afternoon. The formation of the cloud seems to refer to some form of journey, since a pillar of cloud appears in Exodus 13:21, to lead the people out of their exile in Egypt: “And the LORD went before them by day in a pillar of cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light; to go by day and night.” Now, the people in the poem seem to be humanized, given feelings, or at least the potential to react to an event: […] No‐one is fearful, I see them all stop to look into the sky and my famished avowals cast the final petals.[…]
The speaker once again speaks with authority, he sees them all and he knows they are not afraid, just as Moses commanded his people not to be afraid when they saw the pillar of cloud (Exodus 14:13): Moses said unto the people, Fear ye not, stand still, and see the salvation of the LORD, which he will shew to you to day: for the Egyptians whom ye have seen to day, ye shall see them again no more for ever. (KJV)
The speaker now confesses or admits allegiance to what has previously been “famished” or starved in him, a hunger or dissatisfaction prepared for earlier by the “slim and unflowering” fountain. The word ‘famished’ not only denotes hunger and thirst, but carries a religious connotation to do with a regrettable and confining ignorance (Isaiah 5:13): “Therefore my people are gone into captivity, because they have no knowledge: and their honourable men are famished, and their multitude dried up with thirst.” (KJV) George Herbert’s poem “Longing” from the Temple also uses ‘famished’ to suggest being deprived of God’s love: [88]
With sick and famisht eyes, With doubling knees and weary bones, To thee my cries, To thee my grones, To thee my sighs, my tears ascend: No end?
There has been a sense of longing in “Crown” too, introduced by the utterance of the “oh,” but, unlike Herbert, the speaker in this poem does make a gesture towards an end as he “casts the final petals” which might be something a crowd does before a sovereign, or it might suggest the breaking up and casting off of the crown or wreath of flowers, much as Marvell asks for his crown of flowers to be destroyed by God at the end of “The Coronet.” Casting also means setting in metal and here we might think of founding, the beginning or creation of something, or the imprint or coining of money. The petals, however, seem to refer to the “Arabian flower of the century” and this is something of a puzzle in its specificity. It might refer to the resurrection plant or Rose of Jericho (Anastatica hierochuntica or Odontospermum pygmaeum) which can live for years without water but which will come back to life and reseed as soon as the rains come. This would fit with the sense of being parched and then watered so that something can live again, reinforcing in the poem a sense of redemption and return. The flower is the question which had risen like helium away from the human city and is now returning to complete the circle, turning back onto itself. There has been much movement in the poem. From the labile rise and crash of anonymous and dehumanized actions, we were taken up and out with the rising question, and at the same time inward with a glimpse of or glance to the interior, the landscape of mind and high mountain. A lyrical interiority turned from personal affection to the universal “love of any man.” From this vantage, we can see that love and the fullest knowledge of the cosmos are one and the same thing: we are transported from the gutter to the pillar of cloud. The symbolism of the pillar of cloud endows the poem [89]
with a mythical sense borrowed from a story of exile, which is the story of beginning, baptism and a journey back home. In his lecture on Olson’s Maximus poems Prynne talks about how Olson’s work expands beyond the lyrical to something mythical. From the “wide eyed voyage” of Maximus out into the sea and beyond to the cosmos, there is a switch into “the reverse stance.” You go back down that line that you have already taken, you fold back into yourself…you take what has been story and you fold it back into legend. Both of those terms are, of course, still within the range of muthos, of myth, that myth which is the telling of the story of where you are. The first story of where you are is knowing where you came from…The second story is less local, is more grand…so that condition of the cosmos brings about a condition of myth as the structure of the language used, which allows for an extension of mythography, the writing of where one is.23
And so “Crown” ends where it has begun, with water and with time and these terms suggest a fulfillment of what has been prefigured. Now there is clarity, and knowledge, when “the action of month and | hour is warm with cinnamon and clear water.” Cinnamon is used in the Book of Exodus as a holy anointing oil and this, together with “clear water,” suggests a purifying and new beginning reinforced by the ideas that these are the “first slopes.” “[F]irst,” in that we have returned to our earliest condition, which the word “gently” reminds us is our birthright, our noble prerogative. Now the speaker is inclusive: we are all ready to climb. We are standing on the world, and we have it at “our feet.”
23 J.H. Prynne, “On Maximus IV, V, & VI,” Serious Iron [Iron 12] (ca. 1971): n.p. A transcribed lecture, given at Simon Fraser University, B.C., on 27 July 1971. Reprinted (with brief comment from the transcriber, Tom McGauley) Minutes of the Charles Olson Society 28 (April 1999): 3‐13.
[90]
Robin Purves
The Hymen Song: A Note on Iphigenia and J.H. Prynne’s “Letter To John Wilkinson” John Wilkinson gave a public reading of his poem “Iphigenia” in Cambridge on Monday 26th April 2004, introduced by Keston Sutherland.1 It was later published in a 22pp booklet by Barque Press and it is to this manifestation that J.H. Prynne responds in the letter which follows this text; the poem, however has, with some minor variations, been collected alongside other work in Wilkinson’s Lake Shore Drive, published by Salt in 2006. The Barque booklet has a striking cover image when the thin tablet’s hinges are eased open and it is laid face down.2 The colours are muted but the lower half modulates from black to mottled grey, speckled with white, as a mountain range covered in dense evergreen forest and streaked with snow rears below “the effulgent light of a gap in the clouds”3 whose 1 Keston Sutherland’s introduction was later published as “What Is Called John Wilkinson?” The Gig 17 (2004): 49‐52. 2 Cover image displayed at http://www.barquepress.com/iphigenia.html 3 J.H. Prynne, “A Discourse on Willem de Kooning’s Rosy‐Fingered Dawn at Louse Point,” act 2 (1996): 34‐73, 40. Prynne’s reference is, of course, to de Kooning’s painting and not to this photograph, but his next suggestion, that a specific section of the painting “would surely invite at once the specific theme of apotheosis or theophany, as some sacralised figure ascends into heaven or makes a divine sortie down to earth” might not be entirely irrelevant to a
[91]
ominous encroachment is rendered in blotchy pink and washed‐out mauve. A helicopter enters from the right, closer to the sky than the mountains, looking like it wants to land on the name of the author which, with the title of the volume that floats at the top of the page, is rendered in slightly blurred pixels. The poem has eight sections, each entitled “Iphigenia,” or the booklet consists of eight linked poems with the same title hovering above. This is one reason Prynne refers to the eponymous heroine’s shadow making passes overhead. In a post to the UKPOETRY listserv on the day after the Cambridge reading, Marianne Morris noted that comment had been made on the fact that there was “variance in pronunciation of the repeated name.” I did not attend the reading but I would be surprised to learn that this variance had nothing to do with the trans‐European and trans‐disciplinary ubiquity of Iphigenia’s name and appearance in the works of Aeschylus and Euripides, Pindar, Racine, Dryden, Gluck, Goethe and H.D., to name but a few. Morris mentions the author claimed at his reading that “‘the text is calling for’ Iphigenia, who is ‘absent from the Oresteia,’” a detail which suggests the author believes her to be too absent also from his own work in her name. The citation from New Order’s great “Temptation”4 on p.16 tempts the reader to guess that Iphigenia in all of her disguises is, nevertheless, being addressed at this point, and that we’ve never met anyone quite like her before. Much else is folded in to the ‘narrative’ of the poem; it scrolls back and forth, folding time, which happens across a mix of related themes to do with war and over‐consumption, inanition and injustice:
reading of Iphigenia. John Wilkinson has informed me in personal correspondence that the photograph was taken at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver but adds that: “If it were taken to be Afghanistan, that wouldn’t be out of line.” 4 New Order, Temptation, Factory Records: FAC63 (1982).
[92]
But the real work precedes such symptoms. Small wonder looking round trailing edges, paddles, slapping upwards like true selves off the fattening surface— smack each goes into the bulk drink, downed repeatedly, screw‐tight, shatter their own approach & first glimpses. In cages in the basement the illegals prepare food.5
Perhaps even their own food if they are fortunate illegals. John Wilkinson’s poetry has its action sequences; at points in Iphigenia we are embedded in a style which seems to conflate the entirely different ways to saturate a frame invented by Jack Smith, Stan Brakhage and Terrence Malick. We recoil between a picture of dust and a dust‐picture, in the frames only to the extent that we are not: Slide down the bank softening, dropped on the outskirts back of the rig, chewing dirt The worst terrain to vanish inside, you slam against a retaining wall, a windbreak muscles up in thorns, dykes impede you, testing fields grip ankles Black earth, littered with brassica roots, clumps bleeding feet Voracious gulls. Scabby earth thaws in thready light infiltrating along its waterways.6
Voracious gulls, and vicarious ones too, we follow the action and: 5 John Wilkinson, Iphigenia (Cambridge: Barque, 2004) 5. 6 Wilkinson, Iphigenia, 7.
[93]
Events fall out just so. The event shrinks from the necessary thought.7
If Iphigenia is in the poem, one of the places she may appear is in the notion of the “necessary thought” which, in a neat reversal, the “event shrinks from.” Her sacrifice is required, since it will achieve the desired result: winds will stir, speeding the boats of the Greek army to Troy and their vengeful expedition will succeed. If the necessity is divinely imposed by Artemis, it is also in Euripides immediately public and political: the Greek army will permit neither Agamemnon nor Achilles to spare the life of his daughter. This is already more than enough to make her death inevitable; it is Iphigenia’s decision to give the inevitability of her death the aspect of being true under all subsequent interpretations by transforming the state of being compelled to die into her own irresistible drive towards the sacrificial altar. She determines that her own death will be true by its meaning, by accepting in herself “the necessary thought.” And this “necessary thought” entails affirming the doctrine of the ‘necessary response,’ the justification for massive and violent reprisals after suffering perceived insult or attack. Iphigenia works up an impressive enthusiasm for the razing of Troy and the slaughter of its citizens. Hail me now. I destroy Phrygia and all Troy. Clasp on the flower‐circlet. Wind it through the locks just caught with it. Bear water in a deep bowl. Stand around the temple‐front And the altar of heaped earth. For I come to do sacrifice, To break the might of the curse, To honour the queen, if she permit, The great one, with my death.8 7 Wilkinson, Iphigenia, 9. 8 H.D., Choruses From Iphigeneia In Aulis (London: Ballantyne Press).
[94]
It is tempting as a result to see Iphigenia as a kind of anti‐ Antigone, a character who swiftly and with an impressively placid fire transforms the love in and for her royal family into love of the State as the call of duty. Finally she is daughter to the concept of her father as King; her sacrificial voluntarism dissolves the family and rehearses, in a way Hegel would recognise and applaud, the succession of Civil Society in all its gore‐drenched splendour. & does the blood‐red garland decked in thorns like spurs, manifest the crowning dream of a virgin wading through blood—Don’t fuck with me: I want the thick cultivar. The sentence is delayed hunger.9
The noise of rotors from speakers in the corner of the room dissipates the holy hush of Iphigenia’s ancient sacrifice. It is our preference that it does so: The destroyers are fabulous too. I love the cars I love the cars Whitening on the bench. The centrifuge. The little fridge. The strips of yeast cells as they stalk the earth. I love cigarettes.10
J.H. Prynne’s letter repeatedly scours Iphigenia for the victim’s current identity, and considers settling on “our notion of self‐ innocence,” guilty as sin and consciousness.11 The letter is 9 Wilkinson, Iphigenia, 15. 10 Wilkinson, Iphigenia, 14. 11 Jacques Derrida, Glas (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1974): “En fait la simple conscience de bien faire est déjà un applaudissement intérieur et une sorte de recompense économique, une equivalence pour soi du benefice auquel je feins de renoncer lorsqu’il vient d’autrui. La bonne conscience (gute Gewissen)
[95]
double‐folded, sealed and unsealed with the effort to respond in kind, in its own ways, to the “knot‐weed,” “spools & wires,” of conscience, alternately stricken and soothed by the strikes. Not just in classical Greek drama can a chorus have it both ways; we are all still just on‐stage, part of the action (“Act now!”) and applauding our own anguished commentary on it, as it moves the action along for the gods and the stalls and everyone else in between. Ch. Alas, she steps forward To destroy Ilium and the Phrygians. A wreath is about her head, She takes water in a dish. She comes to meet death, To stain the altar of the goddess, To hold her girl‐throat Toward the knife‐thrust. The land‐springs await And the sacred bowls, And the Greek host, eager to depart.12
maintient le cercle de l’échange. Je reprends d’une main ce que je donne de l’autre, chaque main tient le register de l’autre, maîtrise et annule la difference entre les deux operations. Calcul supérieur et sans reste: ce que veut être la conscience.” (71) 12 H.D., Choruses, 19.
[96]
J.H. Prynne
Letter to John Wilkinson 8th August 2004 Dear John So on a sunny afternoon, with maybe a few complacencies also, like the ever‐anxious hoverflies, I turn back to the Iphigenias, slim pamphlet sitting so neat in the hand. So good to browse, then read, then (as usual, by command from the text) to read intently, to find the illegals still there in their arrested preparation and to recall from earlier the mute violence of their sunken cages. The first takes run up with an unfamiliar problem: a story‐ line, that even starts to make sense directly, assembling in episodic serial shot by shot reportage. Such a beguiling cover snap, four‐arm rotor with tailpiece assembly banked up over distant snowy peaks. At once I suspect a decoy, proxy displacements, but are they sacrificial thus as well as within the narration and if so by what rite of punishment. Having recently sat electric through Bellini’s Norma I am hyped up on this topic, and so layer by layer I don reader goggles, maybe high altitude breathing apparatus, maybe also like a fireman edging into a conflagrated mainframe. Whichever, the air seems attenuated, fast respiration. The event doesn’t quite so much [97]
shrink from necessary thought as baulk at the definite article before the thought entailed. Never the mise‐en‐abîme without the rip to separate, I half‐knew the cord would be oedipal, at least or at last no less. So there is flicker by slats and optical moiré fringes, coming up to welts compacted in haematomas not only self‐inflicted, scars of an imperial diadem: a muse‐like crown but worn in sacrifice as mantic garb, the required protocol. Our book flickers with interference affect, really we like the artistic touches, playing for usual high stakes. And thus the material world dematerialises in distress as we pine to control the exchange rate, delinquent and perverse to lift and thrust in the command module, cleared for unit action because if the real work is precedent then the object array of recipient formation must be proxy for itself, the shutters re‐congeal the ordonnance. Value‐added scenic disposition, the mind by decoy invasion is infiltrated by biotrophic obligature. Why should the mind release its grip, derived by oedipal descent from a separation trauma, free to choose necessity and cleavage in twinned fissures of self‐regard. Or as The Times so elegantly reports, ‘a lot of what we do is arbitraging perception and reality,’ facultative discount manoeuvres. Does this feed hunger response through the delay simulator. Very well, the illegals pay up for old‐style herbal supplements, cui bono cuisine. This flip of rapid scenes recoups the gamut of third‐world power fantasies, transit alibis for stand‐back squints internalised by inconstancy, you gotta move fast to hold any line at all. Squat down you fake, Tolstoyan cringe at failed harvest, fair‐trade substitutes, texture of diminished accusation. To drop down from lofty skies is to deploy by film sequence, full air control; to enter as to log into record is of course to put in appearance, self by proxy to stand up; choice of favoured option from off the shelf. Wounds of the chest cavity sucking and frothing, as they do, fabulous destroyers in their gripping drama closets. When you sidle up towards transfiguration I do hold my breath at the ancient mechanism of displacement, the [98]
rose‐garden visit, because these wings are fired with the rust of disuse inflicted, are no longer wings to fly only for those whose flight is denied. Thick description, we love to love being there, but again I know the scent of another decoy arrangement: how many times does Iphigenia’s shadow pass and repass overhead. OK so mortality is mocked in fear and sweet to lick over, for the delay of sentence is life itself and dear in all its cheap condolences, the flicker of that has to be real in the sense of all there is while also worthless because clung to with a nonchalant free option. Are we so horrible, well thankfully yes we are, what else could anyone truly want or mortify. If the righteous war is to take its place there must be placation of ire, by virgin sacrifice: silent, unflinching will I offer my throat to the knife, proxy blade for the ten‐year harvest of blood. Or, she is gagged to stifle her cries and lifted horizontally over the altar so that her throat is bare. So in the gunship wars of current descent over mountain and desert, empowered by a superior morality from un‐named neo‐con oracles, which daughter is on offer and at whose cultic grandstand. Is this by election too or through manifest destiny, each proxy for the other or both for an unnamed third. Why are there no virgin men in this scene, though Poussin could have done it or Tolstoy weirdly in Resurrection. She deputises for deferred power and thus must attain supreme victim appanage, Artemis herself ever‐vengeful in her own chaste resentment. Is this a sex‐role as the top decoy in the pack. I watch the final pass make its debut on p.20, Norma black‐veiled and prepared for her fateful pyre. The croupier riffles out the deeds, fans the pack of possession by title, we are to stake our plays. Do we feed on our own kind, under her terminal gaze, is the autoimmune failure cannibalistic. How should she draw for us any line but across the pipe of her own throat. Our throat weightless in a praise‐ song of utmost pindaric avoidance, a credulous scenario of punishment for falling short. New angles refringent on heavenly devout excuses, but we do want cars, why deny it, a throat ligature sexed‐up like a dossier I have been there, short [99]
chop under the usual curtains now almost drawn back, against long positions in the futures market. As Moneta instructs, ‘Thou hast felt / What ‘tis to die and live again before / Thy fated hour. That thou hadst power to do so / Is thy own safety; thou hast dated on / Thy doom.’ If not indeed doted, as Othello does in his own comforts. To which the anguished reply: ‘Majestic shadow, tell me where I am: / Whose altar this; for whom this incense curls.’ Beads of envy, twinged with avarice, to see as a God sees, or as a Queen of ships benign in mockery; the bright Chamber of Maiden Thought all leading to dark passages, where ‘we see not the ballance of good and evil.’ OK, what ballance hived off, take a chance on it, just to untie a boat and oppress the ground some more, nothing brand‐new here for older faultlines. All in history now of malignant TV shots and battle thrills whirling, all inherit because no one does just that, by foolish spool or buy at fashion best. Chicago futures a secondary, derivative play, the market decoy, every time you indent a line I hunt for the pivot snagging out the prosody, delay as hunger enhanced at the blood‐welt of each suture. Events fall out just so, section files pressed into the deed only as granted: the ideal puff of vapour, each little status light blinking. Every flick of the chopper inflicts another small wound. We are cut up all over, surrogate body we are the decoy and the altar must be our knowledge that this is so, must it or not. Who then is the victim within us, it is our notion of self‐innocence surmised as a precursor for oedipal guilt thrust back into an expiated history, a scapegoat narration with baroque cupids re‐tooled as gunship tweeters up aloft. Yes or not for now, compulsive retorsed love for the other, hatred, fear and species self‐blame. Is this an interim report. I mean, knowingly so. And if so, which way does it point; if it does not separate from the displaced rite is it not encrypted into the rite by negative default (reverse autopsy, you said it). Iphigenia makes her serial runs overhead and through the bloodstream, each reprise no reprieve as a decoy alibi each for the others in spate, in spite. [100]
Is the circle both bloody and vicious. Do we know this, the question if not more. Are we disrupted by knowing it. What is the task of the necessary thought if not to identify the sanction of such necessity (Shelley’s adamant question), is that the real work, is thought free or only ever on its own illusion even at poetic altitude: especially there. Don’t fuck with me, just so not just and not so, also. Are these links irreversibly uncoupled by excess recognition, or if the absent link is the decoy of its negation, what is the task of poetic thought. The illegals prepare food, in their cages, ius gentium. Thus you work things up, again, and slam the reader into a corner, and not by choice nor by election’s mimic. We’ll sign up for the war on terror, not vengeance but the defense of freedom everywhere. More muslim clerics are arrested, our hands barely falter, the kid seethed in its mother’s milk. Complacencies of the peignoir: whose altar this and after all, said and done. Saluti as ever: JHP
[101]
Bruce Stewart
Quincunx: Seamus Heaney and the Ulster Regionalists 1 In April 1964 Heaney contributed an article on the Ulster regionalist movement to a newly‐founded magazine at St. Joseph’s, Belfast, the Catholic Teacher Training College where he had been teaching for a year. At the time of its writing, his poem “Digging” still lay four months in the future—by his own account the first poem in which feelings had got into words.1 Appearing under the title “Our Own Dour Way,” the article begins boldly: “It is high time the North had another literary magazine,”2 a sentence closely echoed in an unsigned editorial: A new magazine in the North is necessary. That is the theme of Seamus Heaney’s article in this our first issue. While we do not profess to fill this need adequately at least we hope to produce the odd poem, short story or article which, he feels, is any magazine’s justification. We believe that the training colleges offer a rich untapped source of creative talent and we hope to provide this talent with a platform on which it can develop.3
1 Seamus Heaney, “Feeling into Words,” Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968‐78 (London: Faber & Faber, 1980) 41‐60, 41. 2 Seamus Heaney, “Our Own Dour Way,” Trench (April 1964): 3. 3 [Editorial]. Trench (April 1964): 1. There is a copy in the John Hewitt collection of the University of Ulster.
[102]
In his own piece, Heaney first takes note of the contemporary surge of Irish writing in the Republic of Ireland, calling to witness several recent prognostications about the renewal of Dublin as a literary centre. While admitting that “Northerners have always felt this slight cultural envy” of the southern writers, he moves on to give an account of the several Ulster magazines—Lagan (1943‐1946), Rann (1948‐53) and Threshold (1957‐ )4—which flew the standard for Ulster writing in the 1940s and 1950s, pronouncing it his purpose to “take a look at these magazines and show the work that they did in their time has not been carried on.”5 Turning his attention to Threshold, the latest in the series, he enters the demur that it “has not taken over where the other magazines left off,” before posing the question, “Why?” Because it is not essentially a northern magazine. It might as well be published in Dublin. In fact put a copy of Threshold inside a Kilkenny Magazine cover and very few people could tell the difference. Moreover, it relies on established reputations.6
In offering these reproaches Heaney takes as his inspiration some editorial comments in the first issue of Lagan, an extract from which appears in a text‐box with his article: “No writer, however talented, should uproot himself in spirit from his native place…An Ulster literary tradition must spring out of the life and speech of the province…the central problem is to 4 Lagan was conducted by Sam Hanna Bell with John Boyd and Bob Davison, Rann by Roy McFadden with Barbara Edwards, and Threshold—called the organ of the Ulster Theatre Movement—by Mary O’Malley with John Hewitt and later by John Boyd alone from 1971, with occasional assistance from Stephen Gilbert and editorial sessions by Roger McHugh, Seamus Deane, D. E. S. Maxwell, Gerald Dawe and Hewitt up to 1980. Threshold has not yet officially concluded. Heaney also remarks on The Northman (1941), edited by Robert Greacen and John Gallen at QUB. 5 Heaney, “Our Own Dour Way,” 3. 6 Heaney, “Our Own Dour Way,” 3. John Boyd, the editor of Lagan, had also posed the question “why?” in his first editorial.
[103]
interpret the complex spiritual life of the province.”7 Besides those sentences, John Boyd had written: “An Ulsterman is not an Englishman, no matter how hard he tries to be…I believe that none of the Ulster writers who have tried this grafting process has succeeded in producing a great body of work, a consistent and integrated oeuvre.”8 And further: An Ulster literary tradition that is capable of developing and enriching itself must spring out of the life and speech of the province; and an Ulster writer cannot evade his problems by adopting either a super‐imposed English or a sentimental Gaelic outlook. His outlook must be that of an Ulster man. He must, therefore, train his ears to catch the unique swing of our speech; train his eyes to note the natural beauty of our towns: above all, he must study the psychology of our people.9
The Second World War being still in progress, it might seem a strange time to insist that Ulstermen were not of the same stock as Winston Churchill. It might be inferred that there was an element of the gadfly in his suggestion that certain Ulstermen were trying to be Englishmen; in fact he is making the calculation that his remarks will meet an answering note of Ulster pride to match his own more natural sense of difference from the English people. Heaney responds to Boyd’s plea with a definite proposal based on a roll‐call of contemporary Ulster writers: “Why could Patrick Boyle, Brian Friel, Stuart Love, Roy McFadden and Denis Ireland not come together between limp quarterly covers and create a true artistic unity in diversity?”10 It is a deliberately cross‐community list, and while the absence of Michael MacLaverty is no less surprising than the presence of Stuart Love only a determination to recruit all parties can account for 7 Heaney gives notice that his source is the recently published compendium Lagan: A Collection of Ulster Writings (1962). 8 John Boyd, Lagan: A Collection of Ulster Writings (1962) 5‐6. 9 Boyd, Lagan, 6. 10 Heaney, “Our Own Dour Way,” 3.
[104]
the inclusion of Denis Ireland, a markedly uncreative writer whose liberal Unionist credentials were unimpeachable. The phrase about “unity in diversity” which happily anticipates the pluralist discourse that emerged in Ulster during the late 1980s seems to have been Heaney’s own.11 In the 1960s, however, there was no ‘cultural traditions’ movement and Heaney found himself resorting to the somewhat hoary example of the United Irishmen by way of a conclusion: “The Northern idealists of 1798 made their point in a forcible and unforgettable manner,” he writes, dragging in some lines from the celebrated Ulster ballad We men of Ulster had a word to say And we said it then in our own dour way And we spoke out loud and clear. I only hope that their descendants of the 1960s follow their example—with the pen which is so much mightier than the pike.12
We need not conclude that Heaney had turned his back upon the nationalist tradition as Kavanagh turned his back upon the “thorough‐going English‐bred lie” of the Irish literary revival.13 In reality he knew little of that tradition in 1964, the curriculum to which he had been exposed at university being almost exclusively English literature—or else branded ‘English’ even where writers such as Yeats and Joyce were concerned. Only
11 See for instance, Cultural Traditions in Northern Ireland: Varieties of Irishness, ed. Maurna Crozier [Proceedings of the Cultural Traditions Group Conference] (Belfast: QUB/IIS, 1989). 12 Heaney, “Our Own Dour Way,” 4. 13 Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Prose (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1967) 13. Heaney quotes the phrase in “A Tale of Two Islands: Reflections on The Irish Literary Revival,” Irish Studies, I, ed. P. J. Drury (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) 1‐20, 15‐16.
[105]
later did he learn anything about contemporary Irish writing as a result of his encounter with Robin Skelton’s Six Irish Poets.14 If Seamus Heaney became an Ulster regionalist in 1964 it is ironic to find that John Boyd, who effected his conversion, had by that date left the field to John Hewitt, author of the most ardent treatise on the subject to appear in the pages of the journal Lagan.15 In it Hewitt made his famous assertion that the Ulster writer “must be a rooted man,” and this became proverbial in the Ulster literary scene, if not always accepted as gospel.16 (Hewitt uprooted himself and worked in Coventry from 1957 to 1972.) When for instance Sam Hanna Bell came to write an Introduction to The Arts in Ulster, he felt obliged to make a passing reference to the Lagan article: “Beyond that too, and part of it, there is a problem for the Ulster writer; our history, for historical reasons, is still warm from the hands of zealots ….”17 What comes as a surprise is that John Boyd should digress from an account of individual authors in his commissioned chapter on “Ulster Prose” for the same compilation in order to record his latest thinking on the question: “As the regional idea is fashionable again I should like to comment on it,” he writes;18 and comment he does. “I am of the opinion that the whole argument both for and against “rootedness” or “uprootedness” is academic, because a writer follows the course that he himself dictates or that is dictated by circumstances.” 19 Further,
14 Six Irish Poets, ed. Robin Skelton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). The anthology contains work by Austen Clarke, Richard Kell, Thomas Kinsella, John Montague, Richard Murphy, and Richard Weber. 15 John Hewitt, “‘The Bitter Gourd’: Some Problems for the Ulster Writer,” Lagan: A Collection of Ulster Writings, 3 (1945) 93‐105. 16 John Hewitt, “‘The Bitter Gourd,’” 105. 17 Sam Hanna Bell, “A Banderol” [Introduction], The Arts in Ulster: A Symposium, ed. Bell et al (London: G. Harrap, 1951) 17. 18 Boyd, “Ulster in Prose,” The Arts in Ulster: 99‐130, 116. 19 Boyd, “Ulster in Prose,” 117.
[106]
Regionalism stresses the fact that a writer should be a ‘rooted’ man; he should feel that he ‘belongs,’ should recognise ancestors of blood and mind. This idea has been applied to cultural activities in Ulster, and it has been asserted that we can contribute to modern regionalist movements in literature, painting, and the other arts and crafts. This theorising on regionalism is merely a restatement of the obvious. A serious writer writes about what he knows best. And sure it is natural for a writer to write about his native countryside and people. It is also natural for a writer to wish to experiment, to enlarge the range of his art so that it may be consonant with his changing experience.20
At this point Boyd pauses to summarise the vigorous debate on ‘deracination’ conducted as far back as 1897 by André Gide and Georges Barrès before concluding in regard to St. John Ervine, Helen Waddell, and Joyce Cary—the best‐known Ulster writers of the period and all migrants to literary London: To wonder what creative work they would have done if they had remained in Northern Ireland is hardly a useful pursuit. Better accept the fact that a certain number of writers—as of other people—successfully transplant themselves, and their work is done in two or more contexts.21
The same conclusion might be applied to Seamus Heaney, except that he migrated to Dublin. The final irony is that John Boyd changed back—or so we may judge from the fact that, in his Lagan editorial, he dismissed St. John Ervine with the sniffy remark, “what about such a deraciné as St. John Ervine?,”22 and returned to the same view of that versatile man of letters in a biographical note of 1974 where he lamented that Ervine had “imaginatively and emotionally renounced his birthright as
20 Boyd, “Ulster in Prose,” 117. 21 Boyd, “Ulster in Prose,” 117. 22 Boyd, Lagan, 4.
[107]
Irishman and Irish writer.”23 There is nothing to say that it was not Heaney’s early achievements as an Ulster regionalist that inspired this recantation. 2 The chief proponent of Ulster regionalism at the time was John Hewitt, socialist man of letters and poet whose work on the “Rhyming Weavers of Antrim and Down,” published in 1974, stemmed from research undertaken for an MA in 1951.24 Hewitt had published a plea on the subject in 1945, while serving as Associate Editor of Lagan: “If writers in an isolated group or in individual segregation are for too long disassociated from the social matrix their work will inevitably grow thin and tenuous, more and more concerned with form rather than content, heading for marvellous feats of empty virtuosity.”25 Unlike Boyd’s editorial, this does not seem to speak of the Ulsterman’s attempt to imitate the English so much as the prevailing atmosphere of cultural apartheid in Northern Ireland. As Hewitt sees it, the denial of a natal link with Ulster amounts to a loss of birthright: “We must have ancestors,” he says, “[n]ot just of the blood, but of the emotions, of the quality and slant of mind.”26 Yet Hewitt was also a British Ulsterman: The Ulster writer must, if he is not to be satisfied in remaining “one of the big fish in the little pond,” seek to secure some recognition outside his native place. But the English language is
23 John Boyd, “St John Ervine: A Biographical Note,” Threshold 25 (Summer 1974): 101‐15. 24 John Hewitt, The Rhyming Weavers and Other Poets of Antrim and Down (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1974). 25 Hewitt, “The Bitter Gourd,” 115. The passage is quoted to a greater or lesser extent in “Introduction.” Contemporary Irish Poetry: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Elmer Andrews (London: Macmillan, 1996) 13, and in Edna Longley, The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Newcastle‐Upon‐Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1994) 50. 26 Hewitt, “The Bitter Gourd,” 115.
[108]
the speech of millions. There is no limit to its potential audience.27
At this juncture, he appeals to the principle of anti‐materialism which had been part of the literary baggage of Irish writers since W. B. Yeats—a view normally directed against the denizens of Ulster with their satanic linen‐mills and their ship‐ yards.28 “Yet I believe this had better not be achieved by his choosing materialism and subjects outside or beyond those presented by his native environment,” Hewitt opines. Finally he proffers a sketch of the true Ulster writer: He must be a rooted man, must carry the native tang of his idiom like the native dust on his sleeve; otherwise he is an airy internationalist, thistle‐down, a twig on a stream. Tolstoy sat at no Montmartre café. Even Yeats came back to climb his lonely tower. An artist certainly in literature, must have a native place, pinpointed on a map, even if it is only to run away from, like Joyce to his Trieste boarding house, and when his roots snapped, we got Finnegans Wake.29
In the 1940s, then, Hewitt reacted to his predicament as a socialist in Northern Ireland by attempting to establish a specifically Ulster regionalism with many of the ruralist and romantic features of the southern nationalist equivalent. His principles, though amounting to nothing as definite as a school or movement, have been perpetuated in some fashion by the John Hewitt International Summer School established after his death in 1987. Notwithstanding this posterity, Hewitt’s regionalism has been rejected by such major writers as John Montague, Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon. In “Regionalism Into Reconciliation,” a note on Hewitt published in Poetry Ireland, Montague conceded that Hewitt 27 Hewitt, “The Bitter Gourd,” 115. 28 Yeats hated Belfast and the feeling was somewhat mutual since he refused the Ulster Literary Theatre permission to produce Abbey plays. 29 Hewitt, “The Bitter Gourd,” 115.
[109]
had been right to adopt literary regionalism on the special grounds that “the Ulster question is the only real outstanding political problem in Ireland” and to “live in the province and ignore it would be like living in Mississippi without questioning segregation.”30 For a generation like his own “escaping from a morbid emphasis on nationality” regionalism was “not merely reactionary but absurd”: “to be Irish was bad enough, but to insist on being Ulster as well seemed to drag literature to the level of a football match.” All of this is to say that, though Hewitt espoused regionalism honestly, it was of a piece with the political problem. Montague expresses his respect for what he calls the “struggle of a stubborn, resolutely honest mind with itself: the mind of the first (and probably the last) deliberately Ulster, Protestant poet,”31 but shows no inclination to acknowledge the regionalist idea considered as a model for other writers—least of all Northern Catholic writers like himself (though he does not say so). And though Montague joined Hewitt on an Arts Council tour of Northern towns in 1970,32 the link between the poets became increasingly tenuous during the Troubles. When Seamus Heaney gave his lecture on “The Sense of Place” in 1977, presenting Montague and Hewitt as mutually exclusive alternatives in Irish poetry, their differences became statutary.33 Derek Mahon’s conversations with Hewitt as he recounts them are both instructive and amusing. In reviewing Hewitt’s Selected Prose in 1988, he began by quoting Hewitt on the dangers of becoming “an airy internationalist, thistle‐down, a twig on a stream.” To this Mahon responded, “This is a bit
30 John Hewitt, “Regionalism Into Reconciliation,” The Figure in the Cave and Other Essays (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1989) 147‐53, 148. 31 Hewitt, “Regionalism Into Reconciliation,” 153. 32 “The Planter and The Gael.” According to the preface of the small anthology printed as a programme for the tour, it “provide[d] illuminating insight into the cultural complexity of the Province.” The Planter and the Gael (NI Arts Council: 1970). 33 Seamus Heaney, “The Sense of Place,” Preoccupations, 131‐49.
[110]
tough on thistledown; and, speaking as a twig in a stream, I feel there’s a certain harshness, a dogmatism, at work there.”34 What of the free‐floating imagination, Keats’s “negative capability,” Yeats’s “lonely impulse of delight”? Literature, surely, is more than a branch of ethics. What about humour, mischief, wickedness? “Send us war in our time, O Lord!” Human nature cries out for more than ethical prescriptions, and it may have been his severe refusal to accept this which laid, and still lays, him open to charges of worthiness and dullness.35
These were good answers—especially the grimly humorous allusion to John Mitchel’s upsetting of The Book of Common Prayer. Mahon’s coup de grâce was aimed at the geo‐political nonsense of Ulster regionalism in an all‐Ireland context: Besides, what is all this about “the Ulster writer”? What about the Munster writer, the East Anglican writer, the Scottish writer? […]. I fail to see why his chosen region should have been Ulster rather than Ireland as a whole: a point on which we stuck more than once, myself sitting forward in my chair, himself puffing pugnaciously at his pipe.36
Seamus Heaney gave an account of his first encounters with John Hewitt’s poetry in a lecture delivered at the Carrickmacross “Kavanagh Yearly” in 1985 where he said: “[Hewitt’s] poems arose from a mind‐stuff and existed in a cultural setting which were at one remove from me and what I came from.”37 He went on: 34 Derek Mahon, Journalism: Selected Prose 1970‐1995 (Oldcastle: Gallery, 1996) 94. 35 Mahon, Journalism, 94. 36 Mahon, Journalism, 94. A notable feature of the Hewitt Collection at the University of Ulster is the perceptible tanning of the books and the persistent aroma of tobacco smoke. 37 Seamus Heaney, “The Placeless Heaven: Another Look at Kavanagh,” The Government of the Tongue (London: Faber & Faber, 1988) 3‐14, 8. The essay was given as a lecture at the Kavanagh Yearly in Carrickmacross, Co. Louth, in 1985.
[111]
I envied them, of course, their security in the big world of history and poetry which happened out there, far beyond the world of state scholarships, the Gaelic Athletic Association, October devotions, the Clancy brothers, buckets and egg‐boxes where I had had my being. I envied them but I was not taken over by them the way I was taken over by Kavanagh.38
In clear contrast, Patrick Kavanagh’s impact on Heaney was based on a definite commonality of experience. As he wrote of the poem “Spraying the Potatoes,” “I was excited to find details of a life which I knew intimately, but which I had always considered to be below or beyond books, being presented in a book.”39 It was obviously “home ground.”40 Heaney returned to the case of John Hewitt in his Oxford lecture on “Frontiers of Writing”41 in a considerably extended version of the critique of Ulster regionalism he had attempted in “The Sense of Place” seventeen years earlier. In 1994, the political component is more explicit since the future of Northern Ireland stood closer to the crisis‐point. “Parity of esteem” for the Irish language and some form of all‐Ireland institutions were on the agenda; and, while Unionists had to formulate a way of conceding cultural and political rights to nationalists, nationalists had to recognise the dual nature of their own cultural and political heritage. As R. F. Foster put it in the sentence that Heaney quotes at the close of his lecture, “the notion that people can reconcile more than one culture has much to recommend it.”42 Viewed from such a standpoint, 38 Heaney, “The Placeless Heaven,” 8. 39 Heaney, “The Placeless Heaven,” 7. 40 Heaney, “The Placeless Heaven,” 4. 41 Seamus Heaney, “Frontiers of Writing,” The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures (London: Faber & Faber, 1995) 186‐203, 195‐98. The lecture first appeared as “The Frontiers of Writing,” Bullán: An Irish Studies Journal 1.1 (Spring 1994): 1‐ 16. 42 Heaney, “Frontiers of Writing,” The Redress of Poetry, 202. The sentence, speaking of ‘jihads’ in Eastern Europe comes at the end of Foster’s Introduction to Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish History and English History (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 1993) xvii.
[112]
Hewitt failed at the essential task of reconciliation (a term previously evoked by John Montague in an article we have quoted): John Hewitt attempted to write into the imaginative record the Ulster Planters’ sense of difference and entitlement by deliberately recognising and affirming the colonial nature of the Ulster Protestant experience.…[His] move was original and epoch‐making, a significant extension of the imagining faculty into the domain of politics, but it could not wholly reconcile the Unionist mystique of Britishness with the Irish nationalist sense of the priority of the Gaelic inheritance.43
What follows is an account of Ulster regionalism considered in the context of modern Irish history and especially the history of Partition. Heaney’s argument has the interesting feature that it disarms its audience by asserting that the erstwhile equity of the United Kingdom was destroyed by Irish separatism and the consequent reduction of Ulster Catholics to second‐class citizenship within the Northern Irish state after 1921. Until then, diversity was the norm within the Union […] every body had a home, if they were not quite at ease with an old dispensation they were at any rate held equally in place by it. But partition created crisis. It kept the Protestant majority out of Ireland’s Ireland every bit as effectively as it kept the Catholic minority within Britain’s, and it created the conditions with which Hewitt’s peculiar mixture of lyric tenderness and secular tough‐mindedness had to make do. His poems are best read as personal solutions to a shared crisis, momentary stays against confusion.44
There was a striking moment in recent years when Mary Robinson, then President of Ireland, made a show of official sympathy with the victims of the Warrington explosion by
43 Heaney, “Frontiers of Writing,” The Redress of Poetry, 195. 44 Heaney, “Frontiers of Writing,” 197‐98.
[113]
reciting Hewitt’s poem about the consequences for him of learning that a great‐grandmother contracted famine fever tending victims of the Great Hunger: And that chance meeting, that brief confrontation, Conscribed me of the Irishry forever. Though much I cherish lies outside their vision And much they prize I have no claim to share, Yet in that woman’s death I found my nation; The old wound aches and shows its fellow scar.45
The poem movingly testifies to the event recounted and also to the poet’s fellow‐feeling with his Catholic compatriots arising from it, but that sympathy is partial. The archaic word “Irishry” in the poem and the title is at once affectionate and disdainful, while a hint of Yeatsian theatricality is not entirely absent either: it distances as much as it embraces. The whole effect might well be called a “momentary stay against confusion,” as Heaney calls it. Certainly it is not the stuff of serious accommodations between the Planter and Gael in Northern Ireland, though it certainly opens communication with the colonial Other. In contrast to Hewitt, Patrick Kavanagh provided Heaney with the example of a poet who spoke a language that he instinctively recognised and understood; there were no communication difficulties. In so doing, moreover, Kavanagh performed a larger service: [He] forged not so much a conscience as a consciousness for the great majority of his countrymen, crossing the pieties of a rural Catholic sensibility with the non serviam of his original personality, raising the inhibited energies of a subculture to the power of a cultural resource.46
45 Seamus Heaney, “The Scar.” See The Irish Times, News Section, 11 Oct. 1993. 46 Seamus Heaney, “The Poetry of Patrick Kavanagh: From Monaghan to the Grand Canal,” in Two Decades of Irish Writing: A Critical Survey, ed. Douglas
[114]
It is pertinent to recall that Kavanagh generated his own version of anti‐metropolitanism under the form of a celebrated distinction between the ‘parochial’ and the ‘provincial’ according to which “[a] provincial is always trying to live by other people’s loves, but a parochial is self‐sufficient.”47 This was neither a regionalist profession nor a nationalist one— indeed, it was part of a conscious flight from all patriotism in its vulgar (that is official) form. Yet the underlying sentiment, with its privileging of the communal over the metropolitan, participates in an identitarian process which both regionalism and nationalism can easily convert into their own coinage. Heaney negotiates this by insisting on the difference between Kavanagh’s poetic and the antiquarianism of the Literary Revival. Kavanagh’s technical achievement here is to find an Irish note that is not dependent on backward looks towards the Irish tradition, not an artful retrieval of poetic strategies from another tongue but […] the English language as it is spoken in this country.48
Here ‘country’ evokes a national collectivity strongly enough to warrant calling this a specimen of literary nationalism
Dunn (Cheshire: Carcanet, 1975) 105‐117, 105‐06 [rpr. in Preoccupations, 1980, 115‐130, 115‐16]. 47 Patrick Kavanagh, “The Parish and the Universe,” Kavanagh’s Weekly No. 7 & 9 (24 May & 8 June 1952). See Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Prose, 292‐93 and November Haggard (NY: Peter Kavanagh Hand Press, 1972) 69‐70. Besides appearing in Heaney’s “The Sense of Place,” 139, these phrases have been variously cited in such places as Michael Longley, “Introduction,” Causeway: The Arts in Ulster [NI Arts Council] (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1971) 7‐8; Alan Warner, Clay is the Word (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1973) 81; Terence Brown, Northern Voices (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1975) 218; J. W. Foster, Colonial Consequences (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1991) 101; Edna Longley, The Living Stream, 209; and Gerry Smyth, Decolonisation and Criticism: The Construction of Irish Literature (London: Pluto Press , 1998) 108. 48 Heaney, “The Poetry of Patrick Kavanagh,” 111.
[115]
notwithstanding its superficial protests to the contrary.49 Yet Heaney is determined to sustain his argument at the level of communal life independently of political partisanship, and his praise of Kavanagh consequently takes the form of a carefully‐ judged tribute to the poet’s ‘voice’ rather than a celebration of his oeuvre considered as the bulwark of this or that tradition: Where Yeats had a conscious cultural and, in the largest sense, political purpose in his hallowing of Irish regions, Kavanagh had no such intent. […] He abjured any national purpose, any belief in Ireland as a “spiritual entity.”50
That is not to say, however, that Kavanagh’s work bears no relation to the Irish nation: And yet, ironically, Kavanagh’s work probably touches the majority of Irish people more immediately and more intimately than most things in Yeats.51
The argument here seems based on the supposition that most Irish people come from agrarian backgrounds—a circumstance now altered. This hardly touches the conclusion, however, which treats of the poet from the standpoint of literary criticism: Kavanagh’s achievement lies in the valency of a body of individual poems which establish the purity, authority and authenticity of his voice rather than in any plotted cumulative force of the opus as a whole.52
A vital measure of that kind of authenticity is the question of dialect and idiom. In “The Sense of Place,” Heaney had offered 49 “Irish note” and “backward looks” are clear allusions to Thomas MacDonagh’s Literature in Ireland (1916) and Frank O’Connor’s The Backward Look (1967). 50 Heaney, “The Poetry of Patrick Kavanagh,” 117. 51 Heaney, “The Poetry of Patrick Kavanagh,” 117. 52 Heaney, “The Poetry of Patrick Kavanagh,” 117.
[116]
an account of Kavanagh’s poetic language, remarking that the poet’s “rendering of the authentic speech” of rural Co. Monaghan “gave the majority of Irish people […] an image of themselves that nourished their sense of themselves.”53 (How far a majoritarian conception of Irish literature influences this kind of criticism is beginning to become apparent.) Heaney illustrated his point with some examples, chiefly the phrases “the bicycles go by in twos and threes” and “every blooming thing” in “Iniskeen Road, July Evening,” one of the most successful of the early poems. Here he comments that those bicycles “do not ‘pass by’ or ‘go past,’ as they would in a more standard English voice or place.”54 He adds, “in that little touch, Kavanagh touches what I am circling,” before dilating on the way that Kavanagh lets “the very life blood of the place in [through] that one minute incision.”55 The words “go by” and “blooming,” moreover, are natural and spoken; they are not used as a deliberate mark of folksiness or as a separate language, in the way that Irish speech is ritualised by Synge. […] The poet meets his people at eye‐level, he hears them shouting through the hedge and not through the chinks in a loft floor, the way Synge heard his literary speech in Co. Wicklow.56
A little oddly, the non‐standard phrases that Heaney selects to illustrate this argument are not particularly representative of Hiberno‐English usage in Co. Monaghan or elsewhere on the island. That verbal phrase “go by,” for instance, is listed in no Hiberno‐English dictionary, while “blooming” is obviously more redolent of Cockney slang than anything connected with an Irish context (unless the soldiers in a play by Sean O’Casey or a tale by Frank O’Connor). Matters are further complicated by the fact that blooming is a pun involving both the expletive 53 Heaney, “The Sense of Place,” 138. 54 Heaney, “The Sense of Place,” 138. 55 Heaney, “The Sense of Place,” 138. 56 Heaney, “The Sense of Place,” 138.
[117]
sense and the more literal connotations of vegetal efflorescence. As such it pertains to what Heaney elsewhere calls Kavanagh’s “wobbly craft” rather than illustrating the authentic voice of Ulster countrymen.57 Whether Heaney uses local coinages in the manner of dialect writing or more occasionally and for rhetorical purposes to maintain contact with the home constituency is a philological question of a different order. 3 Heaney revisits the question of rural place and poetry in an essay on John Clare,58 whose example in resisting the authority of the metropolis he naturally admires. The essay begins with an account of the occasion when Heaney swapped the word “wrought” in a draft for “worked” in the printed poem at the behest of standard English. In the light of that experience he regards the English poet as one who refused to co‐operate after an initial brush with the metropolitan censor.59 Once upon a time John Clare was lured to the edge of his word‐ horizon and his tonal horizon, looked about him eagerly, tried out a few new words and accents and then, wilfully and intelligently, withdrew and dug in his local heels.60
For Heaney Clare was “a poet who possessed a secure local idiom but operated within the range of an official literary tradition.”61 This is a form of bi‐location very like his own and
57 Heaney, “Feeling into Words,” 47. 58 Seamus Heaney, “John Clare’s Prog.” The Redress of Poetry (London: Faber & Faber, 1995) 63‐82, 64 [first published in John Clare in Context, ed. Hugh Haughton, Adam Phillips and Geoffrey Summerfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)]. 59 Heaney, “John Clare’s Prog,” 63. 60 Heaney, “John Clare’s Prog,” 63. One might compare the phrase “dig square heels in” from Hewitt’s poem “The Colony” and referring to the rather different attitude of the Romans in Britain. 61 Heaney, “John Clare’s Prog,” 65.
[118]
the ensuing phrases consequently sound a lot like an account of the Heaneyesque naturalist in action: The eye, at any rate, does not lift to see what effect it is having upon the reader; and this typical combination of deep‐ dreaming in‐placeness and wide‐lens attentiveness in the writing is mirrored by the cess‐pools as they glitter in the sun.62
Here Heaney is ruminating on the lines, “The water o’er the pebbles scarcely run / And broad old cesspools glittered in the sun”; yet, much as these suggest a personal helicon, they contain little that is specific to a regional dialect since cesspools are to be met with elsewhere than on Northamptonshire and Derry farms. Heaney quotes Clare’s lines written at Nortborough at some length, ending with a couplet of great natural music While round them thrums the dragon flye And great white butter flye goes dancing by 63
—which moves him to remark: “Rarely has the butteriness of a butterfly been so available.”64 It is not clear what this effect has to do with dialect. As far as language goes, all that has happened in the last line is that Clare has written “butterfly” according to an eccentric orthography. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that the “origin of the name [butterfly] is unknown”; it also notes that to thrum (v.) means “to pluck the strings” and hence “playing idly,” while the sound so produced is called thrumming.65 Thrums are “ligaments of the tongue” in archaic usage while thrum—marked “dial.” in the dictionary— signifies with “the purrings of a cat,” a usage that seems to fit the case quite well. (It may be pointed out in passing that the 62 Heaney, “John Clare’s Prog,” 65. 63 Heaney, “John Clare’s Prog,” 71. 64 Heaney, “John Clare’s Prog,” 71. 65 James Joyce used “thrummings” in a musical connection in Finnegans Wake (1939) 41 [041.21].
[119]
dropped definite article in the second line is attributable to Northern English dialect.) If these philological features are in any way germane to Heaney’s reading of the poem he does not advert to them. Instead, he cites Tom Paulin’s observation in the Introduction to The Penguin Book of Vernacular Verse that Clare’s poems partake in the character of “a form of Nation language”—in Kenneth Brathwaithe’s coinage—”lack of punctuation, freedom from standard spelling, and charged demotic ripples,” to such effect that “Clare dramatises his experience of the class system and its codified language as exile and imprisonment in Babylon.”66 To this Heaney adds: “By implication then, Clare is a sponsor and a forerunner of modern poetry in post‐colonial national languages, poetry that springs from the difference and/or disaffection of cultural and perhaps political odds with others in possession of normative ‘Official Standard.’”67 And this in turn leads to a modern estimate of his importance: What was once regarded as Clare’s out‐of‐stepness with the main trends has become his central relevance: as ever the need for a new kind of poetry in the present has called into being precursors out of the past.68
This recruits Clare as an ally of Irish poets coming out of linguistic bondage to metropolitan publishers and audiences. As a Belfastman (though born in Leeds) Paulin might be supposed to know about this form of oppression, not withstanding his success as a British broadcaster and long residence in Oxford. Heaney paraphrases him in writing that “wherever the accents of exacerbation and orality enter a text, 66 Heaney, “John Clare’s Prog,” 80. Paulin is a keen proponent of regional dialects who advocated a Hiberno‐English in his Field Day pamphlet A New Look at the Language Question (Derry: Field Day Co., 1983). As Heaney mentions, Paulin has an essay on Clare in Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State (London: Faber & Faber, 1992). 67 Heaney, “John Clare’s Prog,” 81. 68 Heaney, “John Clare’s Prog,” 81.
[120]
be it in Belfast or Brooklyn or Brixton, we are within earshot of Clare’s influence and example,”69 and cites Les Murray, Tony Harrison, Derek Walcott and others as examples of the poetry that emanates from “all outbacks” and “nooks of dialect” when this principle is applied to such places.70 This leads on to the climactic sentence of the lecture in which he describes the right (and also the wrong) way of reading Clare: To read him for exotic flavours of an archaic diction and the picturesque vistas of a bucolic past is to miss the trust he instils in the possibility of a self‐respecting future for all languages, an immense, creative volubility where human existence comes to life and has life more abundantly because it is now being expressed in its own self‐gratifying and unhindered words.71
“[A]ll languages” apparently signifies dialects and ideolects as much as full‐members of the linguistic families involved in the idea of language‐nations—at least since Herder insisted on the necessary connection between languages and nations. A ‘Nation‐language’ is an artful synonym for a people’s language and, rich in democratic implications though it be, it positively refuses to declare whether it refers to region, nation, community or person in the present context. The same difficulty is somewhat apparent in the geo‐cultural constituency of “sense of place” in Heaney’s essay of that name where the “marriage between the geographical country and the country of the mind”72 that he envisages seems as likely to occur in an English as in an Irish jurisdiction: “[W]e could also talk about the sense of place in English poetry and find reward with talents as diverse as Tennyson and Auden, Arnold and John Clare, Edward Thomas and Geoffrey Hill.”73 It should be unnecessary to say that the tendency of Heaney’s development 69 Heaney, “John Clare’s Prog,” 81. 70 Heaney, “John Clare’s Prog,” 81. 71 Heaney, “John Clare’s Prog,” 82. 72 Heaney, “The Sense of Place,” 132. 73 Heaney, “The Sense of Place,” 137.
[121]
is to remove from literary jurisdictions (or rather to subvert them), as his marriage between the Anglo‐Saxon of Beowulf and the language of the “big‐voice scullions”74 nicely demonstrates. It is true that, in “putting a bawn into Beowulf” as he does, he also illustrates “one way for an Irish poet to come to terms with that complex history of conquest and colony, absorption and resistance, integrity and antagonism.” In sum, Heaney’s insistence on the post‐colonial analogy in discussing the “local heels” of John Clare has the effect of collapsing the national context of his mature criticism back into the regional sense of his first critical foray. 4 In 1972 Geoffrey Grigson stated the case against regionalism in these unprepossessing terms: Place obviously matters to a writer as long as he does not stay there exclusively, I mean as long as in his writing he is there and elsewhere. Regionalism is something else: it is a vehicle of sentimentality in which the incompetents chose to travel.75
In the same year—coincidentally or otherwise—Seamus Heaney wrote in the Guardian: “If you like, I began as a poet when my roots were crossed with my reading…My hope is that the poems will be vocables adequate to my whole experience.”76 By 1995 that aspiration had become an acknowledged actuality and it represents something of an upset for the Grigsonian view of literature that in giving his acceptance speech on 5 October,
74 See Seamus Heaney, “Introduction: about this translation,” Beowulf (London: Faber & Faber,1999) xxvi. 75 Geoffrey Grigson, “The Writer and His Territory,” Times Literary Supplement (28 July, 1972): 859‐860; cited in Máirín Nic Eoin, An Litríocht Réigiúnach (Baile Átha Cliath: An Clóchomhar Tta, 1982) 179. Not long after, Grigson edited The Faber Book of Poems and Places (1980) which containing a section devoted to “Scotland and Wales.” 76 Reprinted in Preoccupations, 37.
[122]
1995, the Nobel Prize‐winner should have begun with a series of autobiographical reflections on his Irish Catholic childhood in Northern Ireland: I was the eldest child of an ever‐growing family in rural Co. Derry, we crowded together in the three rooms of a traditional thatched farmstead and lived a kind of den‐life which was more or less emotionally and intellectually proofed against the outside world.77
This was an apposite beginning since, for him, Irish literature is chiefly characterised by what he has called “the sense of place.” In the lecture of that title given in 1977 and published afterwards in Preoccupations, he made the memorable assertion that the kind of writing that he had in mind is “empowered within its own horizons [and] looks out but does not necessarily look up to the metropolitan centres.”78 That might stand as a complete justification of regionalist writing at its best (though it is not, of course, an example of regionalist writing). He then went on: Its impulses and possibilities abound within its boundaries but are not limited by them. It is self‐sufficient but not self‐ absorbed, capable of thought, undaunted, pristine, spontaneous, a corrective to the inflations of nationalism, and the cringe of provincialism.79
So far from expressly invoking the term “regionalism” in all of this, it might even be supposed that Heaney means to repudiate it as he repudiates nationalism (although the “inflations of nationalism” rather than the thing itself are censured here). Indeed, the intellectual strength of the essay derives precisely from the fact that it avoids any resort to “‐isms,” and for this 77 See Seamus Heaney, “Crediting Poetry,” Opened Ground: Poems 1966‐1996 (London: Faber & Faber, 1998) 447. 78 Heaney, “The Sense of Place,” 141. 79 Heaney, “The Sense of Place,” 141.
[123]
reason as much as any other it inspired innumerable imitators. For a generation, “the sense of place” was applied to Irish writers as a measure of their Irishness, serving also as the title of an anthology and even a government‐funded literary tour of Europe in the early 1980s.80 It was very much the object of “The Sense of Place” to read modern Irish poetry from a standpoint independent of Anglo‐ American humanism and—accordingly—to redefine it in the light of deep‐rooted cultural practices that belong especially to the Irish mind. Heaney identified those practices with the landscape and its immanent store of cultural, racial and historical associations. If ‘immanent’ and ‘associations’ seems contradictory, then the way in which the landscape had accrued and retained its lode of Gaelic myth and history was immanent for the purposes of the kind of vital imaginative connection that he had in mind: the landscape served as a living repository of racial memories the way that language does. This in itself was an intrinsically nationalist undertaking since it invokes a privileged relationship between territory and people with implications of owning and belonging on either side. There is also a strong element of nationalism in the way the Literary‐ Revival figures whom Heaney mentions (chiefly Yeats and Synge) initiated the “discovery of confidence in our own ground, in our own place, in our speech, English and Irish” which he sees as the essential work of that Revival—a movement to which he ascribes two chief aims: firstly, “to restore a body of old legends and folk beliefs that would bind the people of the Irish place to the body of their own world”; secondly, “to supplement this restored sense of historical place with a new set of associations that would accrue when a
80 See The Writers: A Sense of Place, ed. Andrew Carpenter & Peter Fallon (Dublin: O’Brien Press, 1980), and the collection, Ireland: Towards a Sense of Place, ed. Joseph Lee (Cork: Cork University Press, 1985). Richard Bizot, “A Sense of Places: Exile, Migration, and the Homing Instinct in the Life and Poetry of John Montague,” Éire‐Ireland 29 (Spring 1993); Eamon Grennan, “Sense of Place for Richard Murphy,” The Snow Path, Tracks 10 (Dublin: Dedalus Press, 1994), etc.
[124]
modern Irish literature, rooted in its own region and using its own speech, would enter the imaginations of his countrymen.”81 Here “rooted” clearly echoes the regionalist doctrines of John Hewitt while “countrymen” means something like co‐nationals. Indeed, Heaney reserved a nationalist sense for ‘country’ in all its applications while avoiding the word ‘countryside’ as belittling. In the main, however, he opted for John Barrell’s term “landscape” in a study of John Clare to which Heaney professed himself indebted in his own essay on the poet.82 From it he also derived the term “the sense of place,” though Barrell’s Marxist outlook gives way to Heaney’s mythopoeic conception of the relationship of poet and his place in the Irish landscape. Heaney’s essay of that title makes no explicit reference to Barrell or his book, but Preoccupations contains a long review of The Penguin Book of English Pastoral Poetry which he co‐edited with John Bull. In it Heaney offers some demur about their “sociological filleting” of the genre with further comments about the way their “Marxist brush” has swept out what they call “mystification.” The result, according to Heaney, is to produce “a certain attenuation of response, so that consideration of the selected poems as things made, as self‐ delighting buds on the old bough of the tradition, is much curtailed.”83 The Marxist term “mystification” he calls “a word I am reluctant to regard as altogether pejorative in poetry”84— something of an understatement in regard to his contemporary
81 Heaney, “The Sense of Place,” 135. 82 The work in question is John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730‐1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). Terence Brown cited Barrell’s book in the bibliography of his Northern Voices: Poets from Ulster (Gill & Macmillan, 1975), but gave no details of the connection with Heaney’s poetry at that date. Heaney expresses his indebtedness—“like all readers”—to Barrell’s “diagnosis of Clare’s strengths and complications” in his own essay on Clare (“John Clare’s Prog,” 65). 83 Seamus Heaney, “In The Country of Convention—English Pastoral Verse,” Preoccupations, 173‐80, 174. 84 Heaney, “In The Country of Convention,” Preoccupations, 175.
[125]
methods of composition of which “The Sense of Place” is both an example and an explanation. One effect of that method, and by no means an accidental one, was to establish a partition between the nationalist sense of Irish landscape as something to be repossessed in terms of “their tribal and etymological implications,”85 on the one hand, and, on the other, at the level of racial associations and the Unionist sense of it as something to be valued and conserved as a natural, industrial, and social environment. “The Sense of Place” is not an Ulster regionalist manifesto—to the contrary, it subsumes Ulster regionalism into a wider Irish cultural nationalism. Yet its author’s underlying concerns are markedly like those of the Ulster regionalists: concerns with ‘rootedness’ in the first instance. What is more, it draws almost exclusively upon an Ulster library for its illustrations. The contemporary poets whom Heaney examines are Ulstermen without exception—Kavanagh, Montague, Mahon, Longley, and Muldoon. Of contemporary prose‐writers, he mentions only R. L. Praeger and J. C. Beckett, both Belfast‐born, though one of these he mentions to disparage while the other provides him with a closing sentence which, though advantageous to Heaney’s argument, is likely to be misconstrued in its new setting. The rough treatment meted out to Robert Lloyd Praeger, first President of the Geographical Society of Ireland, perfectly illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of Heaney’s method of illustration. In The Way I Went, Praeger described Co. Tyrone as “a curiously negative tract, with a paucity of outstanding features when its size and variety of surface are considered.”86 Heaney compares this estimate of the county with John Montague’s imaginative exploration of Knockmany in the light of Irish myth and memory and concludes that
85 Heaney, “The Sense of Place,” 141. 86 Robert Lloyd Praeger, The Way that I Went: An Irishman in Ireland [1st edn.]. (Dublin: Hodges Figgis; London: Methuen, 1947) 101. Further edns. incl. Do. [reduced facs.] Dublin: Allen Figgis [riverrun], 1969), and Michael Viney, intro., Do. London: Collins; Dufour Edns., 1998, 432.
[126]
Praeger’s “sense of the place is, on the whole, that it is no place.”87 Making use of Praeger’s verbal infelicity saying “a minor excitement is caused by the occurrence in this neighbourhood of a small coal‐field […],” Heaney remarks: “Who (except someone with an incurable taste for punning) will agree that a small coal‐field constitutes “a minor excitement”?88 The answer is, presumably, a natural historian such as Richard Lloyd Praeger in his various roles as geologist, geographer, botanist, national librarian, surveyor of shores and harbours, and Irish man of letters. It seems harsh to subject such a man to what Wordsworth calls “the primary laws of our nature, the laws of feeling”89 simply because he did not feel about the landscape of Ireland as a dispossessed Gael—even if there was an element of incitement in the fact of his calling himself “an Irishman” for purposes of his book‐title. Praeger was the son of a Dutch linen‐ merchant and one of the Patterson family that supplied distinguished members to the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society, and attitudes epitomised in his book were widely shared by other Ulster regionalists in works that Heaney very likely met with as a young man in Belfast. In his introduction to The Arts in Ireland, Sam Hanna Bell exhibits a passionate interest in Ulster life in combination with a fairly insouciant attitude towards Irish myth and folklore while articulating the whole Ulster‐regionalist standpoint in these terms. We inherit, in theory at least, the epic myths of our country. Most of us came to them in later life through Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne or the stories of Standish O’Grady and Charles Squire, for these were not the heroic tales that the majority of us were taught at school. They have, I fear, little
87 Heaney, “The Sense of Place,” 144. 88 Heaney, “The Sense of Place,” 144‐45. 89 Heaney, “The Sense of Place,” 145.
[127]
attraction for us who heard them as part of the epic history of their people.
Here he refers to Gerald MacNamara’s treatment of the Ulster saga in a satirical play called Thompson in Tir na nOg which became something of a touchstone for the affectionate contempt in which liberal Unionists held the antiquarian preoccupations of the literary revival. As David Kennedy wrote of another piece by MacNamara directed at the same target: “Ulster common sense instinctively rejected this charlatanism.”90 Sam Hanna Bell’s opinion is somewhat the same: Notwithstanding the beauty of these tales—and there are lovely and moving passages in them—the heroes are too vast, too amorphous; they lack the saving salt of human vulgarity. […] There is nothing, I should say, more distasteful to an Ulsterman, of whatever persuasion, than to be hugged by a myth, unless, of course, he had the privilege of creating it.91
In writing about the literary treatment of folklore—of which “we have in Ulster, as in the rest of Ireland, a rich store”92— Bell’s literary comparisons are with “John Galt of Ayrshire, or the Wessex novels of Thomas Hardy” rather than the Irish literary‐revival authors.93 In this cool spirit, for instance, he lavishes faint praise on Michael J. Murphy, South Armagh story‐writer who—he says—“has made adequate and pleasant use of the old tales he learnt as a child and those he has since uncovered […] for the Irish Folklore Commission,”94 adding: 90 David Kennedy, “The Drama in Ulster,” The Arts in Ulster (1951) 55. Viz., “The shadowy darkness in which [Yeats’s] imagination swathed this strange world owed more to the theosophical vapourings of Madame Blavatsky than to the clear vision and precise image which are the authentic marks of Celtic literature. Ulster common sense instinctively rejected this charlatanism and guyed it in The Mist Does Be on the Bog (1909).” 91 Bell, “A Banderol,” 15. 92 Bell, “A Banderol,” 15‐16. 93 Bell, “A Banderol,” 16. 94 Bell, “A Banderol,” 16.
[128]
It is satisfying to know that to‐day this lore is being gathered by men and women with diligence, perception, and patience, for, with the modernisation of agriculture, the old lingering songs and tales, like lonely thorn bushes and tumbled gables, are being cast down, ploughed under, and lost.95
That was as warm as the Protestant Ulster regionalists were likely to get about such matters; and though the style and attitude are widely at variance with Montague’s or Heaney’s imaginative inhabiting of the landscape, books by Bell, Boyd, Hewitt, and Estyn Evans, and R.L. Praeger formed something of a bridgehead for the Catholic writers coming after. J. W. Foster somewhere pointed out that Heaney owes more than he admits to Estyn Evans and the same point might be made of Brian Friel. Thus, in Irish Folk Ways, Estyn Evans wrote: A glance at any six‐inch Ordnance map will reveal the strange names that Gaelic imagination contrived and English scribes corrupted. Here are a few which I have come across in Ulster: Ballywillwill, Ballymunterhiggin, Aghayeevoge, Treantaghmucklagh. In all Ireland there are no less than 5,000 townlands beginning with “Bally,” forty‐five of them named Ballybeg (little town)96
It is reasonably certain that Friel had met these sentences before he began to meditate his play Translations, and perhaps even before he settled on the name Ballybeg for his eponymous Irish village, first presented in the play Philadelphia, Here I Come! Certainly Evans—who held the chair of Geography at Queen’s University—wrote at least one sentence that Heaney might have quoted, as when he averred that the inspiration of poets, musicians and artists “characteristically springs from intimate association with particular landscapes, local, regional or
95 Bell, “A Banderol,” 16. 96 Estyn Evans, Irish Folk Ways (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957, 2nd ed. 1961) 28.
[129]
national.”97 Yet, even in writing this, he encased it in a disciplinary outlook very different from anything that Heaney might wish to embrace: “Scientists, in trying to explore the roots and measure the strength of regional personality, should welcome the support that comes from the intuitive understanding and interpretation of the creative writer.”98 Only one sentence penned by a member of the Belfast Protestant intelligentsia meets with Heaney’s approbation in “The Sense of Place,” and that is the comment with which he ends the lecture: “I am convinced, as Professor J. C. Beckett was convinced about the history of Ireland generally, that it is to the stable element, the land itself, that we must look for continuity.”99 Heaney meant, as the lecture demonstrates, that the land retained the memory of its Gaelic past; Beckett meant—what all the Ulster regionalists meant—that the land was permanent, retained traces of its use and habitation but did not care who lived in it, Gael or Planter, Anglican, Catholic or Presbyterian and that, reciprocally, the differences between all these were levelled by the harsh necessities impelled on them by Irish land and their common practical response to it. Like Hewitt, Bell is aware that the difficulty surrounding Ulster regionalism has to do with the danger of sparking ancient animosities if memorial forms of consciousness are aroused through modern retellings. It might also be said that the problem arises that the intelligentsia might get more Irish and less British, as happened to Roger Casement, Francis Bigger, the Milligans of Omagh and others. And here Bell trumpets the arrival of a new cohort of Ulster writers whom subsequent generations have learned to describe as the revisionist historians:
97 Estyn Evans, The Personality of Ireland: Habitat, Heritage and History (London: Cambridge University Press, 1973) 84. The sentence is quoted with approbation in Máirín Nic Eoin, An Litríocht Réigiúnach, 61. 98 Evans, The Personality of Ireland, 84. 99 Heaney, “The Sense of Place,” 149.
[130]
There is, of course, a dichotomy to be bound up in every artist born into a childhood of taut loyalties. […]. Beyond that too, and part of it, there is a problem for the Ulster writer; our history, for historical reasons, is still warm from the hands of zealots. And here, I should like to believe, a new element enters. During the past few years a number of Ulster historians have been reassessing, and, indeed, so far as the layman is concerned, discovering the history of our country and our people. T. W. Moody, Cyril Falls, D. B. Quinn, R. B. McDowell, J. C. Beckett, J,. M. Mogley, E. R. R. Green and Hugh Shearman have revealed to us the calm causality of the frenetic story. Estyn Evans, Professor of Geography at the Queen’s University, Belfast, bringing an innate sympathy from Wales to our Province, has gathered into his book Irish Heritage [1942], the crafts, the occupations, and the ingenuities of his forefathers, a book that should be on the shelf of every Ulsterman. Here in the work of these scholars, so far as the writer is concerned, is our history cooled and tempered for us.
This, then, was the Ulster regionalists’ conception of ‘our country and our people.’ Seamus Heaney’s, in writing “The Sense of Place,” was quite another, though traces of his earlier affinities with Ulster regionalism are still apparent if only in an oppositional and reactive way. The dominant note in his reaction to the “Arts in Ulster” consensus is a distrust for that “cooled” version of history and the “calm causality” involved in it: patently, the signature of a liberal Unionist view of Irish land and Irish history. In its place, by a considerable leap of imagination, he espouses a more passionate relation to the Irish landscape that bears within it a still active resentment at the history of dispossession which was for so long the Irish share in the cultural and material history of the island. It is reasonably clear that much of the cultural and historical thinking involved in “The Sense of Place” proceeded from conversations with Seamus Deane, Heaney’s class‐mate at St. Columb’s, Derry, then lecturing at the University College, Dublin (NUI) having graduated from that University and returned from doctoral
[131]
studies at Cambridge.100 Deane’s colloquy with Heaney in the first issue of The Crane Bag reveals a very close intellectual bond between the two men though differences as well as similarities are apparent in their thinking on the Northern Ireland Troubles—Heaney taking a militantly anti‐colonial view. Of the relationship between poetry and the Troubles, he remarks, “There is certainly no direct or obvious connection; but this poetry and the troubles emerged from an intensity, a root, a common emotional ground. The root of the troubles may have something in common with the root of the poetry.”101 Having established a general framework for his lecture in relation to the canonical figures of Yeats and Synge, Heaney proceeds to measure his older and younger contemporaries against “the sense of place” that he has defined in mythopoeic terms. This he does with satisfactory results in regard to Patrick Kavanagh and John Montague, the former contributing that “affirmation of the profound importance of the parochial” upon which Heaney’s valorisation of the local is ultimately based,102 while the latter “plumb[s] the depths of a shared and diminished culture”103 denoted by the Irish place‐names that— like an ancient manuscript—”we have lost the skill to read” (as Heaney says, quoting Montague’s famous lines on the subject).104 Heaney remarks that Kavanagh “abjured any national purpose,” using place‐names only as “posts to fence Heaney’s article “A Tale of Two Islands: Reflections on The Irish Literary Revival.” Irish Studies I (1980) ends with this expression of indebtedness: “I am indebted to Dr. Deane, not only for this article, but for many conversations in which we plied the substance of what I have written here” (20n.1). 101 Seamus Deane, “Interview with Seamus Heaney,” The Crane Bag 1.1 (1977), rpr. in The Crane Bag: Book of Irish Studies (Dublin: Blackwater Press, 1982) 61‐72, 66. Both printings share the same pagination. In the early 1970s, Estyn Evans gave a lecture at Benburb under the title “Understanding Ourselves,” printed shortly afterwards as “The Northern Heritage,” Aquarius (1971) and brought out as a pamphlet as Ulster: The Common Ground (Mullingar: Lilliput Press, 1984). 102 Heaney, “The Sense of Place,” 138. 103 Heaney, “The Sense of Place,” 141. 104 Heaney, “The Sense of Place,” 132. The phrase is from “A Lost Tradition” in The Rough Field (1972). See Collected Poems (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1995) 33. 100
[132]
out a personal language” while Montague uses them to register the “history of his people, disinherited and dispossessed.”105 Thus “[t]here is an element of cultural and political resistance and retrieval in Montague’s work that is absent from Kavanagh’s,”106 though both explore what Heaney calls “a hidden Ulster” (echoing Daniel Corkery).107 This clearly fortifies their kinship with the author who owns, in fact, a real indebtedness to each. In regard to Derek Mahon, Michael Longley and Paul Muldoon, however, no kinship can be asserted and here “the sense of place” can only be rendered workable as a defining concept by means of an inversion: “None of these poets surrenders himself to the mythology of his place but instead each subdues the place to become an element in his own private mythology.”108 To this he adds more darkly: “They may be preyed upon in life by the consequences of living on this island now, but their art is a mode of play to outface the predatory circumstances”109—a sentence which suggests that the quasi‐mystical associations of the Irish landscape may be less apparent to Ulster Protestants than to Ulster Catholics for reasons that Heaney made evident at about the same time in his essay “Feeling into Words” (best regarded, perhaps, as a gloss on the “Bog Poems” with their invocation of the Irish landscape as a female goddess with sacrificial appetites):110 What we have is the tail‐end of a struggle in a province between territorial piety and imperial power. Heaney, “The Sense of Place,” 138; 141. Heaney, “The Sense of Place,” 141. 107 Heaney, “The Sense of Place,” 141. 108 Heaney, “The Sense of Place,” 148. 109 Heaney, “The Sense of Place,” 148. 110 Heaney, “Feeling into Words.” Mahon’s closing lines “Let him revise / His insolent ontology” in the title poem of the collection Lives (1972) have obvious bearing on the matter—the more since the poem was dedicated to Seamus Heaney and apparently written in response to his poem “Bogland” whose central tenets it contests. See Derek Mahon, Selected Poems, 1991, 38. Also Peter Denman, “Know the One? Insolent Ontology and Mahon’s Revisions,” Irish University Review [Derek Mahon Special Number] 24, 1 (1994): 27‐37. 105 106
[133]
Now I realise that this idiom is remote from the agnostic world of economic interest whose iron hand operates in the velvet glove of “talks between elected representatives” […] but it is not remote from the psychology of the Irishmen and Ulstermen who do the killing, and not remote from the bankrupt psychology and mythologies implicit in the terms Irish Catholic and Ulster Protestant.111
Bankrupt they may be, but they do correspond in Northern Irish society to real distinctions, and distinctions unlikely to be obliterated by the successful implantation of Gaelic‐Catholic ideas about a sacramental landscape in the brains of Northern Protestants of a putatively ‘agnostic’ turn of mind. It is questionable, moreover, if Heaney’s metaphysics of landscape are robust enough to survive the cosmopolitan stretches of his own career. Seeing Things and The Spirit Level are brilliant exercises in a metaphysics of disbelief that supercedes conventional dogmas of racial myth or resurrection whether rooted in the green hills of Erin or a “placeless heaven.” In 1977 John Hewitt was the chief example of an Irish poet who had an ‘agnostic’ view of the Irish landscape—as that word was used by Heaney to designate ignorance of or indifference to Irish racial memory—while still laying claim to it in the communal spirit of a ‘rooted’ colonist and a romantic naturalist. In “The Sense of Place” Heaney greets Hewitt rather stiffly as “another poet of our places,”112 before moving on to demonstrate that he possesses “another vocabulary and another mode of understanding” from the Irish poets to whom “sense of place” involves a “mystical apprehension.”113 Hewitt looks at the world “now with the analytic and profane eye of a man of the left, now with the affectionate and feeling eye of ‘an Ulsterman of planter stock,’” and for him the native’s “sacral understandings” are consequently inaccessible. Instead, the
Heaney, “Feeling into Words,” 57. Heaney, “The Sense of Place,” 145. 113 Heaney, “The Sense of Place,” 147. 111 112
[134]
meaning of the countryside reveals itself merely as “the accretions of human memory and human association.”114 The trouble with Hewitt is that he cannot help being English. His civilised mind takes its temper from a political, literary and religious tradition that is English, but his instincts, his eye and ear, are tutored by the Ulster landscape, and it is in the rag‐and‐ bone shop of the instincts that a poetry begins and ends, though it can raise itself by the ladders of intelligence towards a platform and a politics.115
Hewitt, in short, fails to listen to the Gaelic meanings communicated by the landscape and to that extent he is a politician, not a poet.116 Heaney’s notion of the particular resonance of the Irish landscape as a manuscript inscribed with mythical and historical meanings is connected with an onomastic tradition practised in middle‐Irish texts of a genre known as dinnscenchas.117 The foremost example of this genre is the Accallamh Senorach [Contention of the Ancients], a “colloquy” in which St. Patrick and the Fenian hero Oisín review the mythic associations of each place they visit as they travel throughout Ireland. This tradition is reflected in Heaney’s contention early in the lecture that the landscape of Gaelic Ireland was “sacramental, instinct with signs, implying a system of reality beyond the visible realities.”118 In a gesture that seemed required by the personal dimension of the Heaney, “The Sense of Place,” 147. Heaney, “The Sense of Place,” 148. 116 Yeats is made to assist at this excommunication by virtue of the phrase about “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart” quoted from “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” 117 The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature, ed. Robert Welch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Dinnscenchas is defined as a body of toponymic lore preserved abundantly in early Irish writings, more specifically referring to the large corpus of this kind assembled in the eleventh or twelfth century and known as Dinnshenchas Erenn. 118 Heaney, “The Sense of Place,” 132. 114 115
[135]
argument, he supplied a testimony from his own experience that such things can still be felt by Irishmen today: Only thirty years ago, and thirty miles from Belfast, I think I experienced this kind of world vestigially and as a result may have retained some vestigial sense of place as it was experienced in the older dispensation.119
Thirty years ago was 1947, when Heaney was eight years old and therefore the experience was somewhat comparable with events that overtook William Wordsworth in the “seedtime” of his soul in the Lake District. There is a definite intimation here of a poetic Prelude that never quite got written. Without questioning the authenticity of that experience, it may be felt that this amalgam of Celtic scholarship and personal remembrance is more the product of contemporary cultural politics in the late 1970s than proof‐positive of the continuity of mythological consciousness in the minds of Irishmen throughout the ages. It is, at any rate, a potent combination and one that established the governing note of cultural credulity which informed a good deal of Irish criticism for several decades after. 5 In “Frontiers of Writing,”120 Heaney addressed the cultural problems of Northern Ireland with great directness—it was as if he had decided to lay his cards on the table before quitting the Oxford Chair of Poetry. What he offered at the conclusion of his lecture was an personal view of the matter, giving full cognisance to the dual nature of his cultural formation, insisting
Heaney, “The Sense of Place,” 132; also cited in Stan Smith, “Seamus Heaney: The Distance Between,” The Chosen Ground: Essays on the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland, ed. Neil Corcoran. (Brigend: Seren Books; Dufour 1992) 39. 120 Heaney, “Frontiers of Writing,” 186‐203. 119
[136]
on the importance of that bi‐focal vision as an ingredient of the situation and a key to its solution. There is nothing extraordinary about the challenge to be in two minds. If, for example, there was something exacerbating, there was still nothing deleterious to my sense of Irishness in the fact that I grew up in the minority in Northern Ireland and was educated within the dominant British culture.…That culture is one of the places where we live. It’s in the language. And it’s where the mind of many in the republic lives also.121
The ensuing admonition to Ulster Unionists to “make a corresponding effort at two‐mindedness” and so “re‐enter the whole country of Ireland imaginatively, but not necessarily constitutionally, by the northern point of the quincunx”122—an arcanity which we will examine later—ought not to distract us from the fact that this was something of a challenge to those nationalists who see ‘deleteriousness’ in every fissure of Anglo‐ Irish relations. Heaney knows the effect of that outlook very well: in the introduction to his more recent translation of Beowulf he gave an account of it, incidentally mapping out his own escape‐route from the kind of intellectual servitude it represented. There he tells how he had learned the Irish language at his Northern Irish Catholic school (St. Columb’s, Derry) and “lived within a cultural and ideological frame that regarded it as the language that I should by rights have been speaking but I had been robbed of.”123 In consequence, he tended to conceive of English and Irish as adversarial tongues, as either/or conditions rather than both/and, and this was an attitude that for a long time hampered the development of a more confident and creative way of dealing with the whole vexed question—the question, that is, of the relationship
Heaney, “Frontiers of Writing,” 202. Heaney, “Frontiers of Writing,” 202. 123 Heaney, “Introduction: about this translation,” xxiii‐iv. 121 122
[137]
between nationality, language, history and literary tradition in Ireland.124
Heaney next relates how he glimpsed “the possibility of release from this kind of cultural determination” in the lectures of Professor John Braidwood, then holder of the Chair of English at the Queen’s University, Belfast.125 In linking the word “whiskey” (derived from Irish uisce) with the River Usk in England, Braidwood released in Heaney’s mind a sort of “river of rivers issuing from a pristine Celto‐British Land of Cockaigne, a riverrun of Finnegans Wakespeak pouring out of the cleft rock of some prepolitical, prelapsarian, urphilological Big Rock Candy Mountain.”126 Not surprisingly, that experience had “a wonderful sweetening effect” on the poet—not merely in itself but as suggesting a “loophole, an escape route from what John Montague has called ‘the partitioned intellect,’ away into some unpartitioned linguistic country, a region where one’s language would not be simply a badge of ethnicity or a matter of cultural preference or an official imposition, but an entry into further language.”127 At the hour when Heaney delivered “The Frontiers of Writing,” the IRA cease‐fire of 1994 lay in the near future. The terms of that cease‐fire, later to be spelt out in the Belfast Agreement of 1998 (after painful indecision) centrally concerned an attitude towards either culture—Irish and British—which goes by the name of “parity of esteem.” In such a climate of debate, Heaney had good cause to return to his old differences with the Ulster regionalist John Hewitt whom he Heaney, “Introduction: about this translation,” xxiii‐iv. Braidwood’s conception of Hiberno‐English as a perpetuation of the rich language of Shakespeare has been quoted by Benedict Kiely: “Today, probably, only the Irishman, especially the southern Irishman, and some Welshmen, work in the Elizabethan linguistic, mastering the language, where the rest of us, with pusillanimous notions of corrections and good taste hammered into us at school, let the language master us.” “Dialect and Literature,” A Raid into Dark Corners and Other Essays (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999) 235. 126 Heaney, “Introduction: about this translation,” xxiv. 127 Heaney, “Introduction: about this translation,” xxv. 124 125
[138]
now reproached for his lack of empathy with the Gaelic culture of Ireland which, for Heaney, is so much part and parcel of the landscape that Hewitt loved. It is for this reason that he complains that for Hewitt “the fact that Gaelic was a dying language was enough for [him] to absolve himself of any imaginative obligation towards the Gaelic order.”128 This is not an entirely just complaint. After all, the freedom not to engage with mystical notions of land, language, myth and sovereignty as prescribed in “The Sense of Place” is as much an ingredient of ‘unhindered’ imagination in Ireland as the contrary.129 Heaney is on stronger ground where he accuses Hewitt of letting his sense of cultural diversity “congeal into a red and green map”130—though when he absolves MacNeice from such charges with the remark that “his dwelling in England gave him a critical perspective on the peculiar Britishness of that first northern environment,”131 he forgets that a London address renders it nugatory whether Ireland is united or not. On this occasion, Heaney offers a remorselessly political interpretation of Hewitt’s regionalism which, he says, “suited the feeling of possession and independence of the empowered Protestants with their own Parliament and fail‐safe majority at Stormont more than it could ever suit the sense of dispossession and political marginalisation of the Catholics.”132 It is noteworthy that, as in “The Sense of Place,” dispossession and empowerment are the ruling terms in this discourse.) [H]e could not include the Irish dimension in anything other than in an underprivileged way. The pre‐eminence, as he saw it, of the British intellectual tradition, the obscurantism as he saw it, of the Roman Catholic church and the logic of his colonial trope which naturally validated the culture of the
Heaney, “Frontiers of Writing,” 196. For Heaney’s use of “unhindered,” see the close of his essay on John Clare, “John Clare’s Prog.” 130 Heaney, “Frontiers of Writing,” 199. 131 Heaney, “Frontiers of Writing,” 199. 132 Heaney, “Frontiers of Writing,” 195. 128 129
[139]
colonising power over that of the native—all this meant that he stood his ground in the North as a resolute democrat, with a vision of the just society based on regional loyalties, but a vision that was slightly Nelson‐eyed, as it were, more capable of seeing over the water than over the border.133
Given those failings, Heaney regards Hewitt as incapable of assisting the Ulster Unionists to ‘re‐enter’ Ireland from the north‐east corner. Instead, he advocates Louis MacNeice as their proper guide (a suggestion more practical in the classroom than the hustings). Heaney compares the two explicitly when he calls Hewitt “the projector of a Northern Ireland that failed to develop” and MacNeice as “the sponsor of one struggling to be born”—one, that is, “in which allowances for the priority of some of its citizens’” Irishness would not prejudice the rights of others’ Britishness.134 In taking the liberty of suggesting to Ulster Protestants (since that is what is really at issue) which modern poet they should elect as laureate, Heaney is paradoxically stepping back into the Ulster regionalist camp. At the same time, the author of “Frontiers of Writing” comes equipped with a symbolic diagram which assigns to Ulster writing its proper place in the wider design of all‐Ireland culture. This is what Heaney calls the quincunx—a “poetic diagram” by means of which he aims “to sketch the shape of an integrated literary tradition” and hence “to bring the frontiers of the country into alignment with the frontiers of writing.”135 He also represents it as a symbolic ordering of Ireland that admits hope for the evolution of a political order, one tolerant of difference and capable of metamorphoses within all the multivalent possibilities of Irishness, Britishness, Europeanness, planetariness, creatureliness, whatever.136 Heaney, “Frontiers of Writing,” 195. Heaney, “Frontiers of Writing,” 199. 135 Heaney, “Frontiers of Writing,” 199. 136 Heaney, “Frontiers of Writing,” 200. 133 134
[140]
Such a diagram is obviously rich in multi‐cultural overtones, but it is also essentially a nationalist device in that it is designed to display the quarterings of an integrated Irish nation as much as an integrated Irish literature and culture. According to the dictionary, quincunx means “a disposition of five objects so placed that four occupy the corners, and the fifth the centre of a square or rectangle.” It is a somewhat improbable term to use as the keystone in a homily addressed to the Unionists of Northern Ireland and in choosing it Heaney manages to sound unwontedly hieratic, even Yeatsian. In evoking it, however, he stands in direct line of descent from the mythic geographers associated with the Crane Bag journal and the Field Day Company who espouse the notion of a ‘fifth province’ as an emblem for the quasi‐mystical integrity of Ireland. This sort of mapping of the cultural ingredients perhaps began when F. S. L. Lyons described the Irish world as a quaternion consisting of four elements: Gaelic, English, Anglo‐ Irish and Ulster Protestant. In Culture and Anarchy in Ireland 1890‐1939, first given as the Ford Lectures at Oxford in 1978,137 Lyons offered the pessimistic notion that culture is anarchy in Ireland (to the contrary of Matthew Arnold’s formulation of the matter) because of “the collision within a small and intimate island of seemingly irreconcilable cultures, unable to live together or to live apart, caught inextricably in the web of their tragic history.”138 The view has of course been challenged by many who consider that the several traditions living in Ireland are perfectly capable of peaceful co‐existence if only a political solution can be worked out between them. Heaney’s quincunx actually proposes such a solution, though in practice it involves an acceptance of the centrality of the Gaelic element, just as every Irish nationalist proposal of the kind has done since the
F.S.L. Lyons, Culture and Anarchy in Ireland 1890‐1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). 138 Quoted in Roy Foster, “Varieties of Irishness,” [Chap. 2], Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish History and English History (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 1993) 22. 137
[141]
beginning of the century—a pattern established by Douglas Hyde in his 1892 lecture on “The Necessity for the Deanglicisation of Ireland.”139 Heaney’s quincunx, though invoking a novel term, derives from a series of reflections on the cultural and political arrangements in Gaelic Ireland which begins with Eoin MacNeill’s study of early‐Irish polity in Phases of Irish History. In it he gave an account of the provincial divisions of the country in answer to the thorny question why the provinces of Ireland have been for so long called cuigí (fifths) when in fact there are only four of them. According to MacNeill, the division of Ireland into provincial kingships bonded by a central monarchy known collectively as the Pentarchy is “the oldest certain fact in the political history of Ireland.”140 For subsequent students of the matter that five‐fold arrangement came to take on a cosmographic aspect. In 1961 A. D. Rees and R. B. Rees asserted that “the pattern of a central province enclosed by four others in representing the cardinal points cannot be explained otherwise than as a historical reflex of an ancient cosmographic schema,” going on to cite Chinese and other texts in support of their contention.141 Writing in a more strictly historiographical vein, the Celtic scholar Prionsias Mac Cana wrote in 1978: [T]he atrophy of the archetypal symbolism of the centre and the cosmographic vision of totality of which it is a part signifies the collapse of a subtle equilibrium […] that was […] already old when the Celtic peoples were born. This perhaps more than any other single event or innovation marks the end of traditional
See my essay “On the Necessity for De‐Hydifying Irish Literature,” New Hibernia Review 4.1 (Spring 2000): 23‐44. 140 Eoin MacNeill, Phases of Irish History (Dublin: M. H. Gill, 1919; facs. rpr. 1968) 101. Cf. “The details of tradition, upon examination, indicate that the Pentarchy preceded the Monarchy and lasted for a long time, long enough to become the chief outstanding fact in tradition as regards the internal political state of Ireland in the early Celtic period” (102). 141 Alwyn David Rees and Brinley Roderick Rees, Celtic Heritage: Ancient Tradition in Ireland and Wales (London: Thames & Hudson, 1961; 1971) 148. 139
[142]
Irish society and—from the ideological point of view—the reversion from order to chaos.142
In spite of the elegiac note of this, the idea that ancient Ireland had exhibited unity‐amid‐diversity in the degree that separate kingdoms which participated in no overtly ‘united’ political arrangements were actually bonded by the shared belief in a mythic order that involved an invisible ‘central fifth’ took possession of nationalist intellectuals in the 1980s. It did so for the obvious reason that such a notion re‐established the primacy of the national idea amid the cultural pluralities which were then being preached in pointedly secular terms by revision historians. The ‘fifth province’ was the form in which cultural nationalists espoused a vision of the idea of “the body of the country”—in Heaney’s sexualised phrase—without reverting to a baldly geo‐political form of irredentist nationalism. It was this mythic geography that Seamus Heaney reshaped to form the quincunx diagram that he serves as the organising idea in his Oxford lecture on “Frontiers of Writing.” It is a pedigree which, unfortunately, renders it more persuasive and more useful for nationalists attempting to reconfigure their conception of the sort of unity that might prevail in a united Ireland than Unionists seeking how to bring an end to the ‘war’ in Northern Ireland without abandoning their loyalty to British institutions. That the idea met with such a happy reception at Oxford is testimony to the fact that there are probably more Irish nationalists carrying British passports today than living in Ireland so far as political convictions are concerned. In that sense postcolonial principles are part and parcel of contemporary British culture, Northern Ireland therefore representing little more than an awkward constitutional obligation. Heaney’s quincunx permits him to subordinate the Ulster province to an all‐Ireland schema of cultural varieties much as 142
Prionsias Mac Cana, “Early Irish Ideology and the Concept of Unity,” in The Irish Mind, ed. Richard Kearney (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1985) 78.
[143]
his “Sense of Place” lecture postulated a quasi‐mystical relation to the landscape which might be shared by all Irish writers— north or south—who are in touch with the rhythms of the Irish mind. In both of these responses to what he has recently called “the whole vexed question of nationality, language, history and literary tradition in Ireland,”143 he substituted a national framework for the regionalist one that he had espoused in his earliest critical writings. At the same time, he opens the question whether his version of Irish literary nationalism is not in fact a regionalism and whether perhaps Irish national literature in the English language is not finally a regional literature. If so, Geoffrey Grigson is answered: there is nothing incompetent about literary regionalism nor limited about its capacity to dominate the heartlands of English literature when the Ulster regionalists become the establishment at Oxford.
143
Heaney, “Introduction: about this translation,” xxiii‐iv.
[144]
D.S. Marriott
Veil, No.2 The time is the present still yet we watch the shadow lengthen on the earth which carries this unmoving model of itself but walk from here with the sunrise and time shall be with us (from “Moving Parts”)1
When the shadows do indeed lengthen, confuting the indirectness and elusiveness of time’s turning in a “present” instance, it is the texture of the earth itself that reveals the necessity of being, specific in its appearing, a model of revelation finally done. In vignettes such as these, viewed through the perspective of a knowing post‐Romantic irony, one sees how the coupling of time and being has long been key to the work of the English poet, Andrew Crozier. It is not so much a theme as a journey: the journey of the self’s discrete presence through the simulacra of language towards the world, but a 1 All references to “The Veil Poem” are taken from Andrew Crozier, All Where Each Is (London; Berkeley: Agneau 2/ Allardyce, Barnett, 1985. Lewes, Agneau 2: 1982). Hereafter AW with page number. The epigraph is taken from Crozier, AW, 201.
[145]
world that is always the time and space of near night, of diurnal darkness or morning pall. What characterises this poetry is, then, not so much the dark romantic melancholy of a walk through the rubble of history, but a marked awareness driven by a separation from nature—the forgetting of nature in the self—whose trace can only be preserved by a confused and ungainly retreat into myth, or by moments that remain, each in turn, diminished and unfulfilled. By this I mean that this poetry is not about awe and submission in the face of nature, but about what happens when the mind is “overwhelmed by / the sense of it”; when the “earth which carries this” entails no unified, harmonious relationship to past, present and future; and grounds neither what dwells, nor the lived dimension of the future as promise, only the dismal re‐experience of the event itself.2 If the earth is bound to the mimesis of itself (the “model”), time shall be with us only insofar as our shadows lengthen, blinded by the histories which define us, and from which there is no escape. By this emphasis on time as distance, as routinely not with us, the poetry of Andrew Crozier is an attempt to remember the remote occasions of a shared world. It is a world for which we need time to savour and to know. In this sense the poetry sets out to destructure and unground any metaphysics of nature that opposes it to the lived and living time of Dasein. The analysis of Dasein that one finds here is not so much a concern with the transcendental horizon of temporality, but with time stratified; more precisely, with those moments that lift and drift in scant light and then fall again; for there is no authentic moment for this “present” apart from melancholy hope. The things that we touch scorch us by trailing lines of fire. Or: the models we project as the redeeming reunion of nature and history are myths of reason that have been used to devastate 2 Crozier, AW, 119. In my reading I have concentrated on Dasein but one could also read the poem as an ironic comment on the romantic sublime, up to and including Kant’s comments on the veil of Isis in The Critique of Judgement and Murray Abrams’ canonical envisioning in The Mirror and the Lamp.
[146]
the earth. In “The Veil Poem,” a work midway in the corpus, this theme takes on its most negative guise. In the dark there is a fretwork that reveals a lightness beside it, gradually a tree stands out from the hedge and the rest of the garden, the sky lightens and bleeds off at the edges, quite sharp but not definite, the blueness has the frequency of space and there is nothing else but whatever has brought this tree here, quite taut but flowing smoothly through its changes I know it again and again and see how set in one place as it is and small and fragile I cannot dominate it, in the dark or with my eyelids closed it will score my face. Along a bright corridor the way turns or is transected and is lost in shadow, framed by a black latticed screen its light foreshortened, lacking depth. There is no radiant source within these walls, they hold the sunlight to define their intricate arcing.3
When I first read this poem in 1984, I thought that the poem was a struggle to envisage a modality of intimacy pressing the self into careers of stance without the swerving distance of myth or allegory rendering abstract the ‘presence’ in the world evoked by the poem. This reading—titled “The Swerves of Distance”—now has too optimistic an aftertaste.4 I overlooked how being and nature appear both divided and in double form to the nihilism facing them, as the price for any ontological figuration of nature, and, more importantly, the figure of a standing reserve internal to the dialectic of romanticism at the heart of Crozier’s work. I also overlooked how the veil obscuring the world of things was linked to the veil of 3 Crozier, AW, 114. 4 D.S. Marriott, “The Swerves of Distance,” Archeus (1986).
[147]
femininity, defined in the poem as “withholding / a unique gift of truth.”5 It is this ‘natural’ disguise whose meaning becomes a counterpart to the art of semblance which the mind, hemmed in by the press of a wish to know and capture the texture of things, gradually discovers to be its own aggrieved tenancy. What veils the veil is the always impotent witnessing—”I cannot dominate it”—of word, judgement, and look. What seeps and bleeds, I now realize, is the forced and distorted work of the unhomely, and one whose characteristic “picture”—the feminization of nature and the naturalization of the feminine—can only echo and repeat the sexual division of nature and reason. That said, in “The Veil Poem,” sexual difference is also evoked to unground any metaphysics of separation. Or: Geschlecht is also originary to Dasein. This essay is, then, a turning back the better to see what could not be seen in 1984. What hides in darkness and what truths it veils. Which side of these doors am I? This arch might be the sky that bends over us beneath which is our home, it is a wall and outer skin beyond which we expire like the breeze at evening.6
“The Veil Poem,” in its repetitions and measure, is an attempt to write a poetry of transience. As the persona of the poem stands listening or remembering walks through the Sussex countryside, looking into the core of it, all the landscapes and things he finds there, and keeps finding, become emblems of time as self‐alienated nature, so much so that the light coming down carries a trace, not so much of dynamis or energia, but of aporia. More accurately, the stepping out in outward, in the middle distance, is also a kind of dialectical return, and the narrative of time and memory at one remove from the referent
5 Crozier, AW, 116. 6 Crozier, AW, 115.
[148]
as semblance. This is a world neither petrified in facticity, nor redeemed as facticity, but a walking onward in which light is the simplest intimation of transience, of vanishing. Images of bird and leaf, grass and hedge, may establish natural nomenclature, but the self that brushes lightly past walks in the dark, tracing out its own line of separation. The serial spacings of the line are the hinge of this difference in the very act of naming. And yet, what is perceived resonates. What is perceived is the earthly insistence of life, the pulse in the blood (figured later on in the poem as the carnal anti‐spirit of nature). That said, the ‘way back’ seems to me to be neither an appeal to natural beauty, nor to romantic nature, but to the privilege of being’s own manifest simulacrum inscribed in the way we use language to return to the intricacy of ‘is.’ The way back is indeed perilous even if the eye and mind, memory and identity, are unfailing. Accordingly, if perception involves questions of nomination and commencement, it is language that conveys the impression of things in the finitude that arcs from word to states of being. “The Veil Poem” defines, in opposing ways, the relation between sign and percept as one of homelessness and repetition, depiction and the temporality of vision. One glimpses here minor traces of Crozier’s long fascination with impressionist painting and aesthetics. That is, how the brushstrokes reconnoitre the hard edges of objects, but in a way that does not name but convey—without unveiling— the light and colour of semblance. Crozier’s interest in latency, in the somewhat ominous ways in which latent meanings turn and bend away from us, free from the authority of form and the ground of metaphysics, I find to be very powerful. To read this poetry is to be aware of a strong obscurity, that is, a certain dimness in the everyday meaning of such things as love, work, and pleasure, as events of knowledge. But one also hears a certain mystery, a something in which poetry is once again originary and revelatory. Û [149]
The mystery of “The Veil Poem” can be seen in the walker’s fateful movement between the “intricate arching” and the “last arch,” or between the transience that transmutes and the transience framed by a myth of origin. The dialectic of romanticism referred to above is deeply embedded in this shift between foundations and abysses, between the earth as world, and the strife that centres within and between nature and Dasein. The moment wherein the “I cannot dominate it” emerges as a tear in the world is to encounter this dialectic in its sharpest form: the struggle to instate meaningful form upon the earth all the while knowing the referent is not how being appears, and that the ruins of history, for lack of a better term, have themselves fallen victim to the dominations of artifice: “The Veil Poem” is imbued with this dialectic. The poet steps out into the conjuncture of earth and world—what does he find? The continuity of a peculiarly English melancholy? The dialectical completion of modernity in the literal non‐identity of capital and nature? Let’s say no in both cases because both, frankly, remain romantically entwined with the negative as crisis. In my reading of “The Veil Poem,” the voice remains hesitant, conscious of lack as its own knowledge and personal destiny. But it is precisely here that the poem gestures dialectically to the “last” topography of the arch. Only from this fragmentary injury, from a stance of belatedness, can the arch become transcendent. But even this is much too Hegelian. In “The Veil Poem” transience does not disappear from the horizon of being, and its restlessness is not some kind of dying. Think, rather, of that which must be kept veiled so as to be made more bearable, in the face of which history and aesthetics are both rendered impotent, insubstantial. The image I have in mind here is one of light falling, in separation, farther from the threshold of authentic community but beyond alienation. For me, the veil of sublimity does not open out onto transcendence because the inauguration of self occurs in the intimacy of a history of a return without sojourn. This correspondence emerges in the poem as one of location: the self [150]
that moves here is shaped by the broad surround, by the beings that force us to confront our desperate insecurities and incipient resentments. As such, the stance of the poem is one of work and reflection registering a suspension and distrust of the immediate in order to assume the guardianship of what it determines: “it has placed me.”7 Place is where one wants to be, outside in the utterance, but one nearly always ends up alone when faced with the importance of the things that matter. Which, by the way, should not be confused as an appeal to aesthetic stability or instrumentalization—the reproduction of the familiar or same—in the work of the culture industry. (Crozier has always been unflinchingly smart, in fact, about the institution of poetry as a mirror to capital.) Equally, however, the chronicle of the “home” in the poem is not simply some mythic community conjoined with creation in some English idyll. Too many readers of Crozier have reduced his work to pastoral, I think. No, what the poem is suggesting is the lack of any correspondence between the dwelling of the word and of history across the ages of the home. Instead, we are left with an anxiety about origin, and one that cannot be sublated by the promise of a future beyond the homelessness of facticity as negation. Better put, in “The Veil Poem” the self is not in exile from a disenfranchised world of nature, nor is the poem, intermittently, driven by the eschatological glimpse for an immemorial past. There is no reconciliation and no catastrophe. There is only the lone dweller standing humbly in the flow, and going on because this is the fate of his situation. I would like to pursue the aura of this figure for just a touch further. In “The Veil Poem” there are the following lines: Here at the centre of every intersecting circle each infinite yet wholly itself whichever way you turn a way is offered for you to carry yourself 8
7 Crozier, AW, 115. 8 Crozier, AW, 117.
[151]
Once again the figure of an intersecting arc manifests itself, but once again the excursus is not yet a complete or terminal process. The relation between completion and grounding is one carried but one never, finally, delivered. In fact, the way we turn is paradoxically nothing but our separation from each monadic moment closed to the artifice of completion, and yet ever centred on the purviews of discovery worth noticing. The actuality of the world as something as remains empty, nonoccupiable. This “impasse” which the poem announces and concedes is that of history mimicking nature, for what shines in the arc is only the echo of a mimesis without home, no longer joined in spirit to natural history or a history of being. Accordingly, at each diurnal arc a hanging lamp mimics our sun
For “[t]here is no radiant source within / these walls” and what “echoes prodigally down the corridor” is the failure of all metaphysics to unveil Being.9 All we are left with is a darkness over the horizon, not to mention “blood, shit, and pus.”10 These are the organic residues of meaning and subjectivity whose “knowledge / will inundate you unless it is held,” inaugural and valedictory as an utterance of being wholly itself.11
9 Crozier, AW, 114, 116. 10 Crozier, AW, 119. 11 Crozier, AW, 117.
[152]
Stephen Thomson
The Forlorn Ear of Jeff Hilson Jute.—Are you jeff? Mutt.—Somehards. Jute.—But you are not jeffmute? Mutt.—Noho. Only an utterer.1 […] the wren which is a common stutterer and nothin but a tweeny which got caught up in a bush singing one of the f‐family2
Orphans Jeff Hilson reads with passion and humour, but also with what looks like concern: the furrowed brow, the forlorn, puzzled catch in the voice. The manner is appropriate to verse that is engaged without being clamorous or self‐aggrandizing. It does not come armed with a grand political agenda, or claim to change anything. But it is endlessly involved. It rakes over the detritus of everyday life, favouring small things, lost things, things caught in crevices, or hiding under shrubs. Also in the mix are curiosities culled from botany, ornithology, history, architecture and so forth. The verse flits from one to the other,
1 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber, 1975; repr. 1991) 16. 2 Jeff Hilson, stretchers (Hastings: Reality Street, 2006) 52.
[153]
veering in the process from one register to another, from silly to doleful to naïve to lewd. But over each change hovers an abiding perplexity, a sense that the verse itself cannot quite believe it is saying this. This forlorn quality itself seems to point not so much to ‘voice’ as to the ear that heard the phrases in the first place—and continues to hear them—as lost, adrift, stray. There is a danger in this thumbnail sketch of painting Hilson as a sort of literary Womble,3 or of implying that his verse is trivial or whimsical. In the polarised world of contemporary poetry, the ‘linguistically innovative’ or (loosely) Modernist tradition is so often justified in terms of weightiness or political relevance. Though poetry that deals in ‘lightness’ may be much appreciated, as is the case with stretchers or the work of Tim Atkins or Mike Weller, there seems to be a problem for critical discourse in writing up this quality as something other than insubstantiality. Edmund Hardy’s review of stretchers on poetry website Intercapillary Space makes the point by reading Hilson— misguidedly to these ears—through Heidegger.4 This approach seems to me to suggest a sort of metaphysical neediness; an embarrassment of criticism faced with the absence of a grand narrative with which to gloss (over) the errant and paratactic. But if Hilson’s verse is about anything, it is about doing justice to the lostness and naivety of the voices it relays. There are phrases culled from philosophers in stretchers, but they do not take the guise of overmastering philosophical utterance. Nor do they offer themselves as keys, conferring gravity or coherence. For stretchers is interested in the parts of official languages that threaten to uncouple them from their propositional moorings, and lead them to stray. Hilson’s little phrases, coming from here, there and everywhere, remain quite lost. There is a voice
3 The reference is to the oversized rodent squatters of Wimbledon Common who found uses for “things that the everyday folks leave behind.” They first appeared in books by Elisabeth Beresford and subsequently became famous in the 1970s as stop‐motion animations broadcast by the BBC. Hardy, “Jeff Hilson, stretchers,” Intercapillary Space 4 Edmund http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2006/08/jeff‐hilson‐stretchers.html
[154]
speaking them—inevitably, in the barest and most implicit sense—but it does not claim mastery of them in the form of congruence with a source. It does not, with magnanimous violence, claim community with these other (lost) voices. Indeed, it remains, in an important sense, outside them, in the position of one hearing them for the first time, in the “bewilderment of noise.”5 Hilson’s poetry, I am suggesting, is intensely aware of its found material, its little stray lines, as orphaned. The appearance of a thematics of orphanhood is not a cute incidental here. In the Platonic tradition, the written phrase is orphaned.6 Destitute of the logos (voice) supposed to have fathered them, poor little phrases are condemned to roam the streets repeating themselves inanely. Incapable in themselves of paraphrase or self‐explication, they are chronically prey to the dubiously interested philanthropy of citation. The phrase thus has a fundamental pathos springing from its inability to control its own meaning: unable to change its wording, it is equally unable to prevent itself from being made to mean what others want to make it mean. An important thread of poetic thinking has perhaps always held itself in an equivocal relation to this picture of language. For while poetry may be identified with more or less charismatic notions of an author, lyrical ‘I,’ or voice, it has also been the place where ideas of the autonomy of the word have periodically surfaced with the greatest insistence. Perhaps poetry could be seen with greater justice as the exemplary place of tension between these opposing forces. One way of thinking of the linguistic turn of Modernism would be as an intensification of this struggle. But if Modernism is cast as a change in attitude towards the Platonic view of language, the change does not take the form of a refutation. Rather
5 As the postface “How I wrote stretchers” explains, this phrase is taken from Antonin Artaud. Hilson, stretchers, 71. 6 See esp. “Phaedrus,” Plato I: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus, trans. Harold North Fowler (London: Heinemann, 1960) §275, 565‐7. See also Jacques Derrida, La dissemination (Paris: Seuil, 1972) 86‐7, 164‐8.
[155]
Modernism, according to this view, happens when poetry stops lamenting the orphanhood of the phrase, and instead accepts, generalises, and even celebrates it. The way the relationship to phrase as orphan is played out in poetry after Modernism is itself varied, and the basic point is perhaps best made negatively, by a comparison with a pre‐ Modern moment in the form of a couple of orphans from Matthew Arnold. In “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” Arnold bemoans the stasis of contemporary poetry but is unable to see his way out of the impasse. For Arnold, a “joyful sense of creative activity” entails wholeness; it is “a sense which a man of insight and conscience will prefer to what he might derive from a poor, starved, fragmentary, inadequate creation. And at some epochs no other creation is possible.”7 The “fragmentary” is thus something to be borne and can in no way (yet) furnish us with a coherent aesthetic. In the “Preface” to his Poems, the defective nature of the fragment is made even clearer: “We have good poems which seem to exist merely for the sake of single lines and passages; not for the sake of producing any total‐impression.”8 Arnold seems unable to contemplate that the “whole”—the ponderous demand for a whole—might be the problem, rather than the poor little ragged orphan line, however beautiful the latter may be. The sense of a missed opportunity here is all the more poignant when read against another ragged orphan in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” Against the “greatest nation in the world” rhetoric of Mr Roebuck, Arnold offers, in lieu of articulate argument, a little article torn in its entirety from the pages of The Times. The orphan‐killing orphan “Wragg” is a poor thing twice over, a rag torn from a rag; a mere fragment, matter‐of‐ fact, culled and mounted so as to accuse the complacent rhetoric that surrounds it. Arnold’s gloss on it is in large part an 7 Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” Essays in Criticism: First Series (The Shilling Edition. London: Macmillan, 1911) 40. 8 Matthew Arnold, “Preface,” The Poems of Matthew Arnold, 1840‐1867 (Oxford: Humphrey Milford, 1922) 7.
[156]
extended riff on the rhythmic and declamatory possibilities of the syllable “Wragg” itself. So, while the article is cited as a document, evidence for a critique, “Wragg” is mobilized in a “poetic” fashion. Here, Arnold is more “Modern” than in either his poetry or his view of poetry. There the single line accuses the inadequacy of the structure raised around it, but is ultimately held to blame.9 Here, a self‐thematisingly orphaned quotation performs a critical role of another order, one that will one day become available to poetry. If one is prepared to follow this notion thus far, one might well look toward a set of neatly moralized distinctions between different citational practices, according to their treatment of the orphan. Plausibly, one might say “The Waste Land” has corralled its textual urchins, sorted them out according to class origin, and set them to appropriate tasks in a well‐regulated workhouse. Conversely, wherever found material, or a fragment of the overheard bursts in undigested, with no attempt to smooth out the ragged edges, something different would happen. The orphan would be respected, let be, or given a decent home. This seems to be how Jeff Hilson asks us to read stretchers when he says, “They are tatters, ragged flags.”10 The raggedness of stretchers would lie in the acceptance of material as complete in its incompleteness, a refusal to reform it or make it whole. But Hilson also refuses the utopian piety ultimately implicit in such a claim. The point is made through another orphan (of sorts), who stands as something like the patron saint of stretchers: “I love the naïve language Twain gives Huck to use as it has no place in the world, no home.”11 There is no doubt that “Huck” is a trick of ventriloquism, and the object of patronage. But Hilson ‘loves’ his language none the less; indeed, precisely because its orphanhood is absolute. Crucially,
9 For some lovely and funny meditations on the possibilities of the single line drawn from canonical poetry see Peter Manson’s short essay “Let it be” at http://www.petermanson.com/Letitbe.htm 10 Hilson, stretchers, 72. 11 Hilson, stretchers, 75.
[157]
this love is not predicated on any presumption of authenticity.12 Using the phrase does not imply knowing where it comes from, or even that it had anywhere to come from. Huck’s quasi‐ orphan status as character is thus taken to stand for a more fundamental homelessness. This is what I love about stretchers too. They do not aspire to “a make‐you‐believe style.”13 They may be “poor little / open‐and‐shut things,” but only in the sense that their phrases are not in the fortunate position of “pictures / who have always allies.”14 Their forlorn articulation suggests a limit to the penetration of the ear that heard them. Phrases This is not to say that the provenance of phrases is a complete mystery. As Hilson’s essay suggests, “Each stretcher tells a story and each story contains many other stories.”15 But their coherence emerges only in flashes. One recurring source is nursery rhyme, and it seems very much to the point that this is a common, relatively disesteemed, and authorless source. One stretcher has an extended riff structured around “Mary, Mary, quite contrary” that drags in a bit of Eliot16 on the way, as well as some less easily identifiable matter: […] horsey horsey quite the compass see how my garboard strakes with a common or plot and it’s quite massive and hackly like all in rows […]17
12 Hilson does not discuss Twain’s “Explanatory” note where he seems to claim to faithfully transcribe authentic dialects. This note has always seemed to me, like the other paratextual matter of Huck Finn, teasingly equivocal. 13 Hilson, stretchers, 25. 14 Hilson, stretchers, 38. 15 Hilson, stretchers, 73. 16 The Eliot allusion is to “my garboard strake leaks” from “Marina.” 17 Hilson, stretchers, 18.
[158]
Hilson is quite unabashed at such silliness, and the effects of odd matter finding its way into these nursery rhythms can be very funny. But as the metrical template breaks down with “massive and hackly,” the verse is starting to look worried. This nursery‐rhythmed humour often has an undertow of consternation: the sudden interjection “yes sir yes sir I am full of wool” replies with dreadful sincerity to a question one can only guess at but it sounds importuned.18 When Hilson reads such a passage, there is nothing sheepish in the voice. The lines seem to come from somewhere else, but there is no putting‐on of a voice to distance it from his utterance. His is the only voice present, but he seems, a little like an amnesiac, genuinely surprised to find himself saying it. The perplexity is, for the moment, his own. Who, in all seriousness could be saying “a wren / run under it jingle jingle all / the way home,” or “a bird with no name it / go pink pink”?19 Jeff Hilson is saying these lines, but with nothing like full utterance underwritten by a confident lyrical ‘I.’ In these examples we see, as well as found material, found rhythms, producing longer riffs. A characteristically peevish stretcher devoted to the numbness of lottery success, and crying on Christmas day, is in places metrically uncertain, but then resolves in places into thumping repetitions: “my lucky break / my lucky break,” and “his / lucky dip (his lucky dip,” and their template, “on / xmas day on xmas day.” At one point it threatens to burst into the galumphing stomp of Kipling’s Barrack‐Room Ballads or Henley’s In Hospital:20 m carroll he was lost count of when he was on xmas day when he was the biggest ever swiggin’ on a empty lanson at
18 Hilson, stretchers, 13. 19 Hilson, stretchers, 23, 32. 20 Rudyard Kipling, Barrack‐Room Ballads (1892); W.E. Henley, In Hospital (1873‐5).
[159]
the institute of winnin’ 21
Sometimes a phrase will seed a more extended thematic riff. The interjection “oh I am dishy” would be funny almost anywhere.22 Certainly, the lyrical ‘I’ should not speak of itself in such terms. Having committed such an indiscretion, the only thing for it is to dig deeper: see how I am the special our daily order is a beef with stella stella is meltdown stella is good morning and an only voice23
This lighting‐up of phrases and propulsive use of rhythm are perhaps two reasons why this sort of poetry (cut‐up, paratactic) benefits from performance. As the emergence of phrases and metrical order from a welter of less‐well grasped matter is a condition of all poetry heard for the first time, performance levels the playing field. Or, to put this the other way round, stretchers dispense with straightforward narrative because they are simply more interested in what the ‘secondary’ qualities of language do anyway as soon as propositional vigilance nods. Even so, stretchers do promise to tell stories, and the identification of a source and the restoration of some occulted coherence remain teasing possibilities. Stories One question is, do you want to know the source or underlying narrative (if such there be)? And after such knowledge, what forgiveness? The “m carroll” poem quoted above name‐checks the eponymous ne’er‐do‐well, dole‐scamming lottery winner who was widely vilified for not deserving to win the most
21 Hilson, stretchers, 50. 22 Hilson, stretchers, 25. 23 Hilson, stretchers, 25.
[160]
random of games of chance. But is this the main thing to know about the poem? For me, the metrical effects noted above are what ‘makes’ it. A more equivocal example would be “…do re mi in pup tents.”24 Here, one might surmise, a confused bar‐ room scene, with music, veers into a ruined barn, thence to a square where French movies are watched, before descending into a fugue of single words cut from the rest of the poem. But the effect seems to be all about repetition of words at different points in lines. …do re mi in pup tents bill sang notes on tap so known I saw him sway o wise bill smith the average man with marks which whisperin bill (the barroom floor the shout) where’s bill smith is in pup tents packed
There may be a hint that the verse offers itself as a musical score: “(do re mi in / each fourth line a simple / cipher.” “Bill” becomes on this reading almost an autonomous syllable—like Arnold’s “Wragg”—that forces itself out from time to time, puncturing and punctuating the verse, syncopating the beat. The repeated “bill” is on one level an anchor of ordinariness in this confusion of singing, whispering and shouting, yet also inarticulate, uncommunicative. The verse sways round bill as if drunk. When the question implied in a repetition is brought out, the equally repetitious answer is accented with exasperation or lament: “where’s bill smith is in pup / tents packed.” The ending comes back to the confusion of the start, only speeding up into a sort of fugue, like the disintegration of memory cast as the last inches of film running off the spool revealing itself to be only frames:
24 Hilson, stretchers, 34.
[161]
do re mi in pup tents bill barn bill grinnin keys with stuff in old french and english bill just underneath…
Counter to the convivial notion of music in tents and bars (“bill he touched the keys”), there may be a suggestion here that bill lies dead. The ominous suggestion earlier that we “left his body livin” may back this up. When asked to clear up this point, Hilson’s monumentally unhelpful response is, “Probably.” For, as a soldier in the Great War, he by now almost certainly is.25 As it turns out, “do re mi” is a homophonic translation of “Domremy,” the birthplace of Joan of Arc, and the poem is largely culled from a source relating to British soldiers billeted there during the Great War. The question then arises, how does this extraneous knowledge affect my reading of the poem? It certainly brings the phase of the poem just before the closing fugue into focus: an old french barn and angles giving joan where english tourists saw french movies diary a) she had her vision diary b) fine trip all told […]
The two readings come into tension in a longish parenthesis near the middle of the poem: […] (do re mi in each fourth line a simple cipher crumbly concrete beams and rafters and a roof of red tiles) […]
The “cipher” cited above as self‐referential, as facilitating a ‘musical’ reading of the poem was in that instance cut brutally 25 Personal communication from Jeff Hilson.
[162]
from the rest of the parenthesis, which, now restored, restores the weight of something like history: the dilapidated structure may now be an effect of war. But is it also the ruin of the self‐ sufficient cipher? Perhaps the barn always should have been there in my reading anyway, as a sign of the effects of age, and the inevitable fate of all structures. Perhaps more important than a knowledge of a specific source is the knowledge or sense that something is dislocated from a source. The point of the verse, even given the background knowledge, is not to document or even exactly to memorialise “bill smith.” Or perhaps it depends how one thinks of the tomb of the unknown soldier: what sort of memorial is it, and what does it memorialise? Respecting history here, I would argue, does not mean recovering the facts, so as to heal an aching wound in a narrative, but capturing the lostness that provokes such an enterprise. The structures of “do re mi in pup tents” are hastily thrown up bivouacs and a crumbling barn. Its song is a “lull a barn.” This reading hesitates uneasily between taking the suppression of narrative and the resulting confusion as integral to what the verse signifies, and acknowledging a degree of apprehension of what is suppressed (via the scraps remaining) as necessary to accent the loss. Keys Ragged as they are, stretchers do not eschew such structuring devices as beginning‐end parallelisms, or the mise‐en‐abîme of lines read as self‐commentary. As also suggested above, they also engage (obliquely) with political and philosophical ideas. What if these sorts of features were able to furnish a meta‐ narrative that would allow exegesis to triumphantly overcome the lack of story‐narrative? A striking example of this possibility, and to these ears one of the finest stretchers is “…hello and everything,” quoted below in full.26
26 Hilson, stretchers, 40.
[163]
…hello & everything this voice is back (killed it off as stated above that is rare as red closet yellow closet bad boy loose woman mig‐ rant worker (they broke him ope and hid in all his inlets (the one according to mr owl‐ head they were spoiled & left at a b & c but he sound like everyone else & he sound like everyone else (the usual two & two is fair & from three a win‐win & then there were none (they all gone pair‐bonding called also night life (please sir permission to blaze & as he does red clouds of sunset in the west was painted on his coat (this way he was disguised as a spreading display which won me a fiver & her eyes flashed (it’s keepers booty miss) & a yellow patch to match with no patch he was all in jags & numbers will tell you how it was pulled out & some‐be‐lies some‐be‐true even this was found when the end is known (one end is nothing but mum…
So the poem begins with a self‐announcing voice back from the dead and ends in silence. The unmissably performative character of such gestures is easily mobilised to furnish a self‐ commentary that could, if need be, render discussion of what lies between optional or at least contingent. For the point would be precisely that poetry needs something to say, even if it has [164]
nothing to say. The very inconsequentiality of the material would serve to foreground a deeper need to make rhythmical noise. Such an argument left at this point of formal self‐ sufficiency runs obvious risks of laziness and complacency. But for my argument regarding the forlorn it presents in addition a novel seduction. It would stand very nicely as a parable of the phrase as signifying above all its lostness and inarticulacy, a rationale for the utterance of rhythmical noise. But in so doing, it would fail to pay attention to the vicissitudes of individual phrases, so collapsing them all into the blank formal role of voice‐fodder. But where should one go from here? Should one attempt to dragoon every last detail of the poem into coherence? One possible way in would lie in the discovery that the phrase “a yellow patch to match” is from one of Wittgenstein’s little pedagogical examples, asking us to reflect on the oddities of our ways of conceiving of cognition. Given this nugget, the “mum” of the end instantly evokes the famous closing line of Tractatus. But the later Wittgenstein, to which the yellow patch belongs, has perhaps even more to say about the rest of the poem. The preoccupation with abc and 123 would echo the elementary learning situations from which Philosophical Investigations spins out its fundamental problems. These two readings of Wittgenstein could be made to parallel the two readings of the poem. The world‐encompassing pretentions of Tractatus would chime with the totalizing of the poem as self‐ referential parable, while the step‐by‐step, feeling‐its‐way of Philosophical Investigations would be more in keeping with trying to see the poem’s phrases severally. But again, this reading would tend to erect a source as the stabilizing, totalizing key to the whole poem, part for part. One can take it further, but before long the parable starts to diverge and lose its parabolic clarity. How the apparently stern teacher‐ figure “mr owl‐head” would relate to Wittgensteinian pedagogy is not entirely clear, but it would chime with the litany of judgementalism ( “bad boy” etc.) and violent cramming [165]
(“they broke him ope”) of the opening. This hectoring voice also jars with the more characteristically stretcher‐like off‐hand introduction of this voice: “…hello & everything.” But these voices do not seem to organize themselves into a neat opposition or dialogue, outlining a clear attitude towards “Wittgenstein” or “pedagogy.” The strident yet double‐edged repetition, “he sound / like everyone else & he / sound like everyone else,” presents a danger for any such clear division of voice. Far more to the point for stretchers is the way registers bleed into each other, or can leap suddenly out of each other. The theme of basic units of thought, and pairs in particular, adds up to zero as it takes a sharp left out of the classroom with “they / all gone pair‐bonding called / also night life.” The one remaining pupil asks “permission to blaze,” and the brief, tantalizing possibility of westering colonial expansion (as in “blaze a trail”) dissolves into a beautiful and enigmatic tableau painted on his coat. In its immediate context then, following a zigzagging line of association, the “yellow patch” belongs to (matches) a flaming red coat and, at the same time, to Wittgenstein’s debunking of the idea that the object perceived is doubled by a mental representation. The philosophical figure likewise doubles the sensuous yet fabulous coat that wins a fiver and impresses a girl, and collapses into it. The one is as anecdotal as the other. This stretcher, then, cultivates near‐total uncertainty as to the status of its figures: what is a ‘real’ coat in a narrative, and what is a figure for an idea? And is this a question that can ultimately produce a clear and final ruling? The poem seems to tail off into mere, wishy‐washy vacillation (“some‐be‐lies some‐ be‐true”), but its beauty and drive come from a more pointed tension, from a shift in register that appears not in the alternation between phrases, but at the very heart of them. Deprived of either patch, the verse is clothed in rags (“jags”). It does beautifully and wittily what beautiful and witty verse has always done, flirting with negation to project itself as abundance and destitution simultaneously. [166]
Coda We have much to learn from stretchers: simon & garfunkel are moths; a word is not a crystal is a two way shoe; a queen‐strut is a dance; and fun is not the only fun.27 stretchers is also a pack of lies.28 Some of Jeff Hilson’s favourite words are cut, wren, as and &.
27 Hilson, stretchers, 56, 35, 75, 27. 28 Hilson, stretchers, 75.
[167]
Craig Dworkin
Poetry Without Organs In Peter Manson’s Adjunct: an Undigest three of the most distinctive currents of recent poetry converge in a disorienting collage, their flows diverted into thousands of baroque tributaries of eddying, non‐laminar torque. The book opens: The game of Life played on the surface of a torus. Guilt. Concept album about garlic. Some verbs allow clitic climbing and others do not. The natural gas produced was radioactive, which made it unattractive for the home user. Jimmy Jewell is dead. But we are all Lib‐Labs now, and in 1997 New Labour’s triumph will free Labour history from its sectarian socialist and classbound cocoon and incorporate it fully into British history. Athletic Celerity. Martin McQuillan sings chorus to Tubthumping by Chumbawamba during paper on Derrida, apparently. Eric Fenby is dead. Manet’s Olympia as still from X‐ rated Tom and Jerry cartoon. Julian Green is dead. Dick Higgins is dead. Must try not to get killed before finishing this because nobody else’s going to be able to read my handwriting.1
and continues in that mode of paratactic non‐sequitur for another seventy‐five pages and three or four thousand further sentences.
1 Peter Manson, Adjunct: an Undigest (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Review, 2004) 1.
[168]
The most immediately obvious correlate for such writing is the “new sentence,” a style identified with Language Poetry and cultivated in the 1980s by writers such as Lyn Hejinian, Steve McCaffery, and Ron Silliman.2 The sentence, in that mode, constitutes the basic unit of composition. In and of themselves, however, the ʺnewʺ sentences tend to be unmarked: syntactically straightforward, tonally flattened, predominantly declarative, and often simply truncated phrases naming objects. Consequently, the interest of such texts arises not so much from the individual sentences themselves as from the artifice of their composition. Initially, such works rely on the frisson of the paratactic skip or glitch between sentences, as the unshakeable readerly habit of referentially relating any two neighboring sentences is repeatedly invited and then refused. The activity of reading thus comes to incorporate a cyclic series of mid‐ sentence revisions. In addition to that repeated paratactic tic— the ‘fit’ of sentences, in both senses of the word—a similarly syncopated play of coherence and disjunction subsequently unfolds at a different scale, across larger passages. Certain phrases repeat, with variations and permutations, and more conventionally coherent stories can be pieced together from widely dispersed fragments spaced over many pages. These associations allow patterns and structures to emerge against the foreground of local incoherence. Pointing readers anaphorically to previous sentences and creating the expectation of future returns, these repetitions underscore the degree to which ‘reference’ in such works tends to be textual, and that any ‘narrative’ tends to be about the development of the text itself— a story of writing rather than anything written about. Indeed, “new sentence” texts typically diminish or radically distend referential narrative in favor of local textual effect, orienting
2 See, for example: Lyn Hejinian, My Life (Providence: Burning Deck, 1980; revised and expanded edition Los Angles: Sun & Moon, 1987); Steve McCaffery, The Black Debt (Vancouver: Nightwood Editions, 1989); Ron Silliman, Ketjak (Oakland: This Press, 1978), and Tjanting (Great Barrington: The Figures, 1981; reissued Applecross: Salt Publishing, 2002).
[169]
readerly attention to the artifice of the writing itself. And furthermore, any stories the reader is able to reconstruct from widely spaced fragments tend to be exceedingly banal (someone sits in a chair and writes with a ball point pen, a child sees a bird at a zoo, and so on). However easily Adjunct can be assimilated to the tradition of the “new sentence”—a comparison Manson invites with a number of references to Silliman throughout the text—the book is equally indebted to two other literary trends. By including large amounts of found material, Adjunct takes part in the soi‐ disant “uncreative” conceptual poetics that emerged in the 1990s. Building on the tolerance for disjunction and non‐ expressive écriture that Language Poetry had promoted in the previous decades, conceptual writing looked to traditions in post‐war music and the visual arts as well, finding the permission for wholesale textual appropriation and reframing that allowed it to admit a degree of transcription unprecedented in poetry. In relation to Adjunct, the most apposite work in this appropriative tradition is Kenneth Goldsmith’s No. 111 2.7.93‐10.20.96.3 Begun in February 1993 (as its unwieldy title indicates), just a few months before Manson started work on Adjunct, Goldsmith’s book was written in two stages. First, he accumulated a large amount of ambient source material, from snatches of personal conversation and email messages to excerpts from a range of media: books and newspapers, radio and television, and above all the usenet groups of a nascent internet. Then Goldsmith organized that material according to pre‐established rules, sorting it into chapters according to syllable count and alphabetizing the entries within each chapter. According to the book’s subscript, Adjunct took twice as long to complete as No. 111 (a Joycean seven years, in Manson’s case), but the process was quite similar.4 Manson constructed 3 Kenneth Goldsmith, No. 111 2.7.92‐10.20.96 (Great Barrington: The Figures, 1997). 4 Manson, Adjunct, 76.
[170]
the book largely through the accumulation of a large quantity of source material, including diary‐like jottings, quotidian observations, and a range of found material, from library catalogues to product packaging labels. In fact, much of Adjunct has its origin in tabloid newspapers, some of which Manson assembled into a related work of colorful collage with newsprint pasted over a notebook page, framing cut‐out photographs with détourned text.5 Although the final work would be published under the sign of poetry, that notebook construction is more indebted to the DIY post‐punk aesthetic of ‘zines and the dictaphone audio‐collages of Mark E. Smith than to anything published as ʺpoetryʺ (tellingly, there are more mentions of Smith and The Fall in Adjunct than there are to Silliman and Tjanting). In No. 111, the rhetorical conventions of usenet dialogues and discussions lead to jarring tonal shifts, as entries switch suddenly to conventions of abbreviation and slang, or angry retorts erupt without their provocation. The sources for Adjunct leave their imprint on the final work in the same way. Like all genre writing, the stylized language of the tabloid, with its mini‐genres of captions and headlines, carries the uncanny aura of being always already ironically quoted to some extent. Re‐contextualized in Adjunct, that language is raised to another power of citation, something like a third‐ degree of reference: a quotation of a quotation of a quotation. The shifts of distance and perspective in Adjunct, accordingly, can be disorienting, with sources always suggested but always uncertain. Moreover, passages sometimes seem to reveal the context for earlier sentences, but they just as often cast doubt on the presumed source or ostensible subject of previous entries, until the reader finds it increasingly difficult to know what Manson has written himself and what he has merely recorded, or to distinguish the falsely intimate address of public language from the coldly unemotional register in which Manson jots
5 See http://www.petermanson.com/Adjunctcollage.htm
[171]
genuinely personal material, the observed from the confessional, voyeurism from exhibitionism. Whatever the source of its sentences, the process of re‐ transcription—from found sources to Adjunct, often by way of an intermediate pocket notebook—is where Manson’s project takes form. The thousands of phrases that fill the 152 page notebook dedicated to the project were methodically arranged, and that redistribution of previously generated material in Adjunct announces the book’s affiliation with a third major trend in recent poetry. The placement of the sentences in Adjunct was made according to a random number generator, which determined their dispersal. Specifically, by multiplying the number generator’s three decimal figure output by the number of pages in the project’s notebook, Manson obtained a page number and a rough estimate of where on the page the entry should be placed (as result such as 14.2, for example, would place the entry a fifth of the way down on page 14).6 The organization of the sentences is thus strictly determined but unpredictable, and Manson could not have predicted which sentences would appear next to one another. In this respect, Adjunct takes its place in the tradition of ‘chance generated’ forms such as John Cage’s mesostics and Jackson Mac Low’s diastics, both of which used predetermined rules to sort and organize source texts. Not by chance, both Mac Low and Cage are mentioned in Adjunct. Although this formal aspect of the text’s construction is not immediately evident to the reader, its effects can nonetheless be felt. Manson decided that if the page or line indicated by the number generator were already filled, the sentence would be placed on the next available line.7 One collateral effect of this rule is that later entries tend to be clustered closer together in the final text, so that although the procedure for each entry is uniform, and although the statistical spread is equally random in mathematical terms, Adjunct appears to contain occasional 6 Peter Manson, personal correspondence, 24 February, 2005. 7 Peter Manson, personal correspondence, 24 February, 2005.
[172]
pockets of greater order and organization. Moreover, Manson alerts the reader to the presence of some latent form, however invisible in its own right, by including sentences that discuss their own mode of composition: “Print out several pages of random numbers to make this easier,” and “7.2.97 realise that the birthday paradox is the reason why I’ve always worried that the random number generator I’ve been using for this wasn’t random.”8 The randomized disordering of previously published material in Adjunct accounts in part for its subtitle, and the ironic work of its derivational prefix. Adjunct is most certainly a “digest,” in the sense of bringing together material previously published in a range of venues, but as the Oxford English Dictionary records, “digest” has also always implied a method and system. As a noun, “digest” denotes a “methodically arranged compendium of […] written matter”; and as a verb: to distribute “methodically or according to a system.”9 By distributing his material according to a random number scheme, Manson’s text follows a method (digest) without being methodical (undigest). As I will try to show, a comparable dynamic of digestion and its reversal—a play between the breakdown and dispersal of material into fragments and the reabsorption of those fragments into new, undifferentiated wholes—animates Adjunct at every level. Û “Of course,” as Adjunct itself is quick to point out, “few techniques are more exhausted than mere quotation, a quotation which stands in for thought as though it were already 8 Manson, Adjunct, 9‐10, 49; cf. 24. 9 The mathematical procedure may also account for the book’s main title. In set theory, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “adjunction” denotes “the relation holding between sets when without overlapping one another they are so ‘joined’ or continuous as to form another complete set; also, the process of putting them into this relation.” I will return to the idea of related but separate sets at the close of this essay.
[173]
masterly irony,” and one of the reader’s first tasks is to try and account for the bewildering range of material that Manson has had occasion to quote.10 Despite some passages which are apparently “just…verbiage” or “remplissage”—fragments of garbled or incomplete text and abbreviations that remain indecipherable outside of their original context—readers come to discern a handful of distinct topics or sources: a catalogue of obituaries; notes on linguistic morphology; horticultural experiments; allusions to contemporary poets and the 20th century avant‐garde; the class conscious registration of fiscal anxieties; advertisements for clubs and lottery tickets; and briefly noted, diary‐like entries from a telegraphic memoir: the subject of dreams, encounters with friends, thoughts on editing and writing projects, witty observation, postal addresses, the daily life of the body mirrored somewhere between the candid, the self‐deprecating, and the abject.11 Indeed, the body—medically interrogated and thoroughly medicated—emerges as one of the book’s principal subjects. Not to be mistaken for any single body (much less for Manson himself), the concerns of the many bodies mentioned in Adjunct construct a consistent corporeal composite. With the wry recognition of an acknowledged but not entirely controlled addiction, Adjunct records the ingestion of formidable quantities of drugs. From insomnia‐producing stimulants to sleep‐inducing narcotics, injectables to inhalants, the “pharmacological import” of all kinds of chemicals comes to be tested: coffee and cigarettes, Benzedrine and Nytol, hypnotics and hallucinogens, carefully dosed prescription antipsychotics and antidepressants, and a cupboard full of ad hoc intoxicants of concentrated solvents and aerosols.12 One improbable entry even describes “snorting a line of sea‐monkeys.”13 And all of it is washed down with gallons of alcohol. Adjunct records both a 10 Manson, Adjunct, 25. 11 Manson, Adjunct, 54, 46. 12 Manson, Adjunct, 1. 13 Manson, Adjunct, 40.
[174]
frequency and depth of intoxication: “Keep bumping into my neighbor when drunk”; “Difficult THATT I could be as DRUNK AS THIS”; “Wide‐eyed South Park reaction shot of friends discovering how much I now drink”; “surpris ed how mich alcohol he s had”; “After many whiskies, worry about breathing on candle.”14 The pace of consumption is timed with a careful accounting: “Lots of whisky”; “whisky at 9am again”; “three bottles of whisky in six days”; “three bottles of spirits in two days”; “Four Happy Days, two pints of Guinness, a double Grouse, a double Southern Comfort and a litre and a half of Bulgarian Cabernet Sauvignon”; “Four bottles of whisky @ £10.79 + 11 bottles wine @ £2.59 + 2 litres of wine @£2.00= £77.63”; “Dispose of 19 bottles. Move on to Vodka.”15 With the attitude of a “career alcoholic,” the phrase “sensible drinking” is met with a parenthetical “giggle,” and Manson gives the following hilarious example of terms from literary theory: “six‐ pack’s relationship to Peter André’s abdomen is metaphoric; to mine is metonymic.”16 Even with foods, the body in Adjunct only ever seems to drink. With little need for chewing, the foods mentioned are almost always liquid (soup, puree, yoghurt, fondue, “meat extract or homemade meat tea”), melted (butter and chocolate), or softened (enzymatic and mouldering cheeses, a banana forgotten in a coat pocket for three days until “it’s black and soft”).17 Many are already “partly digested” (pap, minces, rissoles, patés).18 The bodies in Adjunct not only take in all this liquid, but they excrete fluids at an equally impressive pace.19 The body as it appears in this book is a site of “hemorrage,” “excrement,” “discharge,” and “evacuations” of all kinds.20 If 14 Manson, Adjunct, 17, 4, 25, 36, 48. 15 Manson, Adjunct, 65, 44, 13, 47, 69, 61‐2, 53. 16 Manson, Adjunct, 13, 51; cf. “Gold Alcoholics Anonymous credit card” (44). 17 Manson, Adjunct, 69, 64. 18 Manson, Adjunct, 65. 19 This is true of non‐human bodies as well; one sentence explains: “These insects eat nitrogen from the earth then discharge a juice which is full of nitrogen” (71). 20 Manson, Adjunct, 20, 5, 17, 55 and 71, 73.
[175]
one of the sentences seems to accuse Manson by rebuking “you don’t surface expressively in your poems,” the poem itself is quite literally “expressive”: “weeping,” “leaking” and “expectorating.”21 Indeed, Adjunct details not only the expected “blood” “sweat” and “tears” (including the blood of bruises and slit wrists, spontaneous hemorrhaging and nosebleeds, erections and menstruations, sugar surges and pressure drops, blisters and poisoning and donations), but the full spectrum of fluid bodily products: “urine,” “pus,” “phlegm” (both “snot” and “spit”), “bile,” “gall,” “mucous,” “milk,” “sperm,” and “semen.”22 Characters are constantly “sick on” their surroundings (“We are such stuff as pukes are made on,” one entry riffs). Another confesses that “it would be great to vomit,” and after discovering a “strange burp in vomit,” a “burp turns into vomit,” escalating to “projectile vomiting at the dinner table” and ultimately “faecal vomiting”—“an undigest” that links regurgitation to the many mentions of “waste” and “sewage”: “shit” and “crap,” “caca” and “merde,” “guano,” “manure,” “droppings,” “dung,” and all tending to the extreme (“bowel too long”), the softened (ʺlaxatives,ʺ whipped excrement), and the liquefied: infant soiling and “diarrhoea.”23 As all this excessive diarrhoea and vomiting indicates, the body in Adjunct can be pathologically productive, and Manson includes all manner of unhealthy retentions and emissions. The body is repeatedly subject to fluid swellings, and it further endures a wart and a wen, “watery cysts,” a blister as big as a matchbox and another that bursts, the suppuration of several
21 Manson, Adjunct, 13, cf. 71, 63, 19, 38, 57. 22 Manson, Adjunct, 16, 25, 34, 35, 40, 47, 49, 50, 56, 58, 63, 67, 68, 70; 45, 52, 38, cf. 52, 13, 14, 21; 7, 21, 42, 66; 70, 25, 61, cf. 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 17, 26, 37, 38, 42, 44, 47, 52, 58; 15; 5, 22, 28, 60, cf. 3, 23, 41, 51, 59, 75; 16, 39, 58; 18, 59; 10; 1, 24, 32, 52; 2, 32, 37, 42, 59, 61; 8, 38, 65, 67; 52. 23 Manson, Adjunct, 12, 36, cf. 38; 49; 75; 44; 19; 35; 15, cf. 13, 22, 24, 39; 39; 68; 11, 25, 28, 30, 41, 58, 60; 26, 60; 18; 8, 20, 41; 44; 41; 65, 74; 24; 67; 45, cf. 6, 42; 28; 45; 22, 36. See also the gaseous releases and soft excretions of the body: “farts” (23, 40, 42, 43, 44, 60, 61, 62, 65, 75), “burps” (19, 44, 55, cf. 61), and “[ear] wax” (12).
[176]
boils (one “persistent” and another that “bursts all over distant curtains”), and a particularly gruesome “explosive pustule.”24 Filling, swelling, leaking, bursting—the body in Adjunct liquefies and overflows. Subcutaneous reservoirs of blood expand alarmingly, fluid spouts from unexpected sites, and the entire self, if not necessarily the actual body, is reduced to blood or excrement: “that man of blood”; “I am shit at my job”; “Dear Sir I’m shit, love Peter.”25 However figural those expressions might be, the focus on the emollient pulps and spongy parts of the body are quite literal; Adjunct pointedly specifies the reservoirs of the spleen, bladder, kidney, liver, adenoids, as well as the lipids of “suet” and “lard,” and the ominous trio of “gelatine, tallow, and semen.”26 Leaving only “grease and dead skin,” the body in Adjunct continually sloughs off solid tissues.27 One finds a surprising number of depilations and exfoliations; hair balds prematurely or is shorn, nails are 24 For instances of swelling: “face swells up” (37); “eyelid swells up” (37); “swollen feet” (43); “swollen appendices” (1); “mysterious swelling fits” (72); and “veins appear on left temple” (64). Other quotations from Adjunct in this sentence: 14; 8; 61; 19; 16, cf. 72; 58; 39; 51; 6. 25 The absence of a bruise on the hematomic body is noteworthy (“no bruise at all from blood donation” [67]), but other bruises unfold fantastically: “if you stare at that bruise long enough, a 3D image of a dolphin appears” (55); “Bruise chromatography” (19); “Bruise on upper arm the same shape and colour as Kandinsky’s Black Strokes I, 1913, though smaller” (56); “Oskar Fischinger cartoon of bruise expanding” (70); “Largest ever mystery bruise on upper arm” (27, cf. 39); “Big blue bruise where the needle went in” (3); “Big bruise around the injection hole” (16); “Bruise starts dripping down leg under skin” (14, cf. 41, 46); “Kneecap bruise larger than handspan” (13); “Kneecap bruise larger than two hand spans” (9); “A dinner plate the size of a bruise” (7); “Skin still discoloured two months after bruise” (6). This injury may be related to the chronic loss of tissue on a leg mentioned in several other entries (see citations in note 27 below) and culminating in “Legs just decide to be scarred” (31). For the emergence of unexpected spouts, see, for example, “clitoris fountain” (72). Other quotations from Adjunct in this sentence: 35; 70, cf. 46; 25. 26 Manson, Adjunct, 76; 55; 26; 11, 21, 41, 44, 52, 61, 66, 72; 68; 17; 56, 76, cf. “fat”: 44, 52, 74; 52. More distressing still, included among several references to fried foods one finds “Noodles fried in human fat” (62), and the recollection of a woman “caught frying her husband’s sperm” (67). 27 Manson, Adjunct, 43.
[177]
clipped, skin peels and flakes off with alarming insistence: “skin loosens on face”; “pieces of skin keep flaking off my leg”; “back of leg rips”; “two years later and bits of skin still keep flaking off my leg and not healing”; “Four years later and the leg is no better.” 28 Or worse: “your skin goes hard and you die.”29 Or worse still: “reconstruct a Victorian schoolgirl from fragments of skin”; “unfortunately the ears were attached to the hair”; “a band of human hair and skin was left 1.5 metres up the wall. Other human body parts, such as eye‐balls, were scattered on the floor.”30 My point is not that the text can be morbid, but that the solid body in Adjunct is relentlessly disarticulated, repeatedly “broken,” “irretrievably shattered,” and even threatening to dematerialize completely.31 “Earless” and “headless,” castrated or having “no genitals,” the body’s skeletal structure and extremities are unfailingly failing: brittle, disarticulated, or removed.32 Lungs collapse and are lost entirely; sections of the liver are “cut out”; legs and arms break or are amputated, leaving people “crutched” and “crippled”; toes “bruise or break”; spines are broken; digits are cut, cut off, and replaced with prosthetics; elbows are fractured, knees 28 A few examples: “did not have exfoliated genitalia, but depilated genitalia (having lost her hair rather than layers of skin)” (41); “Low hair quality: (44); “He cut off a lock of my hair and put it in my hole” (51); “I had very long hair for a while, now I am bald” (61); “I cut my hair” (61); ʺPrematurely baldʺ (21). For other quotations from Adjunct in this sentence: 43, cf. “skin tightens on face” (56); 36; 31; 73; 41. 29 Manson, Adjunct, 52; cf. same page: “Lucian Freud skin disease.” 30 Manson, Adjunct, 56; 5; 9. The scene rhymes with the grisly “contorting pieces of red flesh controlled by the white eye‐balls of crazy horses” (5), and it recalls “red trickles furious with slaughter” and the mention of an “Enucleated Eye” (19; 7). 31 Manson, Adjunct, 3; 14; 15: “If she were to lose weight now one fears she might disappear into her mound entirely.” The absence of a body is foregrounded with the mention of a “cenotaph” (6). Compare the unmarked inclusion of a line from Henry King’s Seventeenth Century poem “The Surrender,” in which the archaic inversion of the terminal verb suggests a plural noun: “As the divorced soul from her body parts” (Manson, Adjunct, 55). 32 Manson, Adjunct, 16; 72; 6; 14; cf. “genital cancer” (69); “testicle [put] in flask” (51).
[178]
capped, other joints grow arthritic or become dislocated, limbs are “dismembered” or “dead.”33 Teeth are similarly at risk in Adjunct; missing, removable, decaying, toxic, blocked, no longer fitting together, artificial, and so essentially unstable that they actually define “insecurity” and “precarious.”34 And although the motivation for the sentence is comically paranomastic, even the hard encrustation of plaque is figured as soft, swollen, and tender: “bubonic plaque.”35 With its structures dissolving and its anatomy remade, the liquefying body in Adjunct resembles Antonin Artaud’s “body without organs.”36 Manson plays on the phrase in the sentence “Gaelic without organs,” and he mentions Artaud at least a half‐dozen times in Adjunct, but the progeny of Artaud’s body are even more to the point.37 With an uncanny precision, the
33 Manson, Adjunct, 16; 70; 44; 13; 20, cf. the displacement and reincorporation of “Richard Cork’s leg” (38); 55; 57; 58; 59, 72; 52; 44; 67; 62; 36; 55, 20; 62, cf. 2; 56. Cf. ʺOrgan donor cardʺ (47). Adjunct also focuses on the infant body’s natural losses and cultural excisions: “Rubbing your face with the afterbirth” (9); “umbilical cord” (22); “prepuce” (30), and the “foreskin” or punning “force kin” (59; 46). 34 Manson, Adjunct, 49; 5; 21; 18; 12; 13; 11; 22; 21. 35 Manson, Adjunct, 7; “plague” proper appears later in the book (49, 67). 36 The phrase appears in the 1947 radio play “Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu,” Œuvres Complètes d’Antonin Artaud Vol. XIII (Paris: Gallimard, 1974) 67 et seq.; translation by Clayton Eshleman with Bernard Bador in Watchfiends & Rack Screams: Works from the Final Period by Antonin Artaud (Boston: Exact Change, 1995) 307. The concept of the body without organs, however, is developed throughout Artaud’s later work. 37 Manson, Adjunct, 40. Manson explains that this phrase originated in an anagrammatic misreading of a title glimpsed on the shelf at a used book store (personal correspondence, 24 February, 2005), which must have been John MacKechnie’s teach‐yourself Gaelic without Groans (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1962). The parapraxis, however, is far from incidental and points directly back to Artaud through the emphasis on “groans [plaintes]” in Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty manifesto. For explicit references to Artaud in Adjunct, see: “Dismembering a small trout while Artaud screams” (2); “Photograph appears to show Artaud being played by Ian McShane in new feature film” (22); “Leave display copy of glossy art‐book open at the Art‐Language / Artaud page” (34); “Artaud film set in late 50s” (45); “A bag containing Joyce’s Dislocutions, The Penguin Book of Contemporary [sic] American Verse, Artaud by Martin Esslin, and
[179]
body in Adjunct describes the precession of “bodies without organs” exhibited by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The composite ‘adjunct‐body,’ as we might summarize it—drugged and liquefying, in mental extremis and abject pain— encompasses the variety of states elaborated by Deleuze and Guattari with a striking exactitude. In their appropriation of Artaud’s term, Deleuze and Guattari define the desire for unrestricted flows as a “corps sans organes [body without organs].”38 That body “est déjà en route dès que le corps en a assez des organes, et veut les déposer, ou bien les perd [is already under way the moment the body has had enough of organs and wants to slough them off, or loses them],” and its multiplicities comprise a “longue procession:—du corps hypocondriaque [….] du corps paranoiaque [….] du corps schizo [….] et puis du corps drogué [….] du corps masochiste…. [a long procession: the hypochondriac body…. the paranoid body…. the schizo body…. then the drugged body…. the masochist body….].”39 an umbrella” (62); “Pan Am advert on colophon of Artaud Collected Works volume 1” (68); “Artaud is what happens when cousins marry” (75). 38 See Capitalisme et Schizophrénie. 2 Tomes (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972/1980), translated as Anti‐Oedipus by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983); and as A Thousand Plateaus., trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). One might note that Adjunct names Deleuze, with the sentence “Gilles Deleuze is dead” (21), but that unlike the hundreds of other persons named in that fashion, the Index does not label Deleuze’s entry as an obituary (79). Although probably inadvertent, the allegory is exact. The relation of death to the body without organs—both examples of limits for Deleuze—is fundamental and wittily summed up by a line from Adjunct: “Nobody dying at the moment (famous last words)” (73). In their discussion of the body without organs, Deleuze and Guattari paraphrase a passage from Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (itself perhaps a dilation of George Eliot’s delicious line from the opening Book and Chapter of The Mill On The Floss [1860]: “I am in love with moistness”), and their digestion reads like an index to Adjunct: “‘I love everything that flows, even the menstrual flow that carries away the seed unfecund.’ Amniotic fluid spilling out of the sac and kidney stones; flowing hair; a flow of spittle; a flow of sperm, shit, or urine…” (Anti‐Oedipe, 11‐12/5‐6). For the original Miller passage see The Tropic of Cancer (New York: Grove Press, 1961) 257‐8. 39 Deleuze and Guattari, Milles plateaux, 186/150.
[180]
We have seen Manson’s version of the drugged and “hypochondriac body,” in which the disarrayed corpus empties out as its “organs are destroyed,” but the adjunct‐body also shares the mental conditions investigated by Deleuze and Guattari.40 One of the diary‐like entries in Adjunct records “becoming borderline delusional”; another quips chiastically: “I saw the best generations of my mind destroyed by madness”; and others discuss “psychiatric assessment,” “mental instability,” “psychological drama,” and “insanity.”41 Among the repeated vocabulary of the book are “psychosomatic,” “schizophrenic,” “neurotic,” “aphasic,” “mad,” “crazed” and “crazy.”42 Adjunct includes a “sadistic invalid” and “masochistic sex,” as well as an international cast of mentally ill characters: “clinically insane guy with a guitar”; “insane Venezuelan”; “Schizophrenic Irishman”; “insane […] Iranian gourmand”; and one woman “rumoured to be slightly mad” but in the final analysis “definitely completely mad.”43 Moreover, with its distinctive combination of chemical, physiological, and mental conditions, the body in Adjunct exhibits the very types of violent intersections, confusions, and blockages that exemplify the body without organs for Deleuze and Guattari. In Milles plateaux, they illustrate their concept with a quote from William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch: “The human body is scandalously inefficient. Instead of a mouth and an anus to get out of order why not have one all‐purpose hole to eat and eliminate?”44 Manson implicitly asks the same question with his interest in opalinidae, creatures with “no
40 Deleuze and Guattari, Milles plateaux, 186/150. 41 Manson: Adjunct, 22; 71; 19; 23; 12; 49. 42 Manson: Adjunct, 40, 49; 2, 43, 59; 33; 32, 34; 26, 51, 55, 61, 63; 1, 5, 57, 75; 51. 43 Manson: Adjunct, 12; 33; 49; 12; 2; 32; 11, cf. 63. In addition to the psychosexual descriptions of sado‐masochism and ʺautoerotic asphyxiationʺ (6), Adjunct includes references to bestiality and incest: “He fantasized about making love to his sister and tried it once with his dog” (47); “Sexual relationships with animals surprised me” (56). 44 Deleuze and Guattari, Milles plateaux, 186/150. For the original text, see William Burroughs, Naked Lunch (New York: Grove Press, 1966) 131.
[181]
‘mouth’ or contractile vacuole” living parasitically “in the rectum of amphibians.”45 He specifies other bodies that possess “no openings or orifices” whatsoever, and includes an unacknowledged quotation from Jacques Cartier’s 1536 account of indigenous North Americans: “The people, possessing no anus, neither eat nor digest.”46 Like Deleuze and Guattari, Manson returns to questions of corporeal blockage and flow. On the one hand, Adjunct details a number of blockages (“butt‐ plugs,” a “tampon,” “anti‐embolism stockings,” swollen eyelids, a man “trying not to open his mouth in conversation”) and the book is punctuated by a series of comments on portraits of English Romantic poets—Blake, Southey, Hazlitt, Shelley, Keats, Hunt—with each man described identically as looking “like he’s got a finger up him.”47 With a similarly sophomoric humor, a line from Robert Burns is détourned to suggest the enemies of unblocked orifices (“As open pussie’s mortal foes / When, pop! she starts before their nose”) and Manson includes a story which demands to be read allegorically—however factually accurate it may be—about the removal of an orifice: “Keith Orifice” (a Hollywood gaffer, we learn from a later entry), “changes name to Keith Orefice.”48 Other sentences narrate more serious, and even fatal blockages: “Dried apricot 45 Manson, Adjunct, 16. Cf. ʺThe mouth is the antechamber of the organismʺ (41). In a book so concerned with the relation of bodies to fluids, the parasites’ host also resonates; Adjunct returns to both hydrophilic amphibians as well as sponges (16, 30, 40, 57; 51, 57), including the book’s final line, which reads like a sort of a backward glancing self‐assessment of the preceding whole: “That looks like a sponge” (76). 46 Manson, Adjunct, 10. 47 Manson, Adjunct, 54‐55; 31; 32; 37; 43. For the portraits, see: 3, 14, 42, 48, 28, and 39. Compare the descriptions of those pictures with similar entries: “up the budgie’s bum” (36); “a cucumber up his bum” (23); “That Jimmy Hill should have the wrong end of a pineapple up him” (43). 48 Manson, Adjunct, 33; for the original poem, see Robert Burns, “Tam O’Shanter.” Antiquities of Scotland, ed. Francis Grose (April, 1791); the pivotal term is a Scots diminutive of “purse.” For the story about Keith Orifice, see the first edition of Adjunct (/ubu editions: 2001) 20; cf. Edinburgh Review edition at 37. Readers should be aware of occasional but significant discrepancies between the two editions.
[182]
rehydrates to block woman’s intestine”; “Having for some years taken a dozen aspirin a day, Cage was now taking a form that explodes in the stomach”; “the mysterious, real constipation which had ended with her husband’s death.”49 On the other hand, as one might expect, Adjunct demonstrates an equal interest in orifices that are ineffectual or overcome, as when “ears spontaneously unblock,” an “eyelid splits,” an ʺanal fissureʺ opens, or someone receives an unexpected “enema.”50 Manson records the “laxative properties” of a meat rissole and the “laxative effect” of excessive consumption; one sentence notes drily (so to speak): “the laxatives were a mistake.”51 Records for continence and the threat of incontinence continue the theme: “Deep sea explorer avoids urinating for 18 hours”; “lips must touch at all times, couples must stand and may not sleep. / People have been warned that there are no toilet breaks and ‘adult nappies’ are banned.”52 Intoxicated, overflowing, schizophrenic, non‐hermetic— pulled between these extremes the adjunct‐body opens to the more serious consequences of a radical loss of any integral, self‐ contained identity, and it displays the kinds of profound dissolution and reabsorption that define the body without organs for Deleuze and Guattari. “Incorporating,” not coincidentally, is one of Manson’s signature words, and many of the body’s interpenetrations are commonplace and unremarkable, but not unrelated to its more extreme embodiments.53 As I have documented, the body in Adjunct is chemically altered by intoxicants; it also digests and metabolizes food, makes use of prostheses, hosts a range of
49 Manson, Adjunct, 18; 37; 35; cf. “constipated” (26). The story gives an ominous cast to the sentence fragment “Partially rehydrated dried fruit” (70). 50 Manson, Adjunct, 56; 29; 74; 40, cf. “unexpected…douche” (24). 51 Manson, Adjunct, 6; 41‐42; 45. 52 Manson, Adjunct, 33; 22; cf. “pampers” (70) and the ʺglazedʺ surface of the ʺJunior Boys toiletʺ (41). 53 Manson, Adjunct, 1, 22, 49, 70.
[183]
microbes, and is susceptible to allergens.54 But these contaminations of the body proper by foreign bodies set the stage for more extraordinary losses of bodily integrity. Even within the body, beset by its series of unregulated flows, organs intrude on one another (“sliding hiatus hernia”) or prove strangely interchangeable (“an eye for a penis. A penis for an eye”), and the frequent evacuations from the body’s orifices are not always as expected: “expectorating siliputty”; “I have four huge squash plants that came out of my bowel”; “Foetus like a grasshopper from out my nose”; “Once she attempted to leap out of her mouth with a ski slope.”55 One sentence asks: “Are you constructing yourself as a pond?”56 Another confesses: “I’ve got rats in my skull.”57 Several entries recount similarly schizophrenic episodes: including characters “who pass through the bodies of the six others,” and an “out of body experience early March 1990 where I move one foot to the left and one foot up, intersecting with myself.”58 Sounding like a triumphant if still delusional Daniel Paul Schreber, finally in control of the rays that penetrate and subjugate his body, one speaker declares; “I put a torch in my mouth and my body
54 Among the many instances of prostheses, “These include a new heart monitor operated through the patient’s mouth, and a glass bolus, much like a boiled sweet for cattle and sheep, which dissolves over a period of months, releasing essential vitamins and minerals” (7), as well as affection for a “false” stéatopyge and “electrical domestic appliances for use with the human body” (22; 28). For some examples of infections and parasitism, see: “pneumonia” (56), that liquid filling of the lungs, which swell for one woman “like a frog” (57); “tropical fungus infection” (6); “tear duct stops being septic” (54); “smelling someone’s armpits” (1); “2 old ladies with B.O. on next park bench” (25); “odour crisis in left armpit only” (58). Among evidence of allergens: “hay fever so bad I can’t sleep” (65); “hay fever” (67); “Can’t stop sneezing” (3); “Furore of Sneezing” (25); “Sneeze / eyes go puffy” (41); “First sneezing fit of 1997” (51); “Wheezing…Second sneezing fit of 1997” (59); “sneezing” (75). 55 Manson, Adjunct, 6; 39; 57; 4; 48; 40. 56 Manson, Adjunct, 66. 57 Manson, Adjunct, 43. 58 Manson, Adjunct, 62; 37.
[184]
fluids act as a fibreoptic guide so I can pee a strand of light.”59 With a less assured tone, one atypically lengthy passage explains a similar bodily luminescence: with an intense need to push my own perception beyond this strangling manifold, I obtained an image, literally of beams of light directed from my own eyes towards the spaces I couldn’t resolve, and of the light being deflected sideways, as if by magnetic repulsion, causing the same pain in the eye‐muscles as is caused by trying to focus on an object too close to the eye.60
Examples could be proliferated, but the point I want to emphasize is that bodies in Adjunct, like those “without organs” in L’anti Œdipe and Milles plateaux, are again and again penetrated and transfixed, confused and commixt, absorbent and absorbed—quite literally promiscuous, improper, and indiscrete. Without clear boundaries between bodies and other objects, those other objects, in Adjunct, end up being much like the body: permeable, fungible, fluid, commingled.61 The confusion begins with flows that reverse or recycle: “Regurg. into mouth tastes like licking open battery”; “Nasal mucous (incorporating day‐old red wine vomit)”; “Antonio looks like he’s tasted a sick man’s urine”; “blood tastes of black pudding”; “removal and disposal of inedible blood”; “Don’t take the liver. I will finish this vase of stale piss in good time.”62 Ingestion or purgation,
59 Manson, Adjunct, 8. This may account in part for the earlier, enigmatic sentence: “Luminous blue abdomen, you are following me around” (5‐6). 60 Manson, Adjunct, 51‐2. 61 The fluids discharged by bodies in Adjunct are frequently reabsorbed by others: “soaking trousers” (8); “sick on my trousers” (36); “trouser leg stiff with blood” (49); trousers soiled (60); “soup stains on slept‐in tee‐shirt” (13); “Can’t stop sneezing for long enough to note that absorbency in handkerchiefs is a function of age” (3); “Alasdair’s jacket can absorb four pints of sweat per hour” (45). 62 Manson, Adjunct, 7; 22; 42; 56; 47; 44. Further examples of “mutant mixture” in Adjunct include (50): “Shit smells of quite good food” (28); “Diarrhoea smells of Lilt” (36); “Fart smells of Malathion” (40); “Fart smells of chips” (65); “Dried parmesan smells of sick” (38); “Urine smells strongly of coffee” and “Tea smells
[185]
digestion or undigestion, it all seems to be the same in Adjunct, where clearly delineated forms dissolve and every thing overflows its boundaries. I have already noted the watery state of comestibles in Adjunct, but even architecture is “not solid” and the structural integrity of buildings fares no better than bodies: they leak, grow damp, then waterlog, and finally collapse.63 A range of materials are described as “porous,” “microporous,” and “ventilated,” and under the “dissipations” of atomizing steams and aerosol sprays, the world of Adjunct is filled with amorphous substances: “sludge,” “foam,” “emulsion” and “paste.”64 Among “spouting,” “frothing,” “percolation,” and “pouring,” its objects “drip,” “decant,” “leak,” and “float,” becoming “glutinous,” “bubbly” and “puffy.”65 Again and again, solids soften, turn “runny,” and “melt.”66 Nylon “dissolves”; one discovers “Mould digesting aluminium.”67 Ultimately, “it is not enough to be pliable,” as one speaker dreams of the further molecular melt of even liquids: “I want my soup to dissociate.”68 of tobacco” (66; 69); “Breath smells of bad Brie” (17); “Ear drops smell of smoked sausage” (71); “cheesy mineral water” (66). One sentence announces, “Vodka tastes of TV licensing envelope glue” (6), and a later entry completes the equation: “TV licensing envelope glue tastes of vodka” (29). 63 Manson, Adjunct, 18. See, for examples: “roof leaks, but not much” (25); “ruins…heavy rain water seeped through” (51); “dripping from my ceiling” (6); “Ceiling is pouring” (60); “ceiling peaked at a bucket an hour” (10); “ceiling collapses” (25). 64 Manson, Adjunct, 59; 29; 65; 46; 52, 37; 2, 29, 32, 33, 59, 70; 9, 68; 17, 28, 74; 36, 37; 56, 62. 65 Manson, Adjunct, 18; 23, cf. 15; 76; 60, cf. 13, 41, 68, 70, 75; 6, 14, cf. 9, 67; 23, 49; 19, 25; 16, 24; 9; 25, cf. 41, 56, 60, 64; 41, 43, cf. 50. 66 Manson, Adjunct, 2; 22, 25, 29, 36, 51, 59. Even solids tend to be in a quasi‐liquid suspension: “precipitated solids” (75); “black precipitate from Dettol and urine” (21); “powdered milk goes like iron filings on hitting the steam” (37); “talcum powder falls onto stamp spraymounted onto sofa” (70); et cetera. Compare to the general state of ʺdegenerateʺ ʺcorruptionʺ in Adjunct (50, 64), exemplified by: ʺshit which has been left to decay for a long timeʺ (25); ʺslow motion cucumber decayʺ (56); ʺpaté left to decayʺ (70); ʺrotted bag of carrotsʺ (21). Cf. leprosy (14, 38, 63). 67 Manson, Adjunct, 38; 60. 68 Manson, Adjunct, 20; 2.
[186]
Û “Because I have had occasion to quote” (to quote from Adjunct), I have risked a tedious amount of documentation in this essay.69 In part, this insistent citation was a tactic for dealing with an unusual kind of text (it’s clear at a glance that Under the Volcano, say, discusses alcohol—the point scarcely needs to be made; in contrast, topics stated with an equal clarity in Adjunct are not equally salient and are easily lost amid the thousands of other interrupting entries). So part of the task at hand was to try and keep an account of certain textual impulses and expenditures, and to see what they would amount to if added up (“actually,” as Adjunct admits, “literary criticism is book‐keeping”). But in part the catalogues of quotation in this essay were also a demonstration of the main argument I want to make: that Adjunct presents its reader with something like a ‘poetry without organs.’ All of the book’s ubiquitous flooding may be no more than a thematic tic, and not particularly interesting in and of itself, but it names a more interesting phenomenon in Adjunct. Fluidity—as should by now be abundantly clear—is obviously one of the topics of the book, but by detailing its occurrences I want to emphasize that it is also a characteristic of the book’s structure: that fluidity is both a theme and also the form of that theme. To be sure, Manson treats each entry as a distinct unit in the composition of the book, and Adjunct itself asks if it isn’t merely “a series of barely‐connected anecdotes and random thoughts?” But as quickly the reader recognizes certain sentences as belonging to discrete thematic sets, more patient readers come to recognize that certain of those sets— food, architecture, bodies, objects—are in fact equated through the pervasive similarities of their characterizations.70 Moreover, the connections and contaminations do not stop there, as topics that at first appear to be distinctly delimited begin to seep into one another, leaching and bleeding. The Latin 69 Manson, Adjunct, 75. 70 Manson, Adjunct, 9.
[187]
nomenclature and methodical scientific tone of the many horticultural references, for instance, initially seem to isolate them from the casual disorder and slang of surrounding passages. The plants in question, however, turn out to almost always be cacti and succulents, defined by their ability to absorb and retain fluids, and the other plants mentioned in Adjunct appear in the context of ecological and topographic discussions of water flow.71 Individual sentences also establish further connections between plants and the human body, irrevocably linking the two topics in the schema of the text.72 Similarly, the economics in the book come down to questions of “solvency” and invoke a vocabulary of real and metaphoric fluidity (“currency,” “liquidation,” “cash flow,” and so on).73 At the same time, those economic passages also link back to the psychological conditions enumerated elsewhere in the text: “inefficient capitalism is literally mad” (indeed, the title of Deleuze and Guattari’s two volume study on bodies without organs is all to the point: “Capitalism et schizophrénie [Capitalism and Schizophrenia]”).74 Likewise, the repeated quotations from advertisements for lottery tickets—like the several references to 71 In addition to the Linnean names, “cactus” and its variants occurs more than a dozen times (1, 6, 15, 16, 24, 38, 38, 44, 49, 69, 72), including “cactophiles” and two mentions of the “British Cactus and Succulent society” (56, 20, 26); see also: “Plants of the Sonoran Desert” and “A succulent, indehiscent fruit, with a central placenta, as a grape” (71; 54). For water ecology see: “Water always evaporates from the trees” (63); “The branches of the tree are vacuum‐like and fibrous so that the inner air is not effect by outer heat (just like thermos) and the fruit does not dry up” (27). And again, elsewhere: “If there would be no trees on the mountains then the surrounding land would be desert due to seasonal streams” (26‐7); “The branch roots of trees absorb extra water” (39); “The grass and roots of the trees save the land from cutting action due to water flow” (71), and so on. These passages are all brought to bear self‐reflexively on the book itself, with the line: ʺNewspapers, magazines, envelopes, tickets and books are all produced from the wood of trees” (56). Finally, the proximity of flower to flow may be all to the point in certain passages. 72 For instance: “Sï‐Hü is intestines; SiHu is flower” (66); and “Lily brain stem” (48). 73 Manson, Adjunct, 65. 74 Manson, Adjunct, 26.
[188]
John Cage—are inflected by the chance‐generated placement of those sentences themselves within the larger structure of Adjunct, which lends them a self‐referential cast.75 By the same token, when books and writing are mentioned, mise‐en‐abîme, in Manson’s book, they are described exactly like the physiological bodies: sites of fluid expression and absorption.76 Adjunct, in this way, ʺcontinues to mutate in form and content.ʺ77 In sum, Adjunct is full of metatextual references, and in an unusually coherent passage, the book itself provides the reader
75 In addition to the numerous advertisements (10, 12, 14, 20, 22, 22, 28, 30, 37, 44, 46, 50, 50, 64, 64, 72), see: “Powerball” (51); “It’s a lottery for each and every person in this country” (53); “LUCKY NUMBERS” (51); “The Tempers of Hazard” (63), et cetera. 76 For the explicit description of the book as a body, note the reference to “The British National Corpus” (45). Throughout Adjunct, “the poetry on the pages ebbs and flows” with fluids (63). Like the personæ, they are soaked in alcohol: “Red wine stains on a random number table” (24); “Curious stain on pages 82 and 83 of Selected Wallace Stevens” (22); “Guinness spot on a Chamfort maxim” (34); “pour beer onto notebook” (68); “Wine poured into a computer keyboard” (70). Similarly, they stain and are stained by fluids: “small blots of printers ink are spreading onto clothes and furniture” (64); “crimson amoeba stained the sheets” (73); “Printer’s ink bleaches to crimson and liberates chlorine” (12). Books are also infested (4, cf. 75), and writing is related to bruises and mental illness (19, 18); notebooks, papers, and envelopes are repeatedly sprayed and licked and sticking together (6, 16, 29, 33, 59, 70, cf. 43, 64). Most emblematic, perhaps: “British Telecom answering machine brochure stuck by an unidentified odourless liquid to back of Adjunct” (2). Additionally, defecation and bodily fluids are repeatedly linked to the materials of writing: ʺbleeding inkʺ (53); ʺspits blood in lettersʺ (58); “gush poems” (67); “Tampon‐ gravure” (31); “Faber Book of Modern Verse smells of cat pee” (12); “Shits pen to paper; wets his shitting pen; is pa‐pee‐er for his ‘pen’” (58); “a journal of descriptions of actual defecations” (60, cf. “Department of fecal studies” [65]); and with a play on the proximity of diary and diarrhea: “Shit Diary continues to mutate in form and content” (60). Similarly: “waste paper” (72); “peeing though a letterbox” (42); “you can’t fart in an envelope” (43). Less explicitly, the parallel grammar and marked punctuation of two sentences further equates the writing in Adjunct with bodily fluids: “It’s just…verbiage!” and “It’s all…sperm!” (54; 65). 77 Manson, Adjunct, 60.
[189]
with a protocol for leveraging themes of fluidity as a means of literary analysis: The ‘leperous distillment’ has spread from the ear of the dead king to infect the whole of Denmark, and normality can only be restored through the destruction of the core of Danish society. Any other ending would have left traces of the poison behind to continue its corruption. It is the difference between treating the symptoms of a disease—and eradicating it.
Other entries invite readers to make similar connections: “The Cagean tradition doesn’t want to define things as known and fixed. It doesn’t want to categorize. Anything can be performed from one modality of art into another.” And more pointedly: “art is supposed to be about breaking down boundaries; you can’t expect the objects to do it on their own.” Or perhaps you can. Deleuze and Guattari profess that “tout ‘objet’ suppose la continuité d’un flux, tout flux, la fragmentation de l’objet [every ‘object’ presupposes the continuity of a flow; every flow, the fragmentation of an object].” In fact, one might consider the very mode of composition in Adjunct—Manson’s particular procedures for distributing citations and its effects—in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s “body without organs” and the dynamic concatenations of their “machines désirantes [desiring machines].” On its surface, Manson’s text has the adjunctive construction that characterizes the coupling of desiring machines. As Deleuze and Guattari insist, such machines arrange themselves by paratactic accumulation: “«et, et puis»…«et puis, et puis, et puis…» [‘and…’ ‘and then…’ (….) and then…and then…and then….]”78 Moreover, as a hinge between texts, channeling source texts into a new construction, Adjunct operates according to the “productive synthesis” or “production of production” by which every connection between desiring machines is a disruption, and every 78 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti‐Oedipe, 11/5 ; 44/36.
[190]
disruption permits a further connective flow. In that endless set of linkages, “one machine is always coupled with another” and “toute machine est coupure de flux par rapport à celle à laquelle elle est connectée, mais flux elle‐même ou production de flux par rapport à celle qui lui est connectée [every machine functions as a break in the flow in relation to the machine to which it is connected, but at the same time is also a flow itself, or the production of a flow, in relation to the machine connected to it]”; “une machine‐organe est branchée sur une machine‐source: l’une émet un flux, que l’autre coup [an organ‐ machine is coupled with a source‐machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts].”79 Manson cuts from source texts, interrupting them and severing their networks of flow by extracting passages, but when rearticulated by the random number generator those passages are then partitioned in the service of another text, where new flows are liberated and possibilities for new channels of communication between the reassembled fragments open. However decontextualized or truncated, when the segments are newly arrayed and remembered they inevitably form a new set of unpredictable but unavoidable associations, linking up through subterranean, rhizomatic tributaries, and overflowing their boundaries. In Proust and Signs, Deleuze designates the poles of this vacillation as two types of literary machines. The first is “définit avant tout part un production d’objets partiels […] fragments san totalité, parties morcelées, cases sans communication, scènes cloisonnées [defined chiefly by a production of partial objects…, fragments without totality, vessels without communication, partitioned scenes].”80 “This machine, as Adjunct cautions, ʺdoes not take messages.” Seen from this perspective, the non sequitur 79 Compare: “C’est qu’il y a toujours une machine productrice d’un flux, et une autre qui lui est connectée, opérant une coupure, un prélèvement de flux [there is always a flow‐producing machine, and another machine connected to it that interrupts or draws off part of this flow]” (Anti‐Oedipe, 11/5) 80 Gilles Deleuze, Proust et les signes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964); translated by Richard Howard as Proust and Signs (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000) 180/150.
[191]
collage of source material in Adjunct exemplify what Deleuze reads as the absence of style, a mode in which utterances—“non digérés, non encore transformés [not digested, not yet transformed]”—“se distribuent dans une fragmentation que le tout vient confirmer, puisqu’il en résulte, et non pas corriger ni dépasser [are distributed in a fragmentation that the whole ultimately confirms [….] because it results from it, rather than corrects or transcends].”81 The second machine, in complement, “produit des résonances, des effets de résonance [produces resonances and effects of resonance]” that are local, selective, and interpretive.82 This machine describes the activity of the reader who is sensitive to the subtle attractions between sequestered sentences, like the mild tug of lunar tides, and who selects and foregrounds certain aspects of the text, thereby facilitating flows between disparate parts. As Adjunct itself advises, that reader must “be able to work accurately, logically and rapidly through complex text. An ability to assimilate unfamiliar concepts and vocabulary quickly, across a wide range of disciplines is essential.” But any networks established by the reader, any flows liberated through the production of resonances, are only ever at the cost of dismantling other connections and shutting down the possibility of yet other flows. The process, again, is one of digestion: a breaking down into discrete particles but also absorbing and assimilating. Anabolism and catabolism, writing and reading, cut and flow: in the case of Adjunct, each mode plays one term against the other—the logical against the aleatory, coherent arrangement against disruptive disordering, assemblage against disarticulation, part against whole—by foregrounding one while relying on the other. As Robert Creeley famously reminded Charles Olson: “form is never more than an extension of content.”83 The content in 81 Deleuze, Proust, 198/165 82 Deleuze, Proust, 181/151. 83 Charles Olson, “Projective Verse,” Human Universe and Other Essays, ed. Donald Allen (New York: Grove Press, 1967) 52.
[192]
Adjunct, accordingly, is what makes the form legible. In fact, content here seems to be a necessary condition for any sense of the form to emerge. The range of topics and registers, plus the apparent diversity of sources and speakers, allow the reader to see the text as a collage of fragments articulated at the level of the sentence and arranged in an palpably random distribution. Or to state this same proposition from a slightly different angle: without reference to the content, the same grammatical structure could simply constitute a style (clipped, staccato, manic, et cetera) not yet sublated to form. But as Robert Creeley reminded more than one interviewer: “content is never more than an extension of form,” and the form of Adjunct, in turn, helps its reader to reassess the content.84 Understood as series of cuts and incorporations, interruptions and flows, the form of the text is structured as a perfect analogue of its themes—a ʺcatastrophic reversion to structure,ʺ as the book itself phrases it.85 So the dynamic in play here is paradoxical, and familiar: a certain inscription is only able to be apprehended because of the ground which that same inscription, in turn, abolishes—proving and destroying its own possibility at one and the same time. Appropriate to its host of lubricating fluids, Adjunct is thus a particularly slippery text, moving from a content that renders form legible to a form that flows the content, therefore making itself disappear precisely at the moment of its manifestation by erasing the very ground that permitted its emergence. Or, in short: form always seeks its own level. This essay is dedicated to my students at the University of Utah.
84 See, for instance, the interview with Robert Arnold (October, 2003) in Memorious 1 www.memorious.org, or with Leonard Schwartz (November 2003) in Jacket 25 (February, 2004) jacketmagazine.com 85 Manson, Adjunct, 66.
[193]
Sophie Read
“say Smile”: Peter Manson’s Faces There is a mottled and craterous potato‐head on the cover of For The Good of Liars, Peter Manson’s new collected poems.1 It stares in misshapen profile, or it would if it had an eye, out of the left edge of the book: Borso d’Este with a worse complexion and a more pronounced underbite. As an introductory icon, this head which seems to encompass a body within its lumpen outline is a fitting choice; it figures, quite casually, the recurrent preoccupations of the writing over which it lugubriously presides. For Manson’s is a poetics of cranial intimacy: interested in feature and physiognomy, and in what might lie beneath them; located in the eye, the ear and the mouth of poet and reader. His work likes to separate and to anatomise, turning a strongly visual imagination to corporeal concerns: the precision of its imagery reveals by distortion, proposing the poem as “the one that mirrors the one that alters.”2 Reading Manson’s poetry, the eye is repeatedly caught by lines which threaten to take on the aspect of familiar things. Faces emerge, even when they are several removes from actually being there, like the reflection that ghosts the lines of the first poem in the book the momentary trompe l’oeil of untidily disposed 1 Cover image “Painting no. 52” by Mandy Ure. Displayed online at http://www.barquepress.com/liars.html All references Peter Manson, For the Good of Liars (London: Barque, 2006) hereafter referred to as Liars. 2 Manson, “Birth Windows,” Liars, 15.
[194]
stationery: “a white envelope glimpsed on the gas fire / which I take for a mirror / before realising my mistake.”3 It is a mistake the poet never seems to learn from, this over‐recognition that seeks to fix features on the inanimate object; the world, here, is often made to resolve itself into approximately anthropomorphic shapes, compelled to yield an answering image to the steady regard of the poetic eye. Object permanence is that stage in a child’s development when the realisation dawns that things continue to exist, the face of a parent, for example, even when no longer present to the sense. The poet proceeds as if he has only just grasped this principle, and each act of recognition comes with the shock of a new revelation as to the capacities of the human mind. To look around and light on strange likeness can after all be quite a discomfiting habit. “[M]irror is,” Manson notices while “Listening to John Cage’s Twenty‐Eight,” “same size and shape as / adjacent photo of my father in 1945 recovering from malaria in Malaya.”4 The accidental graphic similarity of place and adjacent disease (“malaria” comes from the Italian for “bad air”) provides a fleetingly comparable experience for the reader; the observation that follows, though, is of a different order of intimacy: “I do not look like my father yet.” For someone as interested as Manson is in resemblance, such a statement must pitch a pride in individuality against the disappointment of genetic inheritance that fails to assert a sufficiently marked visual connection; the “yet” is at once relieved and saddened that the picture doesn’t show what the mirror does, for all their shared dimensions. The last fully articulated thought of the poem is disingenuous: “I do not know what / mirror looks like.” While this may be true in a metaphysical sense, given the undoubted difficulty of sneaking up on a looking‐glass before it has the chance to start reflecting, the alert reader knows better. Manson’s oddly small mirror (a moderate Narcissus, this poet) looks like a photograph, and an envelope. 3 Manson, “For the first part of this moment,” Liars, 5. 4 Manson, “Listening to John Cage’s Twenty‐Eight,” Liars, 44.
[195]
“Hats” is another poem much concerned with the idea of faces roving out of their proper spheres; it opens with a disconcerting glimpse of real flesh, not, this time, an imagined reflection, though with something of the same eye‐caught quality: Places a face previously was not are filled by skin, visible from the eye down5
Manson’s own gloss on the lines describes their moment of inspiration with deadpan anthropological detachment: “Watching cheeks encroach into the lower visual field during weight gain, November 1995.” The image is, as Manson’s so often are, both precise and obscure: an ordinary physical phenomenon seems at first surreal and almost nightmarish because the perspective is wrong and there is no orientation. A face that appears as if from nowhere, and is “skin, visible from the eye down,” is hardly human; only if the reader stops looking at the eye and decides instead to look through it do the lines come into focus. The escape from the B‐movie atmosphere generated by the apprehension of such deformities is, though, only momentary. “Pink eyes” soon bend their gaze on the cartoon wound of “a gap / exiting from the cut neck in a bubble,” and though it’s possible that this speechless neck might not belong to a person (it might be made of glass, like the one in “In Vitro” “the neck breaks off, uncut”), it isn’t really likely. 6 From decapitatory fantasies, the poem turns back to its preoccupation with faces just a little out of place, considering now the gradual violence inflicted on a profile by the passage of time: The chest cavitates in a slow crush, say 40 years of the chin lowering to a point on the moon’s callus
5 Manson, “Hats,” Liars, 7. 6 Manson, “In Vitro,” Liars, 18.
[196]
The footnote, again, slips in sly humour masquerading as helpful exactitude. This particular imagining of the human body as a crash test dummy in hyper‐slow motion was, we are told, prompted by “the lower half of JH Prynne’s face, as seen in Glasgow, November 1995.” Obviously a good month for observing the facial idiosyncrasies of British poets. The fearful spectre of facelessness raised and dispelled by the poem’s opening lines returns with some force in an arresting acid house moment: “To print with a thumb on the polyp with no face / a yellow sun and say, Smile.” Not the vacuous ecstasy of an early nineties rave icon, it turns out, but a reference to its doppelganger: Mr Happy©, pressed into service as an advertising emblem for the poet’s home city, with the accompanying legend “Glasgow’s miles (Glasgow smiles) better.” Manson, one might conjecture, was not won over by the campaign. This benign character is given the sinister aspect of a polyp, a fleshy growth, or perhaps a simple sea creature, with “no face”: though in fact he’s all face, rather like, if infinitely more cheerful than, the potato head on the cover. Even the printing thumb becomes for an uncomfortable instant the featureless face, skin from the knuckle up, which from some angles it resembles; the difficulty of determining a stable image is again compounded by a deliberate absence of orientating detail. There is an impression of an absurdist aesthetic at work here, a mental doodling fascinated with defacement in all its senses: “replacing the mouth with a joke, with an ear, with a ringpull.”7 This isn’t to suggest, however, that this kind of imagery is simply evidence of a taste for the bizarre that gratifies itself in haphazard facial redisposition or rearrangement: “I’ve always had a strong dislike for Surrealism,” Manson said in a recent interview; “[it’s] always seemed to me to be all depth and no surface.” While Manson’s poetry undoubtedly has both of these things, the two are not as nearly connected as they might be: if
7 Manson, “Switch for Breathing,” Liars, 46.
[197]
his detachable faces can stand as figures for the formal surfaces to which they’re etymologically akin, these thematic preoccupations become more than merely cosmetic. In a moment of revelatory clarity, W. S. Graham, a writer much concerned with language surfaces, wakes to the implications of his image in the glass: “I am up. I’ve washed / The front of my face.” Manson exploits the poetic possibilities of the conceptual fissure that Graham’s lines expose: his words are at times a front, and something between archaeology and divination is required to venture a restructuring of the cognitive mechanisms that shape and underpin them. On one level, he’s interested in the potential for slightly disturbing imagery that this notion gives him; as well as the instances of stray visages outlined above, there is, for example, the imagining of (presumably) one person standing behind another as day breaks from “Sarin Canasta,” a poem in the form of a play‐script which is among Manson’s more impenetrable works: “The face facing the back of your face / moves to distinctness with sunrise.”8 This odd locution takes a few seconds to think through: for the realisation to dawn, in the poem’s terms, or for the eye to adjust to the fact that (as so often) there is nothing freakish here. That faces have a back and a front is an undeniable, if unsettling, anatomical extrapolation. This fascination with façade goes deeper. Sometimes, the reader is invited right through the surface: to catch sight of something strange out of the poet’s eye, to watch the workings of muscle and bone and the pulse of blood from under the skin. “Nosebleed,” the poem most explicitly interested in these analogies, opens with the intimate imperative of a jaw’s movement, perhaps in an act of articulation: “Press forward from inside, / piston of the upper mandible.”9 It goes on:
8 Manson, “Sarin Canasta,” Liars, 29‐30, 30. 9 Manson, “Nosebleed,” Liars, 14.
[198]
You again. what will the face do . during language | smiling | image contracted to this : my face
It is unclear who might be recognising whom here, but this frame‐by‐frame interrogation of an involuntary muscular response suggests at least that the sight is unexpected. To coordinate speech and countenance becomes under these circumstances an unlikely feat, and their independent activities the object of some curiosity. The lines are at the same time pervaded by a self‐consciousness that approaches paralysis: the nervous gaze retreats inward to avoid meeting another eye, travelling some distance back behind the plane of confrontation. It finds the shape of a fragile skull, “An ingot of blond porcelain”; apostrophises quite rudely the head in which it is contained, and in which it has sought sanctuary: o melon ball of bone and brain the harness
“Nosebleed” is concerned more or less directly with the relationship between appearance, what happens on the surface of language, and the submerged processes of its composition, both cerebral and physiological. Manson describes the secret life of a moment of communication: the speech that might have been manufactured at a chance encounter, but also the poem as it exists on the page (“image contracted to this”). He presents the body that is attached to, and results in, the face of the words, a body that is its minimal components, nothing but nerves and excreta. Then, with characteristic capriciousness, he separates them once again: Body | pinched to a spine & the throughput Of bowels, filtering. Face (a) has pinched off | floating | now without reason looping | the corm of a smile
[199]
The title might lead one to expect something more fluid than this stop‐start style, with its barriers of punctuation, that congeals almost to silence; but titles can be fortuitous or deceptive, and a line of Adjunct, a monumental collection of disjecta membra, suggests that this one may be itself the product of a moment of impeded communication. “Fabio mishears Rosebud as Nosebleed p poem.”10 If the pinched‐off face had a rosebud mouth, its “corm of a smile,” “a short fleshy rhizome, or bulb‐like subterraneous stem,” the dictionary claims, “producing from its upper surface leaves and buds, and from its lower, roots” might stand as the midpoint of language, between the root of thought and the flower of words. A fanciful reading, this, perhaps, to find in one of Manson’s many floating faces a sudden linguistic garden, but not so very far away from some of his own imaginings. “The mirror can only blush,” he writes in “A Funeral in Sense,” “reflecting a muted horn”: and once more, the image that should be looking back is strangely lost, distorted out of its proper location by the lines of sight that shy habitually from such things.11 Instead of a reddening countenance there is a horn, “muted” in colour as well as sound, and the poet’s pocket‐sized mirror feels embarrassment at the mistake. All of Manson’s recurrent concerns are here: he shows again the unexpected reflection and the misplaced face. As the perspective shifts firmly back inside the poet’s head, the reader is invited to follow, asked to make sense of what is seen from a privileged vantage point, to feel words planted in the mouth. “I see this by air‐bent light,” it goes on, “and the rose still blisters my tongue.” If the invitation of self‐absorption is accepted, both are left, in the end, with what Manson’s poetry strains always so hard to achieve: a confrontation with the familiar face of the page, “the body eclipsed by language.”
10 Peter Manson, Adjunct: an Undigest (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Review, 2004) 46. 11 Manson, “A Funeral in Sense,” Liars, 61.
[200]
Sara Crangle
The Art of Exhalation in Poetry: Chris Goode’s Bathos Chris Goode’s poetry champions the artlessness of the sinking body. The first poem of his first collection, Boomer Console (2000), begins with a palpable pursuit of boundaries: the ill‐ defined parameters of an unnamed region, the shores or edges of a series of objects—a table, shelf, window. At stanza’s end: “an assertion of / leap‐fall; fail.”1 Paradoxically, falling brings clarity to this fuzzy domain: falling is a claim staked and inseparable from the leap with which it forms a compound, an insistence that to soar is inevitably to descend. These opening lines set the stage for demarcations of bodies stumbling, coming down, deflating: 1. “o, achieve what you can! make you / and be flying to see from the courageous air—” reads “My Mom her Boyfriend”; six lines later there is a crash into the “very very much bluer bodies of / the dane and the beautiful floors.” Ecstatic, floating transcendence collapses into grounded airlessness: those blue bodies have not only fallen, but appear winded, oxygen‐ deprived. Although this movement is sudden, it is not nearly as abrupt as similar descents in Goode’s later work:
1 Chris Goode, Boomer Console (London: Barque Press, 2000) unpaginated.
[201]
2. “Cut to the quick chase….We are (circular breathing) speeding up the / body gameplay, swift slam crash.”2 The acceleration so adamantly asserted in the midst of No Son House (2004) is sustained by presentations of the body plunging dizzily, deleteriously: …We were always falling over—ourselves—and this—in that it finally ends here, ungiving grip on a jacknifed vesicle undo redo vesicle undo redo vesicle the blooded wad pumps on…3
These bodies slump over and within themselves: “jacknifed” signals both weapon and dive, so that the vesicle in question has been stabbed, or plummets through the body that contains it. Goode’s pumping repetition of “undo/redo” underscores the laboured heartbeat of a body struggling for survival, delivering blood and oxygen to an injured self that re‐emerges in another poem: 3. …the echo life map of the breath routine susceptible gait in a blue technology swirl spot kin speak utterly hopelessly loveliness spiral brotherly I came down4
From measured breath to faltering step to bodily descent: this persistent corporeal sinking in Goode’s poetry measures and represents key elements of his particular approach to writing, and more specifically, his use of the bathetic. For if bathos is considered a shift from the elevated to the absurd or trivial, in Goode this movement belongs primarily to the body. “Bathos” is Greek for depth or bottom; the “bathetic” is the movement towards that lowest point. The first known 2 Chris Goode, “Rare motorcade, arterial bleed,” No Son House (London: Barque Press, 2004) 9. 3 Goode, “Rare motorcade,” 9. 4 Goode, “Cot death link to womb dream,” No Son House, 17‐19, 17.
[202]
articulation of literary bathos occurs in Longinus’s third century “On the Sublime,” where he describes instances of turbid writing in which confused images, examined “in the light of day…gradually sin[k] from the terrible to the ridiculous.”5 Alexander Pope popularises and parodies Longinus’s definition in Peri Bathous: or, Martinus Scriblerus, his Treatise of the Art of Sinking in Poetry (1727).6 For Pope, bathos is a journey, a descent into what he considers the weightiness and hasty judgements of contemporary writing. Following Longinus’s lead, Pope also equates bathos with the profound, a word indicating an internalised depth or thoroughness, as well as something influential, with far‐reaching effects. But in the essay that follows, these venerable qualities are deliberately undermined by Pope’s extended critique of fellow writers for their absurd misuses of rhetorical and figurative devices. As Freya Johnston writes, the desire to both reject and accommodate the improper is at the heart of Pope’s “mudd[y] enterprise. Peri Bathos, structured on a wilful misprision of the Longinian ‘sublime,’ celebrates an obscurity or ambiguity of language that it is also the intention of the work to repudiate, in favour of clarity and of common sense.”7 Johnston’s reference to muddiness is particularly apt, in that bathos involves not only Pope’s slinging of defamatory charges, but a more general bemiring: any earthbound descent demands, at its outset, a lofty ideal against which it is measured and found lacking. For Longinus and Pope, this ideal is the sublime: while sublime writing conceals its machinations, bathetic writing clumsily exposes the processes of its own creation; where sublimity involves a universally felt state of wonder, 5 Longinus, “On the Sublime,” Aristotle Poetics, Longinus On the Sublime, Demetrius on Style, ed. and trans. W.H. Fyfe, revised Donald Russell (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995) 143‐308, 167. 6 Alexander Pope, “Peri Bathous: or, Martinus Scriblerus, his Treatise of the Art of Sinking in Poetry,” Alexander Pope, ed. Pat Rogers (NY: Oxford University Press, 1993) 195‐238. 7 Freya Johnston, Samuel Johnson and the Art of Sinking, 1709‐1791, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) 201.
[203]
bathos occurs when an author is ecstatically carried away by ideas or thoughts an audience finds tendentious or silly. These comparisons rely upon the classical ideal of proportion: both Longinus and Pope believe good writing requires an alignment between subject matter and style in a way reflective of nature; both, in other words, argue on behalf of a specific kind of literary realism.8 Longinus writes: “One ought not in elevated passages to descend to what is sordid and contemptible…the proper course is to suit the words to the dignity of the subject and thus to imitate Nature, the artist that created man.”9 But while the veneration of mimesis bore weight in the eighteenth century, this ideological and aesthetic foundation has long since been razed. As Keston Sutherland points out in “The Trade in Bathos”: “We no longer believe in the idea of ‘nature’ as the visible source of truth, with which our relationship can be vitiated by mistaken acts of imaginative description….Without anything to vitiate…how are we expected to believe that we can use language wrongly?.”10 Sutherland erects another bathetic standard: one based on economic history. Arguing that Pope’s repopularisation of bathos was not coincidentally tied to rising prosperity in England in the latter half of the seventeenth century, he suggests that artistic creation and reception become skewed in periods where myriad individual desires are readily satiated; immersed in affluence, there is a tendency to engage only in “the pleasure of being irresponsive, or perversely responsive, to
8 Johnston locates the origin of this ideal in Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric, where he argues: “‘Propriety of style will be obtained…by proportion to the subject matter.’” For Aristotle, weighty matters should not be treated in an offhand fashion, and trifling details should not be granted dignity. Johnston points out that in the Orator, Cicero also divides literary styles into a tripartite scheme of plain, tempered, and grand, approving “congruence between subject matter and expression. He considers it as discordant to narrate a commonplace transaction in the sublime manner as to demean a grand subject by phrasing it in workaday language” (5). 9 Longinus, “On the Sublime,” 299. 10 Keston Sutherland, “The Trade in Bathos,” Jacket 15 (2001): 1‐12, 8‐9.
[204]
our objective material world.”11 Pope too bemoans the way literature is increasingly treated as a manufactured product, a lament shared by Longinus, who acknowledges that while his democratic society should engender the greatest degree of eloquence, in truth, love of pleasure and money has “s[u]nk our ship of life with all hands”—the arts have been degraded by luxury, swagger, and shamelessness.12 In Sutherland’s view, twenty‐first‐century Western wealth has brought about a similar crisis: The split is complete and undialectical: the power of economic domination does not need ideas, and the so called power of intellectual community among the people who are dominated does need them. Bathos is the livid fact and outrage of that split, the infection of all idealistic content in language with its own excluded position, its own existence as an ecstatic compromise.13
Sutherland describes how, in The Republic, Plato sketches an epistemological scale whereby ideas are sublime, and conjecture, the very basest form of knowledge. But where Plato demotes conjecture, Sutherland likens it to “the useful surprise of a grammatical mismatch, the thrill of syntactic breakdown”—as well as any number of bathetic techniques derided by Pope, yet definitive of so much contemporary poetry. Indeed, for Sutherland, “ideas are now possible only where they are sunk by the light innovations of formal conjecture.”14 Unlike Longinus and Pope, Sutherland argues that poetry should “not…be like reality, but…as impossible as reality”; as such, in his own writing, he strives “to make bathos itself seem estranged, alien, and affective viscerally, such that the thickness and onrush of bathetic language can vitiate the
11 Sutherland, “The Trade in Bathos,” 3. 12 Longinus, “On the Sublime,” 303‐5. 13 Sutherland, “The Trade in Bathos,” 10. 14 Sutherland, “The Trade in Bathos,” 10‐11.
[205]
relation to truth in a way that seems wrong.”15 His claim is a deliberately slippery double negative, demanding a spoiling of truth that generates more rottenness. And yet, while promoting untruth as the new improved truth, Sutherland nevertheless appears bent on discovering some truth to call our own. Bathos is the tool by which he begins to carve out this amorphous space, this refusal of any “unnecessary concession to the dominant economic repression of idealism.”16 Crucially, what is most graspable in Sutherland’s bathos is its deliberate traversing of spatial parameters—estrangement, alienation, onrushes—and extraordinary physicality—viscerality, thick‐ ness. In other words, while resuscitating bathos as a specifically linguistic concern, Sutherland demarcates a solution that requires a self‐consciously sentient human body. Much of Sutherland’s exploration of bathos aligns with Goode’s politics and poetics. Goode describes himself as an artist who has “made it [his] business…to be as unrelentingly oversensitive to unacknowledged tyrannies as [he] possibly can”17; the consequences of mass consumerism and globalisation form unremitting aspects of his focus, as not least indicated by his interest in the privatisation of healthcare, a theme that runs through Go Portland, OR (2002) like an oozing wound. More specifically, in his essay “‘These facts are variously modified’: American Writers in an Information Economy,” Goode ruminates on the thickness and onrush of contemporary aesthetic language, considering ways artists respond to the current privileging of factuality, the ever‐ proliferating end product of our information age. For Goode, there exists a pervasive desire for “frictionless mobility,” one characterised by a bid for information that travels freely, but is
15 Sutherland, “The Trade in Bathos,” 10‐12. 16 Sutherland, “The Trade in Bathos,” 11. 17 From Goode’s unpublished essay, “Towards a Poetry of Invisible Lunatics.”
[206]
not impinged upon or altered by its journey.18 This desire he considers a founding concept of the American dream, as evinced by the motto of the U.S. Postal service, which reads: “‘Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.’” Goode observes that this “motto helps to articulate an only partly sardonic postmodern vision of insulation from the natural world and immunity to interference.”19 Arguing that speedy travel, “‘slick’ participation, the ironic courier that never takes an in‐breath” are values that have come to seem “complicit in the mechanic operations of…a capitalist apotheosis,” Goode loosely defines postmodernity as cyberspatial, derived from “the anonymous, disembodied, null individual traversing a hypertextual grid, where the only remaining prestige value is speed.”20 The result is an on‐going conflict between a commitment to stable, assumed ideologies and “the massive complex of permissions bestowed by the experience of attenuated, possibly even terminal, liminality.” Goode’s solution involves a bathetic descent, and a reignition of friction—“the heat of re‐entry, of coming back down to earth”—the making of a choice between having no fixed ideological address and a homesickness for more concrete foundations. This friction constitutes his refusal of the cyberspatial, all predicated on the insistence that “we know, feelingly, how unlike the sleek liminal felicities of The Matrix are the working lives of most people on the planet.” As exemplary proof of this knowledge, Goode cites the post 9‐11 blog entries of Brian Kim‐Stefans, which display an “invigorated tendency towards (even just a language of) ‘bodies’ and ‘touch’
18 Chris Goode, “‘These facts are variously modified’: American Writers in an Information Economy.” Edinburgh Review 114 (2004): 126‐57, 139, 140, 153; hereafter referred to as “Variously Modified.” 19 Goode, “Variously Modified,” 140. 20 Goode, “Variously Modified,” 152‐3.
[207]
suggest[ing] a desire again to invest in the material, the tangible.”21 Friction involves the rubbing of bodily edges and the warm resistance borne of that movement; it is inherently bathetic in that it is associated with attrition, diminution, and wearing down. In “the history of airports” Goode parodically delineates a near‐geological history of the airport, considering the etymology of “terminal” as including terere, to rub, and terminus, a boundary or end‐point. Terminality, he then argues, might be perceived as “the desire to chafe against a limit. Or: the will to break through.”22 In Goode’s poetry, this defined limit may well be the human body; as he writes in “Gay twist varial disaster revert”—a poem to which I will return—“for body read frame….frame you say prove it.” Chafing occurs even within the bodily frame, as when air works its way into the lungs, which in turn push against the ribs in breath. This same frictional swelling defines Pope’s articulation of Homer’s sublime expression: “ ‘Tis the Sentiment that swells and fills out the Diction, which rises with it, and forms itself about it….Like glass in the Furnace which grows to a greater Magnitude, and refines to a greater Clearness, only as the Breath within is more powerful, and the Heat more intense.”23 But Goode is less interested in breath as a site of inflated artistic perfection than he is in the relationship between breath and failure. Failure he extols as an expression of humanness, acceptance, and “a willingness…to abjure the smoke‐and‐mirrors rage of the ego. Where these indicators of failure meet, at the nexus of analogue and digital, breath and entropy, we find very little poetry.” So while Pope’s breath is merely sublime, Goode’s functions as “a measure, a host, a model, an embrace” as well as “a unit of declamation and a site for contest.” Goode wants us to be
21 Goode, “Variously Modified,” 156. 22 “[T]he history of airports” was jointly written for a performance work entitled “The Consolations” (1999), and is included in Goode’s Boomer Console. 23 Alexander Pope, “Preface,” The Iliad of Homer: Books I‐IX, ed. Maynard Mack et al (London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1967) 3‐25, 10.
[208]
distinctly aware of the motions of breath, citing as contrast the circular breathing techniques of saxophonist Evan Parker, whose music involves “extended unpunctuated solos, up to and past twenty minutes without an audible intake,” a process Goode describes as “mind‐bogglingly impressive but neurotic, joyless, airtight, really.”24 Goode longs for punctuation, the connection of “the wailing wall…with the socialised poetry of breath in all its manifestations, from the katajjaq breathing games of the Inuit to the long‐ass Gloria! In Ding‐Dong Merrily on High.”25 If there is a discernible trajectory of breath to be traced throughout Goode’s writing—and this is an “if” of staggeringly terrible proportions—it might look like this: in Boomer Console, breath, like emotion, is often truncated: “too embarrassed to feel nothing and / in some ways deeply afraid you / suddenly stop breathing.” Delayed sentience and stymied breath close this poem: look at this emotionally retarded rothko. i like the closet and his specific lips. excited without being an autistic child, not cold, because it was nothing which I need, dear god i finally stop breathing.26
This grateful, abrupt cessation of internal turbulence occurs also at the close of “the history of airports”: “Surely, then, women and men will always dance in airports…dancing, just dancing, all the doo‐dah day, dancing right up to the limit, and holding 24 Goode, “Towards a Poetry of Invisible Lunatics,” 10. Goode makes similarly disparaging note of a track on Laurie Anderson’s Big Science, “O Superman (for Massenet)”: “(The motor of the track, you will recall, is a looped synthetic ‘ha’ sound, an intoned and unrelenting exhalation functioning—significantly—as the pivot for the song’s persistent, melancholic movement between its major key and it relative minor; there’s never any matching in‐breath—here, cybertechnology eliminates the bounds of physiology and entropy without missing a beat)” (Goode, “Variously Modified”: 140). 25 Goode, “Towards a Poetry of Invisible Lunatics,” 11. 26 Goode, “An Emotionally Retarded Roswell,” Boomer Console.
[209]
our breath and wanting to survive for longer still.” In these instances, breathlessness signals not death, but a highly implausible exceeding of mortality. Pitted against this transcendent breath is a dogged panting, slightly mitigated by vocalisation. Consider: “it / definitely helps to go.grrr.yeah—/ to clamber breathless out of favour,” or “stuck in a loop of shallow breathing, gagging for khoomei.”27 This dual struggle—to articulate breath and make it articulate—re‐ emerges in Goode’s next collection, Go Portland, OR. Amidst a discussion of “pre‐speech tokens” in “Chris Burn,” Goode writes: “wherever / you are you know to be the yes‐maker; author of air‐shapes, / not their guardian, not the diligent bird‐ man, not even; & so / by rubbing, choking, you, Chris, chuck out vivace flecks in a curving jet.”28 But Goode, himself an author of breath rubbed and choked, shift‐shapes the parameters of breath in this volume, most notably with “Footings,” a poem heavy with imperative, medical language and inadequate care, where breath functions as measured refrain‐cum‐stage direction: “electrical strategy distribution impeded and at an end, / medical nothingness. / Forget it. Pay no attention to the world. [Breath.]”29 “Footings” ends: “You may use the following: magnesium; sonar; moonlight serenade. [Breath.]” As in life, this breath is superfluous, parenthetical aside and fundamental punctuation.30 27 The first citation comes from “An Emotionally Retarded Roswell,” the second from “The Tree‐Line.” Khoomei is an Asian form of throat‐singing. 28 Chris Goode, Go Portland, OR (London: Barque Press, 2002). 29 Goode, “Footings,” Go Portland, Or: 15‐26, 23. 30 Goode, “Footings,” 23. Very, very often Goode’s renderings of breath are preceded or followed by mentions of noise. For Pope, poetic sound can form a conduit to the sublime, as in Homer’s numbers, which “awaken and raise us like the Sound of a Trumpet. They roll along as a beautiful River, always in motion, and always full; while we are borne away by a Tide of Verse, the most rapid, and yet the most smooth imaginable” (“Preface,” 11). In Pope’s view, noise should be a kind of frictionless mobility, a vehicle by which words might glide along effortlessly. By contrast, Goode’s interpretation of poetic noise focuses on its friction‐laden sound waves. He is fond of citing Brian Eno in this regard: “A signal sent through a medium interacts with it in complex ways and
[210]
some of the information being sent breaks up into noise.” For Goode, this “additional noise” can only add to any work of art. Again, he quotes Eno: “Distortion and complexity are the source of noise. Rock music is built on distortion: on the idea that things are enriched, not degraded, by noise. To allow something to become noisy is to allow it to support multiple readings. It is a way of multiplying resonances” (quoted in “Invisible Lunatics” and “Variously Modified”). We see this kind of complex distortion in some of Goode’s more cacophonous lines, particularly in No Son House: “drizzles down the entry‐phone like absent dad spat / butterscotch, his vendomatic pop‐shot jenny / droning twilit on like the last fat chop on the slab. / The journalist says popcorn into his daughter’s lap” (8). This distortion is a far cry from Longinus’s urging that the composition of words must follow musical composition in generating a lovely, masterful melody (287). For Goode, noise is resistance, “an accepted index of non‐fidelity to a prevailing ideal” (“Variously Modified” 141). Noise also exceeds the confines of intention, sense, and meaning, in that it proliferates randomly and unexpectedly, like popcorn spat into a lap. Recognising and welcoming this randomness forms an integral part of how Goode delineates “the job of the poet” which “is not to impart or encode, to distil or confer, but rather to act as the guardian of the space around the written record of the poetic event, the sculptor of air and silence whose aim is to preserve the opportunity for individual reading choices and perceptual manoeuvres, rather than the impulse to pedagogy and foreclosure”—an equation of and insistence on the artistic significance of air and silence that recurs in lines of “Chris Burn” quoted above (“Invisible Lunatics”). The strangely militaristic language Goode uses here to describe poetic sculpting of air and silence—he is, after all, pitting himself as guardian of manoeuvres—is extended by another instance in which he describes artistic intention as “a noise‐generating machine.” This is a description Sutherland has questioned, writing in an email exchange with Goode published in the journal Quid, “My problem with this way of thinking is not with ‘noise,’ which is critical and in any case ineliminable. I find the idea of intention as a ‘machine’ actually reductive, and schematically so, in the case of systematic compositional ‘strategies’ in particular” (Chris Goode and Keston Sutherland, “Six Bits of an Exchange,” Quid 10 (2003). As Sutherland’s tone implies, Goode’s veneration of artistically produced silence as a means of opening up interpretive noisinesses is well‐trodden ground. But Goode’s mechanisation of artistic intention demands slightly closer scrutiny, as it jars somewhat against his hope that a return to viscerality might make art more resistant to postmodern tyrannies of effortless, high‐speed anonymity. I return to this difficult and unresolved relationship between mechanisation and viscerality in Goode’s work at the end of this essay. For examples of the history of discussions of artistic silence and noise, see Susan Sontag’s “The Aesthetics of Silence,” first published in 1967 (Styles of Radical Will (London: Vintage, 1988) 3‐34. Sontag argues that contemporary
[211]
Goode’s last work, No Son House, marks something of a thematic return to some of the concerns of Boomer Console; both include speakers who are pop and avant‐garde cultural flaneurs, both delineate vexed relationships familial and friendly. Additionally, inexperienced adolescence seeps through explorations of sex and drugs, a youthfulness ramped up come No Son House into high‐speed depictions of self‐harm, depictions often converging with the medical terminology of Go Portland, OR. These destructive scenes lend a greater urgency to the act of breathing; “the echo life map of the breath routine” is compounded by bids to “uncollapse the lung” and “colonise
artists strive either to completely shut down the communication between artist and audience by not producing art at all, or at the very least, obscuring communication through the deliberate generation of audience displeasure or frustration (7). Sontag maintains that this artistic silence has a violent aspect, one she hopes will ultimately prove beneficial: “Through its advocacy of silence and reduction, art commits an act of violence upon itself, turning art into a species of auto‐manipulation, of conjuring—trying to bring these new ways of thinking to birth” (18). Sontag’s silence is a powerful, punishing, excluding artistic medium; she also asserts unequivocally that audiences confronted with silence are compelled to respond. William R. Paulson’s The Noise of Culture: Literature in the Information Age might be considered an attempt to delineate that response. Paulson suggests readers of difficult texts encounter elements that cannot initially be decoded or integrated and “thus appear as noise” (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). He observes, “rather than dismissing them as noise…the reader makes a particular kind of assumption about them, namely that they indicate the presence of as yet unknown codes or levels of meaning at work within the text” (134‐35). This assumption Paulson considers false; at the heart of his writing—as for Sontag—is the claim that art should not be treated as an object of knowledge; Paulson applies this supposition to the entire discipline of English literature, from criticism to instruction. For Paulson, literature occupies a marginal place in postmodern society, and this is a good place to be: “Literature is not and will not ever again be at the center of culture, if indeed it ever was. There is no use in proclaiming or debunking its central position. Literature is the noise of culture, the rich and indeterminate margin into which messages are sent off, never to return the same, in which signals are received not quite like anything emitted.” (180) “Noise,” then, is Paulson’s term for reader bewilderment and the place literature occupies more generally in the world. His work extends Sontag’s, placing literary reception in a cacophonous, distinctly celebratory byway adjacent to, and dependent upon, her hermitage of silent artists.
[212]
the foetal / breathing pathways.”31 While exhalation has by now become in Goode’s work a near‐motif of friction‐filled descent, its use as bathetic device is supremely rendered in the second poem of this collection. “Lapse” begins with a cinematic panning over a morning scene of “jacked‐in road / works…and blanking nets / to cream out basic number suicide.”32 The aftermath of this “chalk and boron lob collision” occupies the next stanza, which we are encouraged to watch “on polar viewfind.”33 What follows are more hints at the suicidal, including references to “fanbelt paranoia” and “leav[ing] the choker running”; next arise gestures that might be construed as context for all this misery, including articulations of failure, “boredom chamber lot speaks / salary reverse” and familial denial, “son you’re no son / house.” At its end, “Lapse” returns to a hospitalised aftermath of injury and a climactic accusation (compounded by the first appearance of pronouns), a climax that becomes near‐instantaneously bathetic: “stole / everything stole you stole / you stole everything you stole and / the fault was always yours skied lofted / turn around and run.”34 As the brief temporality of its title suggests, “Lapse” oscillates very rapidly between the sublime and the bathetic; attempts to put an end to life and breath are quickly countered by bids to keep the choker—the throat, its machinations— running.35 These quick and multiple descents into pain and difficulty, crises, as Goode puts it in his second line, “all abruptly first morn” are also made negligible, a “plus or minus 31 For uncollapsing, see “Virtual drive capacity in the problem bird”; for colonisation, see “Cot death link to womb dream.” Both poems are located in No Son House. 32 Goode, “Lapse,” No Son House, 6‐7, 6. 33 Boron is an element used in textile fibreglass, a material fundamental to automobile construction. 34 Goode, “Lapse,” 7. 35 The word “lapse” is in itself marvellously bathetic, in that it refers to a fall from a previous standard of accomplishment, quality, or conduct. “Lapse” also indicates a gradual passage or slip, a deterioration or decline, as well as a minor or temporary failure—all definitions very much in keeping with what Pope describes as the very base or bottom of modern poetry.
[213]
one like a compound lapse / in fake dusk.” If, at the end of the day, nature forsakes, and even dusk is artificial, where might reality be gauged? In the fallible body, its frame and breath: “cough starts breath trapped / in bottled error and longed‐4 uh‐scape”—a final phrase smacking of adolescent abbreviation, even as the “uh” underscores the general indecisiveness at hand. In “Lapse,” attempts to escape the body lead only to more breath, and in turn, to dependencies on chemical solutions that can cause as much pain as they relieve: “in‐ patient clam at its width in battery truck pig / out on solpadeine pent error float / in carmine ache said ache in dub‐plate / tetanus doubt.”36 Technology aids and abets, and is often a meagre salve to the real, physical consequences of disaster: “tab tab bit slide belongs to coma princess / in a leap and roll and parascend / too late now to stoop to understand / the roar of the crow it is as similar / across itself as ice‐cream.” The comatose princess—an individual breathed‐for, and only breathing— moves up, down, and up again; in so doing, she makes the necessity of descending towards comprehension strangely and simultaneously absurd, sublime, and banal: hence roaring crows, the consistencies of ice cream. While the prefix “para” of “parascend” is most commonly defined as “‘to make ready, prepare’”—hence its use in parachute, parapluie, and parascension—as a Greek preposition, it also means “by the side of” or “alongside” as well as something faulty or amiss. Goode’s “parascend” might then be taken to mean a perverted ascent, or a levelling out of rolling and stooping with leaping and rising. And so quick are the turns between the sublime and the bathetic in “Lapse” that they appear to deliberately echo the life map of inhalation and exhalation, make a parity of rising
36 Goode, “Lapse,” 7. Solpadeine is a well‐known pharmaceutical pain‐reliever; carmine is a chemical dye. Used in numerous foodstuffs and primarily comprised of boiled insects, carmine has been known to cause anaphalactic shock in some individuals, although the American Food and Drug Administration is hesitant to require that it be listed on consumer packaging. Artificial carmine thus can lead to bodily “ache.”
[214]
and falling. Frictionless mobility—the “skied lofted” of the second‐to‐last line—almost immediately becomes a resistant surface upon which we “turn around and run”—action generating still more in the way of heavy breathing. “Lapse” gains some momentum from immediately following “The steel workers’ proposal for the decommissioning of Beaubourg,” a poem similarly breathless and suicidal, where “dude huffing a dream from the bag the / milk came in” is followed shortly thereafter by “Let’s kick it. / Teenage girls always slit their wrists in the bath.”37 But while employing many of the same motifs, “steel workers” does not descend to the poetic non plus ultra in the same way as “Lapse,” in part because it uses a deliberately comic form of bathos; here Goode’s sublime is rendered with the self‐conscious awareness that it will instantaneously rocket into the absurd. Consider: “Now yellow round the tree / and trumpets shall sound (novelty goddamn / door chime funniest thing)” or “Jesus comes like a gift in the / cereal.” Some of the funniest and, when used too habitually, weakest, moments in Goode’s writing reference mainstream culture as a means of collapsing the import of the poetic moment. From Go Portland, OR: “a furore dribbles neon down the Mall” and “now there are boys born without shoulders, how / will they ever learn ping‐pong?”38 Similarly, pop icons litter “steel workers,” as in: “six second glimpse of Duran Duran” or “Whitney’s an oreo / whore. Dionne’s wig’s on funny honey.” Goode’s tactics in this regard might well be explained by the following, from “the history of airports”: It’s hard to think about perspective when, as we know, in a single airport minute, whole hand‐to‐hand wars may be won and lost, and we have often seen a hundred thousand
37 Goode, “The steel workers’ proposal for the decommissioning of Beaubourg,” No Son House, 4‐5, 5. 38 From Goode, “Apparition of the crowd enclosing Mario Merz,” Go Portland OR, 27‐31, 29.
[215]
microformal presidents of the United States of America rollerblade into an oblivion of collapsed Muzak. All the ventilation filters leak a cold yellow mucus39
Without ventilation, a coagulated mess of sound‐bites and tinned music ensues; this speed of cultural and political event perhaps instigates the accumulated meaninglessness permeating the first three quarters of “steel workers,” as well as other poems in No Son House. In these instances, it is as if Goode becomes “the ironic courier that never takes an in‐breath,” the very joyless, airtight artist he so carefully interrogates in his essays. And this is in part because Goode seems to have a vexed relationship with the high‐velocity list. Recalling, with evident pleasure, a performance piece in which miniature character sketches are delivered rapid‐fire to the audience—“‘A drunk man shouting at the moon’; ‘An agoraphobic professor on cruise control’”—Goode explains: At this level it’s simple: as the amount of available information increases, its value naturally decreases unless consumption is managed in such a way that demand continues to outstrip supply. In practice, though, the hyperacceleration of supply tends, currently, to exert a pressure which eventually forces a kind of state‐change in the way the reading audience apprehends that information. Immanent value…suddenly sublimes into transcendent value. No longer experiencing form, the consumer perceives only scale…..Through its multiplicity and undifferentiation information becomes simply that which travels, that pinpoint of photochemical expression by which speed becomes visible.40
39 Goode, “the history of airports,” unpaginated. 40 Goode, “Variously Modified,” 137‐8. The character sketches are taken from “Emmanuel Enchanted (or a description of this World as if it Were a Beautiful Place),” a 1992 piece by Forced Entertainment, a London‐based theatre company, and subsequently published in Certain Fragments: Contemporary performance and Forced Entertainment (London: Routledge, 1999) 142‐61. Goode discusses this work in “‘Variously Modified.’” It should be noted that a similar form of inchoate listing demarcates a recent prose‐piece Goode published in
[216]
While Goode characterises expectations of frictionless mobility as problematic, he also believes consciously constructed aesthetic speed may well pave the way toward a kind of sublimity. There are less than faint echoes of Marinetti and the Futurists in this claim, the sustainability of which remains questionable in large part because while emotional transport seems an inevitable consequence of engaging with art, the accelerated drive towards transcendence is considerably harder to justify.41 And the strongest moments in Goode’s speediest work, No Son House, are not often located in its bulleted lists, drive capacities, or mechanisations of the human body, but in its more contemplative descents toward profundity. The comically glutinous amalgam of pop cultural reference in “steel workers” ends with just such a moment, a collapse into repetitions of the word “knife,” as if to demand something
Quid 15 (2005). Entitled “An introduction to speed‐reading,” this work is full of parodic, bulleted instructions on how to read quickly and effectively, broken up by “reading myths” such as: “Reading myths, #2: ‘Reading is a laborious process and is time‐consuming.’’ Nothing could be further from the sofa. Get a mandrel bent exhaust system. Install an undrive serpentine pulley. Grab a witch‐hammer. Make your fucking Hispanic pool‐cleaner move the book while you keep your eyes absolutely still…Allow your mind to wander from (a) sea to (b) shining sea and (c) back again.” By extolling the virtues of careless reading, Goode’s piece forms a none‐too‐subtle critique of the devaluation of literature in an information economy, underscoring the current privileging of scale over form. 41 At stake in this portion of Goode’s essay is whether we can use excessive information against itself; or, in Benjamin’s terms, can seemingly uncontrollable mechanical reproduction have a human, nuanced—perhaps even ironic and self‐conscious—point of initiation? Goode’s resurrection of transcendence seems to compound rather than alleviate the doubtfulness of this enterprise. Arguments in favour of aesthetic transcendence have almost always relied upon belief in a rational, complete subjectivity from which one might step outside or beyond. Subjective autonomy is inarguably one of the most contentious philosophical concepts of the latter half of the twentieth century; as it comes increasingly into question, so too does the plausibility of art as a conduit by which that cohesive self might be overcome. Examples of recent works addressing transcendence include Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999) and James Kirwan’s Beauty. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999).
[217]
clear‐cut: “Knife. Knife. What in the picture says knife.” The blade in question expertly incises its way into the visceral, the fearfully emotional: “Kissing his boyfriend’s eyelids / knife….Knife by the way of / leaves that fall and the boyfriend sleeping / barely near as adrenalin when the emergency comes.” This insistent repetition—and I use Gertrude Stein’s terms here consciously, just as Goode mimics something of her nounal structures in these lines—of pain and tenderness seems to defy the bathetic gestures that precede it; the humour has evaporated, and we have arrived at a baseline, possibly an answer to the question posited in “Gay twist varial disaster revert”: “how do you dive off the ground?” “Gay twist” marks a momentous finale to No Son House in that it addresses so many of the issues that arise elsewhere in Goode’s work, namely, the descending body, and the vexed relationships between emotion and intellection, palpability and abstraction.42 Frictionless mobility defines the outset, “how in love’s / late place you drive down the / strip your convertible / language the slipstream by night” but quickly shifts into palpable vulnerability. While Goode often writes about pain and injury, “Gay twist” is unusual in refusing bravado and assumed bodily limits: “ask …where do they measure a kiss in / teslas? the firmament in banjos?”43 The delicious, ragged torture of even unrequited love affirms and interrogates many of Goode’s poetic parameters: your innovative need reworking a space craft mark my / how we love these sounds for the words they make each tongue in the other
42 Goode, “Gay twist varial disaster revert,” 20‐21, 20. 43 In No Son House Goode writes, “the body no more than how dread becomes visible” (12) and many of the descriptions of the body in this work, as in Go Portland, OR are accompanied by delineations of bruises and panic. There is a sense that the injured body is a limited means of communication, as in these lines from No Son House: “roll up the sleeves of his long‐sleeve t‐shirt / several new cuts this is how we fucking / talk to each other when the music’s too loud” (18).
[218]
mouth itself a commitment to public speaking ask in your dialect how to pronounce the eventual body undress or the hurtling upwards wall and the rewritten skyline based on what on the love breaks down what you say into birdseed where’s the emergency entrance? how do you dive off the ground? for body read frame for inscribe read persistent desire read modernity frame you say prove it
“Gay twist” aches with its own uncertainty; looks to the body for a gratification it cannot have, neither ascends towards a sublimely rewritten skyline, nor finds refuge in bathetic frictions. It is grounded by an insatiable but possibly fruitless desire to dive, delve deeper. If, as Samuel Johnson suggests, “one thing we can be sure of is that ‘the natural tendency of all things is downwards’” the question Goode asks here is this: where do we go after hitting rock bottom?44 An answer is perhaps embedded in this poem, one in keeping with Goode’s suggestion that there exists “a desire to invest in the material, the tangible: the poetry in the book, the writing on the wall.”45 While acknowledging the hyper‐ mechanisation of the postmodern body—“we are / seven times the speed of sound”—“Gay twist” insists, at its end, on slowing the body down, making it quite literally graspable: “you’re curving back you right here / travelling at hand.” This return journey toward the curvaceous, graspable body might well define both Goode’s and Sutherland’s approaches to contemporary bathos, their respective bids to remake the bathetic into a practice whereby some sort of affectiveness and viscerality might thrive. That this practice involves a separation from the liminalities and frictionless mobilities of market capitalism is understood. Less clear‐cut is the distinction between Pope’s argument that the bathetic represents a deviation from proper artistic replication of nature, and 44 Quoted in Johnston, Samuel Johnson and the Art of Sinking, 123. 45 Goode, “Variously Modified,” 156.
[219]
Goode’s articulation of a living, breathing, bathetic body by which to overcome the postmodern refusal of the natural world. Goode writes: the same technological and economic conditions which allow for whole‐cultural liminality serve to mask or quantize seasonal change. The Western city‐dweller, who most probably works in a temperature‐regulated office, buys the same foods year‐ round, and spends her leisure time realizing the postal service’s vision for an experience of the world uninflected by the natural inconveniences of the environment, has no need for the cycle of seasons or relationship to it.46
While nature may never be again, as Sutherland puts it, “the source of visible truth,” eighteenth and twenty‐first century considerations of bathos share a concern about alienation from the material world and its phenomena. As such, Goode’s curving back toward the graspable may well be imbued with some sort of nostalgia, a nostalgia quite conceivable in a world actively engaged in market capitalism for well over five hundred years, a nostalgia discernible even in Pope’s essay of 1727: “Nothing seemed more plain to our great authors, than that the world had long been weary of natural ways.”47 But the situation is considerably more complicated than this. In a typical double move, Pope derides the divorce of poetry from what Longinus describes as “Nature, the artist that created man,” whilst simultaneously arguing that bathos “is the Natural Taste of Man,” a pre‐lapsarian “first simplicity and innocence” perverted by custom or example into a love of the sublime.48 In other words, Pope muddies Longinus’s claim that nature “from the first breathed into our hearts an unconquerable passion for whatever is great and more divine than ourselves”—for Pope, living, breathing nature is transcendentally sublime and universally, bathetically common, 46 Goode, “Variously Modified,” 153. 47 Alexander Pope, “Peri Bathous,” 201. 48 Pope, “Peri Bathous,” 197.
[220]
both imperfect truth and inarguable fallibility, a source and site of friction.49 And it is this resistance that Goode exploits to such palpable effect in his own work, where he chafes against parameters as elusive as air: “we hold these truths / you can’t handle these truths….something to do with hope / or breathing.”50
49 Pope, “Peri Bathous,” 277. 50 Goode, “INT. Aaron Sorkin, situation room. Evening,” No Son House, 14‐16, 15‐ 16.
[221]
Malcolm Phillips
“Loss Format”: Liminality and Incorporation in Chris Goode’s Poetry The poet, theatre director, performance artist and musician Chris Goode, at present resident in London, has published three collections of poetry to date, all with Barque Press: boomer Console (2000), Go Portland, OR (2002) and No Son House (2004). Some satirical prose poetry pieces, otherwise uncollected, have appeared in Quid magazine and the Barque Press anthology 100 Days.1 More recently, an extract from a poetic score for solo performance, O Vienna, appeared in Masthead magazine in 2006, while Goode’s author page at the Archive of the Now website contains readings of new and previously collected poems.2 Goode has also written three remarkable pieces on poetics and poetry, one of which remains unpublished (a paper given at the Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry [CCCP] in 2000): the others have appeared in Quid and Edinburgh Review.3 In this essay, I should like to follow some general remarks with
1 All available from Barque Press http://www.barquepress.com/ 2 See http://www.masthead.net.au/issue10/goode.html and http://www. archiveofthenow.com/ respectively. 3 Chris Goode, “Towards a Poetry of Invisible Lunatics” (unpublished). An untitled essay in Quid 7c (April 2001). “‘These facts are variously modified’: American writers in an information economy,” “the darkness surrounds us,” American poetry. Edinburgh Review 114 (2004) 126‐157 (Hereafter referred to as “American writers”).
[222]
readings of two poems that fall either side of an account of Goode’s poetics. I hope to show how Goode’s carefully articulated aesthetic of noise draws on his interest in cybernetics and anthropological theories of rites of passage in search of poems that might trace the transition from an act of individuation to one of solidarity, but in such a way that both acts are somehow occluded. Noise is a paradox of gain (the flooding of frequencies, or in cybernetic terms the delivery of a mass of undifferentiated data) and loss (of a fully recoverable, differentiated, clear and isolable signal). It is palpable, even intrusive, but marks loss or disappearance. Goode has an enduring interest in cybernetics, the study of human control functions and of the mechanical and electronic systems designed to replace them; for Goode, the OuLiPo sets a precedent for the translation of cybernetics (to which it is roughly contemporary) to literary practice, being a kind of bureau for the development of systems to replace the lyric subject.4 Liminality is a term borrowed from the anthropology of rites of passage. In casting poems as traces of transitions, I want to suggest the delicate interplay between three different kinds of liminal phase: Goode’s perception of a social condition he terms a state of arrested liminality; that moment, in composition, performance or reading, in which works come to be realised; and the rapid and repeated acts of transition that characterise the movement of Goode’s poems. I will say more about rites of passage later in this essay, by which time I hope that Goode’s use of anthropology will have come to seem typical of a practice that seeks to reveal deep, sometimes disturbing structural parallels between the institution of art, as it were, and institutions in general.
4 “Writers of the Oulipo approach with a kind of laboratory interest the cybernetic organisation of the language‐game, so that rigorous administrative logic precedes semantic, narrative or pictorial concerns.” Goode, “American writers,” 132.
[223]
Goode’s poem “Cot death link to womb dream” speaks of a “spurious lossless format,” and implicitly affirms and valorises poems that are forms capable somehow of admitting loss, properly opposed to art works that appeal to a deceptive model of fidelity. We may consider this former kind of poem as a “loss format.” The instability and noise of Goode’s poetry, its effacement and multiple surfaces, are not merely formalist but seem to point toward a lyric of the weak, of the defeated, the full eschatological implications of which remain inevitably faintly spoken. As I consider that both the political dimension of this work and, more generally, Goode’s highly sophisticated poetics, are most persuasively integrated to his poetry in No Son House, this essay closes with remarks on that collection and on “Cot death link to womb dream” in particular. One of the notable features of Goode’s work is the attention brought to bear on a wide range of contemporary practices— performance art, theatre, electronic music, television, film, visual arts, the novel—in a manner common to the period of the historical avant‐garde, but which is now less familiar. In the course of Goode’s CCCP paper, he draws on Russell Hoban’s novel Turtle Diary, Brian Eno’s remarks on noise in rock music, Laurie Anderson’s performance piece United States II, Matthew Barney’s film Cremaster 5, Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno, the films of Gregg Araki, the writing of Christopher Knowles, the performance company Goat Island, the music of Cornelius Cardew, Alvin Lucier, Ryoji Ikeda and Markus Popp, and prose work by Harmony Korine and Ben Marcus, in developing a poetics of noise. Goode opposes this breadth of reference to what he calls “the relative seclusion of contemporary poetic practice.” His involvement in multiple practices has had its own impact on his work, despite the separation of the arts that he is concerned also to maintain (“I do not want my poetry to do a job that could be
[224]
done in any other way”).5 The poem “Behind station analogue” serves as an example: collected in Go Portland, OR, the poem deforms material taken from rehearsal notebooks and, prior to its appearance in Go Portland, OR, featured on the album “Copy of” by COAT, Goode’s musical project with fellow dramatist and poet Jeremy Hardingham. Hardingham’s recorded reading of the poem is distorted and combined with the sound of a Yamaha keyboard attempting to play back keyboard improvisations that have been programmed to its memory and speeded up over the sound of a malfunctioning metronome, the demented clicking of which also comes to stand in for the ellipses in the published poem: […]bring seahorse, to get seahorse pierced. lift up the hair. kiss the unreliable imprint there. put head on timebomb] glow setting:…………………………...……………………..go Italy go history go fact & atoms. go to sleep on a chain. the fuzz strike where the city is most like a] bird & where the bird is most like an oven: the available body zodiac in demo mode]6
In the recording of the poem, the regulatory device of the metronome is misused to delay and defer delivery rather than to measure it: the pre‐programming function of the keyboard is pushed beyond its capability. The poem itself engenders an apparently uncontrollable, anaphoric chain or sequence in this passage, the possible significance of which I will return to shortly. Knowing the origin of the written material, it is possible to see how the concept of playback, whether mechanical (by the keyboard) or performative (in rehearsal notebooks) is antagonised in the poem. The poem’s appearance in Go Portland, OR makes of its musical performance one more 5 Chris Goode, from “Six Bits of an Exchange,” Quid 10iii (2002): 15‐25, 24‐25. 6 Go Portland, OR is published in landscape format and I regret that the long lines of several of its poems are difficult to reproduce here.
[225]
suppressed or absented playback, like the lost rehearsal and the improvisation as first performed on the keyboard. The poem is in some sense bracketed by absent performers and performances. Its disjunct surface obscures the rehearsal (one might argue the manipulation of the recorded voice in the version on “Copy of” threatens a similar operation on the text itself), but traces remain in its misdirections, its mishearings and impossible or absurd instructions. In his CCCP paper, Goode tells of a series of impossible tasks that performers in the group Goat Island are set by member Lin Hixson, e.g. “Tie a knot in a rope of water”: in “Behind station analogue,” as elsewhere in Goode’s poetry, apostrophes that make similarly absurd demands raise questions about the possible operators and operations that might be conjured by the poem: what actions are urged, by what agency? The word “go,” echoing the collection’s title in a sequence of delicate internal rhyme and stop‐start rhythm, seems to function as instruction, transformation and more faintly, lament for a “cycle of fall” that may signal a ritual movement toward tragic failure but that also refers comically to the spin cycle of a washing machine that requires its own instructions: go Italy go history go fact & atoms. go to sleep on a chain…go lip‐ balm, go soft sift go totally vertically skin‐ back, all in the cycle of fall, spin [my ellipsis]
If the poem does function as a series of impossible tasks for improvisation, that might usefully prompt us to think of the poem as the result of an unrecoverable performance, designed in turn to precipitate further, only loosely predictable and unrepeatable performances in public and private reading. This is commensurate with Goode’s poetics. Here is Goode on the acts of reading and writing that go into a poem: Every act of written poetry begins in an act of reading, and the reading can go on for some time before the writing begins, and [226]
will continue throughout the act of writing, and may never superliminally end. This act of reading may take place across several texts at once and sometimes almost in an instant. A reported event or a sense of a power arrangement may be read or re‐read, suddenly, critically, closely. Some of the texts may be ambient, or hypothecated, or deduced.
Performance is one such form of “ambient” text: and the act of reading needs to be understood here not only as an act of communication, but also as a performance: Flip it over. Across the long moments of reception, the reader may also, as the contract requires, make a reading of the poem, the poem being the record, or one of the many possible and provisional records, of the poet’s initial reading acts. Make a reading that is individual, a reading that has to be a reading against, or beside, or within.
For Goode, these private and unrecoverable readings bracket the written poem: In this ultra‐hygienic rendering of the perfect person‐to‐person poetic exchange, the written poem does two quite specific things, and these only. It precisely records that a particularised act of reading has taken place; and it permits an act of reading, or a set of acts, to be instigated. As such, it represents only the axis x=0: the imaginary instant where two immiscible reading‐ acts touch…the written poem becomes a kind of hysteric sublimation of an act of poetry, and the poetry itself is always having to be privately and momentarily activated, even in a public reading.
After a discussion of glitch music and the origins of Alvin Lucier’s 1970s piece “I Am Sitting In A Room” in the composer’s speech defect, Goode considers the possibility of failure in performance as an ethical revelation of humanness, in terms that may recall to us the animus against playback of “Behind station analogue”: [227]
The immanence of failure within the construction of liveness is so total and so revelatory that (as phenomenon and cultural host site) they may be considered practically the same thing. Where time travels in one direction only, the improvised gesture cannot be recalled (either through private acts of reconsideration or through public affirmation of the performative frames of play and ritual) and failure becomes expressive not just of humanness but of its acceptance: of a willingness, in other words, to abjure the smoke‐and‐mirrors rage of the ego.
This leads Goode to conceive of artistic production in terms of the concept of signal to noise ratio, which derives from electrical engineering. In both his CCCP paper and, much later, in his article in Edinburgh Review, Goode quotes Brian Eno: A signal sent through a medium interacts with it in complex ways and some of the information being sent breaks up into noise.
By the time “American writers in an information economy” was written, Goode had become more ambivalent about this concept, viewing it as “perhaps the high‐artist’s (and cyberneticist’s) rationalisation: noise as a faithful reflection of the reading processes through which signals are classified and information is identified.”7 In the period between the CCCP paper and “American writers in an information economy,” Goode had made a collage‐article for the 7th issue of Quid magazine (April 2001) which mobilises handwritten fragments, xeroxed quotations and a partly obliterated computer printout that gives details of a system failure, all in the service of an attack on the notion of fidelity and digital media:
7 Goode, “American writers,” 142.
[228]
Where digitality aims to tend towards the elimination of failure, analogue has the creative fecundity of failure at its heart. (Noise is failure; failure is noise.)8
In “American writers in an information economy,” Goode develops these claims with reference to the art critic Rene Ricard’s writing on Jean‐Michel Basquiat and some remarks by Victor Turner on rites of passage. Goode discusses Ricard’s view that Basquiat’s graffiti art emerges from a street environment “livid with noise” and notes that Ricard believes the artist’s imperative remains to resist that noise, by raising their work “above the vernacular.”9 Goode then quotes Turner’s characterisation of the transitional or liminal period during rites of initiation: in many societies the liminal initiands are often considered to be dark, invisible, like the sun or moon in eclipse or the moon between phases, at the “dark of the moon”; they are stripped of names and clothing, smeared with the common earth, rendered indistinguishable from animals.10
Goode remarks that there is some correspondence between Turner’s description of the liminal period and Ricard’s evocation of the noisy street environment from which Basquiat emerges into the art gallery, which stands here both for the phase of incorporation, in the anthropological terms derived from von Gennep and Turner, and the digital, clean space, devoid of failure, described in Goode’s article for Quid. Goode insists, however, that Basquiat’s mid‐period work can be seen as “an exemplary liminal field, characterised by ambivalence, rapid motion, the suspension of narrative and forward‐time, and by words freed from legible, stable signification.”11 Noting 8 Goode, untitled essay, Quid 7c. 9 Goode, “American writers,” 150. 10 Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The human seriousness of play (New York: PAJ Publications, 1982) 26. 11 Goode, “American writers,” 152.
[229]
that cultural criticism has identified the potential of contemporary subcultures to undergo liminal or liminoid phases, Goode postulates Basquiat’s work as an exemplary artistic response to what he calls the state of “arrested liminality” seen to characterise Western society: When a whole society enters the kind of ritual passage described by van Gennep and Turner, the purpose is to mark a change in seasons, a cyclical progression. And yet the same technological and economic conditions which allow for whole‐ cultural liminality serve to mask or quantize seasonal change. The Western city‐dweller, who most probably works in a temperature‐regulated office [and] buys the same foods year‐ round…has no need for the cycle of seasons or relationship to it (aside from peak buying periods in the calendar such as Christmas and Thanksgiving). Whereas in van Gennep’s formulation, the liminal phase derives its effectual significance from the subsequent re‐delivery of the participant into a changed but sustained real‐world region made up of the specific, the individual and the contingent, here, by contrast, the velocity benefits of liminality—not just to commerce but to creativity—are too great to be written off as merely transitional.12
Noise, then, might be thought of as characteristic of arrested liminality: it renders signals barely recognisable and ought normally to be removed in order that the signal be made coherent once more, yet in contemporary music it is perpetuated and celebrated for its own “velocity benefits.” Noise, failure, unrecoverable performance, dark or invisible figures and displacement: the development of these ideas in and across Goode’s poetic work has gathered critical force through his three published collections. boomer Console presents a collage of vitiated communicative acts, cut‐up email correspondence that evokes the speed and instability of electronic modes of communication, obliterated events, 12 Goode, “American writers,” 153‐154.
[230]
partially visible personal lives. The word “boomer” is threaded through the text, like stray computer code or a graffiti tag. It remains unclear which of the word’s various definitions may be appropriate: it has a slangy instability totally suited to random appearance, being a generational tag, a name for transient workers (most often in bridge construction, fittingly), a seismic instrument and an echo of a word used by the autistic poet Christopher Knowles, whose work was the focus of Goode’s performance piece “YEAH BOOM: A Christopher Knowles Reader” (2006). The words “go” and “or,” similarly, are threaded through Go Portland, OR, (most obviously in “Behind station analogue” but also elsewhere, particularly in the short, numinous lyric “A digger plaint, a sleeve”), performing different kinds of displacement of the substantives on which they operate within a mode Goode refers to as “chaotic speedway alterity”13. This threading‐through at once binds the two collections together, but also helps to suggest that the poems are sites under development, through which words and acts of reading pass without finding their ultimate destination. Go Portland, OR develops other techniques of displacement too: the vertical spine provided by a name disperses words to either side in the mesostic “Chris Burn,” while Oulipian techniques like the S+7 system and (possibly) the quenine are at work in “Footings,” a sequence of poems that “rechoreograph[s] the output from an automatic speaking (and walking) exercise”—that is, then, linked to an unrecoverable performance much in the same manner as “Behind station analogue.”14 No Son House represents a point of culmination and convergence between Goode’s “instinctual attraction to an aesthetic of noise,” his critique of “arrested liminality” and his
13 Goode, “Six bits of an exchange,” 19. 14 From Goode’s handout notes for his performance at SubVoicive Poetry (London, October 2000).
[231]
reflection on masculinity. The collection is framed by epigraphs that suggest dark, invisible, male liminal initiands: In England and Wales, the census shows that the actual population is some 900,000 lower than previously estimated … The difference is made up almost entirely of young men. ⎯ “Implications of the 2001 Census Results,” National Statistics Online A house is not a holiday Your sons are leaving home, Neil. ⎯ Aztec Camera, “Good Morning Britain,” from Stray (1990)
When the UK’s 2001 Census was first issued, the Office for National Statistics attempted to explain the apparent disappearance of 800,000 young men by reference to increased possibilities of emigration within the EU: one example in particular that received much media attention was the phenomenon of rave subcultures setting up transitory communities on islands like Ibiza.15 The explanation is improbable and more plausible accounts have since been given: as an example of sheer bureaucratic delirium, however, it is of enduring interest. No Son House is haunted by other, undeniable kinds of loss, most obviously suicide and homelessness. Britain and America are the only countries in the world which have diverging trends in male and female suicides (between 1971 and 1998, the suicide rate for women in England and Wales almost halved, while in the same period the rate for men almost doubled); the collection may partly have its origins in an aborted project to develop a 15 See for example Graham Bowley, “The last census?” Prospect 92 (Nov. 2003) available at http://www.prospect‐magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=5743
[232]
performance piece based on found texts relating to missing persons posted on the internet.16 Meanwhile “Good Morning Britain,” Aztec Camera’s panoramic vision of the UK at the end of a decade of Thatcherism, comes to rest on Wales in the lines quoted: the “Neil” addressed is Neil Kinnock, then leader of the Labour party and representative of an industrial Wales that, like Scotland, has for some years seen population of working age migrate elsewhere within the UK, predominantly to the south east of England. The title, No Son House, punningly casts the collection as a failed blues lament for missing young men, as the disowning reproach in the poem “Lapse” indicates: “son you’re no son / house.”17 Between census and lyric lies the site of contest in No Son House, where the possibilities of intimacy and physical presence are assessed and screened by the operations of bureaucracy. “American writers in an information economy,” written at around the same time, revealingly takes as its starting point the repositioning of poetry from publishing to information within the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) administered by the U.S. Census Bureau. How might poetry occupy this site without taking an early exit toward either some heroic mode of self‐affirmation or abdication in favour of free play? The poems in No Son House inhabit this predicament, seeking to absorb and process many different kinds and items of data and signal, the interaction of which constitutes that noise, or loss format, in which the human may make its necessarily intermittent appearance. In closing, I offer “Cot death link to womb dream” by way of example of that process.18 16 See the UK mental health charity Mind’s fact sheet on suicide in the UK, available at http://www.mind.org.uk/Information/Factsheets/Suicide/ Goode mentions a project on missing persons in his handout notes for SubVoicive Poetry, which was to use material from missing.inthe.net, a page now itself sadly missing from the internet, though its homepage remains at the Internet Archive. 17 Chris Goode, “Lapse,” No Son House, 6‐7, 6. 18 Chris Goode, “Cot death link to womb dream,” No Son House, 17‐19.
[233]
The poem gathers a great number of kinds of screening and disappearance in a net of conflicting signals, by turns melancholic, violent and absurd, grouped in 11 line stanzas interspersed with italicized tercets. Its title refers to a recent theory on the cause of cot death that proposes some babies may stop breathing when they dream of the womb and at the poem’s close, the baby is portrayed as the frailest liminal initiand on a tragically curtailed journey, the “scared child moonless asleep at the wheel.”19 It begins with a colon that may retroactively attribute the opening lines to a nameless dramatic persona; alternatively, it may cast the poem as a dream about a strange, surrogate matrix. The opening of the poem evokes the grainy, partial images of ultrasound scans (which are later described as “the echo life map of the breath routine”): : I am so scared of the work ahead the hands turn into silt & steal away recall abyssal reach recovery plan goes Challenger Deep & nearly vertical how I will hold up here until the rain bumps speed lights skidding abed
The poem selects and holds in suspension forms that are already in some sense suspended, uncoupled to varying extents from past and future: the scientist’s projection of the image of a dying baby that dreams of an unrecoverable state is paradigmatic, but the speed of the poem’s transitions withholds any possibility that it might be seen in isolation. The infant child has an alienating vision of itself as an ultrasound scan as it retreats in fear of the future: its image is then further displaced by reference to human interventions that classify and then attempt to rescue marine species that are endangered (the “abyssal reach recovery plan”). This destructive benevolence finds its own disturbing echo in animal experimentation:
19 See BBC News. “Cot death babies ‘dreaming of womb,’” Tuesday 5 August 2003, available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3125619.stm
[234]
an infant pigtail macaque compares two mother surrogates: one is covered in cloth, the other is a bare wire cage
Acts and techniques of identification threaten deprivation or imprisonment of the bodies they delineate: the line “susceptible gait in a blue technology” refers to DARPA’s plan for surveillance technology that could identify people by the signature provided by their way of walking. Opposed to such technologies, a noise aesthetic may nevertheless involve other signatures, no less harmful: roll up the sleeve of his long‐sleeve t‐shirt several new cuts this is how we fucking talk to each other when the music’s too loud
Popular culture’s strange relation to harm is further treated in a sequence of references to the death of singer Jeff Buckley, which is announced at an ever earlier age, satirising the contemporary figuration of the poète maudit. In “American writers in an information economy,” Goode proposes that icons have become susceptible to modification in a manner similar to shareable computer programming, but modification that is libidinally charged—Goode cites “slash fiction,” in which celebrities are placed in erotic scenarios, as the most articulated example of this impulse. The death of Jeff Buckley in Goode’s poem is another form of slash fiction, inevitably recalling Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash: Buckley becomes an “‘open source’ individual.”20 The same sick humour throws up the “bonnet macaque” that “slips out” of the lab to go to the cinema and “lights up in the toilets where the usherettes aren’t.” The overall effect of such noisy collisions of pain, suffering and absurdity is, indeed, Goode’s own distinct acting out of the conditions of inappropriateness in which poems currently take place: witness also Peter Manson’s Adjunct: an Undigest, the public readings of 20 Goode, “American writers,” 145.
[235]
which frequently involve an audience’s laughter washing over death notices; or the cartoon smash‐ups of high culture reference and sheer terror in Keston Sutherland’s Neocosis. Goode’s poetic registers the forms of impairment and damage that result from a state of arrested liminality, where people and objects are scrutinised in transition without any stable prior state of separation, or subsequent incorporation: yet it is honest in confronting the permissions and excitements of such a state as well as its despair. The speed at which the poem operates is also the source of the pathos of its close: its sudden arrest has an unexpected impact, one which is felt in a number of Goode’s poems.21 Data re‐emerge from the stream and recombine in ways that mimic the endless combinatory operations of communications technology itself: if the juxtapositions become more pointedly absurd, this only underlines the disparity between the formal equivalence of items of data and that knowledge of them we still have in which resistance to their arbitrary exchange is grounded. The rising torrent of data comes—movingly—to a halt: one’s name is the least of it one in a thousand succumbs it says here suddenly withdrawn into soundless nightlessness great unlearning vivisect the splitfin flashlight fish determine its smokeless fuel no word from the beagle rewired cat on the sleepstalk scared child moonless asleep at the wheel
Sudden arrest is all this poetry teaches us we might reasonably currently expect: the denial of closure is not here some special poetic achievement, but only the surest sign of the cultural predicament in which this writing situates itself—and it is not 21 Although “Cot death link to womb dream” is not featured there, the recording of a reading by Goode in Cambridge, available at http://www.archiveofthenow.com/ demonstrates how this impact has been integrated, very effectively, in performance.
[236]
too sure, at that. The end of the poem, its sudden withdrawal, is one of the indices of that uncertain space where “two immiscible reading acts touch”: it also bespeaks a wish for continuity, incorporation, solidarity. If data may endlessly be recombined, the corollary is that endings become unreal and revelatory of an impossible need, for that process to come to a rest rather than arrest. Combination is not yet solidarity: the hope that works might proceed from one to the other and a simultaneous acknowledgement that this might run contrary to a wider prevailing condition perhaps lie behind the negative reference to Cornelius Cardew’s “The Great Learning.”22 The poem leaves the child instead at a point of utter deprivation, without temporal or spatial co‐ordinates, borne forth by technology, halted by terror of “the work ahead.” Goode has spoken of his hope that “new languages” might be developed by the producers of poetry—“its writers, manufacturers, distributors and readers…in which gift‐making will be rehabilitated as an aspect of social incorporation” in resistance to the “increasingly irrelevant and hopelessly contaminated ‘information economy.’”23 Poems as a format for loss become signs for the absence of the gift.
22 “The Great Learning” takes Ezra Pound’s translation of the first 7 paragraphs of Confucius’ Dà Xué as its starting point. It was written for and dedicated to a collective of professional and student musicians, artists, dancers and people with no artistic training of any kind and involves various kinds of collaborative activity, composition and improvisation. Paragraph 7 employs a large, untrained choir and takes twenty‐four lines from the Dà Xué which must be sung by each person for the length of a breath a given number of times. Each performer works at his or her own speed through the material and when they begin a new line, they sing it at a pitch they can hear being sung by a colleague, so that the piece gradually resolves. 23 Goode, “American writers,” 156.
[237]
Tom Jones
Andrea Brady’s Elections The linguistic resources of the historic avant‐gardes were assessed by linguists of the Prague School, providing a basis for the analysis of that politically motivated kind of utterance now called experimental poetry. Jan Mukarovsky, for example, says that in poetic language figure performs a very different function than in communicative utterances: because the purpose of poetic language is aesthetic, that is, to consider the nature of the use of signs, figure in poetry does not do what figure does in, for example, emotive communicative utterances—it doesn’t communicate a state of mind. Figure in poetry demonstrates that it is possible to substitute a new and different sign for a designation with which people are already familiar. As the series of signs that might be substituted for the same designation is almost without end (what after all marks the limit of acceptable comparison?) the effect of figure is to emphasise the choice of the artist: she chose this particular figure, and not any of the others. Figure in poetic language then brings the artist’s choices to the fore. Mukarovsky also says that “any set of words, if it is signalled by syntactic intonation as a sentence, will be for us a communicative unit (unité de communication) to which we will—even forcibly—ascribe a total meaning. Modern poetry greatly exploits this basic property of the semantic structure of the sentence in various ways.” He refers to avant‐garde poetry to illustrate his point: “later [238]
movements (Futurism, Dadaism) force the reader to ascribe semantic intentionality to accidental clusters of words—again on the basis of the semantic unity of the sentence.”1 In this essay I want to explore the phenomenon of highly wrought figurative choices that seem to share some properties with these accidental clusters of words, to explore the politics of an interaction between choices and accidents in language. Elections are great opportunities for corruption, intimidation and incompetence, either by manipulating the social or technological context in which votes are cast, or by interfering with the votes once cast. Free and fair elections are deemed vital to the participation of any particular state in the international community; elections in Western European countries and the United States are frequently marked by allegations of corruption, intimidation, incompetence, by the non‐participation of the electorate, and by the relative success of right wing extremist candidates. The two last American elections have been surrounded by well‐supported allegations of the deliberate exclusion of African‐American voters in particular through challenges at the polls, the loss of votes due to problems with vote‐recording technology, and the manipulation of electoral results through early and inaccurate reporting in the media.2 The particular course of events today in Afghanistan, Iraq and many other places around the world was determined by the political manipulation of demographic and technological contexts for the choosing of names.3 1 Jan Mukařovský, The Word and Verbal Art: Selected Essays by Jan Mukařovský, trans. and ed. John Burbank and Peter Steiner, foreword René Wellek (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977) 4, 6, 12, 50, 67, 69‐70, quotations from 50. 2 Edwin D. Dover notes, for example, that the design of a butterfly ballot used in Palm Beach County, Florida may have lost Gore the 2000 election, The Disputed Presidential Election of 2000: A History and Reference Guide (London and Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2003) 51. 3 Geoffrey Brennan and Loren Lomasky, Democracy and Decision: The Pure Theory of Electoral Preference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), develop a theory of expressive voting that does not follow the public choice model of utility maximization often used to explain electoral behaviour. Interestingly
[239]
Andrea Brady writes poetry in which the demographic and technological contexts for the choosing of names are brought to the fore and made part of a general consideration of the use of signs, poetry in which the violence of political manipulation is seen in the violence done to syntactical norms, but in which nonetheless there is semantic coherence. I do not mean to suggest that there are strictly definable norms for figuration in English, nor that departure from such norms would always best be described as violence, nor that all utterances possess an identical degree of semantic coherence. A basic distinction might be made, for instance, between a violence parallel to political manipulation, and a violence that is resistant to political manipulation; another between intrinsic and extrinsic semantic coherence. It is in the dynamics between these kinds of violence and kinds of coherence that Brady’s poetry operates, in a manner that is exemplary both in ethical and artistic terms. Brady’s poetry may have no significant corrective effect on world politics, but it is part of the artistic and political work of international citizenship that literature can contribute to culture at large. I want to look at three poems in which electoral practices feature and thereby contribute to a general understanding of Brady’s technique. The three particular issues to which these poems respond are the U.S. election of 2000, the claim that the extension of democracy to the Middle East was a reason for war in Iraq, and the U.S. election of 2005. In each case I will begin by looking at the presentation of voting and the difficulty of poetic speech, moving on to explore Brady’s figures and substitutions, and their tendency to emphasise an exemplary form of poetic choice that recognises the violence of figurative substitutions, but which nonetheless retains a semantic coherence.4 There is, in my reading, a distinction to be
they demonstrate how this expressive theory might be better able to account for the willingness of electorates to vote for wars that would represent irrational choices in any analysis of likely benefit. See 49‐51. 4 For another view of the ways in which choice of figure can offer political alternatives see George Lakoff and Mark Turner’s suggestion that avant‐garde
[240]
drawn between Brady and, for example, Bruce Andrews, for whom the project is to challenge semantic coherence as a political force, rather than, as Brady does, engage dynamically in the dialectic of its inevitability.5 Voter preferences, their economic conditions and the linguistic means of expressing them provide the context of “Song (for Florida),” a poem recognisably in the American tradition of moral‐economic topographical survey.6 The voting public figures in the poem: Oh from their porches in Orlando a nation’s vacationers wave, happy voters.
The poem achieves a lyric realisation of the economic and social conditions that contributed to the extraordinary events in Florida in the 2000 presidential election, and is interested in the difficulties of speaking in such circumstances, the problems of expressing a view in the face of electoral manipulation: “I can’t answer out. Trust has no tongue.” The poem is preoccupied with a culture of consumption and credit that provides the context for particular utterances, and which also makes electoral choice analogous to the reifying choice of goods imaged in the selection of a girl for a private erotic display:
poetic practice exercises a critical function in relation to dominant metaphorical mappings, More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989) 203‐4; this despite their insistence on the rigidity and uni‐directionality of conceptual mappings. 5 In a talk given in New York on 25 September 2001, Andrews suggests that writing needs to be set free from genre, and asks “Is normative syntax a genre?” http://www.ubu.com/papers/andrews.html Andrews is advocating a libertarian response to violence just two weeks after the attacks on the twin towers. He begins his talk with an emphasis on the materiality and deautomatization of the text that is as indebted to formalist and structuralist poetics as my position. 6 Andrea Brady, Vacation of a Lifetime (Applecross, Western Australia and Great Wilbraham, Cambridge: Salt, 2001) III, “The Torpedo of Excess,” 78‐9.
[241]
How much can your credit buy before the cashier cuts up the transaction, turns your precious accident of language into nothing but races your heart? The girls are live in the booth, where your choice lies.
Credit is an accident of language, it is a verbal illusion ended by the cashier cutting up a card, perhaps cutting up one’s name on the signature strip, one’s “precious accident / of language”: properties or things to which names refer are considered contingent by philosophers as diverse as Zeno of Elea and Saul Kripke—attachment to a name is a mere accident.7 There is an adrenaline rush in pushing credit to its limit, where it becomes a word with no referent, a catachresis, language turned into nothing. The ultimate consumption by credit that people perform is the consumption of other people. The booths in which girls perform are also voting booths: “choice lies” in them by residing in them, in the case of the girls by lying prostrate in them, and in the case of the vote giving the lie to the outcome of the election in them; it is a lie to say there is choice, and in choosing, one lies. The conclusion of the poem, that “You may be called / to testify” suggests that in the collapse of a credit‐driven economy of consumption, when the catachresis of credit and of illegitimate government are acknowledged, speech will be required by law or by some moral or religious necessity. The apocalypse is prepared for in a passage on the Messianic tendencies of contemporary American Christianity: 7 “These three are joyned to one another; that which is signified, that which signifieth, and the contingent. That which signifieth is the voice, as Dion: That which is signified, is the thing it selfe declared by the voice; it is that which we apprehend, and is present in our cogitation. The contingent is the outward subject, as, Dion himselfe.” Thomas Stanley, The History of Philosophy, 2 vols (London: Humphrey Moseley and Thomas Dring, 1656) II, 28, paraphrasing Zeno. See also Saul A. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980) rev. and enlarged edn; first pub. in Semantics of Natural Language, ed. G. Harman and G. Davidson (Dordrecht and Boston: D. Reidel, 1972) passim.
[242]
All resting with peace of conscience in them, the new Israel. Armed with the best money can buy. And anyway their idol candies everyone with his winsome, secretive smile, the good looks of the likeable shmuck stupid as a neighbour, the mild innocence of an orphan. James wades through a hundred stations looking for a tolerable script, sucked in to the prayer channel tagging 35 dollars as market value for Christian slaves; buy one for Christmas from militant Islamic dealers in their criminal Sudan.
America is “the new Israel,” “Armed with the best money / can buy,” that is, with the best‐equipped army, but with the best currency and a purchasing power that is itself an act of warfare. Christianity has been commoditised, as the reference to the “prayer channel” suggests, and this commoditised Christianity drives the criminalisation of Islam and the Islamic world in general: the prayer leaders claim “militant Islamic dealers” are selling Christian slaves at $35 “in their criminal Sudan.” In this poem for the state most famous for technological confusions and dubious outcomes in recent electoral history, the choice of the poet to speak and write is acknowledged as a difficulty, and its difficulty is recorded in complex figures such as the “booth”; choices that exploit and choices that are exploited (the private dancer, the vote) now participate in the same economy as that poetic choice which settles on the figure; the choice of figure stands in an exemplary relation to the choice of consumables or candidates, engaging with the complexities of appetite and volition with resourceful language, rather than eschewing them in a forlorn gesture to the transcendental beyond. At the physical centre of “Cellular Contact” is a criticism of the claim that America invaded Iraq as part of its purported programme of exporting democracy: “No mass sightings of an
[243]
excuse for democracy / have been reported.”8 Democracy is as unlikely to appear as the WMD previously cited as a reason for invasion, and as alien as UFOs (“mass sightings” is part of the jargon of the spotter). The poem is concerned with what it is possible to say in response to the war in Iraq, what freedom of speech remains, what democratic expression is possible in the circumstances. “Anything you could say / is indexed”: any attempt at speech is recorded and listed, the surveillance culture meeting with the languages of the stock market and archive. Law has taken over speech and regulates the creation of poems, “the reactive / patter of tiny metrical feet” (this is a poem in part about conception), so as to ally the poetic speaker (in an ethically dubious moment that seems to demonstrate the insufficiency of a radical empathy in excess of economy when compared to the resourceful analysis of the economic relation of choices described in “Song (for Florida)”) with the victim of bombing campaigns in a position of violated speechlessness: Anything you might say is legislated feel your teeth chatter and split as initiative paralysis takes over your tongue alone is still workable though penetration bombs fill your mouth with rubble.
The poem points out that “Language isn’t bad enough yet,” neither bad enough to do the work that this poem wants it to do, to voice opposition to the horrors of the war, nor to do the work of the media and politicians without rebellion. “Fuck puns / split the corners of the newscaster’s mouth, / ministers say ‘kill’ without mincing.” A barely concealed language of sexual violence and an open language of political assassination need to be acknowledged in poetic language if it is to have dialectical purchase.9 The poem’s acts of substitution and
8 Andrea Brady, Cold Calling (London: Barque, 2004) 9‐11. 9 For comment on the position of language in relation to warfare with which Brady is familiar see J.H. Prynne, “A Quick Riposte to Handke’s Dictum about
[244]
violation with respect to syntactic and semantic norms are a confrontation with the technological and demographic manipulation of the democratic choosing of names, both in America and in Iraq, that the war represents. An account of the working conditions of an American soldier opens the poem, with “apocalyptic pop” played down a “synchronised headset,” the syntax opening out to a degree at which any coherence has the feel of being imposed rather than found: Music stirs up tinder, memorial briquettes jet off the production line including toilet paper. Nobody asked us— Pilot lights out for a smoke. The boiler goes dead quiet, […]
The briquettes initiate a series of barbecuing images that plays the charring of corpses off against happy domestic insularity, but this semantic function only becomes clear later in the poem;10 at this point the briquettes occupy an indeterminate position in relation to the other terms: do they “jet / off”? are they “jet” in colour, recently “off the production line”? are they recycled partly from “toilet paper”? The lack of consultation (“Nobody asked us”) identifies the disorientation of the subject position with regard to the function of the other items in the discourse. The disorientation continues with the “Pilot” War and Language,” Quid 6: 23‐6, available on‐line at http://www.barquepress.com/quid.html 10 For a similar image of the barbecue in connection to American imperial war see Robert Duncan, “UP RISING, PASSAGES 25,” Selected Poems, ed. Robert J. Bertholf (New York: New Directions, 1993) 92‐3, where Duncan refers to “a great potlatch, this Texas barbecue / of Asia, Africa, and all the Americas” and describes an America raised “from the fearful hearts of good people in the suburbs turning the savory meat over the charcoal burners and heaping their barbecue plates with more than they can eat.”
[245]
recalling “jet,” suggesting a pilot going for a smoke, or to smoke a target, straining “lights out” between British and American idioms; but again a domestic context is opposed to the military reading, with the pilot light of the boiler going out, forcing a strained reading of “a smoke.” A frame of disorientation that confuses domestic interiority and global political violence recalls Mukarovsky’s account of the familiar designation being poetically deautomatized, but in Brady’s work the deautomatization takes the form of identifying an apparent absurdity offered by the figurative range of the language world (that a pilot light extinguishing itself in a boiler and a pilot lighting out for a cigarette or a bombing mission are comparable), and then demonstrating, over the course of a poem, the internal logic of that often violent absurdity. That is, the relation between choice and accident is reassessed, apparent contingencies of language are analysed into their constitutive political choices. The poem employs the language of modern technological and media‐friendly warfare in uncomfortable situations that force open‐ended revisions of the potential of particular phrases. Full spectrum dominance is the ambition to control entirely the media and ideological battle that is now integral to any act of warfare, but if when “You bled out into full / spectrum dominance, light of day is / endless red‐white decade,” life is diffused into an ambient colour spectrum that is at the same time the information spectrum, and the poem presents a lyric realisation of the violence the phrase attempts to conceal. The Fox media group is treated in a similar way. “Fox smokes out” date rapists, closes discussion of health service provision “and dresses mutton as lamb / to satisfy Wolfowitz despite Colin’s clout.” The air of a beast fable surrounds the analysis of the media and its service of Bush’s cabinet, the fox serving the wolf, with Colin Powell turning up as the narrator of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar. After this it’s back to the barbecue, but with a play on interrogation, as “All summer, grillings had us up / against the wall‐,” and [246]
introducing a run of phrases that present gustatory consumption as a metonym for all absurd consumption, and absurd inequalities in consumption: “infants” with “soft spots / for pop tarts,” “the latest celebrity diet,” “carnivores cut loose / in the mainframe.” The disorientation of the beginning of the poem is lessened, as the spheres of activity alluded to in the discourse (consumption and warfare) bear a closer relationship to one another (being connected by consumer greed) than a dodgy gas boiler and aerial bombardment. But that early disorientation has provided a register for the poem that will enable its conclusion. The poem then remarks on democracy, as noted above, and takes a diversion through Palestine and American abortion law before reflecting on its own practice again: “Keep going until hate demolishes the concrete / poem and gives us all the lie.” Concrete poetry draws on the physical properties of text, and realises form from them; this poem is demolishing the artistic connections between the material properties of words, by finding in them nothing but a code for the aggression of the world; but in the very act of breaking that code, of demolishing poetry through hate, the poem writes itself.11 Acts of violation at the foundation of a religion (the tearing of a veil) and the corruption of religion through the commercialisation of ritual (“‘Love is giving’ / says the Christmas sale sticker”) lead to a treatment of the invocation of God in the war on terror: God of course He’s everywhere rooting for the home team, He reasons asymmetrical warfare pitches Yankee ingenuity against past horrors and canker coalitions, we emulate His endless present and smack out three runs with the blunderbuss of hatred. 11 See Mary Ellen Solt, “Introduction,” Concrete Poetry: A World View http://www.ubu.com/papers/solt/intro.html: “there is a fundamental requirement which the various kinds of concrete poetry meet: concentration upon the physical material from which the poem or text is made.”
[247]
God approves the war on terror as an ingenious response to previous American involvement in the horrors of the Saddam regime. God is only conceivable in baseball language, and his commercialised immanence (his “present,” the gift of his presence) is directly involved in the justification of the war on terror. The final stanza of the poem gives another possible model for poetry and presents a further confrontation of gustatory consumption and military aggression. Keep transcribing the voices of those dead not picked up on answering machines, who fade out and blur into another billowing horizon. Home zooms into the foreground and lights up the amoral heaven‐bracket, they tuck in.
Poetry here is the record of the voices of the dead of the September 11 attacks and their aftermath, but voices that were not recorded on answering machines and so have not been valorised in the media. The poem will at least acknowledge those voices that have not been recorded, whose wishes and views have not been expressed. Home, the domestic sphere, is taken over by the political mood of homeland security, and the importance of support back home for the boys overseas. This idea of home gives the firmament its glow, and justifies tucking in to the barbecue. This poem explores the conditions of its own potential to choose names and figures, to designate particular events and meanings, in the context of the manipulation of such choices when made by populations as a whole as a means of pursuing and justifying war; it places an emphasis on its own power of choice in the matter of figuration, and on its own violence in departing from syntactic norms and in forcing readers to impose semantic coherence on its utterance, in order to explore the violent manipulation of choice and the restriction of the freedom to speak in the circumstances of the war on terror.
[248]
“The Ballot Spoilers” perhaps occupies a position mid‐way, technically, between the two poems I have just discussed.12 The title designates a minimally ambiguous referent: voters who spoil ballot papers. The only obvious extension of this designation is to people who spoil ballots, not just ballot papers, either by spoiling their papers, or by being involved in a form of electoral manipulation. The poem expands its original designation, the ballot (paper) and the spoilers, in figures that confuse domestic and political spheres, that enact the violence done in recent American electoral practice, and that take a critical attitude to expression in linguistic acts such as writing poems and in political acts such as voting. With little introduction the poem begins a series of complex substitutions that are not fully explicable: Don’t fill up on that junk the truth, a peppermint counter dwindles from the ceiling over our eyes and the scabbards of our throats; snaps on the radio each equal to a blanked kid, to every paper fed head‐side up down into slits.
The truth is disrecommended in language that echoes the petrol station forecourt. Context makes the counter a vote counter, but it is hard to see how a vote counter can be peppermint: the context cannot determine the scope of figuration involved in the term. The remainder of the stanza paraphrases more easily: each slot of radio time bought for presidential advertising has equivalent campaigning value to blanking the name of a young (therefore probably Democrat) voter from the register and to a ballot paper fed into a voting machine the wrong way up. The practice of electoral violence is presented in a series of equivalents for which the poem’s figurative technique is a critical parallel, registering and exposing a political violence
12 Andrea Brady, Embrace (Glasgow: Object Permanence, 2005) 3‐4.
[249]
with a linguistic resourcefulness, semantic coherence offering resistance to the violence of politics rather than indicating a submission to it. The ballot spoilers will be recognised by their “loyalty cards”: they are a writing or at least a signing class of political apathists, “that class subscribed to postponing / resistance.” They “ride three minutes to midnight / arab bucks in the eventing.” Eventing is a horse‐racing event, so the arab bucks are horses (“buck” can be the male of many animals), but they are also a vulgarised view of Middle Eastern wealth (“bucks” as dollars), a wealth that is ridden in world events; “bucks” are also the lowest military ranks, and “buck” can be slang for people of dark skin. Syntactically, “three minutes to midnight” can qualify the bucks, so that the bucks are associated with proximity to nuclear confrontation and disaster. The (ballot) paper returns in the third stanza: “If you unpack the paper carefully you will find it / is full of nails and metal but the image of shopping.” Paper is normally packing, not that which is unpacked, and so conceals shopping rather than being its image. The ballot paper also resembles the poem here: it is an object for interpretation that requires unpacking, an unpacking that reveals violence. The ballot paper is also the image of shopping as it is modelled on consumer choice (at least in public choice theory). The nails and metal suggest nail bombing, perhaps the nail bombing campaign in London in 1999 which sought to attack black, Asian and gay communities by bombing Brixton, Brick Lane and Soho, centring, in the first two cases, on markets—where people were shopping. Again, the poet’s choice in the extremity of this figure—the nail bomb for the ballot paper—makes coherence out of violence, as the nail bombings were conceived as expressions of political will (the bomber was a far‐right sympathiser), and presents this kind of critical choice as an alternative to the bad political choices described. The “Charges” that are then “dropped like a glass of water” develop the nail bomb designation, but also suggest criminal charges: the comparison works either way, the [250]
crashing of the glass as the explosion of the charge, or the neutrality of the water as the end of litigation, dropping charges. The activity of the charge is connected to global warming in the form of retreating glaciers, and is said to be “their target / coupon, helps bulk the receipts a little.” It is a fraudulently submitted expenses claim (there was a deal of media coverage surrounding the first public record of parliamentary expenses in Britain in 2004), but also the aim of political patronage, a coupon being a “recommendation given by a party leader to a parliamentary candidate” (OED 4). The development of the poem at this point strains the connective potential of language: someone breaking “fields of china rabbits” with “a rope with a concrete buckle” is like “many general / Swannacks ravening a walnut,” Swannack being one of the generals to criticise Rumsfeld’s handling of Iraq. The position of the Western critic of Western foreign policy, co‐ opted into perpetrating, makes the triumphalism of Pound’s Herakles in the face of the coherence he sees amidst violence an impossibility; nonetheless, even if one can’t say “WHAT SPLENDOUR / IT ALL COHERES,” it may all still cohere without splendour.13 Both first and second person pronouns in the poem seem to refer to the ballot spoilers: this is in part a poem of voter guilt. In one hand, she holds a basket of currency things a person needs just to get by, pellets of ethics packing peanuts. In the other electric carving knife. You cast your shadows over stable proxies, tactical voters frozen in blocks with a floating appliance […]
The glacial image sequence is retrospectively applied to the macro‐conditions governing voter patterns that make
13 Sophocles, Women of Trachis, trans. Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1957) 50.
[251]
individual choice seem to matter so little in mass electoral systems: tactical voters are frozen because their “real preference” must be tailored to a realistic sense of what is achievable in the circumstances. The poem closes with the depiction of political work as ultimate leisure, and a forlorn sense of the postponement of politics inevitable once the voting classes are contented: Our position as permanent revolutionaries is waiting by the pool […]
In this poem choices of figure and designation again indicate the critical exemplarity of poetry in a running analogy with electoral choice, particularly electoral choice that is at least in part determined by technological manipulation (the “floating appliance”) and demographic questions (voters frozen in blocks), both of which are themselves a form of violence (someone holds an “electric / carving knife”) that are comparable to other acts of political violence (the nail bombing). It is primarily towards these acts of violence that the “violence” done to syntactic and semantic “norms” by poetic language is exemplary, asking of readers a critical stance towards their own attitudes to discrimination of what is like and what is unlike, what can stand in for what—a question as central to political as to linguistic representation, and a question into which Andrea Brady’s poems enquire with considerable political, ethical and linguistic conscience.
[252]
Josh Robinson
“Abject self on patrol”: Immaterial Labour, Affect, and Subjectivity in Andrea Brady’s Cold Calling In their 2000 study of globalisation and contemporary capitalism, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri describe what they identify as the three dominant models of production that have characterised the progression from agrarian society to the service economy of the present day: a first paradigm in which agriculture and the extraction of raw materials dominated the economy, a second in which industry and the manufacture of durable goods occupied the privileged position, and a third and current paradigm in which providing services and manipulating information are at the heart of economic production.1
We are presented with the latest instalment in the narrative of the recent end of modernity. Industrial production, we are told, is no longer in the ascendancy. While industrialisation and modernity brought migrations of labour from primary to secondary industry, we are currently witnessing the ‘postmodernization’ (or ‘informatization’) of economic 1 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000) 280
[253]
relations, particularly through the shift in employment in dominant economies away from manufacturing towards service sector industries. These jobs, whether in healthcare provision, entertainment, transport, finance, education or advertising, all share a fundamental concern in their day‐to‐day tasks with the realms of knowledge, communication and affect. Following Maurizio Lazzarato, Hardt and Negri describe this shift as one from material to immaterial labour, “labor that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge, or communication.”2 For Lazzarato, the concept of immaterial labour bears two important characteristics. Firstly, it tends to involve much greater use of information and communication technologies and accords greater importance to communication, both with peers and along the chain of command. Secondly, its apparent aim differs radically from its material counterpart: tasks carried out by immaterial labourers often involve “a series of activities that are not normally recognized as ‘work’—in other words, the kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opinion.”3 Immaterial labour distinguishes itself as much through the labourer’s experience as through the function of the employer. This isn’t, then, a relatively simple transition from secondary to tertiary industry, but a fundamental and qualitative shift in the nature of labour, a shift that takes place in each of the traditional industrial sectors. In a further taxonomical division, labour within the service sector is itself split into three categories: The first is involved in an industrial production that has been informationalized and has incorporated communication
2 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 290. 3 Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labour,” trans. Ed Emery, Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) 133‐47, 133.
[254]
technologies in a way that transforms the production process itself. Manufacturing is regarded as a service […]. Second is the immaterial labor of analytical and symbolic tasks, which itself breaks down into creative and intelligent manipulation on the one hand and routine symbolic tasks on the other. Finally, a third type of immaterial labor involves the production and manipulation of affect and requires (virtual or actual) human contact, labor in the bodily mode.4
The division between manufacturing and service industries has been blurred, and with it the distinction between material and immaterial labour. Hardt and Negri see this as evidence of the hegemony of immaterial labour under contemporary relations of production. Increased use of information and communication technologies has homogenised the experience of labour to an extent never seen before even under high industrial capitalism. “Today we increasingly think like computers,” they assert. Meanwhile, labour is less and less tied to the location in which it is carried out: “the assembly line has been replaced by the network as the organizational model of production.”5 In contrast with the hierarchical modes of production in which workers communicate only with those on either side of them, labour is now able to be decentralised. “Workers involved in a single process can effectively communicate and cooperate from remote locations without consideration to proximity. In effect, the network of laboring cooperation requires no territorial or physical centre.”6 The ease with which information can be transported allows capital, increasingly mobile, to relocate at very short notice to places where conditions—in particular, labour conditions—are more favourable to profit. These phenomena constitute the economic context in which Cold Calling sites itself.7 The title places us in the world of call centres, impersonal and unsolicited sales attempts—a form of 4 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 293. 5 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 295, italics original. 6 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 295. 7 Andrea Brady, Cold Calling (London: Barque Press, 2004).
[255]
labour of which of which more and more of which has been outsourced over the last decade, particularly to the Indian subcontinent.8 The first poem of the sequence, “Dream Vacation,” addresses this sort of relocation, opening by personifying labour and its movement as an individual dreaming of a holiday.9 For metallic say cushy, then work to rule manning black liners as the manual advertisement. Switching like metal she woke up, India dream of surety in series of pink groves and monkeys is that dream available in time for Christmas.10
India, both first name and exotic potential destination. As well as being the bin bags into which disused, worthless or broken tat is thrown, the “black / liners” might be a drab means of transport, perhaps a generic relative of the Black Star Line run by the United Negro Improvement Association in the early twentieth century. Dreaming is conflated with a consumer’s longing, desire that cannot be satisfied immediately, however predictable annual fluctuations in spending patterns might be: “is that dream available in time for Christmas.”11 Satisfaction cannot be achieved, whether because a head has “its jaw taped up” or you are “in the lap of penury mauling you.”12 The “freedom of assembly” is perhaps restricted by the unfreedom 8 By 1997, the potential for relocating call‐centres abroad due to varying labour costs and cheap telephony was becoming apparent; see David Bowen, “Why the world answers your local phone call,” The Independent on Sunday, 13 April, 1997: 16. By 2002, GE, ABN‐Amro, British Airways, Zurich Insurance and others were operating call‐centres in India; see Simon Caulkin, “Is there anybody on the line?” The Observer, 25 August, 2002: 10. Available online at http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,780078,00.html 9 Brady, “Dream Vacation,” Cold Calling, 3‐4. 10 Brady, “Dream Vacation,” ll. 1‐6. 11 Brady, “Dream Vacation,” l. 6. 12 Brady, “Dream Vacation,” l. 7; l. 10.
[256]
brought about by the need to spend time on an assembly line, observed by a “foreman.”13 A “work to rule” involves the voluntary submission to greater restrictions on freedom in attempt to improve conditions in the long term. Meanwhile, the apparent liberation from servitude with the migration of employment—an end to labour, at least for some—does nothing to increase now unemployed worker’s substantive freedom, instead leaving a worsened state of penury. What Hardt and Negri see as outmoded mode and relations of production persist, along with the struggles associated with them, but in such a way that they are no longer so apparent in the societies in which the vast majority of produced goods are consumed. Cold Calling refuses to conform to the narrative which Hardt and Negri impose on the early years of the twenty‐first century. This is a world in which production depends on labour that is material in terms both of the experience of it and of the goods that are produced. Nor do Hardt and Negri’s claims about the diminishing power of the nation‐state seem to stand up under questioning.14 The concern with the geopolitics of the ‘war on terror’ evident throughout the collection draws attention to a situation in which, although it is not the only political and military agent, the nation‐state retains control over the strongest force. The “tracked sky”15 suggests not only detailed aerial observation, monitoring all visible movement, but also a scene in which the night sky displays the ‘tracks’ of fireworks or, more malignly, missiles and artillery fire, perhaps suggestive of the ‘shock and awe’ tactics of the opening of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, inflicting huge amounts of damage and pain in a short time:
13 Brady, “Dream Vacation,” l. 17; l. 33. 14 See, e.g., Hardt and Negri, Empire, 161‐62. 15 Brady, “Dream Vacation,” l. 24.
[257]
How can she wakes up on fire recognise love when the surgeons were at him16
These lines appear composed of fragments of different utterances that have been spliced together, as if it is impossible to make a complete whole out of whatever remains among the debris. The implied question “How can she […] recognise / love” is interrupted by “wakes up / on fire,” as if the pronoun undergoes some sort of double exposure, sounding in both clauses. The aporetic masculine pronoun refers presumably to the source of the unrecognisable love, injured in the same blast. Explosions necessitate emergency surgery; ruptured language is the consequence of a damaged body. Hardt and Negri may be right to argue that “the nation‐state has less and less power” to regulate the movement of money, technology, people and goods across national boundaries,17 but it is undeniable that other actions that remain firmly under the control of the nation‐ state continue to have severe and damaging consequences for large sections of a population. The experience of labour is played out rather differently in the book’s penultimate poem, “Her Conceit”: At the prompt input your name. The identification card snaps to attention, jiggle of bars all types of wishes smeared onto a wet mount.18
The poem begins with the act of logging in. A name is reduced to a sequence of characters, replaceable—superseded, indeed— by a chip or barcode on a piece of plastic. The card becomes a sign for a sign, a means of verifying an ‘identity’ that itself
16 Brady, “Dream Vacation,” ll. 11‐14. 17 Hardt and Negri, Empire, xi. 18 Brady, “Her Conceit,” Cold Calling, 40.
[258]
stands in for a living person. The bars imprison the individual and her lived experience within the transcribed records of her credit history. Experience is irrelevant to any measure of the computerised labour, any value that is created. Personal information becomes data, a means of identifying oneself to a computer, data which is of increasing value to businesses. With the development of more powerful computing technologies it becomes easier to find useful (that is, profitable) details within vast quantities of (often noisy) information.19 Consumer data are used to develop increasingly accurate estimates and predictions of current and future financial and demographic traits.20 This practice is profitable not only for those who analyse the information, but also for its collectors, as retailers find a market for their transaction‐records.21 Impersonal and generic attempts to sell are targeted through an ever‐increasing reliance on personal data. And yet the act of logging in, however much it destroys the individual in the eyes of capital, seems to be a prompt to the imagination. It is as if installing oneself at a computer opens the unmentioned eye to things that were previously unseen. Imagined and lived experience become indistinguishable, as “the centuries mist” becomes something that “you can touch.”22 Breath is not only a means of sustaining life, but also a means of speaking, emphasising, communicating, as it “generally lets out / finally the a” in what seems to be a final expiration.23 The opening of “Can Somebody Play Amber Above the Clouds?” suggests that experience has become in some way fragile:
19 Michael J.A. Berry and Gordon Linoff, Data Mining Techniques: For Marketing, Sales, and Customer Support (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1997) 73‐80. 20 Berry and Linoff, Data Mining Techniques, 52‐54. 21 Jon Ronson, ‘Who killed Richard Cullen?’ The Guardian, 16 July, 2005: 19; online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,,1528705,00.html. 22 Brady, “Her Conceit,” Cold Calling, l. 9; l. 10. 23 Brady, “Her Conceit,” ll. 13‐14.
[259]
“I’ve won lots of industry awards.” Dark patch above the granary corrodes our minutes together along strip down to the water.24
The apparent request of the poem’s title places us at a party, perhaps, or in front of a jukebox. The “industry awards” boasted of in the opening utterance accord recognition and status, perhaps valued in the form of symbolic rather than finance capital. The vulnerability of “our minutes together” suggests that they are both few and precious, although corrosion implies not only damage but also a qualitative change in substance. Experience cannot be guaranteed to remain untainted. The fifth line, “Disc brake on motor, motor responses,” conflates mechanical and bodily movements: the brake, an impediment to vehicular motion, becomes a means of interfering with the nervous system and the reactions that it generates. Transportation takes place within the body as much as outside it. No it doesn’t look like snow, her head careers to her left dodging airborne paper, a passerby asks her—why him—to cut up a sim laugh.25
It is as if the different parts of the body have become separately controllable entities, not through the physical rupture of a nearby detonation, but in the experience of whiplash. A sudden change of velocity causes a head to move as if involuntarily, independently of the rest of the body. “Careers” suggests motion that is out of control rather than paths of development that require careful navigation by the aspiring professional, yet the participial phrase “dodging airborne paper” suggests a
24 Brady, “Can Somebody Play Amber Above the Clouds?” Cold Calling, 5‐6. 25 Brady, “Can Somebody Play,” ll. 7‐12.
[260]
purpose to the movement, as the administrative and military worlds coincide. Rapid motion is a source of physical pain, the sensation of which causes the body to stop being experienced as a unity. Its independent parts come with suggestions of inauthenticity, as if the head is being manipulated from elsewhere in order to generate or splice a manufactured display of amusement. In contrast with the metaphorical movement of labour confronted in “Dream Vacation” (for labour doesn’t move: people cease to be employed in one place, and others are taken on elsewhere), “Can Somebody Play Amber Above the Clouds?” examines some more literal forms of movement and transportation. But at the same time it calls into question the possibility of making any comparison at all between these different forms of dislocation and relocation. The “new / radiographic machine,” bought (only a phoneme away from brought) by the (presumably National Health Service) trust, involves both exchange of money for a commodity that has an inescapably bodily importance to the cancer‐patient, and (one might hope) the physical transportation of a machine into a hospital or clinic.26 And yet the attempt to “find […] qualified technicians” is a task that exists in a different space.27 The technicians may exist, but they are not immediately employable at a price that suits the trust. Not all labour is easily relocated. While Hardt and Negri acknowledge that unlike the other two forms of immaterial labour, the manipulation of affect requires human contact, they overlook some of the consequences of this. This ‘human contact’ can take on very different forms. Although both depend to a great extent on the manipulation of affect, the potential for outsourcing and decentralised “network production”28 is very different when running a customer helpline in comparison with a high‐end restaurant or a nursing home. While, in theory at least, queries 26 Brady, “Can Somebody Play,” ll. 18‐19. 27 Brady, “Can Somebody Play,” ll. 18‐19. ll. 19‐20. 28 See Hardt and Negri, Empire, 294‐97.
[261]
can be answered and anxieties reassured from afar over the phone, it is difficult to conceive of how a waiter in Bangalore could deliver the ultimate dining experience to a customer in London, let alone how a nurse could insert a catheter when the patient is several thousand miles away. Capital is not yet able to remove labour from entire local populations. Perhaps more worrying are Hardt and Negri’s claims for the emancipatory potential of immaterial labour. They insist that whereas in earlier modes of production, communicative activity was imposed on labour from the outside, it is essential to production based on immaterial labour. Brains and bodies still need others to produce value, but the others they need are not necessarily provided by capital and its capacities to orchestrate production. Today productivity, wealth, and the creation of social surpluses take the form of cooperative interactivity through linguistic, communicational, and affective networks. In the expression of its own creative energies, immaterial labor thus seems to provide the potential for a kind of spontaneous and elementary communism.29
Immaterial labour, that is, is essentially liberatory. The informational and communicative content of the labour is in its nature democratic. The key battles, therefore, consist in the ‘biopolitical’ struggles over the control of this information.30 The distinction between aspects of immaterial labour and some activities that labourers choose to undertake when they are not working have indeed been blurred, to an extent: for example, in the growing use of the internet and email both for work and for leisure. However, immaterial labour remains distinguished from life‐activity that involves similar cognitive processes by the fact that it is alienated labour. The phenomenon whereby 29 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 294. 30 As an aside, one might add that the task of telling academics and anti‐capitalist summit‐hoppers that their work is not only significant but even indispensable to the prospects of future revolution is one that is likely to bring with it considerable popularity with those groups.
[262]
production becomes inherent in labour itself—labour produces the means of production—is in no way unique to immaterial labour and production. Completed (dead) labour, sedimented in capital, necessitates future labour.31 Hardt and Negri share a view of subjectivity that insists that it is shaped by production, by labour. The subject is made in the process of production. However, for them this is a unidirectional process: there is no dialectical relationship between subject and object. Subjectivity, therefore, in Empire, is externally dictated, imposed from above. In contrast, I contend, Cold Calling helps fashion a model of thinking about the subject and its experience which, in direct contrast with thinking that descends from heaven to earth, seeks to move from earth to heaven, starting with the individual experience.32 According to Marx’s labour theory of value, the process of commodification reduces labour, each experience of which differs qualitatively from other such experiences, is reduced to the more easily measurable socially necessary labour time.33 And against Hardt and Negri’s claim that in “postmodern capitalism” value is “beyond measure,”34 capital is developing increasingly sophisticated means of measuring labour that don’t rely on the relatively crude measure of clock‐time.35 Indeed, its measurable 31 Cf. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “Keep on Smiling,” Aufheben 14 (2006) 23‐44: 32. 32 Cf. Karl Marx, “The German Ideology,” Early Political Writings, ed. by Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 119‐81, 125. 33 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1970, vol. 1) 41‐59. 34 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 366‐67. 35 For example, Emma Dowling, in her paper “Formulating New Social Subjects? An Inquiry into the Realities of an Affective Worker,” given at a conference on Immaterial Labour, Multitudes and New Social Subjects: Class Composition in Cognitive Capitalism in April 2006 in Cambridge, describes techniques such as “mystery dining” whereby unidentified observers give feedback to the restaurant on the tasks carried out by waiting, bar and kitchen staff. In “Cognitive Capitalism and the Rat Race: How Capital Measures Ideas and Affects,” given on the same panel, Massimo de Angelis and David Harvie analyse the processes of quantification, standardisation and surveillance that take place in UK higher education.
[263]
profitability is one of the professed advantages of cold calling. One manual, listing cold calling’s advantages over other forms of sales, claims that it is “direct,” “accurate,” “flexible,” more personal and interactive than letters, more cost‐effective and time‐efficient than travelling, and easily controlled and evaluated: it is simple to “monitor the effectiveness” and success of phone‐based sales attempts.36 Concrete advice abounds as to effective means of doing this.37 In any case, the aim of capital is to reduce the qualitatively different to the quantitatively comparable. And importantly, the qualitative differences exist not only between distinct spheres of labour, but between different people doing the same job, or even the same task, and even an individual doing the same task at different times. These changes in affective experience are often fundamental to the task at hand. Improving the mood of the worker is a means of making her more productive, whether through the physical layout of the call centre38 or through such advice as “Turn off all negative thoughts you have about the person talking,”39 or, in the words of a motivational guru, “Break the link between the experience and the emotion.”40 The employee’s own affective response to the work is something to be overcome; that of the potential customer (or “prospect”) is to be manipulated. At all times, the aim is to nurture a disposition that is likely to be persuadable to make a deal. In dealing with objections, for example, Repeat the objection to the prospect to make sure that he or she really understands it.
Pauline Rowson, Easy Step by Step Guide to Telemarketing, Cold Calling, Appointment Making (Hayling Island: Romark, 1998) 24‐25. 37 See, e.g., Chris de Winter, The Secrets of Successful Telephone Selling: How to Turn Cold Calling into Hot Profit (Oxford: Heinemann Professional, 1988) 117‐24. 38 de Winter, The Secrets of Successful Telephone Selling, 60‐63. 39 Rowson, Easy Step by Step Guide, 75. 40 Jon Ronson, “Cold Sweat,” The Guardian, 28 January, 2006: 20, online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,,1695278,00.html 36
[264]
Reassure the prospect about the point that’s been raised. Resume your pitch and set the appointment.41
This is a field in which rhetorical structures are employed formulaically. The aim is to persuade: any ability to move or delight is pressed into the service of this goal. It is in this respect that the apparent similarities between immaterial labour and some aspects of life‐activity are a distraction: my subjective experience of making a phone call to a friend during my free time is entirely different to that of a conversation made on a headset with a former student in attempt to solicit donations to a university’s annual appeal. Difference between forms of communication is explored in “Cellular Contact.”42 In the opening lines we are confronted with the prospect of information relayed over a “synchronised headset” and “the tannoy.”43 Music is present to entertain—or, perhaps more accurately, to distract. Fox enacts the fusion of news and entertainment, creating stories as well as following those that unfold of their own accord. This fusion is set against the background of the ongoing ‘war on terror,’ in particular the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The high‐explosive shelling of shock and awe “makes up a red field” as the white light is suffused with blood. Meanwhile, embedded journalists follow the troops’ every move while the “24‐hour general” is on‐hand to field media enquiries at any time.44 Unlike the rhetoric of the cold‐ callers’ scripts, Cold Calling refuses to commit itself to the attainment of a particular persuasive or even communicative outcome. Rather, the poem reveals the extent to which communication is to be mistrusted by exploring the range of its associations. The military and judicial realms are increasingly closely linked to consumer society, whether in their relationship
41 Stephan Schiffman, Cold Calling Techniques that Really Work! (London: Kogan Page, 1987) 44, italics original. 42 Brady, “Cellular Contact,” Cold Calling, 9‐11. 43 Brady, “Cellular Contact,” l. 2; l. 4. 44 Brady, “Cellular Contact,” l. 13.
[265]
with the media spectacle of twenty‐first‐century warfare or through the “double‐blind trials” in military courts, ensuring the safety of the product for prospective users.45 At the same time, the media spectacle dictates the dominant usage of language in relation to the invasion: military reporting develops its own distinct vocabulary in the same way as the “latest celebrity diet.”46 “Anything you could say / is indexed.”47 Military events and changes in the structure of industrial production combine to have complex effects on individual experience. Neither set of events can be viewed in isolation. The “model of efficiency”48 that mediates actions in “Stand up Routine” appears in the context of “an army / uniformed in winter / black.”49 In “Bounty Hunter” the “reward / card, played for air miles” seems as likely to lead to the “quiet / zone” of streets emptied by gunfire as a “fantasy over land cape.”50 The “Abject self on patrol” of “Fess Up” suggests that even the most downcast are charged with vigilance and responsibility.51 Meanwhile, “language seems just,” 52 but the sentence continues across the line‐break: […] Now pastured that language seems just as extinct, as wild convulses in the desert.
The communication on which twenty‐first‐century labour depends is unreliable, perhaps even impossible. But this is a poem in which the speakers “own mind refused to give up a regular sentence”: it is impossible to let go of what we know we can’t rely on.53 Indeed, returning to “Cellular Contact,” the
45 Brady, “Cellular Contact,” l. 18. 46 Brady, “Cellular Contact,” l. 34. 47 Brady, “Cellular Contact,” ll. 35‐36. 48 Brady, “Cellular Contact,” l. 29. 49 Brady, “Stand up Routine,” Cold Calling, 17‐18, ll. 2‐4. 50 Brady, “Bounty Hunter,” Cold Calling, 22‐25, ll. 49‐50; ll. 31‐32; l. 20. 51 Brady, “Fess Up,” Cold Calling, 12, l. 7. 52 Brady, “Fess Up,” l.21. 53 Brady, “Fess Up,” l. 25.
[266]
mistrust of communication comes through in what feels like a deliberate and insistent deployment of language. The poem’s opening: A pulse scatters ash. From the synchronised headset you hear apocalyptic pop, oily shouts on the tannoy drowning their commuting voices. Music stirs up tinder, memorial briquettes jet off the production line including toilet paper. Nobody asked us— Pilot lights out for a smoke. The boiler goes dead quiet, but gas whispers under the brackets, we work topless, listening to the 24‐hour general.
As I read these lines I feel a slowness brought about not through hesitancy but through something closer to a reluctance to speak. The pace set by the two adjacent heavily stressed syllables in the first line, further slowed by the repeated consonant, is reinforced by the marked syntactic break at the end of the line. Line‐endings frequently coincide with unmarked breaks between clauses as if to reinforce them, while many of the clauses that are split over two lines could conceivably end at the line‐break, only to be continued. “Music stirs up” could be a complete clause with an intransitive verb, while “Pilot lights out” can be construed as an order and “The boiler goes dead” as a statement, complete in themselves. These breaks and suggested breaks combine with the space within and between lines to slow down any attempted delivery. Meanwhile, the poem is almost entirely paratactical. There are hardly any conjunctions: clauses are frequently placed together linked only by punctuation. This accentuates the breaks between clauses, which become the only means of implying relationships of subordination or co‐ordination. The experience [267]
is one of the rapid absorption of significant quantities of information from sources that refuse to order it. Any suggestion of causation must be implied by the listener: there is no one there to explain how the different phenomena are interrelated. Interspersed with the account of the coalition’s progress in Iraq as narrated by Fox News are references to Arafat and the PLO, the ongoing military incursions into Afghanistan, the “wildcat strikes” (l. 31) at British Airways in summer 2003, even baseball.54 News stories merge into each other in a mass of communication that washes over the relatively passive ‘consumer.’ The onus is on the viewer or listener to distinguish one item from the next, let alone discern which are news and which comment: but unlike the processing of information at work, there is no compulsion to do so. Perhaps the most striking demand on the reader is the imperative to perform the text. “Keep going until hate demolishes the concrete / poem and gives us all the lie.”55 It is only possible to stop when the words’ potential has been realised. Not through the involuntary “chatter” of teeth caught up in “initiative paralysis,” but through the deliberately “reactive / patter of tiny metrical feet.”56 And yet the question remains as to the relationship between performance of the text and the possibility of (political) action outside it. This political action has to begin with the analysis of rhetoric, the interrogation of every speech‐act. Cold Calling is a sequence that is constructed out of this interrogation: it performs the unrelenting critique of the linguistic sources, both actual and putative, from which its thematic material is drawn, and reworks language in such a way as to refuse the slippery rhetoric of crude persuasion, laying bare the reliance of poetry on the singular experience of the body that performs it. The rhythm with which this poem steps is not quantifiable according to the supposed regular schemas of the traditional metrician, but rather insists on its 54 Brady, “Cellular Contact,” l. 31. 55 Brady, “Cellular Contact,” ll. 59‐60. 56 Brady, “Cellular Contact,” l. 49; l. 50; ll. 46‐7.
[268]
qualitative variation from one syllable, word, line to the next, and even between readings. This variation between readings is inextricably linked to decisions as to how the text should be interpreted—or another sort of readings. And as with the interrelationship of labour and subject‐formation, we mustn’t understand this as a one‐way process. The decision as to what a text means doesn’t merely determine the way it should be voiced. The two forms of reading are developed together, particularly in more problematic sections of the text: Keep transcribing the voices of those dead not picked up on answering machines, who fade out and blur into another billowing horizon.
This, the opening to the poem’s closing section, begins with what seems to be an imperative. We are told to extend the process whereby voicemails left from mobile phones on 9/11 have been compiled and manipulated, more or less cleverly, into serving extrinsic political aims, to those voices that were not recorded—or perhaps, whose messages haven’t yet been picked up, listened to. To continue and expand the act of transcription is an implicitly political act, but one whose valency is problematic. Like so many of the other implied utterances in this collection, the identity, the source of the voice that gives voice to it is not clear. It is on the one hand an imperative that we not only remember the dead, but also allow their voices to be heard. And yet, at the same time, it is the memory of these dead that is repeatedly invoked in the justification of the ‘war on terror,’ the invocation to remember them being inspired by disconcerting political motivations. An order to “Keep transcribing” is at once a request to carry on co‐opting the memory of the dead to the service of imperialism and a suggestion to keep probing, perhaps as if to imply that looking deeply enough will reveal that reveal that the trite justifications are by no means reflective of the entire silenced majority. [269]
The command is to “Keep transcribing,” to transfer the unrecorded sounds into easily publishable records. Transcribing an actually spoken message removes all trace of pitch, duration and intonation from what is said, transforming an individual’s words into a representation of them. But transcribing the putative words of now dead speakers involves according to the written words an imagined or constructed voice in which they are spoken: voices are much more easily co‐ opted when they’re no longer able to answer back, let alone when no‐one else heard them speak in the first place. Living voices, in contrast, preclude the possibility of such certainty. And the status of the voice that issues the imperative is much less easily determined. There is no indication as to which unrecorded voices are to be transcribed, nor to what end. Whereas the qualitatively varying experiences of different living individuals are reduced in the eyes of capital to their function of carrying out tasks at the lowest possible rate of remuneration—or for Hardt and Negri the medium on which a notion of subjectivity divorced from any individual experience can be imposed—the voice that utters this command offers no possibility of being abstracted from the experience that forms the situation in which it speaks. The voices that speak in this collection refuse to remain either silent or predictable.
[270]
Sam Ladkin
Problems for Lyric Poetry 1 […] Are the accidents that have nothing to do with my life whatever I want. […]1
This rhetorical conundrum, which is not punctuated by a question mark, I take as an example of the rift central to operations of lyric poetry under present conditions, or at least a rift that should be a pressing concern for current lyric practice. 2 1 Keston Sutherland, “Mother Shorney,” Neutrality (London: Barque Press, 2004) unpaginated. For an explanation of the term “Mother Shorney,” used in trade disputes in the early nineteenth century, see E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978 [1st pub. 1963]) 277‐8. Sutherland’s Neutrality considers the establishment of working class political movements in the nineteenth century, and the role of alcohol in such movements, as well as its role in more personal histories. In both mechanisms of protest and in lyric practice Sutherland interrogates historical changes in the meaning of spontaneity. See also Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005) Reflection 147, 228‐231. 2 An earlier version of this paper was delivered as part of the Chicago Review “British Poetry Issue” tour at the University of Miami (Ohio) and the University of Notre Dame. I am very grateful to the following people for our conversations, and for the generous help which has been offered, and eagerly accepted, whilst writing this article: Andrea Brady, Sara Crangle, Matt Ffytche, Edward Holberton, Neil Pattison, J.H. Prynne, Robin Purves and Keston Sutherland.
[271]
In Frank O’Hara’s “Poem ‘À la recherche d’ Gertrude Stein’” love excludes […] the intrusions of incident and accidental relationships which have nothing to do with my life3
“my life” is the residuum privileged to remain after love’s evacuation of contingent relationships. Keston Sutherland’s poem “Mother Shorney” reuses the renunciation love makes as an ethical foreclosure, leaving the flip imperative “do with my life whatever I want.” The western mandate to pursue pleasure is end‐stopped: the price of that freedom from incursion is paid in harm, in accidents and no doubt emergencies, elsewhere. The designation “my life” suggests a belonging which is frequently integral to a concept of love. Sutherland reveals “my life” to be the repression of the parts of our lives which we exclude from our sense of self identity. This repression includes the ethical blindness that fails to witness the suffering western capitalist identities create in distant places. Sutherland’s lyrics, particularly in his recent work, are frequently painful to read since harm elsewhere is shown to be subjugated to what is most valuable to us, our desires and most generous feelings (“my life” or “love”). Few poets have been as casually attentive to Proustian minutiae of incident and accident as O’Hara, so this moment of lyric foreswearing, separating out the essentials of love in life, or life in love, makes of the excluded a deafening background hum. This poem’s form of lyric ontology is strange and strained within O’Hara’s oeuvre, and within the poem. By lyric ontology I mean those moments where the strength of love’s bond assumes an accident‐free essentialist solipsism, isolating the lyric mode from linguistic detritus and everyday contingencies. The poem’s twin dedication to Marcel Proust and Gertrude 3 Frank O’Hara, ‘Poem “À la recherche d’ Gertrude Stein,” Collected Poems, ed. Donald Allen (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1995) 349.
[272]
Stein is a joke about the remembrance of Steinian time, that elusive “continuous present,” and the immanence of love.4 The difficult dependence of the present on the past is held in the grammatical crisis: “where since once we are,” playing the pathos of a lost love (“once we were”) backwards into presentness. O’Hara needs to make such a promise of love, and I dare say many of us do to, and the generosity of its endeavour shouldn’t be too easily or cynically dismissed, even if ontological love is undermined by the “accidental relationships” and indeed the physical “intrusions” which this poem occludes, the casual sex occurring outside and possibly during the lifetime of this love, as well as untold minor social interactions. Its disingenuousness increases the closer it gets to sincerity strongly felt. The conflation of the discourse of Being with love is something O’Hara frequently upsets with his accidentalism, and something that Sutherland more aggressively subverts. Sutherland takes the war rhetoric of O’Hara’s poem literally, anxiously asking whether the pseudo‐ontology of “my life” is being used to […] defeat all its enemies and all of mine and all of yours and yours in you and mine in me
The designation “my life” performs the lie that we separate our true or lyric life, the life which I feel to be integral to myself, out from the ruinous effects this identification causes elsewhere. It makes a farce out of the ethical interleaving we stage‐manage between, for instance, the wars carried out ‘in our name’ and the moral sanctity we reinscribe for ourselves by guiltily acknowledging such contingency. Part of Sutherland’s task is to cure or perhaps more accurately to radiate the “sick logic and feeble reasoning” which O’Hara diagnoses and Sutherland 4 On the “continuous present” see Gertrude Stein, Composition as Explanation (London: Hogarth Press, 1926); reprinted in What Are Masterpieces (New York: Pitman Pub. Corp. 1970) 23‐38.
[273]
takes as the West’s prime weapons in the theatricalisation and banalization of war: the provision of a “proportional” response in both speciously legitimated military action and repressively reasonable liberal discourse. The shooting deaths at Camp Ganci. Afterward we advanced up to it, that have nothing do without my life, over through a square you know something about.[…]
Camp Ganci is one of the camps within the Baghdad Central Detention Center, formally Abu Ghraib prison. Ganci was the Chief of the New York fire department. He died in the World Trade Centre in 2001. The co‐implication of these events/places and their “ground truth” (where truth tends toward zero and a new truth, the post‐9/11 calendar, is established) through real historical (over)determinations and through their accord under the “accident” of a name isn’t, therefore, a conceit that originated in the poem.5 The poem includes with its over‐egged “shooting deaths” what are recognisably lyric moments; apostrophic turns toward personal incident and private knowledge, and scenes recuperable by the poet’s memory or the reader’s sentiment for nostalgic discourse. The “nothing to do / with my life” morphs into “we […] that have nothing do / without my life,” the pronoun “we” being borrowed presumably by the ‘enemy combatants’ who do without “my life” by suicide or by lifelong internment in Gitmo, in the “legal twilight” outside the jurisdiction of habeas corpus or the “quaint” anachronisms of the Geneva Convention.6
5 For a discussion of the manipulation of grief to extend political domination see Andrea Brady, “Grief Work in a War Economy,” Quid 9; reprinted Radical Philosophy 114 (July/August 2002): 7‐12. Quid is available online at www.barquepress.com/quid.html 6 In his advice “memo” to George Bush dated 25 January 2002, Alberto Gonzales wrote: ʺAs you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of war.[…] The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors
[274]
“Are the accidents that have nothing to / do with my life whatever I want”: the line break separates off the “accidents” from the injunction to the pursuit of desire. The prosodic shift obliterates the question trying to be asked: How do events excluded from the experience I call “my life” relate to my desires, to what “I want”? This line can be read as an indictment of the blinkered isolation of a Western consumer identity: are the events occurring elsewhere the consequence, unacknowledged by me, of life in a culture of getting “whatever I want”? The desires of the consumer aren’t just “what I want” but wanting “whatever” there is. The harm that typically precedes consumption is considered only accidental, rather than integral or essential, to the experience of consumption, harm such as the conditions of labour, the alienation of workers from their time and the profits of their production, and also the full spectacular arsenal of economic, diplomatic and military support which sustains this privileged isolation. In this article I take these lines as paradigmatic of a series of problems for contemporary lyric practitioners. Our identities are dependent for their making and sustenance on the catastrophic exploitation of the unfortunate inhabitants of other places. How can lyric, one of the traditions of which deals with the representation of immediate, personal experience, enact a fidelity to this dark matter of production’s displacement? How can lyric register the experience of ethical neutrality in acts of consumption which reap such harm elsewhere? How is suffering elsewhere figured by lyric poetry? And how can lyric document the rift in the identity of the consumer, that alienation from “my life” propagated by the commodities and advertisements of the society of the spectacle? In 2005 Coca in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians.[…] In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.ʺ From “The Roots of Torture” Newsweek International. 17 August 2007 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4989481/ The “new paradigm” follows the “ground truth.” For “legal twilight” see Andrea Brady, “Saw Fit,” Embrace (Glasgow: Object Permanence, 2005) 54‐7, 54.
[275]
Cola ran a poster campaign in which the only text on the poster, written in the font which, like good Pavlovian dogs, thirsty for the “real thing,” we know means “coca cola,” was the single word “love.” How can lyric respond to such audacity? This article will differentiate the lyric practices of two contemporary poets, Keston Sutherland and Andrea Brady, who share a deep leftist critique of the dominant political and capitalist powers. To do so I present their work alongside that of Thomas Wyatt, whose lyric performances are tied to court politics and foreign diplomacy. The lyric quality of sprezzatura and its manipulation of value will be traced from Wyatt, via Frank O’Hara, into Sutherland. This enquiry into the exchange of value in lyric will finally be contrasted to the transvaluation between different economic fields in the poetry of Brady, the model for which I take to be the praise poems of Pindar. 2 In the terminal attention of consumption we receive a sustained attack on what we take to be our expressive lives, our spontaneity, the particularity of experience. The alienation of the Western consumer is, however, like an idealized lyric self in that the privileged space of the internal life pretends to an expressive power. This expressive power is recorded but also produced by ideas associated with lyric and commercial persuasion. Paradigms of the identity of the consumer are tacitly those of the lyric subject. Anne Williams understands contemporary assumptions about lyric to be those of Romanticism, with “qualities” of subjectivity, imagination, and emotion.7 In the work of Sutherland and Brady various forms of 7 Anne Williams, Prophetic Strain: The Greater Lyric in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984): “The standard definitions of lyric reflect Romantic theory and Romantic practice almost exclusively, though we may sometimes reassert the more primitive associations of the lyric with music. “A lyric,” according to one such definition, “is a brief subjective poem strongly marked by imagination, melody, and emotion, and creating for the reader a single, unified impression.” Another defines it as “any fairly short, nonnarative
[276]
consumption and production are represented. Especially prominent is the co‐implication of digestive, commercial, military, and information economies. Discussing the confusions of internal/external and production/consumption, and we might interpose “lyric” where he has “private,” Jean Baudrillard writes: [A]ll is clear if we accept that needs and consumption are in fact an organized extension of the productive forces: there is then nothing surprising about the fact that they should also fall under the productive and puritan ethic which was the dominant morality of the industrial age. The generalized integration of the individual ‘private’ level (needs, feelings, aspirations, drives) as productive forces cannot but be accompanied by a generalized extension at this level of the patterns of repression, sublimation, concentration, systematization, rationalization—and, of course, alienation!— which for centuries, but particularly since the nineteenth century, have governed the construction of the industrial system.8
In her struggle for a general working definition Williams considers the “lyric mode” to be that in which the “author induces the reader to know from within, the virtual experience of a more or less particularized consciousness.”9 The use of “induced” hustles into the equation the persuasion and rhetoric whose moral and ethical intensities this definition of the lyric would rather forego and I would like to unveil. I want to look
poem presenting a single speaker who expresses a state of mind or a process of thought or feeling”” (7). For an important discussion of the Romantic imagination as ideological tool see Forest Pyle, The Ideology of Imagination: Subject and Society in the Discourse of Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). 8 Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (London: Sage Publications, 1998 [1st pub. 1970]) 76. 9 Williams, Prophetic Strain, 15. Note that this production of sympathy is exclusively in the direction from the reader to the poet, rather than, for example, sympathy for a suffering third party.
[277]
further back than the industrial system, to the construction of something like “lyric subjectivity” in the poetry of Thomas Wyatt. A crucial moment in English language lyric production is occupied by a figure proximate to political power in both foreign and domestic courts. His lyrics are quietly duplicitous, offering under their trials of love and seduction imagery loaded with the mediation of social influence and domination. Brady and Sutherland write against the holders of political authority, and reckon without their attention, so we might speculate on their different requirements for obscurity and explicitness. Wyatt’s persuasive force is difficult to map. It is frequently pitched at seduction, or castigation, but a presumed addressee and a generalized reader aren’t coincident. His lyrics apostrophize, but typically as speculative lessons, within which their target audience may have to be self‐selective, by admission of guilt or complicity, though this need not assume contemporaneity. Furthermore, and more importantly for this argument, his persuasive force folds back into the construction of lyric identity. Wyatt is both courtier and ambassador, and the tactics appropriate to such roles, persuasion, secrecy, diplomacy, duplicity, might be more helpful names for some properties of lyric poetry.10 His proximity to political power goes some way to accounting for his lyrical dissembling. The secret given most 10 On the institutions of foreign diplomacy see Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (New York: Dover, 1988). Mattingley discusses the provision of diplomatic immunity in the light of Wyatt’s part in the plot to murder Reginald Pole on page 240. On Wyatt’s ambassadorial and courtly career see Elizabeth Heale, Wyatt, Surrey and Early Tudor Poetry (London: Longman, 1998) 11‐23; and David Starkey, “The Court: Castiglione’s Ideal and Tudor Reality; Being a Discussion of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Satire Addressed to Sir Francis Bryan,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 45 (1982): 232‐239. On the poets influential to Wyatt, his knowledge of whom relied on his, or their, foreign travel in courtly circles see Patricia Thomson, “Wyatt and the School of Serafino,” Comparative Literature 13.4 (Autumn, 1961): 289‐315; and Roland Greene, “The Colonial Wyatt: Contexts and Openings,” Rethinking the Henrician Era: Essays on Early Tudor Texts and Contexts, ed. Peter C. Herman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994) 240‐266.
[278]
public reckoning is the representation of his love affair (“some kind of amorous liaison”) with Anne Boleyn, before she became the wife of Henry VIII.11 In “Whoso list to hunt I know where is an hind” the poet, by this argument, capitulates the prize deer (Boleyn) to Caesar/Henry. Such diplomatic self‐regard was prescient since in May of 1536 he was imprisoned for his relationship with Boleyn, and describes witnessing her death from his cell, though he was spared.12 More generally however Wyatt’s poetry relates to courtly tact at home and abroad: the stealth of mind required to flatter, inveigle, represent and offend on the king’s behalf are not fully separable from the tactics of seduction, of Wyatt’s transformation of the veil of Petrarchan modesty, the praise of the perfection of the loved one into the hectoring sufferance of unrequited love and lust over the duplicitous mistress.13
11 Elizabeth Heale, Wyatt, Surrey and Early Tudor Poetry (London: Longman, 1998) 54‐5. 12 See Heale, Wyatt, Surrey and Early Tudor Poetry, 54‐58. “Who lyst his welthe and eas Retayne” probably refers to the witnessing of Boleyn’s hanging: “The bell towre showed me suche syght / That in my hed stekys day and nyght.” Thomas Wyatt. Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, ed. Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thomson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1969) 187. Kenneth Muir speculates that “What wourde is that that chaungeth not, / Thought it be tourned and made in twain?” and “That tyme that myrthe dyd dtere my shypp, / Whyche now ys frowght with hevines” are about Boleyn. See Kenneth Muir, Life and Letters of Sir Thomas Wyatt (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1963) 13‐37. 13 J.H. Prynne describes the Petrarchan courtly lover “who knows he may not look for the sign of favour which he ardently desires, for fear that the perfection of his lady might become compromised, so that his desire is both the more inflamed and by his own acknowledgement the more frustrated; this specialised hurt thus becomes for the woeful suitor his badge of accreditation. Not to be granted the wound of love is worse than all the hurt that such a wound might and must cause.” They that haue powre to hurt: a specimen of a commentary on Shake‐speares sonnets, 94 (Cambridge: privately printed, 2001) 19. See also R. Howard Bloch, “The Love Lyric and the Paradox of Perfection,” Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) 143‐164; and Roland Greene, Post‐ Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
[279]
Wyatt’s strategically shifting discourse, full of manoeuvres and deceptions is the discourse of the diplomat folded into the lyric voice. For Stephen Greenblatt, Wyatt’s achievement is dialectical: if, through the logic of its development, courtly self‐fashioning seizes upon inwardness to heighten its histrionic power, inwardness turns upon self‐fashioning and exposes its underlying motives, its origin in aggression, bad faith, self‐ interest, and frustrated longing. Wyatt’s poetry originates in a kind of diplomacy, but the ambassadorial expression is given greater and greater power until it intimates a perception of its own situation that subverts its official purpose. Wyatt’s great lyrics are the expression of this dialectic; they give voice to competing modes of self‐presentation, one a manipulation of appearances to achieve a desired end, the other a rendering in language, an exposure, of that which is hidden within. 14
However, this “suspension” of Wyatt’s lyrics between “impositions of the self on the world and critical exploration of inwardness” pretends these two zones can be held apart, when the force of rhetoric and of manipulation is self‐alienating. Both “inwardness” and the veils which invent it, are corrupted by the language of diplomacy. Consider this rondeaux: WHAT vaileth trouth? or, by it, to take payn? To stryve by stedfastnes, for to attayne, To be iuste, and true: and fle from dowblenes: Sythens all alike, where rueleth craftines Rewarded is boeth fals, and plain. Sonest he spedeth, that moost can fain; True meanyng hert is had in disdayn.
14 Stephen Greenblatt, “Power, Sexuality, and Inwardness in Wyatt’s Poetry,” Renaissance Self‐Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) 115‐156, 156. Anne Ferry documents the sixteenth‐century construction of the “inner life,” the hidden interior self, in The “Inward” Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
[280]
Against deceipte and dowblenes What vaileth trouth? Decyved is he by crafty trayn That meaneth no gile and doeth remayn Within the trapp, withoute redresse, But, for to love, lo, such a maisteres, Whose crueltie nothing can refrayn, What vaileth trouth?15
This earnest plea is deceitful at every turn. Its triple “refrayn” “What vaileth trouth?” replays the pun between “vail” meaning avail, both the ability to be effective and the value or worth of something, and “veil” meaning that which conceals, an obscurant, to play the deceptions of action and the intentions behind it, against those of language and its intentions. On the one hand “What value truth?” On the other, “What veils truth?” How we might begin to answer such questions is, in part, a condition of suffering. “To stryve by stedfastnes”: Strive derives etymologically from etriver, to quarrel or contend. Usages of disputation, conflict, contention largely prefigure the more contemporary meaning of “endeavor vigorously.” It includes a specifically linguistic case, meaning, “To contend in words, dispute,” citations given in the OED throughout the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Also of note is to “offer obstinate resistance, struggle against.” Remaining steadfast is holding your ground, especially in battle, though “Unshaken, immoveable in faith, resolution” was also used by the thirteenth century, as was its use as a firmly established legal document. There is a paradox here between earthly resolution,
15 This, from the Egerton Manuscript, is printed in Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, ed. Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thomson, 1‐2. A discussion of manuscript variations can be found in Richard Harrier, The Canon of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975) 98‐99. For a modernised version see Sir Thomas Wyatt, The Complete Poems, ed. R.A. Rebholz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978) 72‐3.
[281]
holding one’s place, one’s land, and the supposed flight from doubleness: to strive by staying resolute in fleeing deception. The defamation of this cruel mistress is, therefore, played out in language suffused with military and legal rhetoric. This is a lyric paradigm, that beneath the apostrophic address resides ideological machinery, in the felt contest of the subject’s desire. “Sythens all alike, where rueleth craftines.” This line potentially destabilizes the lyric project of the discrimination or praise of attributes (e.g., the veneration of beauty) by the very mechanism of the exchange of values lyric provides in its analogies and metaphors.16 The rule of lyric craft flattens the paradoxical and the particular in an exhibition of similitude. The line suggests, for example, that all mistresses are alike when they behave according to a learned craft of seduction or propriety. And that all lyrics effect the same outcome if it is by craft, rather than by inherent truth, that their successes must be judged. And crucially that all are alike when lyric exchanges one attribute for another by the truth of a comparison. Doubleness, rather than exacerbating difference ends up effacing it. This is a fascinating reversal of the value transformations of lyric metaphor, where comparison of properties typically acts to raise value, relying in fact on the valuable properties of a thing to be released from their context deemed by the lyric moment to be unessential. The value of truth is, by implication but not of necessity, downgraded to similitude, like for like, if craftiness rules.17 The value of the 16 Such questions of value and similitude exercised famously by Shakespeare in Sonnet 18, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” and Sonnet 130, “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” ending: “I think my love as rare / As any she belied with false compare.” 17 On “plain” style as it relates to the “fals” and the true see Heale, Wyatt, Surrey and Early Tudor Poetry: “Cultivated plainness was a carefully acquired and deployed style whose aim was transparency. It purported to give unmediated access to truth and the integrity of the speaker” (116). The motivation toward “plain” speech included theological pressures since the reformation had given new status to the vernacular. “The translation of the Bible into English, and the importance for Reformers of disseminating God’s word and reliable doctrine to a wide audience, was leading to a defence of a clear, plain English contrasted by
[282]
love object is reduced by comparison. Such craft may be the production of homogeneity and the loss of particularity. Does this generalization also happen to the representation of suffering? Jonathan Crewe’s reading of this poem elides the suffering, the “payn,” which acts, potentially, to re‐tether truth to negative value.18 It is lyric suffering, however, which makes the question urgent. That exquisite turn from “nothing can refrayn” to the refrain, “What vaileth truth?” asks, given that nothing can prevent this harm, what value has truth? What effect does suffering have on truth? Does truth in fact veil suffering by fabricating a duplicitous interiority, fashioned from harm into self‐righteousness? Are suffering and truth identical or dependent values? Is one the gauge of the other? This is important since the exchange of the properties of suffering might otherwise be known as sympathy, that is as a consonance between individuals. The exchange of attributes in lyric comparison is the production of untruth, both in the damage done to the particularity of the addressee or love object, and in the residual material that is not essential to the force of the comparison, i.e., all the ways the heart is not “stony.” What occurs in the production of sympathy by isolating and comparing attributes such that damage is done to the truth of that objective? For example, do we elide the particularity of the individual with whom we sympathize? This is a poem of duplicity, standing against doubleness even as its earnest entreaties are undermined by hidden craft. It
Reformist propaganda with the deceptive ‘rhetorical’ Latin of Roman Catholicism” (117‐118). For the plain vernacular style as it relates to Protestantism see J.N. King, English Reformation Literature: the Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982) 138‐44; see also Kenneth J.E. Graham, The Performance of Conviction: Plainness and Rhetoric in the Early English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); and Douglas L. Peterson, The English Lyric from Wyatt to Donne: A History of the Plain and Eloquent Styles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967). 18 Jonathan Crewe, Trials of Authorship: Anterior Forms and Poetic Reconstructions from Wyatt to Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) 30‐1. For an analysis of this poem see 26‐47.
[283]
is most duplicitous as it sets itself against the duplicity of a mistress. As the other’s doubleness is scorned the lyric suffers a haemorrhaging, re‐instigating the duplicity within the schedule of language craft. I single out this poem of Wyatt’s as a particularly insidious performance in which its promotion of an overt intended meaning is not just undermined by a system of ambiguities but its doubleness reflexively digests the poet’s position. It isn’t just that “truth” is upset by “doubleness” but that the site of the declarative truthsayer is re‐imagined, is built to defend against suffering even as the ascription of the duplicity of another rebounds into the lyric voice. I want to offer with this poem a reading of one of Andrea Brady’s poem, “Displaces.” Her more recent work has turned to the ambitious task to carve out a space for pleasure and love, a difficult task for a poet so conscientious about witnessing damage. It is a poem embedded in a restrained lyric language that further problematizes gaps “between discourse and intention,”19 and reconstructs the displacements of sublimation, repression and alienation of the “private” realm, diagnosed earlier by Baudrillard. It also sets up the dialectical machinations of displacement as a lyric operation. In full: “The truly happy are clean and beautiful.” —Plato, Sophist Dug in my opposite number, the present need to be soluble like muscle how patient it is, its craft enclosures and through it: we the live‐ins who stroke home air a wet brush fine, dragged or bold approach through shade press up to full sun radiating the perfumes of the skins, to reach an accommodation inside. Everyone hunts for water, starlings fly off with the take and a shelter in which to sweat to decant the body. The needs are basic, 19 Greenblatt, “Power, Sexuality, and Inwardness in Wyatt’s Poetry,” 156.
[284]
underestimated by rhetorics of tools; in a metal racket, or tubal web, lying around with yellow or red in the face, we wish we could shelter in each other, give up our lives and keep our inveterate longing spirits: embodied like ash in a pan. Such openings give permission to dream of perpetuity, the shade falls at your feet like a saline dressing how I fall out and in, marking the stages. Simply a place to live, distances to mark on a surface more forgiving than the sky of every spot we chose, swept out and bounded we still were far enough from intent to keep trying that legacy of flesh.
Brady’s poetry frequently operates through a rigorous displacement of and mis‐matching between various social units. That is, each social unit swaps attributes with another; corporation, nation state, city, home, individual, body, and exchanges within the body too. This poem figures lyric subjectivity negatively as the individual moves through the home, as the self moves through the body, as the mind moves through the dream. It records the displacements of one life in another (“we wish we could shelter in each other”), of the self in its “life,” in its domestic space, in its language. This love poem operates inside and around various kinds of alienation, again interrogating a lyrical conception of “life,” or more accurately, places “to live.” The injunction to “give up our lives and keep / our inveterate longing spirits” installs an alienated differential between our contingent and our lyric lives, that which we have to be and that which we sanction. The complex ironies of “What vaileth truth?” are restaged between rhetoric and intention and figured in the discrepant spaces these ironies constitute. The linguistic term, displacement, means the capacity of language to represent the past, the future, the not‐ here. The poem puts forward a present tense of experience
[285]
against the other places, other times, and other people of which life here and now is a displaced response. The quote “The truly happy are clean and beautiful” from Plato’s Sophist follows a passage about the cleansing attributes of refutation, clearing sophism of cant. There is cleanliness and beauty in the dialectical model by which lyric displaces suffering to constitute lyric privilege. This poem is a dialectical lyric in which each wishing, dreaming, longing for typically lyric pleasures, beauty, the delights of the body, the satisfactions of love, invokes a harm which necessitated the desire for such pleasures, and sets out the ways each pleasure harbours and instigates its opposite, as alienation, as a form of displacement. Each attempt to displace suffering, or to celebrate pleasure, recalls and constitutes a new shadow, a new need for refutation. When suffering from the medical condition hæmathidrosis the body can literally “sweat blood to / decant the body.” Around the sweat glands there are blood vessels which restrict under great mental or emotional stress. As the anxiety passes the vessels dilate and blood floods the sweat glands. The search for “shelter,” domestic and loving, is thereby compared to the body’s struggle to relieve anxiety. This decanting is also an allusion to Luke 22 in which Jesus is said to sweat blood as he contemplates the agony of choosing “the legacy of flesh,” his own death. Starlings are lyrical songbirds whose chanting (canting) for territory and partnership is considered to mimic human speech, and they “fly off with the take / and a shelter.” The poem is extremely sensitive in retaining the life in these displaces, not vaunting a metaphysical collapse of self and other but rather managing those “craft enclosures.” The lyrical praise of bodily desires, and the desire for home and love, is set against the earlier anxieties of alienation. The “live‐ins” become “Simply a place to live.” The choice to live the life of the flesh in the truth of that conviction is more valuable than the succour on offer from a disingenuous life of theological mercy. Just as Wyatt asks what [286]
value a truth which causes hurt, so Brady asks, what value suffering for the sake of truth. Metaphysical succour is a displacement of suffering and a form of cant, a spurious rhetoric. Instead, we choose to remain “embodied / like ash in a pan,” the flash‐in‐a‐pan of mortality. To choose the “legacy of flesh” however isn’t simple since the body has been inscribed by a history of rhetoric or of cant: insincere speech, hypocritical, secretive, disingenuous and affected. The body is not coterminous with truth. In The Interpretation of Dreams Sigmund Freud argues that the content of dreams, often of great intensity, are skewed or displaced into a new symbolic order. Displacement is the act of replacing agony or a thought‐content of significant value with a new order of symbolic representation under lower pressure, a dream form of blood‐letting, displacing stress to allow for a hermeneutic recovery. Freud writes: In the course of the formation of a dream these essential elements, charged, as they are, with intense interest, may be treated as though they were of small value, and their place may be taken in the dream by other elements, of whose small value in the dream‐thoughts there can be no question.20
The manipulation of value in “Displaces” is about the relief of suffering (and the gaining of pleasure) and, with Freud, about the capacity to work through arguments when their psychic weight is decreased. As anxiety rises into a symbolic order, divested of imminent hurt, its system of representation can become interpretable. What had been chaotic suffering becomes, if not a clarified symbolic order, at least an arrangement approachable without the anamorphosis of suffering. An “overdetermined” (417) cant displaces the intensity hidden homophonically in “intention.” Is the lyric
20 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1991) 415. See particularly “The Work of Displacement,” 414‐419.
[287]
project then a means to defer knowledge of the real state of things, or the cryptolect by which suffering is made available? Again, does lyric invent truth to veil suffering? Kathy Eden’s Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition records the legal and ethical history of rhetoric.21 Eden discusses oeconomia, economy, a term originating in the discourse of the domestic space and applied to the interpretation of literary style.22 The “unified multiplicity” of the art‐work can, according to Quintilian, be described as a body, and as a social unit (societas) “in which no member suffers estrangement but all are familiar, at home.”23 Quintilian understands the work of art to be the coherence of various economies: And it is not enough merely to arrange the various parts: each several part has its own internal economy, according to which one thought will come first, another second, another third, while we must struggle not merely to place these thoughts in their proper order, but to link them together and give them such cohesion that there must be no trace of any suture: they must form a body, not a congeries of limbs (corpus sit, non membra). This end will be attained if we note what best suits each position, and take care that the words which we place together are such as will not clash, but will mutually harmonise (complectantur). Thus different facts will not seem like perfect strangers (ignotae) thrust into uncongenial company from distant places (distantibus loci), but will be united with what precedes and follows by an intimate bond of union (societate), with the result that our speech will give the impression not merely of having been put together (composita), but of natural continuity (continua).24
21 Kathy Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy & Its Humanist Reception (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) 11. 22 Eden, Hermeneutics, 27. 23 Eden, Hermeneutics, 29. 24 Quintilian quoted by Eden, Hermeneutics, 29‐30.
[288]
The terms of rhetoric are legal, ethical, familial (oikos) and corporeal. Brady’s lyrics steer through similar rhetorical discourses: the body, craft, “rhetorics of tools,” “intent.” In De audiendis poetis, an aide for the young in reading poetry, Plutarch “understands the literary interpretative process itself as an accommodation in the radical sense of the term: as a coming to feel at home with the literary text, a process of making familiar.”25 The struggle against alienation, the attempt to feel at home in the domestic, bodily, sexual and hermeneutic spaces, is the strongest pull of this poem and perhaps a particularly lyric intent. Brady’s lyric struggles precisely with this desire to “reach an accommodation inside.” Greenblatt’s interpretation of lyric “interiority,” exposing “that which is hidden within” is a dialectic between diplomatic persuasion and self‐expression which doesn’t sufficiently attest to the figure of alienation. The ironies of Wyatt’s unrequited love lyric upsets the stability of an interiority from which self‐ expression supposedly bubbles forth. Wyatt’s and Brady’s poems are exemplary of the internecine dependencies of truth, suffering and craft as alienating identities. This model of alienation, upsetting a true interiority which can never exist, is one which Brady’s poem reconstitutes in a late‐capitalist mode. As Baudrillard writes: [The] unvarnished truth of the process of alienation: nothing of what is alienated runs off into some neutral circuit, into an ‘external world’ over against which we might be said to remain free—suffering, with each disposition, only a loss in our having, but always retaining possession of ourselves in our ‘private’ sphere and ultimately remaining intact in our being. This is the reassuring fiction of the ‘inner self’ or ‘heart of hearts’…, where the soul is free of the word. Alienation goes much deeper than that. There is a part of us which gets away from us in this process, but we do not get away from it. The object (the soul, the shadow, the product of our labour become object) takes its revenge. All we are dispossessed of remains attached to us, but 25 Plutarch quoted by Eden, Hermeneutics, 31.
[289]
negatively. In other words, it haunts us. That part of us sold and forgotten is still us, or rather it is a caricature of us, the ghost, the spectre which follows us; it is our continuation and takes its revenge.26
The struggle between accommodation and displacement occurs at the level of the metaphor. Patricia Parker analyses metaphor as “a substitution which is also a displacement,” that is in Quintilian’s terms “out of place” or “improper” as opposed to his understanding of “trope” as being “proper.”27 Metaphor’s displacement is only justified when the transfer is toward a higher value. Quintilian writes: For metaphor should always either occupy a place already vacant or if it comes into that of another should be worth more than that which it expels.28
Restraint was required in the composition of texts to accommodate the reader to the satisfactions of social proportionality, which might be sought in the permitted scale of transference of value in metaphor, or in the conventions and decorum of prosodic measure. The use of tropic comparisons in lyric is a struggle between discovering the satisfactions of accommodation, of home, and the ideological constraints of propriety, of limiting the violence of overwhelmed comparisons. The domestic is of course a place of violence, alienation, and commodity fetishism, whilst the lyric arts of persuasion have been shown to be replete with military, legal and gendered violence: “We consist in a fantasy of
26 Baudrillard, The Consumer Society, 189. 27 Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987) 37, 38. For connections between metaphor and property see chapter 3 “The Metaphorical Plot,” 36‐53. 28 Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property, 38, and quoting Quintilian (38) from Institutio oratoria, Loeb translation, VIII.vi.18.
[290]
proportionality.”29 The poetry of Brady and Sutherland responds differently to a shared insight into the veiled conservative ideological formulation of proportion, and our alienation from the society it imagines. They both negotiate values that exceed and are surplus to such constraints. A generalization of their different responses might be that where Brady’s poetry tends to concentrate on the desire for and complicity with this accommodation, Sutherland’s poetry excoriates the attempt to be healthy within the violence of the current social situation as already the sanctioning of it. Both seek to effect change, one by utilising the surplus of disproportion against proportionality, the other by working more extensively within that surplus. I want now to concentrate further on Sutherland’s debt to Wyatt and O’Hara. 3 Sutherland’s debt to Wyatt can be demonstrated by “Ode to Squid,” which includes and apes “My hert I gave the not to do it payn.” 30 For instance the final section: come back please come back departing from the fire which a wick of ice chokes up bitten off he who believes his fist will bear this truth into the shattered noon air rips out plugs of water he snorts up the sandpit.
replays: 29 Andrea Brady, “In Law” section of the poem Tracking Wildfire on Dispatx Art Collective. http://www.dispatx.com/show/item.php?item=2062 30 Keston Sutherland, Neutrality, unpaginated. Thanks to Keston Sutherland for this information. For this Wyatt poem see Heale, Wyatt, Surrey and Early Tudor Poetry, 84‐5; and Diane M. Ross, “Sir Thomas Wyatt: Proverbs and the Poetics of Scorn,” Sixteenth Century Journal 18.2 (Summer, 1987): 201‐212.
[291]
Farewell, I say, parting from the fyer: For he that beleveth bering in hand Plowith in water and soweth in the sand.31
“Ode to Squid” exacerbates Wyatt’s comparison between the failure to be sexually “rewarded” by an unrequited love with the rhetoric of financial debt, of servile behaviour and agrarian misadventure. Suffering is due to the mistaken belief in the diplomatic (Latin diplo meaning doubling or fold) “bearyng in hand”/”fist” of one’s heart, or the worldly goods that go with it, given to another in the expectation of its value being preserved or increased: “I should be rewarded again.”32 The premise of the diplomatic lyric is to raise value. Greenblatt writes that “Wyatt’s poetry is, in effect, a species of conduct.”33 The intertwining of conduct at court and in poetry can be evidenced in, for instance, George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (1589), who referred to Wyatt as one of the “chieftaines” of “a new company of courtly makers.”34 The Arte relies extensively on the codification of the behaviour of the courtier given in Baldassare Castiglione’s hugely influential Book of the Courtier (Il Libro del Cortegiano), first published in Italian in 1528 and translated into English by Thomas Hoby in 1561.35 Wyatt had read Castiglione’s advice to ambitious young
31 Wyatt, Collected Poems, 13. 32 See also Sutherland, “Diplomatica Fides,” Antifreeze (Cambridge: Barque, 2002) 118‐122. 33 Greenblatt, “Power, Sexuality, and Inwardness in Wyatt’s Poetry,” 136. 34 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936) Ch. XXXI, 60. 35 Puttenham quoted by Heale, Wyatt, Surrey and Early Tudor Poetry, 70. On Castiglione see also pages 39‐40. See chapter 2 of Daniel Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978) 50‐75: “The formulation of such behavior in [Castiglione’s] The Courtier readily serves to define aspects of modern court rule so often assumed in the Arte [of English Poesie]” (55).
[292]
male courtiers and satirised it, according to David Starkey, in his “Satire Addressed to Sir Francis Bryan.”36 As an example of Puttenham’s use of Castiglione note the title he gives the figure of allegoria: “the Courtier.” The name suggests the interpretation of people’s actions to be a similar hermeneutic task to the disclosure of language.37 The class of allegoria includes various ironic devices and is the way of making “words beare conrary countenance to th’intent.”38 By developing the art of poetry in the terrain of courtly conduct possibilities for doubleness become potentially socially radical. Strikingly Puttenham links doubleness to “insurrections” within the state: “[Such ambiguity] carryeth generally such force in the heades of fonde people, that by the comfort of those blind prophecies many insurrections and rebellions have bene stirred up in this Realme.”39 The duplicity of courtliness is concealed, or the veil of its duplicity is practiced, primarily by the art of sprezzatura which I contend is an important tool of English language lyric. Castiglione recommends sprezzatura “to conceal all art and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it…. Therefore we may call that art true art which does not seem to be art; nor must one be more careful of anything than of concealing it.”40 Sprezzatura is the art of effortlessness, of casual charm and crucially privileges spontaneity, quickness of mind and wit: “art without art, a negligent diligence, an inattentive attention.”41 It is a 36 Starkey, “The Court: Castiglione’s Ideal and Tudor Reality; Being a Discussion of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Satire Addressed to Sir Francis Bryan,” 232‐239. 37 See Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) 36. Also C. Bates, The Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992). 38 See Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England, 60. 39 Quoted by Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property, 99. 40 Quoted by Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England, 55‐6. 41 Eduardo Saccone, “Grazia, Sprezzatura, Affettazione in the Courtier,” Castiglione: The Ideal and the Real in Renaissance Culture, ed. Robert W. Hanning and David Rosand (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983) 45‐67, 57. On rhetoric and wit
[293]
nonchalance that engenders and veils subterfuge, properties shared with the lyric. In his study Ambition and Privilege Frank Whigham summarizes some of the possible translations of sprezzatura including disdain, misprision, depreciation, recklessness, nonchalance. He calls it the “dynamic mode of the fundamental stylistic category of grace.”42 By acting with casual grace in diplomatic negotiations the courtier reveals their value beyond the mere “affectation…the laborious display of virtues that can be rightly revealed only spontaneously.”43 It was the modus operandi for the ambitious courtier seeking social elevation and as such was threatening to the aristocracy who had little dominion over something as unquantifiable as performance. Sprezzatura was encouraged by the powerful at court since its political mendacity was valuable. It was equally feared as the degeneration of the “transcendent authority” of birth to the “sheerly formal, learnable, vendible skills of persuasion.” 44 For Puttenham poets must “passe the ordinary limits of common utterance, and be occupied of purpose to deceive the eare and also the minde, drawing it to a certaine doublenesse, whereby our talke is the more guilefull & abusing.”45 Poets have a privileged permission to stray beyond the propriety considered “ordinary” in “common utterance,” just as the diplomat’s behaviour differs from that acceptable outside of courtly life. The poet is by no means free from proportion however, which for Puttenham should be maintained prosodically in the regularity of meter and semantically in virtuous metaphorical shifts. Comparisons should raise value. Such boundary setting reveals the fear of proportion being see James Biester, Lyric Wonder: Rhetoric and Wit in Renaissance English Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). See also Peter DeSa Wiggins, Donne, Castiglione, and the Poetry of Courtliness (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), especially the chapter “Sprezzatura or Transcendence,” 87‐111. 42 Whigham, Ambition and Privilege, 93. 43 Whigham, Ambition and Privilege, 94. 44 Whigham, Ambition and Privilege, 3. 45 Quoted by Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England, 58.
[294]
overwhelmed, a “spontaneous overflow” we can relate to sprezzatura. Sprezzatura is a subset of the ethos of grace. Castiglione writes: I [says Count Lewis], imagining with my selfe often times how this grace commeth, leaving apart such as have it from above, finde one rule that is most generall, which in this part (me thinke) taketh place in all things belonging to a man in word or deede, above all other. And that is to eschue as much as a man may, and as sharpe and dangerous rocke, too much curiousness, and (to speake a new word) to use in everye thing a certaine disgracing [una certa sprezzatura] to cover arte withall, and seeme whatsoever he doth and saith, to doe it without paine, as (as it were) not minding it [quasi senza pensarvi].46
This disgrace is not the lack of grace but an acknowledgement that the way to have grace is to hide it. Importantly, he who acts with sprezzatura “seeme[s]…without paine.” Such a consideration fits the poetry of Frank O’Hara well. Sutherland I understand to have taken up the lyric economy of sprezzatura and pushed it wittingly too far. O’Hara embraces the sprezzatura of Wyatt in his own courtly making: Morton Feldman eulogized that O’Hara ʺseemed to dance from canvas to canvas, from party to party, from poem to poem—a Fred Astaire with the whole art community as his Ginger Rogers.ʺ47 His style, in his prose as in his poetry, tends towards a quickness and brevity, refracting the speed of thought through the light of transient moments. Think of the “custom / to beguile” in “Naphtha” describing “Jean Dubuffet painting his cows / ‘with a likeness burst in the memory.’”48 His impulse is to attend to the fleeting which, no matter how fast, remains unequal to the task. These machinations never stray 46 Quoted by Whigham, Ambition and Privilege, 93. 47 Quoted in David Lehman, “O’Hara’s Artful Life—Poet, Curator and Critic,” Art in America (February, 2000). 48 O’Hara, Collected Poems, 337‐8.
[295]
too far from conduct, from a keenness to behave a certain way or keep his poetry near to the pitch of a break‐neck conversation, or mocking of the attempt by poets and artists to solder leaden feet to each tripping accidentalism. In “Poetry” the “casual” quickness which approaches knowledge of time is also a programme for prosody. It begins “The only way to be quiet / is to be quick” and ends: All this I desire. To deepen you by my quickness and delight as if you were logical and proven, but still be quiet as if I were used to you; as if you would never leave me and were the inexorable product of my own time.49
Quickness replaces causality with a logic of “as if,” the agility of prosody and thought zapping into a moment of insight a new time, more fully owned.50 O’Hara’s conceptualisation of grace follows the lyric grace and disgrace of Wyatt. Those famous lines of “In Memory of My Feelings” for instance, only half of which were considered suitable for his tombstone, suggest duplicity: Grace to be born and live as variously as possible. The conception of the masque barely suggests the sordid identifications.51
49 O’Hara, Collected Poems, 49. 50 Discussing the art of Jackson Pollock, O’Hara writes: “This is not automatism or self‐expression, but insight. Insight, if it is occasional, functions critically; if it is causal, insight functions creatively. It is the latter which is characteristic of Pollock, who was its agent, and whose work is its evidence.” Frank O’Hara, “Jackson Pollock,” Art Chronicles (New York: George Braziller, 1975) 13. 51 O’Hara, “In Memory of My Feelings (Dedicated to Grace Hartigan),” Collected Poems, 252‐257, 256. This is echoed in Sutherland’s Mincemeat Seesaw (“Fit B”), which again echoes Wyatt: “the grace of trended variables to be borne / not of yourselves, nor yet to tease awry / the flat‐out frown and all it militates / in
[296]
Commonly, analysis of duplicity and sprezzatura takes them to be vainglorious malice but in grace their exercise is tethered to a different, more ethical logic. Saccone quotes the definition of gratia given in the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae: Strictly, gratia signifies favor, i.e. the inclination of the soul toward doing well to someone, or toward cherishing something as much gratuitously as because of any benefit previously accepted. Whence it is transferred to the condition of the person to whom this favor pertains. Similarly it is applied to the quality of the thing that pleases.52
The art of deception is not divided from an ethical idea of gift and the lyric tradition of the gratuitous bestowal of praise: the person who cherishes with their gift of grace gains something of the “quality of the thing that pleases.” This is not a martyrish morality and it chimes with much of my understanding of O’Hara’s pleasures. The fond regard with which his friendship was considered is part of the giving and receiving of grace, the more you give the more you get. Such an economy is sumptuous in its logic, gaining value as it acts reflexively. We can join these ideas together: quickness or sprezzatura as the performance of grace is a rare economy in which giving does not equal loss. And indeed the praise of loss by sacrifice is also the production of grace.53 I understand O’Hara’s lyric facility to be
favour of as wrapped in plastic rags / an Afric baby slender as an elf / sidles in picturesque sedition, in / time to the beat of the fist in your heart which sprung / open reveals the grip you achieve on love, / as you see fit to lunge at it, timing a gag in the dark.” First published Barque, 1999; reprinted Antifreeze, 64. 52 Saccone, “Grazia, Sprezzatura, Affettazione in the Courtier,” 47. For a counter argument see Harry Berger, Jr., The Absence of Grace: Sprezzatura and Suspicion in Two Renaissance Courtesy Books (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2000). 53 The debt praise owes to loss as sacrifice can be seen in the “endless originality of human loss” in O’Hara’s acrostic for Vincent Warren, “You are Gorgeous and I’m Coming,” Collected Poems, 331, or at the end of “Joe’s Jacket,” Collected Poems, 330. Joe’s jacket is: “all enormity and life it has protected me and kept me here on / many occasions as a symbol does when the heart is full and risks no
[297]
the casual accumulation of the gift of grace, operating to praise friends, lovers and pleasures, the possibility of which only occurs in the fleeting prosodic moment. His praising junctures of similitude, as he practically reinvents the otherwise embarrassing use of “like,” work by the graceful speed of their inception. For O’Hara sprezzatura approaches the condition of intimacy, held by immanent loss, available to the spontaneous overwhelming logic of love’s compare. For Castiglione grace is: a sauce to everie thing, without the which all his other properties and good conditions were litle worth54
As value is unmoored from aristocratic power the verve of spontaneity becomes itself valuable. Grace and its performance in sprezzatura becomes the “fundamental signifier of value.”55 When Puttenham argues that tropes in language must be constrained by proportionality, the maintenance under duress of a social hierarchy, sprezzatura offers a potentially more radical system, one in which the correctness of comparisons is ratified not by proportion but by speed, quickness, charm, the bearing of behaviour. This idea of value has far‐reaching consequences for similitude in lyric. Where the exchange of value used to require proportion, value could instead be held in the brevity of the exchange itself, hence a difficult dialectic of sprezzatura: value can be generated by quickness and by doing so value itself is potentially devalued, destabilized. “Sythens all alike, where rueleth craftines” is the mental and prosodic quickness of grace, the “sauce to everie thing,” and the duplicity engendering suffering. In Wyatt’s astonishing “They fle from me that sometyme did me seke” there is this moment of lyric grace:
speech / a precaution I loathe as the pheasant loathes the season and is preserved / it will not be need, it will be just what it is and just what happens.” 54 Quoted by Whigham, Ambition and Privilege, 93. 55 Whigham, Ambition and Privilege, 94.
[298]
when her lose gowne from her shoulders did fall and she me caught in her armes long & small therewithall swetely did me kysse and softely said dere hert how like you this56
The short third line pausing on the turn into softness, the exercise of quietness, leads into the apostrophe of love’s compare and creates the possibility for what I read as a quiet and insistent quadruple stress, “how like you this.” The question operates as plain address: does this delight you? It also folds into its reversal of gender power, the woman standing over the man, choosing his fortune, a question of comparison: in what ways are these bodies alike and what relation do such differences have to the social power imbalance?57 The “dere hert” plays out this drama; the motif of the hunt of male for female (hert to dere) is reversed. As the poet unveils the body of the lover, so the lover herself steals the grace of the moment. Crucially we are left with that markedly lyric question: how does the compulsion (particular but not exclusive to poets) to find likenesses begin to approach a moment of such casual erotic charm? What happens to presentness in the time of metaphorical comparison? How does liking something, taking delight in it, act with the likeness of comparison? Is the lyric poet’s search to do justice to such scenes only going to displace and alienate the poet and the lover from pleasure? In Sutherland’s extraordinary “Hot White Andy” we read:
56 Wyatt, Collected Poems, 27. For a reading of this poem that emphasises its, arguably, modern and romantic nature see Donald M. Friedman, “The Mind in the Poem: Wyatt’s ‘They Fle from Me,’” Studies in English Literature, 1500‐1900 7.1: The English Renaissance (Winter, 1967): 1‐13. 57 For the gender and power relations of the scene see Barbara L. Estrin, “Wyatt’s Unlikely Likenesses: Or, Has the Lady Read Petrarch?” Rethinking the Henrician Era, 219‐239. See also Michael McCanles, “Love and Power in the Poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt,” Modern Language Quarterly XXIX.1 (March, 1968): 145‐160.
[299]
live up the dream how like you this finale to the whole Chang question the whole problematic congelation of hot genitals wrapped in the Houston Chronicle to crack its metaphysic ad banner. In white out your tenses are the wanton of desire, gazing through the Xi’an YMCA window at The imitation Gap lit up scampi‐eyed desire krush ex necromat it lives my own way, soft hard soft hard soft […]58
Wyatt’s flourish is skewered on the line break. Its pathos is part‐turned into retribution, “how typical of you” perhaps, and its elegant disdain is forced further into the concluding bustle of the poem, the extravagance of this “finale” in its re‐rendition of lyric equivalence, “to” the attachments of desire, “to” the Fetish‐ character of commodities, “to” the fear of Chinese capital.59 “Hot White Andy” mirrors the earlier “Roger Ailes,” published in Neocosis, and reprinted with “Hot White Andy” in Chicago Review.60 “Roger Ailes” was addressed to the Roger Ailes, chairman of Fox News.61 Sutherland’s introduction to the poem, which more or less remained the same during a reading tour of the USA in 2007 is worth quoting at length:
58 Keston Sutherland, “Hot White Andy,” Chicago Review “British Poetry Issue” 53:1 (2007): 73‐87, 87. Compare the dream back to “Want the enormous tragedy of the dream?” (76); and “I keep dreaming about you every single night last / night I you making love Stan[…]” (75). 59 The poem is littered with overwhelmed overleaping comparisons and exchanges, excessive, farcical, superfluous: “You soften inside the to, harden in the craniofrontonasal Berkshire disco. / Disappointed AmEx to the phlogiston, or make up your own (using ‘to’). / Each is delivered and to each, / transverse adamantine. / Unnecessary examples followed […].” (80) 60 “Roger Ailes” was the first panel of a triptych in Keston Sutherland, Neocosis (London: Barque Press, 2005). References will be to its publication in Chicago Review “British Poetry Issue” 53:1 (2007): 88‐94. 61 Presumably this “He” is Roger Ailes: “[…] He is the human appurtenance of the Neocon revolution / and all the appurtenances are available for data organization / choking out useable error margins in the freedom reading / by any means optional in the revisionist stock uprising.” “Roger Ailes,” Chicago Review, 94.
[300]
[Neocosis] was my attempt to think about the damages kind of directed, in this case, from how I was thinking about it, inward, onto our own societies by the people who can control media agendas in our society, so a pretty familiar type of criticism for everyone I’m sure. So it was an attempt to criticise specifically the neoconservative rise to power and its entrenchment in Fox News. Now this poem that I’m about to read to you is a kind of complement to that or maybe another insult. Instead of focusing on how we reach inwards and are predators to ourselves within our own communities, this one thinks about how we project our predatory feelings outwards, in this case outwards to China specifically, so the poem has an object, has a target in a sense, which is how we think about China. I was really pleased to stumble across this image online [an image reprinted in Chicago Review showing a vast mock‐Oriental tower block] because really it captured for me very beautifully what I think a lot of people in the west are afraid of in China, which is this suddenly upright and strong, growing, tumescent Chinese economy which threatens to penetrate into all of the darkest recesses of our most private culture. That picture is in the book, so you get the picture.62
In “Roger Ailes” seeing incorrectly was predominantly, though not solely, due to the manipulations of the media and the interests it serves: “Our money is where your mouth is.”63 It adjusted the “mood lighting” of Wordsworth’s Prelude: Tranquil, receiving in my own despite Amusement, as I slowly pass’d along, From such near objects as from time to time Perforce intruded on the listless sense Quiescent, and dispos’d to sympathy, With an exhausted mind, worn out by toil, And all unworthy of the deeper joy Which waits on distant prospect, cliff, or sea, 62 Mesh Works: The Miami University Archive of Writing in Performance. 17 August 2007. http://www.orgs.muohio.edu/meshworks/archive/miami/new‐british‐ poets/ 63 Sutherland, “Roger Ailes,” 88.
[301]
The dark blue vault, and universe of stars.64
became the violent and violated bruising of: days on any shift in the universe of stars vault now puce in fact on the verisimilitudinous rim shift itself […]65
The “deeper joy” Wordsworth longs for “waits on distant prospect.” The epic space of the universe forms the “prospect,” a fundament of “worth.” The subtle phrasing makes of “prospect” the lyrical looking forward and out and also the principle of the position from which seeing to a distance reflects back. We know where we are by this distant mirror of prospect, the principle of a distant place that locates us.66 This is Wordsworth’s question for the lyric in its personal, provisional attestation to “near objects” and how to locate them in a truth or sublimity outside the reach of subjective intrusion, which may indeed make of it no kind of lyric. We are “dispos’d to sympathy,” to the perception of suffering, according to the scale of the lyric, when attending to the proximate and partial. If this sympathy isn’t to be overwhelmed by untruth, for Wordsworth, it requires an epic distance to place it, and that distance must have an affective order, a “joy.” Joy is therefore connected to the capacity to experience things truthfully. The metaphors of lyric, replacing one thing with another, which fails to apprehend the beauty of the singular world, can dispose us 64 William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book IV, ed. Mark L. Reed. 2 Vol (Ithaca, NY: 1991 [1805‐6]) I.159‐60. In “Hot White Andy” the Rojar character is reported as saying: “A quiescence so fucking dead / catchy the sky cracks up its earplugs” (82). 65 Sutherland, “Roger Ailes,” 89. For “rim” in Wordsworth and J.H. Prynne see Keston Sutherland, “XL Prynne,” in this book. 66 See J.H. Prynne, “On Maximus IV, V, & VI,” Iron 12 (1971): n.p. A transcribed lecture, given at Simon Fraser University, B.C., on 27 July 1971. Reprinted (with brief comment from the transcriber, Tom McGauley) Minutes of the Charles Olson Society 28 (April, 1999): 3—13.
[302]
toward the type of not seeing clearly which we call sympathy.67 This recognition is not the justification for a sublime heartlessness, rather an affective value of truth to which suffering is related. What, though, should lyric do when suffering is distant? William Wordsworth’s letter to Dorothy Wordsworth of September 6, 1790, describing the view from Villeneuve across Lake Geneva reads: The lower part of the lake did not afford us a pleasure equal to what might have been expected from its celebrity; this owing partly to its width, and partly to the weather, which was one of those hot gleamy days in which all distant objects are veiled in a species of bright obscurity.68
And from “Hot White Andy”: All distant objects are veiled in a species of bright obscurity: omnidirectional scanning allows any Article orientation provided the Article jargon faces the scanner.69
What for Wordsworth was the vagueness of a light strewn scene across the distance of the valley becomes the bureaucratic obscurity of these “Articles,” possibly the “entry into force” of the “Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War,” the convention the USA’s cant of “extraordinary renditions” obscures.70
67 On Wordsworth’s lyrics see J.H. Prynne, Field Notes: ‘The Solitary Reaper’ and others (Cambridge: privately printed, 2007). 68 Letter addressed to “My dear Sister” of 6 September, 1790 The Early Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth (1787‐1805), arranged and ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935) 31. 69 Sutherland, “Hot White Andy,” 80. 70 Office of the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights. Available at http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/91.htm On vagueness see Keston Sutherland, “Vagueness, Poetry,” Quid 7c (2001); and the response by Robin Purves, “Some Marginalia on Vagueness, Poetry,” Quid 8i (2001).
[303]
The mechanism of “Hot White Andy” is to mangle two love poems into one: one an apostrophic wound‐tending after the “damage” of a failed love, the other its strange dialectical opponent, a love poem to someone the poet has never met, decided at random via the internet namely “Andy Cheng…the export manager for a tungsten production company in Wuhan China.”71 Sutherland’s answer to the question of how personal lyric can treat of distant others is to craft a “bright obscurity,” a lyrical address to a love object as the distant prospect, a figure ensconced in the manipulated fears of a new economic order. As one of the lyrical demands reads: “But I live in imperative sympathy with you.”72 Sutherland’s recent poetry operates in the mutual displacement of (at least) two forms of distortion or anamorphosis: the Marxist analysis of reification, particularly Adorno’s continuation of Lukács’ analysis, and various Freudian, specifically theatrically Lacanian, deformations of accurate perception, e.g. anaclitic affects and paranoia. Reification is a problem of misperception in which a relation between people has taken on the character of a thing, and the relation between things has taken on something of the character of a relation between people. Witness for example the reification of commodities in the attribution by marketing and advertising of properties of social relations within the object, many of which are lyric virtues such as spontaneity, vitality and genuineness. Summarizing the views of Lukács, Axel Honneth explains that the vast expansion of commodities has become “the prevailing mode of intersubjective agency” by which subjects are “mutually urged (a) to perceive given objects solely as “things” that one can potentially make a profit on, (b) to regard each other solely as “objects” of profitable transactions, and finally (c) to regard their own abilities as nothing but supplemental “resources” in the calculation of profit 71 Mesh Works, 17 August 2007. http://www.orgs.muohio.edu/meshworks/archive/ miami/new‐british‐poets/ 72 Sutherland, “Hot White Andy,” 84.
[304]
opportunities.”73 Misrepresentation is therefore motivated by surplus value, veiling labour behind the spectacle of commodities. Adorno implies that a form of primary reification is necessary to our development in infancy.74 It is through libidinal cathexis, the emotional identification with another, a love object, that the objective world exceeds our egotism and becomes stable. Our perception is prevented from remaining infantile and egotistical by the empathetic re‐imagining of objects from the perspective of other people. Honneth summarizes: The more second person attitudes a subject can attach to this same object in the course of its libidinal cathexis, the more rich in aspects the object will ultimately appear in its objective reality.75
For Adorno conceptual thought, the “depersonalized conception of reality,” is dependent on remaining critically conscious of this original cathexis, hence in “Hot White Andy” “Stupidity is the glass ceiling of decathexis.”76 Alienation according to this argument is initially an affective empathy; the “early imitation of a loved figure of attachment” constitutes the “primal form of love.”77 This other whose perspective is
73 Axel Honneth, Reification: A Recognition‐Theoretical View. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values Delivered at University of California, Berkeley, 14‐16 March, 2005: 91‐135, 96 and 97 available on The Tanner Lectures on Human Values http://www.tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/Honneth_2006.pdf. Such a description recalls the earlier discussion of “My hart I gaue thee, not to do it pain.” 74 See Adorno, Reflection 99, “Gold Assay,” Minima Moralia, 152‐155. 75 Honneth, Reification: A Recognition‐Theoretical View, 133. 76 According to “Stan” on page 83. 77 Honneth, Reification: A Recognition‐Theoretical View, 117 followed by Adorno, Minima Moralia, 154. In Sutherland’s article in this book, “XL Prynne,” he considers Prynne’s analysis of Lukácian reification to be an “extortionate sentimental contrivance.”
[305]
imitated becomes part of the meaningful apprehension of objects. Adorno’s reflection, “Gold assay,” is an essay on the discourse of the genuine. ‘Assay’ means the subjecting of metal to chemical analysis to discern its make‐up, i.e., to see whether or not it is “genuine,” and this Adorno analogously applies to self‐identity, to the “bourgeois morality” which claims that if “nothing else can be bindingly required of man, then at least he should be wholly and entirely what he is.”78 According to Adorno “untruth is located in the substratum of genuineness itself, the individual.”79 Thus the truth of an integral alienation is to be critically discerned amidst the sanctimonious pleas for the “genuine.” Adorno writes: The whole philosophy of inwardness, with its professed contempt for the world, is the last sublimation of the brutal, barbaric lore whereby he who was there first has the greatest rights; and the priority of the self is as untrue as that of all who feel at home where they live…. The more tightly the world is enclosed by the net of man‐made things, the more stridently those who are responsible for this condition proclaim their natural primitiveness. The discovery of genuineness as a last bulwark of individualistic ethics is a reflection of industrial mass‐production. Only when standardized commodities project, for the sake of profit, the illusion of being unique, does the idea take shape, as their antithesis yet in keeping with the same criteria, that the non‐reproducible is the truly genuine.80
“Hot White Andy” is motivated by the desire to apprehend through the mediation of a loved figure, and the damage perpetrated by the loved one’s withdrawal of said perspectives; “how like you / this” becomes a question in which the loved one stands over the ex‐lover and asks to what extent an empathetic perspective has been shared. The poem connects the 78 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 152. 79 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 152. 80 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 155.
[306]
anamorphosis due to love to that of reification not only because the spirit of love is so frantically sold by the culture of consumables but because against the nostalgic harbouring after a “true” ontological perspective the self is always experiencing a reified world. Furthermore reification is sympathy. The switch between sympathy and empathy is symptomatic of that definition of reification cited above. To invert Wordsworth, the “deeper joy” of the “primal form of love” is a worth insistently maligned by our sympathy for the surplus value of commodities. Seeing objects from the perspective of a loved one becomes seeing commodities from the perspective of the production of profit. For Adorno, and arguably for Sutherland, the lack of the genuine shown in “the first conscious experiences of childhood” i.e., imitation play, is potentially utopian: In such behavior, the primal form of love, the priests of authenticity scent traces of the utopia which could shake the structure of domination.81
Recognition of the original cathexis, the “imperative sympathy,” is a kind of pre‐emptive knowledge of the condition of alienation, veiled by the rhetoric of the genuine and of inwardness. Wyatt’s “inwardness” is strategically betrayed by the doubleness of his language. The closer his verse comes to the pathos of interiority, and to its persuasive accord with those in power, the more fully doubleness exposes the tenuous reign of proportionality. O’Hara’s lyrics use grace, vulgarity, charm and quickness to over‐ and underwhelm ontological acuity. Sutherland’s lyrics make more explicit our entrapment in and blindness to the capitalist exchange of value in the “net of man‐made things.” The sentimental fraud of genuineness goes back to bourgeois blindness to the exchange process: 81 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 153 and 154.
[307]
Genuine things are those to which commodities and other means of exchange can be reduced, particularly gold. But like gold, genuineness, abstracted as the proportion of fine metal, becomes a fetish. Both are treated as if they were the foundation, which in reality is a social relation, while gold and genuineness precisely express only the fungibility, the comparability of things; it is they that are not in‐themselves, but for‐others. The ungenuineness of the genuine stems from its need to claim, in a society dominated by exchange, to be what it stands for yet is never able to be. The apostles of genuineness, in the service of the power that now masters circulation, dignify the demise of the latter with the dance of the money veils.82
The dominant mode of exchange is the “long arabesque of equivalence” operating in the profit of fiscal transactions and in the similitudes of the love lyric. 83 Lyrical vision is by the “light” of overwhelming affect: love, fear, desire, loss. the woman you see in light is light itself— the light of the world, its copula and armrest, she is the fulguration, the axis about whom endless birth of heart revolves in magic fire and in fury you must make her love you.[…]84
Sections of lyric praise are consumed and excreted throughout the poem, their imagery reattaching, cathecting themselves, wherever they can. The collapse of these lyric parcels breaks the possibility of the poet and reader becoming martyred to them. The damage to lyric is real harm but also real health, preventing the reification of the love object into the statue of loss for life to worship. The love object is the very identity of witnessing the world through and with love, the paradigm of which is libidinal cathexis; love is “copula” which grammatically
82 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 155. 83 Sutherland, “Hot White Andy,” 75. 84 Sutherland, “Hot White Andy,” 78.
[308]
connects subject and predicate as well as joining this particular subject by the act of copulation.85 The unhealthy disturbance of libidinal cathexis is the proclivity towards “anaclitic affects,” conceptualised by Freud in his paper “On Narcissism” and treated by Sutherland in his paper on Frank Zappa.86 The anaclytic is a type of dependency in which the choice of a love‐object is determined by a skewed longing to fulfil a different desire, for example hunger. The libido is driven to find a “succession of substitutes” typically for the parents who supplied nourishment and care in infancy, and as we have determined, also acted as the borrowed perspective of cathexis. For Sutherland the culture industry teaches us by “lyrical rote” to think of ourselves as “anaclitic and thus actually to become so.” For Freud ʺa real happy love corresponds to the primal condition in which object‐libido and ego‐libido cannot be distinguished,”87 a condition Sutherland finds to be “consonant with…commodity love,” the feeling of endless recognition between narcissistic understanding of our own desires and their imitation in the generalities of the discourse of love, “the conscious or unconscious belief that the ʺmental processesʺ given to [consumers] as pop‐songs are out there only to be fused back into the consumer’s own spontaneous feelings and needs.” This is the consumer in the “Cathex‐Wizz monoplex,” the speed of capital as the general equivalent producing cathectic dependency, and explains Sutherland’s critical exculpation of spontaneity.
85 On narcissism in “Hot White Andy” see Jennifer Cooke’s article in this book, “The Laughter of Narcissism: Loving Hot White Andy and the Troubling Chain of Equivalence.” 86 “What’s The Ugliest Part of Your Market‐Researched Anaclitic Affect Repertoire?” on Militant Esthetix www.militantesthetix.co.uk/ice‐z/keston.htm and published in Academy Zappa: Proceedings of the First International Conference of Esemplastic Zappology, ed. Ben Watson and Esther Leslie, 2005. Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” (1914) On Metapsychology […] The Pelican Freud Library, trans and ed. James Strachey. 11. (Penguin, 1984) 59‐97. 87 Quoted by Sutherland, “What’s The Ugliest Part of Your Market‐Researched Anaclitic Affect Repertoire?”
[309]
amity to the pyrite on the ironing board, what is it for this rapture of transitivity, this equivalence hypodermic, the infinity of desire? What do I spread for?88
The flattening by lyric equivalence of friendship (amity) and love’s fire (pyrite) is “rapture,” an ecstatic transcendence and a violent rape, that is at once the most vaunted and debased of exchanges. Later we read: But the rapture, what is its negatum? It is whispers Cheng the Fetischcharakter, not of commodities but of dialectic itself […]89
Sutherland understands Marx’s analysis of der Fetischcharakter der Ware, which he translates as “the fetish‐character of commodities,” to be essentially a “satire against western political economists.”90 The Fetischcharakter of dialectic negates the flattening by capitalist exchange, the exemplary case being the difference between sexual ecstasy and rape, the “third term” of which is “farce”91 conscious of the satire and violence of its etymological meaning of ‘stuffing.’ …disjunctive part lives will then cancel the asymmetry of self‐inclusion, each of them will have the whole of love in it.92
Maintaining the “part” from “particularity” the poem (here) rejects Freud’s (narcissistic) dictum for love as the consonance 88 Sutherland, “Hot White Andy,” 80. 89 Sutherland, “Hot White Andy,” 80. 90 Keston Sutherland, “The concept of globalisation and the diction of social analysis.” Conference paper delivered at University of Southampton, 2 May 2007. “The wealth of nations, Marx effectively said, is, from the point of view of our most advanced instruments of economic analysis, an immense accumulation of icons, golden calves and rabbits’ feet.” 91 Keston Sutherland, “The concept of globalisation,” 85. 92 Keston Sutherland, “The concept of globalisation,” 76.
[310]
of object‐libido and ego‐libido, that “parity” of self love and love for another. This parturition recalls Sutherland’s earlier interest in his love lyrics with the relation of part to whole lives, and particularly the use of “depart.”93 The phrase “amity to the pyrite” recurs homophonically in “fading like parity”: But I love you despite the boring terrorism of particularity, fading like parity, ground spilled into water 94
The shift of “particularity” into “parity” is the flattening equivalence foregrounded by the homophonic reduction.95 The “ground” here relates to the epigraph, taken from Hero and Leander, attributed to Marlowe: “Love deepely grounded, hardly is dissembled.” A love well grounded is earthed and settled but is also the corpse of love, buried deep. Either way it is hard to falsify, hard to disguise and hard to imitate. According to Puttenham the ideal courtier is “cunningly to be able to dissemble.”96 ‘Dissemble’ includes the production of semblance, of likenesses and “Hot White Andy” is a love poem in the doubleness of “despite me.” Rather than extending sprezzatura’s capacity to exchange intimate value as a form of disproportion, Sutherland performs
93 Consider the poem “To Andrea” from Antifreeze which ends: “where you are you / are in part the whole of my world / flooded by brilliancy, also you depart” (101). Sutherland’s argumentative logic reminds me of Donne’s “Lovers Infinitenesse” whilst the dialectic of part to whole and “depart” strongly recalls Sidney’s “Oft have I mused, but now at length I find”: “I hear a cry of spirits faint and blind, / That, parting thus, my chiefest part I part. / Part of my life, the loathed part to me, / Lives to impart my weary clay some breath; / But that good part, wherein all comforts be, / Now dead, doth show departure is a death; / Yea, worse than death: death parts both woe and joy; / From joy I part, still living in annoy.” 94 Sutherland, “Hot White Andy,” 81. 95 Parity can refer to the “fact or condition of having given birth” which links to “birth of heart” (108). 96 Quoted by Whigham, Ambition and Privilege, 36.
[311]
a bathetic sprezzatura. Sutherland takes bathos to be not‐ accidentally historically coincidental to the new era of financial speculation, the introduction of paper currency, the national debt in the 1690s, and to the “revolutionary growth in commerce,” the prospect that production and credit would allow indefatigable desire to be matched by endless supply.97 This crisis of value gives way to “our current period…of crisis in that history,” the crisis in evidence as bathos. Bathos is the collapse in certitude over the nature of value as the value of capital falsifies exchange. Sutherland’s discriminating use of bathos performs shifts of exchange at such speed and across such distances that something of the universalized mediation of capital becomes apparent. Where O’Hara’s grace is an economy of surplus at the point of loss, operating by sacrificial praise, Sutherland invents a bathetic surplus, a quick confrontation with the loss of real value in the orgiastic exhibition of fetish‐ value. Sutherland speeds exchange horizontally and vertically, overleaping in superfluity and collapsing in bathetic excess. Whigham writes of sprezzatura: In the ascription of virtues, courtesy enjoins the display of effortlessness. This injunction fetishizes the recreative realm, the unwrought mode of life characterized by leisure, spontaneity, the private, the casual.98
Sutherland takes the pleasures of this fetishism and reifies them. He compulsively pushes the overwhelming spontaneity of lyric abandon too far, exposing the virtues of the leisure class and their vice‐like grip on the outsourcing of production, of harm, of labour, of domination. Commodities operate by untethering proportion as the slightest object proffers itself in bioluminescent prostration. Sutherland takes apart sprezzatura 97 Keston Sutherland, “The Trade in Bathos.” Paper delivered at the University of London, Birkbeck. 29 November 2000. Published Jacket 15 (December, 2001) http://jacketmagazine.com/15/sutherland‐bathos.html See also Sara Crangle’s article in this book, “The Art of Exhalation in Poetry: Chris Goode’s Bathos.” 98 Whigham, Ambition and Privilege, 88.
[312]
to show its workings in the social construction of “genuine” inwardness. His sprezzatura is the hyperdecathexis of the “wanton” desire‐mongering of every commodity, leering in the falsification of empathy. Some of this thinking follows Sutherland’s lecture, “Nowhere else in the market: bathos and ethics in Prynne” in which he establishes Prynne’s early engagement with the phenomenology of Nicolai Hartmann.99 Hartmann’s idea of “givenness,” the ontological priority of objects over the interference of subjectivity, is connected by Sutherland to Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism. Sutherland translated Hartmann as writing: “Phenomenology must hold all phenomena to be equivalent and of equal value.” This “givenness” is therefore associated with the accurate apprehension of the world lost by the vagaries of the manipulation of value in the spectacularised world of commodities, where subjective distortions are fed and expanded. Perhaps this is one way of vulgarly distinguishing the motivations of Sutherland’s poetry from those of Prynne: whereas an accurate phenomenological ethic underpinned Prynne’s early work, which documented its violation by the forces of alienation, Sutherland instead proceeds from the violation of cathectic engagement, the alienation of the initial infantile surge of value fed by desire.100 Sutherland enters such
99 Lecture delivered at the University of London, Birkbeck, 14 December 2006. 100 Consider Prynne’s “riposte” (my italics): “The complicity with bad consciousness is universal, though it may be argued that societies with more power to elaborate fanciful domains of individual freedom and purity of heart ought maybe to carry more of the guilt for their own self‐deception. The only workable alternatives are sainthood (model now discontinued) or the intense cultivation of dialectical consciousness. Otherwise the self‐implication of all consciousness in all acts of reflection designed to search out its limits and blind spots will completely obstruct even partial insight. The total scheme, in whatever kind, is the final obstacle, because it interdicts the even possible part‐ success of dialectical enquiry. Alienation of human consciousness is fundamentally inevitable within the structure of mental presence, and its acknowledgement is the necessary precondition for an attempted dialectic.” J.H. Prynne, “A Quick
[313]
arguments from the spectacularised end of the spectrum, het up on hectic violence and a flurry of hyperbolic and crass desires. I wonder whether libidinal cathexis as the model of self‐ estrangement is a value, an origin of truth, to which bathos relates in the poetry of Sutherland, as had been the case for “nature” in Pope? As Sutherland describes it he seeks “to make bathos itself seem estranged, alien, and affective viscerally, such that the thickness and onrush of bathetic language can vitiate the relation to truth in a way that seems wrong.”101 This wrongness can be expressed in a term John Wilkinson used to introduce “Hot White Andy,” preposterous.102 Preposterous is wrong‐ headed and something placed in the wrong and unjust order. Puttenham: Your misplacing and preposterous placing is not all one in behauiour of language, for the misplacing is alwaies intollerable, but the preposterous is a pardonable fault, and many times giues a pretie grace vnto the speech.103
The search for the intolerable and unpardonable fault strikes me as an apt description of Sutherland’s desire. It does not wish to find a way to be healthy in a world with such willed suffering. By writing a lyric love poem to someone close and someone far Sutherland is preposterous enough to approximate the sprezzatura described here, in other terms, by Adorno: Only at a remove from life can the mental life exist, and truly engage the empirical. While thought relates to facts and moves by criticizing them, its movement depends no less on the maintenance of distance. It expresses exactly what is, precisely because what is is never quite as thought expresses it. Essential
Riposte to Handke’s Dictum about War and Language” Quid 6 (November 2000): 25‐6. 101 Sutherland, “The Trade in Bathos,” unpaginated. 102 Introduction to a reading at the University of Notre Dame, 4 April 2007. 103 Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, 255.
[314]
to it is an element of exaggeration, of over‐shooting the object, of self‐detachment from the weight of the factual, so that instead of merely reproducing being it can, at once rigorous and free, determine it…. The unbarbaric side of philosophy is its tacit awareness of the element of irresponsibility, of blitheness springing from the volatility of thought, which forever escapes what it judges.104
4 I want finally to return to the poetry of Andrea Brady to distinguish her project from that of Sutherland. I accentuate a difference here that in the complicated and responsive work of these poets is not evident at all times. In his essay “American Change: A Note on Andrea Brady and the Language of Consumption” Robin Purves considers the poem “Post Festen e,” a poem that calibrates the festival of consumption of Thanksgiving Day against its nominal source, the time in American history when consumption was the satiation of a more pressing and real hunger.105 As Purves documents, the poem examines the “American Family” through scaled economies of the consuming body, the family (oikos), the U.S. and global economies. Marx’s assessment of capital as the “general equivalent” is related, by Purves, to the equivalence held in metaphorical and metonymic tropes.106 Purves argues: Since money, as what is general, and metaphor, can each render all transactions analogous or homogeneous, the progress that
Adorno, Minima Moralia, 126‐7. “Post Festen e: thanksgiving seasonal 9i,” Vacation of a Lifetime (Cambridge: Salt, 2001) 96‐8. 106 “Because money is the general equivalent, the general power of purchasing, everything can be bought, everything may be transformed into money.” Karl Marx, “Notebook VII,” Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books: 1974) 838. Quoted by Robin Purves, “American Change: A Note on Andrea Brady and the Language of Consumption,” the darkness surrounds us: American poetry, ed. Sam Ladkin and Robin Purves, Edinburgh Review 114 (2004): 177‐185, 183. 104 105
[315]
the poem makes, makes of it an uneasily complicit indictment, one that seems to enact the difficulty or impossibility of escape from complicity in this instance. The basic poetic technique of inventing or discovering analogies, that is, the positing of an abstract equivalence between two or more separate spheres, is not itself analogous to the processes which the poem ultimately condemns: it is, in a sense, those processes. Could a poem be written that was not in some way complicit with the forces of unequal exchange?107
I understand Sutherland’s poetics to witness this general equivalence and to respond by making of its contiguity a bitter and vituperative farce. His poetry pursues preposterous comparisons until bathos articulates the absurdity which constitutes suffering and depredation within each trinket purloined for western consumption, and yet allows conscience and consciousness to carry on regardless. Sympathy as registered by the equivalence of lyric is one target for his poetry as it is symptomatic of the reification of commodities, each tendering a new cluster of affect to suck on, and as a diagnosis of the intensely saccharine emotionalism of current political discourse. By generalizing sympathy such that distant suffering is perceived as a form of suffering “I” do or could imagine experiencing, my guilt in the production of suffering is exchanged for the insipid forgiveness I offer myself because I feel sympathy. Better to become more critical and more knowledgeable of the dominant powers of unequal exchange. On these points Brady and Sutherland agree. Brady offers a different response, one that frequently documents the affective mundanity of exchanges that Sutherland serves to irradiate in their absurdity. Brady’s poetry contemplates the unequal exchange of the war economy, wage labour, the death penalty, etc., in ways which frequently makes palpable their deadening restitution into society (again we can diagnose sympathy with suffering as one such performance of
107
Purves, “American Change,” 184.
[316]
restitution). Her work bears a negative relation to the rhetorical trope of accommodation and the Pindaric economies of differentiation and integration. Where Sutherland makes the relation between harm and consumption disgracefully exposed, Brady seeks to comprehend how we manage to integrate suffering into western minds and culture.108 To do this the logic of her metaphors remains tirelessly acute; there is always some force of truth to the exchange. In her work on funerary elegies Brady considers the elegists’ use of sexual and monetary imagery to “articulate their debts, independence and aggression, and to negotiate unequal power relations.”109 Brady links “critical elegy” to “Pindar’s epinikia, which sought to reintegrate the individual hero’s virtuous excellence into the oikos, aristocracy and polis from which he should derive his power.”110 The Pindaric is involved in constituting its community, the model for which is the contest, the agõn. Agõn, the root meaning of which is “gathering,” describes the social system as the exchange of contested and unequal forces. The pindaric concerns itself with the integration of glory (kleos) back into the oikos, described variously as “a kind of trade”111 or a “traffic in praise.”112 The victory being celebrated is for Pindar a debt, and the encomium or praise is a restitution of that imbalance; should it become excessive it will draw the envy of the community, therefore in the Pindaric ode’s oscillation between strophe, antistrophe and epode, the debt and encomium are economically balanced.113 The gift of The influence of Pindar on Sutherland is also extensive, particularly in his long‐ term experimentation with ode structures. For example, “Ode to Squid” (Neutrality) is a mutant ode form in which strophe, antistrophe and epode are churned together. 109 Andrea Brady, English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century: Laws in Mourning (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) 170. 110 Brady, English Funerary Elegy, 170‐1. 111 Brady, English Funerary Elegy, 171. 112 Leslie Kurke, The Traffic in Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). 113 See William Fitzgerald, Agonistic Poetry: The Pindaric Mode in Pindar, Horace, Hölderlin, and the English Ode (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980) 11. 108
[317]
the Pindaric commemorating victory is designed to “facilitate the aristocracy’s reintegration into public life,” that is, to maintain a hierarchical social structure.114 The Pindaric epinikion reintegrates the commodity of glory via a variety of exchanges across different economic matrices and to a variety of different audiences, from small symposia to large city festivals.115 The poet is therefore in a difficult and complicit role, able to comment to some extent subversively on social relations from a position of some authority outside the common social structure, but also primarily employed to conserve social and economic privilege.116 The charge, therefore, that the metaphors and metonyms of Brady’s poetry “could work artificially to homogenize heterogeneous social transactions” is partly accurate since her work outlines the dominant rhetorical codes by which unequal exchange (of which suffering is evidence) is accepted. By making it “artificial” prosodically and in the contest between different subjects the absurdity of unequal exchange is also of course expressed (providing moments closer to the work of Sutherland) but this truth is frequently a pact between the poet and the reader, a shared knowledge deliberately not afforded to the people in her poems. This absurdity can express itself as incredulity at the persistence of social proportion barricaded against the suffering being represented. Again to differentiate, this may help explain why Brady’s work confronts itself with the task to be right, which extends of course to the registering of its own complicity. Sutherland’s critical imagination, however, courts the spur of wrongness and offers a Brechtian alienation For a historicist account of the movement of the Pindaric into the English ode see Stella P. Revard, Pindar and the Renaissance Hymn‐Ode: 1450‐1700 (Temple, Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2001). 114 Brady, English Funerary Elegy, 171. 115 See Kurke, The Traffic in Praise, 1. 116 It is intriguing that Sutherland’s poetry is bathetic, where the history of bathos is aligned to the relativity of value. If Brady’s poetry takes the Pindaric praise poem as inspiration then it is not insignificant that Pindar struggled with the encroaching transference from a barter economy to a coin economy.
[318]
effect of livid bad taste. Much of this difference is manifested in Brady’s persistent use of the discourses of homeliness, work‐ life, everyday minor details, strategically the banal compared to Sutherland’s preposterousness. Briefly stated some of the qualities of Pindar’s poetry shared by Brady (and to a greater or lesser extent useful categories to apply to late‐modernist poetry more generally) are as follows. Pindar frequently skips steps in the grammatical or argumentative movement between ideas, leaping from idea to idea such that his poems contain large shadow forms in the connections we must re‐supply.117 The “concealed transitions” and “sanctioned obscurity” make great demands on the critical faculties of the audience.118 Pindar makes extensive use of litotes (negative illustration), and of parataxis.119 The relationship between metrical and syntactical structures is not coterminous.120 And significantly the Pindaric is exemplary of occasional poetry, best related to Brady’s “Seasonals 9b‐0z,” one of which is “Post Festen e.” 121 “Post Festen e” weaves (the term used for discussing Pindar is poikilia) two subjects, the festival of thanksgiving and capital punishment.122 The aggrandisement of conspicuous consumption expressed in the ritual of thanksgiving is set against the victim of a state execution. Rather than integrate the triumphs of an Olympian back into the oikos and polis, the poem integrates the status of prisoners into society via the federal economy and the local job market. The state execution, the
See Frank J. Nisetich, Pindar’s Victory Songs: Translation, Introduction, Prefaces (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980) 22‐26. 118 John T. Hamilton, Soliciting Darkness: Pindar, Obscurity, and the Classical Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003) 173 and quoting Fry, also 173. 119 Nisetich, Pindar’s Victory Songs, 45‐6. 120 See Nisetich, Pindar’s Victory Songs, 31‐40. 121 Brady, “Post Festen e,” Vacation of a Lifetime, 91‐130. 122 For poikilia see Hamilton. Soliciting Darkness, 81. On Thanksgiving see Melanie Wallendorf and Eric J. Arnould, “‘We Gather Together’: Consumption Rituals of Thanksgiving Day,” The Journal of Consumer Research 18.1 (June 1991): 13‐31. 117
[319]
“skull, become a conductor / of American power,” is joined to the “pioneer” dreams of manifest destiny with a logic that makes the executed a sacrifice. […] As you know Americans love a good barbecue. That’s our idea of community, eating our kills.123
The consumption of this sacrifice registers the ways that are found to justify killing for the sake of the society that can sustain such consumption. And this consumption is largely of the people and the produce of elsewhere: “The Asian Economic Miracle,” the “black[s],” “Africans,” “Mexicans, Taiwanese and other immigrants.” Consumption itself is the integration into society of unequal exchange, and its forgetting. The poem’s resistance is to document this restitution. A modern equivalent of the rationale of the Pindaric ode might be Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of a variety of economic “fields,” not simply financial but also “cultural capital” such as skills, knowledge, qualifications, and “symbolic capital” such as prestige. He writes that there is “perfect interconvertibility of economic capital (in the narrow sense) and symbolic capital”124 and the implacable logic of this convertibility is a key target for Brady’s poetry. An extended idea of the household is a particularly significant point of juncture for these different economies, as the location for the inculcation of habits in childhood, and as a site of ideological pressure. “House” (the Greek oikos and its synonyms) is at once house and household, building and family, land and chattels, slaves and domestic animals, hearth and ancestral grave: a psycho‐ physical community of the living and the dead and the unborn.125 Brady, “Post Festen e,” 97. Quoted by Kurke, Traffic in Praise, 93. 125 Kurke, Traffic in Praise quoting John Jones, 8‐9. 123 124
[320]
Furthermore “dispositions” become “ingrained in the body in such a way that they endure through the life history of the individual, operating in a way that is pre‐conscious and hence not readily amenable to conscious reflection and modification.”126 Earlier I made reference to the hermeneutic idea of coming to an “accommodation” with a text, and the text’s similarity to the body, “not a congeries of limbs.” I want to reiterate that conception now that we have definitions of the house (oikos), as porous site that integrates and redirects different economies. Brady’s poetry refuses the coherence of the text as body and home to make apparent how we do “suffer…estrangement” by exchanges of inequality in the rhetoric of familiarity, home and proportionality.127 Banalization is for Brady but one of the ideological strategies for forms of forgetting and blindness to the suffering of unequal exchange. To finish I offer a short reading of the brilliant “Saw Fit.” In “Saw Fit” Brady witnesses the old tropes the virgin and the whore as identifications by which footage of torture is reintegrated seamlessly into the American and British psyches.128 Rather than a poem reintegrating glory into the household we are presented with the strategies by which blame suspends and deflates social culpability, and thereby change. The case of Lynndie England is set against that of Jessica Lynch: her “lewd face in the Lynch mirror.” Lynch is the sentimentalized victim, theatrically saved from stage‐managed harm (and someone who was outspoken about those lies). England is portrayed with reifying moral damnation. Both tactics excuse our witnessing, one into the “spring of your John B. Thompson, “Introduction,” Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. and introduced John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992) 13. 127 Quote from Quintilian, footnote 23. 128 For a reading of “Saw Fit” and the “auto‐cancelling lyric” (107) see John Wilkinson, “Off the Grid: Lyric and Politics in Andrea Brady’s Embrace,” Chicago Review 53.1 (2007): 95‐115. For a powerful reading of “Saw Fit” visit Mesh Works, as above. 126
[321]
pity,”129 the other into what Prynne calls “climax outbursts of sanctimony.”130 “Saw Fit” marvels at the economy of exchange by which the perception of events is manipulated to maintain the status quo. Sympathy and the moral high ground pay each other’s debts: “crying to dream again.” In the case of England the rhetoric of homeliness is used to inspire affective responses in the public by which torture, in truth an institutionalised policy, is felt to be exceptional and inexplicable: “loving parents the long fall afternoons shoot / turkey and squirrels, she declined to shoot deer””; “Terrie / believes her daughter was at heart Thinking in the dirt.” The mundane and the scandalous are both used tactically to restrict critical thinking. The torture scenes of Abu Ghraib are consumed by shock and urgency, deflationary procedures of media attention by which the torture that is routinely and institutionally ordered is transformed into a singular aberrance. Lynndie England becomes the symbolic patsy for state sanctioned violence, the “whip‐ / kitten who let us watch.” Brady conflates the hooded figures tortured into a human pyramid with the “collapsed pyramid / of accountability.” By doing so the poem makes explicit the real culpability the political elite have for the events taking place in Abu Ghraib, and by exposing the contest which veils responsibility resists it. The final analogy elides the identities of the victims of torture and the political elite in the loaded contest of unequal exchange: […] She cannot say “I am a survivor” oop oop she’ll make her money back get more out of the birth above her, men, hooded leave no paper trail through the wreckage 131
Brady, “Saw Fit,” Embrace, 56. Prynne, “A Quick Riposte to Handke’s Dictum about War and Language,” 25. 131 Brady, “Saw Fit,” 57. 129 130
[322]
Jennifer Cooke
The Laughter of Narcissism: Loving Hot White Andy and the Troubling Chain of Equivalence So, if I dream I have you, I have you, For, all our joys are but fantasicall. And so I scape the pain, for pain is true; And sleepe which locks up sense, doth lock out all. (John Donne, “Elegie X: The Dreame”)
The writer of sparse short stories, Raymond Carver, once blandly opined that “every poem is a love poem.”1 I prefer the search‐response Google threw back at me: “Did you mean: ‘every poet is a love poem’?” With this skewed piece of serendipity, Google proffers a more appropriately disjunctive entry into Keston Sutherland’s incredible, rambunctious and strangely moving love poem, “Hot White Andy,” which I want to listen to here in order to explore some of the conjunctions between love objects, narcissism, poetry and laughter. In particular, love is my focus because I believe that this poem’s stances towards love, its invocation and sporting play with the tradition of the love poem and the lyrical first person, intentionally reveal the narcissistic elements these forms 1 Raymond Carver quoted in Larry MacCaffery and Sinda Gregory, Interviews With American Authors of the 1980s (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1987) 72.
[323]
conceal behind a personal address to a lover. If love for an other necessarily incorporates an element of self‐love, as Freud fleetingly formulates, then the love poem may be a privileged form of narcissistic expression. As I will elaborate, such a proposition is complicated in a poem as self‐conscious as “Andy” by the role and risk of its parodic position‐taking. The significance of love as a category of experience is picked out by Robin Purves and Sam Ladkin in their introduction to the volume of the Chicago Review which carries Sutherland’s poem. They isolate love, alongside life, as “the concepts most inassimilable to the system.”2 Poetry which seeks to critique such conditions, through showing the poverty of experience they entail, involves a reflection of the ways in which “love” and “life” have been damaged or even lost. These categories become, as Purves and Ladkin note, “unrepresentable” and “incapable of being idealized in poetic language.”3 Used as just words, love and life “underline their unnameable aspects.”4 Arguably, writing such as Sutherland’s thus preserves these categories of experience by preventing them from being “easy” to access, read or, in that regrettably prevalent pseudo‐ sentiment, “relate to.” This is a political and ethical move. In much of the poetry of Sutherland and other writers with a similar commitment, love and life come to represent the unmediated experience we long for with an idealism aware of its own fallacious self‐deceptions: they are, at one and the same time, reified categories, potentially out of reach, idealised and preserved, as well as being intertwined with the litter and clutter of our everyday muddiness, our own equivocal “realities” embedded within our own socio‐politico‐economic circumstances. “Andy” wildly and deliberately veers between these two vocabularies, often in the same breath.
2 Sam Ladkin and Robin Purves, “An Introduction,” Chicago Review 53:1 (2007): 13. 3 Ladkin and Purves, “An Introduction,” 13. 4 Ladkin and Purves, “An Introduction,” 13.
[324]
It is possible to propose a theory of love as the necessary promise we should all cling to which continually runs the risk of not escaping assimilation to categories of need and desire shaped by systems alien to love, aligned to profit. One route towards understanding Sutherland’s previous and highly complex poetry might be as an articulation of this risk, expressed and compounded by the corrosive registers which inevitably cross over with it. In the past, Sutherland’s poems have quite often finished on a note which suggests that love remains, almost as though it is an antidote or a balm to the violences the poem has enacted up until that point; a sort of faux‐happy ending. John Wilkinson gently admonishes Sutherland for underestimating the power of lyric to harness and elevate love’s sentiment. In Sutherland’s previous book, Neocosis, the last poem, “The Food at Alcove One,” invokes love in its final lines, albeit problematically, disjunctively, and in partnership with a flame‐grilled liver.5 Wilkinson warns that here “the lyric surge operates at a level that can overwhelm or obliterate any counterflows at the semantic level.”6 In this reading, the turning towards love at the end of the poem, and the use of lyric to express this, means that love is the only feeling to survive, despite the bruises the whole of Neocosis has inflicted upon it as the book unfurls its violence and energy. Matt Ffytche offers a slightly different reading of the same ending, more sympathetic to the liver, which interprets the poem’s love as compromised by its own narcissism: instead of redemption there is “a terminal closure.”7 I suspect that both Wilkinson and Ffytche may be right: the two ways of reading that the ending wishes us to slip between have been somewhat polarised by its commentators. Ffytche’s identification of narcissism, the eye which he reads as looking “lovingly at
5 Keston Sutherland, Neocosis (London: Barque Press, 2005) 24. 6 John Wilkinson, “Off the Grid: Lyric and Politics in Andrea Brady’s Embrace,” Chicago Review 53:1 (2007): 109. 7 Matt Ffytche, “Roger and Me,” Chicago Review 53:1 (2007): 154‐5.
[325]
itself,”8 highlights how the love in Neocosis and the love in “Andy” differ: in “Andy” there are many objects of love, in Neocosis there is more sex and need than love and even when love is invoked, it tends to be done abstractly, as an idea or (im)possibility but not, like in “Andy,” as an exquisite and effervescent torture of the self. In “Andy,” life and love collide; the lover might be deserted but he is not, as at the end of Neocosis, desolate. “Andy” opens with a spluttering of language, a syntactic challenge to the reader wishing to hear his own voice, who is energetically forced through verbal atrocities and confusions at high speed.9 Clarity comes with intimacy, and it slows the pace: I keep dreaming about you every single night last night I you making love Stan, I didn’t know him then it hurts, and I disappear but the nights stick.10
While the “I” might disappear from the dream, the dream does not disappear from the poem; nor does the “I” or the “you,” what “Andy” will later scathingly refer to as “all that fashionable / legless jackbooting of the abstract second person.”11 The poem cultivates its disjunctions and its violence, as though it cannot contemplate or condone the pleasures of expressing an undisturbed intimacy or love. On the one hand, the problem is formal and extrinsic to the progression of “Andy” itself: how to express love anew when it has been done before so many times, by so many poets, in a tradition which in itself is not clear of conscience and unproblematic? The question is further tormented, and more specifically marked in Sutherland’s poetry, by the way our languages of love have been co‐opted by advertising, Clinton Card schmaltz and the 8 Ffytche, “Roger and Me,” 154. 9 “His” voice, here, is strategic; as we shall see, the poem genders its reader male, at the clearest point in the final few lines, through the usage and inevitable slippage of the lyrical “I.” 10 Keston Sutherland, “Hot White Andy,” Chicago Review 53:1 (2007): 75. 11 Sutherland, “Hot White Andy,” 84.
[326]
vapid superficialities of kitsch and romcoms. There is, with these backdrops, little direct expression of love left to us which is not tainted either by mere imitative nostalgia or the intrusion of the fiscal realm impersonating happiness, usually coded through wedding bells and baby showers. If a poet is still committed, as Sutherland is in “Andy,” to expressing the intimacies of love then this occurs by means of contrast and violence, quotation, surprise and self‐irony: WANT HOT ANDY CHENG? Want the enormous tragedy of the dream? Last night I of you very hard and real I have put my fingers on you and your fa ce if you were here Russ Cheng I mocking the crap Peisistratidai at reflector Ningbo, into dead right crunch up your debit virtù Baode, we present a fist with the power of law. Poetic sound bites down hard into the fire blanket.12
Ezra Pound is put to personal work: the dream of enormous tragedy resting on his peasant’s shoulders is reconfigured to allude to the dream of intimacy around which “Andy” pivots. Yet the poetic clarity of Pound’s voice gains even more pathos in the drop from what looks like internet spam, shouting about Andy, to the half‐articulated, stuttering recollections of personal dream or memory. Here is, indeed, tragedy; a tragedy of desire and longing that is in the process of continually displacing itself: from the pornographic invitation to the despair of an unfinished or torn, lyric moment, punctured by an amusingly adolescent, yet almost de Sadean, stutter and slippage between fanny and face. Is this the dream? “I…of you” suggests so through the elision which echoes of “dream”; but equally this could be a “real” memory instead of one of those 12 Sutherland, “Hot White Andy,” 76.
[327]
dreams retrospectively described as feeling “real.” The status of reality, of the contagion between dreams and reality, between memories of dreams and memories of the real, is flagged as problematic; not in the more typical use of this trope which is either to produce a visionary dream, à la Shelley or Dante, or to point up, with Descartes, that our dreams can feel as real as reality. Instead, the poem notes the prosaic potential of dreams to haunt us, to deliver realities back up to us which do not comfortably dissolve upon waking. This is not a poetic conceit for which the dream is merely a conduit; it is a performance of what Freud observes in his dream book: dreams can use the superficial and the everyday to commit themselves to the psychically disturbing and deeply felt. At the same time, in “Hot White Andy” this dream is literary, belonging firstly to Pound’s Cantos, then to Sutherland’s poem. As quickly as “Andy” takes us into the intimacy of a private relationship, it zooms out again, repositioning its language and its versification, mocking and redistributing the mass production of reflective arm bands produced by a Chinese export‐import firm or adopting the warlike rhetoric of Iraqi insurgents claiming to be seeking peace. The poem simulates something of the embarrassment intimacy can cause, especially publicly expressed intimacy: the spunky, combative and virtuosic syntax follows on directly from the personal window into pain, like a man who has to jump out of bed immediately after sex and start doing things.13 This change in speed and poetic form becomes a pattern throughout “Andy”: moments of intimacy or what appear to be personal feeling, indicated by their lyric configuration, often follow or are chased up by a burst of complex, highly technical, forceful yet often exuberant
13 The window is a repeated image in the lyrical sections. The first begins: “In an empty window love dead / to the frame recapitulates its stare,’ giving us the strange ambiguity of a love which either stares again, dead, at the frame or a love which is unaware of the frame. Whichever way, we are given a self reflection of love, for this is “in” not through the window. Sutherland, “Hot White Andy,” 77.
[328]
language. Surrounded as they are in this way, the lyrical sections appear ravished and under threat; as though they are all that survives of something longer and more explicit, an expression less opaque, that existed before the poem began cannibalising itself and the poetic tradition. Who and where is the addressee of this love poem? In the last of the lyric sections, we read “I go on without you,”14 while the first of these begins “In an empty window love dead.”15 As revealed by Sutherland himself, introducing the poem at a reading at Notre Dame University in the USA,16 “Andy” is a love poem to two people, one known, whose absence clearly saturates the lyrical sections, and appears intermittently everywhere else as “she” or “you”; the other, reportedly a random internet find, one Andrew Cheng of Wuhan, China, CEO of a tungsten company, and the Andy, of course, of the title. There are a plethora of characters in this poem, from the “real life” Lenny Henry, slowly bleaching himself white, to Stan, a dream‐figure, but apart from the “I” of the poem the main recurring characters are named “Cheng,” sometimes alone, sometimes with a first name attached, such as “Andrew” or “Russ.” The distinctions are not always clear and there is a disturbing tendency throughout for people to bleed into other people. For instance, a beautiful woman, described euphorically as “light itself,”17 is identified not as the Russ of the intimate lyrical section quoted above, but as Andrew Cheng. Identities are not stable and, uncannily, the figure of the poet, the “I” of the poem, has a tendency to merge with and take over different characters: Akinsola Akinfemiwa becomes Kebton Akinfemiwa; Cheng, at a poetry reading, becomes Keston Sutherland, author of “Hot White Andy,” as the poem mischievously describes its
14 Sutherland, “Hot White Andy,” 86. 15 Sutherland, “Hot White Andy,” 77 16 A video of the reading given at Miami University, USA, complete with Sutherland’s introductory comments is available online at http://www.orgs.muohio.edu/meshworks/archive/miami/new‐british‐poets/ 17 Sutherland, “Hot White Andy,” 78.
[329]
own contents in self‐deprecating tones. This “hot white Cheng‐ scenester” grabs the microphone and begins: …his performance poetry, some kitsch Ovidian thing Raytheon and Erinys, bathotelescopic beyond belief, literally, then some thinky retro poetical work in progress full of you soften and you harden, all that fashionable legless jackbooting of the abstract second person, inevitable prosodic botox as points de capiton, ● inevitable hackneyed sex negativity ● inevitable recusant lyrical I18
The bullet points continue but the point has been made: not only the poet but the poem will perform itself, read itself, analyse itself and disparage itself in an ironic display of self‐ critical dexterity. In other words, “Andy” pre‐empts at least one camp of potential detractors by parodying their objections. There is an indifference to the specificity of character, object or personality in all these substitutions, a reduction to equivalence which the poem is aware of performing. In the first few lines we are instructed in how this works: Lavrov and the Stock Wizard levitate over to the blackened dogmatic catwalk and you eat them. Now swap buy for eat, then fuck for buy, then ruminate for fuck19
Eating, buying, fucking, thinking: all are equal substitutes in an economy of consumption. The speed at which these substitutions accumulate expresses an exhilaration induced by the act of substitution itself, with no regard for motivation or sense. This is what the poem will shortly refer to as “the long arabesque of equivalence.”20 What is disturbing is not that tungsten can be converted into electrodes or that stocks and shares as monitored by the internet Stock Wizard can be 18 Sutherland, “Hot White Andy,” 84. 19 Sutherland, “Hot White Andy,” 75 20 Sutherland, “Hot White Andy,” 75.
[330]
converted to profit and cash: these are the realities of equivalence in an economy of exchange and profit. It is when people are treated in the same way that the “equivalence hypodermic” injects distress.21 The poem performs this process of conversion or substitution upon its cast: things or even countries (“CHINA”)22 can be exchanged in the place of love or desire; “Akinsola” can be swapped for “Kebton,” “Russ” for “Andrew,” “Andy Cheng” for “Aaron Zhong,” and so on. It is as though there is an indifference to the objects of love, rendering them infinitely substitutable. As we shall see, these acts of substitution are a feature of sublimation and of humour, which are both attempts to divert energy and attention away from the love object represented by the other. The “kitsch Ovidian thing” that “Andy” describes itself as performing, is not, I would like to suggest, the love affair between an arms dealer and a private security firm which the poem kittenishly offers us, but Ovid’s tragi‐comic tale of the beautiful boy Narcissus. The question of narcissism, the love we may direct toward ourselves even if in a relationship with another, is introduced by the multiple positions of the poet and the “I” in the poem: every street and alleyway “Hot White Andy” takes us down seems to have the poet‐figure, the lyrical I, the Kebton or Cheng‐scenester at the end of it. But it is not quite here that I see a similarity; this splatter‐act of narcissism is too obvious and thus obviously courted by the poem. We are supposed to think to ourselves, “how narcissistic.” Instead, the trail is laid by what the poem performs: an idealisation of love and of woman which appears to be sustained by its necessary absence, just as the only one that Narcissus can love fully and most truly is the one whom he cannot touch and cannot possess, who is only available to him as a reflection of himself. The poem marks its idealisation by responding implicitly to Wilkinson’s accusation mentioned earlier: it harnesses the lyric, inflates its love inflections with a mounting, building, 21 Sutherland, “Hot White Andy,” 80. 22 Sutherland, “Hot White Andy,” 86.
[331]
overblown helium rush, then bursts the result with an asinine but beautifully balanced one‐liner. This all occurs when the “I” sees a “she,” described as “a woman in light”: and he turned to me, Akinsola Akinfemiwa, and said the woman you see in light is light itself— the light of the world, its copula and armrest, she is the fulguration, the axis about whom endless birth of heart revolves in magic fire and in fury you must make her love you. She is Andrew Cheng, imperator of the sled, backstreet lumen naturalis, acting CEO for the true‐way arc of priapic boredom, you must be the voice she falls in love to categorically. But Akinfemiwa is a fucking idiot.23
Akinfemiwa’s imperatives, “you must make her love you” and “you must be the voice she falls in love to” are narcissistic formulations insofar as they presuppose that the poet is the one who has the power, Siren‐like, to attract: love travels in one direction, from woman to (male) poet. At this point, the poet is placed in the position of Freud’s classically narcissistic female: she herself cannot love; instead, she loves being loved.24 But these are Akinfemiwa’s words and he is dismissed in a rhythmic and sonorous insult. Yet, he does not disappear: a few lines on and the poet asks, “but was I perhaps wrong to be maddened by Akinfemiwa? / And how would I know? From the dream?”25 Later, as we have seen, this “fucking idiot” is conflated with Sutherland, and “Akinsola” becomes a badly pronounced or spam‐mashed “Kebton.” In the section above, however, lyric invocations of love accumulate hyperbolically but their power to be emotive even in their exaggerated state is 23 Sutherland, “Hot White Andy,” 78. 24 Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” On Metapsychology, Penguin Freud Library Vol. 11, trans and ed. James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1991) 82. Sutherland has written about Freud’s narcissism essay in “What’s The Ugliest Part of Your Market‐Researched Anaclitic Affect Repertoire?” available online at http://www.militantesthetix.co.uk/ice‐z/keston.htm 25 Sutherland, “Hot White Andy,” 78.
[332]
acknowledged by the hesitating questions which they provoke. On the one hand, Akinfemiwa’s words enact the traditional role of love poetry: they transform woman and love into transcendental categories but praise them in a way which, if unpicked, reveals the speaker and lover as narcissistic precisely through his articulation of loving protestations. The invocations, even in their ludicrous amplification, recall a naïve idealism which in itself is seductive enough to have nourished love poetry for many a century. On the other hand, this is a parody of precisely such anachronistic transcendentalising and idealism, an amusing articulation of loving eulogies deliberately employing what Fredric Jameson has called “speech in a dead language.”26 A beautifully encapsulated narcissism masquerading as loquacious love for the woman it effaces versus a parodic ventriloquising of the redundant tropes of traditional love poetry. If it were not for the honesty of the hesitation, the poem would be firmly aligning itself with the second of these. As it is, however, the self‐questioning following the easily kicked target, for there is no doubt that this is Akinfemiwa’s part here, allows for a space which, while not recuperating the language of love poetry, at least recognises the lunacy of ignoring or disavowing its power. It is at the moment of undecidability between these two positions, see‐sawed by the hesitation, that the route for a sustained thinking about narcissism is opened out. “Andy” and its “I” are carefully self‐reflexive on the issue of narcissism; in fact, the poem’s lyrical first person assiduously complies with Freud’s description of love in his 1914 essay, “On Narcissism: An Introduction.” For Freud: “Loving in itself, in so far as it involves longing and deprivation, lowers self‐regard.”27 As we have seen, “Andy” mercilessly parodies itself, staging a reading scene replete with excoriating (self)appraisal. Freud continues: “When libido is repressed, the erotic cathexis is felt 26 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991) 17. 27 Freud, “On Narcissism,” 94.
[333]
as a severe depletion of the ego, the satisfaction of love is impossible, and the re‐enrichment of the ego can be effected only by a withdrawal of libido from its objects.”28 Decoded from Freud’s quasi‐mechanical terminology, the ego’s energy, its libido, is withdrawn from external objects such as lovers and redirected internally, onto the ego itself. One way in which libido can be redirected that Freud notes in this essay is not through repression but through sublimation. The difference between the two is an area of psychoanalysis which remained under‐theorised by Freud himself. What is clear, however, is that sublimation is a form of activity, usually cultural, creative and artistic, where sexual energy is directed or diverted towards non‐sexual aims. This leaves the libido free to attach to different objects of interest, such as writing poetry, whereas in repression, the object‐relation is fixed. The theorist Leo Bersani has worked extensively on this area. In his reading of Freud’s rather confused statements in the narcissism paper, acts of sublimation are always narcissistic projects: “They are extensions of self‐love; more precisely, they are interests and activities that contain an expansive narcissism. Far from being a transcendence of self‐interest, sublimations are the elaborated forms of self‐enjoyment.”29 “Andy” qualifies as a piece of sublimation, a way, perhaps, of re‐vivifying an ego depleted by suffering from impossible love, a displacement of the energies of love into the energies of writing love poetry. Sublimation of a special kind, however, because love poetry, when addressed to a lover, has a sexual aim out of compliance with Freud’s or Bersani’s requirement that the activity which sublimated 28 Freud, “On Narcissism,” 94. 29 Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (London and Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1990) 43. See also Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). Bersani’s reading of Freud on sexuality proposes that the ego is constituted by a paradoxical desire for self‐shattering, a kind of auto‐eroticism insofar as pleasure with the other is sought for self‐excitement. Interestingly, Andy carries the lines ‘shatter / me shatter me screams,’ which seems to capture some of Bersani’s thinking. Sutherland, “Hot White Andy,” 87.
[334]
energy is directed towards be nonsexual. Love poetry is declarative, oratorical, rhetorical and essentially persuasive; as Akinfemiwa perceives, it attempts to be “the voice she falls in love to.” It wishes to sustain, stimulate or regain love. To follow this through, we must return to the paragraph we have been reading from “On Narcissism.” Freud writes: The return of the object‐libido to the ego and its transformation into narcissism represents, as it were, a happy love once more; and, on the other hand, it is also true that a real happy love corresponds to the primal condition in which object‐libido and ego‐libido cannot be distinguished.30
Freud is being slightly arch here, with his assertion that the individual who loves himself, who takes himself for his own love object, has achieved “a happy love once more.” Nevertheless, his next comment, which returns us to primary narcissism, is galvanising: what if the love poem, as form and as a form of narcissistically charged sublimation, were a place where object‐libido and ego‐libido might meet? Thus the self transformed into poetry, sublimated into verse, might be a way of taking others and oneself as love objects simultaneously, indistinguishably merging the loved object with self‐love within the poem itself. The love poem, “For Us,” as the dedication of “Andy” intimates, solders self and other. This would account for the shifting identities in “Andy.” Albeit temporarily, the love poem might offer an experience of ‘real happy love.’ Sublimation, as Bersani has elaborated, is narcissistic; love poetry would not so much be a special exception to narcissism as its most ultimate form. It would be the only place where “Andy”‘s mournful desire could be satisfied: …disjunctive part lives will then cancel the asymmetry of self‐inclusion,
30 Freud, “On Narcissism,” 94‐95.
[335]
each of them will have the whole of love in it.31
The whole of love, if we follow Bersani and Freud, unavoidably incorporates “self‐inclusion” as well as the other. This is all very serious, of course. “Andy,” however, while serious, is also extremely funny. Humour and love are repeatedly brought into close proximity in the poem through pain, a grouping that Freud would have instantly recognised: in “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious” (1905) humour is inextricably linked to pain and “distressing affects.”32 As always with Freud, this is a matter of the economies of energy, a conversion, a substitution or transfer which, as we have seen, is one of “Andy”‘s overactive leitmotifs: Now humour is a means of obtaining pleasure in spite of the distressing affects that interfere with it; it acts as a substitute for the generation of these affects, it puts itself in their place. The conditions for its appearance are given if there is a situation in which, according to our usual habits, we should be tempted to release a distressing affect and if motives then operate upon us which suppress that affect in statu nascendi.33
Insert or substitute: impossible love or missing lover for “distressing affects” and writing poetry for “our usual habits.” Writing of love in such circumstances could indeed be supposed to “release a distressing affect,” which could, in turn, be offset by humour. What, then, of sublimation, and of the “real happy love” posited by “On Narcissism”? The two are not incompatible. Within the poem is properly the only place where “real happy love” could be performed, through a conjugation and a slippery merging of self and other(s) as love objects. Yet this does not exclude the possibility that the material 31 Sutherland, “Hot White Andy,” 76. 32 Sigmund Freud, “Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. VIII, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 1960) 233. 33 Freud, “Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious,” 228.
[336]
motivation for the writing of the poem, the “reality” as opposed to the literary dream, could be strewn with the debris of a painful love experience and that the writing of this is, in itself, a difficult act, requiring the relief and diversion that humour brings. Humour, in this respect, would be a way of diverting attention away from the intimacies of the self. This humour would not necessarily derive exclusively from the love objects in the poem, nor from the lover’s predicaments. That would be a wilful and myopic misreading. In large part the humour is caused by absurdity and a deliberate type of stupidity34: the poem, for example, includes a play where a touchingly confused Vyshinsky ruminates upon the nature of “home security.” The echo of homeland security is consciously courted but translated into domesticity: Vyshinsky is worried about locking his home when he has neither home nor lock. The levels of humour are multiple, helped along in this little play by a prose closely mimicking Beckett as well as the “logic” of certain types of philosophical manoeuvres and caveats: “Homes then not being capable of being had were if anything still less capable of being locked, which in any case was an absurdity which was in no case so gross an absurdity as in the case of homes.”35 The monologue is, indeed, absurdly serious: scholars who were so inclined would be able to detect a penetrating critique of contemporary fears and their relationship to private property. To do that seriously, however, would be to sheer the poem of its affect, to strip it of the humour and disable what Freud calls, almost euphemistically and certainly fortuitously, the ‘discharge’ of translating unpleasure into pleasure.36 The poem’s linguistic excesses and exaggerations, part of its deliberate pushing at the boundaries of poetic conventions, are another source of humour: 34 Sutherland has presented work, in both the USA and the UK, on stupidity as a contemporary poetic practice. 35 Sutherland, “Hot White Andy,” 82. 36 Freud, “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious,” 233.
[337]
an army without culture is a fucking dull‐witted army correction an army without culture is fucking a dull‐witted army rose‐tint auroral fistfuck light points your face at the news.37
Here the reader is presented with the simple delight to be derived from the displacement of one sole word to generate a whole new meaning, topped off with the authoritarian language of efficient readjustment which sidesteps an admission of error, encapsulated in that little word “correction.” Its humorous way of evoking what happened in Iraq, including a shadowy reference to the violent, sexually explicit torture of Abu Ghraib which stapled us to our news‐ screens, is supposed to make us uncomfortable in our laughter. As the examples discussed here demonstrate, the poem’s humour strategies are myriad; the pains they “détourn” (one of the poem’s own words) are political and social as well as interpersonal. However, these concerns and the use of parody, the poem’s finest trait, are finally dominated by the personal. If “Andy” is about a lover and his love objects, then, as it says itself, “farce is the third term.”38 Parody is a constitutively ambiguous and risky form due to the necessity of performing what it is mocking. I have already touched upon this in relation to the parody of love eulogies in Akinfemiwa’s speech: his overblown phrases are indubitably comical, and part of this is generated by the fact that the specificity of the woman herself is erased by such clichéd and therefore generalised compliments. This woman does not speak; she is spoken about, and not just by Akinfemiwa. The lyrical sections too are capable of being read as the caricaturing of a traditional love form. Even the substitutability of the characters, one for another, or of the terms “eat,” “buy,” “fuck” that the poem begins with, are involved in the same question. They are open to a reading 37 Sutherland, “Hot White Andy,” 87. 38 Sutherland, “Hot White Andy,” 85.
[338]
which interprets this as a performance of the type of thinking that consumption entails, whereby one object replaces another in a chain stinking of equivalence and lacking respect for the uniqueness of people or their activities. To a certain extent, then, performing this unpleasant consequence of capitalist thinking entails replicating it. The poem fights the chain of equivalence by performing it in mockery. Yet, that fight, which does, I believe, critique how an environment of substitutability and exchange may infect our thinking of the personal, also has a corollary effect, which is to reify the individual. In this case, it is the individuality of the poet’s voice, which has proved itself more than capable of subsuming and ventriloquising the voices of others, of dominating the scene and of taking up and taking over many of the character positions in the poem. This would appear to be narcissism, and not just the performance of it, but it is a narcissism paradoxically constitutive for the critique it informs. Knowing the other, for Narcissus, is knowing the self; similarly, the other(s) of “Hot White Andy” all lead inexorably back to the earnest and very male voice which finally declares itself “a real man / accumulating men, desire and intensity until I die.”39 Sincere declaration or parody or both? The impossibility of deciding leaves the reader confronted with the power of the individual poetic voice. The individual self, however important a category for the poet who wishes to know himself, as in Wordsworth’s project, is a construct and one that has been extremely convenient to the dissemination of capitalist thinking and the behavioural inculcation that accompanies it. “Andy” gives us a penetrating performance of parody and the position‐taking of narcissism; it suggests that love and the form it is traditionally expressed in poetically may be a complex form of narcissism embroiled in a striving to express love for both self and other. In some respects, its dissolution of the individuality of the poet into other characters can be seen as a critique of conceptions of individuality which are politically
39 Sutherland, “Hot White Andy,” 87.
[339]
and theoretically popular, instead of a colonising of these different figures. However, the closing lines of “Hot White Andy” somewhat undermine this by restoring the powerful and traditional poetic authority of the male voice. The substitution of “woman” for “man” in these lines reveals the “naturalness” with which we perceive such a declaration from “a real man.” To proclaim myself “a real woman / accumulating women, desire and intensity until I die” not only invokes an execrable pop song but it underlines the narcissism that gathers desire to itself, that loves to be loved, more acutely than does the “I” gendered male. Narcissism, Freud thought, was always more typically female yet the questions the male “I” of “Andy”‘s ending raise demonstrate that we tend to understand certain forms of male narcissism as appropriate to masculinity. “Andy” is capable of teaching us about the narcissism involved in love, and therefore inevitably in relations between the genders. However, for the closing lines of “Hot White Andy” to avoid reinstating the sovereignty of the male voice, with all its historical privileges of expression; for these lines not to undercut the poem’s excitement and humour, its challenges and sheer exuberance, they have to be read, by this female reader at least, as a final, potentially risky and uncomfortable parody of masculine declarative authority.
[340]
Ian Patterson
Born Again, Born Better: Text Generation and Reading Strategies in Michael Kindellan and Reitha Pattison, Word is Born 1. Where does a poem come from and does it matter If you don’t know where words come from, it can be hard to know what the materials of a poem might be, or how meaningful terms like “content” or “form” are. I don’t mean their etymology, though all forms of philological investigation are helpful, I mean where the poet finds the words, and why they follow their order. Descriptive terms like critique, response, enactment, gesture, reference, quotation, elision, distortion, translation, and so on may designate some kind or degree of relation between poems and worlds or texts, but the processes of their incorporation into what confronts a reader tend to be invisible or, if not invisible, the status and purpose of their visibility is difficult to assess. Since the poet’s mind and its growths stopped being overtly bounded and framed by the poet’s autobiography, creating or finding or setting limits has become part of the writing process itself, rather than its precondition. It seems to be much easier for people to recognise something like this at work in painting and the visual arts than in poetry. [341]
Poetry is complicated by assumptions about its referring directly to the world and by normative demands for communicative clarity, familiar syntax, and conventionally comprehensible meanings. Abstract painting may still cause arguments, but its existence is not in question. Almost a hundred years since the birth of abstraction in painting, comparable work in poetry is endlessly disparaged by readers who can’t see the point of it. But as Frank O’Hara once said, it is intriguing, and it is to be found “in the minute particulars where decision is necessary.”1 These are the kinds of decisions that are constantly present in translation or other methods of reworking texts. How far, for example, is it necessary or pertinent, or even interesting, to reveal what you’re doing? A great deal of current or contemporary poetry uses programmes, devices, or strategies of some sort to generate their text, some function in ways comparable to rhyme schemes, some of which are more arcane or baroque. The extent to which a poem shows its workings depends on a range of decisions. Sometimes, by way of reminding a reader of the long tradition of poets reworking earlier poems, a reference is signalled directly, as in O’Hara’s “After Wyatt” or “An Airplane Whistle (After Heine).” The latter simply takes Heine’s famous opening line “Die Rose, die Lilie, die Taube, die Sonne” and translates it, retaining the central idea of the poem but giving it a new tone and a new setting and different development, escaping the insistent rhymes made more insistent by the Schumann setting; and it is transparent about its purpose and process. The word ‘after’ means different things to different writers at different times but always has something to do with indicating an undefined degree of fidelity and licence. Sometimes the reference may be present but obscured, as in John James’s Letters from Sarah,2 where the title transforms Tristan Tzara’s surname in a gesture that simultaneously points 1 Frank O’Hara, “Personism: A Manifesto,” The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, ed. Donald Allen (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971) 498‐9. 2 John James, Letters from Sarah (Cambridge: Street Editions, 1973).
[342]
to the text’s source, or in Word is Born3 where Bertran de Born’s name is decontextualised to create the space for multiple meanings. It is a compression that Raymond Roussel preferred to eschew, having limitless time, money and mental space at his disposal; he would have needed to bring in “whirred” and “bourn” and then construct a narrative bridge between the two sets of homophones, creating his echoic pairs in order to make that divergence, relying on ambiguity to be the motor of his fundamentally inertial works.4 Here the simple eye‐rhyme of “word” and “born” sets up an asymmetrical recursivity which unsettles one reading of the title’s statement, and prompts one to ask what it is that gives birth to the words in these poems. 2. Born: vita A prefatory note, “For Word,” intervening between the title page of Word is Born and the first page of the text, explains that the poems in this book are “translations from eight lyric poems by the Perigordian troubadour poet Bertrand de Born,” each done twice, once by each author. They are translations “from” de Born’s work rather than “of” it, it should be noted. Ownership displaced to the writers, the poems won from de Born like lands or castles. Readers are therefore alerted to the need to consider why, and to what end, de Born is being used. Bertran de Born is reckoned to be the author of forty‐seven poems.5 Hitherto he’s probably been best known to readers of poetry through Pound’s translations of his work and his comments in The Spirit of Romance, where he quotes the most famous historical account, from the useful literary Who’s Who
3 Michael Kindellan and Reitha Patterson, Word is Born (Cambridge: Arehouse, 2006). 4 See Raymond Roussel, Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres (Paris: JJ Pauvert, 1963) 11‐14. 5 On the canon of de Born’s poems, as for details of his life and works, see principally William D. Paden, Jr., Tilde Sankovitch, and Patricia H. Stäblein, The Poems of the Troubadour Bertran de Born (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1986) esp. 87‐94.
[343]
that is Dante’s Inferno. When Dante meets him, he’s a ghastly sight, which he is quick to explain: Perch’io parti’ cosi giunte persone partito porto il mio cerebro, lasso! dal suo principio ch’e in questo troncone. Cosi s’osserva in me lo contrapasso.
Dante emphasises one quality here, his divisiveness. In fact he could hardly present it more memorably than through the figure of the head severed from the body; but as well as that emblematic moral figure, he also (elsewhere) characterised de Born as simply the best poet writing about arms in the vernacular.6 War and politics is what he did, until he gave it up and became a monk. His poems are boastful, violent, witty, dismissive, justificatory, macho, aggressive, taut, and musical. His virtues are twelfth‐century Perigordian virtues, and his political allegiances led him to rebellion and to suffering consequent reprisals against him and his castle at Autafort. War, love, politics, and violence are the subject matter of his poems. Division is essential to music as well as to war, and it seems to be a watchword in Word is Born. Each pair of pages is divided between Pattison on the left and Kindellan on the right, and anyone who tries to read one against the other will find it hard to bring the divided readings together, even contrapuntally, despite the haunting echoes that sound across the gap between the pages. An aura of the Occitan world is sometimes visible in Pattison’s lines but less commonly so in Kindellan’s, which seem more aggressively bent on increasing the distance between his world and de Born’s. But division and war and their pleasures are salient matters still for both writers, pressing 6 De Vulgaria Eloquentia, Book II, 2, 9: “Circa que sola, si bene recolimus, illustres viros invenimus vulgariter poetasse, scilicet Bertramum de Bornio arma, Arnaldum Danielem amorem, Gerardum de Bornello rectitudinem; Cynum Pistoriensem amorem, amicum eius rectitudinem. Bertramus etenim ait.”
[344]
even, and so we might want to take the historical materials of de Born’s life as part of the matter referenced by the book’s title. What, it suggests, are we to make of the relation between Born and Word that results in such unembarrassed enthusiasm for fighting? What are we born into in the way of language? What can we avoid that it encodes? How contingent is it? How far can we rewrite the codes that run it? The poems may themselves be instances of this rewriting process. It’s a question of the qualities of attention in the relation between rewriting and translation. 3. Translation, terminable and interminable As translations, the poems have their processes. But there is not much evidence of mechanical reconstitution here, no Oulipian reconstruction according to a set formula or other related method of transformation, such as Andrew Crozier for instance uses in High Zero and then again in “High Zero Quadrature.”7 The processes here are closer to the ones he uses to convert the poems in Duets into “Loopy Dupes,” reworking each line into a semantically‐related one, so that “Punctual as returning something” appears as “Fed back to the dot.”8 The connections between “punctual” and ‘dot,” “returning” and “fed back” are fully visible: but their place within the line unit has changed, as has the grammatical structure. By using the original text as its basis, transformations of this sort are provided with a frame to work in, if nothing else. They can work implicitly as response or commentary, or ignore their source more or less completely.
7 Andrew Crozier, High Zero (Cambridge: Street Editions, 1978); collected in All Where Each Is (London; Berkeley: Agneau 2/ Allardyce, Barnett, 1985). For “High Zero Quadrature” see One 3, ed. David Chaloner (Spring, 1976): 21‐24. 8 Andrew Crozier, Duets (Guildford: Circle Press, 1976); collected in All Where Each Is, 203‐14; for “Loopy Dupes” see All Where Each Is, 259‐64. For a more detailed account of the procedures used in High Zero, see the interview with Andrew Duncan in Don’t Start Me Talking. Interviews with Contemporary Poets, ed. Tim Allen and Andrew Duncan (Cambridge: Salt, 2006) 111‐130.
[345]
Not being aleatory, this book then raises questions about translation, which get additionally emphasized by the doubling of the versions. At the same time, though, the poems are decidedly not translation in any subordinate sense: de Born’s poems are the pretext, not the dominant end product. It is a question, all the same, as to what exactly their status is, given that they are not disowned by Kindellan and Pattison—indeed that they’re rather emphatically present. Reading them, especially reading them with (or against) the source texts, I find myself wondering what processes give them their shape and coherence, and what sorts of things are translated in translations like these. Where words fit in, and where and when they get born adds another layer to thinking about what gets translated into words, and whether words exist in isolation. Look at the last poem in the book, variously titled “Le Bateleur” by Reitha Pattison and “Songs Eight” by Michael Kindellan. All Kindellan’s titles are numerical whereas Pattison’s are not but this is the only one of hers to depart from English. Hers is even a teasing title, as the word might suggest a kinship with “battle” and cognate martial terms, although it actually means conjuror or charlatan or juggler. But this means it can provide a bridge between the already established material and the first line of her version, “He was once the greatest conjuror” (Born wrote “Ges no me desconort,” and Kindellan translates (if that’s the word) as “Okay just get me | to the concert…”); it’s a reversal of the usual procedure, and a further indication that translation in this book is taking place in several quite different ways simultaneously in order to feed the finished texts. Let me begin to count the ways. First of all there is conventional translation. Often this is no more than a word or two: “Cataloigna” becomes “Catalan” in Pattison’s “Seven” (but is transformed to “cunnilingus” in Kindellan’s “Songs Seven” on the opposing page), but sometimes, as in the opening of “Method, Number One,” the translation reproduces quite a lot of the Occitan fairly exactly. Born’s “sirventes” begins like this: [346]
Un sirventes on motz non faill ai faich, c’anc no·m costet un aill. (I’ve made a sirventes where every word tells and it never even cost me a clove of garlic)
while Pattison’s begins: The unfailing words of foot soldiers never cost more than a garlic clove.
The “unfailing words” and most of the second line are simply transferred from Born’s linguistic register to ours, but the “sirventes” (a technical term for a kind of satirical poem) has become “foot soldiers” by some quite different sort of process. The second stanza starts with the line “Tot jorn contendi e·m baraill!” (All day I contend and fight) which becomes “Every day contentious and over a barrel,” where something of the proper meaning remains by chance in “contentious,” but where the original sense of the word “baraill” is trumped by its form. This second form of translation, based on literal or sound patterns, is seen more clearly in Kindellan’s version of the same line as “Totally in countenance with this Braille,” where no semantic relation is attempted at all. There is another process at work, too, which has to do with the way the new version recreates (or doesn’t) equivalence to (a version, or an ironised version, of) the moral stance of the source poem. As all de Born’s poems are (ostensibly) autobiographical, the pronouns, the names and the places have specific historical resonance, most of which get lost or replaced in these versions. One prominent feature of these versions, though, is their tonality. Both poets bring distinctive and recognisably personal modes to their texts, Kindellan inventive, extravagant in lexis and register, and nonchalantly alert to the rhythms of speech, Pattison syntactically smoother, curiously knowing and full of glimpses of a narrative. The seventh poem, for instance begins in these rather disparate ways: [347]
Bless me, if it wasn’t a voiceless sign in commas, carnally senescent. (Pattison) The Lord in common with blasphemers expedes their vouchsafe in the causes of some anaptyxis… (Kindellan)
The conceit of the original was to write about territorial war as if it was love. Pattison shifts figure and ground until her poem is dealing through its cocky unnamed persona with language and melody in verse. Kindellan, with his determination to “quit this Ritz cracker and go for the jugular” is similarly bent on dismissing the frothy or irrelevant but manages to create a surface which also raises questions about how voices get inhabited, which then enter into productive dialogue across the page with Pattison’s list of vocal mannerisms. It is a virtue of this book’s layout that the reader’s eye is encouraged to slip sideways and read across the parallel pages, creating a useful and attractive attention to surface and tone. It’s only when this process is detached from the less deviant readings we have to start off with that the proper ethical potential of these translations becomes visible. But at the same time, new questions appear about the original de Born texts. 4. Born free Let’s go back to the beginning, and the two treatments of de Born’s first poem, “Lo coms m’a mandat e mogut…,” a powerful and accomplished poem in seven stanzas of six eight‐ syllable lines and two two‐line envois, rhyming throughout on “ut” and “o.” (His rhyme schemes are gleefully performative: one of his later poems finishes with a couplet asking his messenger to tell “Rotgier et a totz mos parens | qe no·i trob plus ombra ni om ni esta,” that is, that he’s run out of rhyme words.) The poem is a good‐natured, hard‐edged sirventes which seems to have been commissioned to help encourage the barons to take the side of Count Raymond V of Toulouse in a local war. In Pattison’s version it becomes “An Air for my Luke [348]
of Hope,” retaining the idea of a commissioned song, keeping references to “the Catalans, the Aragons” and to the king and Tarascon, but subjecting their context to the randomising consequences of attending primarily to the shapes of words and improvising contexts for them. As a rule she tends to expand on the original, though here there are only 52 lines as against de Born’s 46. Kindellan’s version has 34 altogether, although most of them are longer, and it begins with two italicised (apparently extratextual) lines, which might be taken as a reading aid. The opening line, “The caravan has little use for maps,” can be taken as a statement of purpose, an intention to follow his nose and make a new way through the landscape of the poems. The lines that follow frequently bear scant connection to the originals: it’s true that the first line, “lo coms m’a mandat e mogut” is rendered in Kindellan’s second line as “Lo, how my mandate’s enamelling gluts…” but many of the lines that follow have only a passing reference to the original. Where there is some echo, it tends to be fanciful (the phrase “mind the entrails” seems to derive from the word “mentaugut” (celebrated or famous)) or else violently reconceived (as in “Culpability is assuaged with steel softly | rammed up the anus” for the end of de Born’s stanza 5). The lexicon is extensive and unpredictable, the syntax occasionally disjunct. What relation then does the whole poem bear to its source text, and to its counterpart on the facing page? There is a martial or feudal vocabulary— armaments, fortification, escutcheons, cut, blade, ambush, campaign, pavilion, seigneurs, garrisons and auxiliary barricades—some of which is historical, some of which might be resolutely or casually modern, like the sentence that makes up most of the last four lines. Some of these terms are reimported into the poem, as if into an imagined original. The tone is in some ways generally equivalent to de Born’s, and the quatrain structure echoes de Born’s sixaines. But the processes of text generation in between the fragments of sound association are pretty much opaque. Is it enough to say this?
[349]
Digging further is always an option, and anything unearthed may provide some intellectual entertainment. But the private or contingent associations or promptings that fill in the gaps between words or thoughts that spring from translation or transformation won’t usually turn up, so we have to track them through their distorted obverse in our own reading experiences, and then triangulate them with the source texts, creating new sets of associations and patterns shaped in turn by, and reflecting, the pressure points of the translations. So that our mental shapes and thinking processes, and our topographies and vectors of attention, adapt themselves both to the points of greatest intensity and the moments where spaces of clarity open through the text’s poetic thinking on to matters in the poems’ nexus of concerns. The most prominent of these seem—appropriately enough—to be to do with violence and language, and the fact that (as Kindellan puts it in one of his occasional and unforgettable pentametres) “Torts and fears are puns for joy of love.” The treachery of tropes, the ease with which music and melody become stupid, the pleasures and dangers of excess, and the pleasure in poetic company which may lie at the heart of the whole project (not excluding hitching an eyebrow at the “über agon” of Roadafar), all these issues structure and animate both sets of poems, in Kindellan’s even to the point of paralexical ghosting and travesty. In fact travesty might be another, better word for these poems than translation, especially given the place thinking about gender also has in the book. Reclaiming the term, like reclaiming the old musical sense of parody for respectful rewriting, is probably part of what I’m trying to do here. Word is Born makes it possible to reread de Born without irrelevant encrustation. What is here and now, like who is we or I, needs regular and attentive applications of that sort of freedom, which is profoundly opposed to an ethic that allows authority to be stultifyingly located in a confident account of the unchanging relations of language, justification and the world. Rereading de Born’s poetry through the optic of Reitha Pattison and Michael [350]
Kindellan provides an encouraging instance of it. I could of course have taken very many other texts, and other kinds of procedures, to make similar points. But there is a particular elegance and not‐necessarily‐anarchic energy about this book which I think is worth looking at.
[351]
Notes on Contributors Alizon Brunning is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Subject Leader for Creative Writing at the University of Central Lancashire. Her publications include essays on Ben Jonson and J.H. Prynne. Jennifer Cooke is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Loughborough. Her publications include “Dreaming Plague and Plaguing Dreams: The Teachings of Psychoanalysis” (Textual Practice) and a review of J.H. Prynne’s To Pollen which can be read at the website Intercapillary Space. She is currently working on a book about legacies of plague in literature, theory and film. Sara Crangle is a research fellow at Queens’ College, University of Cambridge. Her publications include a chapter entitled “Compton‐Burnett and Risibility” in British Fiction After Modernism: The Novel at Mid‐Century. Thomas Day is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Central Lancashire. He has published a number of essays and articles on modern poetry, and is currently writing a monograph on Geoffrey Hill. Craig Dworkin is the author of Reading the Illegible (Northwestern University Press) and editor of Architectures of Poetry (Rodopi) and Language to Cover a Page: The Early Writings of Vito Acconci (MIT Press). He curates two on‐line archives: [352]
Eclipse (english.utah.edu/eclipse) and The UbuWeb Anthology of Conceptual Writing (www.ubu.com/concept). He teaches at the University of Utah. Tom Jones teaches in the School of English, University of St Andrews. He is the author of Pope and Berkeley: The Language of Poetry and Philosophy (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), a pamphlet of poems, Transactions Grotesques (Cambridge: Barque, 2002), and translations of Akhmatova (London: Perdika, 2007). Sam Ladkin researches the poetry of Clark Coolidge at the University of Cambridge. With Robin Purves he co‐edited “the darkness surrounds us”: American Poetry. (Edinburgh Review 114), and British Poetry Issue (Chicago Review 53.1). He co‐curated the Cambridge Poetry Summit in 2004 and 2005, and runs a small press, Arehouse, with Neil Pattison. D.S. Marriott is the author of Incognegro (Salt, 2006), Haunted Life (Rutgers University Press, 2007) and On Black Men (Columbia University Press, 2000). He teaches at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Ian Patterson teaches English at Queens’ College, Cambridge. His most recent book is Guernica and Total War (Harvard University Press, 2007). He translated Proust’s Le temps retrouvé, for Penguin (Finding Time Again, 2003). A volume of his new and selected poems, Time to Get Here, was published by Salt in 2003. Malcolm Phillips has written essays on Roy Fisher, Frank O’Hara and W.S. Graham. His first book of poetry is Poems For My Double (Arehouse, 2005). He lives and works in London. J.H. Prynne works at the University of Cambridge. He has published twenty‐eight collections of poetry during the period 1968‐2007, all but one reprinted in the second enlarged edition [353]
of his Poems (Fremantle Arts Centre Press and Bloodaxe, 2005), as well as a few miscellaneous items such as extended commentary‐essays on the Han Chinese lyric, Willem de Kooning, Shakespeare and Wordsworth. He has collaborated on translations of his work into several foreign languages, including French and German and Chinese. Robin Purves is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Central Lancashire. With Sam Ladkin he co‐edited “the darkness surrounds us”: American Poetry (Edinburgh Review 114), and British Poetry Issue (Chicago Review 53:1) and he has published articles on contemporary poets such as J.H. Prynne, Denise Riley and Andrea Brady. Sophie Read read English at Queens’ College, Cambridge, and now teaches seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century literature at Christ’s. Her publications include “Lancelot Andrewes’s Sacramental Wordplay” (Cambridge Quarterly, 2007), and an essay on puns in Renaissance Figures of Speech (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Josh Robinson is a former call‐centre worker and a graduate student at the University of Cambridge. His research interests include Frankfurt School Critical theory, the phenomenology of aesthetic experience, and contemporary and experimental poetry. His first sequence of poems, Shift Report, was published by Arehouse in 2005. Bruce Stewart teaches at the University of Ulster. He is assistant editor of the Oxford Companion to Irish Literature (1996) and has written entries for the New Dictionary of National Biography (2006) and the Cambridge Companion to Irish Fiction (2007). He served as Secretary of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literature during 1996‐2002 and directed the Princess Grace Irish Library, 1997‐2006. [354]
Keston Sutherland is the editor of QUID and the co‐editor of Barque Press. He is a lecturer in English at the University of Sussex. His collections of poetry include Antifreeze (2002), The Rictus Flag (2003), Neutrality (2004) and Neocosis (2005). Articles include “Ethica Nullius” (on J.H. Prynne’s late poetry) in Avant‐ Post: The Avant‐Garde under “Post‐” Conditions (Litteraria Pragensia, 2006) and “Vagueness, Poetry” in Contemporary Poetics (Northwestern University Press, 2007). Stephen Thomson teaches English and American Literature at the University of Reading. His publications include essays on T.S. Eliot, Charles Olson and Apollinaire.
[355]