Etymologies, 1980—the Allegorical Moment
Some thirty years ago the art critic Craig Owens pronounced that “postmodernist art may in fact be identified by a single, coherent impulse” (1992, 58), and although this statement may now strike us as naive, many of Owens’s contemporaries more or less agreed with him. The alleged perpetrator of the new and disconcerting sensibility in the arts was the allegorical impulse, which for a time during the 1980s and 1990s took center stage in critical debates about postmodernism. Allegory, it turned out, was more than just an antiquated poetic trope, dismissed by Goethe and Coleridge and laid to rest by the romantic sentimental lyric and the modernist “machine made of words.” It had instead become the cutting tool of the cultural edge, its formal disjunctions and the semiotic arbitrariness at its core perfect analogues for the alienation and crises of late-capitalist culture. Fueled by the newly translated books of Walter Benjamin and the gasoline of DeManian deconstruction, everything from the commodity fetish to subjectivity itself, from the rhetorical modes of critical interpretation to the basic configuration of the linguistic sign, was declared allegorical—and hence hollow, contingent, and arbitrary. The sense of melancholy was palpable; the Modern Language Association has never fully recovered.
Indeed, 1980 was a banner year for the study of allegory in American art and literary criticism, and it marks roughly the midpoint of the period covered by this book, which examines the theory and practice of allegory in American poetry and poetic form between 1930 and the present. Both Owens’s essay “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism” and Joel Fineman’s essay “The Structure of Allegorical Desire” appeared that year in the spring issue (number 12) of the art critical journal October (which also ran an obituary for Roland Barthes). Along with several other important works, these two essays consolidated an interest in the study of allegory in American scholarship that had been building gradually since the early 1970s.1 The trope had received a certain amount of scholarly attention earlier—notably in Angus Fletcher’s encyclopedic Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (1964); Edwin Honig’s Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory (1966); and Paul de Man’s revolutionary essay “The Rhetoric of Temporality” (1969)—but the year 1972 marked the beginning of a renewed interest in all things allegorical. Robert Murray Davis’s introduction to a symposium on allegory in modern fiction in the December issue of the journal Genre that year is at once wryly apologetic and forward looking:
The usefulness of a symposium on allegory in the modern novel is clearly indicated by the very process of assembling material for it. Many scholars mentioned as possible contributors answered that they know nothing about the topic; one or two added with humility or its counterfeit that they were not intelligent enough to understand the subject, let alone write about it. Many others were not approached because their public views on allegory closely resemble those of Alice’s Pigeon towards serpents: alarm, despondency, and the strong implication that if the word and the thing do exist, they would not in a well-ordered universe.
(1972, iii)
Gayatri Spivak’s essay in the same journal, “Thoughts on the Principle of Allegory,” points out that contemporary American scholarship on the subject lagged behind its European counterpart:
Contemporary European criticism has witnessed the renovation of the term “allegory.” Walter Benjamin began it unwittingly in his now-famous monograph Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels [translated as The Origin of German Tragic Drama]. The new trend in Western European literary criticism gradually recognized allegory as an authentic voice of literary expression, regardless of historical period. The old trend—a discrediting of allegory associated with Goethe, Blake, Coleridge, Yeats—was reversed. The energy of that reversal impinges upon literary criticism in the United States at present. Pedagogy, however, still undertakes the nineteenth-century dismissal of allegory, while medievalist and Renaissance scholarship presents an historical enthusiasm for allegory that remains a specialists’ joy; and experts in contemporary literature exclaim over the resurgence of allegory in Kafka, Beckett, Borges, Barth without questioning its nature. Within this generally retrospective scene, some American critics, notably Paul de Man, Morton W. Bloomfield, Robert Scholes, share the energy of the renovation of “allegory” as a term of general critical theory.
(1972, 327)
American criticism in the early 1970s was indeed just beginning to be impinged on by a recent European “renovation” of allegory (although Benjamin’s Trauerspiel would have to wait until 1977 to appear in English). By 1972, as Davis puts it, “an increasing number of students of modern fiction and of allegory, most notably Edwin Honig and Angus Fletcher, would agree with Professor Spivak that, ‘Like “point of view,” “allegory” should be one of the global terms of the rhetoric of fiction’” (1972, iii). My study charts the “reversal” that Spivak describes, but it examines its Benjaminian energy for the rhetoric of poetry rather than of fiction. My project, to state it plainly, is to examine the allegorical impulse in American poetic form after World War II.
The presiding spirit of the new allegory studies represented by Fineman’s and Owens’s articles is Roman Jakobson (who died two years after these articles were published, in 1982), whose work became increasingly visible during the decade. The year 1980 also saw the publication in the small San Francisco Bay Area journal Hills of Barrett Watten’s essay “Russian Formalism” (reprinted in Watten 1985), which, although obscure at the time, signaled a growing interest in Russian and Prague school formalism and constructivism among members of the emerging American poetic avant-garde later known as the language poets. For Watten and other writers such as Ron Silliman and Lyn Hejinian, formalist and constructivist models became means for breaking away from what many poets felt at the time to be a generalized, restrictive, and unadventurous lyric mode that had gradually come to dominate in American poetry over the previous quarter-century. And although my study is by no means exclusively devoted to language poetry, it acknowledges the movement’s importance to developments in American poetry and poetics over the past thirty years.2 The upshot is that by 1980 Russian formalism, in particular Jakobson’s work, had become familiar to the American poetry public and important to working poets. Jakobson is a major figure in Watten’s 1985 collection of essays Total Syntax, and in The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (2003), Watten argues for the continuing relevance of formalist and constructivist practices in contemporary American poetry.3
But poetic models derived from Russian and Prague school linguistics were not the only literary exotica showing up on American shores at the time; the year 1981 saw the publication of Marjorie Perloff’s The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage. This book’s first chapter begins with four epigraphs, including the following by Barthes: “Modern poetry, that which stems not from Baudelaire but from Rimbaud . . . destroyed relationships in language and reduced discourse to words as static things. . . . In it, Nature becomes a fragmented space, made of objects solitary and terrible, because the links between them are only potential” (3). Hence, the onset of Perloff’s decades-long tracing of an “indeterminate” mode of poetics from Rimbaud to the language poets and beyond. In 1986, Perloff published The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture, a book in which she refined her earlier conclusions regarding what she calls “the poetry of ‘the other tradition’” by examining the legacies of European futurism; this study begins with Blaise Cendrars and ends with Roland Barthes and Robert Smithson—proponents, she declares, of “what we might call a disillusioned or cool Futurism” (195). Perloff compares Barthes’s deconstructive reading of the Eiffel Tower to Cendrars’s heroic celebration of the same structure to argue a futurist patrimony for Barthes, and she brings Smithson, whose 1967 Artforum piece “The Monuments of Passaic” “is reminiscent of Russian Futurist manifestos” (217), into the futurist fold: here “the spirit of invention, of rupture, of the conceptual art work as something that can actually change our landscapes and our lives” (234) affiliates the American artist with the futurist moment.
Watten also closes his “moment” book with Robert Smithson, this time conceived as a kindred figure to the photographer Stan Douglas and thus as the latest avatar not so much of the futurist as of the constructivist moment. However, the most extensive treatment of Smithson in the 1980s presented the sculptor as neither a futurist nor a constructivist, but as an allegorist: in a series of articles and reviews beginning in 1977, Craig Owens developed his theory of postmodernism as an allegorical impulse that he traces in the visual arts after 1960, based on work by Barthes, Jakobson, and Benjamin, with special reference to Smithson. In a different critical climate, Owens might have named 1980 “the allegorical moment,” and so this is the neglected terrain that I explore in the present study.4
But what is at stake in doing so, and why turn to a synchronic and semiotic mode of criticism after Perloff and Watten exploited the diachronic and historical modes to such productive ends? My study is intended as a supplement to the work that these and other scholars have done; although critics have explored the allegorical impulse in postmodern painting, sculpture, film, and architecture,5 no one has described allegory as it functions in postmodern poetry—and certainly not in postmodern poetic form. It is as if in the very medium and genre historically most amenable to allegory the trope is inoperative or anyhow invisible in the second half of the twentieth century.6
To be sure, under the generalized pressures of romanticism, literary allegory largely became unfashionable after the late eighteenth century, and it was not wildly popular in modernist poetry either, which no doubt accounts to some extent for why critics have been disinclined to discuss allegory in poetry written later in the twentieth century. It is also true that much poetry written after World War II is overtly antiallegorical: one school of critical opinion maintains that, as Peter Crisp put it as late as 2005, “allegory has not been a major form for well over 200 years” (335). But if postmodernism in general is indeed motivated by an allegorical impulse—by what Fredric Jameson calls the “allegorical transcoding” that is its distinguishing method and mark—then two questions arise: Does this impulse also occur in the poetry of the period? And if it does so, where? Or is there something about the poetry of the past fifty years that has made it immune to more seismic shifts in aesthetic trends, shifts that have transformed even its literary cousins, such as narrative fiction?7
This book argues that there is an allegorical impulse in American poetry composed after World War II, that it can to some extent be accounted for by theories of postmodernism such as those found in Jameson and Owens, and that it derives in part from an ongoing traffic in surrealism. Furthermore, I argue that the move to allegorical form distinguishes what has gradually become one of the main branches of postmodern poetry, that this feature appears most dramatically in some of the most formally adventurous poetry of the period, and that the allegorical element in this poetry has remained largely invisible to critics because it has literally moved. My thesis is this: postmodern poetry appears when allegory shifts from the poem’s thematic levels into its formal registers. Put alternatively: When the allegorical impulse is projected from the poem’s narrative level, where it has traditionally been located, into its formal and linguistic features, then we have postmodern poetry. The burden of proving these assertions makes up the study that follows.
My shift from the purview of arts movements such as futurism and constructivism to a literary trope such as allegory permits me to examine the semiotics of postmodern poetry while situating the subject of poetic form in contemporary philosophical discussions that have up until now been neglected in the critical literature; it also permits me to discuss allegory away from the trope’s historical entanglements in surrealism. Following Barthes, Jakobson, Owens, Jameson, and others, I understand the presence and practice of allegory at any “moment”—futurist, constructivist, surrealist, or otherwise—to be rooted in historical circumstance. During the period that this study covers, allegory was very much in the cultural air—as I think my discussion of the events of 1980 suggests—not only as a subject of general interest, but as a working trope employed by poets and other artists. In this present work, I read the poetry of the period against contemporary critical and philosophical discussions of allegory in order to understand better that poetry’s motivations and methods, for although allegory was figuratively speaking “everywhere” at the time, it was not always immediately approached or even perceived as such, and one of the marked features of discussions of allegory in postmodern poetry is that critics frequently describe the trope without naming it. When, for instance, Barthes is quoted that modern poetry “destroyed relationships in language and reduced discourse to words as static things” and that, “in it, Nature becomes a fragmented space, made of objects solitary and terrible, because the links between them are only potential,” we encounter a passage that easily could have been lifted from any number of descriptions of allegory written over the preceding half-century.
Both in this introduction and in the ensuing chapters, I sketch out a history of relevant moments in the literary life of allegory in the second half of the twentieth century, with an occasional glance back at earlier periods. The evolution of the discussion of the trope as the decades unfold is a fascinating topic in its own right; for one, it acts as a lens through which to observe many of the central critical and aesthetic debates of the day. As Spivak intimates, two very different branches of philosophical tradition—one primarily American and the other broadly European—contribute to late-century conversations about allegory, and these two meet and mix uneasily in the early 1970s to develop ultimately into what I call, after Joel Fineman, the “trope of tropes” trope around 1980.8 What such a history reveals is a long and ongoing multidisciplinary discussion riddled with controversies and outright contradictions—as it turns out, nobody agrees on what allegory is: the entry for the term in the third edition of The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics declares that “[allegory] resists any attempt at strict and comprehensive definition” (“Allegory” 1993, 31). As such, it makes an excellent ideological cipher, for how one approaches allegory says a great deal about how one approaches language, meaning, writing, representation, cognition, aesthetics, commodity fetishism, political discourse, and a host of other issues. What Barthes might call the “myths” of allegory generated over the course of the century are often as compelling and as curious as the texts that such myths were designed to read.
The bulk of this book features chapter-length close readings of a series of poems in which, I claim, the poets use allegory as a formal device for exploring a range of issues: the dynamics of psychosexual projection; photography, film, and the mechanical technologies of representation; American history, colonialism, emigration, and political and national identity; writing and its relationship with landscape, mapping, biography, and alphabetical notation; citation, appropriation, and literary piracy and parasitism; and the operations of semiotics.9 The poets I discuss include Louis Zukofsky, Lorine Niedecker, Clark Coolidge, Peter Inman, Myung Mi Kim, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, and Craig Dworkin, among others. I read their works alongside and through critical and philosophical debates about allegory ranging from Charles Sanders Peirce to the present. As I have already suggested, Jakobson and Jameson are key players here, as are Fletcher, Owens, and later writers such as Gordon Teskey. I make use of Benjamin’s provocative discussions of allegory and surrealism, particularly in tracing the allegorical impulse through John Ashbery’s art criticism and poetry from the early 1960s and on into the work of Coolidge; I have written elsewhere of William Carlos Williams’s Paterson as one of the first texts of American poetry to conceive of form as allegorical, and I briefly return to that discussion here.10 I also take into account the impressive literature surrounding iconicity that linguists have generated over the past several decades. This rich and little-exploited body of work, to my mind, could be integrated into literary studies with high critical returns.
My interests in this project lie not only in theorizing allegory and cataloging the ambitious formal innovations of the poems under hand but also in making a difficult and often recalcitrant body of poetry available to a wider readership than it presently enjoys. Each one of the poetic works I examine here is compelling on some level or other—in its formal inventiveness, in the scope of its vision, in the complexity of its devices, in the depth of its insights, in the sheer weirdness of its premises. This is poetry as strange and as intellectually rigorous as anything that William Blake, Emily Dickinson, or Gerard Manley Hopkins might have written; in certain ways it is closer in spirit to the works of baroque era poets such as John Donne and George Herbert. I also realize that, aside from perhaps Lyn Hejinian and Susan Howe, the writers whom I have chosen to showcase are not widely known even to readers of poetry, much less to the larger reading public. One task for the scholar is to bring interesting if obscure work to the fore; another is to account as objectively as he or she can for any and all poetic texts of a given period because, as climbers say so elegantly of mountains, they are there—and given the sheer volume of poetry produced over the past fifty years, it is not easy to gain perspective on the myriad poetic peaks and ranges.11 Each of the works I treat in this study not only is, I maintain, interesting as an aesthetic object in its own right but also treats of issues that are urgent, profound, and relevant to contemporary American culture. Finally, in the spirit of Benjamin in the Trauerspiel, I have deliberately chosen works that are formally “extreme” in one capacity or another because it is in the very eccentricity of certain formal features that the allegorical profile can most clearly be made out.12 This is particularly true, Benjamin claims, of baroque art, and the resemblances between the latter and the postmodern poetry that I handle here are the subject of the next section in this introduction.
A final word about that other troublesome term in my title: postmodernism, or what in 21st Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics (2002) Perloff calls “the tired dichotomy that has governed our discussion of twentieth-century poetics for much too long: that between modernism and postmodernism” (1–2). In her book, Perloff argues for a closer kinship between contemporary poetry and the poetry of modernism than critics have traditionally ascribed to them; indeed, she ends the book with yet another “moment,” claiming that “ours may well be the moment when the lessons of early modernism are finally being learned” (200)—and hence offering the twentieth century as perhaps the longest “moment” of them all.13 Brian McHale concurs but qualifies Perloff’s conclusion, arguing in his book The Obligation Toward the Difficult Whole (2004) that she means “that when, in the second and third decades of the twentieth century, a relatively stable modernist poetics was crystallized out from the churning heterogeneity of early-modernist innovation, what was left out and left over—the ‘lost’ avant-garde—remained available for revisiting and reappropriation by later generations of innovators. So ‘postmodernism’ signifies the full range of possibilities . . . available before a normalizing modernism had made its choices, and which became available again after normalized modernism had run its course” (x).
Although Perloff’s argument and McHale’s qualification of it are persuasive—it is true that nearly all of the techniques and devices one finds contemporary poets using can also be found used in poetry from the first half of the twentieth century—I wish to treat of one mode practiced in later poetry that does not appear as such in the canons of modernism and to argue that the presence of this mode constitutes a mark of real difference. Postmodernist is perhaps at this point too burdened a term to be of much use in describing period poetics; like Peter Middleton and Tim Woods in Literature of Memory (2000), I find that “the enormously influential periodising concept of postmodernism remains both useful and inadequate” (3). Perhaps it would be best simply to describe the mode as it appears in practice and leave off labeling it altogether. My argument is that a unique species of formal allegory is operative in American poetry of the postwar period. In this view, I depart from McHale’s description of postmodernism as a revisitation and a reappropriation: the allegorical impulse as it plays out in such poetry makes of it something altogether different from its modernist predecessors. I treat the issue of postmodernism at greater length later in this introduction; to raise the issue of allegory in literature after 1950 is anyway to be obliged to take account of the term postmodernism and its troubled history.
In 1964, Angus Fletcher publishes Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode, initiating a half-century of American scholarship on the issue; fifteen years later Maureen Quilligan writes that “we seem in the last quarter of the twentieth century to have reentered an allegorical age” (1979, 155); a quarter of a century passes, and we look to be entering yet another period preoccupied with allegory: both Bill Brown and Peter Crisp publish major essays on the topic in 2005, and my study begins and ends with the redoubtable Fletcher, who publishes “Allegory Without Ideas”—an article in which he calls allegory “the captain of all rhetorical figures of speech”—in boundary 2 in 2006. The discussion begun decades ago continues. But rather than make ultimate claims regarding the nature and meaning of allegory, my intention here is to understand an historical shift in poetics that occurred in American poetry written after World War II. That this movement may be described as a shift to an allegorical mode accords with larger philosophical and aesthetic forces in play during the past fifty years. And although I rely on theoretical work by Peirce, Jakobson, Fletcher, and others, I do so provisionally, being interested primarily in the dynamics between a historical moment’s notions of how language and writing work, on the one hand, and the poetry that appears accordingly, on the other. The allegorical impulse that critics discriminate as central to postmodern aesthetic sensibilities has never been discerned in the period’s poetry, to which I now turn.
The New Baroque
Never has poetry been less winged.
—Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama
Consider four page-length examples of poetry published at roughly ten-year intervals over the past four decades. The first is from Clark Coolidge’s Polaroid, a hundred-page work from 1975:
point seem thing or never one may turn it one to matching
all whole point all seem to a thing a may turning up this it can during
the light of the everything single point to its seem thing
its lap seat head inch truck still least due to close capper light
acting here sending missing matter to a point the thing very once yet
may seem
the open of a match send it this bolt to think just standing point
a thing there till within hence all over means to
single till the reach point of everything a hading tend go say
before match around some tho still its emitter seldom the one tho cause
about matter
during the let matter the think a point may sending seem can thing
a single match by how long before everything as point to of middle inch
still backing tho all pats may apart by those kind must aside
twinning musts and lighting keep to these say a point to nothing
a whelm keep lap such as the amid on an only often
leaving such place a still tho flap a bolt each thing
of miss nothing looming the lot in match of place the till yet
matching the whom passes the dialing into out of becausing last stay
some lost
matters it that the time
trucks turning in stays of lighting a must seeming light
this thus having to may such least a thinking lost the match to a veering
twin
one enter tho still a massed line emitter to the stay the since points
to which upward turning gotten aside past the lot it keeps taking
whiles of ago letting the light one may nothing near
see bolt think past the head the lap post a still twinning a bulk along
then one
then capper that’s what
a capped in that deign twin what’s that stilling
to say by seems to staying miss comes its nothing seeing
being or let the point miss one just standing
for or by and of along since the beneath never between very amidst
this nothing one misses tho time and still or light of think loom
place pin bulk dip tap inch (Coolidge 1975, 100)
The second piece is a page from Peter Inman’s poem “nimr,” published in his book Think of One in 1986:
The third exhibit is from Myung Mi Kim’s poem “Measure,” published in Dura (1998):
Screw, lever, press
Moveable face
: Reed stems, red dates
: Grown fat and sleek
Dandelion sea belched the lending
Ships of trade accompanied by ships of war
(26)
Finally, consider the following page from Mary Rising Higgins’s “waive SHIFT,” from her 2005 book )cliff TIDES((:
In the foregoing passages, all culled from longer sequences, we notice certain generic similarities familiar to students and readers of contemporary poetry. Our four examples make up a veritable catalog of what are generally known as postmodern poetic effects, techniques, methods, and devices. None of the passages, for instance, features a strong lyric center or a discernable romantic subjectivity, however construed; it is impossible to locate the particular poet’s “voice” or personality in any of these sequences, making the writing here feel resolutely impersonal. The poems eschew stories and scene settings; Coolidge’s and Inman’s pieces apparently lack any thematic subject or issue whatsoever. At the level of syntax, the writing in all four is discontinuous and fragmented; the lines splice unrelated words, phrases, and sentences, leaving an overall sensation of semantic interruption and incompletion: rupture and collage work at the level of the line here and sometimes, as in Inman’s work, at the level of the word (“stodg”). Whereas Kim uses word play for a heightened sense of ambiguity—for example, “Reed stems, red dates” can be heard as “Read stems, read dates”—Higgins inserts spaces between the letters of individual words and shapes the end of the poem as a waving W. Both pieces exemplify what Charles Bernstein calls “dysraphism,” a term that Perloff glosses as “the collaging of items that are not only disparate but have different syntactic orders, shifting voices, sources, and multiple allusions . . . combined with a penchant for punning and word play” (2002, 172). The creative use (or misuse) of punctuation and typographical features such as lineation and print font and size are also well-documented features of postmodernist poems.
But they are also well-documented features of modernist poems, and each of these four pieces can also be described as fitting futurist or constructivist norms or both, given Perloff’s and Watten’s and McHale’s respective criteria; as such, they can be perceived as working precisely in “revisited and reappropriated” modernist modes. In fact, the list of poetic characteristics that I used earlier to describe them is derived from the last chapter of Perloff’s book 21st Century Modernism, with a couple taken from McHale’s book The Obligation Toward the Difficult Whole (“erasure,” “found text”). McHale lists three other features of postmodern poems that are relevant here: the first is “poetry as prosthesis: aleatory and mechanical procedures”—that is, “predetermined procedures to generate poetry” (2004, 253, italics in original)—such as James Merrill’s use of the Ouija board, John Cage’s “writing-through” method, and Allen Ginsberg’s use of the tape recorder (ultimately, McHale declares all “fixed forms”—including traditional ones such as the haiku, the sonnet, and so on—to be “prosthetic”). Another is “the replenishment of narrative,” in which postmodernist poetry “adopts . . . the conventions of popular narrative genres—science fiction and gothic, the Western and the adventure story, comic books and animated cartoons, soap opera and pornography,” as well as premodernist narrative modes such as romance and epic (258, italics in original). Finally, citing Jameson, McHale lists “the spatial turn” of postmodernist poetry, its “emphasis on the materiality of poetry itself” and its “foregrounding [of] the spaces of the worlds it projects,” including architectural, cartographic, and corporal spaces (260–261, italics in original).
I would like to expound on these three features of what McHale calls “the postmodern repertoire,” for although none of them is exemplified by any of the passages that I have selected—the poems were not generated by chance or mechanical procedures; they are not narrative after the conventions of popular or premodernist literatures, nor do they in any obvious manner “foreground the spaces of their projected worlds”—there is a way in which I will use all three of these features to discuss what the poems are, which is, as I shall demonstrate, allegorical. For although the poems were not generated by aleatory or preset procedures, there is a sense in which they are mechanical; although they do not tell stories, there is a way in which they behave like narratives; and although they do not operate formally after the manner of maps or diagrams or otherwise index “the world,” there is a sense in which they project into space. Now, allegory is nothing if not a mechanical narrative projected into space: the simplest definition of the trope describes it as a metaphor extended into narrative. Hence, if I want to make an allegory, I take a metaphor and elaborate it into a story—the metaphor “life is a pilgrimage,” when subjected to narrative “extension,” becomes the allegorical tale Pilgrim’s Progress. This is the oldest definition of allegory, present in Quintillian and Cicero,14 and although it has been challenged, qualified, supplemented, and modified over the centuries, it is, as I demonstrate later, very much behind what is going on in poems such as Polaroid, “nimr,” “Measure,” and “waive SHIFT”—although with a difference.
One may already at this point object that examples of allegory abound in twentieth-century poetry in spite of the fact that most critics tend to omit the trope as a major characteristic of modernist or postmodernist poetics or both. Hart Crane’s Brooklyn Bridge, Wallace Stevens’ snowman, and even T. S. Eliot’s Madame Sosostris—but certainly his Waste Land—all arguably carry allegorical heft. Postmodernist candidates operating in the same vein might include Edward Dorn’s gunslinger, Susan Howe’s Hope Atherton, and John Ashbery’s landscape with rutabagas and farm instruments. In each of these cases, a metaphor—the Brooklyn Bridge as progress, futurity, America; the modern world as a wasteland; Hope Atherton as “an emblem foreshadowing a Poet’s abolished limitations in our demythologized fantasy of Manifest Destiny” (Howe 1990, 4)—has been extended into the narrative details that the respective poems relate in their different ways. However, although the four postmodernist poems I shared earlier are also built, as we shall see, around extended metaphors—writing figured as film (Coolidge), American history as an industrial assembly line (Inman), postcolonial politics as a printing press (Kim)—the allegory in each of these cases does not extend into narrative content. Instead, it is projected deeper into the poem, where it works at the level of syntax and grammar and in the organization of the lines on the page: that is, the allegorical impulse operates in these cases in the formal—even in the material—registers of the poem. Any “narrative” movement in these poems is figured not by its content but instead by its formal procedures.
In order to explain how this deeper projection of allegory works and how it differs from the formal dimensions of poems such as The Bridge or The Waste Land or As We Know, I need to describe the larger formal features of the poems from Coolidge, Inman, and Kim, which are all but invisible in the short excerpts I have presented so far; this I do in ensuing chapters. But before I do it, I want to draw attention to a baroque sensibility inhering in my four exhibits, and here I draw on Benjamin’s descriptions in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1998, originally published as Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels in 1928). To put it simply: in each of the passages given earlier we see a dense, extravagant, richly imbricated, sometimes anarchic linguistic surface organized into systematic, methodical, and complex formal macropatterns. Baroque literature, Benjamin tells us, is first and foremost just such an art of carefully managed extravagance: its nature is to shock (1998, 183) by employing linguistic exaggeration and violence (54) and voluptuousness (184); its language is rich and extravagant, breeding ambiguity (177) through the use of neologisms and figurative words (55); “the language of the Baroque is constantly convulsed by rebellion on the part of the elements which make it up” (207) and its “outlandish linguistic creations” (199). It is also notably an art—Benjamin calls it a cult—of the ruin (177–178), “fragmentary, untidy, and disordered” (188), in which “language is broken up so as to acquire a changed and intensified meaning in its fragments” (208): “[T]he highly significant fragment, the remnant, is, in fact, the finest material in Baroque creation. For it is common practice in the literature of the Baroque to pile up fragments ceaselessly” (178).
Certainly any of these characterizations can be applied to my four poetic examples, which appear initially as heaps of damaged fragments and linguistic detritus. Like Benjamin’s baroque poetry, the writing here is resolutely antitranscendental and irradiant; these poems work explicitly to replace the intimate and the mysterious with the enigmatic and the concealed (Benjamin 1998, 180–181). Such writing is profoundly antiabsorptive.15
According to Benjamin, however, the broken fragments of baroque art are always accompanied by a palpable sense of form: the baroque ruin, he says, is “consciously constructed” (1998, 182): “[T]he writer must not conceal the fact that his activity is one of arranging, since it was not so much the mere whole as its obviously constructed quality that was the principal impression which was aimed at. Hence the display of the craftsmanship, which . . . shows through like the masonry in a building whose rendering has broken away” (179). Baroque writing is heavily crafted; it seeks “complexity” (195); it works toward “extravagant pomp” (176) and ornament as opposed to raw disorder or chaos. Benjamin describes “the endlessly preparatory, circumlocutious, self-indulgently hesitant manner of the baroque process of giving form” (183) to the disassociated fragments it construes: “Every bit as characteristic of this verse is the contrast between the logical—if one will, the classicistic—structure of the façade, and the phonetic violence within” (206).
Like the poetry of the baroque, the four passages I have chosen are characterized “by the regular rhythm of the constant pause, the sudden change of direction, and consolidation into new rigidity” (Benjamin 1998, 197): as I detail later, very little is left to accident in these poems, least of all in their overall formal registers, where they are not given to the disjunctive, open antiform, play, or chance tendencies that critics such as Ihab Hassan claim characterize postmodernism (1987, 91). Each piece elicits a strong tension between microlinguistic disarray and macroformal order; each is finally systematically schematic (Benjamin 1998, 184). According to Benjamin, baroque form tends toward the visual and the runic (1998, 175–176), the plastic (177), the bibliographic and the monumental (184), the decorative (188), and finally the sepulchral, the immobile, and the concrete. Truly, “never has poetry been less winged”—unless perhaps after the manner of the burned-out angel depicted in Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I, a figure that is important in texts as various as the Trauerspiel, Williams’s Paterson, Coolidge’s Melencolia, and Craig Dworkin’s Dure.
And it is precisely the qualities of the baroque—albeit these qualities extended—that distinguish my poetic examples from their modernist predecessors as well as generally from poetry of previous periods: nowhere in the canons of modernism or in any other period do we find texts at once so utterly demolished on the local level and yet so rigidly and systematically organized on the global. In these poems, what Benjamin describes as the formal strategies of allegory are elaborated to the point that they transfigure the literal body of the text, rendering a new kind of poetic object. In my reading, the postmodern moment is precisely “the return and the revival, if not the reinvention in some unexpected form, of allegory as such,” as Jameson puts it in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991, 167); I take his phrase “unexpected form” more literally than he does, however.
Now, at first glance texts such as “waive SHIFT” might appear to utilize “visual” forms, similar to the picture-poems of writers such as George Herbert and Robert Herrick and even John Hollander; likewise, the dense pages of Polaroid might finally be read as instances of concrete poetry: the forms of all four poetic examples might be construed as being iconic. But I argue that this is precisely not what is going on—that what is going on marks these poems as crucially different. In order to talk about what this poetry’s form is and does, I must first talk about what it is not and does not do, and to do so I resort to the semiotics of C. S. Peirce.
Form as Index, Icon, Symbol
There is every reason in a study of allegory to turn to Charles Sanders Peirce, whose work in philosophy and linguistics at the beginning of the twentieth century casts a giant shadow over criticism at midcentury and beyond.16 And although nowhere to my knowledge does Peirce directly address the topic of allegory, his tripartite division of the sign into index, icon, and symbol played a major role in the discussions of allegory that occurred in the 1970s and 1980s; the artists, critics, and poets of the time were actively working and thinking through Peirce’s semiotics. From this perspective, the formal ruptures and innovations—what Ezra Pound generalized as the breaking of the heave of the pentameter—that appeared in Anglophone poetry beginning with Walt Whitman in the middle of the nineteenth century and continued on through the twentieth can be described as a shift from symbolic to indexical and iconic forms or more generally from unmotivated to motivated regimes of the sign. Accordingly, the vast assortment of traditional verse forms, prosodic devices, meters, and stanza types passed down in English and American poetry from the early modern period to the New Formalists of the present day can be classified as symbolic signs because they are arbitrary and unmotivated—that is, neither are they caused by nor do they resemble the content that they construe (i.e., they are neither indexical nor iconic); instead, they are the products of convention, habit, and tradition.17 Modernist poetics developed out of a generalized reaction to poetic forms as symbolic signs—and hence as conventional, unmotivated, and arbitrary—coupled with an accompanying elaboration of poetic forms that supposedly bear a more compelling and immediate relation to their subjects.
FORM AS INDEX
This impulse can already be witnessed in the unprecedented free-verse lines of the poems in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, which, according to Whitman in his preface, differ from their metrical European predecessors and counterparts precisely in that they are not arbitrary—instead, he claims, these lines of verse are organically generated by an American body and brain, the former attuned to the vast geophysical spaces of the New World, the latter to “a corresponding largeness and generosity”: the poet’s “spirit responds to his country’s spirit. . . . [H]e incarnates its geography and natural life and rivers and lakes” as well as its social and political systems (Whitman 1996, 5–7). Whitman resorts to vegetable metaphors when describing the “new life of the new forms” (5): “The rhyme and uniformity of perfect poems show the free growth of metrical laws and bud from them as unerringly and loosely as lilacs or roses on a bush, and take shapes as compact as the shapes of chestnuts and oranges and melons and pears, and shed the perfume impalpable to form. The fluency and ornaments of the finest poems or music or orations or recitations are not independent but dependent. All beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain” (11). True American poetic form, then, is an index of the poet’s body and brain in the same way, to use a familiar example, that smoke is an index of fire: smoke is dependent on fire; fire is the immediate cause of smoke. This idea that a poem’s form should be an index of the poet’s physiology becomes a main motivation for the development of free verse in France, England, and the United States and gradually gains currency over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century and into the first half of the twentieth; the idea is worked out at length in the human and biological sciences during the period, ultimately to become a cornerstone of modernist poetics, where it is a key factor in the turn toward non-metrical speech-based prosodies. The idea of a “physiological” connection between prosody and human biology is unique to the modernist period; it does not appear in any systematic way before the late nineteenth century.
It also continues into American poetics after World War II: for example, Charles Olson’s projectivist breath-based line, the basic unit of “Open Field” poetry—“the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE,” as he puts it in “Projective Verse”—is also indexical: “And the line comes (I swear it) from the breath, from the breathing of the man who writes, at the moment that he writes, and thus is, it is here that, the daily work, the WORK, gets in, for only he, the man who writes, can declare, at every moment, the line its metric and its ending—where its breathing, shall come to, termination” (1997, 242, full capitals in original). Any true line of poetry, then, will register the breathing of the person who composed it; a poet’s sense of measure will necessarily be specific and unique to his or her personal metabolism.18 Other Black Mountain writers concur: for Robert Duncan, “the cadence of the verse, and, in turn, the interpenetration of cadences in sequence is, for me, related to the dance of my physical body. . . . Stress patterns are dancing feet; my ear and voice follow a deeper rhythm, the coming and going of a life/death tide back of the beat of the heart and the breath” (1984, ix). Robert Creeley works Olson’s dictum on breath into the registers of speech: “When Olson speaks of breath, he is speaking of an exact thing—a thing which can be defined, say, physiologically, and whose influence on the rhythm patterns of our speech can’t be pushed off” (1970, 26, italics in original). Taking his cue from William Carlos Williams, Creeley advocates a poetry generated by the individual poet’s speech as modulated by his or her breathing: “When Williams beats on the sonnet, and he has done it I think brilliantly—he is hitting at a usage which denies form now. In short—that implies we ourselves are incapable—as our predecessors were of course not—of invention, of finding in the direct context of what we know, where we are, an exact means to form—which will be the direct issue of such contact. The sonnet says, in short, we must talk, if you want, with another man’s mouth, in the peculiar demands of that ‘mouth,’ and can’t have your own” (1970, 26, italics in original). Any authentic poem, then, will index not only the poet’s breathing but also his or her mouth, his or her manner of speaking as it is inflected by the rhythms of his or her particular body. Because traditional poetic forms, such as the sonnet or the iambic pentameter, do not so index any part of the individual breathing or speaking body, Creeley considers them inadequate and obsolete modes for a contemporary poet to address the contemporary condition (i.e., “the sonnet says . . . [you] can’t have your own [mouth]” [italics added]).
Creeley derives his ideas of the physiology of speech and the indexing of the mouth in poetry from Williams’s introduction to The Wedge (1944):
[Poetry’s] movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character. In a poem this movement is distinguished in each case by the character of the speech from which it arises.
Therefore each speech having its own character the poetry it engenders will be peculiar to that speech also in its own intrinsic form.
(in Williams 1963, 4)
Hence poetic form as an index of the poet’s speech and hence Williams’s “beating on the sonnet”—as he puts it, “To me all sonnets say the same thing of no importance” (1963, 5)—as well as his repudiation of all other traditional prosodic devices: “I say we are through with the iambic pentameter as presently conceived,” he declares in “The Poem as a Field of Action,” “at least for dramatic verse; through with the measured quatrain, the staid concatenations of sounds in the usual stanza, the sonnet” ([1954] 1969, 281). American poetry, if it is to be true to the “American idiom” (which Williams claimed “offer[s] the poet an opportunity to rid himself of the necessity to be herded with other poets around him and also of the past” [1959, 149]), will necessarily be formally different than its European counterparts.
A crucial development out of Black Mountain poetics occurs when poetic form is declared capable of indexing not just breathing and speaking but also the poet’s thinking. This notion already appears in the “other half” of Olson’s “LAW OF THE LINE”: “the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE”: “I am dogmatic, that the head shows in the syllable. The dance of the intellect is there, among them, prose or verse. Consider the best minds you know in this here business: where does the head show, is it not, precise, here, in the swift currents of the syllable? can’t you tell a brain when you see what it does, just there?” (1997, 19, full capitals in original). For the projectivist poet, the syllable is the sonic interface between ear and mind, the very place where sound and thought meet. As “the king and pin of versification,” it constitutes the phenomenal ground of the poet’s work, where the peculiar mating of music and intellect that is poetry happens. If the rhythmic shape of the line is an index of the poet’s breath, then the “head shows” in the play of the line’s syllables—in the wedding of the mind (“HEAD”) and the sound (“EAR”) in the syllable (“it is from the union of the mind and the ear that the syllable is born” [Olson 1997, 18]), the poet’s literal thinking is indexed. The patterns in which a poem’s lines and words are construed on the page—the verse, the very turn and cut of the lines themselves—can indicate the poet’s momentary thinking, allegedly recording it as it occurs.19 As Creeley puts it, “No forms but in activity”: applied to writing, this assertion, along with Olson’s famous principle (also derived from Creeley) “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT” (1997, 240, full capitals in original), fits perfectly the criteria for the Peircian index, that type of sign that bears a real, direct, dynamic, and physical, local, or temporal connection to the object to which it refers. For the projectivist writer, poetic content physically (i.e., sonically or graphically) extends into poetic form, which, as the immediate mark or trace of the poet’s will and attention to the language under hand, is an index at once of his or her breathing body and thinking brain.20
As Larry Eigner succinctly puts it, “A poem . . . can be a stretch of thinking” (1989, 3), and this dictum goes on to become one of the main tenets of language poetry, as Charles Bernstein perhaps expresses it best in his early essay “Thought’s Measure”: “Many writers have wanted to plug into the stream of thinking that seems to be constantly going on in the head, or have wanted to cast an image or make a picture of what thinking is like, or to actually embody thinking in writing” (in Bernstein 1986, 63). According to Bernstein, Creeley, “sharing the conceit of meditation—thought presented and examined, weighted and measured—is more involved with the texture of the process itself, less with a representation than an enactment” (1986, 66). This enactment of thinking in writing determines the form of such a poem as indexical, and the attempt to so enact thinking leads the poet to certain formal maneuvers:
[T]houghts think the world. In this way, too, the mapping of the free-associative “thinking” process, the ordering internal to the movements of the mind/perception, provides a model for writing in sharp contrast to common expository and representational modes by focusing in on other types of movements from one thing to the next, allowing for writing to be put together in continuously “new” ways—how various shapes and modes and syntaxes create not alternate paraphrases of the same things but different entities altogether. Grains of mind.
(68)
To actually map the fullness of thought and its movement. Cut of mind/perception/grain of mind . . . to . . . the factness of the world in the factness of the poem. Poem becoming a perceptual field/experience “independent” of “author.” (Cf: Olson’s “Projective Verse” essay: each perception instanter on the next: the form of the poem charts the perception so eliminating of traditional “inherited” forms which strip poetry of this active power.) The antihabitual ordering of attentions so that attention can be vivid—the intending rather than assuming of order, including order of sound/syllable/phonemes.
(70–71)
Through its disruption of conventional and habitual modes of composition, then, a poem can embody or enact the “movement” of the mind thinking; it becomes a direct index of the poet’s cogitations (and in turn a stimulus for the reader’s cogitations).
Ultimately, for Bernstein—and generally for the language poets—writing can itself be a mode of thinking: “Language is the material of both thinking and writing. We think and write in language, which sets up an intrinsic connection between the two” (1986, 61).21 This understanding to some extent accounts for the shift in language poetry from a speech-based to a writing- or composition-based poetics. In “On Speech,” an essay from 1971 that is often cited as foundational for language poetics,22 Robert Grenier extends Williams’s “beating on the sonnet” (“all sonnets say the same thing of no importance”) to speech itself: “Why imitate ‘speech’? Various vehicle that American speech is in the different mouths of any of us, possessed of particular powers of colloquial usage, rhythmic pressure, etc., it is only such. To me, all speeches say the same thing, or: why not exaggerate, as Williams did, for our time proclaim an abhorrence of ‘speech’ designed as was his castigation of ‘the sonnet’ to rid us, as creators of the world, from reiteration of the past dragged on in formal habit. I HATE SPEECH” (1986, 496, italics and full capitals in original).23 For many language poets, the linguistic dispositions of everyday speech (or literary versions of the same) are as restrictive and as fatally habitual as any verse form or metrical system. So it is not just traditional stanza forms such as the sonnet that stifle what Creeley calls “contact”; the very conventions and habits of speech syntax itself require intervention in order for critical—and critically utopian—“thinking” to occur (as Bernstein puts it in a concise equation, “language control = thought control = reality control” [1986, 60]). This dismissal of speech-based poetry is what initially so controversially marked off the language poets from many of their modernist predecessors as well as from most major trends in postwar poetry, including Beat, confessional, Deep Image, New American, New York school, and New Formalist practices, among others. For the language poets, what can happen in writing is more interesting than what can happen in speaking, at least in “speech” as it has been construed as the vehicle of common everyday conversation and the proper medium for poetry. For these writers, poetic form still indexes thinking, but it no longer necessarily indexes speaking.
FORM AS ICON
But Bernstein’s other two terms for capturing thinking in poetry—mapping and charting—are not indexical signs; maps and charts are among what Peirce lists as icons, and the second way that modern poets effected their revolution against traditional poetic forms was to write iconic or “visual” poetry or both.24 Willard Bohn argues that the shift to iconicity in poetic form is a distinctly modernist phenomenon; he locates “the birth of modern visual poetry in Italy and France in 1914” ([1986] 1993, 6), the year that Guillaume Apollinaire “invented (or reinvented) the figurative poem” (9), which Bohn claims more generally was both a response to the contingencies of modernity and a specific reaction to symbolist poetics:
Before [1914] pictorial effects were few and far between, and no attempt was made to exploit them. Although occasional examples can be found, such as Mallarmés Un Coup de dés, Symbolism’s obsession with musical analogy effectively discouraged visual experimentation. Among other things the renewed interest in visual poetry was part of the general reaction against the Symbolist aesthetic. It also grew out of an increasingly visual context in which technology vied with poetry to establish the supremacy of the image. Thus shortly before the First World War poets and painters rediscovered this ancient genre and began to explore it systematically.
([1986] 1993, 6)
For Bohn, “it has become increasingly evident that the first visual poems marked the emergence of a brand new episteme” (2001, 18). Along with the idea that poetic form can operate indexically, the new epistemology of visual and iconic forms effected the rupture between modernist poetics and any poetics that had gone before.
According to Peirce, icons are different from indices in that they bear no immediate or causal connection or relation to their objects but instead resemble or otherwise share characteristics with them.25 Images, diagrams, and metaphors are icons: all three are fundamentally similar to their objects, although they are not directly caused by them (indices, in contrast, do not resemble their objects: smoke is caused by fire but does not look like it). Iconic forms include shaped poems such as Herbert’s “Easter Wings” and Apollinaire’s calligrames; even the first four lines of Ezra Pound’s third canto have been described as iconic:
I SAT on the Dogana’s steps
For the gondolas cost too much, that year,
And there were not “those girls,” there was one face,
And the Buccentoro twenty yards off, howling “Stretti”
(1993, 11)
Here the Dogana’s steps upon which the poet sits are visually suggested on the right side of the stanza in its four gradually lengthening and descending lines. A different type of iconic form occurs in Williams’s famous “cat” poem, in which the lineation, the stanza breaks, and the syntax’s hesitant manner suggest a cat’s careful stepping and hence offer an example of analogical iconicity: this poem does not form a visual outline or a silhouette of a cat, nor was it physically caused by one, nor do the poem’s lines index the poet’s breathing or thinking; instead, the careful breaking and halting of the poem’s stepped lines act as visual analogues to the cat’s stepping. Iconic poems thus bear in their formal elements some marked similarity—be it pictorial, analogical, or diagrammatic—to their subject matter.
According to Bohn, modernist interest in visual and iconic poetry was relatively short-lived, and when it reappeared after World War II, it evolved into something quite different:
By 1928 . . . interest in visual poetry had largely subsided and was not to reappear until the 1950s with the creation of concrete poetry. Once the major avenues had been explored, its practitioners abandoned their essays in visual form in favor of other, more provocative experiments. In particular the rise of Surrealism coincided with the genre’s decline and captured the imagination, literally, of a whole generation of writers and artists. In this manner visual poetry succumbed to the same forces that had been responsible for its triumph. At the forefront of the avant-garde initially, it passed through the ranks and disappeared into historical oblivion.
([1986] 1993, 6)
Concrete poetry’s iconic dimension has been well documented, as has the ongoing influence of concretism on later and contemporary poetry: Bohn’s sanguine declaration of the subgenre’s demise has been belied by the sheer volume of visual poetry composed since 1928 (or at any rate since 1986, when his book The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry was published).26 The practice begun in 1914 of composing in iconic forms has continued into the twenty-first century and is presently alive and well. But it is Bohn’s statement about the rise of surrealism that I wish to pursue via a detour through Peirce’s third semiotic mode.
FORM AS SYMBOL
To recapitulate: new conceptions of verse form as alternately indexical or iconic made for the modernist break from traditional poetic form, which, using Peirce’s terminology, would be understood to operate in the mode of the symbolic; this third type of sign is distinguished from the icon and the index by being unmotivated, arbitrary, and conventional. Hence, neither the iambic pentameter nor the requisite 140 syllables of the sonnet, for example, indicate or point to anything, nor do they picture forth their content. They are the conventional and arbitrary signs of “poetic-ness,” handed down through the ages purely by force of habit and tradition. This is what disturbed the modernists so much about them: such formal signs bear no discernible relationship to either the body or the mind of the poet or to their own subject matter, and so the recasting of poetic form along indexical and iconic lines became the revisionary poetic project during the first half of the twentieth century.
But return for a moment to the four poetic examples given earlier, and you will see that form as icon or index is not at all what’s going on in Polaroid, “nimr,” “Measure,” and “waive SHIFT.” These poems’ formal features are not intended as means for us to hear or to sound the text in the manner, for instance, of Olson’s projectivist poetics—these forms do not score the text for performance, nor are they indices of the speaking body or the thinking mind. Nor do they visualize anything in the text; that is, these poems’ content is not pictured by their forms in the manner of a futurist poem, say, or of Appolinaire’s La Cravate et la montre. Nor do they formally mime, strictly speaking, any thing in the world.
Instead, in each of the four cases, the poem’s form is both constrained and mobilized by a metaphor projected into the syntagmatic chain. In other words, these poems’ forms work not as indices or as icons, but as allegories. What happens in such poems is a rejection of form as iconic or indexical—no breathing body or picture shape here—and a return to a symbolic mode of poetic form—that is, a form whose meanings are arbitrary and unmotivated, although no longer strictly speaking “conventional.” This is not to say that these poems’ forms are not systematically patterned—they certainly are—but they are so under a different order of the sign. Indexical forms are constrained by the rhythms of the body or the contours of thought; if true to their various sources, they are less “free” even than traditional verse forms, bound as they are to real things in the world. Similarly, iconic forms are constrained by their subjects’ physical shapes or movements: if the poet transgresses the boundary of the iconic form, the picture the poem makes no longer resembles its subject. Again, the constraint is, practically speaking, as rigid as any traditional verse form. As Pound, Eliot, Williams, and many another modernist poet knew, “free” verse was never free—it was based instead on a fully motivated relation between form and content.
Peirce’s symbolic sign, however, is based on an arbitrary relation between signifier and signified: this sign neither looks like nor is causally connected to its referent. Traffic signals, language in general, iambic pentameter, the fourteen lines of the sonnet, and the letters of the alphabet, for instance, are all examples of the Peircian symbol: none of these things bears any necessary relation to its subject. So why then aren’t the forms of the four poems given here simply a reactionary return to the same principle motivating conventional and traditional premodernist noniconic and nonindexical verse forms? Here’s where things get interesting, but first let me say a few more things about allegory.
Since classical times, as I said earlier, allegory has been defined as a symbol introduced in continuous series, the temporal extension of metaphor. This iteration is given by Craig Owens, the Octoberist art critic who coined the phrase “the allegorical impulse of postmodernism” and went on to note that this definition, when cast into structuralist terms, maps on to Roman Jakobson’s famous definition of the poetic function, which involves “the projection of the metaphoric, or static, axis of language onto its metonymic, or temporal, dimension” (Jakobson 1987, 49)—that is, the projection of the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection or metaphor into the axis of contiguity or metonymy. The poet, by using the principle that informs the vertical axis of language—that is, the principle of equivalence that makes the substitution of one word for another possible—to structure the horizontal axis of language, or the placing of words next to one another in the syntagmatic chain, arrives at the repetitions and patterns—formal and syntactical and grammatical and even thematic—of poetry.27
What is remarkable about our four postmodernist poems, however, is the depth of this axial projection: Coolidge, Inman, Kim, and Higgins intensify the poetic function by generating both the syntax of the individual line as well as the arrangement of lines into larger formal patterns in accordance with a controlling metaphor, a kind of Jakobsonian “dominant” that at once mobilizes and structures each of their texts.28 For Coolidge, as I demonstrate in chapter 2, this intensification involves the allegorical transcoding of photography and writing; in Polaroid, he is literally translating the mechanical, the technical, and even the chemical integers and dynamics of film into poetry. The language that makes up Polaroid is conceived as the literary equivalent of the crystalline solution that coats Polaroid film, and the words of this text are literally arranged as the emulsifying crystals that orient themselves, when exposed to light, in the same direction in order to produce photographic images. The dominant metaphor enabling this text, writing = photography, is projected not into its narrative register—that is, this is not a poem about photography—but deeper, into the very syntactic string of the writing itself, while at the same time it generates the logic that organizes the overall shape of the text. Note, again, that the poem’s form is neither indexical—film is not physically indicated in the poem’s formal registers, it is not a trace left in the body of the poem—nor iconic—we don’t see the outline of a camera here. What we have instead is the projection of the technical dynamics of one discourse into the material body of another, an act of transcoding that renders the formal dynamics of the poem allegorical.
This sort of discursive transcoding is also the formal gear of surrealism, and I examine the entangled histories of allegory and surrealism later in elaborating a theory of allegory derived from a number of writers, each of whom contributes one or more features of the definition of the trope. My point here is not to cherry-pick my sources but to derive a description of allegory apt to my present purpose, which is to articulate a working theory of postmodern poetic form. Several key features of allegory are important for me to clarify in order to situate the terms of my subsequent analyses: I include these features under the rubrics dissection and articulation; collage and montage; melancholy and arbitrariness; transcoding and projection. As The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics puts it, “allegorical writing is a particularly elusive procedure. No account of selected changes in its operation . . . can fully show the interplay of its compositional and interpretive forms” (“Allegory” 1993, 35). A critic can, however, map a theoretical terrain and situate a literary practice against it; this is how I proceed.
It is also important to point out here that in this book I am concerned primarily with allegory, not with surrealism: the latter is interesting to me principally because of its formal methods, not because of its psychological theories of dream or its politics. I am not interested in the dynamics of automatic writing. Surrealism, of course, is as complicated and as heterogeneous a phenomenon as allegory; the term resists easy definition. Not all surrealism is allegory, just as not all allegory is surreal. I acknowledge the influence of surrealist painters on poets such as Ashbery and Coolidge, but this is not a book about the influences of surrealism as such on American poetry.29 Likewise, if the critical literatures on allegory and surrealism are two principal preoccupations in what follows, a third is what Quilligan calls “the context of structuralism’s allegorical tendencies” (1979, 240). A substantial book detailing the effects of structuralism on American poetry remains to be written; this is not it. Structuralism is crucial to modern discussions of allegory, and Jakobson in particular is a key figure in these discussions—hence the occasional structuralist bent to the discussion in the next section.30
In that section, I discuss salient theories of allegory and surrealist form in order to provide scaffolding for subsequent arguments about individual poems, the idea being that each of the elements of allegory that I describe has an exaggerated analogue in postmodern poetic form—that, essentially, postmodern poetic form is projected or extended allegory. For this reason, it is important to start with fundamentals and then work up to more complex iterations. Beginning with Fletcher, who provides a basic definition of the trope, I describe how the allegorist, like the surrealist (and, according to Barthes, like the structuralist), starts by isolating objects and then recombining them with other, unrelated objects or by otherwise distorting or decontextualizing them. Although parataxis and collage are generic stylistic tools, allegory’s temporal aspect leads me to discussions of montage. I return to Benjamin and his notion of the “brittleness” of the trope, which he claims leads to the allegorist’s melancholy knowledge of the arbitrariness of the sign, and then I work through Jameson’s notion of postmodern allegorical transcoding. I end with Craig Owens’s appropriation of Jakobson’s theories of metaphor and metonymy in order to describe the formal method of what Owens calls the “allegorical impulse” of postmodernism.
I refer throughout to a host of other writers, essays, books, and articles, for the issue of allegory always was and still is contentious—as well as persistent, relevant, and remarkably resilient: a recent chapbook dealing with the contemporary conceptual poetry movement, Notes on Conceptualisms, opens with the declaration, “Conceptual writing is allegorical writing” (Fitterman and Place 2009, 13). The authors, Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman, construe allegory very broadly in order to make their argument; my intention here is not to criticize the accuracy of their definitions31 but to point out the ongoing preoccupation in contemporary poetics with allegory as a functional trope. I return to the issue of allegory and present-day conceptual poetics in chapter 5, which focuses on Craig Dworkin.
Concept: The “Trope of Tropes” Trope
There is nothing wrong about talking about the foot of a mountain—as long as one does not wonder whether it has a shoe.
—Maxwell Bennett and Peter Hacker, Neuroscience and Philosophy
DISSECTION AND ARTICULATION
[W]e might speak of structuralist activity as we once spoke of Surrealist activity (Surrealism, moreover, may well have produced the first experience of structural literature, a possibility which must some day be explored).
—Roland Barthes, “Structuralist Activity”
What does Barthes mean when he says that surrealism “may well have produced the first . . . structural literature” (1972, 214, italics added)? He begins by classifying both surrealism and structuralism as “activities of imitation”: “[T]here is, strictly speaking, no technical difference between structuralism as an intellectual activity, on the one hand, and literature in particular, art in general, on the other: both derive from a mimesis, based not on the analogy of substances (as in so-called realist art), but on the analogy of functions (what Lévi-Strauss calls homology)” (215).
Barthes goes on in this passage to explain that when structuralist linguists, folklorists, economists, anthropologists, and literary critics go to work, “they are all doing nothing different from what Mondrian, Boulez, or Butor are doing when they articulate a certain object—what will be called, precisely, a composition—by the controlled manifestation of certain units and certain associations of these units” (1972, 215). More specifically, both structuralist “activities” and modernist antirealist art “involve two typical operations: dissection and articulation” (216). Barthes’s privileging of surrealism as the first experience of structural literature, then, suggests that something critical happens when the latter appears in the early 1920s: the activity of “dissection and articulation” becomes more explicit under the hand of the surrealist, who evidently is the first “structural man” to “take the real, decompose it, then recompose it . . . not in order to copy it but to render it intelligible” (215)—and thereby to “highlight the strictly human process by which men give meaning to things” (218). In a later parlance, both the surrealist and the structuralist might be said to work to reveal the constructedness of human meaning making.32
But what is it that makes the surrealist the better exemplar of Barthes’s “structural” man over his Dadaist or constructivist predecessors? The answer, in short: the surrealist is the first structural artist because he proceeds as if the foot of the mountain really does have a shoe. In other words, the surrealist operates explicitly within the parameters of the structuralist paradigm: he is the first artist to work methodically and systematically by projecting the metaphorical axis of substitution into the metonymical axis of contiguity—who treats the substitutions of metaphor (the “foot” of the mountain) literally as if they were the contiguities of metonymy (has a shoe).
And when the surrealist sets that shoe a-walking, he produces allegory—that is, he introduces his metaphor into continuous series; he extends it into narrative. As equally a mimesis based on the analogy of functions, allegory makes a third homologue to the pair structuralism/surrealism and is nothing if not an activity of dissection and recomposition. The idea that the twin nativities of structuralism and surrealism in the 1920s were intimately bound up with a resurgent “activity” of allegory can be derived from the works of Walter Benjamin, but even before his works were made widely available (especially in the English-speaking world33), the structural links between surrealism and allegory were discerned: approaching the issue from an entirely different philosophical orientation than Benjamin, Angus Fletcher ends his Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (1964) with a section entitled “Surrealism in Old and New Allegories.” The surrealist mode, he argues in a key passage, is fundamentally allegorical in its proclivity for isolating and fragmenting objects and images and then submitting them to what he calls a “curiously inwrought” texture marked by “an idealizing consistency of thematic content [in which] the relations between ideas are under strong logical control” (105). Fletcher goes so far as to declare that among “the requirements of the allegorical image” is the injunction that “it should allow an emphasis on the visual modality, specifically on visual or symbolic ‘isolation,’ not to say Surrealism” (109); surrealism, he says, is marked by “unexpected even shocking collocations of heterogeneous objects. . . . Above all, discontinuity and unnatural groupings seem to characterize surreal art” (379).34
Although Fletcher’s book is much more encyclopedic than I let on here, I wish to focus on the primary and initial facts of surrealist isolation and recombination as a first step in a working theory of allegory. In a footnote, Fletcher quotes Paul Nougé’s description of surrealist procedure:
The method itself consists in isolating the object by breaking off its ties with the rest of the world in a more or less brutal or in a more or less insidious manner. We may cut off a hand and place it on the table, or we may paint the image of a cut-off hand on the wall. We may isolate by using a frame or by using a knife, but even more by a deformation, or a modification, in the subject of an object—a woman without a head, a hand of glass. Or by a change of scale—a lipstick the height of a forest. Or by a change of scenery—the Louis-Philippe table on a field of ice, a statue in a ditch.
(quoted in Fletcher 1964, 100)
Both the allegorist and the surrealist, then, begin by figuratively amputating or excising an object from its usual or conventional context: although this strategy of dissection is no doubt obvious and straightforward enough, Barthes’s second “operation”—articulation or recomposition—is more complicated. Once the surrealist-allegorist isolates an object, he renders it strange by introducing it into a process of combination: he either juxtaposes it with other, dissimilar objects or places it in an environment with which it is not usually or logically associated or distorts it in scale, size, or shape. This accounts for what in “The Death of the Author” Barthes calls “the famous Surrealist ‘jolt’” (1977, 144): examples include Salvador Dali’s flaming giraffes, André Breton’s winged octopuses, and Max Ernst’s tiki-headed Victorian dame admiring herself in a mirror as a giant praying mantis looks on. Such “extraordinary displacements” characterize what Louis Aragon calls the surrealist “marvelous” or “miraculous”: “The miracle is an unexpected disorder, a surprising disproportion” (1970, 38). André Breton writes of surrealism as “a function of our will to complete displacement of everything” and describes “‘fields of force’ created in the imagination by the reconciliation of two different images” (1970, 54). Such “fields” necessarily acquire their “forces” via specific formal strategies.
COLLAGE AND MONTAGE
The basic methodology of “displacement” leads to what Fletcher calls allegory’s “paratactic order” (1964, 171), Quilligan its “paratactic leisure” (1979, 236): at base, allegory, like surrealism, brings dissimilar images or objects into conjunction with few or no causal or syntactical connecting links.35 And this conjunction leads, in turn, to the technique of collage, which Max Ernst defines as “an alchemical composition of two or more heterogeneous elements, resulting from their unexpected reconciliation” (1970a, 130) and which he famously describes as key to surrealist sensibility. In “What Is Surrealism?” he cites “the classic example of the phenomenon discovered by the Surrealists, wherein the reconciliation of two (or more) seemingly incompatible elements within a scheme, incompatible to them, provokes the strongest poetic ignitions” (1970b, 135). “Underlying all Surrealist art,” Lucy Lippard tells us, “is the collage esthetic, or the ‘reconciliation of two distant realities’ on a new and unexpected plane” (1970, 2).
This notion of a combustible reconciliation raises an intriguing question: How exactly does the surrealist or allegorist “reconcile” what are often determinedly incompatible objects conjoined in radically paratactic configurations? Such recuperation36 is precisely what Fletcher means by an “idealizing consistency of thematic content [in which] the relations between ideas are under strong logical control,” and, for many critics, recuperation’s presence marks off surrealism from other collage-based modernist arts. Lippard suggests as much when she traces an evolution in Ernst’s work:
In Ernst’s collages of 1921 it is possible to see an illustration of the gradually diverging strains of Dada and Surrealism. His Dada work, founded on the harsh conjunction of opposing realities, was essentially destructive and dissective in its approach to accepted meanings, styles, and pictorial references. By 1921, however, the artist began to connect dissimilar objects by association; the result was no longer a single new image but a new situation, narrative, or drama comprised of recognizable images integrated into a novel context that was closer to the now standard idea of Surrealist “dream pictures.” The unity of this carefully constructed oneiric realism was assured by such smooth passage between images.
(1970, 2, italics in original)
The surrealist work, then, has a situational, narrative, or dramatic aspect that Dadaist “destructive and dissective” art does not: the surrealist looks for or manufactures narrative “associations” between the dissimilar objects that she or he brings into proximity. But whereas Lippard argues that the mechanics of dream imagery provide for the dramatic unities of surrealism, Theodor Adorno maintains that
surrealist constructions are merely analogous to dreams, not more. They suspend the customary logic and the rules of the game of empirical evidence but in doing so respect the individual objects that have been forcibly removed from their context and bring their contents, especially their human contents, closer to the form of the object. There is a shattering and a regrouping, but no dissolution. . . . To conceptualize Surrealism along these lines, one must go back not to psychology but to Surrealism’s artistic techniques. Unquestionably, they are patterned on the montage.
(1991, 87)37
For Adorno, it is not (psychological) dream but (artistic) technique, driven by modern technologies of reproduction, that renders the peculiar unities of surrealist “regrouping,” and it is not the dissolutions of collage but the continuities of montage that account for the surreal object’s eccentric form.38 This is a critical point with which Fletcher, it turns out, concurs: speaking of the isolation of the surrealist image in painting, he tells us that
when . . . surreal imagery is rendered in poetry, the poet takes the same liberties with perspective [as does the painter]; he makes his poem temporally discontinuous; he makes spatial relationships discontinuous. A riddle, after all, is a verbalized, Surrealistic collage, with a hidden meaning that draws the parts together “under the surface.” Lautréamont’s classic definition of l’humour noir, “the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table,” fits the pattern of enigmatic allegory; like an Eisenstein montage it challenges us to interpretation by means of an elliptical form and fragmented imagery.
(1964, 100–101)
Thus, when the temporal and spatial discontinuities of surrealist collage are transferred into writing—are verbalized—they assume narrative dimensions: they take on, according to Fletcher, the form of the riddle, which has a “hidden meaning” that gives the text thematic unity.39 Accordingly, as surrealism moves from a mode of painterly collage to a mode of filmic montage, it comes to require an intensified participation on the part of the reader or viewer: that is, the riddle asks to be solved. What changes when Ernst moves from Dada dissections to surreal associations is precisely the degree of thematic relations between the heterogeneous elements that make up the art object—that is, Fletcher’s “thematic content under strong logical control”—and this change in turn requires a different grade of reading.
Surrealism thus has a “photographic condition,” as Rosalind Krauss puts it (1993, 87)—although I would qualify by calling it a cinematic condition. Like the critics noted earlier, Krauss distinguishes Dada from surrealism by looking at how the artists of the two movements treat photography—specifically photomontage. Her argument parallels Fletcher’s and Lippard’s: Dada photomontage treats its juxtaposed images like dissociated fragments by spacing them—and thus by retaining patches of white space between them on the page: “Spacing destroys simultaneous presence: for it shows things sequentially, either one after another or external to one another—occupying separate cells. It is spacing that makes it clear—as it was to Heartfield, Tretyakov, Brecht, Aragon—that we are not looking at reality, but at the world infested by interpretation or signification, which is to say, reality distended by the gaps or blanks which are the formal preconditions of the sign” (1993, 107). Whereas the dissociated images of Dadaist collage are kept separated and thus unlinked or un-subordinated to one another, surrealist photographs retain “the seamless unity of the print” by employing what Krauss calls doubling—that is, by superimposing images on top of one another or by stretching or distorting them or by casting suggestive shadows or silhouettes over them or by otherwise blending them into what appears to be a seamless pictorial space. There are no white spaces left in surrealist montage; instead, the photograph integrates “spacing” into the very body of the image itself in order to emphasize “nature as representation, physical matter as writing” (Krauss 1993, 115).
What Krauss does not point out is that surrealist “doubled” photographs can also be conceived as being modeled on the microsequencing of the individual frames in a film: in essence, the surrealist photograph works like a tiny movie, one where only two or three frames appear, superimposed upon or juxtaposed next to or blended into one another. In other words, surrealist photographs introduce an element of contiguity or process—of combination—into the very body of the image, which is replicated or stretched to suggest a trace of temporality: this is properly speaking the montage element in the surrealist object. In all four of the analyses that I have treated here, surrealist art is characterized by this process of projection, in which fragmented objects are either extended into a riddling syntax or stretched into narrative time and space: according to Peter Bürger, the nexus of the surrealist montage object is metonymic or syntagmatic (1984, 79).40 As Krauss puts it, under the aegis of surrealism “reality was both extended and replaced or supplanted by the master supplement which is writing: the paradoxical writing of the photograph” (1993, 118). It is this characteristic projection of metaphor into metonymy that affiliates surrealist art with allegory.41
In other words, as Paul de Man reminds us, “allegory is sequential and narrative” (1981, 1): in allegory as in surrealism, metaphor is temporalized. Hence, strictly speaking, allegory does not produce an emblem or an image but an activity or a process. Allegorical forms are neither pictures nor diagrams; as literary devices, they generate procedures, not static objects: “tropes are transformational systems, not grids” (de Man 1979, 63 n. 8). This point cannot be emphasized enough; it makes for major differences between poetic modes. Thus, whereas for a primarily indexical poet such as Creeley there are, as quoted earlier, “no forms but in activities”—that is, activities produce forms—and hence “form is never more than an extension of content” (italics added and full capitals not used), for an allegorical poet such as Hejinian “form is not a fixture but an activity” (2000, 47): there are no activities but in forms; “it is form that provides an opening” (41); and content is never more than an extension of form. But I anticipate myself here. Carolyn Van Dyke states the general point succinctly: “The [allegorical] text operates on what may be called a vertical and a horizontal axis, and the two continually intersect: as the narrative progresses, its agents appear in various forms and at various levels of abstraction, and the means by which they are signified affects and constitutes the narrative”: “allegorical events proceed . . . through the interconversion of static ideas and their temporal embodiments” (1985, 45, 66).42
MELANCHOLY AND ARBITRARINESS
Walter Benjamin, of course, is the most famous philosopher of allegory and surrealism, and his work agrees in general with many of the points I have made.43 Because “modernity has, for its armature, the allegorical mode of vision” (Benjamin 1993, 336) and the surrealists are the primary dream readers and allegorists of the modern period (13), surrealism—born, in Benjamin’s own allegorical figuration, of the unholy union of Dada and an arcade (82)—provides the materialistic, anthropological “profane illumination” (1999, 209) of the “mythologie moderne.”44 For Benjamin, then, surrealism is the “image sphere” where allegory and a kind of proto-structuralism come into rich and generative critical play (1999, 191–192). As it is for Barthes, surrealism may be said to be for Benjamin the first experience of a structural literature.
And likewise for Benjamin, montage is the principle formal method of both surrealism and allegory as well as finally of his own work; the theory in Passagen-Werk (translated as The Arcades Project) “is intimately related to that of montage” (1999, N1, 10): “Method of this project: literary montage” (N1a, 8).45 Rolf Tiedemann comments, “What linked [Benjamin’s] methods to Surrealist ones, the immersion of what has been into layers of dreams, represented not an end in itself for the Passagen-Werk, but rather its methodological arrangement, a kind of experimental setup” (1999, 935)—that is, a compositional method that ultimately had a constructivist goal. Benjamin tells us in the Trauerspiel that the allegorical writer “must not conceal the fact that his activity is one of arranging, since it was not so much the mere whole as its obviously constructed quality that was the principal impression which was aimed at” (1998, 179). Hence, to return to Barthes, the allegorist-surrealist “highlight[s] the strictly human process by which men give meaning to things.”
This “obviously constructed” quality of both allegorical and surreal objects leads to an issue of a different register—that is, to what Benjamin calls allegory’s “brittleness”: “allegory, as the sign that is pointedly set off against its meaning, has its place in art as the antithesis to the beautiful appearance <Schein> in which signifier and signified flow into each other. Dissolve this brittleness of allegory, and it forfeits all authority” (1999, 374). The allegorical text is constructed of objects conjoined in such a way as to highlight or to emphasize the arbitrariness of their being brought together (as Owens explains it, “If the symbol is a motivated sign, then allegory, conceived as its antithesis, will be identified as the domain of the arbitrary, the conventional, the unmotivated” [1992, 63]).46 In pointed opposition to the symbol, allegorical signifier and signified do not “flow into each other” but instead are set off in mutual and frequently antagonistic opposition to one another: due to its “brittleness,” allegory can easily break into its component parts.47 Allegory thus causes a kind of semiotic distress; it works to disfigure and unsettle the world of things so that “only the fragments of that world are left to it now, as object of its brooding” (Benjamin 1999, 349). According to Benjamin, as the allegorist “dislodges things from their context and, from the outset, relies on his profundity to illuminate their meaning,” his or her world image “cannot be explained apart from the passionate, distraught concern with this spectacle” (1999, 211).48 Brooding over the deliberately broken work of his own hands, the allegorist “by no means avoid[s] that arbitrariness which is the most drastic manifestation of the power of knowledge” (1998, 184); “that which the allegorical intention has fixed upon is sundered from the customary contexts of life: it is at once shattered and preserved. Allegory holds fast to the ruins” (1999, 329).49
Thus, the brittle “doubleness at the heart”50 of allegory provides for the melancholy that Benjamin famously posits as the allegorist’s distinctive condition: the antinomies of the allegorical include the possibility for a kind of abyssal semiotic freefall as under their aegis “any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else. With this possibility a destructive, but just verdict is passed on the profane world: it is characterized as a world in which the detail is of no great importance” (1998, 175): “the sense of ‘the abyssal’ is to be defined as ‘meaning.’ Such a sense is always allegorical” (1999, 27).51 The allegorist becomes melancholic as she or he contemplates semiotic ruins made of arbitrarily disposed signifiers conjoined into fragile and ungainly new artifacts (1998, 185): “the brooder, whose startled gaze falls on the fragment in his hand, becomes an allegorist,” for “brooder and allegorist are cut from the same cloth” (1999, 324, 367).52
TRANSCODING AND PROJECTION
Two of the most ambitious attempts to write theories of postmodern allegory can be found in the respective works of Fredric Jameson and Craig Owens, each of whom describes different aspects of the formal mechanics of the trope. These theories lead in turn to two somewhat different approaches to allegory, both of which are important for my subsequent discussion of poetry. Out of his study of Benjamin, Jameson develops his theory of allegorical transcoding, an aesthetic as well as a critical strategy that he places at the center of postmodern sensibility. He defines it as “the setting into active equivalence of two preexisting codes, which thereby, in a kind of molecular ion exchange, become a new one” (1991, 394).53 Transcoding is thus methodologically identical to the surrealist practice of conjoining dissimilar objects: in postmodernist art, Jameson explains, two unrelated discourses are brought into mutually defining and deforming conjunction: the postmodernist architect, for instance, might conceive of a building as a narrative (as in his own famous example of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel); the postmodern writer might use principles drawn from the geological sciences or architecture to structure a poem or a novel.54
The new allegorical object created by such a mingling of codes is by definition internally at odds with itself, and Jameson goes on to tell us that “the allegorical . . . can be minimally formulated as the question posed to thinking by the awareness of incommensurable distances within its object of thought” (1991, 168). For Jameson, this incommensurability at the core of the postmodernist project is a symptom of alienation as well as the source of a new kind of intellectual trouble: it ultimately “stand[s] as the symbol and analogon of that even sharper dilemma which is the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects” (44). Allegorical in essence and finally both decadent and hollow, postmodern art is “Surrealism without the Unconscious: such is the way in which one is also tempted to characterize the newer painting, in which the most uncontrolled kinds of figuration emerge with a depthlessness that is not even hallucinatory” (174).55 Radical heterogeneity and disconnection are the working modes of the new dispensation: in his essay on Benjamin in Marxism and Form (1971), Jameson tells us that “allegory is . . . the privileged mode of our own life in time, a clumsy deciphering of meaning from moment to moment, the painful attempt to restore a continuity to heterogeneous, disconnected moments” (72).
Likewise, Craig Owens, in a series of articles published in 1979 and 1980 in which he argues that postmodernism operates as an “allegorical impulse” that first appeared in the visual arts as the latter found themselves caught in the general “turn towards language” in the 1950s and 1960s, complicates the technical analysis of allegory by, as I mentioned earlier, mapping the traditional definition of the trope as extended metaphor onto Jakob son’s definition of the poetic function as the projection of the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection (or substitution or metaphor) onto the axis of combination (or contiguity or metonymy): allegory, says Owens, “superinduces a vertical or paradigmatic reading of correspondences upon a horizontal or syntagmatic chain of events” (1992, 57).56 This is a more generalized definition of the trope than Jameson’s, and it leads to different consequences, according to Owens, wherein allegory is approached not so much as a transcoding of discursive registers but instead as “the projection—either spatial or temporal or both—of structure as sequence” (57). Hence, the principle of metaphorical correspondence generated by the rule of equivalence that motivates the vertical axis of language is projected into the contiguous sequences of the “line” of the metonymic or horizontal axis. As I mentioned earlier, Owens plugs allegory as the ultimate, primary, and characteristic formal armature of postmodernism, ultimately suggesting that the motivations behind all postmodernist art may be reducible to this “single, coherent impulse” (58).
Owens’s Jakobsonian formula suggests a deeper implicit logic behind much of what we think of as postmodern writing; it also raises a host of questions that I defer addressing at this point in order to treat them as they crop up as issues in the individual analyses of the poets I focus on in this book. Meanwhile, it is helpful to generalize what has been established so far: poetic allegory is created by the transcoding of two dissimilar objects or images into a metaphorical figure, which is then projected into sequence either by being extended into narrative or, in its postmodern iteration, by otherwise contributing the logic to how the formal elements of the writing in the poem are construed. Put most simply, allegory is metaphor motivating sequence. The unresolved tension in the allegorical text caused by the projection of the arbitrariness of metaphor into the contingency of metonymy—the surrealist blending of dissociations in which the metaphorical vehicle, rather than falling away, is instead elaborated (that is, the foot of the mountain sports a shoe)—makes for the semiological distress that both Jameson and Owens detect in postmodernist art and that Benjamin detected earlier in surrealism. In postmodern poetry, surrealism occurs at the level of form, where distress plays out not in narrative registers but in syntax and line arrangement and in the logics mobilizing the poem’s larger structures. But before we turn to poetic construction after 1950, I wish to examine an early episode in the history of the American reception of surrealism in the 1930s as a means of introducing and situating the issues surrounding the allegorical impulse as it travels down through the poetry and poetics of the twentieth century.
