Louis Zukofsky and Lorine Niedecker
Yes, the mantis nails it down.
—Clark Coolidge, “Conversation with Clark Coolidge”
Early in the 1930s, Louis Zukofsky and Lorine Niedecker shared a fundamental disagreement about praying mantises and, by way of association, about the literary value of surrealism. Zukofsky’s disapproval of Niedecker’s attraction to the latest avant-garde interloper from Europe illuminates a rift in modernist poetics regarding both poetic allegory and surrealism, the latter historically having had a difficult time gaining legitimacy in American poetry and criticism. In this chapter, I examine the reasons for this rift by tracking the spectral figure of the mantis as it appears in the pages of the journal Minotaure and in Salvador Dali’s hallucinations, as it wings up out of the entrance of the New York City subway system and haunts the decorative ironwork around the Paris metro, and ultimately as it is treated in the poetry of these two objectivist writers. Zukofsky distrusted the way the surrealists treated this insect’s cannibalistic reproductive habits as allegories for human psychosexual relations; he called such art “predatory” and explicitly conceived objectivism as its polar opposite. The story I relate in the next section is thus itself a kind of allegory for modernist American poets’ antiallegorical inclinations.
A “Presence in the Air”
Zukofsky’s sestina “‘Mantis’” and its companion poem “‘Mantis,’ an Interpretation” have gradually come to occupy prominent places in the reception of his work and in general discussions of the objectivist movement.1 Critical accounts of the poems focus on one of three issues—their relations to Marxism or their relations to imagism or their relations to formalism. The latter is especially well represented in the literature: in the words of Zukofsky’s biographer Mark Scroggins, the general consensus seems to be that “the knowledge that [‘“Mantis”’] bears is a function of its relational structure rather than its referential reach” (1998, 321).
I wish, however, to return to the poem’s “referential reach” because something has been missing from the discussion around “‘Mantis’”—that is, the figure of the praying mantis itself, clearly the “object,” the rays of which have been brought to a focus by this objectivist poem.2 It is as if the rigors demanded of critical attention by the poem’s formal frame render invisible the figure at its center. In her essay on the poem, Susan Vanderborg mentions in passing Zukofsky’s sense of the “cost of isolating the insect from its past and present contexts” (1997, 196); and it is precisely these contexts—in particular the contemporary historical context of “‘Mantis’”—that I wish to reinvest in the discussion. After all, as Zukofsky says in his essay “Modern Times,” “art does not rise out of thin air” (in Zukofsky 2000, 57); and in “An Objective,” he speaks directly to the issue of historical and contemporary contexts: “A poem. Also the materials which are outside (?) the veins and capillaries—The context—The context necessarily dealing with a world outside of it—The desire for what is objectively perfect, inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars” (in Zukofsky 2000, 15). Later in the same essay, he writes, “Impossible to communicate anything but particulars—historic and contemporary. . . . The revolutionary word if it must revolve cannot escape having a reference” (16). A poem’s “referential reach,” then, is the necessary other half of the objectivist equation, demanding the same grade of attention as the “relational structure” of its form.
Thus, in spite of the fact that Zukofsky stages the mantis as (literally) rising out of thin air—aloft on the updrafts from a subway tunnel—the praying mantis was visible in myriad contemporary contexts in 1934, the year the two mantis poems were written. My intention here is to recover these contexts, and my main point is that although critics have articulated the poems’ concerns with imagism, Marxism, and formalism, no one has adequately discussed these concerns’ relationship to surrealism: the praying mantis is the surrealist object as it was being theorized by painters and writers—in particular Salvador Dali and Roger Caillois—in the early 1930s. References to both of these artists appear in “‘Mantis’” and “An Interpretation,” and both prominently featured praying mantids in their works at the time. Hence, just like “the poor” in “‘Mantis,’” Zukofsky’s praying mantis “rises from the news”—or from the newspapers, journals, and art galleries of the day.
My reading makes visible a critical element in the lineage of the “object” in objectivism: that is, the surrealist object as it was being articulated around 1934. Both surrealism and objectivism are aesthetic epistemologies, concerned to understand how an object means what it means and to provide blueprints for producing what Caillois calls “lyrical objects”: paintings, sculptures, films, poems. The differences between these epistemologies, however, are profound, and for reasons that I detail in this chapter they preoccupied Zukofsky in 1934. In “‘Mantis’” he addresses them directly: his objectivist poem transforms the surrealist mantis from an archetypal and allegorical figure into a fully historical and political object. Situating Zukofsky’s mantis among the numerous images of mantids circulating through the surrealist art and theory of the early 1930s allows us to recover a generative tension in the aesthetic ideologies of late modernism.
This issue is important for several reasons, not the least of which is the fact that both objectivism and surrealism have until recently received short shrift from critics and historians—although for very different reasons. Objectivism, a distinctly American homegrown literary “movement”—whose status as such has always been problematical—has remained obscure, if not entirely invisible, even to American readers and scholars; I address this issue here. Surrealism, in contrast, although easily the most visible and popularly recognizable of the major twentieth-century art movements, has paradoxically suffered from its very successes, which have tended to diminish it in the eyes of critics and art historians. Thus, as recently as 2003 Jonathan Eburne could write of the “reductive tendency” that dogs much of the critical work devoted to surrealism, and although he argues that “the study of Surrealism has begun to move beyond the endless axiomatic work of summarizing and introducing the movement” (2003, 149), he also acknowledges that a great deal of work remains to be done.3 This is especially true in the North American context: here, the definitive work on surrealism is still Dickran Tashjian’s magisterial study A Boatload of Madmen: Surrealism in the American Avant-Garde 1920–1950, published in 1995—up to which year, Tashjian reminds us, “there had been no detailed study of Surrealism in its American setting” (xx).4 He goes on to disavow any “claim to be comprehensive” in this book, but it nonetheless remains a major benchmark in the study of surrealism and American modernism. However, despite Tashjian’s excellent chapters on American surrealist poets such as Parker Tyler and Charles Henri Ford, a definitive critical study of the effects of surrealism on American poetry remains to be undertaken.5
In this regard, it is telling that neither Louis Zukofsky nor Lorine Niedecker—nor, for that matter, Roger Caillois6—is mentioned in Tashjian’s book: for the two Americans poets, surrealism was a contentious issue in the 1930s—for Niedecker, it remained a critical point for decades to come. The absence of their names does not so much indicate an oversight on Tashjian’s part as it illustrates the two writers’ relative invisibility at the time of the publication of A Boatload of Madmen. Indeed, since 1995, scholars and critics have gone a long way toward making these poets and the objectivist movement in general both more visible and more tangible.7 Something of a sea change is currently under way in the ongoing rewriting of the history of modernism as it becomes increasingly clear to many people that the objectivist poets represent a compelling alternative to the canons of high modernism as they have been articulated over the past half-century and that these writers asserted—and continue to assert—a profound influence on poetic practice after World War II.8 The works of Zukofsky and Niedecker and of the other objectivists are currently being rescued from decades of neglect in a salvaging operation that is changing the landscape of modernism and its poetic legacies.9
In Zukofsky’s and Niedecker’s mantis poems, the initial collision of these two undertheorized movements of late modernism—surrealism and objectivism—occurs. In them, we witness the opening salvos in a debate that will modulate throughout American poetry and poetics of the latter half of the twentieth century and on into the twenty-first, a debate involving fundamental questions regarding poetic agency and the nature of the poetic object, the role of cognition in poetic production, the issue of form and its relations to content, the possibilities for writing a political poetry, and the use of allegory in modern and postmodern poetry. When John Ashbery writes in 1968 that “surrealism has influenced us in so many ways that we can hardly imagine what the world would be without it” (1991, 5), he invites us to think more critically of the role that surrealism played both in aesthetics and in larger social circumstances of the midcentury. Because Zukofsky’s “‘Mantis,’” in dialogue with Niedecker’s early poems, stands at the beginning of this critical preoccupation with the practice of surrealism in American poetry, it is important that we understand the issues at stake in this poem.
Zukofsky and Surrealism in the Early 1930s
It is by no means immediately obvious that “‘Mantis’” and “‘Mantis,’ an Interpretation” deal in any substantial way with surrealism; this apparent lack of connection again has something to do with the fact that the poems have to date not garnered much critical attention. To begin, then, most simply: “‘Mantis’” deals with surrealism because in a letter dated March 15, 1935, Zukofsky tells Ezra Pound that it does so.10 However, although Zukofsky does indeed include the stray phrases “Surrealiste/Re-collection” and “Millet in a Dali canvas” (followed by “Circe in E’s Cantos”) in “‘Mantis,’ an Interpretation” (1991, 69, 70), he nowhere else mentions surrealism in the two poems, which are in no technical way surrealistic. It would have been difficult for Pound to do much with these cryptic gestures even if he had read the poem, and they haven’t lost their obscurity for most readers in the ensuing decades.
But if we recall the role that surrealism was playing in the arts in America during the early 1930s, we can begin to see Zukofsky’s poems as an urgent response to the movement’s presence. Although officially founded by André Breton in Paris in 1924, surrealism did not become a force in American art and literature until the early 1930s.11 Its full impact had to wait until the Newer Super-realism show at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, which opened on November 16, 1931, and the same exhibition, retitled Surrealism, when it moved to the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in January 1932.12 In March of the same year, Julien Levy premiered L’Age d’or, the collaborative film by Dali and Louis Bunuel—the original program of which, by the way, featured on its cover a drawing of a praying mantis by Max Ernst. Thus, by the middle of 1932 surrealism had become the subject of a great deal of attention in the American press and among writers and members of the public interested in art, although Zukofsky would have been exposed to it even earlier in the pages of the little magazines of the 1920s and early 1930s—notably in Eugene Jolas’s journal transition, which had been publishing surrealist art and literature since 1926.13 Finally, however, it is 1933 that represents the watershed year both for surrealism in the United States and for Zukofsky’s exposure to and concern with the movement. Minotaure, the premier surrealist journal, began publication in June of that year and was distributed in New York by Levy.14 Dali’s first one-man show in New York at Levy’s gallery extended from November 20 to December 31, 1933; one of the persons to visit it was Lorine Niedecker, who had published her surrealist-inflected poem “Promise of Brilliant Funeral” in Poetry magazine in September: in a letter dated January 31, 1933, she tells Harriet Monroe that Zukofsky “referred [her] to the Surrealists for correlation” (1996, 177). And on December 12, 1933, Dali published an article on art nouveau in Minotaure; I argue here that in “‘Mantis’” Zukofsky refers to the photographs accompanying this article.
Zukofsky also spent two and a half months of 1933 (July to mid-September) abroad, first in Paris and then in Italy to visit Ezra Pound. In Paris, Minotaure was the important new publication, and the Gallerie Pierre Collet had hosted two surrealist exhibitions in June, the second a one-man show featuring Dali’s Millet’s Angelus, to which, as we have seen, Zukofsky alludes in “An Interpretation.”15 And Zukofsky again mentions the surrealists to Pound in a letter dated July 12 and written on stationary from the Hotel du Perigord.16 Thus, by the end of 1933 Zukofsky had certainly encountered the surrealists, who by all accounts were a cultural force to be reckoned with, whether in Europe or America, in the pages of literary journals, or on the walls of art galleries. It is in this context that “‘Mantis’” was conceived. The question is, What exactly did one “see” when one looked at or read the surrealists’ work in 1934?
Roger Caillois’s Lyrical Object
In fact, one saw praying mantids, which were featured prominently both in the visual arts and in the literature and theory at the time and which by 1934 had achieved an iconic significance for the surrealists.17 Sidra Stick notes that the praying mantis is among those “swarms of anthropomorphic insects and insectile humans” that fascinated the surrealists, who “created images like [Giacometti’s] ‘Woman with Her Throat Cut,’ which represent female/insect figurations as entrapping menaces who are also the victims of violence, pain, and destruction” (1990, 61).18 Be that as it may, mantids and mantid-inspired forms proliferate in the painting of the early 1930s. Aside from Caillois and Dali, whom I deal with in detail in this section and the next, respectively, “Picasso suggestively adapted the most characteristic features of the praying mantis in two canvases, Seated Bather and the Crucifixion, which date from the beginning of 1930,” according to William L. Pressly (1973, 607), who reads the figure in the former as an insect-headed woman with mantid mandibles. I have already mentioned Ernst’s mantis cover for L’Age d’or, but paintings such as Ernst’s Human Figure (1931) also feature mantidlike forms, and a praying mantis appears prominently in the second plate of the Easter Island section of Ernst’s collage novel Une Semaine de Bonté of 1934.19 Finally, Pressly tells us, “André Masson was the artist who most consistently exploited the image of the praying mantis” (1973, 607). Mantids skitter across canvases such as Summer Divertissement and Insect’s Betrothal (both from 1934), and Masson continued to paint mantids and anthropomorphized mantids throughout the later 1930s. Mantids were “in the air,” or at any rate in the paint, in 1934, and Zukofsky was no doubt aware of their presence.
This omnipresence is brought home conclusively when we consider Dali and Caillois. By 1934, the former had achieved a great deal of notoriety;20 we have already seen that Zukofsky was familiar with his work. But it was Roger Caillois, I have discovered, who provided the immediate impulse for the “‘Mantis’” poems. In May 1934, Minotaure published an essay by Caillois called “Le Mante religieuse” in which he examined the praying mantis as the prime example of the surrealist “lyrical object”:
Certain objects and certain images, as a result of a particularly significant form or content, enjoy a greater lyrical potential than others. This potential is valid for a very large number of individuals if not for everyone, so that it seems to be an essential part of the element in question and consequently to have as much claim as this element to objectivity.
The praying mantis seemed to me, by its name, form, and habits, to present to a rare degree this objective capacity to act immediately upon one’s affectivity, which is so useful in resolving the problem of the lyrical communication of the syntheses of the imagination. I therefore carried out some research to confirm my hypothesis on this matter and to understand, by taking a concrete example, how a representation could act upon each individual separately and, so to speak, secretly, in the absence of any symbolic character that would essentially derive meaning from its social use and the greater part of its emotional effectiveness from its role within the community.
(in Caillois 1990, 68)21
Caillois goes on to examine the praying mantis from various perspectives, describing it in biological and sociohistorical terms, analyzing its names and the scientific terminology used to classify it, and collecting various religious, mythic, and legendary anecdotes about it. He quotes numerous authorities, including one who
recounts that the mantis, when questioned by children who are lost, shows them the right way by extending its finger, only rarely, if ever, misleading them. . . .
. . . On the same subject, Eugene Rolland (Faunes Populaires de la France, vol 13, p. 117) refers to Regius, Mat Medic. (p. 32), but the popular nomenclature he collected is particularly interesting: sometimes the mantis is called an “Italian girl” or a “phantom,” and less explicably a “strawberry” or a “madeleine.” . . .
. . . According to [the Hottentots and the Bushmen] the supreme deity and creator of the world is precisely the mantis (Cagn), whose loves are, it seems, “pleasing,” and it is especially attached to the moon, having made it out of one of its old shoes. . . . Among its other avatars, it is worthwhile to point out that when killed by thorns that once were men, and eaten by ants, it was resuscitated, its bones having been put back together again.
(1990, 70–71)
Readers familiar with “‘Mantis’” will recognize these passages from Caillois in the fourth, fifth, and sixth stanzas of Zukofsky’s poem:
Don’t light on my chest, mantis! do—you’re lost,
Let the poor laugh at my fright, then see it:
My shame and theirs, you whom old Europe’s poor
Call spectre, strawberry, by turns; a stone—
You point—they say—you lead lost children—leaves
Close in the paths men leave, saved, safe with you.
Killed by thorns (once men), who now will save you
Mantis? what male love bring a fly, be lost
Within your mouth, prophetess, harmless to leaves
And hands, faked flower—the myth is: dead, bones, it
Was assembled, apes wing in wind: On stone,
Mantis, you will die, touch, beg, of the poor.
Android, loving beggar, dive to the poor
As your love would even without head to you,
Graze like machined wheels, green, from off this stone
And preying on each terrified chest, lost
Say, I am old as the globe, the moon, it
Is my old shoe, yours, be free as the leaves.
(1991, 66)
It is clear that Zukofsky lifted this information almost verbatim out of Caillois’s Minotaure article, suggesting that in the poem he is not so much encountering a mantis as he is encountering a “Mantis”—that is, a text (which could account for the double quotation marks that always accompany the poem’s title). Michael Davidson calls the mantis “a curriculum” (1991, 527); I concur, but I would point out that it is a curriculum with a very distinct (surrealist) origin.
If “‘Mantis’” is, as Zukofsky tells Pound, a poem about the state of surrealism in 1934, it only makes sense that Caillois’s text appears in the middle of it. But we must interrogate “Le Mante religieuse” in order to understand what use Zukofsky is making of it: “‘Mantis’” is by no means a surrealist poem, although it is “about” surrealism and has a (literal) surrealist subtext. The question is, How is Zukofsky translating Caillois’s surrealist lyrical object in—and into—his objectivist poem?
In “Le Mante religieuse,” Caillois attempts to articulate the terms of what he calls “the systematic overdetermination” (1990, 79) of objects—which means, as we have seen, the capacity for certain objects to work immediately and “lyrically” upon “each individual” independently of any socially constructed meaning or cultural symbolic character. Presumably, then, the mantis would “act immediately upon one’s affectivity” by stimulating a “primordial” level of the psyche; Caillois concludes his essay by calling the mantis one of those “objective ideograms, which are, in short, a material realization in the external world of the virtual lyrical and passional elements of consciousness” (85, italics in original). Although the “objective lyrical value of the praying mantis” is only “increased” by the scientific facts and folk legends Caillois catalogs in his essay, it cannot be reduced to them. To understand the generalized “disturbance” everyone seems to feel at encountering a praying mantis, we must descend to a biological level: human beings feel “an unequivocal attraction to the praying mantis” (79, italics in original), according to Caillois, because of a series of uncanny correspondences between the insect’s shape and behaviors and various complexes of human neuroses.22 Thus, the mantid’s supposed “vampirism” “corresponds to a certain phase of [human] affective development”—that is, the “castration complex” (78–79).23 Likewise, Caillois points out, “naturalists find in the praying mantis an extreme form of the close connection that often seems to combine sexual with nutritional voluptuousness, a connection that Dali has made immediately and intuitively explicit” (80). Its physical rigidity assimilates “the mantis to an automaton—that is, in view of its anthropomorphism, to a female android” (82; compare Zukofsky: “Android, loving beggar, dive to the poor / As your love would even without head to you”)—and hence evokes thoughts of death. Moreover, the mimetism of mantises “illustrates in a somewhat hallucinatory fashion the human desire for a return to an original insensibility that one must compare with the pantheistic conception of a fusion with nature, a frequent philosophical and literary translation of the return to a prenatal consciousness” (83). In short, the mantis, “in its form, being of all the forms the one in which man can recognize his own” (84), is precisely “a material realization in the external world of the virtual lyrical and passional elements of consciousness.” As such, it is the premier surrealist “objective ideogram,” an allegorical object that immediately inspires irrational fear and attraction by operating directly on the unconscious.
The mantis that Zukofsky encounters in the subway inspires just such a range of visceral and immediate emotions, but it also leads to the possibility of historical and political interventions that are absent from Caillois’s texts as well as from the other various appearances of the mantis in surrealist contexts. And if Zukofsky hadn’t already noticed the connection between surrealism and the praying mantis, he would have heard it rendered in Caillois’s essay, where the latter explicitly mentions the mantid theme in Dali’s study of Millet.24 Because the phrase “Millet in a Dali canvas” appears in “‘Mantis,’ an Interpretation”—and in interesting company with “Circe in E’s Cantos”25—I now turn to the figure of the praying mantis in Dali’s work in order to sketch more completely the surrealist object against which Zukofsky was writing.
Salvador Dali’s Predatory Metro
Dali’s preoccupation with praying mantids began as early as 1930 and peaked in 1934 with his book-length study Le mythe tragique de l’Angélus de Millet: Interprétation “paranoïaque-critique” (not published until 1963, but, as we have seen, already mentioned by Caillois in 1934, probably in reference to the publication of Dali’s article with a similar title in Minotaure in 1933). The earliest reference I can find to praying mantids in Dali’s published public writing occurs in “L’Amour” (1930)—which, again, may be where Zukofsky learned of Dali’s “sodomitical” inclinations.26 Dali mentions mantids here in the context of the psychology of love, dreams, and predation, and the image of the praying mantis as the devouring female ultimately serves to bring together a number of related concerns in Dali’s work as the 1930s wear on.27 Two of these concerns in particular, I argue, are critical to Zukofsky’s mantis poems: Dali uses the praying mantis to develop a theory of “predatory” art—and here we may remember Zukofsky’s call in “An Objective” for “[t]he object unrelated to palpable or predatory intent” (2000, 16)—and Dali explicitly associates the praying mantis with the entrances to the Paris Metro, hence Zukofsky’s mantis in the subway updraft. In a very real sense, what Zukofsky encounters in “‘Mantis’” is not so much an insect but a Dali text winging up at him from the entrance to the underground.
Perhaps the best way to approach Dali’s mantis/Millet/metro confluence is to chronicle it as it develops from 1930 on. We have seen the mantis in association with devouring and dream in Dali’s essay “L’Amour”; in 1931, Dali publishes “Surtout l’art ornemental,” in which he transfers the oneirics of predation from humans to the art nouveau–inspired ornamental wrought-iron entrances of the Paris metro.28 This predatory or gustatory cast to art nouveau decoration is also the subject of his essay “Concerning the Terrifying and Edible Beauty of Art Nouveau Architecture,” which ran in volumes 3–4 of Minotaure during the winter of 1933–1934. Most remarkable are the four Brassai photographs of the Hector Guimard wrought-iron ornaments in the entrance to the Paris metro that accompany Dali’s essay and that, as both Pressly and Haim Finkelstein point out, are explicitly shot to resemble praying mantids poised in what Dali calls the “spectral attitude” of postcoital, cannibalistic mantid aggression. The ornamental iron of the metro is another “lyrical ideogram,” an overdetermined, allegorical object that, like Caillois’s praying mantis, is a “material realization in the external world of the virtual lyrical and passional elements of consciousness,” although in this case the biological mantis can be sensed through the crafted metal of the ornament.
The link to Millet’s painting is made explicit in the caption under the photograph at top right: “It has moreover to do with the metal atavism of Millet’s L’Angélus.” The mantislike posture of the iron ornament resembles the bowed figure of the praying woman in Millet’s Angélus, a painting that Dali reproduced numerous times in his own work and that is the subject of his study Le mythe tragique de l’Angélus de Millet: Interprétation “paranoïaque-critique.” In this work, Dali describes the “atavism” of the female figure in Millet’s painting as manifested by her “expectant” or “spectral” posture and goes on to work out in great detail his “paranoico-critical” reading of the painting, focusing on the figure of the praying mantis and generally following Caillois’s examination of the insect’s “lyrical potential”: hence, the latter’s citation of Dali’s use of “the fearsome insect” in his “paranoiaco-critical study” and hence the series of grotesque metamorphoses through which Millet’s peasants travel during the 1930s in Dali’s paintings and graphic works.29 The difference is that for Dali the praying mantis itself is not the lyrical object that so violently stimulates the unconscious; instead, the “spectre” of the mantis haunts the images in the painting, just as its presence can be sensed in the metro’s iron ornaments.30
In sum, the praying mantis had developed by the summer of 1934 into a central and highly visible icon for the surrealists:31 Zukofsky’s admonition to Pound that had he read “An Interpretation,” he would have “found out” that the poem concerned surrealism suggests that Zukofsky assumed that anyone who kept up with the arts at the time would have recognized the mantis as a subject of recent surrealist discourse: What else in the poem would alert one to such a notion? As part of a more general interest in the hermeneutics of the unconscious, the preoccupation with mantids and mantidlike forms in surrealist art and writing of the early 1930s was an attempt to comprehend the mechanics of unconscious projection, to determine the procedures whereby the mind senses correspondences between natural phenomena and its own neuroses. Primarily through the writings of Dali and Caillois, the praying mantis became the premier lyrical object of surrealism—an object always already (a) complex; a text whose “wing’s leaves” (Zukofsky’s phrase) required reading and analysis; a creature whose universally terrifying “effect,” acting “secretly,” could be gauged only from a position outside of history; an altogether allegorical object whose meaning did not derive from “its social use” or “its role within the community” but instead from the psyche’s organic structure.
Zukofsky’s “‘Mantis’” in Context
This, then, is the composite object that Zukofsky runs into in the subway entrance—a “paranoic” thing, rooted in unconscious neuroses and complexes, that immediately and simultaneously strikes fear, attraction, and repulsion in the poet, who “can’t bear to look, cannot touch,—You—”: “Don’t light on my chest, mantis! do . . . ,” he commands in contradiction. Zukofsky’s “Re-collection” of Caillois’s surrealist collection of facts and stories in stanzas 4, 5, and 6 shows that he had read “Le Mante religieuse” carefully and again suggests that “‘Mantis’” is not so much the description of a sudden encounter between a man and an insect but a more carefully nuanced account of an encounter between a poet and a movement.32 Indeed, with Dali’s mantic metro as subtext, what Zukofsky encounters in the poem might more accurately be construed as an unconscious force, a force moving through and informing the myriad objects of modernity but here most clearly apprehended in that quintessentially modern space, the subway—itself a fundamental sign of modernity ever since Pound’s “A Station in the Metro” (a poem in which the poet also encounters phantoms—that is, “apparitions”).
“‘Mantis’” also suggests that Zukofsky is not entirely dismissive of surrealism. Indeed, his own “original shock” (1991, 72) at the mantis would seem to confirm Caillois’s “hypothesis” regarding people’s universal and unconscious reaction to the insect. Not only does Zukofsky appropriate Caillois’s catalog to account in part for what he calls his “sudden jolt,” but his project in “An Interpretation” also closely parallels Caillois’s project in “Le Mante religieuse”: in the process of describing how he came to determine the poem’s proper form (i.e., the sestina), Zukofsky is at pains to understand how the mantis provokes so many intense and various feelings, all in a heartbeat.
Thoughts’—two or three or five or
Six thoughts’ reflection (pulse’s witness) of what was happening
All immediate, not moved by any transition.
(1991, 67)
Although hypertextualists may want to hear an allusion to the title of Jolas’s journal at the end of this quote, Zukofsky locates his response to the mantis in the phrase “One human’s intuitive Head” (68) or, more locally, in the “[i]nevitable recurrence again in the blood” (69) and in the “nerves, glandular facilities, [and] electrical cranial charges” (71) of the brain. At one point, he even evokes what appears to be Carl Jung’s collective unconscious when he describes
lines 35 and 36—creation myth (Melanesia), residue of
it in our emotions no matter if fetched
from the moon.
(72)33
But there is a crucial difference between the two writers’ conclusions about the praying mantis: whereas Caillois’s mantis affects the psyche at the level of the neurotic complexes, stimulating castration anxieties, desires to return to the womb, and other “primordial passional conflicts,” Zukofsky’s remains resolutely sensual and textual: his concern is instead with a “forgetting and remembering Head” (68):
Since continuous in the Head, whatever has been read,
whatever is heard,
whatever is seen
Perhaps goes cropping up again with
Inevitable recurrence again in the blood
(1991, 69)
The “residue” of the Melanesian creation myth in our emotions, then, is not archetypal but instead the product of something that has been read, heard, or seen: that is, in this case Caillois’s essay, which Zukofsky had no doubt read before he encountered the mantis (Caillois’s essay was published in May 1934, and the two poems were written on October 27 and November 4, 1934, respectively). For Zukofsky, the mantis provokes only recent memories, not a collective unconscious:
So that the invoked collective
Does not subdue the senses’ awareness,
The longing for touch to an idea, or
To a use function of the material:
The original emotion remaining,
like the collective,
Unprompted, real, as propaganda
(1991, 72)
This stanza of “An Interpretation” is critical for understanding Zukofsky’s transformation of Caillois’s surrealist allegorical figure into an objectivist object. Note that the poet is most interested in the point at which the “senses’ awareness” interfaces with the “invoked collective,” which, as we have seen, comprises “whatever has been read, heard, and seen”: here again, like Caillois, Zukofsky interrogates his shocked reaction to the mantis as the product of what he “presently” sees (i.e., the mantis in the subway) and what he formerly learned (whether forgotten or remembered) of mantids. However, the collective, he says, remains as propaganda—not as an archetypal unconscious but as a “material” with a “use function.” Zukofsky thus implicitly criticizes any art in which an “invoked collective / . . . subdue[s] the senses’ awareness”: that is, an art that insists that objects such as the mantis are only signifiers of an ahistorical, universal Unconscious, an art that loses the “senses’ awareness” and hence the present scene, transected by history and politics.
This is in fact precisely the substance of Zukofsky’s comments regarding surrealism in the essay “Modern Times,” written just two years after he wrote the mantis poems: “Start with an obsession of eating, like the Surrealistes, and what exists is obsession, a razor blade consuming an eyeball, as in Dali’s Le Chien Andalou, and congealing all movement. . . . The ‘scientific’ data and shock of the Surrealistes become more and more inert, remain for the most part just data, and their explicit or implicit comment complicates a ridiculous morality” (in Zukofsky 2000, 58). Here, then, is a “predatory” art, an art that is not just itself obsessed with appetite and predation but that constantly collapses “lyrical objects” into their Freudian pretexts, their “‘scientific’” data forever used to rehearse versions of castration anxiety or the Oedipal complex. Zukofsky advocates in this essay a return to “the historical dimension of events actually happening” (59); as against the films of Jean Cocteau and Rene Clair, he praises Charlie Chaplin for realizing his characters “as products of the economics of working day life or a holiday and present[ing] them as people of impulse” (59): “Charlie’s devices and ‘types’ live with material thoughtfulness and thus historical meaning. . . . So that a new idea in a new Chaplin film is not merely a notion, a general sense of today, or an understanding of politics, art, life or whatever, but inventive existence interacting with other existence in all its ramifications: sight, hearing, muscular movement, coordination of all the senses acting on the surrounding world and rendering it laughably intelligent” (59–60).
“‘Mantis’” is just such a montage, a poem bringing together a host of interacting facts, emotions, texts, memories, and impressions, all situated in a particular historical moment, into the dialectic of “thought’s torsion” (Zukofsky 2000, 68). Zukofsky famously likens the objectivist poem to a camera, “the lens bringing the rays of an object to a focus . . . inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars” (2000, 12, italics in original).34 Thus, like Chaplin’s cinema, Zukofsky’s poem captures an “existence interacting with other existence in all its ramifications”:
The mantis, then,
Is a small incident of one’s physical vision
Which is the poor’s helplessness
The poor’s separateness
Bringing self-disgust.
(1991, 71)
The mantis, then, is not a symbol, but an incident in a complex visual field, a fact operating in concert with an ensemble of other facts:
The mantis might have heaped up upon itself a
Grave of verse,
But the facts are not a symbol.
There is the difference between that
And a fact (the mantis in the subway)
And all the other facts the mantis sets going about it.
(70)
Surrealist symbols versus objectivist facts; the collective unconscious versus a curriculum of texts; the “invoked collective” versus the “senses’ awareness”; predation versus propaganda; psychodynamics versus political dynamics; symbolism versus historical dialectics; allegory versus object: these are the issues addressed in “‘Mantis’” and “‘Mantis,’ an Interpretation.” Zukofsky’s two poems make up a long commentary on surrealism and its objects, on the limits of a hermeneutics so categorically bound to the texts of psychoanalysis, and on the inability of the “movement” to “move”—whereas surrealism’s data have “become more and more inert,” “the mantis can start / History etc.” (1991, 70) or, at any rate, startle it into starting.
Niedecker’s “Petalbent” Devil
Zukofsky ends “‘Mantis’: An Interpretation” with the strangely disembodied “Head” that appears several times earlier in the text (capitalized up to a point), a Head that remembers words, poetic phrases, and “even more constantly/the poor”:
Nor is the coincidence
Of the last four lines
Symbolism,
But the simultaneous,
The diaphanous, historical
In one head.
(Zukofsky 1991, 73)
Unlike the surrealists, who “subdue the senses’ awareness” and thus the present (historical) scene in their pursuit of the unconscious and its complexes, the objectivist poet keeps both “the simultaneous”—incidents, objects, immediate “existence in all its ramifications”—and “the diaphanous”—what has previously been seen, heard, and read, cropping up as it does unexpectedly in the blood—historical in his one head. For Zukofsky, the unconscious is a product of culture and history, not of nature and instinct—to defer to the latter is to replace the possibility of revolutionary movement with the inertia of psychological archetypes.
But Zukofsky makes here what is perhaps an inevitable and certainly a suggestive association between the poet’s Head and the decapitated head of the male praying mantis, also alluded to at the end of “‘Mantis’”: “Android, loving beggar, dive to the poor / As your love would even without head to you” (1991, 66). This alignment of capitals suggests an element of danger: the female surrealist mantis decapitates the male objectivist mantis—whose Head continues its Orphic song regardless. Surrealism was, as I pointed out earlier, a potent new aesthetic just beginning to become prominent in American arts and letters in the early 1930s, and Zukofsky no doubt felt threatened by its rising popularity, especially given the public’s general lack of interest in his own work and that of his fellow objectivists. Perhaps he realized that his call at the end of “‘Mantis’” for the return of the surrealist lyrical object to a revolutionary “use”—
Fly, mantis, on the poor, arise like leaves
The armies of the poor, strength: stone on stone
And build the new world in your eyes, Save it!
(1991, 66)
—would go unanswered; certainly, there was little in the winter of 1934 to suggest otherwise.
But Zukofsky was also aware that his audience was small and intimate and included primarily other poets such as Williams, Pound, and Niedecker, with whom in 1934 he corresponded. Zukofsky’s disapproval of Niedecker’s interest in surrealism has been well documented; I have already mentioned her visit to the 1933 Dali show, the publication of her surrealist-inspired poems in Poetry magazine, and Zukofsky’s referral of her to the surrealists “for correlation.”35 In February and May 1934, she sent 2 three-poem series, entitled “CANVAS” (later spelled “CANVASS”) and “Three Poems,” to Harriet Monroe, who promptly rejected them; Pound, however, published all six poems in Bozart-Westminster in the summer of 1935. Pound complains to Zukofsky about these poems in the context of a discussion regarding surrealism, and in the same letter—in fact, in the same paragraph—in which Zukofsky admonishes Pound for not reading “‘Mantis’” and hence not understanding his opinion regarding surrealism, he mentions Niedecker’s “mental stubbornness” regarding the issue. Thus, in “‘Mantis,’” Zukofsky was also responding to the surrealist proclivities of one of his closest associates, as illustrated in Niedecker’s poem “Beyond What”:
momently to the constant removal
liquidating aftermath
inspired marksmanship
Devil the ash trays show it
instant with glee
black winged lazuli
beets redden and revert
(2002, 34)
Do we not see in these lines the figure of the praying mantis? Niedecker’s interest in surrealism in 1933 and 1934 coincided with the publication of Caillois’s “Le Mante religieuse” in Minotaure and with Dali’s ongoing preoccupation with the praying mantis in his essays and painting. To employ phrases such as “decapitated areas,” “liquidating aftermath,” and “black winged lazuli” in a surrealist poem in 1934 would be to evoke the mantis that was ubiquitous in surrealist discourse at the time: Niedecker’s cryptic phrases sketch a mantis couple at the precise moment of the postcoital decapitation of the male by the female, as the “inspired marksmanship” of the female leads to the “gleeful instant” of the cannibal feast. The spectral insect haunts Niedecker’s language just as it can be sensed in the Paris metro’s iron ornaments.36 That Niedecker labels “Beyond What” the “subconscious” entry to the series only corroborates this connection—whatever the fragmentary, insectoid lyrical object in the poem is, it participates in the very specific surrealist vocabulary designed to evoke the violent and demonic underside of the psyche that Caillois and Dali argue is so sensitive to the image of the praying mantis.
The apparition of the praying mantis also peeks out of “Canvass,” the left-row subconscious section of Niedecker’s earlier triptych poem of the same name:
Unrefractory petalbent
prognosticate
halfvent purloined
adark
vicissitudes of one-tenth
steel-tin
cream redbronze
attempt salmon egress
masked eggs
ovoid
anodyne lament
metal bluegreen
drying
smoke dent
exceptional retard
bald out
affidavit
flat grey shoulder.
carrions eats its call, waste it.
He: she knows how
for a testament to Sundays.
(2002, 33)
The bent petal of line 1 suggests the ubiquitous foliage that acts as camouflage for the mantis’s leaflike body (think of the jungles that Masson’s and Ernst’s mantids inhabit); the “masked,” “ovoid” eggs in the middle of the poem and the color counters “bluegreen” and “flat grey shoulder” accommodate themselves to the figure of a predatory insect, as the “carrions eats its call, waste it.” Even the droll ecclesiastical carriage of the praying mantis is caught in the “testament to Sundays” of the poem’s final phrase.
In fact, “refractory” of line 1, suggesting the refraction of the bent petal, also evokes “refectory,” the dining hall in a monastery or a convent. The poem reads as a sort of gnomic hallucination of erotic predation—“gnosis” and “loin” peek through the refracted foliage of the first three lines, and the language in the middle of the poem—“cream redbronze / attempt salmon egress / masked eggs / ovoid / anodyne lament”—suggest spermazoa swimming salmonlike upstream to ova (only to end up “lamented”). The poem’s rhetorical registers multiply: “anodyne” suggests “anodize,” the process of coating metal, hence the “steel-tin / bluent” and the “metal bluegreen / drying.” Anyone who has ever blued the barrel of a gun recognizes what is going on here—this is a poem about hunting: one blues a rifle barrel in order to protect it from moisture. “Smoke dent” and “exceptional retard” suggest the firing and recoil of the weapon, braced against a “flat grey shoulder.” What is being hunted here is apparently a canvas back—according to Webster’s, the canvasback duck has a “brownish-red (i.e., “redbronze”) head, dark breast, and light grey back” (i.e., “flat grey shoulder”). In true surrealist fashion, Niedecker violently yokes dissimilar images to present a dreamlike collage or collision of images of hunting, sex, and eating; the copulating cannibal mantis is also the duck hunter—or, to transpose the letters of the single word in the fourth line, a drake hunter, for the hunter of “Canvass” is explicitly a huntress (“she knows how / For a testament to Sundays”) whose “inspired marksmanship” becomes the subject of “Beyond What.”
Zukofsky’s mantis poems can thus be read as a riposte to the “petalbent” devil in Niedecker’s early surrealist work, and the praying mantis operates as a highly suggestive lyrical object through which the two poets consider their aesthetic allegiances. Not only was Niedecker reading about and looking at figures such as Dali’s Homage to the “Angelus” of Millet and Architectonics of Millet’s Angelus, but she was incorporating them directly into her poetry. On the May–June 1935 calendar page of the text known as “Next Year, or I Fly My Rounds Tempestuous,” which Zukofsky dated Christmas 1934, Niedecker scrawled the following poem:
Dali’s “Archeological
Reminiscence of
Millet’s Angelus”
Strike a thrall.
Bring an ear-
drum up to a
laughing order
at spittle point.
For tipped aurals
and aluminum
casticulars.
(2002, 51)
Dali’s picture depicts the two bent peasants of Millet’s painting as brick ruins, mourning two tumbledown structures at their feet. Clearly, Dali’s threatening woman continued to haunt Niedecker’s imagination, if only “aurally.” In the winter of 1934, was she planning to use its mantid wings “next year” to “fly her rounds tempestuous”? Suffice it to say that Zukofsky’s two poems about surrealism were intended as both a plea and a warning to writers such as Niedecker: if the surrealist is, figuratively speaking, the mantis in “‘Mantis,’” then Zukofsky’s call to her to fly on the armies of the poor reads as a request for a return to a political poetry; alternatively, Zukofsky is warning us that the surrealist praying mantis can bite off a poet’s head—the “forgetting and remembering Head”—rendering the poet not a bodiless Head but a headless Body, a preconscious intelligence tied to the fiction of instinctual drives and blind to the historical circumstance around it. This is Dali’s atavistic archetypal specter haunting everything from nineteenth-century paintings to the Paris metro stations’ grillwork.
For Zukofsky, however, the danger derives not so much from the French surrealist painter’s paranoic objects as it does from the American objectivist poet’s surrealistic text. The problem is that although the surrealist, in Jameson’s words, “set[s] into active equivalence two preexisting codes”—allegorically transcoding, in the present case, entomology and psychology—for Zukofsky “the facts” of the mantis “are not a symbol.” They are and they should remain objective facts; the artist at her own peril construes them as allegories for the sexual dynamics of the human mind. It is precisely surrealist art’s treatment of the objects of the world as allegorical that debases it. How much more dangerous for a poet then would be an art that sought to formalize this new transcoded entity—that is, an art that projects the metaphorical equivalence between the two parts of the allegory directly into its own formal procedures? This is precisely what Niedecker’s tripartite poems do: she describes the two series as “an experiment in three planes: left row is deep subconscious, middle row beginning of monologue, and right row surface consciousness, social banal” (2002, 370)—hence the Freudian paradigm so dear to the surrealists. These poetic triptychs, however, are not about praying mantids or Freudian psychology: instead, the surrealist metaphor of the id as a mantis and the Freudian figuring of the psyche into three “parts” play out directly in each poem’s formal features. Hence, the menacing images and broken syntax of the poems’ “deep subconscious” left panels suggest the irrational nature of the id as well as its sexual dangers. The poems’ middle panels—as described in notes at the bottoms of both texts—are designated respectively “toward monologue” and “wakeful” and represent something like the surfacing of speech into consciousness: the mantid terrors are absent or have been sublimated into what begins to resemble conventional speech. Thus, “Beyond what” is followed by “I heard”:
too far for me to see
lest we forget
no fan thank you
peonies
if only one could
I was born on a farm
I watched arrive in spring
city your faith in arches
(2002, 34)
And finally Niedecker composes “Memorial Day,” the series’ “social banal” third panel, using completely normative—if somewhat stilted—syntax and subject matter:
Thou hast
not foreign aggression
but world disillusionment
dedicated to the proposition
of an ice cream cone
and the stars and stripes forever
over the factories and hills of our country
for the soldier dead
(2002, 34)
The allegorical conceit animating both series of poems, then, motivates their respective formal characteristics at the level of syntax and line as well as at the level of global shape and organization on the page. Inspired directly by the surrealists, Niedecker more or less single-handedly invents a new kind of poetic form that spiels out in its own details the ramifications of the “content” it addresses. Notice again that the poems’ forms are not iconic—they do not behave like Herbert’s “The Altar” or “Easter Wings.” Niedecker’s poetry does not resolve into a picture: instead, it puts a procedure, a process, into play by projecting a metaphor into the dynamic contiguities generated as its metonymic axis—by operating, in essence, allegorically.
Zukofsky’s decision to cast “‘Mantis’” as a sestina—a purely conventional form that does not allegorize anything—makes sense, then, although he does trouble this choice by claiming that the sestina is a form that by virtue of its particular orderings stimulates “thought’s torsion”: he thinks of his poem’s form as literally mobilizing the dynamics of its thinking—hence the importance of the poem’s “relational structure.” Form for the objectivist poet doesn’t represent things; it does things. According to Zukofsky, the highly conventional sestina form in the case of “‘Mantis’” is not arbitrarily imported from outside the procedures of the poem’s own occasion; instead, it is used literally to stage that occasion.37
In a short piece from 1930 entitled “Influence,” Zukofsky discusses the matter of other writers’ and traditions’ effect on the poet: “The matter of an influence acting in common upon individual temperaments results in differences which have variegated it and been variegated by it in accordance with: 1. its presence in the air: sometimes the proximity of a poet’s edified literary acquaintances, however conscious or unconscious a poet may be of the almost literal drafts around him. . . . 3. conscious choice or rejection of a literary tradition” (in Zukofsky 2000, 135). Here is “‘Mantis’” in a nutshell: the poem is precisely a response to a “presence in the air,” and in this case the insect “steadying lost / In the cars’ drafts” and the “almost literal (literary) drafts” around the poet come to the same thing—the premier surrealist lyrical object transformed by a poem figured as a “lens bringing the rays of an object to a focus . . . inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars” (Zukofsky 2000, 12).