Polemical Preface
1. Critics have recently taken up this issue. For an early discussion, see Borkhuis 2000; for a more recent analysis, see Arnold 2007.
2. I should point out that I am not concerned here with American surrealist poetry as such—for instance, poetry composed by writers such as Charles Henri Ford, Parker Tyler, and Philip Lamantia or appearing in journals such as View or VVV or George Hitchcock’s Kayak or written by poets such as Kenneth Patchen or the Deep Image writers. Although these and other writers and literary venues were certainly influenced by surrealism, they generally did not engage in the kind of syntactically and grammatically disjunctive poetry that I attend to here: in essence, they did not formalize allegory. The difference is between poets who use surrealism at the level of content and poets who use allegory at the level of form. For a history of American poets’ early receptions of surrealism, see Tashjian 1995.
3. For a recent and thorough introduction to theories and praxes of allegory from classical times to the present, see Copeland and Struck 2010 as well as Tambling 2010.
4. Henry Sayre agrees: “It is vision, not sound, that the ‘variable foot’ depends upon. And [Williams’s] form is arbitrary, imposed upon his subject matter, not organically derived from it” (1983, 3).
1. Two essay collections also appeared in 1981: Allegory, Myth, and Symbol edited by Morton W. Bloomfield and Allegory and Representation edited by Stephen Greenblatt. In his 1983 review essay in Poetics Today, Joel D. Black wrote that “the conspicuous priority of the term ‘allegory’ in the titles of these two collections of essays at once suggests that this figure has now come fully into its own as a central preoccupation of Anglo-American literary criticism” (109). Black’s essay is a comprehensive discussion of the state of affairs at the time.
2. In this I agree with Jed Rasula’s assessment that “the legacy of language poetry has been disseminated into the environment at large” (2004, 18). Referring to Ron Silliman’s 1986 anthology In the American Tree (Silliman 1986a), Rasula explains: “In other words, I assume language poetry as a necessary given of the contemporary American poetic landscape, but I also assume this givenness in the mode of dissolution and absorption. Many of the most interesting demonstrations of the insistence of language writing are no longer to be found exclusively in the work of Silliman’s core group; the lessons have migrated; the emphasis on the signifier climbed down from the tree and rhizomatically infused the grassy horizon” (209).
3. Watten’s book The Constructivist Moment, which won the Rene Wellek Prize for Comparative Literature in 2007, is explicitly designed not as “a historical account or aesthetic genealogy of Constructivism, Soviet or otherwise” (2003, xviii), but instead as an ambitious attempt to read an eclectic selection of materialist poetics and poetry against contemporary social and political contingencies, from “the Soviet period to the emergence of the Language school” (xx), in order to theorize the relationships “between historical crisis and the capacious unfolding of aesthetic form” (xxi). It “seeks to develop specific historical and cultural entailments of the material text as critical agency” (xxiv). Although for Watten “the Soviet Constructivists are the privileged example of the historical avant-garde” (xx) over Italian futurists, German Dadaists, and French surrealists, he uses the term constructivism to refer broadly to works that foreground their formal construction as a response to political, historical, and cultural contexts.
4. Hence, Maureen Quilligan argued in 1979 that “in the latter part of the twentieth century, we are once again in a position to appreciate the original function of allegorical narrative, and therefore to recreate this function in a new context—not only as readers of older texts, but as readers of contemporary texts that are themselves recreating the original function of allegorical narrative” (279). For Owens a year later, “an unmistakably allegorical impulse has begun to reassert itself in various aspects of contemporary culture” (1992, 53), and Carolynn Van Dyke stated in 1985 that “ours is certainly an age fascinated by allegory” (239). J. Robert Baker in 1994 claimed that “in the postmodern age . . . allegory has undergone resuscitation and perhaps even a second flowering” (304), and two years later Franco Moretti wrote that “the twentieth century has decisively revoked the condemnation of allegory, and indeed seen in this figure the sign of a particular self-awareness of modern literature” (1996, 78).
5. See especially Hal Foster’s The Return of the Real (1996).
6. Critics’ general privileging of other art forms and literary genres over poetry when it comes to the subject of allegory is still very much with us: in her essay “Allegory Happens: Allegory and the Arts Post-1960” in The Cambridge Companion to Allegory (2010), Lynette Hunter mentions the names and works of novelists, playwrights, filmmakers, dancers, performance artists, photographers, and even a bus tour artist, but not a single poet or poem.
7. See, for example, Josh Cohen’s book Spectacular Allegories (1998).
8. In the passage in question, Fineman mentions several other features of postmodern allegory crucial to my discussion: “Thus generalized, allegory rapidly acquires the status of trope of tropes, representative of the figurality of all language, of the distance between signifier and signified, and correlatively, the response to allegory becomes representative of critical activity per se” ([1980] 1981, 27).
9. Stephen A. Barney tells us that “allegory, in its referential aspect, pretends to name, not things, but whatever lies under things—substances, relations, intentions, faculties, categories, powers, ideas” (1979, 22, italics in original). For postmodern allegory, I would replace the terms in his list with the following: drives, machines, technologies, histories, politics, letters, alphabets.
10. See my essay “Weathered Measures and Measured Weathers: W. C. Williams and the Allegorical Ends of Rhythm” (2004). A somewhat different version of this essay appears as the final chapter in my book Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science (2008, 208–223).
11. Craig Dworkin’s essay introduction “Seja Marginal” to the collected volume The Consequence of Innovation (Dworkin 2008) offers an enlightening statistical description of the current poetry scene (as of 2008) in the United States.
12. With a few emendations, the following passage from the Trauerspiel might stand as a description of my own project: “The necessary tendency towards the extreme which, in philosophical investigations, constitutes the norm in the formation of concepts, means two things as far as the representation of the origin of the German Baroque Trauerspiel is concerned. Firstly it serves as a reminder that the whole range of subject matter should be disinterestedly observed. Given the by no means excessive quantity of dramatic production, the task of such research must not look for schools of poets, epochs of the oeuvre, or strata of individual works, as the literary historian quite properly might. Rather will it be guided by the assumption that what seems diffuse and disparate will be found to be linked in the adequate concepts as elements of a synthesis. And so the production of lesser writers, whose works frequently contain the most eccentric features, will be valued no less than those of the great writer” (Benjamin 1998, 57–58).
13. The question of legitimacy has haunted the term postmodernism since its inception; in many ways, Perloff is answering Ihab Hassan’s call in The Postmodern Turn (1987) for just such a study as she offers in 21st Century Modernism: “Can we really perceive a phenomenon, in Western societies generally and in their literatures particularly, that needs to be distinguished from modernism, needs to be named? If so, will the provisional rubric ‘postmodernism’ serve? Can we then—or even should we at this time—construct of this phenomenon some probative scheme, both chronological and typological, that may account for its various trends and counter-trends, its artistic, epistemic, and social character? And how would this phenomenon—let us call it postmodernism—relate itself to such earlier modes of change as turn-of-the-century avant-gardes or the high modernism of the twenties? Finally, what difficulties would inhere in any such act of definition, such a tentative heuristic scheme?” (Perloff 2002, 84).
14. Fineman states the principle succinctly: “The standard formulation, of course, is Quintillian’s, which characterizes allegory as what happens when a single metaphor is introduced in continuous series” ([1980] 1981, 30). See also Fletcher 1964, 70–75, and Van Dyke 1985, 26.
15. “Above all it is the offensive, the provocative quality of the gesture which is Baroque. . . . The poems have ‘no forward movement, but they swell up from within.’ If it is to hold its own against the tendency to absorption, the allegorical must constantly unfold in new and surprising ways” (Benjamin 1998, 183). See Charles Bernstein’s essay-poem Artifice of Absorption ([1987] 1992) for a contemporary version of an antiabsorptive poetics.
16. Paul de Man writes that Peirce “laid the philosophical foundation for modern semiology” (1979, 8), and Roman Jakobson calls Peirce “the most inventive and versatile among American thinkers,” whose “semiotic drafts are of epochal significance” (1987, 414–415). Peirce remained for Jakobson “the deepest inquirer into the essence of signs” (1987, 429). In his opening comments to the famous 1966 conference at Johns Hopkins (“The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man”), Richard Macksey credited Peirce with being the “historical precedent” of the so-called Structuralist Controversy itself (1970, 3–6). In Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida compares Peirce favorably to Edmund Husserl in that he “goes very far in the direction that I have called the de-construction of the transcendental signified” (1998, 49).
17. According to Peirce, a symbol is “a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of law, usually an association of general ideas” (1955, 112–113).
18. In this, Olson agrees with Pound, although for the latter it is not the personal breath that is indexed by poetic rhythm but personal emotion: “Rhythm.—I believe in an ‘absolute rhythm,’ a rhythm, that is, in poetry which corresponds exactly to the emotion or shade of emotion to be expressed. A man’s rhythm must be interpretative, it will be, therefore, in the end, his own, uncounterfeiting, uncounterfeitable” (Pound 1997, 9).
19. Creeley likens composition to driving a car: “The simplest way I have found to make clear my own sense of writing in this respect is to use the analogy of driving. The road, as it were, is creating itself momently in one’s attention to it, there, visibly, in front of the car. There is no reason it should go on forever, and if one does so assume it, it very often disappears all too actually. When Pound says, ‘we must understand what is happening,’ one sense of his meaning I take to be this necessary attention to what is happening in the writing (the road) one is, in the sense suggested, following. In that way there is nothing mindless about the procedure. It is rather, a respect for the possibilities of such attention that brings Allen Ginsberg to say, ‘Mind is shapely.’ Mind, thus engaged, permits experience of ‘order’ far more various and intensive than habituated and programmed limits of its subtleties can recognize” (1970, 58).
20. Creeley suggestively brings together these themes of indexicality, speech, the mind, and poetic form in a poem from 1969, “The Finger”:
and whatever is said
in the world, or forgotten,
or not said, makes a form.
The choice is simply,
I will—as mind is a finger,
pointing, as wonder
a place to be.
(Creeley 1969, 12)
21. Bernstein follows the early Ludwig Wittgenstein in essentially equating thinking and language: “There are no thoughts except through language” (1986, 49). In 2008, Perloff generalizes this notion when she discusses the “dominant mode” of language poetry, whose “jagged free verse, designed to represent the rhythm of thought, underscores the primacy of the poet’s language in its ability to mean and not to mean. The limits of my language, in Wittgenstein’s words, are the limits of my world” (2008, 255, 257, italics added).
22. See, for example, Ron Silliman’s introduction to In the American Tree (Silliman 1986b).
23. “On Speech” (Grenier 1986) was originally published in the first issue of This (Winter 1971), the journal that Grenier cofounded with Barrett Watten.
24. Bohn writes that visual poetry “differs from ordinary poetry . . . in the extent of its iconic dimension” (2001, 15).
25. “The icon has no dynamical connection with the object if represents; it simply happens that its qualities resemble those of that object, and excite analogous sensations in the mind for which it is a likeness. But it really stands unconnected with them. The index is physically connected with its object; they make an organic pair” (Peirce 1955, 114).
26. On visual poetry, see the chapter “Songs of the Earth: Ronald Johnson’s Verbivocovisuals” in Perloff 2004, 194–204, and Solt 1982. In Modern Visual Poetry, Bohn reiterates his gloomy assessment: “For various reasons, interest in visual poetry declined during the next two decades. Although a few poets continued to dabble in the genre, its potential seemed to have been largely exhausted. By the end of the 1920’s, if not before, Surrealism had eclipsed previous avant-garde accomplishments and had become the dominant movement” (2001, 232).
27. I am aware of the fact that Jakobson’s theory of metaphoric and metonymic axes has largely been discredited. Paul Kiparsky addresses this criticism as early as 1987 in “On Theory and Interpretation”; I quote this essay at length to give some sense of the issues involved:
Recall that, in Jakobson’s view of things, literature is the province of two theoretical disciplines: poetics and semiotics. Poetics, a branch of linguistics, is concerned with those aspects of verbal art which are rooted in the specific organization of language as a representational system, for example with metrics and with syntactic parallelism, traditionally called “figures of language.” Semiotics deals with those aspects (such as metaphor and other “figures of thought”) which stem from the communicative function of language, and consequently recur in other sign systems which serve that function. But Jakobson and his supporters, as well as their critics, missed the full import of dividing the labour in this way, because they accepted the structuralist and semiotic doctrine about language and communication, according to which all sign systems can be analysed by the same fundamental techniques. Specifically, they subscribed to the following two propositions:
1. both language and other semiotic systems are definable by networks of similarity and contiguity relations;
2. interpreting an utterance is definable as a decoding process.
From the perspective of those assumptions, linguistics and semiotics seemed closely akin in methodology and subject matter, so that not much depended on how the explicanda were partitioned between them.
But both assumptions have meanwhile turned out to be false. The study of grammatical structure has shown that neither syntax nor phonology can be reduced to similarity and contiguity relations (Chomsky 1972), and the emerging study of pragmatics has shown that communication involves inference as well as encoding and decoding (Grice 1975, Sperber and Wilson 1986). Linguistics and semiotics deal with questions of a very different sort and neither can simply adopt the theories or methods of the other.
(185–186)
Because most of the critics and poets important to the present study, however, thought (some still so think) with and through Jakobson’s paradigm, I retain it for the sake of historical accuracy. The correctness of Jakobson’s formulation is not at stake here; what matters is what artists and critics made of it. His theory can be thought of as an “enabling fiction” for a generation or more of avant-garde poets.
28. “Inquiry into the dominant had important consequences for Formalist views of literary evolution. In the evolution of poetic form it is not so much a question of the disappearance of certain elements and the emergence of others as it is a question of shifts in the mutual relationship among the divers components of the system, in other words, a question of the shifting dominant. Within a given complex of poetic norms in general, or especially within the set of poetic norms valid for a given poetic genre, elements which were originally secondary become essential and primary. . . . Genres which were originally secondary paths, subsidiary variants, now come to the fore, whereas the canonical genres are pushed toward the rear” (Jakobson 1987, 44).
29. Good work on this topic has appeared recently: see especially David Arnold’s book Poetry and Language Writing (2007), which speculates about the complicated issue of the reception of surrealism by the American poetic avant-garde from W. C. Williams through the objectivists and on to language poets. Whereas Arnold describes what might be called a “surrealist moment” in American poetics, I focus instead on an allegorical impulse underlying both surrealist and postmodern poetics.
30. In this I concur with Arnold’s sentiment that “‘straight’ structuralism is rarely called upon these days to elucidate texts, but in the case of Surrealism a structuralist analysis is worth considering as an antidote to ‘the expressivist fallacy’” (2007, 47); I would argue that the same holds true for the case of allegory. For an insightful discussion of why “high Surrealism must be included as an intellectual pressure to which the French theoretical avant-garde responded,” as Margaret Cohen argues (1993, 12), see her book Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (1993).
31. In the foreword to Notes on Conceptualisms, Fitterman calls it “a collection of notes, aphorisms, quotes and inquiries. . . . Notes on Conceptualisms is far from a definitive text and much closer to a primer, a purposefully incomplete starting place” (Fitterman 2009, 9–10).
32. Although speaking specifically of surrealism, Peter Bürger famously makes this claim for avant-garde art generally in Theory of the Avant-Garde: “One of the decisive changes in the development of art that the historical avant-garde movements brought about consists in this new type of reception that the avant-gardiste works of art provokes. The recipient’s attention no longer turns to a meaning of the work that might be grasped by a reading of its constituent elements, but to the principle of construction” (1984, 81).
33. See Grossman 1992 for a history of the publication and critical reception of Benjamin in America.
34. In discussing Benjamin’s Trauerspiel, Bürger lays out the issue with respect to allegory like this: “As one attempts to analyze the allegory concept into its components, the following schema results: 1. The allegorist pulls one element out of the totality of the life context, isolating it, depriving it of its function. Allegory is therefore essentially fragment and thus the opposite of the organic symbol. . . . 2. The allegorist joins the isolated reality fragments and thereby creates meaning. This is posited meaning; it does not derive from the original context of the fragments” (1984, 69). Owens similarly writes that “allegorical imagery is appropriated imagery; the allegorist does not invent images but confiscates them. He lays claim to the culturally significant, poses as its interpreter. And in his hands the image becomes something other (allos = other + agoreuei = to speak). He does not restore an original meaning that may have been lost or obscured: allegory is not hermeneutics. Rather, he adds another meaning to the image. If he adds, however, he does so only to replace: the allegorical meaning supplants an antecedent one; it is a supplement” (1992, 54).
35. Owens speaks of “yet a third link between allegory and contemporary art: in strategies of accumulation, the paratactic work composed by the simple placement of ‘one thing after another’”: “And does not collage, or the manipulation and consequent transformation of highly significant fragments, also exploit the atomizing, disjunctive principle which lies at the heart of allegory?” (1992, 56, 61).
36. Sayre Greenfield writes of “the allegorical recuperation of associative disjunctions” (1998, 87).
37. This echoes Ernst’s analysis in “What Is Surrealism?” “Thus, when it is said of the Surrealists that they paint constantly changeable dream-reality, this does not mean that they paint a copy of their dreams (that would be descriptive, naïve naturalism), or that each individual builds his own little world of dream elements, conducting himself amicably or maliciously within it (that would be a ‘flight from time’) but that they freely, bravely, and self-confidently move about in the borderland between the internal and external worlds which are still unfamiliar though physically and psychologically quite real (‘sur-real’), registering what they see and experience there, and intervening where their revolutionary instincts advise them to do so” (1970b, 135–136). See also chapter 7 of Margaret Cohen’s book Profane Illumination for a discussion of how Benjamin’s work gradually becomes “a striking but thoroughly intelligible synthesis more resembling Eisensteinian montage than the transformations of the Surrealist image” (1993, 178).
38. I realize that the terms collage and montage are often used interchangeably, even in professional art criticism, but as I use them here, they refer to very different formal techniques. I rely on the definitions for the two terms given in the Oxford English Dictionary:
collage: An abstract form of art in which photographs, pieces of paper, newspaper cuttings, string, etc., are placed in juxtaposition and glued to the pictorial surface.
montage: The act or process of producing a composite picture by combining several different pictures or pictorial elements so that they blend with or into one another.
Most basically, the term collage retains the sense of a single pictorial space coinhabited by juxtaposed fragments that remain separated from one another; montage implies an attempt to “blend” such fragments into a “composite” picture.
39. According to Benjamin, “[the puzzle] is the gesture, in particular, of the allegorist” (1999, 368).
40. For a discussion of why montage “is a category that permits a more precise definition of a particular aspect of the concept of allegory,” see Bürger 1984, 73–82.
41. Greenfield’s comment on the issue implies surrealism without actually mentioning it: “The mutability of metaphor into metonymy allows allegory, despite the inherent conservatism of allegorical thinking, to construct some radical disjunction. Allegories, by linking two or more different topics metaphorically, allow literary texts to unite topics that would be incompatible in a reader’s normal patterns of association” (1998, 136). The characterization of surreal narrative as a riddle suggests a deeper homology between surrealism and allegory: both are founded ultimately on the analogical structure of the pun. Hence, Lippard declares that “the basis of [the surreal] collage esthetic is the pun” (1970, 3); Quilligan tells us that “allegorical narrative unfolds as a series of punning commentaries, related to one another on the most literal of verbal levels—the sound of words” (1979, 22). And hence back to my “shoe on the foot of the mountain” example: what makes the “radical disjunction” of this surreal image work is precisely the implied pun on the word foot. For Quilligan, the fact that “allegory . . . names the fact that language can signify many things at once” forces an intensified reading dynamic: “The presence of the pun makes it not only easier for the reader to see connections across the surface of the text, but necessary” (1979, 26, 41). Greenfield goes so far as to argue that “genres [such as allegory] do not describe texts but ways of reading” (1998, 48).
42. Benjamin famously treats of the temporal aspect of allegory in the Trauerspiel. In a discussion of the difference between allegory and symbol, he quotes Joseph von Görres: “I have no use for the view that the symbol is being, and allegory is sign. . . . We can be perfectly satisfied with the explanation that takes the one as a sign for ideas, which is self-contained, concentrated, and which steadfastly remains itself, while recognizing the other as a successively progressing, dramatically mobile, dynamic representation of ideas which has acquired the very fluidity of time” (quoted in 1998, 165).
43. For Benjamin’s discussion of “the analogy between the endeavours of the baroque and those of the present and the recent past,” see Benjamin 1998, 54–56.
44. See Benjamin’s essay “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” (1999, esp. 207–209). The phrase “mythologie moderne” is taken from Rolf Tiedemann’s essay “Dialectics at a Standstill” (1999); for his comments on Benjamin and surrealism, see pages 932–935.
45. For discussion of Benjamin and allegory, surrealism, and montage, see Bürger 1984, 68–82. Susan Buck-Morss discriminates two “dimensions” of montage in Benjamin’s work: a “destructive, critical dimension” and a “constructive dimension” (1991, 77). In the former, based on Dada photomontage, “the image’s ideational elements remain unreconciled, rather than fusing into one ‘harmonious perspective’” (67); this sort of montage “makes visible the gap between sign and referent” (68). Constructive montage, in contrast, was historically “preceded by the Chinese Puzzle which, because its juxtaposed elements were not randomly arranged but cohered around a central idea, was the true ur-phenomenon of the principle of montage as a constructive principle” (74). It goes without saying that these two types of montage match up with Lippard’s, Fletcher’s, and Krauss’s comments on surrealism, collage, montage, and allegory given earlier. For Buck-Morss’s comments on Bürger, see pages 225–227.
46. “Baroque translators delighted in the most arbitrary coinings such as are encountered among contemporaries, especially in the form of archaisms, in which its is believed one can reassure oneself of the wellsprings of linguistic life. Such arbitrariness is always the sign of a production in which a formed expression of real content can scarcely be extracted from the conflict of the forces which have been unleashed. In this state of disruption the present age reflects certain aspects of the spiritual constitution of the baroque, even down to the details of its artistic practice” (Benjamin 1998, 55).
47. “Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things,” for “in the field of allegorical intuition the image is a fragment, a ruin,” albeit a “consciously constructed” one (Benjamin 1998, 178, 176, 182). Hence, Hillis Miller’s statement that “in allegory, writing and personification reveal, bring out into the open as Scheinen, the eternal disjunction between the inscribed sign and its material embodiment”: “What seems specific to allegory is a larger degree of manifest incompatibility between the tenor and the vehicle than we tend to expect in symbol, where the ‘material’ base and the ‘spiritual’ meaning are thrown together, as the name suggests, with some implication of overlapping, consubstantiality, or participation. In allegory one does not directly suggest the other” (1981, 365, 357).
See also Deborah Madsen: “Classical allegorism . . . presupposes an arbitrary relation of similitude between the text and its referent” (1996, 50, and esp. 121–129); Carolynn Van Dyke: “Allegory bases itself frankly on the disruption of signifier and signified, and therefore renounces the illusions of semantic unity and directness promoted by such modes as symbolism” (1985, 27); and Jonathan Culler: “The symbol is supposed to contain in itself all the meaning we produce in our semantic transformations. It is a natural sign in which signifiant and signifié are indissolubly fused, not an arbitrary or conventional sign in which they are linked by human authority or habit. Allegory, on the other hand, stresses the difference between levels, flaunts the gap we must leap to produce meaning, and thus displays the activity of interpretation in all its conventionality. Either it presents an empirical story which does not itself seem a worthy object of attention and implies that we must, in order to produce types of significance that tradition leads us to desire, translate the story into another mode, or else it presents an enigmatic face while posing obstacles even to this kind of translation and forces us to read it as an allegory of the interpretive process. . . . Allegory, one might say, is the mode which recognizes the impossibility of fusing the empirical and the eternal and thus demystifies the symbolic relation by stressing the separateness of the two levels, the impossibility of bringing them together except momentarily and against a background of disassociation, and the importance of protecting each level and the potential link between them by making it arbitrary. Only allegory can make the connection in a self-conscious and demystified way” (1975, 229).
See also Gordon Teskey: “In a system of this kind every determination of meaning is rendered unstable by virtue of its almost limitless correspondences with other, potential determinations. These are limited only at the limit, by the arbitrary configuration of the system as totality. . . . If disorder is understood as unrestricted analogy . . . anything can be made to mean anything else; such was the state of crisis reached by allegory, according to Benjamin, in the seventeenth century” (1996, 64–65). And see André Breton: “For me, the strongest [surrealist image] is that which presents the highest degree of arbitrariness” (quoted in Max Ernst 1970a, 130 n. 7). The relevant literature on the differences between symbol and allegory is extensive, stretching from the ancients to Goethe and Coleridge and down to the present day. For a comprehensive historical overview of the issue, see Crisp 2005; for a discussion of its history in German romantic writing, see Todorov 1982, 198–221.
48. It is important to point out here that this aggressive impulse in allegory is considered a good thing. Thus, despite the fact that “allegory views existence, as it does art, under the sign of fragmentation and ruin . . . [it] has to do, precisely in its destructive furor, with dispelling the illusion that proceeds from all ‘given order,’ whether of art or of life: the illusion of totality or of organic wholeness which transfigures that order and makes it seem endurable. And this is the progressive tendency of allegory” (Benjamin 1999, 330, 331). Madsen explains: “The lack of closure is an inevitable concomitant to the arbitrary relation between the sign and its referent that Benjamin sees as characteristic of allegory. But this lack is not to be regretted; the absence of a unitary meaning deprives the sign both of semantic power and of cultural power exercised through the interpreter” (1996, 125).
49. Peter Crisp launches an all-out attack on the notion of allegory as arbitrary; for him, “although there is a distinction worth making between allegory and symbol, it is one of degree rather than kind”: “Metaphor is rooted in our using more familiar or experientially basic concepts to understand less familiar, less experientially basic, concepts. It is thus highly motivated in nature, its motivation residing in the nature of the human mind. Our minds are naturally adapted to dealing directly with everyday forms of embodied experience. When we think metaphorically we project . . . directly constituted conceptual structures, or source domains, onto less directly constituted structures, or target domains. The relationship between source and target domain is thus highly motivated in two ways. First, the source domain is typically more experientially basic than the target domain. Second, the two domains must share sufficient conceptual structure to allow one to be mapped onto another. Not just any domain can be mapped onto any domain. The relationship between conceptual domains in metaphor is thus highly motivated and non-arbitrary. If allegory is a form of metaphor then it too is highly motivated and non-arbitrary” (2005, 335, 331). Crisp is talking here about metaphors in thinking and by extension in speech, and he uses Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress as an example of a written allegory where the “source” and the “target” domains are eminently mappable. The sorts of obscure and willfully extravagant metaphors and allegories employed by surrealists and later poets, however, are explicitly designed to disrupt conventional, habitual, or even “natural” maps. For the surrealist, it is certain that “any domain can be mapped onto any domain”: this is what makes for the “shock” of the surreal.
50. The phrase “doubleness at the heart” is J. Robert Baker’s (1994, 308). Baker posits two “varieties” of allegory, one based on arbitrariness, the other based on correspondence: the two are “strains that Dante called the allegory of poets and the allegory of theologians. The allegory of poets is an allegory of ‘this for that’ in which the literal sense is a fiction, serving only to express a second, more important meaning. This type of allegory, resting on the disjunction between signifier and signified, between sign and thing, anticipates Saussure’s theory of linguistics in which the relation between these is utterly arbitrary and differential. The allegory of theologians, on the other hand, posits the truth of the literal sense in itself; here literal events reflect a second meaning without themselves being denigrated. Such allegory assumes a correspondence of signifier and signified, a similarity between word and event, between event and meaning” (304–305).
See also Van Dyke 1985, 27, 43; Teskey 1996, 3; and, for an extended discussion of the different types of allegory, Bloomfield 1981. Raymond J. Wilson III extends the issue to a discussion of the differences between metaphoric and metonymic symbols: in the former, which are based on arbitrary conjunctions of images or objects, “the literal expression is discarded” when the metaphor is understood; in the latter, based on part-to-whole substitutions, “no such discarding occurs” (1994a, 293). Surrealism, then, can be understood as treating metaphors as if they were metonymies, as if figures of substitution/replacement were figures of contiguity. The surrealist “foot” of the mountain would not be discarded as it dissolves into its tenor; instead, it would slip on a shoe.
51. In a discussion of Roman Jakobson and Paul Ricoeur, Wilson describes allegory as “metaphoric symbolism,” which he argues “confers the advantage of flexibility. In metaphoric symbolism, almost any word can become the vehicle for any tenor, provided that the writer constructs a text that implies the tenor by cuing the reader to some corner of overlapping meaning” (1994a, 300; see also Wilson 1994b).
52. In one of the more provocative passages in The Arcades Project, Benjamin argues for a fast correspondence between allegorical form and the commodity fetish: “The brooder’s memory ranges over the indiscriminate mass of dead lore. Human knowledge, within this memory, is something piecemeal—in an especially pregnant sense: it is like the jumble of arbitrarily cut pieces from which a puzzle is assembled. An epoch fundamentally averse to brooding has nonetheless preserved its outward gesture in the puzzle. It is the gesture, in particular, of the allegorist. Through the disorderly fund which his knowledge places at his disposal, the allegorist rummages here and there for a particular piece, holds it next to some other piece, and tests to see if they fit together—that meaning with this image or this image with that meaning. The result can never be known beforehand, for there is no natural meditation between the two. But this is just how matters stand with commodity and price. The ‘metaphysical subtleties’ in which the commodity delights, according to Marx, are, above all, the subtleties of price formation. How the price of goods in each case is arrived at can never quite be foreseen, neither in the course of their production nor later when they enter the market. It is exactly the same with the object in its allegorical existence. At no point is it written in the stars that the allegorist’s profundity will lead it to one meaning rather than another. And though it once may have acquired such a meaning, this can always be withdrawn in favor of a different meaning. The modes of meaning fluctuate almost as rapidly as the price of commodities. In fact, the meaning of the commodity is its price; it has, as commodity, no other meaning. Hence, the allegorist is in his element with commercial wares. As flâneur, he has empathized with the soul of the commodity; as an allegorist, he recognized in the ‘price tag,’ with which the merchandise comes on the market, the object of his broodings—the meaning. The world in which this newest meaning lets him settle has grown no friendlier. An inferno rages in the soul of the commodity, for all the seeming tranquility lent by the price” (1999, 368–369).
53. Bill Brown calls allegory Jameson’s “master trope” (2005, 742). The term transcoding appears in Jameson’s book The Political Unconscious (1981), where it operates in the context of critical methodology: “The concept of mediation has traditionally been the way which dialectical philosophy and Marxism itself have formulated their vocation to break out of the specialized compartments of the (bourgeois) disciplines and to make connections among the seemingly disparate phenomena of social life generally. If a more modern characterization of mediation is wanted, we will say that this operation is understood as a process of transcoding: as the invention of a set of terms, the strategic choice of a particular code or language, such that the same terminology can be used to analyze and articulate two quite distinct types of objects or ‘tests,’ or two very different structural levels of reality” (40).
54. As Greenfield puts it, “The metaphors of allegory can, in a limited sense, also create new associations by bringing concepts usually confined to separate discourses into the same discourse”: “Allegories, by linking two or more different topics metaphorically, allow literary texts to unite topics that would be incompatible in a reader’s normal patterns of association” (1998, 111, 136). See also Owens: “Let us say for the moment that allegory occurs whenever one text is doubled by another. . . . In allegorical structure, then, one text is read through another, however fragmentary, intermittent, or chaotic their relationship may be; the paradigm for the allegorical work is thus the palimpsest” (1992, 54–55).
55. This depthlessness is close in spirit to Fletcher’s notion of an “allegory without ideas,” the evolution of which he traces (via Benjamin on the baroque) from its inception in mid-seventeenth-century nominalist skepticism on down to the “bland semiosis” characteristic of the “surgically deformed” allegory of postmodernism. See also, however, his critique of the classical definition of allegory as “continued metaphor” (2006, 94–95).
56. For Jakobson’s classic statement on the issue, see Jakobson 1987, 62–94 and 95–119. As Madsen succinctly puts it, “A figurative language that is structured into metaphoric equivalences and organized in a subordinate fashion fits the definition of allegory proposed by the Latin rhetoricians” (1994, 35). See also Fineman: “In Roman Jakobson’s linguistic formula, which here simply picks up classical rhetorical theory (along with the awkward metaphoricity of the definition of metaphor itself), allegory would be the poetical projection of the metaphoric axis onto the metonymic, where metaphor is understood as the synchronic system of differences which constitutes the order of language (langue), and metonymy as the diachronic principle of combination and connection by means of which the structure is actualized in time in speech (parole; cf. Taleus: ‘continued metonymia is also allegory’). . . . No other figure so readily lays itself out on the grid constructed out to the hypothesized intersection of paradigmatic synchrony and syntagmatic diachrony, which is to say that no other figure so immediately instances the definition of linguistic structure which was developed by Jakobson out of Saussure and the Russian Formalists, and that has since been applied to all the so-called ‘sciences of man,’ from anthropology (Levi-Strauss) to semiotics (Barthes) to psychoanalysis (Lacan)” ([1980] 1981, 31–32).
1. Entomologies: Louis Zukofsky and Lorine Niedecker
1. See Davidson 1991, Dembo 1979, Taggart 1979, and Vanderborg 1997.
2. Zukofsky defines his poetics in “An Objective”: “An Objective: (Optics)—The lens bringing the rays from an object to a focus. That which is aimed at. (Use extended to poetry)—Desire for what is objectively perfect, inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars” (2000, 12, italics in original).
3. “Even now, in an era longing to resist the mounting pressures of orthodoxy and fundamentalism, we continue to brand Surrealism as an orthodoxy of it own, albeit an orthodoxy of the bizarre. In the eyes of its Anglo-American critics, Surrealism still tends to designate a quaint set of formal practices that produced the movement’s unusual, if obfuscatory, visual and verbal works, as well as its broader ‘utopian’ program of dream and revolution” (Eburne 2003, 148).
4. See also Tashjian’s study of William Carlos Williams’s reaction to surrealism in “Williams and Automatic Writing: Against the Presence of Surrealism” (1996). The special issue of the William Carlos Williams Review in which this essay was published is devoted to Williams and surrealism and is an excellent introduction to the subject.
5. Two recent important studies are Arnold 2001 and Sweet 2003.
6. According to Claudine Frank, “Caillois has received little significant French critical commentary, [and] he is even less discussed at present in the Anglo-Saxon sphere” (2003, 2).
7. Most importantly, the past several years have seen the reappearance—and at times the first appearance—of both Zukofsky’s and Niedecker’s major works, many, if not all, of which had been out of print for years. Niedecker’s collected works, edited by Jenny Penberthy, appeared in 2002, and between 2000 and 2004 the six volumes of The Wesleyan Centennial Edition of the Complete Critical Writings of Louis Zukofsky were published. Both poets were also the subjects of major centennial conferences: the Lorine Niedecker Centenary Celebration 1903–2002 took place October 9–11, 2003, in Milwaukee and the Louis Zukofsky Centennial Conference at Columbia University and Barnard College took place in New York City September 17–19, 2004.
8. Here, the history of the various Norton anthologies of poetry over the past twenty years is instructional. Zukofsky was included in the first edition of The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry in 1973 but was dropped from the second edition in 1988. He subsequently reappeared in the third edition in 2003. He has never appeared in the more comprehensive and general Norton Anthology of Poetry, although he is mentioned as a “theorist” who influenced Michael Palmer in the latter’s biographical sketch in the fifth edition of that anthology in 2005. Niedecker’s first appearance in a Norton anthology was in the 2003 third edition of The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry.
9. To this end, see especially Marjorie Perloff’s essay “‘Barbed-Wire Entanglements’: The ‘New American Poetry,’ 1930–32” ([1995] 1998).
10. “There’s no use wasting yr. time calling me down about Surrealisme—if you had read Mantis, An Interpretation, you’d have found out I think pretty much as you do about Surrealisme—but you haven’t read it” (Zukofsky to Pound, March 15, 1935, in Zukofsky 1987, 165). Pound had complained in an earlier letter that “Surrealism <meaning the yester year frog variety> is a painter’s show / what fahrtin literature has it got<?>” (March 6, 1935, in Zukofsky 1987, 162).
11. Tashjian tells us that “the trans-Atlantic drift of Surrealism was virtually invisible during the 1920’s”: “it was mainly during the 1930’s that the American public came to know the Surrealists, who were then exhibited in American museums and galleries, discussed in symposia and lectures, and published not only in the little magazines and anthologies of the avant-garde but also in the commercial press” (1995, 11, xviii).
12. In what appears to be an uncanny coincidence, Matthew Josephson’s review of the Julien Levy show in the New Republic for February 3, 1932, is followed by a very short story by one Moe Bragin entitled “The Praying Mantis.” In this story, a group of working men—a cabby, a waiter, a cook, and “the owner of the dog”—who says things such as “[Hoover] don’t do nothing about this deepression”—watch a dog attack a praying mantis as they “sit on boxes in the night” behind a “cheap lunch room in a Virginia city” and discuss current politics. The mantis “‘must be one of them bugs the gov’ment brings in to eat germs,’ says the cabby,” who later crushes the wounded insect with his foot (Bragin 1932, 322). The four men complain about the ineffectual policies of the Hoover administration and the Depression in general and conclude that the mantis is better off dead because it will not have to work. I have no idea whether Zukofsky saw either the review or this story, but it reminds one of his call in “‘Mantis’” for the mantis to “Fly . . . on the poor, arise like leaves / The armies of the poor” (1991, 66).
13. Issue number 21 of transition, published in March 1932, featured a section entitled “The Mantic Personality”; see also Pierre Loving’s short story “Praying Insects” in transition, no. 16 (1929). After 1929, Zukofsky would have seen surrealist work in Charles Henri Ford’s Blues, and in September 1932 the English journal This Quarter published a surrealist issue edited by André Breton. In a letter dated February 17 that year, William Carlos Williams recommends that Zukofsky read a review of the Levy show in Fifth Floor Window that he terms “a readable article on Surrealism” (quoted in Tashjian 1995, 10).
14. In a letter to Pound dated April 15, 1933, Zukofsky mentions Dali in a context suggesting a familiarity with what he calls Dali’s “sodomitical” writings—referring perhaps to the 1930 essay “L’Amour” in Le Femme visible (Zukofsky 1987, 147).
15. Breton’s sixth number of Le Surrealisme au service del la revolution, which appeared in May, featured reproductions of Dali’s Gala et L’Angelus de Millet precedent immediatement la venue des anamorphes conique and Meditation sur la harpe, both paintings important, as I explain, with respect to Dali’s interest in praying mantids; and Minotaure number 1 published Dali’s article “Interpretation paranoiaque—critique de l’image obsedante ‘L’Angelus de Millet,’” a text that I argue is also implicated in “‘Mantis.’”
16. “I presume one has to be in a trance to be allowed to see the Surrealistes. However, I’ll try, without getting into a trance” (Zukofsky to Pound, July 12, 1933, in Zukofsky 1987, 151).
17. In his 1973 essay “The Praying Mantis in Surrealist Art,” William L. Pressly of Yale University chronicles the appearance of the insect in the works of Picasso, Dali, Masson, Ernst, Breton, Caillois, and others; I am indebted to his essay for my discussion. For a more recent discussion of the surrealist praying mantis in terms of mimesis, see Harris 2004, 211–218.
18. Pressly writes that “the praying mantis became a central iconographic preoccupation for the Surrealists and their circle primarily as a result of its extraordinary mating ritual in which the female devours the male during or after coitus. Influenced by the writings of Freud and fascinated by his concept of man’s repressed sexuality, the Surrealists found this insect’s cannibalistic nuptial a compelling image of the potential for erotic violence lurking in the darker recesses of the human mind” (1973, 600).
19. Readers can see these images and others I mention in either my article “Petalbent Devils: Louis Zukofsky, Lorine Niedecker, and the Surrealist Praying Mantis” (2006) or Pressly’s “The Praying Mantis in Surrealist Art” (1973) or by Googling them. Works by Ernst from 1935—such as La Joie de Vivre, Celebration of Hunger, and Garden Airplane Trap—continued to feature mantids or mantislike forms.
20. As Tashjian puts it, “By the early 1930s . . . [n]ot the reserved Duchamp or even the forceful Breton but the brash Dali had come to represent Surrealism to most Americans” (1995, 36).
21. See also Lang 1999, 146–161.
22. “It is not surprising that the great similarity between humanity’s organic structure and biological development, combined with the identical external conditions of its physical world, should have considerable resonances in its psychic world, tending to produce within it a minimum number of similar reactions and consequently spawning within every mind the same affective tendencies and primordial passional conflicts” (Caillois 1990, 85).
23. “So it would not be impossible for the fear of castration to be a specific instance of the male’s fear of being devoured by the female during or after copulation: a very precise representation of this is provided objectively by the nuptial habits of the mantids, so great is the symmetry, or better still, the continuity, between nature and human consciousness” (Caillois 1990, 78–79).
24. “Andre Breton, for example, raised praying mantises in Castellane for two years in succession, and Paul Eluard, whom I questioned on the presence in his home of a magnificent collection of mantises, admits to seeing the ideal sexual relationship in their love-making habits. . . . The case of Dali is even more applicable because of the impressive, comprehensive document on the relationship between love and homophagy that goes to make up his paranoiaco-critical study of Millet’s Angelus; he was forced to bring in the fearsome insect that in fact unites these two savage desires” (Caillois 1990, 80).
25. The subject–rhyme here of Pound’s Circe and Dali’s praying mantis in “his paranoiaco-critical study of Millet’s Angelus” (Caillois 1990, 80) is worth noting: in the same letter (March 1935) to Pound where Zukofsky berates Pound for not reading “‘Mantis,’ an Interpretation,” Zukofsky writes that “in Mr. Pound’s last ‘Cantos’ I have found nothing to move the cockles of my heart or the network of my brain, outside of 5 lines (perfect lines) given over to Hathor and her box and some musical metaphysics of the dark Cavalcanti” (in Zukofsky 1987, 164). This directs us to Pound’s Canto XXXIX (published in Eleven New Cantos XXXI–XLI in 1934), a poem given over entirely to the Circe episode (book X) of the Odyssey. Pound describes here the heavily opiated, densely sexual atmosphere of Aiaia. Zukofsky suggests that Circe, she “of the velvet marge” (Pound 1993, 193), is a type of the sexual predator that the surrealists objectified as the praying mantis.
26. Dali states here that “one loves completely when one is ready to eat the beloved woman’s shit” (1998, 191). In 1933, Zukofsky writes to Pound of “financiers, their sodomy confined to the female (vide Dali)” (April 15, 1933, in Zukofsky 1987, 147). For a discussion of Dali’s interest in praying mantids, see Ades 1982, 140–149.
27. “Nothing could be more surprising than the punctilious documentary of the postures of sleep, especially in the case of love, these postures being always those of annihilation or the intrauterine curvature, and even more so when they are those adopted by the happy ones who fall asleep in the passionate and cosmic 69 position or in that of the female praying mantis devouring the male” (Dali 1998, 191).
28. “The Art Nouveau decorative objects disclose to us, in the most tangible way, the persistence of dream through reality. . . . In the hideous street, gnawed on all sides by the perpetual torment of a corrosive reality that is strengthened and upheld by the abominable modern art with its appalling quality, in the hideous street, the delirious and completely beautiful ornamentation of the Art Nouveau mouths of the Metro appears to us a perfect symbol of spiritual dignity” (Dali 1998, 192–193). In “The Object as Revealed in Surrealist Experiment,” published originally in English in the issue of This Quarter edited by Breton in 1932, Dali describes “the post-mechanical open street, where the most beautiful and hallucinating iron vegetation sprouts those electric blooms still decorating in the ‘Modern Style’ the entrances to the Paris Metro” (1998, 236).
29. “In addition to the well-known symbolic eroticism of mystical ecstasies to which the posture of the woman in L’Angelus corresponds, you will agree with me that the position of the hands brought up together under the chin and leaving exposed especially the legs and the belly, is a common posture. . . . This posture entails in my opinion very distinct exhibitionistic, expectant, and aggressive factors. In fact, we are dealing with a typical posture of expectation. It is an immobility that is a prelude to imminent violence. It is also the classical springing posture of animals, and it is one that is common to kangaroos and boxers; and above all, it is the one dramatically illustrated by the praying mantis (spectral posture)” (Dali 1998, 290–291).
30. For a reading of the politics of Dali’s painting, see Mendelson 2003.
31. Julien Levy makes one of the oddest conjunctions of surrealism and praying mantids in Memoirs of an Art Gallery, where he describes Arthur Cravan: “Bravado, Cravan, how you are transformed! Into a praying mantis that flew into my room years ago and nibbled into my ear that you were Arthur Cravan, friend of our best friends, father of my first wife’s half-sister. Are you praying now, or preying, out in the wild? . . . And there was the time there appeared on my wall a mantis, clawing a painting by Yves Tanguy—if it was you. Then that summer night in Yves’ own room when we spoke of you and mantis again, you flew in the window. We preserved you in a jelly jar. Jean Cocteau thought you very genial, a Knight of his Round Table. Marcel Duchamp thought you were Marcel Duchamp. He told me this once, and, unbelievably, another mantis flew by. When I was in Greenwich Village, a girl who said her name was Margie (she later explained it was a marginal name) rang the doorbell, boldly put her foot in the door, and asked, ‘Did you call my call house?’ A mantis was tangled in her hair and she was your joking daughter Fabienne, quite disguised. I have a short film of your fight with the world champion prizefighter Jack Johnson. It was mislaid for a period, and the day it turned up, I swear a mantis entered my house again” (1977, 39). Levy includes in his book a photograph of Cravan juxtaposed to a photograph on the facing page by Jonathan Bayer of a praying mantis crawling down a curtain. The caption reads, “‘Arthur, Arthur.’”
32. As Zukofsky says of the mantis, “There should be to-day no use for a description of it / Only for a ‘movement’ emphasizing its use” (1991, 71).
33. Jung’s “Psychology and Poetry” appeared in the June 1930 issue of transition.
34. Rachel Blau DuPlessis pointed out to me recently that in his definition of the objective in “An Objective,” Zukofsky never mentions a camera, only a lens. Although this is true, the camera is nevertheless implied in a number of other places in Zukofsky’s writing where he explains his poetics. Hence, in “A” 6, when he speaks of the elements of his poetry’s “common air,” he writes, “The thought in the melody moves— / A line, flash of photoplay” (1991, 27). Likewise, in the preface to Bottom: On Shakespeare, he tells us that “even a photographic eye—a lens—is placed by some human” (2002, 10). I would argue that although the “lens” in Zukofsky’s definition need not exclusively refer to a camera lens, it accommodates itself to the latter meaning as well as to any others.
35. For a discussion of Niedecker’s early writing and her relationships to both Zukofsky and surrealism, see Penberthy 1992. See also Nicholls 1996.
36. According to Jean Claude Teyssier, a folk name for the praying mantis is “the Devil’s riding horse” (1997, 44; cf. Niedicker’s line “Devil the ash trays show it”).
37. According to Mark Scroggins, “‘Mantis,’ an Interpretation” “argues that the sestina form, as complex and seemingly arbitrary as it might appear, is ultimately the only form that can capture ‘The actual twisting / of many and diverse thoughts,’ what Zukofsky in ‘“Mantis”’ itself called ‘thought’s torsion’” (2007, 154). See also Taggart 1979.
2. Epistemologies: Clark Coolidge
1. For a parallel discussion of Williams’s poem in light of Cézanne, see Altieri 1989, 222–236.
2. See Silliman1978, 19.
3. There is reason to believe that Coolidge had such a multivolume, large-scale project in mind: in a letter to Paul Metcalf dated 1974, he speaks of his “big work” as “a bringing together of all the areas of interest to me over the years, rewriting & metamorphosing all that material through my own natural bent for process, to find what form(s) it all finally takes” (Coolidge 1978c, 29). And in an earlier letter he provides Metcalf with this chart, which he titles “A Possible Range”:
Here Coolidge’s accretive vocabulary—in which “particles” combine into “aggregates” of “elements,” that then become structural metaphors (i.e., allegories) for “physical states of matter”—is presumably derived from the mineralogical sciences. See Coolidge 1978c, 23.
4. See, for instance, interviews of Coolidge by Barrett Watten in This (Coolidge 1978b) and Lee Bartlett in Talking Poetry (Coolidge 1987).
5. See, for instance, Longenbach 1997 on the “two different kinds of poems in The Tennis Court Oath” (112).
6. See Suarez-Toste 2004 for a discussion of Ashbery as a “surrealist American.” Ellen Levy’s Criminal Ingenuity: Moore, Cornell, Ashbery, and the Struggle Between the Arts (2011) offers an overview of surrealism’s reception in the United States, and see especially her discussion of Ashbery in chapter 4, “Surrealism in ‘the Second, Open Sense’: The Poets of the New York School” (125–157).
7. It might be argued that Coolidge in essence domesticates surrealism, as he suggests in a letter to Paul Metcalf from 1973: “I was thinking, this summer when we were standing in Arches national Park amid all that torsion of red sandstone up in the sun, about maybe did Tanguy think a world of rocks was ‘surreal’ only because he’d never seen one? & there it is right out there for all to see. And none the less enigmatic for all that, in fact more the so [sic]” (Coolidge 1978c, 27).
8. Perloff calls “Europe” “a kind of Surrealist cadaver exquis” (1981, 269).
9. “I did some works in 1966, which appeared in Space, where I was even trying to see the resistances. They were little constellations of words, maybe five or six, spaced out rather than in vertical structures. To see what kind of resistance words had against going together, to somehow tap that energy” (Coolidge 1987, 3).
10. “Also, another thing I was interested in, at the time, was making a poem of words that don’t go together in some ways, that have a resistance, that they don’t go. That kind of energy. As that word ‘ohm’ has to do, in a way, with electrical resistance” (Coolidge 1978a, 163). Watten claims that “Clark Coolidge must be given credit for realizing the possibilities of extension of a syntax of ‘arrangement,’ although a number of writers have preceded him in recognizing its possibilities for art. . . . Coolidge’s extension of this possibility proceded [sic] in a deliberate, step-by-step manner over the course of his work” (1985, 89).
11. According to the American Heritage Dictionary (1982 edition), a trilobite is a fossil “marine arthropod . . . having a segmented exoskeleton divided by grooves or furrows into three longitudinal lobes” (hence “tri-lobe”).
12. Note the aural dimension realized by the poem as well: three strong beats followed by three strong beats followed by a line of dactylic dimeter. Lines 2, 3, and 4 tend to resolve themselves into a single line both aurally and visually in that their single words are spaced so as to make a single diagonal “line.”
13. The poem in its entirety reads:
grammar a granite
which toddler
so ban
cram ifs which more
tie modes
so one
eye tea half average
whens
gore smug
(Coolidge 1970, 70)
14. As Charles Bernstein puts it, in the poems in Space “meaning seems to lie in the surface. The (outer) surface has collapsed onto—become—the (inner) meaning: so that meaning does not accompany the surface of words but is simultaneous with it” (1978, 5).
15. Watten details this feature of Coolidge’s work: “The breakthrough in [The Maintains] is Coolidge’s use of an ‘equivalency principle’ in the line that demands a larger form. The syntax of statement in the poem is not only word-to-word (as in ‘jars jars jars’) but line-to-line. . . . There is a metalinguistic architecture, derived from the dictionary definition, behind every line” (1985, 95–96).
16. Silliman calls this procedure “aiming”: “In The Maintains, Coolidge distills this process of aiming, of direction. . . . Alter the aiming element of the terms, the direction, and you alter the basic nature of the image-track. As much as anything, this is the discovery and thrust of The Maintains” (1978, 21).
17. Smithson quotes P. W. Bridgman’s The Nature of Thermodynamics to the effect that “‘the crystal is the seat of greater disorder than the parent liquid’” (1979, 17).
3. A=L=L=E=G=O=R=I=E=S: Peter Inman, Myung Mi Kim, Lyn Hejinian
1. Charles Borkhuis argues for a “bridge between surrealism and recent textual poetry” by tracing what he calls a “linguistic” or “syntactical” “parasurrealism” in American writing that derives less, he says, from Breton than from “tangential writers, influenced by surrealism but antithetical to its orthodoxy—such as Artaud, Bataille, Leiris, Michaux, Celan, and Paz—[who] advance a critical, antiabsorptive strain of writing that rips at the fabric of phenomenological perception, availing itself of textual poetry’s more syntactical excesses and differences. This is a distinction that goes unaddressed by Watten and Bernstein, whose only example of surrealistic writing is the poetry of Breton” (2000, 245). Borkhuis generalizes the differences between surrealism and language writing: “Philosophically, surrealism postulates an ideal or absolute reality—a super-reality toward which all of its actions are directed. . . . This philosophy of essence keeps orthodox surrealism on a vertical axis, working to transform base metals into the alchemical gold of a truer reality, whereas ‘Language’ poetry insists on a horizontal axis of multiple meanings and constructed ‘selves’” (244).
2. Both Borkhuis and David Arnold work hard to redeem surrealism for language poetics by claiming that writers such as Watten, Silliman, and Bernstein tend to “abbreviate” their accounts of surrealism either by focusing exclusively on Breton as spokesperson for the group or by “engaging Surrealism only at the level of its aspirations” (Arnold 2007, 14, 16). Building on Peter Nicholls’s insight that “the accommodation of Surrealism by American poets turns on a distinction between those who followed André Breton in an ‘orthodox’ fashion—yielding primarily to its allure as a poetics of the inner life—and those whose unorthodox interpretation led to its absorption as a ‘practice of writing’” (as summarized in Arnold 2007, 13), Arnold argues that a “Surreal-O-bjectivist nexus” informs language poetics. He calls surrealism “a negative exemplum for the early poetics of Language writing. In this context, Surrealism stands routinely accused of expressivism, of leaving writing at the service of the subjective interior” (2007, 15). He goes on to quote Charles Bernstein’s criticism of surrealism’s “underlying psychologism” (19) and claims that “the materialism of Bernstein, Watten and others precludes Surrealist writing from critique on the grounds that it fails to register the substance of language and the materiality of writing” (23).
3. See Silliman’s blog for Friday, August 8, 2008, at http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search?q=six+lectures.
4. “Surrealism was above all a defense of the self and its value in art. And Surrealism is the movement involving method par excellence. While the method was continually being worked out, it never rested in a fixed social role. The Surrealists were addressing a great instability in like terms. When conditions changed, the moment of efficacy of ‘the self’ disappeared, and the content of Surrealist method was irrevocably changed” (Watten 1985, 35).
5. “The Constructivist moment is itself prefigured—Breton might say ‘predicted’—in the essay on Surrealism and [the journal] L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E in Total Syntax, when Watten argues that Surrealism’s ‘defense of the self’ must be superseded by a turn to reflexivity. . . . Reflexivity forges the link between Surrealism and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, amongst the early articles in which are to be found ‘a series of reflexive positions’ (p. 50). These positions both acknowledge the mediation of the self in language and seek to re-establish the ‘dialectical frame’ that had been lost from post-war American interpretations of Surrealism” (Arnold 2007, 140).
6. “The poem is basically ‘about’ Smith’s discovery, but we are not going to know that in any literal way. Rather there is a mode of consideration of the ‘initial,’ which having become psychological is identical to the writer. The event of the poem is less history than the present being constructed in the work; perhaps this is the only way that history can be known. The ‘statement’ of the poem is the poet’s discovery of the materials and his breakthrough into the past, which is the discovery of himself” (Watten 1985, 134).
7. Mark Wallace warns us that “of all the writers associated with language poetry, P. Inman may be the most severe. . . . While it’s always a mistake to suggest that any writer can ultimately serve as a paradigm for a whole field of literary activity, Inman’s work puts into action, relentlessly, some of the ideas most fundamentally associated with language poetry” (2006–2007, 1).
8. Compare Gordon Teskey’s point that allegorical texts demand “a reader who adheres unreservedly to the crushing exigencies of the poem’s design” (1996, 29). Wallace argues that “to the extent that themes exist in [Inman’s] work, they’re embedded within the structure, not a commentary about the world but a function of the interrelationships of the pattern. So the only way to consider what his work is about is to look at the pattern at how his poems create a shifting framework of words” (2006–2007, 4).
9. “During the 70’s my work underwent a series of syntactical reductions. [It] progressed (some would say regressed) downward through the syntactical chain from the sentence through the phrase & then further into the abyss of the sub-word or non-word. The progression mimed Clement Greenberg’s proposition that modernism entailed a progressive rejection of inessential media conventions until you finally got down to what was essential about painting, or sculpture, etc. . . . I’m actually pretty fuzzy on when I became conscious of that analogy between what was happening in painting & sculpture & what was beginning to happen in writing. But certainly by the late 70’s & early 80’s I was more focused on how those issues were playing out in painting & minimalist sculpture than in writing” (Inman 2003, 21–22).
10. Several critics have also speculated about Inman’s debt to surrealism. According to Benjamin Friedlander, “P. Inman in like manner comes out of surrealism. Surreal compression as in a dream or fairy tale, nightmare decompression of city life and modern warfare” (1990, 91–92). Likewise, Wallace describes Inman’s images as “never quite realistic, tending more towards a disruptive surrealism that highlights absurd juxtapositions” (2006–2007, 2). Because Inman nowhere mentions surrealism as a reference point for his poetics, however, it may be more accurate to trace any influence from surrealism on him through its transformations in abstract expressionism and minimalism, as, for instance, Ashbery argues in the relevant essays in Reported Sightings (1991).
11. The fact that such writing may produce narcotic effects, however, does not imply that it avoids history or politics. As Bernstein goes on to say, “We don’t / in fact escape ideology”:
To escape, however, if only
trope-ically, is not a utopian refusal
to encounter the realpolitic of history: it is a
crucial dialectical turn that allows imaginal place
outside history as we “know” it,
an Archemidian point of imaginative
construction, in which we can energize,
our resources shored.
(1992, 55, italics in original)
12. Bernstein’s recent collection of essays is called Attack of the Difficult Poems (2011).
13. “The primacy of the metaphoric process in the literary schools of Romanticism and Symbolism has recently been repeatedly acknowledged, but it is still insufficiently realized that it is the predominance of metonymy which underlies and actually predetermines the so-called Realist trend” (Jakobson 1987, 114).
14. “Taylor’s time studies. Simple actions isolated & defined, then repackaged into an overall picture of productive motion. The subdivision of the workers’ movement into its smallest possible parts. Cartesian analysis again. A refinement of descriptive skills put to business. So that all the working parts must be recombined, trimmed of fat; inserted into a streamlined sequence of manufacture” (Inman 1991a, 91).
15. As Inman puts it, “There’s more than one way of keeping the work indigestible” (2003, 35).
16. “I didn’t conceive of the language as being non-English or as part of some incipient new language, e.g. ‘zaum.’ For me the language did remain English-bound, although there were also some other languages in the mix as well—a lot of Native American (or Europeanized, ‘pidgin Indian’ versions of same) place names that I’d culled from various places” (Inman 2003, 30).
17. According to Teskey, “America is haunted by names that the aboriginal peoples have given its places, and the old names are preserved because they seem to have a numinous connection to what those places are metaphysically: a vast cultural body, now in an advanced stage of decay. I suggest that a similar but more extensive and layered process, lacking the suddenness of conquest and genocide took place in early Christian Europe, and that its cultural effects were felt through a period coextensive with the trajectory of allegory as the most authoritative literary form” (1996, 72).
18. “To be an effective model of motion narrative itself had to be streamlined. Too much detail & its line bogged down. Buckled. A balance between its acquisitive penchant for accumulating details & effects & its need to embody a speed that had to be struck. The paring down of digressions & detours. The right balance of verisimilitudinous ornamentation & plot. The nailing down of reading & writing positions. Richardson whittled down to Elmore Leonard” (Inman 1991a, 191).
19. This point concurs in spirit with the following comment Silliman made in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book in the early 1980s: “Black American poetry, in general, is not language writing because of what so-called language writing is—the grouping together of several, not always compatible, tendencies within ‘high bourgeois’ literature. The characteristic features of this position within literature have been known for decades: the educational level of its audience, their sense of the historicity of writing itself, [and] the class origin of its practitioners” (1984, 168).
Of course, poets of different ethnicities eventually take up the aesthetics of language writing. Christopher Beach calls Walter K. Lew’s Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry “one of the most encouraging signs that there is a future for poetry in North America. The combination of the linguistic and formal energies of the avant-garde or experimental tradition with the transcultural and interpersonal energies of an expanded racial and ethnic context seems to be generating a more radical and more innovative practice than either one is capable of creating and sustaining in isolation” (1999, 185).
20. See, for example, Perloff’s essay “The Word as Such: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry in the Eighties” (in Perloff 1985) and Craig Dworkin’s essay on Writing Is an Aid to Memory, “Parting with Description” (2002).
21. Hejinian qualifies this assertion later in the same essay: “It is impossible to discover any string or bundle of words that is entirely of possible narrative or psychological content. Moreover, though the ‘story’ and ‘tone’ of such works may be interpreted differently by different readers, nonetheless the readings differ within definite limits. While word strings are permissive, they do not license a free-for-all” (2000, 51).
22. As so often in language poetics, Gertrude Stein comes to stand as the originary point for this project: “In Tender Buttons Stein attempted to discover uses of language which could serve as a locus of meaning and even of primary being; to do so she had to disassemble conventional structures through which language, in mediating between us (thought) and the world (things), becomes instead a barrier, blocking meaning, limiting knowledge, excluding experience” (Hejinian 2000, 97).
23. In this sense, the famous title-logo of the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E is itself a figure for allegory—that is, for equivalence projected into contiguity.
24. This series accords with Jakobson’s understanding: “In poetry not only the phonological sequence but, in the same way, any sequence of semantic units strives to build an equation. Similarity superimposed on contiguity imparts to poetry its thoroughgoing symbolic, multiplex, polysemantic essence” (1987, 85).
25. As Charles Olson puts it in “Projective Verse,” “To step back here to this place of the elements and minims of language, is to engage speech where it is least careless—and least logical” (1997, 241).
26. Hejinian claims Stein as a model in this regard; one way to read a work like Tender Buttons, she says, is “philosophical, best seen in terms of phenomenology, insofar as it addresses and tests empirically available material—things which can be viewed ‘objectively,’ which is to say viewed as objects but also viewed in the process of coming into objecthood. . . . If one accepts Merleau-Ponty’s definition of phenomenology, Tender Buttons might be read as a phenomenological masterpiece, a work that guarantees writing a role in the exploration of ‘realness’” (2000, 97).
27. In Joel Fineman’s words, allegory is “representative of the figurality of all language, of the distance between signifier and signified, and correlatively, the response to allegory becomes representative of critical activity per se” ([1980] 1981, 27).
28. Compare Hejinian’s thought on what she terms “radical discontinuities”: “I have talked from time to time in the past about gaps, gaps between sentences, for example, and how one thinks across them. Gaps are sometimes essential to my work, although they don’t exclude linkages and turns” (2000, 183).
29. In this, I take seriously Hejinian’s statement in her essay “Writing Is Written” that “all theory is most inventive when ascribed in retrospect” (in Hejinian 2000, 28).
30. “Allegory depicts what has been undepicted in a depiction. To do so it cannot proceed except across temporal gaps. It requires time travel. This allegorical activity is not hierarchical or totalizing; it is horizontal, a process requiring what Jameson likes to term cognitive mapping, but the mapping isn’t so much a spatialization as an historicization, by which I mean an exercising of historical consciousness, an act of temporal contextualization and/or projection. The temporality it transports might as easily be that of what-might-come-about as that of what-has-been” (Hejinian 2011b, 285).
31. “It isn’t promise of resolution that the allegorical presents but the fact of an irresolvability, an impasse. And it is this impasse—as a negativity rather than a totality (and, indeed, as a register of a collapse of totality)—that, at the moment, gives us the best hope of better things to come” (Hejinian 2011b, 297). See also Hejinian on “matching”: “To match is to take two predictably related elements and make them unpredictably relevant. Matching in this way generates what the Russian formalist writer, Yurii Tynianov, calls oscillating signs, a type of which is the pun. . . . And the oscillating sign is one in which two principal signs jostle for primacy, as in the pun” (2000, 79).
32. For Hejinian, Stein, with her explosive logics, is the consummate allegorist: “It is in the nature of the allegorical that contradictions come into being. In generating a dialectic situation, it preserves those contradictions. And contradictoriness has expansive force; it is, for example, built into art as the immortal feature of mortality, the endlessness of leaving it that adds to it. And, as Gertrude Stein represents it in all the major works from Tender Buttons on, allegorical contradictoriness of this expansive kind exists even (or perhaps especially) at the level of the utterly quotidian, mundane, or even trivial” (2011b, 294).
33. See Terry Eagleton’s discussion of how “it was one of the Russian Formalists . . . —the linguist Roman Jakobson—who was to provide the major link between Formalism and modern-day structuralism” (1983, 98).
34. “While metonymy maintains the intactness and discreteness of particulars, its paratactic perspective gives it multiple vanishing points. Deduction, induction, extrapolation, and juxtaposition are used to make connections” (Hejinian 2000, 148–149).
35. “To suggest that there is a relationship between grammar and landscape in Stein’s work—or to suggest that we can usefully imagine one in order to understand the meaning of a form of poetic language in her writing—is really not an imposition, since landscape and grammar were what Stein herself was simultaneously writing and thinking about (the two for her are almost inseparable) during the twenties and early thirties, the years in which she wrote a number of plays (many of them included in Operas and Plays), Lucy Church Admirably, and the works collected in How to Write” (Hejinian 2000, 109).
36. For Hejinian, landscape writing also involves time; she says that in Writing Is an Aid to Memory she “attempted to explore some epistemological relationships that hold time to language and language to time. . . . [M]y interest was in building time. I wanted to release the flow of accumulated time in syntax and thereby to make time happen. Obversely, I wanted to release the flow of accumulated syntax in time and thereby make sentences (and their concomitant thoughts) happen. In both cases, I felt that formations of knowledge could be made perceptible—offering a picture of knowledge underway [sic]” (2000, 22).
37. “Any given allegorical figure is engaged in a temporal configuration, a constellating of temporally-charged discourses. To think of the allegorical as ahistorical and transcendent is to misunderstand it” (Hejinian 2011b, 288).
38. “Allegory is achieved through conjuncture, by making use of an occasion. It’s an assemblage. It is also, in the 18th century sense of the term, sentimental—a site of unexpressed, because overwhelming, complexity of emotion or thought” (Hejinian 2011b, 282–283).
39. I owe this insight to Craig Dworkin. The Piaget fragments appearing in Hejinian’s text are drawn from Genetic Epistemology (Piaget 1970) as follows: “guage means general” from the middle of page 45, where the three words descend vertically down the left margin of the middle of the page; “carried out on the pebbles” from page 17; “children sticks for the smallest sticks,” collaged from several places on page 29; “plus the other birds plus more birds bigger” from different places on page 28; “and make several trios” from page 29; “even a pile of blue tokens” from page 32. The single fragments “tory” and “ysis” appear on page 2 of Piaget’s text.
40. For this Piaget–Chomsky debate and extended commentary, see Language and Learning: The Debate Between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky (Piatelli-Palmarini 1980).
4. Semiologies: Susan Howe
1. The classic study of allegory as the “American bias” is Matthiessen 1941, especially 242–315. For comments on F. O. Matthiessen and a discussion of allegory in American literature before 1900, with special reference to Emerson, see Madsen 2010. See also Madsen 1996 for a look at how “allegory has been the privileged form to which successive generations of American writers have turned” (4) and to find a comprehensive bibliography on the subject up to 1996. Howe herself is an historian of early American literature; referring to one of her own books, she calls Anne Hutchinson “the rose at the threshold of The Birth-mark: unsettling the wilderness in American literary history. In this dark allegory—the world—wild roses are veils before trespass” (1993, 21). Later in the same text, she calls allegory “a grid [an author] can get over” (125). The standard work on the special role of metaphor in conceptions of American history is Slotkin 1973. See White 1999 for the more general role literary tropes play in historical writing. See Schultz 2005, 141–158, for an analysis of how “Susan Howe’s work emerges from a paradoxical crossroads in thinking through the relationship between history and imaginative writing” (157).
2. For an explanation of how Howe’s “documentary collage” operates through “structures of apposition” to furnish both visual and aural analogues of her poem’s themes, see Perloff 1990, 297–310. For Howe’s forms as emblems, see Collis 2006, especially 36–47, and see Ma 2008, 135–153, for a study of Howe’s forms as “ways of knowing things” in a “Serresian paradigm of Western epistemology as a hunt” (139).
3. Peter Nicholls concurs but hears an allusion to Theodor Adorno in the use of this word (2002, 441 n.).
4. As Nicholls puts it, “Howe’s allusions to his theories are lapidary and often difficult to construe, and she seems generally less interested in Peirce as a logician than as a kind of phenomenologist” (2002, 445).
5. “The underlying concept that will enable us to think historically about allegory is not culture but poiesis, or making. Poetic making is the ground on which real relations between allegory and history stand: the production of new things from the material remains of the past” (Teskey 1996, 158).
6. The question of scholarly thoroughness inevitably arises when dealing with Susan Howe’s work. The inclination is to run down every reference and locate every quotation in the service of re-creating the original bibliographic circumstances for the composition of the poems. This is not my intention here, nor is it necessary for my argument, which posits Howe’s text as an instance of postmodern allegory. Although I do treat some of the sources in Pierce-Arrow, I do not pretend to be comprehensive in this regard. However, I sympathize with Nicholls when he admits to “a slight feeling of guilt” in his glossing of one of Howe’s passages, as he puts it, “partly because Howe has no manifest intention of directing us to her source here, but also because the lines she generates from it need no external prop to guarantee their effectiveness” (2002, 451).
7. For convenience in quoting from various works by Peirce, I use a standard and easily available compilation of his works, Philosophical Writings of Peirce (1955), published by Dover and in print continuously since 1940.
8. It is in this context that the remaining piece of Pierce-Arrow’s front matter—a reproduction of two pages from one of Peirce’s notebooks featuring a handwritten list of numbered sentences and a corresponding hand-drawn chart—becomes relevant. All the sentences include prepositional phrases (“Fig. 99 Somebody praises somebody to his face / 100 Somebody does not praise everybody to his face”), each of which Peirce then analyzes in the chart using his idiosyncratic diacritical notation involving circles, dashes, loops, and hatch marks in a systematic interrogation of the operations of the indexical marker to. Likewise, the phrase “It thunders” (reproduced in Pierce-Arrow [2]; see the epigraphs to this section in this chapter) brings together two indices—the pronoun and the sound—and reminds this reader of another reference to indexicality: Queen Gertrude’s “Ay me, what act, / That roars so loud and thunders in the index?” (Hamlet III.4.51–52).
9. Indexes, icons, and symbols compose Peirce’s second trichotomy of signs; see Peirce 1955, 101–102.
10. Most basically: “First is the conception of being or existing independent of anything else. Second is the conception of being relative to, the conception of reaction with, something else. Third is the conception of mediation, whereby a first and second are brought into relation” (Peirce 1955, 322, italics added).
11. As Nicholls puts it, “The ‘Iliadic’ conflicts evoked in Arisbe thus seem to dramatize almost literally Peirce’s notion of resistance and ‘Brute Actuality’” (2002, 446).
12. I have not been able to run down the exact source(s) for these quotations, but they echo various discussions of “fallibilism” in Peirce’s work. See, for example, Peirce 1955, 56–58.
13. “The so-called natural signs, such as weather signs, symptoms of diseases or Sherlock Holmes’s clues are typically indexical signs” (Nöth 2001, 18).
14. See Montgomery 2010, 136–137, for a discussion of Howe’s “Orpheus-like descent” into the library.
15. Peirce: “A philosophy which emphasizes the idea of the One is generally a dualistic philosophy in which the conception of Second receives exaggerated attention; for this One (though of course involving the idea of First) is always the other of a manifold which is not one” (1955, 322–323). According to Irene Portis-Winner, “This category [of Secondness] introduces resistant fact, experience and the unexpected leading to the double consciousness that is forced upon us when becoming aware of ourselves as other. In becoming aware of the not-self we become aware of ourself” (1994, 135).
16. See Portis-Winner 1994 for a discussion of how the “interpenetration of the metaphor and the metonym is, whether by coincidence or design, a kind of Jakobsonian concretization of the Peircian interdependencies of the icon and index” (125).
17. I have no idea whether Howe intended the page-based symmetries in the appearances of these references to Dombey and Son, but they do appear evenly spaced at 24-page intervals throughout the New Directions edition of Pierce-Arrow (1999, 24, 48, and 73). The final reference—the Skewton quotation—appears precisely in the center of the 144-page book: Does the figure of the stroke victim somehow function as the poem’s fulcrum?
18. For an illuminating discussion of the signature as both iconic and indexical, see Bal and Bryson 1991, 190–191.
19. “It seems, then, that the true categories of consciousness are: first, feeling, the consciousness which can be included with an instant of time, passive consciousness of quality, without recognition or analysis; second, consciousness of an interruption into the field of consciousness, sense of resistance, or an external fact, of another something; third, synthetic consciousness, binding time together, sense of learning, thought” (Peirce 1995, 95).
20. For a different but related reading of this passage, see Nicholls 2002, 450.
21. Alternatively, Nicholls interprets Howe’s prosody in “Rückenfigur” as realizing Peirce’s category of Secondness (2002, 455–458).
5. Fictocritical Postlude: The Melancholy of Conceptualism
1. I thank Andres Torres for pointing out this connection to me.