Poetic Machinations: Allegory, Surrealism, and Postmodern Poetic Form 9780231538633

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Polemical Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Etymologies, 1980—the Allegorical Moment
1. Entomologies: Louis Zukofsky and Lorine Niedecker
2. Epistemologies: Clark Coolidge
3. A=L=L=E=G=O=R=I=E=S: Peter Inman, Myung Mi Kim, Lyn Hejinian
4. Semiologies: Susan Howe
5. Fictocritical Postlude: The Melancholy of Conceptualism
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

poetic machinations

Michael Golston Columbia University Press

New York

p o e t i c m a c h i nat i o n s allegory, surrealism, and postmodern poetic form

columbia university pr e ss Publishers Since 1893 new york chichester, west sussex c o p y r i g h t © 2015 columbia university pr e ss all r ights r e served Grateful acknowledgment is made to reprint the following: Excerpt from John Ashbery, The Tennis Court Oath, © 1962 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. “From a Photograph.” By George Oppen, from New Collected Poems, copyright © 1962 by George Oppen. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. “The Red Wheelbarrow.” By William Carlos Williams, from The Collected Poems: vol. 1: 1909–1939, copyright © 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. “Excerpt.” By Susan Howe, from Pierce-Arrow, copyright © 1999 by Susan Howe. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Exerpts from Lorine Niedecker, Collected Works, copyright © 2002. Reprinted by permission of University of California Press. All Louis Zukofsky material copyright © Paul Zukofsky; the material may not reproduced, quoted, or used in any manner whatsoever without the explicit and specific permission of the copyright holder. Reprinted by permission of New Directions and Wesleyan University Press. A version of chapter 1 was published as “Petalbent Devils: Louis Zukofsky, Lorine Niedecker, and the Surrealist Praying Mantis,” Modernism/Modernity 13, no. 2 (2006): 325–347. Copyright © 2006 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission by The Johns Hopkins University Press. A version of chapter 2 was published as “At Clark Coolidge: Allegory and the Early Works,” American Literary History 13, no. 2 (2001): 295–316. Part of chapter 3 was published as “Mobilizing Forms: Lyric, Scrolling Device, and Assembly Lines in P. Inman’s ‘nimr,’ ” in Mark Jeffries, ed., New Definitions of Lyric: Theory, Technology, and Culture, 3–15 (Levittown, Pa.: Garland, 1998).

Special thanks to Peter Inman, for permission to quote from Think of One, copyright © 1986. Myung Mi Kim, for permission to quote from Dura, copyright © 1998. Craig Dworkin, for permission to quote from Strand, copyright © 2005. Charles Bernstein, for permission to quote from A Poetics, copyright © 1992. Clark Coolidge, for permission to quote from Own Face, copyright © 1978; Polaroid © 1975; Quartz Hearts, copyright © 1978; Smithsonian Depositions/Subject to a Film, copyright © 1980; Space, copyright © 1970; The Maintains, copyright © 1974. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Golston, Michael. Poetic machinations : allegory, surrealism, and postmodern poetic form / Michael Golston. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-231-16430-6 (cloth : acid-free paper)— ISBN 978-0-231-53863-3 (ebook) 1. American poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Allegory. 3. Surrealism (Literature) 4. Poetics. I. Title. PS323.5.g65 2015 811′.509—dc23 2014045626 Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

This one’s for Cork.

Self-portrait, by the author’s father, Lawrence (Tuck) Golston (1940)

content s

Polemical Preface Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Etymologies, 1980—the Allegorical Moment 1 1. Entomologies: Louis Zukofsky and Lorine Niedecker

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2. Epistemologies: Clark Coolidge 67 3. A=L=L=E=G=O=R=I=E=S: Peter Inman, Myung Mi Kim, Lyn Hejinian 101 4. Semiologies: Susan Howe

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5. Fictocritical Postlude: The Melancholy of Conceptualism 185 Notes

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Works Cited 231 Index

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The great misunderstandings. Yes. That’s a whole history of art, isn’t it? —Clark Coolidge, “An Interview with Clark Coolidge”

This book sets out to describe a line or, perhaps more accurately, a practice of postmodern American poetry that I maintain is fundamentally allegorical and that early on finds its inspiration in certain aspects of surrealism, to which it later maintains varying degrees of affiliation. The trope plays a key role in American avant-garde poetry in nearly every decade from the 1930s to the present, and poets as distant in time and style as the objectivist Lorine Niedecker, the language writer Lyn Hejinian, and the conceptualist Craig Dworkin can, I argue, be classified as allegorists. During this same ninety-year period, allegory also consistently appears in critical discussions and period histories: it is alternately pronounced the “armature” of modernism (Walter Benjamin, Angus Fletcher); the characteristic signature of postmodernism (Fredric Jameson, Craig Owens); and the principal mode of a kind of post-postmodernism (Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place). Every time a new direction in poetry is announced or discerned over the past hundred years, the trope is invoked: some configuration, whether critical or creative, of the literary avant-garde periodically declares allegory its principal mark of difference. This claim immediately calls for qualification: American avant-garde writers have more often than not condemned allegory as artificial, antique, formalist, reactionary, painterly, “European,” or otherwise degraded. The most familiar branches of experimental or innovative poetry in America— that is, those deriving from Ezra Pound and imagism or from the early

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William Carlos Williams or from objectivist, Black Mountain, Beat, or language poetics, to mention only a few—are not in any overt sense allegorical. Not coincidentally, these movements are also generally not friendly to surrealism.1 The matter is complicated by the fact that allegory has never entirely lost its early affiliations with surrealism, although the philosophical entanglements of the two are problematical: they share certain formal strategies, but not all surrealism is allegorical, not all allegory surreal. The ongoing dynamic between the rhetorical trope and the art movement is part of what I deal with in this book. The trajectory I trace goes like this: carried to American shores along with surrealism during the early 1930s, allegory is embraced for a time by Lorine Niedecker and then largely dropped until rediscovered by John Ashbery in the late 1950s. Clark Coolidge picks up the impulse in the 1960s, and it travels on to certain of the language poets in the 1970s and 1980s and into the works of writers such as Susan Howe and Myung Mi Kim in the 1980s and 1990s, after which it winds up informing present-day conceptualist poetics.2 Along this nearly hundred-year journey, as I said, allegory simultaneously becomes the subject of a great deal of critical consideration—attaining a structuralist cast at midcentury, allegory develops into an important term for deconstructive semiotics and as a means for critics to angle back to writers such as Charles Sanders Peirce, Walter Benjamin, and Roman Jakobson, and it ultimately evolves into a principle concept in discussions of postmodernism and post-structuralism.3 Often described and even used without being named, allegory accrues to itself a number of postmodern myths. For instance, a common conceit in the critical literature concerning allegory is that somehow the social, political, and cultural circumstances of a given historical period account for the period’s proclivity for (or its allergy to) the trope; the scholar uses the absence or presence of allegory in the literature of a given period as a kind of critical thermometer for determining the pitch of the fever, so to speak, of the cultural moment. This is already central to Benjamin’s idea of allegory as the “armature” of particular period aesthetics such as the baroque as well as to Jameson’s notion of the Westin Bonadventure Hotel as an architectural “analogon” for the postmodern subject’s inability to navigate decentered global political environments. According to Stephen Greenblatt, “One discovers that allegory arises in periods of loss, periods in which a once powerful theological, political, or familial authority is threatened

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with effacement” (1981b, viii); or, as Deborah Madsen puts it, echoing an older modernist formulation, allegory “registers a dissociation of sensibility” (1996, 126), appearing, for instance, “as the individual genius valued by Romanticism gives way to the culturally constituted discursive subject prized by poststructuralism” (123). Generally speaking, she says, allegory is “conceived as a way of registering the fact of crisis” (119). Critics thus often strike a moralizing note, construing history as a tragic narrative of ongoing loss while mourning the passing of a mythic time when language supposedly had more “power.” Maureen Quilligan writes that “allegory as a form responds to the linguistic conditions of a culture” (1979, 19): due, she says, to the “context of a renewed concern for language and its special potencies . . . we have regained not only our ability to read allegory, but an ability to write it” (204), and she goes on to declare that allegory “will flourish in a culture that grants to language its previous potency to construct reality” (236). But was language previously—or for that matter ever—more “potent”? And did “we” at some point really lose our ability to read and write allegorically? At this late date, there is something quaint about the idea that language “constructs” reality or that it has levels of “potency” that change from one historical period to another or that a literary trope could have much to do with such momentous circumstances. Sayre Greenfield goes so far as to claim that “allegory, as one of the most complex and indirect forms of reading, reveals the limits of how we think” (1998, 154). This last statement raises many questions. What exactly are the “limits” of my thinking? How would I know when I have reached them? What if there are no limits to thinking? Why should there be? Do all people in every culture fall into allegorizing at the limits of their thinking? How can we know? As it turns out, no one has proven that different languages limit thinking in different ways or, for that matter, that they limit thinking whatsoever or that language in any meaningful way constructs reality or that particular languages have anything to do with particular cultures— that, indeed, language has anything at all to do with culture—or that specific languages carry specific politics or “worldviews” or “epistemologies.” The bulk of theoretical and experimental work done in linguistics over the past half-century suggests otherwise. Language, it turns out, is finally not destiny: Swahili is just as elastic and dynamic as German or Maori or Chinese—and vice versa. No worldview is built into the grammar of

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Hopi. A speaker of Ebonics is neither incapable of saying or thinking things that a speaker of standard English might say or think, nor can she say or think things that a native speaker of Nahuatl can’t say or think. To hold otherwise is not only to ignore decades of scientific research but also to entertain a discredited linguistic essentialism every bit as pernicious as the old racial and cultural essentialisms that everyone in the humanities has worked so hard over the past fifty years to discredit and disavow. The notion that allegory crops up only during periods of cultural crisis is equally untenable—What hard evidence do we have for this assertion? One should probably not extrapolate from the formal structure of a literary trope to a given historical period’s sociopolitical circumstances; this relationship might be the biggest myth of all in the modernist postbag (see, for example, Ezra Pound on the thickness of line in painting as an “analogon” of a culture’s tolerance of usury, which he goes on to describe as a “hormone” that can infect an entire civilization) as well as in the postmodernist post office (Is there finally any real difference between Pound’s “hormonal” analysis and Jameson’s fable about his uneasiness in an edgy new hotel lobby?). Homology itself is grounded on the flimsiest of logical pretenses, the constructing of analogies: it is no wonder that surrealism and allegory are the tikis guarding the structuralist longhouse. One comes away from the literature on allegory distressed by the sheer insouciance with which untested and untestable pronouncements about cognition, language, history, and culture get made. The philosophical excesses of postmodernism are too well known at this point to require any systematic treatment, and at any rate this is not my purpose here. Many grand and ultimately unsupportable claims about allegory were made during the past fifty years, during which time the trope took on transcendental dimensions, explaining everything from the dynamics of money to the structure of language and the nature of consciousness itself. In other words, the term allegory has ended up a keyword in the catalog of the pieties of postmodernism, which has become its own weird old arcade, dusty shops full of the twentieth century’s intellectual Kewpie dolls and the dented helmets of the war before the (culture) war before last, all of it awaiting the demolition team from the latest boulevards project. But I am less interested here in what is true or false regarding theories of allegory and language than in the ways that the philosophical fictions of a period enable, compel, or reflect a shift in poetic sensibili-

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ties. No serious person today believes that the dialects of rural people are nearer to “the language of the heart” and therefore a more fit medium for expressing human sentiments than are the dialects of urban people, but we know that a branch of romantic poetry was founded on just this bad premise. Likewise, the myths of linguistic determinism or the hundred Eskimo words for snow or the homological structure of human societies or the mirror stage of child development at one point made possible—and to some extent still do—certain developments in American poetry and poetics. The truth-value of these claims and theories—all of them discredited long ago, though they are still current in English departments across the land—is not what is at stake here. What is of interest is the literature that they made possible. For the purposes of the present study, then, I take—under consideration—contemporary theories of allegory as seriously as they were taken a quarter of a century ago in order to think about a historical shift in the nature and function of poetic form. I go over what is no doubt familiar ground to some people—if there is a certain nuts-and-bolts quality to what follows, it is because the topic of allegory has largely faded from contemporary scholars’ BlackBerry screens and disciplinary journals: there is these days a whiff of the archaic and the esoteric about an issue that was once, allegorically speaking, burning. However, what I say about contemporary poetry in this book has not, to my knowledge, been said before, which, I hope, is its real contribution. All but two of the eight poets I have chosen to discuss are still alive and writing (Lorine Niedecker and Louis Zukofsky died in 1970 and 1978 respectively). All of them, with the exception of Zukofsky, write a poetry of formal allegory that is signally unlike any poetry written before. The chronological anomaly here is Niedecker, whose work from the early 1930s, derived directly from her encounters with surrealism, was a precursor of—albeit not an influence on—the later poems I treat in this book. I came upon the topic for this study as I was finishing my previous book, Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science (2008), the final chapter of which examines the triadic stanza and the variable foot of W. C. Williams’s late poetry. Beginning in the late 1940s, Williams begins arranging much of his poetry, including large sections of Paterson, into roughly identical stanzas, each comprising three regularly staggered free-verse lines. Some critics have complained about the seeming randomness of this stanza, seeing

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it as marking a decline of formal integrity and purpose in Williams’s poetry, but what struck me about it was precisely its arbitrariness: Williams suggests in a number of places that the stanza signifies “relativity,” for him the primary condition of modern American life—and although this relativity might be easy to see in the “variability” of the variable foot, nowhere does he speak of the rationale behind his three staggered lines. It is as if his decision to cast his poetry into triads was as “relative” or arbitrary as any other choice might have been.4 But, more to the point, I came to realize that in these poems form works allegorically: the triadic stanza and the relative foot themselves “imply another set of actions, circumstances, or principles, whether found in another text or perceived at large,” to quote the definition of allegory in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (“Allegory” 1993, 32). In an abrupt departure from any previous mode of modernist poesis, Williams begins in the late 1940s to work out a distinctly postmodern poetics—a poetics based on the arbitrary relation of content to form in the service of an “allegorical impulse,” as Craig Owens’s (1992) felicitous phrase puts it. This is the formal shift in poetry after 1950 that I trace in this book. As I was preparing this manuscript, a colleague advised me to take the word allegory out of the title; he warned me that academic readers would have a bad taste left in their mouths from their encounters with the topic in graduate school. This may be true; the term does have a certain staleness about it: after all, it was practically designed to induce academic melancholy. But as I demonstrate here, the use of allegorical form is one of the major strategies of postwar American poetic writing, and the trope is very much alive and kicking in American poetry at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

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ackno wled g m en t s

This book has been a long time in the making, so the list of people I feel I should acknowledge stretches to the crack of doom; for the sake of brevity, I will mention only a few by name. First, of my many friends and colleagues at Columbia University, without whose excellent companionship and awesome intellectual acumen I would surely be lost, I single out Brent Edwards and Jean Howard, who provided sharp and insightful readings of early versions of the manuscript, as well as Molly Murray, James Shapiro, and Sarah Cole for their ongoing support, both institutional and personal. Junior professors—you know who you are—rock! Michael Taussig, with whom I cotaught a graduate seminar on the dialectical image, has been an inspiring interlocutor and all around mate. I would also like to thank my brilliant Columbia students, graduate and undergraduate, former and present, who have contributed more than they can know to what appears in this book. Over the years, I have floated many of my ideas about allegory and poetic form in sundry conferences, talks, and casual conversations with a host of brilliant critics, friends, and scholars: in particular the “New Mexico” crowd—Craig Dworkin, Anne Jamison, Stephanie Sobelle, Ondrea Ackerman, Matt Hofer, Scarlett Higgins, J. B. Bryan, and John Tritica—but also Brian Reed, Paul Grimstad, James Livingston, Ursula Heise, Andrew Schelling, Charles Bernstein, Bob Perelman, and Peter Nicholls. My two best New York City buds, Bruce Andrews and Paul Stephens, have been

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constant companions and excellent partners in crime; they are constantly pushing my envelope. I owe an incalculable debt to Marjorie Perloff, who was and continues to be an inspiration and a model; the earliest pieces I wrote for the book—the chapters on Louis Zukofsky, Clark Coolidge, and Peter Inman—were originally conceived and written under her expert guidance. I also thank my Columbia University Press editor, Philip Leventhal, whose infinite patience and good will I fear I nearly exhausted. Portions of this study were composed at the New York Public Library, where I had the good fortune to be a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers during the fall of 2009 and the spring of 2010. Huge thanks to Jean Strouse and her excellent staff as well as love and gratitude to the intrepid crew of fellows with whom I bunked for “the best year our lives” in Room 225. I also thank Kornelia Freytag of Ruhr Universität Bochum, the University of Pennsylvania Poetics Colloquium, Elisabeth Frost of Fordham University, and the Poetry and Philosophy Symposium at New York University for opportunities to present portions of this work in public. Finally, I thank my family—my wife, Cherrymae; our daughter, Azara; our son, Chris—for their patience and love. You are an inspiring bunch and literally the lights of my life.

poetic machinations

Introduction Etymologies, 1980—the Allegorical Moment

Some thirty years ago the art critic Craig Owens pronounced that “postmodernist art may in fact be identified by a single, coherent impulse” (1992, 58), and although this statement may now strike us as naive, many of Owens’s contemporaries more or less agreed with him. The alleged perpetrator of the new and disconcerting sensibility in the arts was the allegorical impulse, which for a time during the 1980s and 1990s took center stage in critical debates about postmodernism. Allegory, it turned out, was more than just an antiquated poetic trope, dismissed by Goethe and Coleridge and laid to rest by the romantic sentimental lyric and the modernist “machine made of words.” It had instead become the cutting tool of the cultural edge, its formal disjunctions and the semiotic arbitrariness at its core perfect analogues for the alienation and crises of late-capitalist culture. Fueled by the newly translated books of Walter Benjamin and the gasoline of DeManian deconstruction, everything from the commodity fetish to subjectivity itself, from the rhetorical modes of critical interpretation to the basic configuration of the linguistic sign, was declared allegorical—and hence hollow, contingent, and arbitrary. The sense of melancholy was palpable; the Modern Language Association has never fully recovered. Indeed, 1980 was a banner year for the study of allegory in American art and literary criticism, and it marks roughly the midpoint of the period covered by this book, which examines the theory and practice of allegory

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in American poetry and poetic form between 1930 and the present. Both Owens’s essay “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism” and Joel Fineman’s essay “The Structure of Allegorical Desire” appeared that year in the spring issue (number 12) of the art critical journal October (which also ran an obituary for Roland Barthes). Along with several other important works, these two essays consolidated an interest in the study of allegory in American scholarship that had been building gradually since the early 1970s.1 The trope had received a certain amount of scholarly attention earlier—notably in Angus Fletcher’s encyclopedic Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (1964); Edwin Honig’s Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory (1966); and Paul de Man’s revolutionary essay “The Rhetoric of Temporality” (1969)—but the year 1972 marked the beginning of a renewed interest in all things allegorical. Robert Murray Davis’s introduction to a symposium on allegory in modern fiction in the December issue of the journal Genre that year is at once wryly apologetic and forward looking: The usefulness of a symposium on allegory in the modern novel is clearly indicated by the very process of assembling material for it. Many scholars mentioned as possible contributors answered that they know nothing about the topic; one or two added with humility or its counterfeit that they were not intelligent enough to understand the subject, let alone write about it. Many others were not approached because their public views on allegory closely resemble those of Alice’s Pigeon towards serpents: alarm, despondency, and the strong implication that if the word and the thing do exist, they would not in a well-ordered universe. (1972, iii)

Gayatri Spivak’s essay in the same journal, “Thoughts on the Principle of Allegory,” points out that contemporary American scholarship on the subject lagged behind its European counterpart: Contemporary European criticism has witnessed the renovation of the term “allegory.” Walter Benjamin began it unwittingly in his now-famous monograph Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels [translated as The Origin of German Tragic Drama]. The new trend in Western European literary criticism gradually recognized allegory as an authentic voice of literary expression, regardless of historical period. The old trend—a discredit-

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ing of allegory associated with Goethe, Blake, Coleridge, Yeats—was reversed. The energy of that reversal impinges upon literary criticism in the United States at present. Pedagogy, however, still undertakes the nineteenth-century dismissal of allegory, while medievalist and Renaissance scholarship presents an historical enthusiasm for allegory that remains a specialists’ joy; and experts in contemporary literature exclaim over the resurgence of allegory in Kafka, Beckett, Borges, Barth without questioning its nature. Within this generally retrospective scene, some American critics, notably Paul de Man, Morton W. Bloomfield, Robert Scholes, share the energy of the renovation of “allegory” as a term of general critical theory. (1972, 327)

American criticism in the early 1970s was indeed just beginning to be impinged on by a recent European “renovation” of allegory (although Benjamin’s Trauerspiel would have to wait until 1977 to appear in English). By 1972, as Davis puts it, “an increasing number of students of modern fiction and of allegory, most notably Edwin Honig and Angus Fletcher, would agree with Professor Spivak that, ‘Like “point of view,” “allegory” should be one of the global terms of the rhetoric of fiction’ ” (1972, iii). My study charts the “reversal” that Spivak describes, but it examines its Benjaminian energy for the rhetoric of poetry rather than of fiction. My project, to state it plainly, is to examine the allegorical impulse in American poetic form after World War II. The presiding spirit of the new allegory studies represented by Fineman’s and Owens’s articles is Roman Jakobson (who died two years after these articles were published, in 1982), whose work became increasingly visible during the decade. The year 1980 also saw the publication in the small San Francisco Bay Area journal Hills of Barrett Watten’s essay “Russian Formalism” (reprinted in Watten 1985), which, although obscure at the time, signaled a growing interest in Russian and Prague school formalism and constructivism among members of the emerging American poetic avant-garde later known as the language poets. For Watten and other writers such as Ron Silliman and Lyn Hejinian, formalist and constructivist models became means for breaking away from what many poets felt at the time to be a generalized, restrictive, and unadventurous lyric mode that had gradually come to dominate in American poetry over the previous quarter-century. And although my study is by no means exclusively

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devoted to language poetry, it acknowledges the movement’s importance to developments in American poetry and poetics over the past thirty years.2 The upshot is that by 1980 Russian formalism, in particular Jakobson’s work, had become familiar to the American poetry public and important to working poets. Jakobson is a major figure in Watten’s 1985 collection of essays Total Syntax, and in The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (2003), Watten argues for the continuing relevance of formalist and constructivist practices in contemporary American poetry.3 But poetic models derived from Russian and Prague school linguistics were not the only literary exotica showing up on American shores at the time; the year 1981 saw the publication of Marjorie Perloff ’s The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage. This book’s first chapter begins with four epigraphs, including the following by Barthes: “Modern poetry, that which stems not from Baudelaire but from Rimbaud . . . destroyed relationships in language and reduced discourse to words as static things. . . . In it, Nature becomes a fragmented space, made of objects solitary and terrible, because the links between them are only potential” (3). Hence, the onset of Perloff ’s decades-long tracing of an “indeterminate” mode of poetics from Rimbaud to the language poets and beyond. In 1986, Perloff published The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture, a book in which she refined her earlier conclusions regarding what she calls “the poetry of ‘the other tradition’ ” by examining the legacies of European futurism; this study begins with Blaise Cendrars and ends with Roland Barthes and Robert Smithson—proponents, she declares, of “what we might call a disillusioned or cool Futurism” (195). Perloff compares Barthes’s deconstructive reading of the Eiffel Tower to Cendrars’s heroic celebration of the same structure to argue a futurist patrimony for Barthes, and she brings Smithson, whose 1967 Artforum piece “The Monuments of Passaic” “is reminiscent of Russian Futurist manifestos” (217), into the futurist fold: here “the spirit of invention, of rupture, of the conceptual art work as something that can actually change our landscapes and our lives” (234) affiliates the American artist with the futurist moment. Watten also closes his “moment” book with Robert Smithson, this time conceived as a kindred figure to the photographer Stan Douglas and thus as the latest avatar not so much of the futurist as of the constructivist moment. However, the most extensive treatment of Smithson in the 1980s presented the sculptor as neither a futurist nor a constructivist, but as an

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allegorist: in a series of articles and reviews beginning in 1977, Craig Owens developed his theory of postmodernism as an allegorical impulse that he traces in the visual arts after 1960, based on work by Barthes, Jakobson, and Benjamin, with special reference to Smithson. In a different critical climate, Owens might have named 1980 “the allegorical moment,” and so this is the neglected terrain that I explore in the present study.4 But what is at stake in doing so, and why turn to a synchronic and semiotic mode of criticism after Perloff and Watten exploited the diachronic and historical modes to such productive ends? My study is intended as a supplement to the work that these and other scholars have done; although critics have explored the allegorical impulse in postmodern painting, sculpture, film, and architecture,5 no one has described allegory as it functions in postmodern poetry—and certainly not in postmodern poetic form. It is as if in the very medium and genre historically most amenable to allegory the trope is inoperative or anyhow invisible in the second half of the twentieth century.6 To be sure, under the generalized pressures of romanticism, literary allegory largely became unfashionable after the late eighteenth century, and it was not wildly popular in modernist poetry either, which no doubt accounts to some extent for why critics have been disinclined to discuss allegory in poetry written later in the twentieth century. It is also true that much poetry written after World War II is overtly antiallegorical: one school of critical opinion maintains that, as Peter Crisp put it as late as 2005, “allegory has not been a major form for well over 200 years” (335). But if postmodernism in general is indeed motivated by an allegorical impulse—by what Fredric Jameson calls the “allegorical transcoding” that is its distinguishing method and mark—then two questions arise: Does this impulse also occur in the poetry of the period? And if it does so, where? Or is there something about the poetry of the past fifty years that has made it immune to more seismic shifts in aesthetic trends, shifts that have transformed even its literary cousins, such as narrative fiction?7 This book argues that there is an allegorical impulse in American poetry composed after World War II, that it can to some extent be accounted for by theories of postmodernism such as those found in Jameson and Owens, and that it derives in part from an ongoing traffic in surrealism. Furthermore, I argue that the move to allegorical form distinguishes what has gradually become one of the main branches of postmodern poetry,

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that this feature appears most dramatically in some of the most formally adventurous poetry of the period, and that the allegorical element in this poetry has remained largely invisible to critics because it has literally moved. My thesis is this: postmodern poetry appears when allegory shifts from the poem’s thematic levels into its formal registers. Put alternatively: When the allegorical impulse is projected from the poem’s narrative level, where it has traditionally been located, into its formal and linguistic features, then we have postmodern poetry. The burden of proving these assertions makes up the study that follows. My shift from the purview of arts movements such as futurism and constructivism to a literary trope such as allegory permits me to examine the semiotics of postmodern poetry while situating the subject of poetic form in contemporary philosophical discussions that have up until now been neglected in the critical literature; it also permits me to discuss allegory away from the trope’s historical entanglements in surrealism. Following Barthes, Jakobson, Owens, Jameson, and others, I understand the presence and practice of allegory at any “moment”—futurist, constructivist, surrealist, or otherwise—to be rooted in historical circumstance. During the period that this study covers, allegory was very much in the cultural air—as I think my discussion of the events of 1980 suggests—not only as a subject of general interest, but as a working trope employed by poets and other artists. In this present work, I read the poetry of the period against contemporary critical and philosophical discussions of allegory in order to understand better that poetry’s motivations and methods, for although allegory was figuratively speaking “everywhere” at the time, it was not always immediately approached or even perceived as such, and one of the marked features of discussions of allegory in postmodern poetry is that critics frequently describe the trope without naming it. When, for instance, Barthes is quoted that modern poetry “destroyed relationships in language and reduced discourse to words as static things” and that, “in it, Nature becomes a fragmented space, made of objects solitary and terrible, because the links between them are only potential,” we encounter a passage that easily could have been lifted from any number of descriptions of allegory written over the preceding half-century. Both in this introduction and in the ensuing chapters, I sketch out a history of relevant moments in the literary life of allegory in the second half of the twentieth century, with an occasional glance back at earlier periods.

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The evolution of the discussion of the trope as the decades unfold is a fascinating topic in its own right; for one, it acts as a lens through which to observe many of the central critical and aesthetic debates of the day. As Spivak intimates, two very different branches of philosophical tradition— one primarily American and the other broadly European—contribute to late-century conversations about allegory, and these two meet and mix uneasily in the early 1970s to develop ultimately into what I call, after Joel Fineman, the “trope of tropes” trope around 1980.8 What such a history reveals is a long and ongoing multidisciplinary discussion riddled with controversies and outright contradictions—as it turns out, nobody agrees on what allegory is: the entry for the term in the third edition of The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics declares that “[allegory] resists any attempt at strict and comprehensive definition” (“Allegory” 1993, 31). As such, it makes an excellent ideological cipher, for how one approaches allegory says a great deal about how one approaches language, meaning, writing, representation, cognition, aesthetics, commodity fetishism, political discourse, and a host of other issues. What Barthes might call the “myths” of allegory generated over the course of the century are often as compelling and as curious as the texts that such myths were designed to read. The bulk of this book features chapter-length close readings of a series of poems in which, I claim, the poets use allegory as a formal device for exploring a range of issues: the dynamics of psychosexual projection; photography, film, and the mechanical technologies of representation; American history, colonialism, emigration, and political and national identity; writing and its relationship with landscape, mapping, biography, and alphabetical notation; citation, appropriation, and literary piracy and parasitism; and the operations of semiotics.9 The poets I discuss include Louis Zukofsky, Lorine Niedecker, Clark Coolidge, Peter Inman, Myung Mi Kim, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, and Craig Dworkin, among others. I read their works alongside and through critical and philosophical debates about allegory ranging from Charles Sanders Peirce to the present. As I have already suggested, Jakobson and Jameson are key players here, as are Fletcher, Owens, and later writers such as Gordon Teskey. I make use of Benjamin’s provocative discussions of allegory and surrealism, particularly in tracing the allegorical impulse through John Ashbery’s art criticism and poetry from the early 1960s and on into the work of Coolidge; I have

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written elsewhere of William Carlos Williams’s Paterson as one of the first texts of American poetry to conceive of form as allegorical, and I briefly return to that discussion here.10 I also take into account the impressive literature surrounding iconicity that linguists have generated over the past several decades. This rich and little-exploited body of work, to my mind, could be integrated into literary studies with high critical returns. My interests in this project lie not only in theorizing allegory and cataloging the ambitious formal innovations of the poems under hand but also in making a difficult and often recalcitrant body of poetry available to a wider readership than it presently enjoys. Each one of the poetic works I examine here is compelling on some level or other—in its formal inventiveness, in the scope of its vision, in the complexity of its devices, in the depth of its insights, in the sheer weirdness of its premises. This is poetry as strange and as intellectually rigorous as anything that William Blake, Emily Dickinson, or Gerard Manley Hopkins might have written; in certain ways it is closer in spirit to the works of baroque era poets such as John Donne and George Herbert. I also realize that, aside from perhaps Lyn Hejinian and Susan Howe, the writers whom I have chosen to showcase are not widely known even to readers of poetry, much less to the larger reading public. One task for the scholar is to bring interesting if obscure work to the fore; another is to account as objectively as he or she can for any and all poetic texts of a given period because, as climbers say so elegantly of mountains, they are there—and given the sheer volume of poetry produced over the past fifty years, it is not easy to gain perspective on the myriad poetic peaks and ranges.11 Each of the works I treat in this study not only is, I maintain, interesting as an aesthetic object in its own right but also treats of issues that are urgent, profound, and relevant to contemporary American culture. Finally, in the spirit of Benjamin in the Trauerspiel, I have deliberately chosen works that are formally “extreme” in one capacity or another because it is in the very eccentricity of certain formal features that the allegorical profile can most clearly be made out.12 This is particularly true, Benjamin claims, of baroque art, and the resemblances between the latter and the postmodern poetry that I handle here are the subject of the next section in this introduction. A final word about that other troublesome term in my title: postmodernism, or what in 21st Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics (2002) Perloff calls “the tired dichotomy that has governed our discussion of twentieth-

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century poetics for much too long: that between modernism and postmodernism” (1–2). In her book, Perloff argues for a closer kinship between contemporary poetry and the poetry of modernism than critics have traditionally ascribed to them; indeed, she ends the book with yet another “moment,” claiming that “ours may well be the moment when the lessons of early modernism are finally being learned” (200)—and hence offering the twentieth century as perhaps the longest “moment” of them all.13 Brian McHale concurs but qualifies Perloff ’s conclusion, arguing in his book The Obligation Toward the Difficult Whole (2004) that she means “that when, in the second and third decades of the twentieth century, a relatively stable modernist poetics was crystallized out from the churning heterogeneity of early-modernist innovation, what was left out and left over—the ‘lost’ avant-garde—remained available for revisiting and reappropriation by later generations of innovators. So ‘postmodernism’ signifies the full range of possibilities . . . available before a normalizing modernism had made its choices, and which became available again after normalized modernism had run its course” (x). Although Perloff ’s argument and McHale’s qualification of it are persuasive—it is true that nearly all of the techniques and devices one finds contemporary poets using can also be found used in poetry from the first half of the twentieth century—I wish to treat of one mode practiced in later poetry that does not appear as such in the canons of modernism and to argue that the presence of this mode constitutes a mark of real difference. Postmodernist is perhaps at this point too burdened a term to be of much use in describing period poetics; like Peter Middleton and Tim Woods in Literature of Memory (2000), I find that “the enormously influential periodising concept of postmodernism remains both useful and inadequate” (3). Perhaps it would be best simply to describe the mode as it appears in practice and leave off labeling it altogether. My argument is that a unique species of formal allegory is operative in American poetry of the postwar period. In this view, I depart from McHale’s description of postmodernism as a revisitation and a reappropriation: the allegorical impulse as it plays out in such poetry makes of it something altogether different from its modernist predecessors. I treat the issue of postmodernism at greater length later in this introduction; to raise the issue of allegory in literature after 1950 is anyway to be obliged to take account of the term postmodernism and its troubled history.

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In 1964, Angus Fletcher publishes Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode, initiating a half-century of American scholarship on the issue; fifteen years later Maureen Quilligan writes that “we seem in the last quarter of the twentieth century to have reentered an allegorical age” (1979, 155); a quarter of a century passes, and we look to be entering yet another period preoccupied with allegory: both Bill Brown and Peter Crisp publish major essays on the topic in 2005, and my study begins and ends with the redoubtable Fletcher, who publishes “Allegory Without Ideas”—an article in which he calls allegory “the captain of all rhetorical figures of speech”—in boundary 2 in 2006. The discussion begun decades ago continues. But rather than make ultimate claims regarding the nature and meaning of allegory, my intention here is to understand an historical shift in poetics that occurred in American poetry written after World War II. That this movement may be described as a shift to an allegorical mode accords with larger philosophical and aesthetic forces in play during the past fifty years. And although I rely on theoretical work by Peirce, Jakobson, Fletcher, and others, I do so provisionally, being interested primarily in the dynamics between a historical moment’s notions of how language and writing work, on the one hand, and the poetry that appears accordingly, on the other. The allegorical impulse that critics discriminate as central to postmodern aesthetic sensibilities has never been discerned in the period’s poetry, to which I now turn.

The New Baroque Never has poetry been less winged. —Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama

Consider four page-length examples of poetry published at roughly tenyear intervals over the past four decades. The first is from Clark Coolidge’s Polaroid, a hundred-page work from 1975: point seem thing or never one may turn it one to matching all whole point all seem to a thing a may turning up this it can during the light of the everything single point to its seem thing its lap seat head inch truck still least due to close capper light

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acting here sending missing matter to a point the thing very once yet may seem the open of a match send it this bolt to think just standing point a thing there till within hence all over means to single till the reach point of everything a hading tend go say before match around some tho still its emitter seldom the one tho cause about matter during the let matter the think a point may sending seem can thing a single match by how long before everything as point to of middle inch still backing tho all pats may apart by those kind must aside twinning musts and lighting keep to these say a point to nothing a whelm keep lap such as the amid on an only often leaving such place a still tho flap a bolt each thing of miss nothing looming the lot in match of place the till yet matching the whom passes the dialing into out of becausing last stay some lost matters it that the time trucks turning in stays of lighting a must seeming light this thus having to may such least a thinking lost the match to a veering twin one enter tho still a massed line emitter to the stay the since points to which upward turning gotten aside past the lot it keeps taking whiles of ago letting the light one may nothing near see bolt think past the head the lap post a still twinning a bulk along then one then capper that’s what a capped in that deign twin what’s that stilling to say by seems to staying miss comes its nothing seeing being or let the point miss one just standing for or by and of along since the beneath never between very amidst this nothing one misses tho time and still or light of think loom place pin bulk dip tap inch (Coolidge 1975, 100)

The second piece is a page from Peter Inman’s poem “nimr,” published in his book Think of One in 1986:

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A: A.

N:

slag, olmec kilter in chapter black moot of dream druther had a “whitewall” sound hard off exist ohm of elastic (died so that caw) women near clang a page off vegetable turning tv sets off for a living stopped short by the sight of his own landscape stodg, tack. relaxant parches over suspicion filled with people blew where’s exact in that manter, quoei (3)

The third exhibit is from Myung Mi Kim’s poem “Measure,” published in Dura (1998): Screw, lever, press Moveable face : Reed stems, red dates : Grown fat and sleek Dandelion sea belched the lending Ships of trade accompanied by ships of war

(26)

Finally, consider the following page from Mary Rising Higgins’s “waive SHIFT,” from her 2005 book )cliff TIDES((:

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In the foregoing passages, all culled from longer sequences, we notice certain generic similarities familiar to students and readers of contemporary poetry. Our four examples make up a veritable catalog of what are generally known as postmodern poetic effects, techniques, methods, and devices. None of the passages, for instance, features a strong lyric center or a discernable romantic subjectivity, however construed; it is impossible to locate the particular poet’s “voice” or personality in any of these sequences, making the writing here feel resolutely impersonal. The poems eschew stories and scene settings; Coolidge’s and Inman’s pieces

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apparently lack any thematic subject or issue whatsoever. At the level of syntax, the writing in all four is discontinuous and fragmented; the lines splice unrelated words, phrases, and sentences, leaving an overall sensation of semantic interruption and incompletion: rupture and collage work at the level of the line here and sometimes, as in Inman’s work, at the level of the word (“stodg”). Whereas Kim uses word play for a heightened sense of ambiguity—for example, “Reed stems, red dates” can be heard as “Read stems, read dates”—Higgins inserts spaces between the letters of individual words and shapes the end of the poem as a waving W. Both pieces exemplify what Charles Bernstein calls “dysraphism,” a term that Perloff glosses as “the collaging of items that are not only disparate but have different syntactic orders, shifting voices, sources, and multiple allusions . . . combined with a penchant for punning and word play” (2002, 172). The creative use (or misuse) of punctuation and typographical features such as lineation and print font and size are also well-documented features of postmodernist poems. But they are also well-documented features of modernist poems, and each of these four pieces can also be described as fitting futurist or constructivist norms or both, given Perloff ’s and Watten’s and McHale’s respective criteria; as such, they can be perceived as working precisely in “revisited and reappropriated” modernist modes. In fact, the list of poetic characteristics that I used earlier to describe them is derived from the last chapter of Perloff ’s book 21st Century Modernism, with a couple taken from McHale’s book The Obligation Toward the Difficult Whole (“erasure,” “found text”). McHale lists three other features of postmodern poems that are relevant here: the first is “poetry as prosthesis: aleatory and mechanical procedures”—that is, “predetermined procedures to generate poetry” (2004, 253, italics in original)—such as James Merrill’s use of the Ouija board, John Cage’s “writing-through” method, and Allen Ginsberg’s use of the tape recorder (ultimately, McHale declares all “fixed forms”—including traditional ones such as the haiku, the sonnet, and so on—to be “prosthetic”). Another is “the replenishment of narrative,” in which postmodernist poetry “adopts . . . the conventions of popular narrative genres—science fiction and gothic, the Western and the adventure story, comic books and animated cartoons, soap opera and pornography,” as well as premodernist narrative modes such as romance and epic (258, italics in original). Finally, citing Jameson, McHale lists “the spatial turn” of postmodernist poetry, its “emphasis on the materiality of poetry itself ” and its “foregrounding [of]

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the spaces of the worlds it projects,” including architectural, cartographic, and corporal spaces (260–261, italics in original). I would like to expound on these three features of what McHale calls “the postmodern repertoire,” for although none of them is exemplified by any of the passages that I have selected—the poems were not generated by chance or mechanical procedures; they are not narrative after the conventions of popular or premodernist literatures, nor do they in any obvious manner “foreground the spaces of their projected worlds”—there is a way in which I will use all three of these features to discuss what the poems are, which is, as I shall demonstrate, allegorical. For although the poems were not generated by aleatory or preset procedures, there is a sense in which they are mechanical; although they do not tell stories, there is a way in which they behave like narratives; and although they do not operate formally after the manner of maps or diagrams or otherwise index “the world,” there is a sense in which they project into space. Now, allegory is nothing if not a mechanical narrative projected into space: the simplest definition of the trope describes it as a metaphor extended into narrative. Hence, if I want to make an allegory, I take a metaphor and elaborate it into a story—the metaphor “life is a pilgrimage,” when subjected to narrative “extension,” becomes the allegorical tale Pilgrim’s Progress. This is the oldest definition of allegory, present in Quintillian and Cicero,14 and although it has been challenged, qualified, supplemented, and modified over the centuries, it is, as I demonstrate later, very much behind what is going on in poems such as Polaroid, “nimr,” “Measure,” and “waive SHIFT”—although with a difference. One may already at this point object that examples of allegory abound in twentieth-century poetry in spite of the fact that most critics tend to omit the trope as a major characteristic of modernist or postmodernist poetics or both. Hart Crane’s Brooklyn Bridge, Wallace Stevens’ snowman, and even T. S. Eliot’s Madame Sosostris—but certainly his Waste Land—all arguably carry allegorical heft. Postmodernist candidates operating in the same vein might include Edward Dorn’s gunslinger, Susan Howe’s Hope Atherton, and John Ashbery’s landscape with rutabagas and farm instruments. In each of these cases, a metaphor—the Brooklyn Bridge as progress, futurity, America; the modern world as a wasteland; Hope Atherton as “an emblem foreshadowing a Poet’s abolished limitations in our demythologized fantasy of Manifest Destiny” (Howe 1990, 4)—has been extended into the narrative details that the respective poems

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relate in their different ways. However, although the four postmodernist poems I shared earlier are also built, as we shall see, around extended metaphors—writing figured as film (Coolidge), American history as an industrial assembly line (Inman), postcolonial politics as a printing press (Kim)—the allegory in each of these cases does not extend into narrative content. Instead, it is projected deeper into the poem, where it works at the level of syntax and grammar and in the organization of the lines on the page: that is, the allegorical impulse operates in these cases in the formal—even in the material—registers of the poem. Any “narrative” movement in these poems is figured not by its content but instead by its formal procedures. In order to explain how this deeper projection of allegory works and how it differs from the formal dimensions of poems such as The Bridge or The Waste Land or As We Know, I need to describe the larger formal features of the poems from Coolidge, Inman, and Kim, which are all but invisible in the short excerpts I have presented so far; this I do in ensuing chapters. But before I do it, I want to draw attention to a baroque sensibility inhering in my four exhibits, and here I draw on Benjamin’s descriptions in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1998, originally published as Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels in 1928). To put it simply: in each of the passages given earlier we see a dense, extravagant, richly imbricated, sometimes anarchic linguistic surface organized into systematic, methodical, and complex formal macropatterns. Baroque literature, Benjamin tells us, is first and foremost just such an art of carefully managed extravagance: its nature is to shock (1998, 183) by employing linguistic exaggeration and violence (54) and voluptuousness (184); its language is rich and extravagant, breeding ambiguity (177) through the use of neologisms and figurative words (55); “the language of the Baroque is constantly convulsed by rebellion on the part of the elements which make it up” (207) and its “outlandish linguistic creations” (199). It is also notably an art—Benjamin calls it a cult—of the ruin (177–178), “fragmentary, untidy, and disordered” (188), in which “language is broken up so as to acquire a changed and intensified meaning in its fragments” (208): “[T]he highly significant fragment, the remnant, is, in fact, the finest material in Baroque creation. For it is common practice in the literature of the Baroque to pile up fragments ceaselessly” (178). Certainly any of these characterizations can be applied to my four poetic examples, which appear initially as heaps of damaged fragments

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and linguistic detritus. Like Benjamin’s baroque poetry, the writing here is resolutely antitranscendental and irradiant; these poems work explicitly to replace the intimate and the mysterious with the enigmatic and the concealed (Benjamin 1998, 180–181). Such writing is profoundly antiabsorptive.15 According to Benjamin, however, the broken fragments of baroque art are always accompanied by a palpable sense of form: the baroque ruin, he says, is “consciously constructed” (1998, 182): “[T]he writer must not conceal the fact that his activity is one of arranging, since it was not so much the mere whole as its obviously constructed quality that was the principal impression which was aimed at. Hence the display of the craftsmanship, which . . . shows through like the masonry in a building whose rendering has broken away” (179). Baroque writing is heavily crafted; it seeks “complexity” (195); it works toward “extravagant pomp” (176) and ornament as opposed to raw disorder or chaos. Benjamin describes “the endlessly preparatory, circumlocutious, self-indulgently hesitant manner of the baroque process of giving form” (183) to the disassociated fragments it construes: “Every bit as characteristic of this verse is the contrast between the logical—if one will, the classicistic—structure of the façade, and the phonetic violence within” (206). Like the poetry of the baroque, the four passages I have chosen are characterized “by the regular rhythm of the constant pause, the sudden change of direction, and consolidation into new rigidity” (Benjamin 1998, 197): as I detail later, very little is left to accident in these poems, least of all in their overall formal registers, where they are not given to the disjunctive, open antiform, play, or chance tendencies that critics such as Ihab Hassan claim characterize postmodernism (1987, 91). Each piece elicits a strong tension between microlinguistic disarray and macroformal order; each is finally systematically schematic (Benjamin 1998, 184). According to Benjamin, baroque form tends toward the visual and the runic (1998, 175–176), the plastic (177), the bibliographic and the monumental (184), the decorative (188), and finally the sepulchral, the immobile, and the concrete. Truly, “never has poetry been less winged”—unless perhaps after the manner of the burned-out angel depicted in Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I, a figure that is important in texts as various as the Trauerspiel, Williams’s Paterson, Coolidge’s Melencolia, and Craig Dworkin’s Dure. And it is precisely the qualities of the baroque—albeit these qualities extended—that distinguish my poetic examples from their modernist predecessors as well as generally from poetry of previous periods: nowhere in

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the canons of modernism or in any other period do we find texts at once so utterly demolished on the local level and yet so rigidly and systematically organized on the global. In these poems, what Benjamin describes as the formal strategies of allegory are elaborated to the point that they transfigure the literal body of the text, rendering a new kind of poetic object. In my reading, the postmodern moment is precisely “the return and the revival, if not the reinvention in some unexpected form, of allegory as such,” as Jameson puts it in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991, 167); I take his phrase “unexpected form” more literally than he does, however. Now, at first glance texts such as “waive SHIFT” might appear to utilize “visual” forms, similar to the picture-poems of writers such as George Herbert and Robert Herrick and even John Hollander; likewise, the dense pages of Polaroid might finally be read as instances of concrete poetry: the forms of all four poetic examples might be construed as being iconic. But I argue that this is precisely not what is going on—that what is going on marks these poems as crucially different. In order to talk about what this poetry’s form is and does, I must first talk about what it is not and does not do, and to do so I resort to the semiotics of C. S. Peirce.

Form as Index, Icon, Symbol There is every reason in a study of allegory to turn to Charles Sanders Peirce, whose work in philosophy and linguistics at the beginning of the twentieth century casts a giant shadow over criticism at midcentury and beyond.16 And although nowhere to my knowledge does Peirce directly address the topic of allegory, his tripartite division of the sign into index, icon, and symbol played a major role in the discussions of allegory that occurred in the 1970s and 1980s; the artists, critics, and poets of the time were actively working and thinking through Peirce’s semiotics. From this perspective, the formal ruptures and innovations—what Ezra Pound generalized as the breaking of the heave of the pentameter—that appeared in Anglophone poetry beginning with Walt Whitman in the middle of the nineteenth century and continued on through the twentieth can be described as a shift from symbolic to indexical and iconic forms or more generally from unmotivated to motivated regimes of the sign. Accordingly,

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the vast assortment of traditional verse forms, prosodic devices, meters, and stanza types passed down in English and American poetry from the early modern period to the New Formalists of the present day can be classified as symbolic signs because they are arbitrary and unmotivated—that is, neither are they caused by nor do they resemble the content that they construe (i.e., they are neither indexical nor iconic); instead, they are the products of convention, habit, and tradition.17 Modernist poetics developed out of a generalized reaction to poetic forms as symbolic signs— and hence as conventional, unmotivated, and arbitrary—coupled with an accompanying elaboration of poetic forms that supposedly bear a more compelling and immediate relation to their subjects.

form as index This impulse can already be witnessed in the unprecedented free-verse lines of the poems in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, which, according to Whitman in his preface, differ from their metrical European predecessors and counterparts precisely in that they are not arbitrary—instead, he claims, these lines of verse are organically generated by an American body and brain, the former attuned to the vast geophysical spaces of the New World, the latter to “a corresponding largeness and generosity”: the poet’s “spirit responds to his country’s spirit. . . . [H]e incarnates its geography and natural life and rivers and lakes” as well as its social and political systems (Whitman 1996, 5–7). Whitman resorts to vegetable metaphors when describing the “new life of the new forms” (5): “The rhyme and uniformity of perfect poems show the free growth of metrical laws and bud from them as unerringly and loosely as lilacs or roses on a bush, and take shapes as compact as the shapes of chestnuts and oranges and melons and pears, and shed the perfume impalpable to form. The fluency and ornaments of the finest poems or music or orations or recitations are not independent but dependent. All beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain” (11). True American poetic form, then, is an index of the poet’s body and brain in the same way, to use a familiar example, that smoke is an index of fire: smoke is dependent on fire; fire is the immediate cause of smoke. This idea that a poem’s form should be an index of the poet’s physiology becomes a main motivation for the development of free verse

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in France, England, and the United States and gradually gains currency over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century and into the first half of the twentieth; the idea is worked out at length in the human and biological sciences during the period, ultimately to become a cornerstone of modernist poetics, where it is a key factor in the turn toward nonmetrical speech-based prosodies. The idea of a “physiological” connection between prosody and human biology is unique to the modernist period; it does not appear in any systematic way before the late nineteenth century. It also continues into American poetics after World War II: for example, Charles Olson’s projectivist breath-based line, the basic unit of “Open Field” poetry—“the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE,” as he puts it in “Projective Verse”—is also indexical: “And the line comes (I swear it) from the breath, from the breathing of the man who writes, at the moment that he writes, and thus is, it is here that, the daily work, the WORK, gets in, for only he, the man who writes, can declare, at every moment, the line its metric and its ending—where its breathing, shall come to, termination” (1997, 242, full capitals in original). Any true line of poetry, then, will register the breathing of the person who composed it; a poet’s sense of measure will necessarily be specific and unique to his or her personal metabolism.18 Other Black Mountain writers concur: for Robert Duncan, “the cadence of the verse, and, in turn, the interpenetration of cadences in sequence is, for me, related to the dance of my physical body. . . . Stress patterns are dancing feet; my ear and voice follow a deeper rhythm, the coming and going of a life/death tide back of the beat of the heart and the breath” (1984, ix). Robert Creeley works Olson’s dictum on breath into the registers of speech: “When Olson speaks of breath, he is speaking of an exact thing—a thing which can be defined, say, physiologically, and whose influence on the rhythm patterns of our speech can’t be pushed off ” (1970, 26, italics in original). Taking his cue from William Carlos Williams, Creeley advocates a poetry generated by the individual poet’s speech as modulated by his or her breathing: “When Williams beats on the sonnet, and he has done it I think brilliantly—he is hitting at a usage which denies form now. In short—that implies we ourselves are incapable—as our predecessors were of course not—of invention, of finding in the direct context of what we know, where we are, an exact means to form—which will be the direct issue of such contact. The sonnet says, in short, we must talk, if you want, with another man’s mouth, in the peculiar demands of that ‘mouth,’

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and can’t have your own” (1970, 26, italics in original). Any authentic poem, then, will index not only the poet’s breathing but also his or her mouth, his or her manner of speaking as it is inflected by the rhythms of his or her particular body. Because traditional poetic forms, such as the sonnet or the iambic pentameter, do not so index any part of the individual breathing or speaking body, Creeley considers them inadequate and obsolete modes for a contemporary poet to address the contemporary condition (i.e., “the sonnet says . . . [you] can’t have your own [mouth]” [italics added]). Creeley derives his ideas of the physiology of speech and the indexing of the mouth in poetry from Williams’s introduction to The Wedge (1944): [Poetry’s] movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character. In a poem this movement is distinguished in each case by the character of the speech from which it arises. Therefore each speech having its own character the poetry it engenders will be peculiar to that speech also in its own intrinsic form. (in Williams 1963, 4)

Hence poetic form as an index of the poet’s speech and hence Williams’s “beating on the sonnet”—as he puts it, “To me all sonnets say the same thing of no importance” (1963, 5)—as well as his repudiation of all other traditional prosodic devices: “I say we are through with the iambic pentameter as presently conceived,” he declares in “The Poem as a Field of Action,” “at least for dramatic verse; through with the measured quatrain, the staid concatenations of sounds in the usual stanza, the sonnet” ([1954] 1969, 281). American poetry, if it is to be true to the “American idiom” (which Williams claimed “offer[s] the poet an opportunity to rid himself of the necessity to be herded with other poets around him and also of the past” [1959, 149]), will necessarily be formally different than its European counterparts. A crucial development out of Black Mountain poetics occurs when poetic form is declared capable of indexing not just breathing and speaking but also the poet’s thinking. This notion already appears in the “other half ” of Olson’s “LAW OF THE LINE”: “the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE”: “I am dogmatic, that the head shows in the syllable. The dance of the intellect is there, among them, prose or verse. Consider the best minds you know in this here business: where does the head show, is it

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not, precise, here, in the swift currents of the syllable? can’t you tell a brain when you see what it does, just there?” (1997, 19, full capitals in original). For the projectivist poet, the syllable is the sonic interface between ear and mind, the very place where sound and thought meet. As “the king and pin of versification,” it constitutes the phenomenal ground of the poet’s work, where the peculiar mating of music and intellect that is poetry happens. If the rhythmic shape of the line is an index of the poet’s breath, then the “head shows” in the play of the line’s syllables—in the wedding of the mind (“HEAD”) and the sound (“EAR”) in the syllable (“it is from the union of the mind and the ear that the syllable is born” [Olson 1997, 18]), the poet’s literal thinking is indexed. The patterns in which a poem’s lines and words are construed on the page—the verse, the very turn and cut of the lines themselves—can indicate the poet’s momentary thinking, allegedly recording it as it occurs.19 As Creeley puts it, “No forms but in activity”: applied to writing, this assertion, along with Olson’s famous principle (also derived from Creeley) “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT” (1997, 240, full capitals in original), fits perfectly the criteria for the Peircian index, that type of sign that bears a real, direct, dynamic, and physical, local, or temporal connection to the object to which it refers. For the projectivist writer, poetic content physically (i.e., sonically or graphically) extends into poetic form, which, as the immediate mark or trace of the poet’s will and attention to the language under hand, is an index at once of his or her breathing body and thinking brain.20 As Larry Eigner succinctly puts it, “A poem . . . can be a stretch of thinking” (1989, 3), and this dictum goes on to become one of the main tenets of language poetry, as Charles Bernstein perhaps expresses it best in his early essay “Thought’s Measure”: “Many writers have wanted to plug into the stream of thinking that seems to be constantly going on in the head, or have wanted to cast an image or make a picture of what thinking is like, or to actually embody thinking in writing” (in Bernstein 1986, 63). According to Bernstein, Creeley, “sharing the conceit of meditation—thought presented and examined, weighted and measured—is more involved with the texture of the process itself, less with a representation than an enactment” (1986, 66). This enactment of thinking in writing determines the form of such a poem as indexical, and the attempt to so enact thinking leads the poet to certain formal maneuvers:

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[T]houghts think the world. In this way, too, the mapping of the freeassociative “thinking” process, the ordering internal to the movements of the mind/perception, provides a model for writing in sharp contrast to common expository and representational modes by focusing in on other types of movements from one thing to the next, allowing for writing to be put together in continuously “new” ways—how various shapes and modes and syntaxes create not alternate paraphrases of the same things but different entities altogether. Grains of mind. (68) To actually map the fullness of thought and its movement. Cut of mind/ perception/grain of mind . . . to . . . the factness of the world in the factness of the poem. Poem becoming a perceptual field/experience “independent” of “author.” (Cf: Olson’s “Projective Verse” essay: each perception instanter on the next: the form of the poem charts the perception so eliminating of traditional “inherited” forms which strip poetry of this active power.) The antihabitual ordering of attentions so that attention can be vivid—the intending rather than assuming of order, including order of sound/syllable/phonemes. (70–71)

Through its disruption of conventional and habitual modes of composition, then, a poem can embody or enact the “movement” of the mind thinking; it becomes a direct index of the poet’s cogitations (and in turn a stimulus for the reader’s cogitations). Ultimately, for Bernstein—and generally for the language poets—writing can itself be a mode of thinking: “Language is the material of both thinking and writing. We think and write in language, which sets up an intrinsic connection between the two” (1986, 61).21 This understanding to some extent accounts for the shift in language poetry from a speech-based to a writing- or composition-based poetics. In “On Speech,” an essay from 1971 that is often cited as foundational for language poetics,22 Robert Grenier extends Williams’s “beating on the sonnet” (“all sonnets say the same thing of no importance”) to speech itself: “Why imitate ‘speech’? Various vehicle that American speech is in the different mouths of any of us, possessed of particular powers of colloquial usage, rhythmic pressure, etc., it is only such. To me, all speeches say the same thing, or: why not exaggerate, as Williams did, for our time proclaim an abhorrence of ‘speech’ designed as was his castigation of ‘the sonnet’ to rid us, as creators of the world,

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from reiteration of the past dragged on in formal habit. I HATE SPEECH” (1986, 496, italics and full capitals in original).23 For many language poets, the linguistic dispositions of everyday speech (or literary versions of the same) are as restrictive and as fatally habitual as any verse form or metrical system. So it is not just traditional stanza forms such as the sonnet that stifle what Creeley calls “contact”; the very conventions and habits of speech syntax itself require intervention in order for critical—and critically utopian—“thinking” to occur (as Bernstein puts it in a concise equation, “language control = thought control = reality control” [1986, 60]). This dismissal of speech-based poetry is what initially so controversially marked off the language poets from many of their modernist predecessors as well as from most major trends in postwar poetry, including Beat, confessional, Deep Image, New American, New York school, and New Formalist practices, among others. For the language poets, what can happen in writing is more interesting than what can happen in speaking, at least in “speech” as it has been construed as the vehicle of common everyday conversation and the proper medium for poetry. For these writers, poetic form still indexes thinking, but it no longer necessarily indexes speaking.

form as icon But Bernstein’s other two terms for capturing thinking in poetry—mapping and charting—are not indexical signs; maps and charts are among what Peirce lists as icons, and the second way that modern poets effected their revolution against traditional poetic forms was to write iconic or “visual” poetry or both.24 Willard Bohn argues that the shift to iconicity in poetic form is a distinctly modernist phenomenon; he locates “the birth of modern visual poetry in Italy and France in 1914” ([1986] 1993, 6), the year that Guillaume Apollinaire “invented (or reinvented) the figurative poem” (9), which Bohn claims more generally was both a response to the contingencies of modernity and a specific reaction to symbolist poetics: Before [1914] pictorial effects were few and far between, and no attempt was made to exploit them. Although occasional examples can be found, such as Mallarmés Un Coup de dés, Symbolism’s obsession with musical

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analogy effectively discouraged visual experimentation. Among other things the renewed interest in visual poetry was part of the general reaction against the Symbolist aesthetic. It also grew out of an increasingly visual context in which technology vied with poetry to establish the supremacy of the image. Thus shortly before the First World War poets and painters rediscovered this ancient genre and began to explore it systematically. ([1986] 1993, 6)

For Bohn, “it has become increasingly evident that the first visual poems marked the emergence of a brand new episteme” (2001, 18). Along with the idea that poetic form can operate indexically, the new epistemology of visual and iconic forms effected the rupture between modernist poetics and any poetics that had gone before. According to Peirce, icons are different from indices in that they bear no immediate or causal connection or relation to their objects but instead resemble or otherwise share characteristics with them.25 Images, diagrams, and metaphors are icons: all three are fundamentally similar to their objects, although they are not directly caused by them (indices, in contrast, do not resemble their objects: smoke is caused by fire but does not look like it). Iconic forms include shaped poems such as Herbert’s “Easter Wings” and Apollinaire’s calligrames; even the first four lines of Ezra Pound’s third canto have been described as iconic: I SAT on the Dogana’s steps For the gondolas cost too much, that year, And there were not “those girls,” there was one face, And the Buccentoro twenty yards off, howling “Stretti”

(1993, 11)

Here the Dogana’s steps upon which the poet sits are visually suggested on the right side of the stanza in its four gradually lengthening and descending lines. A different type of iconic form occurs in Williams’s famous “cat” poem, in which the lineation, the stanza breaks, and the syntax’s hesitant manner suggest a cat’s careful stepping and hence offer an example of analogical iconicity: this poem does not form a visual outline or a silhouette of a cat, nor was it physically caused by one, nor do the poem’s lines index the poet’s breathing or thinking; instead, the careful breaking and halting

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of the poem’s stepped lines act as visual analogues to the cat’s stepping. Iconic poems thus bear in their formal elements some marked similarity—be it pictorial, analogical, or diagrammatic—to their subject matter. According to Bohn, modernist interest in visual and iconic poetry was relatively short-lived, and when it reappeared after World War II, it evolved into something quite different: By 1928 . . . interest in visual poetry had largely subsided and was not to reappear until the 1950s with the creation of concrete poetry. Once the major avenues had been explored, its practitioners abandoned their essays in visual form in favor of other, more provocative experiments. In particular the rise of Surrealism coincided with the genre’s decline and captured the imagination, literally, of a whole generation of writers and artists. In this manner visual poetry succumbed to the same forces that had been responsible for its triumph. At the forefront of the avant-garde initially, it passed through the ranks and disappeared into historical oblivion. ([1986] 1993, 6)

Concrete poetry’s iconic dimension has been well documented, as has the ongoing influence of concretism on later and contemporary poetry: Bohn’s sanguine declaration of the subgenre’s demise has been belied by the sheer volume of visual poetry composed since 1928 (or at any rate since 1986, when his book The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry was published).26 The practice begun in 1914 of composing in iconic forms has continued into the twenty-first century and is presently alive and well. But it is Bohn’s statement about the rise of surrealism that I wish to pursue via a detour through Peirce’s third semiotic mode.

form as symbol To recapitulate: new conceptions of verse form as alternately indexical or iconic made for the modernist break from traditional poetic form, which, using Peirce’s terminology, would be understood to operate in the mode of the symbolic; this third type of sign is distinguished from the icon and the index by being unmotivated, arbitrary, and conventional. Hence, neither

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the iambic pentameter nor the requisite 140 syllables of the sonnet, for example, indicate or point to anything, nor do they picture forth their content. They are the conventional and arbitrary signs of “poetic-ness,” handed down through the ages purely by force of habit and tradition. This is what disturbed the modernists so much about them: such formal signs bear no discernible relationship to either the body or the mind of the poet or to their own subject matter, and so the recasting of poetic form along indexical and iconic lines became the revisionary poetic project during the first half of the twentieth century. But return for a moment to the four poetic examples given earlier, and you will see that form as icon or index is not at all what’s going on in Polaroid, “nimr,” “Measure,” and “waive SHIFT.” These poems’ formal features are not intended as means for us to hear or to sound the text in the manner, for instance, of Olson’s projectivist poetics—these forms do not score the text for performance, nor are they indices of the speaking body or the thinking mind. Nor do they visualize anything in the text; that is, these poems’ content is not pictured by their forms in the manner of a futurist poem, say, or of Appolinaire’s La Cravate et la montre. Nor do they formally mime, strictly speaking, any thing in the world. Instead, in each of the four cases, the poem’s form is both constrained and mobilized by a metaphor projected into the syntagmatic chain. In other words, these poems’ forms work not as indices or as icons, but as allegories. What happens in such poems is a rejection of form as iconic or indexical—no breathing body or picture shape here—and a return to a symbolic mode of poetic form—that is, a form whose meanings are arbitrary and unmotivated, although no longer strictly speaking “conventional.” This is not to say that these poems’ forms are not systematically patterned— they certainly are—but they are so under a different order of the sign. Indexical forms are constrained by the rhythms of the body or the contours of thought; if true to their various sources, they are less “free” even than traditional verse forms, bound as they are to real things in the world. Similarly, iconic forms are constrained by their subjects’ physical shapes or movements: if the poet transgresses the boundary of the iconic form, the picture the poem makes no longer resembles its subject. Again, the constraint is, practically speaking, as rigid as any traditional verse form. As Pound, Eliot, Williams, and many another modernist poet knew, “free”

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verse was never free—it was based instead on a fully motivated relation between form and content. Peirce’s symbolic sign, however, is based on an arbitrary relation between signifier and signified: this sign neither looks like nor is causally connected to its referent. Traffic signals, language in general, iambic pentameter, the fourteen lines of the sonnet, and the letters of the alphabet, for instance, are all examples of the Peircian symbol: none of these things bears any necessary relation to its subject. So why then aren’t the forms of the four poems given here simply a reactionary return to the same principle motivating conventional and traditional premodernist noniconic and nonindexical verse forms? Here’s where things get interesting, but first let me say a few more things about allegory. Since classical times, as I said earlier, allegory has been defined as a symbol introduced in continuous series, the temporal extension of metaphor. This iteration is given by Craig Owens, the Octoberist art critic who coined the phrase “the allegorical impulse of postmodernism” and went on to note that this definition, when cast into structuralist terms, maps on to Roman Jakobson’s famous definition of the poetic function, which involves “the projection of the metaphoric, or static, axis of language onto its metonymic, or temporal, dimension” ( Jakobson 1987, 49)—that is, the projection of the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection or metaphor into the axis of contiguity or metonymy. The poet, by using the principle that informs the vertical axis of language—that is, the principle of equivalence that makes the substitution of one word for another possible—to structure the horizontal axis of language, or the placing of words next to one another in the syntagmatic chain, arrives at the repetitions and patterns—formal and syntactical and grammatical and even thematic—of poetry.27 What is remarkable about our four postmodernist poems, however, is the depth of this axial projection: Coolidge, Inman, Kim, and Higgins intensify the poetic function by generating both the syntax of the individual line as well as the arrangement of lines into larger formal patterns in accordance with a controlling metaphor, a kind of Jakobsonian “dominant” that at once mobilizes and structures each of their texts.28 For Coolidge, as I demonstrate in chapter 2, this intensification involves the allegorical transcoding of photography and writing; in Polaroid, he is literally translating the mechanical, the technical, and even the chemical

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integers and dynamics of film into poetry. The language that makes up Polaroid is conceived as the literary equivalent of the crystalline solution that coats Polaroid film, and the words of this text are literally arranged as the emulsifying crystals that orient themselves, when exposed to light, in the same direction in order to produce photographic images. The dominant metaphor enabling this text, writing = photography, is projected not into its narrative register—that is, this is not a poem about photography— but deeper, into the very syntactic string of the writing itself, while at the same time it generates the logic that organizes the overall shape of the text. Note, again, that the poem’s form is neither indexical—film is not physically indicated in the poem’s formal registers, it is not a trace left in the body of the poem—nor iconic—we don’t see the outline of a camera here. What we have instead is the projection of the technical dynamics of one discourse into the material body of another, an act of transcoding that renders the formal dynamics of the poem allegorical. This sort of discursive transcoding is also the formal gear of surrealism, and I examine the entangled histories of allegory and surrealism later in elaborating a theory of allegory derived from a number of writers, each of whom contributes one or more features of the definition of the trope. My point here is not to cherry-pick my sources but to derive a description of allegory apt to my present purpose, which is to articulate a working theory of postmodern poetic form. Several key features of allegory are important for me to clarify in order to situate the terms of my subsequent analyses: I include these features under the rubrics dissection and articulation; collage and montage; melancholy and arbitrariness; transcoding and projection. As The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics puts it, “allegorical writing is a particularly elusive procedure. No account of selected changes in its operation . . . can fully show the interplay of its compositional and interpretive forms” (“Allegory” 1993, 35). A critic can, however, map a theoretical terrain and situate a literary practice against it; this is how I proceed. It is also important to point out here that in this book I am concerned primarily with allegory, not with surrealism: the latter is interesting to me principally because of its formal methods, not because of its psychological theories of dream or its politics. I am not interested in the dynamics of automatic writing. Surrealism, of course, is as complicated and as heterogeneous a phenomenon as allegory; the term resists easy definition. Not all surrealism is allegory, just as not all allegory is surreal. I acknowledge the

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influence of surrealist painters on poets such as Ashbery and Coolidge, but this is not a book about the influences of surrealism as such on American poetry.29 Likewise, if the critical literatures on allegory and surrealism are two principal preoccupations in what follows, a third is what Quilligan calls “the context of structuralism’s allegorical tendencies” (1979, 240). A substantial book detailing the effects of structuralism on American poetry remains to be written; this is not it. Structuralism is crucial to modern discussions of allegory, and Jakobson in particular is a key figure in these discussions—hence the occasional structuralist bent to the discussion in the next section.30 In that section, I discuss salient theories of allegory and surrealist form in order to provide scaffolding for subsequent arguments about individual poems, the idea being that each of the elements of allegory that I describe has an exaggerated analogue in postmodern poetic form—that, essentially, postmodern poetic form is projected or extended allegory. For this reason, it is important to start with fundamentals and then work up to more complex iterations. Beginning with Fletcher, who provides a basic definition of the trope, I describe how the allegorist, like the surrealist (and, according to Barthes, like the structuralist), starts by isolating objects and then recombining them with other, unrelated objects or by otherwise distorting or decontextualizing them. Although parataxis and collage are generic stylistic tools, allegory’s temporal aspect leads me to discussions of montage. I return to Benjamin and his notion of the “brittleness” of the trope, which he claims leads to the allegorist’s melancholy knowledge of the arbitrariness of the sign, and then I work through Jameson’s notion of postmodern allegorical transcoding. I end with Craig Owens’s appropriation of Jakobson’s theories of metaphor and metonymy in order to describe the formal method of what Owens calls the “allegorical impulse” of postmodernism. I refer throughout to a host of other writers, essays, books, and articles, for the issue of allegory always was and still is contentious—as well as persistent, relevant, and remarkably resilient: a recent chapbook dealing with the contemporary conceptual poetry movement, Notes on Conceptualisms, opens with the declaration, “Conceptual writing is allegorical writing” (Fitterman and Place 2009, 13). The authors, Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman, construe allegory very broadly in order to make their argument; my intention here is not to criticize the accuracy of their definitions31 but

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to point out the ongoing preoccupation in contemporary poetics with allegory as a functional trope. I return to the issue of allegory and presentday conceptual poetics in chapter 5, which focuses on Craig Dworkin.

Concept: The “Trope of Tropes” Trope There is nothing wrong about talking about the foot of a mountain—as long as one does not wonder whether it has a shoe. —Maxwell Bennett and Peter Hacker, Neuroscience and Philosophy

dissection and articulation [W]e might speak of structuralist activity as we once spoke of Surrealist activity (Surrealism, moreover, may well have produced the first experience of structural literature, a possibility which must some day be explored). —Roland Barthes, “Structuralist Activity”

What does Barthes mean when he says that surrealism “may well have produced the first . . . structural literature” (1972, 214, italics added)? He begins by classifying both surrealism and structuralism as “activities of imitation”: “[T]here is, strictly speaking, no technical difference between structuralism as an intellectual activity, on the one hand, and literature in particular, art in general, on the other: both derive from a mimesis, based not on the analogy of substances (as in so-called realist art), but on the analogy of functions (what Lévi-Strauss calls homology)” (215). Barthes goes on in this passage to explain that when structuralist linguists, folklorists, economists, anthropologists, and literary critics go to work, “they are all doing nothing different from what Mondrian, Boulez, or Butor are doing when they articulate a certain object—what will be called, precisely, a composition—by the controlled manifestation of certain units and certain associations of these units” (1972, 215). More specifically, both structuralist “activities” and modernist antirealist art “involve two typical operations: dissection and articulation” (216). Barthes’s privileging of surrealism as the first experience of structural literature, then, suggests that something critical happens when the latter appears in the early 1920s:

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the activity of “dissection and articulation” becomes more explicit under the hand of the surrealist, who evidently is the first “structural man” to “take the real, decompose it, then recompose it . . . not in order to copy it but to render it intelligible” (215)—and thereby to “highlight the strictly human process by which men give meaning to things” (218). In a later parlance, both the surrealist and the structuralist might be said to work to reveal the constructedness of human meaning making.32 But what is it that makes the surrealist the better exemplar of Barthes’s “structural” man over his Dadaist or constructivist predecessors? The answer, in short: the surrealist is the first structural artist because he proceeds as if the foot of the mountain really does have a shoe. In other words, the surrealist operates explicitly within the parameters of the structuralist paradigm: he is the first artist to work methodically and systematically by projecting the metaphorical axis of substitution into the metonymical axis of contiguity—who treats the substitutions of metaphor (the “foot” of the mountain) literally as if they were the contiguities of metonymy (has a shoe). And when the surrealist sets that shoe a-walking, he produces allegory— that is, he introduces his metaphor into continuous series; he extends it into narrative. As equally a mimesis based on the analogy of functions, allegory makes a third homologue to the pair structuralism/surrealism and is nothing if not an activity of dissection and recomposition. The idea that the twin nativities of structuralism and surrealism in the 1920s were intimately bound up with a resurgent “activity” of allegory can be derived from the works of Walter Benjamin, but even before his works were made widely available (especially in the English-speaking world33), the structural links between surrealism and allegory were discerned: approaching the issue from an entirely different philosophical orientation than Benjamin, Angus Fletcher ends his Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (1964) with a section entitled “Surrealism in Old and New Allegories.” The surrealist mode, he argues in a key passage, is fundamentally allegorical in its proclivity for isolating and fragmenting objects and images and then submitting them to what he calls a “curiously inwrought” texture marked by “an idealizing consistency of thematic content [in which] the relations between ideas are under strong logical control” (105). Fletcher goes so far as to declare that among “the requirements of the allegorical image” is the injunction that “it should allow an emphasis on the visual modality, spe-

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cifically on visual or symbolic ‘isolation,’ not to say Surrealism” (109); surrealism, he says, is marked by “unexpected even shocking collocations of heterogeneous objects. . . . Above all, discontinuity and unnatural groupings seem to characterize surreal art” (379).34 Although Fletcher’s book is much more encyclopedic than I let on here, I wish to focus on the primary and initial facts of surrealist isolation and recombination as a first step in a working theory of allegory. In a footnote, Fletcher quotes Paul Nougé’s description of surrealist procedure: The method itself consists in isolating the object by breaking off its ties with the rest of the world in a more or less brutal or in a more or less insidious manner. We may cut off a hand and place it on the table, or we may paint the image of a cut-off hand on the wall. We may isolate by using a frame or by using a knife, but even more by a deformation, or a modification, in the subject of an object—a woman without a head, a hand of glass. Or by a change of scale—a lipstick the height of a forest. Or by a change of scenery—the Louis-Philippe table on a field of ice, a statue in a ditch. (quoted in Fletcher 1964, 100)

Both the allegorist and the surrealist, then, begin by figuratively amputating or excising an object from its usual or conventional context: although this strategy of dissection is no doubt obvious and straightforward enough, Barthes’s second “operation”—articulation or recomposition—is more complicated. Once the surrealist-allegorist isolates an object, he renders it strange by introducing it into a process of combination: he either juxtaposes it with other, dissimilar objects or places it in an environment with which it is not usually or logically associated or distorts it in scale, size, or shape. This accounts for what in “The Death of the Author” Barthes calls “the famous Surrealist ‘jolt’ ” (1977, 144): examples include Salvador Dali’s flaming giraffes, André Breton’s winged octopuses, and Max Ernst’s tiki-headed Victorian dame admiring herself in a mirror as a giant praying mantis looks on. Such “extraordinary displacements” characterize what Louis Aragon calls the surrealist “marvelous” or “miraculous”: “The miracle is an unexpected disorder, a surprising disproportion” (1970, 38). André Breton writes of surrealism as “a function of our will to complete displacement of everything” and describes “ ‘fields of force’ created in the

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imagination by the reconciliation of two different images” (1970, 54). Such “fields” necessarily acquire their “forces” via specific formal strategies.

collage and montage The basic methodology of “displacement” leads to what Fletcher calls allegory’s “paratactic order” (1964, 171), Quilligan its “paratactic leisure” (1979, 236): at base, allegory, like surrealism, brings dissimilar images or objects into conjunction with few or no causal or syntactical connecting links.35 And this conjunction leads, in turn, to the technique of collage, which Max Ernst defines as “an alchemical composition of two or more heterogeneous elements, resulting from their unexpected reconciliation” (1970a, 130) and which he famously describes as key to surrealist sensibility. In “What Is Surrealism?” he cites “the classic example of the phenomenon discovered by the Surrealists, wherein the reconciliation of two (or more) seemingly incompatible elements within a scheme, incompatible to them, provokes the strongest poetic ignitions” (1970b, 135). “Underlying all Surrealist art,” Lucy Lippard tells us, “is the collage esthetic, or the ‘reconciliation of two distant realities’ on a new and unexpected plane” (1970, 2). This notion of a combustible reconciliation raises an intriguing question: How exactly does the surrealist or allegorist “reconcile” what are often determinedly incompatible objects conjoined in radically paratactic configurations? Such recuperation36 is precisely what Fletcher means by an “idealizing consistency of thematic content [in which] the relations between ideas are under strong logical control,” and, for many critics, recuperation’s presence marks off surrealism from other collage-based modernist arts. Lippard suggests as much when she traces an evolution in Ernst’s work: In Ernst’s collages of 1921 it is possible to see an illustration of the gradually diverging strains of Dada and Surrealism. His Dada work, founded on the harsh conjunction of opposing realities, was essentially destructive and dissective in its approach to accepted meanings, styles, and pictorial references. By 1921, however, the artist began to connect dissimilar objects by association; the result was no longer a single new image but a new situation, narrative, or drama comprised of recognizable images integrated

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into a novel context that was closer to the now standard idea of Surrealist “dream pictures.” The unity of this carefully constructed oneiric realism was assured by such smooth passage between images. (1970, 2, italics in original)

The surrealist work, then, has a situational, narrative, or dramatic aspect that Dadaist “destructive and dissective” art does not: the surrealist looks for or manufactures narrative “associations” between the dissimilar objects that she or he brings into proximity. But whereas Lippard argues that the mechanics of dream imagery provide for the dramatic unities of surrealism, Theodor Adorno maintains that surrealist constructions are merely analogous to dreams, not more. They suspend the customary logic and the rules of the game of empirical evidence but in doing so respect the individual objects that have been forcibly removed from their context and bring their contents, especially their human contents, closer to the form of the object. There is a shattering and a regrouping, but no dissolution. . . . To conceptualize Surrealism along these lines, one must go back not to psychology but to Surrealism’s artistic techniques. Unquestionably, they are patterned on the montage. (1991, 87)37

For Adorno, it is not (psychological) dream but (artistic) technique, driven by modern technologies of reproduction, that renders the peculiar unities of surrealist “regrouping,” and it is not the dissolutions of collage but the continuities of montage that account for the surreal object’s eccentric form.38 This is a critical point with which Fletcher, it turns out, concurs: speaking of the isolation of the surrealist image in painting, he tells us that when . . . surreal imagery is rendered in poetry, the poet takes the same liberties with perspective [as does the painter]; he makes his poem temporally discontinuous; he makes spatial relationships discontinuous. A riddle, after all, is a verbalized, Surrealistic collage, with a hidden meaning that draws the parts together “under the surface.” Lautréamont’s classic definition of l’humour noir, “the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table,” fits the pattern of enigmatic allegory;

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like an Eisenstein montage it challenges us to interpretation by means of an elliptical form and fragmented imagery. (1964, 100–101)

Thus, when the temporal and spatial discontinuities of surrealist collage are transferred into writing—are verbalized—they assume narrative dimensions: they take on, according to Fletcher, the form of the riddle, which has a “hidden meaning” that gives the text thematic unity.39 Accordingly, as surrealism moves from a mode of painterly collage to a mode of filmic montage, it comes to require an intensified participation on the part of the reader or viewer: that is, the riddle asks to be solved. What changes when Ernst moves from Dada dissections to surreal associations is precisely the degree of thematic relations between the heterogeneous elements that make up the art object—that is, Fletcher’s “thematic content under strong logical control”—and this change in turn requires a different grade of reading. Surrealism thus has a “photographic condition,” as Rosalind Krauss puts it (1993, 87)—although I would qualify by calling it a cinematic condition. Like the critics noted earlier, Krauss distinguishes Dada from surrealism by looking at how the artists of the two movements treat photography—specifically photomontage. Her argument parallels Fletcher’s and Lippard’s: Dada photomontage treats its juxtaposed images like dissociated fragments by spacing them—and thus by retaining patches of white space between them on the page: “Spacing destroys simultaneous presence: for it shows things sequentially, either one after another or external to one another—occupying separate cells. It is spacing that makes it clear—as it was to Heartfield, Tretyakov, Brecht, Aragon—that we are not looking at reality, but at the world infested by interpretation or signification, which is to say, reality distended by the gaps or blanks which are the formal preconditions of the sign” (1993, 107). Whereas the dissociated images of Dadaist collage are kept separated and thus unlinked or unsubordinated to one another, surrealist photographs retain “the seamless unity of the print” by employing what Krauss calls doubling—that is, by superimposing images on top of one another or by stretching or distorting them or by casting suggestive shadows or silhouettes over them or by otherwise blending them into what appears to be a seamless pictorial space. There are no white spaces left in surrealist montage; instead, the photograph integrates “spacing” into the very body of the image itself in

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order to emphasize “nature as representation, physical matter as writing” (Krauss 1993, 115). What Krauss does not point out is that surrealist “doubled” photographs can also be conceived as being modeled on the microsequencing of the individual frames in a film: in essence, the surrealist photograph works like a tiny movie, one where only two or three frames appear, superimposed upon or juxtaposed next to or blended into one another. In other words, surrealist photographs introduce an element of contiguity or process—of combination—into the very body of the image, which is replicated or stretched to suggest a trace of temporality: this is properly speaking the montage element in the surrealist object. In all four of the analyses that I have treated here, surrealist art is characterized by this process of projection, in which fragmented objects are either extended into a riddling syntax or stretched into narrative time and space: according to Peter Bürger, the nexus of the surrealist montage object is metonymic or syntagmatic (1984, 79).40 As Krauss puts it, under the aegis of surrealism “reality was both extended and replaced or supplanted by the master supplement which is writing: the paradoxical writing of the photograph” (1993, 118). It is this characteristic projection of metaphor into metonymy that affiliates surrealist art with allegory.41 In other words, as Paul de Man reminds us, “allegory is sequential and narrative” (1981, 1): in allegory as in surrealism, metaphor is temporalized. Hence, strictly speaking, allegory does not produce an emblem or an image but an activity or a process. Allegorical forms are neither pictures nor diagrams; as literary devices, they generate procedures, not static objects: “tropes are transformational systems, not grids” (de Man 1979, 63 n. 8). This point cannot be emphasized enough; it makes for major differences between poetic modes. Thus, whereas for a primarily indexical poet such as Creeley there are, as quoted earlier, “no forms but in activities”—that is, activities produce forms—and hence “form is never more than an extension of content” (italics added and full capitals not used), for an allegorical poet such as Hejinian “form is not a fixture but an activity” (2000, 47): there are no activities but in forms; “it is form that provides an opening” (41); and content is never more than an extension of form. But I anticipate myself here. Carolyn Van Dyke states the general point succinctly: “The [allegorical] text operates on what may be called a vertical and a horizontal axis, and the two continually intersect: as the narrative progresses, its agents appear

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in various forms and at various levels of abstraction, and the means by which they are signified affects and constitutes the narrative”: “allegorical events proceed . . . through the interconversion of static ideas and their temporal embodiments” (1985, 45, 66).42

melancholy and arbitr ariness Walter Benjamin, of course, is the most famous philosopher of allegory and surrealism, and his work agrees in general with many of the points I have made.43 Because “modernity has, for its armature, the allegorical mode of vision” (Benjamin 1993, 336) and the surrealists are the primary dream readers and allegorists of the modern period (13), surrealism— born, in Benjamin’s own allegorical figuration, of the unholy union of Dada and an arcade (82)—provides the materialistic, anthropological “profane illumination” (1999, 209) of the “mythologie moderne.”44 For Benjamin, then, surrealism is the “image sphere” where allegory and a kind of protostructuralism come into rich and generative critical play (1999, 191–192). As it is for Barthes, surrealism may be said to be for Benjamin the first experience of a structural literature. And likewise for Benjamin, montage is the principle formal method of both surrealism and allegory as well as finally of his own work; the theory in Passagen-Werk (translated as The Arcades Project) “is intimately related to that of montage” (1999, N1, 10): “Method of this project: literary montage” (N1a, 8).45 Rolf Tiedemann comments, “What linked [Benjamin’s] methods to Surrealist ones, the immersion of what has been into layers of dreams, represented not an end in itself for the Passagen-Werk, but rather its methodological arrangement, a kind of experimental setup” (1999, 935)—that is, a compositional method that ultimately had a constructivist goal. Benjamin tells us in the Trauerspiel that the allegorical writer “must not conceal the fact that his activity is one of arranging, since it was not so much the mere whole as its obviously constructed quality that was the principal impression which was aimed at” (1998, 179). Hence, to return to Barthes, the allegorist-surrealist “highlight[s] the strictly human process by which men give meaning to things.” This “obviously constructed” quality of both allegorical and surreal objects leads to an issue of a different register—that is, to what Benjamin

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calls allegory’s “brittleness”: “allegory, as the sign that is pointedly set off against its meaning, has its place in art as the antithesis to the beautiful appearance in which signifier and signified flow into each other. Dissolve this brittleness of allegory, and it forfeits all authority” (1999, 374). The allegorical text is constructed of objects conjoined in such a way as to highlight or to emphasize the arbitrariness of their being brought together (as Owens explains it, “If the symbol is a motivated sign, then allegory, conceived as its antithesis, will be identified as the domain of the arbitrary, the conventional, the unmotivated” [1992, 63]).46 In pointed opposition to the symbol, allegorical signifier and signified do not “flow into each other” but instead are set off in mutual and frequently antagonistic opposition to one another: due to its “brittleness,” allegory can easily break into its component parts.47 Allegory thus causes a kind of semiotic distress; it works to disfigure and unsettle the world of things so that “only the fragments of that world are left to it now, as object of its brooding” (Benjamin 1999, 349). According to Benjamin, as the allegorist “dislodges things from their context and, from the outset, relies on his profundity to illuminate their meaning,” his or her world image “cannot be explained apart from the passionate, distraught concern with this spectacle” (1999, 211).48 Brooding over the deliberately broken work of his own hands, the allegorist “by no means avoid[s] that arbitrariness which is the most drastic manifestation of the power of knowledge” (1998, 184); “that which the allegorical intention has fixed upon is sundered from the customary contexts of life: it is at once shattered and preserved. Allegory holds fast to the ruins” (1999, 329).49 Thus, the brittle “doubleness at the heart”50 of allegory provides for the melancholy that Benjamin famously posits as the allegorist’s distinctive condition: the antinomies of the allegorical include the possibility for a kind of abyssal semiotic freefall as under their aegis “any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else. With this possibility a destructive, but just verdict is passed on the profane world: it is characterized as a world in which the detail is of no great importance” (1998, 175): “the sense of ‘the abyssal’ is to be defined as ‘meaning.’ Such a sense is always allegorical” (1999, 27). 51 The allegorist becomes melancholic as she or he contemplates semiotic ruins made of arbitrarily disposed signifiers conjoined into fragile and ungainly new artifacts (1998, 185): “the brooder, whose startled gaze falls on the fragment in his hand, becomes

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an allegorist,” for “brooder and allegorist are cut from the same cloth” (1999, 324, 367).52

tr anscoding and projection Two of the most ambitious attempts to write theories of postmodern allegory can be found in the respective works of Fredric Jameson and Craig Owens, each of whom describes different aspects of the formal mechanics of the trope. These theories lead in turn to two somewhat different approaches to allegory, both of which are important for my subsequent discussion of poetry. Out of his study of Benjamin, Jameson develops his theory of allegorical transcoding, an aesthetic as well as a critical strategy that he places at the center of postmodern sensibility. He defines it as “the setting into active equivalence of two preexisting codes, which thereby, in a kind of molecular ion exchange, become a new one” (1991, 394).53 Transcoding is thus methodologically identical to the surrealist practice of conjoining dissimilar objects: in postmodernist art, Jameson explains, two unrelated discourses are brought into mutually defining and deforming conjunction: the postmodernist architect, for instance, might conceive of a building as a narrative (as in his own famous example of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel); the postmodern writer might use principles drawn from the geological sciences or architecture to structure a poem or a novel.54 The new allegorical object created by such a mingling of codes is by definition internally at odds with itself, and Jameson goes on to tell us that “the allegorical . . . can be minimally formulated as the question posed to thinking by the awareness of incommensurable distances within its object of thought” (1991, 168). For Jameson, this incommensurability at the core of the postmodernist project is a symptom of alienation as well as the source of a new kind of intellectual trouble: it ultimately “stand[s] as the symbol and analogon of that even sharper dilemma which is the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects” (44). Allegorical in essence and finally both decadent and hollow, postmodern art is “Surrealism without the Unconscious: such is the way in which one is also tempted to characterize the newer painting, in which the most uncontrolled kinds of figuration emerge with

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a depthlessness that is not even hallucinatory” (174).55 Radical heterogeneity and disconnection are the working modes of the new dispensation: in his essay on Benjamin in Marxism and Form (1971), Jameson tells us that “allegory is . . . the privileged mode of our own life in time, a clumsy deciphering of meaning from moment to moment, the painful attempt to restore a continuity to heterogeneous, disconnected moments” (72). Likewise, Craig Owens, in a series of articles published in 1979 and 1980 in which he argues that postmodernism operates as an “allegorical impulse” that first appeared in the visual arts as the latter found themselves caught in the general “turn towards language” in the 1950s and 1960s, complicates the technical analysis of allegory by, as I mentioned earlier, mapping the traditional definition of the trope as extended metaphor onto Jakobson’s definition of the poetic function as the projection of the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection (or substitution or metaphor) onto the axis of combination (or contiguity or metonymy): allegory, says Owens, “superinduces a vertical or paradigmatic reading of correspondences upon a horizontal or syntagmatic chain of events” (1992, 57).56 This is a more generalized definition of the trope than Jameson’s, and it leads to different consequences, according to Owens, wherein allegory is approached not so much as a transcoding of discursive registers but instead as “the projection—either spatial or temporal or both—of structure as sequence” (57). Hence, the principle of metaphorical correspondence generated by the rule of equivalence that motivates the vertical axis of language is projected into the contiguous sequences of the “line” of the metonymic or horizontal axis. As I mentioned earlier, Owens plugs allegory as the ultimate, primary, and characteristic formal armature of postmodernism, ultimately suggesting that the motivations behind all postmodernist art may be reducible to this “single, coherent impulse” (58). Owens’s Jakobsonian formula suggests a deeper implicit logic behind much of what we think of as postmodern writing; it also raises a host of questions that I defer addressing at this point in order to treat them as they crop up as issues in the individual analyses of the poets I focus on in this book. Meanwhile, it is helpful to generalize what has been established so far: poetic allegory is created by the transcoding of two dissimilar objects or images into a metaphorical figure, which is then projected into sequence either by being extended into narrative or, in its postmodern iteration, by otherwise contributing the logic to how the formal elements

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of the writing in the poem are construed. Put most simply, allegory is metaphor motivating sequence. The unresolved tension in the allegorical text caused by the projection of the arbitrariness of metaphor into the contingency of metonymy—the surrealist blending of dissociations in which the metaphorical vehicle, rather than falling away, is instead elaborated (that is, the foot of the mountain sports a shoe)—makes for the semiological distress that both Jameson and Owens detect in postmodernist art and that Benjamin detected earlier in surrealism. In postmodern poetry, surrealism occurs at the level of form, where distress plays out not in narrative registers but in syntax and line arrangement and in the logics mobilizing the poem’s larger structures. But before we turn to poetic construction after 1950, I wish to examine an early episode in the history of the American reception of surrealism in the 1930s as a means of introducing and situating the issues surrounding the allegorical impulse as it travels down through the poetry and poetics of the twentieth century.

1

Entomologies 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

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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

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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:

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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,

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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

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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 midSeptember) 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

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“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

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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.

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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

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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

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“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

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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 “paranoicocritical” 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

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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

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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

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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

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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)

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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

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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”:

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decapitated areas 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

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bluent, specifically unjust 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.

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“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 canvasback—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 eardrum 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

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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

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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.

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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).

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Epistemologies Clark Coolidge To see the tiger in a lapse of photography marble. —Clark Coolidge, “Sundance at Bob John’s,” in Own Face

Louis Zukofsky’s “lens” suggests that, like surrealism, objectivism has a “photographic condition,” although the objectivist camera takes a very different kind of picture: if the surrealist photomontage blends images into predatory allegories, then the goal of the objectivist snapshot is to maintain the integrity of the object as object. A good example of this can be seen in George Oppen’s poem “From a Photograph” from The Materials: Her arms around me—child— Around my head, hugging with her whole arms, Whole arms as if I were a loved and native rock, The apple in her hand—her apple and her father, and my nose pressed Hugely to the collar of her winter coat. There in the photograph It is the child who is the branch We fall from, where would be bramble, Brush, bramble in the young Winter With its blowing snow she must have thought Was ours to give to her. (1975, 47)

An interesting feature of this poem is the fact that the object that it “brings to a focus” is a photograph, which is already an object that itself brings

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an object to a focus —that is, the image of father and child recorded in its surface. The lens of a camera having brought an object to a focus, the poem as lens now brings that object to a focus and hence is a meditation on “the materials” of representation: in a kind of nested-dolls scenario, the poem is an object that itself describes a picture of an object. Marjorie Perloff argues that the poems in The Materials mark a “paradigm shift” in American poetry from modernism to postmodernism (1991, 58); Oppen’s writing, she says, interrogates the “modernist faith in the image” (83), drawing attention instead to language itself “by rupturing the very sentence and phrasal units in which the image appears” (80); “by seeing how words, taken out of their normal syntactic contexts, can assume new meaning” (82); and by putting into play “the possibilities of syntax rather than of image or metaphor” (84). But if any poet ruptures linguistic units in the way that Perloff describes, it is Clark Coolidge, and I want to examine what it means to move from a book like The Materials to one like Coolidge’s The Maintains, which includes stanzas such as the following: the first and third half pert minor a child’s interval oligocene league a locust short film hole at bay with a lock nut lay or deposit

(1974, 37)

Here again we have child and film, but in Coolidge’s work, as Perloff puts it, “ ‘making strange’ now occurs at the level of phrasal and sentence structure rather than at the level of the image cluster” (1991, 78). As I demonstrate in this chapter, the driving of the impulse to “make strange” into the syntagmatic axis (“the level of phrasal and sentence structure”), coupled with an overall narrative mandate, renders The Maintains a radically different book than The Materials and Coolidge’s work, properly speaking, postmodern allegory.

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Constellations Williams is our Cézanne. With him the way of working begins to open. —Clark Coolidge, “From Notebooks” so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.

(Williams 1970, 138)

By now, several generations of undergraduates have been traumatized by William Carlos Williams’s tiny masterpiece, an icon of high modernism in its stripped down, minimalist mode. What after all can one say about this poem? Often cited as a textbook example of American free verse, “The Red Wheelbarrow” famously flies in the face of centuries of poetic tradition in the sheer spareness of its simplicity, but in spite of the weighty implications of its first line it doesn’t seem to hold much in the way of content. What does this poem mean? “So much” depends on a wheelbarrow? Such as what, exactly? And why might Coolidge hail Williams as “our Cézanne” (1983, 182)— Cézanne, the postimpressionist predecessor of cubism, who in his late work flattens and shatters the surface of his painting into small square brushstrokes, laying his pictures into a kind of grid of paint as if he were anticipating Piet Mondrian as much as Picasso? Cézanne was a consummate painter of structure, and Williams was a consummate poet of the same, for “The Red Wheelbarrow” is also constructed as a kind of grid— or, better, as a series of grids, overlapping and superimposed on one another—as if Williams were laying his wheelbarrow into a kind of mesh of language. On a second look, it becomes clear that his poem is anything but

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free verse: it comprises 4 two-line stanzas, each with an initial line of three words followed by a second line of one word: the pattern is 3-1 / 3-1 / 3-1 / 3-1. But the pattern gets more complicated when we count syllables—then it is 4-2 / 3-2 / 3-2 / 4-2, with the first line of the last stanza a syllabic mirror (2-1-1) of the first line of the first stanza (1-1-2). Two gridlike patterns overlap to construe the body of the poem, one based on word count, the other on syllable count. But the patterns are further complicated when we look at the vowels of the stressed syllables of the principle nouns in each line: starting at the bottom, the stressed vowels are all i’s in the last stanza; all a’s in the penultimate stanza; all e’s in the second stanza (the a in “barrow” flattens to a short e); all o’s and u’s in the first. Only the solitary verb in the poem—“depends”—doesn’t fit the pattern. What this poem finally depends on then is the distribution of its stressed vowels, the a’s, e’s, i’s, o’s, and u’s that make all the difference in its lines and in fact finally determine which word goes where. Literally, “so much depends upon a red wheel barrow”—the poem’s sonic and graphic elements are selected and arranged according to preordained principles so that no single word can be moved or changed without upsetting the constructive parameters that constitute this very particular piece of writing. The red wheelbarrow cannot be blue; the chickens can never be horses (wrong vowel) or pigs (wrong number of syllables); wet cannot substitute for rain—all because of purely formal considerations: vowel value, metrical stress, syllable count, word count, line arrangement. In this poem, content is explicitly an extension of form.1 Now consider “Machinations Calcite,” an early poem by Coolidge in Space: acetone imprinted oblique swatch on the skin car barn oil wall ocarina & mumps much wet green I’d leave sole key to this game to my friend, sheet water cat actor impressed weaving candle turn on computer cigarette, paper wall tarheels & balance

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a lot of yellow stick neck He’ll have to hurry & carry away, to my blue friend hustling bringing his moon & car agate inked merry melodies drool on shank of wet lead star tool crayon & sands length of granite buck-drill It’s sucking up the strand, his crystal flag, & the eels tube for that, their parade swizzle fun arctic suck splinter dry-ice spazz luke-ing ace supper at church hard pinks & sponge breath many forams drift Roller window going up on I repeat my offer food list in iron flakcs (1970, 5)

In spite of obvious and pronounced differences—there is no single clear image in Coolidge’s poem, and the writing constantly switches syntactic registers—“Machinations Calcite” is, like “The Red Wheelbarrow,” carefully and systematically constructed.2 It has four stanzas of five lines apiece, with strong symmetrical patterns tying each to the other: the first line of each stanza except the last comprises two words, the first of which begins with an a and the second with an i (“acetone imprinted”; “actor impressed”; “agate inked”; “arctic suck”). The third line of each stanza is made up of two words connected by an ampersand, with, again, the fourth stanza deviating in substituting two-word phrases: “ocarina & mumps”; “tarheels & balance”; “crayon & sands”; “hard pinks & sponge breath.” The fourth line of each stanza has to do with terms of count and measure (“much,” “a lot of,” “length of,” “many”); the first and last of these fourth lines are three words long and have to do with mass and amount (“much wet green”; “many forams drift”); these two bookend the corresponding fourth lines of the second and third stanzas, both of which are written in regular duple tetrameter and once again have to do with measure (“a lot of yellow stick necks”; “length of granite buck-drill”). The

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fifth line of each stanza is written as a conventional long sentence with no end punctuation; only these lines contain personal pronouns. This poem, too, is certainly not written in free verse. Other poems in Space are composed in mirror forms, as in “said lines types ohm”: said lines types ohm gear cock wood ide eke tong (frame or Tom) arch bean red of the send it a gloaming b cormorant pile a piles of rich snag (file oat loop) gilled friendlier ram snuck gull bat same galled cork none soap gilled

(1970, 43)

After the poem’s opening couplet, every line is systematically arranged around its “center,” the word snag. Hence “tong” and “gilled,” both flush left, are respectively followed and preceded by an indented line (“(frame or Tom)”; “cork none soap”); the indented lines are respectively followed and preceded by pairs of lines flush left, which in turn frame single indented lines, which in their turn frame single flush-left lines, which themselves frame single indented lines (“rich”; “(file oat loop)”): the latter finally frame the flush-left center word/line, “snag.” Other more local symmetrical patterns appear: “galled” and “gilled” frame “cork none soap” and form an alliterative series with the earlier “gilled”; “rich” and “ram” frame three alternately indented lines; and so on. Coolidge describes these poems as “crystalline” in structure, and the poetic crystal is a figure that will become important for the larger allegorical dimension of Coolidge’s work.

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Or consider the following poem: by

a

I

of on we a

to no or to

no

by I of on we or

(Coolidge 1970, 87)

Here the eight-word string “by a I of to on no we,” variously broken into four lines, is repeated, differently broken, and the two iterations are connected by two or’s, one in the exact middle of the poem, the other at its end, to form an endlessly looping by-a-I-of-to-on-no-we, shaped one way or the other—a kind of Möbius strip or, maybe better, a mirror displacement of language. Even the tiniest of Coolidge’s poems often follow hidebound logics: is so of from (1970, 83)

Each word in this poem is generated by the final letter of the word before it: the s of “is” becomes the s of “so”; the o of “so” becomes the o of “of ”; the f of “of ” becomes the f of “from.” Hence, each word is so, of, and from the word before it. No word can be moved from its position in this little gem; every unit is as locked into the structure as Williams’s “red wheel / barrow” or “white / chickens.” Or consider the gnomic poem: the even been the

(1970, 83)

Another exegetical nightmare for the undergraduate: What does this poem say? The better question might be, What does this poem do? When

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read aloud, one hears again the poem’s vowels, in this case all e’s, but pronounced variously: hence “thee,” “eeven,” “bin,” “the.” And notice how the first “the” must be pronounced differently than the second. If nothing else, this is a poem that rings the changes on e. And by the way, “thee” has even been “the”—in fact, it is precisely so in the case of this poem. Many of Coolidge’s poems from Space reward this kind of attention, but what happens when we encounter the dense sheets of verbiage that make up a text such as Polaroid? few part once and then one as around leaves close stays then some of you few head so forth by whom why leave either to go part and it leaves once you then some do you within stays besides either few or just some once of either leaving miss it to close to it beside the either one or it you part per whom via either one or few do stay once it’s close to you missing the whole either one still few part once and then either it’s around you or some close beyond (Coolidge 1975, 92)

Aside from the obvious peculiarities of such writing, one might ask what relation it has with film and in particular with Polaroid processing, and it is here that an allegorical reading can begin to take place. Coolidge’s preoccupation with film and photography is obvious from the titles of books such as Polaroid (1975) and Smithsonian Depositions/Subject to a Film (1980), and although Jerome McGann has noted that photography acts as both the topic and the agent of much of Coolidge’s writing (1989, 270), what is immediately clear about the passage from Polaroid is that it is not “about” photography; one cannot read this text looking for its declared “subject.” So in what sense is the text “Polaroid”? As it turns out, Coolidge’s early books—in particular Space (1970), The Maintains (1974), Polaroid, Quartz Hearts (1978d), Own Face ([1978] 1993), and Smithsonian Depositions/Subject to a Film—can be read as an ongoing allegory of the process of filmmaking, from its initial phase as a microlevel chemical process of crystal distillation (in Space and The Maintains) to the orienting of those crystals to make the image-sensitive surface of the film/text itself (in Polaroid ), to the “developing” of actual “photographic” images (in Quartz Hearts and Own Face), and finally to the making of a movie (Jaws) in Subject to a Film. The strangeness produced by this alle-

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gory, the deeply integrated terms of which derive from two very different media, is compounded by the fact that its contours unfold over ten years and stretch through six books.3 Each of Coolidge’s works from this period contributes in sequence to a radical equation of photography and writing that illustrates what Fredric Jameson calls the postmodern “return and the revival, if not the reinvention in some unexpected form, of allegory as such” (1991, 167, italics in original): Coolidge’s blending of photography and poetry constitutes a literary instance of allegorical transcoding, that mode in which “new theoretical discourse is produced by the setting into active equivalence of two preexisting codes” ( Jameson 1991, 394). At each stage of his work, Coolidge develops a metaphorical equation of writing and some structural element of photography—its material, chemical, or technical apparatus; the optical operation of the camera lens; the cropping and framing of snapshots; the “grammar” of movies—to produce a deeply linked allegory involving writing and film. In a passage from Smithsonian Depositions, Coolidge provides something of an outline for his photographic project as it has “developed” from Space to Subject to a Film: A great many crystals of the same material start growing at about the same time in many different places. They grow until something gets in their way, or until they get in one another’s way, and then they stop. Since they start with no knowledge of one another, they all have different orientations, and when they meet they cannot join to form a single big crystal. The result is a polycrystalline mass. Its component crystals all have the same kind of orderliness, but they all have different directions of that orderliness. Polaroid contains crystals that behave like tourmaline. The process by which Polaroid is manufactured turns all the crystals the same way, so that the film is much like a broad, thin, single crystal plate of tourmaline. But if one identifies and examines the words one finds them beginning to separate and to act independently. The dictionary seems a vastly supersaturated solution of languages, roots entangled along sunken axes, originations buried in the dawn of man. Dangling amalgams of image and speech gradually propel themselves through all quadrants of the mind. A language must be carefully guarded and closed in sommon [sic] usage for its clastic energies to be held in check. Words and rocks contain a language that follows a syntax of splits and ruptures.

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Look at any word long enough and you will see it open up into a series of faults, into a terrain of particles each containing its own void. (1980, 26)

Like Robert Smithson, whom Coolidge quotes at length here and throughout Smithsonian Depositions, Coolidge exploits a network of intersections and parallels between the scientific discourses of geology and crystallography, on the one hand, and the aesthetic mediums of film and language, on the other, to create a body of work that renegotiates epistemological and medial boundaries. But because Coolidge derives his methods from surrealism as much as he does from minimalism or Smithson’s writings, I now turn to his relations with the former.

Fusing and Stretching Underlying nonetheless. The edge of the door is a pumpkin tray. And the lights let down. And the dry of a pin a witness. May this plunge and take the edge aligned. —Clark Coolidge, “Of Tanguy,” in Own Face

That Coolidge was inspired early on by surrealism is clear from poems such as “Of Tanguy” in Own Face ([1978] 1993) as well as from comments he makes in his lectures and interviews.4 In “Arrangement,” a talk that he gave at Naropa Institute in 1977, he recounts various initial sources of inspiration for his early work; they include, among others, science fiction novels that he read as a teenager, a trip he took as a child to a natural history museum, his experiences as a student of geology and as a spelunker, jazz and the paintings of Philip Guston, and the cut-up novels of William Burroughs. He also mentions John Ashbery’s The Tennis Court Oath (1962), in particular the long poem Europe, as a major influence on the work he later collected in Space, describing both Ashbery’s work and his own as “somewhat Surrealist” (Coolidge 1978a, 164). The adjective somewhat here is interesting; Coolidge’s qualification suggests the general postwar suspicion of surrealism described by Jonathan Eburne (2003) and David Arnold (2007), but it also acknowledges a real affiliation between surrealist art

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and experimental poetry after midcentury. Ashbery’s controversial second book (Harold Bloom famously declared it “a fearful disaster”) has come to be seen as an iconic pivot between two distinct modes of American writing that developed after 1960: the one—the road finally not taken by Ashbery—leading to verbal fragmentation and collage and then on to certain types of language poetry and other disjunctive modes of writing; the second leading to poetry that, no matter how irrational or disjointed its subject matter, retains nominal integrity at the level of syntax.5 Ashbery’s derivation of the first mode from the discontinuities and ruptures of the surrealist art that he was writing reviews about during the mid-1960s has been well documented, and it is clearly the writing in The Tennis Court Oath that attracted Coolidge.6 Coolidge also describes his early fascination with the paintings of Yves Tanguy—a fascination shared by Ashbery, for whom Tanguy “seems more than any other Surrealist painter to embody the spirit of Surrealism” (Ashbery 1991, 27). Coolidge claims that Tanguy was a primary source of his own early intuition of the cardinal importance of what he calls “arrangement” in art: “Very early I saw reproductions of the works of Yves Tanguy . . . who painted landscapes where the horizon is maybe not there. You can’t quite tell. It seems to be a slanting plane. It may be on the water, it may be the desert, but anyway, there are these forms. Are they mineral, are they animal, are they about to move or are they frozen there since before time? Fantastic. They’re placed. There’s an arrangement” (1978a, 149). Hence, another source for the symmetrical and mineralogical arrangements of the poems in Space: take what is Cezannesque in Williams, salt it with the surrealist in Tanguy, and you might very well get a poem such as “Machinations Calcite.”7 On a more basic level, both Coolidge and Ashbery are attracted by two features of Tanguy’s paintings. The first is the way that Tanguy fuses his images—for Ashbery, “Tanguy’s landscapes [are] neither vegetal nor mineral but an amalgam of both”: “the arbitrary distinction between abstract and figurative painting did not exist for Tanguy, who painted real if nonexistent objects, so that his work is in a sense a fusion of the two” (1991, 19, 27). For Coolidge, as we see in his statement quoted earlier, both the animal and the mineral, the solid (the desert) and the liquid (the sea), and even movement and stasis are so fused. The second feature of Tanguy’s work involves how he “stretches” his images: Coolidge recalls seeing a

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reproduction of a “juvenile painting” of an ocean liner with “endless rows of little windows. . . . Tanguy had this painting of a ship which seemed to be stretched incredibly out” (1978a, 150). Likewise, for Ashbery, in Tanguy’s paintings “space and perspective are methodically distorted; it is impossible to gauge distances by the size of the figures” (Ashbery 1991, 21), although Ashbery—in spite of all his talk about distortion and amalgamation—nevertheless considers the surrealist painter a realist, and in his comments that the “governing principle” in Tanguy’s work is “self-abnegation in the interests of a superior realism” (1991, 26–27) (the painter’s bizarre fusions he says operate “always in the interests of a more integral realism” [27]), he echoes the statement that he makes on the original dust cover of The Tennis Court Oath that his own poetry is also a means toward “a greater, more complete kind of realism.” But in what sense exactly is Tanguy’s painting realist? The twin techniques of fusing and stretching recall the formal procedures of allegory— dissection and rearticulation, montage and extension—and, indeed, Ashbery reads Tanguy’s pictures as simultaneously realist and allegorical: their weirdly abstract and at the same time “obviously real” biomorphic figures, “strung out on an infinite plain” (1991, 22), represent the ultimate “embodiment of the spirit of Surrealism”—a ne plus ultra surrealism of pure forms that never resolve into recognizable objects, stretched into pure dimensions that never resolve into recognizable spaces. In Tanguy’s work, we have the paradox of a realist surrealist: his are not so much paintings that use surrealist techniques as they are paintings of surrealist techniques—of surrealist fusing and stretching as such. Tanguy’s is a surrealism at the service of representing its own procedures. But then what might Tanguy’s paintings allegorize? In his essay, Ashbery calls Tanguy “the Poussin of the . . . inner landscape” (1991, 27), suggesting that his paintings depict the inner working spaces of the human mind: in them, then, we have something like highly articulated pictures of intellection itself in the forms of objects representing the dynamics of the mind in the process of thinking. Tanguy paints mindscapes, and I would posit that he in fact does so literally in that many of his figures appear to be modeled after drawings of the brain stem and medulla that were common in the medical journals of the early part of the twentieth century. More accurately, then, Tanguy may be said to be depicting brainscapes: he constructs his biomorphic figures out of the organic components of the

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brain itself, reconfiguring them so as to suggest its parts caught in a moment of movement relative to one another. His paintings depict the very machinations of the brain. Tanguy’s pictures might be the closest things we have to allegorical images of the mind in motion. Something of the spirit of this depiction spills over into the 111 numbered sections of Ashbery’s long poem Europe in The Tennis Court Oath, composed largely of cut-up fragments of a novel; here are sections 103 to 106: 103. streaming sweeping the surface long-handled twig-brooms starving wall great trees

104. blaze out

aviators dastardly

105. We must be a little more wary in future, dear 106. she was trying to make sense of what was quick laugh hotel—cheap for them caverns the bed box of cereal Ere long a flare was lit I don’t understand wreckage

(1962, 82–83)

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In this systematized arrangement of fragments—the numbering of the sections and the gridded structure of number 104 show the author intentionally organizing his found materials—enough of the vocabulary and syntax of the original source text (Beryl of the Biplanes, a children’s novel set during World War I) remain to create a distinct sense of the familiar in all of the strangeness: one is confronted in Europe precisely by Tanguy-like fusions of recognizable but disparate units construed into carefully discriminated verbal objects arranged into a consciously constructed (in this case serial) setting.8 What attracts both Ashbery and Coolidge in Tanguy’s work is its synthesis of utterly strange and yet completely familiar elements into fastidiously arranged reticular structures that, even while they resist interpretation and even recognition, invite one to read, to hear, to wonder, to speculate—in short, to think: recall Jameson’s formulation that “the allegorical . . . can be minimally formulated as the question posed to thinking by the awareness of incommensurable distances within its object of thought” (1991, 168). As Coolidge puts it in a context that he extends to include the reading of the “units” in Europe, “Now, where are they ? What kind of pattern do they make? What sort of arrangement? There seems to be no intelligence behind it but there is an arrangement. There are places in space being occupied and moving” (1978a, 153, italics in original). For Coolidge, Ashbery is also a Poussin of the inner landscape; Europe, like Tanguy’s Ma vie blanche et noire, can be read as a surrealist amalgam of distorted (in this case literary) objects, fused out of parts of other texts, occupying the space of the page and moving in relation to one another. Coolidge similarly organizes his poetic “places in Space” into systematic structures that render the familiar strange. However, whereas many of his early poems resemble those in The Tennis Court Oath, his poetry as it develops throughout the 1970s assumes very different senses both of objective and of scale, the latter in particular making of the two poets completely different sorts of artists. What is missing in Ashbery’s work and what Coolidge’s poetry assiduously cultivates is precisely the larger element of allegorical form. The formal features of Europe—the numbering of the sections; the gridding of section 104; the particular arrangements of particular fragments, lines, and so on—do not finally signify anything; they enhance the strangeness of the piece, certainly, but they are not generated by the transcoding of dissimilar discourses, nor are they the temporal extensions of metaphor or symbols introduced in continuous series.

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They do not finally represent any other thing, process, or idea, nor do they otherwise point beyond themselves. Coolidge takes his poetry into an entirely different aesthetic register by pushing to their logical extremes the implications of Europe’s two surrealist formal procedures: the cut-up parataxis at the level of its phrases, lines, and stanzas; and the guiding principle of a larger organizational mandate at work in the poem (hence, back to Fletcher’s “idealizing consistency of thematic content [in which] the relations between ideas are under strong logical control” [1964, 105]). Coolidge’s writing becomes at once more disjunctive at the levels of syntax and sentence and more conjunctive at the levels of poem and book— indeed, at the level of books. Whereas the individual compositions of The Tennis Court Oath bear no intrinsic relationship to one another, never coalescing into a comprehensive image or idea, Coolidge composes works across books, putting the local dissociations and disarticulations of surrealism to work in the service of a larger and entirely unprecedented poetic project—the allegorical writing of photography.

Lost in Space The task of literary history, by the way, is precisely to reveal form. From this point of view, literary history which explains the nature of a literary work and its factors is in a sense dynamic archaeology. —Juri Tynianov, “Rhythm as the Constructive Factor in Verse”

Or dynamic geology, as the case may be—in the poems in Space, Coolidge metaphorically equates words and rocks (both of which “contain a language that follows a syntax of splits and ruptures”) to create a text in which “a great many crystals of the same material start growing at about the same time in many different places.” That is, he takes the first step in allegorically transcoding photography and poetry by writing film’s material (crystalline) ground. Just as the art of photography is grounded in the science of crystallography (“polaroid contains crystals”), so Coolidge (citing Smithson) posits that, figuratively speaking, writing and geology share a grammar—or, as he puts it in Space, “grammar a granite” (1970, 70). Coolidge constantly quotes Smithson in his early works, which might perhaps be read as literary analogues to Smithson’s “non-sites” and

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“earth works,” or, in Craig Owens’s parlance, “earthwords” (1992, 50). For Owens, Smithson’s works signaled the “catastrophe” of postmodernism in the visual arts by being consciously constructed as texts; they testify to “the eruption of language into the field of the visual arts,” which Owens argues “is coincident with, if not the definitive index of, the emergence of postmodernism” in the 1960s (45). He maintains that this “interchangeability of writing and sculpture” in Smithson “reveals the fundamentally allegorical nature of his aesthetic activity, whether visual or verbal” (43)— hence an instance of the allegorical transcoding that Jameson claims designates postmodernism. But what then happens to poetry during the 1960s, when “language erupts into the aesthetic field”? As it turns out, a work such as Space, published in 1970 but comprising pieces dating back to 1966, operates precisely as literature into which language has erupted. Referring to these early poems, Coolidge explains: “I was really trying to work with the words, look at the words, try to use all their qualities. There’s no question of meaning, in the sense of explaining and understanding this poem [‘ounce code orange’]. Hopefully, it’s a unique object, not just an object. Language isn’t just objects, it moves” (1978a, 161). The poems in Space do not “mean” anything in a conventional sense but are themselves “unique moving objects”; Coolidge calls them “little constellations of words.”9 Language, its referential function dramatically compromised in these poems, has “erupted” to the textual surface to become its own “object.” Although, as Barrett Watten puts it, “words are not being given ‘object status’ here” (1985, 92), Coolidge suggests that groups of words are—his poems, he says, are precisely objects made of constellated words: ounce code orange a the ohm trilobite trilobites.

(1970, 68)

In this poem, the words resist referring in any obvious manner to a discernible subject, although they do “point” to one another within the space of the poem itself, which can be read as a constellation of words with certain semantic and syntactic possibilities. Coolidge explains his interest in “tap-

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ping the energy” of words that resist one another and in the “interlacing” of the poem’s various logics: “ ‘ounce code orange’: ways of measuring, in a sense. Weight, a symbol system, a color. ‘a/the’: the indefinite article, the definite article, ‘ohm’ is the unit of electrical resistance, a quality of metal, let’s say, that requires a certain amount of juice to go through. . . . So there are those vectors going there” (1978a, 165).10 Such “vectors,” parallels, echoes, resonances provide possible moments of “movement” in the reading(s) of this poem—the words move or mean in nonstandard ways to create a lively object of possible attentions. But we can employ another paradigm in situating a reading of Coolidge’s early works within postmodern literary practice: the “eruption of language into the field of arts” that initiated the postmodern moment in the visual arts mirrors the postmodern moment in the literary arts initiated by an eruption of the visual into the textual field. In other words, as words erupt to the surface of the text, they become visible. Hence, in a poem such as “ounce code orange,” the words do not disappear into a syntax referring to “something else”: in “resisting” one another they assume a certain palpability. According to Viktor Shklovsky, the reader of such a poem no longer recognizes the word; she or he sees it (1965, 13). In “grammar a granite,” words assume something of the hardness and density of rocks. So far, however, Coolidge’s postmodernism resembles sundry versions of modernism: Shklovsky, after all, was writing in the 1920s, during which time various poets were also making language visible. The continuities between Coolidge’s work and earlier avant-garde practice have been duly noted: Michael Lally calls Coolidge’s poetry “an extension of Stein stuff and Zukofsky stuff, and even much European Futurist work now almost a hundred years old, nevertheless” (1978, 4). That “nevertheless” needs to be explored here, however, for Coolidge departs from modernist practice by cultivating the visual aspect of his poetry precisely through allegory. Hence, the form of “ounce code orange” visually processes certain ramifications of its “content”: not only does this poem involve standards of measurement, as Coolidge points out, but it also is itself a carefully measured “constellation.” The poem, corresponding to the three-lobed trilobite, constellates in complexes of series of threes: the three words of the first line are followed by three single-word lines, which are in turn followed by a single line with 2 three-syllable words.11 The poem has three “lobes”: two horizontal axes and one diagonal, which are visually “echoed” by the

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three descending words of the diagonal axis. The six syllables of the last line repeat the three syllables of line 1 plus the three in the next three lines; or, alternatively, if the second syllable of “orange” in line 1 isn’t slurred (“ornge”), the s on the end of “trilobites” visually and aurally supplements the third line, establishing an equivalence of a different sort with the first. The three o’s of the first line assonate with “ohm,” the third word in the third position in the diagonal line, as well as with the “trilobite trilobites.” A densely woven mesh of triplets constellates this moving poetic object.12 Thus, although “the poem wants to be a spatial object, a rock, and as opaque” (Lansing 1987, 167)—that is, a visual object—it also wants to be a visible object, an object not only that one can see but also in which one can see, and what one can see in it are words formally enacting along vectoral and axial lines the spatial possibilities of their grammars (hence, space). Poems such as “ounce code orange” and “grammar a granite” are constellations of words that are at once visual “hard verbal things” (McGann 1989, 262) and translucent (or, in Coolidge’s parlance, “crystalline”) “verbal things” that reveal the logic of their grammars to the reader’s gaze. McGann accurately describes Coolidge’s method in these poems as an effort “to shut down all the gaps that might develop (and that do develop) between thought and word and thing” (1989, 263). Hence, one constantly “sees” and “hears” “things” in Coolidge’s poems: a good example is the seventh line of “grammar a granite”: “eye tea half average.”13 Confronted by this line, the eye cannot resolve what the ear hears: the constant collapse of “eye tea” to “i t” or “it,” the ultimate, irreducible index of the object condition. One might read “eye tea” precisely as language, as that which the eye “drinks in” (Ron Silliman calls the poems in Space “word salad” [1986b, xvi], but why not “eye tea”?). And although the words are thus “consumed,” they at the same time retain their status as printed objects constellated on the page: “grammar a granite” indeed, and notice the absence of the copula—not “grammar is granite,” but the fact of the matter visibilized. But in what sense is such a visible “eruption” allegorical? Following Owens on Smithson, if we recast McGann’s observation that “the ‘subject’ . . . has entered this text as one of its ordering principles” (1989, 263) into structuralist terms, we can say that in “ounce code orange” Coolidge projects

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the vertical axis of language into the horizontal axis; recall that Jakobson postulates that “the poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination. . . . [I]n poetry the equation is used to build a sequence” (1987, 71). Coolidge, however, intensifies the poetic function by driving the vertical axis deeper into the horizontal axis than is common: thus, “trilobite” is projected into the metonymic axis to create the conditions of combination that unfold in the poem, the “meaning” of the word generating a correspondent form.14 In “ounce code orange,” a single metaphor (“tri-lobe”) is “introduced in continuous series” and hence projected into the poem’s metonymic dimension to create a “crystalline” structure, a linguistic structure “in” which one can see a grammar at work. “Ounce code orange” both announces itself as a code and names what is missing, for in Space Coolidge gives a series of poetic messages, but not the metalingual decryption. Jakobson opposes the poetic function to the metalinguistic function; in the latter, “speech is focused on the code: it performs a METALINGUAL (i.e., glossing) function,” which he distinguishes from “the set (Einstellung) towards the message as such, [the] focus on the message for its own sake, [which] is the POETIC function of language” (1987, 69, capitalization in original). In Coolidge’s poetry, the projection of the vertical “metaphor” into the horizontal axis of contiguity in such an absolute manner compromises any metalingual “glossing” function of language—we have pure meaning with no code: words that have extended into syntax. Thus, the phrases “grammar a granite” and “eye tea” resolve into visible objects, only to play out into syntactic strings and then dissolve back into words. In fact, as we recall, “Words and rocks contain a language that follows a syntax of splits and ruptures. Look at any word long enough and you will see it open up into a series of faults, into a terrain of particles each containing its own void” (Coolidge 1980, 26). Coolidge cribs these lines from Smithson’s essay “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects” (1968), and in the last section of Space he puts into practice Smithson’s geological allegory: tive a ture

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the ing tions.

(1970, 119)

Here we see a verticalized “terrain of particles” stratified into “a syntax of splits and ruptures,” a granitic grammar in which the suffix -ing can become a subject of the definite article, and -tive and -tions operate in the “syntax of splits and ruptures” that words and rocks (both inhabiting a “terrain of particles”) share. Such a radical collapse of structure into sequence creates the “crystalline” axes of the “space” of this poem, and “space” becomes the text’s overriding single metaphor, cast into the “continuous series” of the poems. Coolidge even includes the dictionary definition of the word space as a preface, as if to anchor the exact terms of the allegory that the text will explore: s pa c e (spas), n. O.F. espace, fr. L. spatium space. 1. That which is characterized by extension in all directions, boundlessness, and indefinite divisibility; the subject of determinations of position and direction.

This is the terrain that Coolidge explores: the multidirectional, boundless, and infinitely divisible ground of language, coupled with the irreducible, crystalline object–status of words on the page. Coolidge’s poems open themselves to “space,” “geology,” and “trilobite” not as literary subjects, but as the agents and indices of an allegorical moment: Space is a book of visible—“crystalline”—objects.

Maintaining the Dictionary in The Maintains What I think is that you start with materials. You start with matter, not with rules. The rules appear, the limitations appear, and those are your limitations and the limitations of the material. —Clark Coolidge, “Arrangement”

What, after all, does the maintain? Or, conversely, what are the maintains? Given the fact that Coolidge wrote The Maintains (1974) by “looking in the

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dictionary and using those pages as a source directly” (Coolidge 1989, 17), one might expect an investigation here of the mechanisms of the “maintenance” of the language: we go to the dictionary to find out what a word means and how to use it properly. And if we go to the dictionary, we find that the word the can be used either as the definite article or as an adverb, not as the subject of a verb. Similarly, maintains is a transitive verb, which can’t possibly operate as the object of the definite article. Hence, the title The Maintains reads initially as a species of nonsense: the two words composing the title phrase resist coalescing into any sort of syntactic harmony; in fact, they become visible in the same way as the words in Space. Upon a second reading, however, a kind of sense can be construed; as the definite article, the might be understood to perform precisely a maintenance function: it is a word used to maintain distinctions, to delimit objects and points of reference, in fact to point to those words that the culture understands as indices of the real. Ergo, the can maintain. These words initially throw into disarray the very meaning they invoke because one doesn’t normally think of the as a substantive noun or of maintains as a possible object of the definite article, but the phrase shifts rapidly back and forth between nonsense and new sense, grammatically deconstructing itself only to immediately resurrect its meaning at a more fundamental level. The words look at once out of place and deeply and securely in place: in fact, they perform the very functions that are proposed for them by the phrase as they propose the functions in the phrase. Coolidge’s title proposes a different order of syntax, only to relapse into the maintaining function of the syntax that it disturbs. The Maintains thus involves what McGann calls “Coolidge’s technique of double exposure” (1989, 259), the operation of which I have attempted to illustrate by my reading of the book’s title. In a phrase such as “the maintains,” in fact, four operations are made possible and occur simultaneously: (1) the words become “visible” as (2) they simultaneously disappear back into syntax (become “meaningful”), while concurrently (3) and (4) each word doubles to become simultaneously the definite article and the subject of the sentence in the case of the and a verb and a noun, subject and predicate, in the case of maintains. The doubling technique of the poems in Space has in effect been doubled again in The Maintains through the introduction of what Coolidge describes as the “syntax of the dictionary”: “I found out that there was a syntax in the dictionary which I

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hadn’t noticed before. You might think dumbly of the dictionary as a list of words with nothing in between, but of course in its definitions it has phrases like ‘that which is blank,’ that sort of syntax. So that kind of thing got in there and helped hook the work together. Of course I was still close to that time earlier when I was trying to use words that didn’t go together, to see what could come from that kind of resistance” (1989, 17). Coolidge thus complicates his earlier project of exploring the “resistances” of words to one another by introducing the syntax of the index. If the dictionary is the ultimate index of language and its uses, Coolidge’s syntax may be said to index the Index: it points at once to the dictionary and the dictionary’s function of maintenance even as it complicates that function in its own operations. The field of exercise has thus been broadened in The Maintains; no longer only “little constellations of words,” the individual units of this book (one hesitates to call them distinct “poems”) are “hooked together” by a syntax that itself indexes the larger syntax employed at the heart of the “language business,” so to speak, or at least at the core of that project, the object of which is to “maintain” the language and dispense rules for its usage. The work now indexes not only the words that may be found in the dictionary but the very syntax that informs and makes possible that text’s larger metalinguistic function. As the site where language exercises most forcefully its glossing function, the dictionary concerns itself exclusively with the lexical code, using language to comment on language in a project that ceaselessly bears no message and hence precludes entirely any exercise of the poetic function. Thus, Coolidge not only makes available a greater possible range of meanings for his poems but also implicates his work in a larger realm of reference by pointing to the particular syntactical arrangements that inform the dictionary. What does it mean to index this index? And more to the point, what does it mean to project the metalingual syntax of the index, a horizontal syntax of metonymy, onto the vertical or metaphorical structure of poetry? The first four lines of The Maintains may be scanned using the same criteria employed in the approach to “ounce code orange”: laurel ratio sharp or hard instrumental triple to or fro

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granule in award one to whom is made

(1974, 1)

A certain visibility of language is made possible by the arrangement of the words here, although that visibility is complicated by an aural dimension. “Laurel” sounds like “aural” or even “oral,” depending on how broadly the au is pronounced: the “ratio” of seen word to heard word is immediately foregrounded much as it is in “grammar a granite” (“eye tea”), while at the same time the “sharp or hard” (“heard”?) “to or fro” (“two or four”?) of the lines’ trochaic tetrameter informs that (l)aurel ratio. “Triples” troubles the “ratios heard”: Is “ratio” after all a dactyl or a trochee here? Is “instrumental” to be heard as “instruméntal” or “ínstruméntal,” which is how the line scans if the tetrameter is insisted on? Is “to or fro” in this line between a “heard” tetrameter and an “actual” underlying pentameter? Exactly how sharp are the ratios here, and just how instrumental is the “to and fro” between triples and duples to the aural ratio, which, sharp and hard as it may be, has already been disrupted by a stray l ? Is this the “granule in aw(o)rd”? Here we see the kinds of “vectors,” parallels, echoes, and resonances that Coolidge employs to such fine effect in Space likewise informing little “constellations of words” that make possible a number of interlacing “movements” in The Maintains. But both the quantity and the quality of the possible movements in these three lines are complicated in two ways: first of all, by the dictionary definition of laurel, which includes in its meaning poetic laurel(s) (hence, “laureate”)—that is, the laurel wreath given traditionally to the winners of poetic contests—and hence by the bracketing of the stanza with “laurel” and “award.” In other words, a cultural nexus is being indexed by the writing, which evokes a realm of significance outside of the immediate environment of the poem itself; the ratios of this particular stanza are framed by reference to “Poetry” writ large. This stanza, then, points to a network of concerns outside of itself in which it is nevertheless firmly ensconced. Here is “meaning” not present in “ounce code orange.” The line following the first stanza, “one to whom is made,” introduces a new dimension into the equation, as we witness the dictionary’s “ ‘that which is blank’ sort of syntax” create a number of vectoral possibilities. This line forcefully indexes the dictionary’s horizontal syntax, for it contains words that themselves partake of the logic of the index, most notably

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the pronouns one and whom. Coolidge utilizes the deictic component of pronouns here; “whom” points back to “one,” which itself points to some “person”—in this case, given the logic of the first three lines of the poem, presumably to the receiver of the “laurel award.” A certain metalingual or, as Jakobson puts it, a “glossing” function has appeared in the poem— hence once again a text in which equivalence becomes the (re)structuring device for a horizontal syntax of contingency.15 Indexing the syntax of the Index creates a metalinguistic gloss on metalanguage: a code of Codes. Organizing these traces of indexical syntax into the vertical structure of poetry creates a recursive text that endlessly points back into itself as it simultaneously points to “the wor(l)d” (again that errant l), at least as it is defined in the dictionary.16 In fact, for some readers The Maintains ultimately abolishes the image track altogether. Aram Saroyan mentions Coolidge’s “uncanny way of using all sorts of words and yet avoiding any kind of accumulation of these words into meaning or image” (1978, 6), and Ron Silliman notes not only that the lines in this text “confront this issue directly, if provisionally, often deliberately focusing or blocking any image track,” but that as the text progresses, Coolidge develops a language entirely “blind,” “where words present themselves only” in a “process of aiming” (1978, 21). Charles Bernstein, however, points out that Coolidge’s “verbal clusters allow for the most extravagant and wonderful fantasy—words building entities wilder (and more hilarious) than our dreams” (1978, 5). Which is it? Does Coolidge’s writing compel or resist the projection of an “image track?” I would argue that his work vacillates between the imaginable and the unimaginable, between the visible and the invisible, between words as things and words as shifters referring to something else, and that in fact this strategy of double exposure is already present in the book’s title in the way that the words the and maintains vacillate between being “visible” and disappearing into syntax. If we go forward to Smithsonian Depositions, we find another dimension of reference embedded in and embedding The Maintains that situates the book in the larger allegorical structure of Coolidge’s work. For if “the dictionary seems a vastly supersaturated solution of languages, roots entangled along sunken axes” (Coolidge 1980, 26), then Coolidge in The Maintains figuratively precipitates (linguistic) crystalline structures out of the dictionary’s “supersaturated solution.” As the fourth edition of The

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New Columbia Encyclopedia (1975) puts it, a crystal forms “by a substance passing from a gas or liquid to a solid state, or by going out of solution” (692) (which recalls Solution Passage, the title of Coolidge’s 1986 book). Crystals and crystallography are of course also central to Smithson’s sense of his generation’s interest in structures of entropy, the socioscientific ideology of the day —the sculptural “new monuments” of the “crystal land” representing nothing less than the slow but inevitable “freezing” of time and space as energy drains from the universe (Smithson 1979, 9–20). And true to thermodynamic theory, Coolidge’s “crystalline” stanzas reveal a higher level of chaos than the dictionary “solution(s)” from which they were precipitated.17 If Coolidge’s business is to “generate a language of [his] own” (1987, 12), then clearly the site at which to mine his raw material is the dictionary, with its “dangling amalgams of image and speech” (Coolidge 1980, 26). The Maintains has initiated the possibility of conceiving a radically different image track, one predicated on a different range of orders, although, as the logic of Coolidge’s allegory makes clear, this step is only the first, for what has been constructed in this text is a “polycrystalline mass,” which is by definition incapable of producing a coherent image at all, although bits of images may be present there. Back to Smithsonian Depositions: “A great many crystals of the same material start growing at about the same time in many different places. They grow until something gets in their way, or until they get in one another’s way, and then they stop. Since they start with no knowledge of one another, they all have different orientations, and when they meet they cannot join to form a single big crystal. The result is a polycrystalline mass. Its component crystals all have the same kind of orderliness, but they all have different directions of that orderliness” (Coolidge 1980, 26). This passage accurately describes the writing in The Maintains, in which the “component crystals” of Space have all been given “the same kind of orderliness” (i.e., by virtue of the fact that they have been situated in the vertical orders of poetic equivalence), but “all have different directions of that orderliness.” We recall with Silliman that in this text Coolidge distills this “process of aiming, of direction” (1978, 21), until in fact the words in the text do nothing but “aim” in “directions,” producing ultimately its “blind” language. After precipitating poetic crystals from the solution of the dictionary and distilling the syntax of aiming, Coolidge will want next

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to reorient the unordered crystals into “a single big crystal” that will once again act as a medium for producing images: what is required after The Maintains, in other words, is the writing of Polaroid. Continuing to read the paragraph on crystals quoted earlier, we hear: “Polaroid contains crystals that behave like tourmaline. The process by which Polaroid is manufactured turns all the crystals the same way, so that the film is much like a broad, thin, single crystal plate of tourmaline” (Coolidge 1980, 26). At this point, Coolidge crosses two areas of discourse: crystallography merges into photography or, more concretely, film, and we see that Polaroid will contain and orient the “crystals” precipitated out in The Maintains in the same way that Polaroid film contains and orients the crystals it comprises. Before we get to Polaroid, however, I would like to return briefly to George Oppen’s The Materials, which, as Perloff points out, broke considerable ground twelve years before The Maintains was published and which may in fact have been on Coolidge’s mind when he wrote his own book, the title of which implies an affinity of some sort with Oppen’s, suggesting either a riposte or an elaboration of certain principles operative there already. Coolidge’s comment that the poet begins with “materials” (see the epigraph to this section) is in any case an invitation to compare the two works. What McGann calls Coolidge’s “objectivist inheritance” (1989, 263) has been pointed out many times, but there are two ways in which Coolidge’s work differs from Oppen’s: first, although the former starts with “the materials,” it does not end with them but instead enacts them; and second, the older poet’s work is in no sense allegorical. We can see the difference clearly in the titles of the two books: The Materials announces the book’s subject matter, which is the language materials that it comprises. The phrase “the materials” can only point to its subject: “The” remains the definite article; “Materials” forever a noun. The writing will be about the nouns, verbs, prepositions, and so on that make up the language—but it will be about them: it is most emphatically writing with an object, even though or if that object is its own materials. Coolidge’s writing in Space and The Maintains is very different: we recall that he denies that his writing is “language about language”; he claims that “there’s no question of meaning” in his poems; and he tells us that “language isn’t just objects, it moves.” Oppen’s writing is language about language; it is objectivist (it is about the materials); and there is a question of meaning in his poems—his daughter, the snow, the tree branch, and the apple are

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object materials in his poem, words that, although “taken out of their normal syntactic contexts,” nevertheless “can assume new meanings” (Perloff 1991, 82). The difference between generating new meanings on the literal level and generating no meaning on the literal level (although doing so on an allegorical level) is at crux here, as the difference between an objectivist language and a language that “moves” is demonstrated in the phrase “the maintains,” which, in the ways that I described earlier, puts into motion the very materials alluded to in Oppen’s title. What we see in Coolidge is a fully mobilized grammar, and although there are hints and beginnings of this movement in Oppen’s poetry, it remains firmly grounded in the objective. Coolidge encodes his writing with the technical and mechanical procedures of photography—as Owens puts it, “the allegorical work is synthetic; it crosses aesthetic boundaries. This confusion of genre, anticipated by Duchamp, reappears today in hybridization, in eclectic works which ostentatiously combine previously distinct art mediums” (1992, 57–58). Thus, I now consider Coolidge’s most radically hybrid work, Polaroid, and his later works of the 1970s.

Code Sans Message Edward Foster: You don’t like the word “metaphor.” Clark Coolidge: Unless it’s, like, infinitely extended metaphor. Metaphor chains. —Clark Coolidge, “An Interview”

With the phrases “infinitely extended metaphor” and “metaphor chains” (Coolidge 1989, 41), a writer again describes allegory without naming it as such: the textbook definition of allegory is “extended metaphor,” and “chains” of them suggest precisely the stretched dimensions of Coolidge’s large-scale photologic project. The theoretical links between photography and allegory have been demonstrated: Rosalind Krauss notes that Roland Barthes characterizes the photograph as “the paradox of a message without a code” because in it “the relation of signified and signifier is quasitautological . . . the photograph implies a certain displacement of the scene (cropping, reduction, flattening), but this passage is not a transformation (as an encoding must be)” (quoted in Krauss 1993, 211). Because

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the photograph so immediately partakes of the “logic of the index” (i.e., it “points” in an unmediated way to the world), it “heralds a disruption in the autonomy of the sign. A meaninglessness surrounds it which can only be filled in by the addition of a text” (Krauss 1993, 205). “The photograph could be called sub- or presymbolic, ceding the language of art back to the imposition of things” (Krauss 1993, 203), so photography demands that “eruption of language into the field of the visual arts” that Owens proposes as the signal of postmodernism and of the allegorical impulse that motivates it. In his discussion of “the essentially pictogrammatical nature of the allegorical work,” Owens argues that photography is at base an allegorical art (1992, 56–57). Jameson also links photography, “whose extraordinary reinvention today (in theory as well as in practice) is a fundamental fact and symptom of the postmodern period,” to the allegorical transcoding he finds at the center of postmodern practice (1991, 173). Because the photograph presents a “message without a code,” language is required as a supplement to provide meaning. The genius of Coolidge’s Polaroid, however, is that it transcodes a stage in the photographic process of image making prior to the taking of the photograph; it allegorically enacts filmic emulsion, that layer of silver halide crystals that coats film before it has been exposed. Because it represents the step before the taking of the photographic image, the writing in this book presents not a message without a code, in fact nothing like a photographic “image” at all, but instead the very elements (the “crystals”) of the code (the film) that will ultimately be used to encode images in this “pictogrammatical” medium. Its language linked into “chains of extended metaphor,” Coolidge’s text participates concurrently in the two separate codes of the media (writing and photography) that it blends. Operating at once as language and as film, the writing here represents both the raw material of the “text” that will be used to supplement the images of photography—that is, the coding “syntax” that will give “voice” to the message of the “mute presence of an uncoded event” (Krauss 1993, 212)—as well as the actual words that make up the medium for recording images in language. In other words, Polaroid presents a code without a message in the same way that the crystalline emulsion coating film presents a coding medium that has not yet registered an image: the crystalline elements for recording the message/image are present but have not yet been “turned” into a message/image.

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And “turning” is a key metaphor, for we recall with Coolidge that “the process by which Polaroid is manufactured turns all the crystals the same way, so that the film resembles a broad, thin, single crystal plate.” What better description of the writing in Polaroid ? point seem thing or never one may turn it one to matching all whole point all seem to a thing a may turning up this it can during the light of the everything single point to its seem thing its lap seat head inch truck still least due to close capper light acting here sending missing matter to a point the thing very once yet may seem. (Coolidge 1975, 100)

Silliman characterizes the language of this text as “horizontal, blind. Not without sight, but with a specific, sightless vision” (1978, 21, italics in original), and he describes how, as the text progresses, Coolidge uses lexical repetition to create a horizontal “feast of memory and desire”: “In Polaroid certain terms (and only certain terms) leap forward, directed not at objects in a referred world, but across the page(s) at one another. The meaning of a word is no longer just the interface of its acoustic form and its aim at the imagetrack, it is also its location and aim” (21). The reader confronted with such nonreferential writing thus begins looking not for the “objects in a referred world” but for moments in the text when terms and phrases recur to establish a “new in-house referentiality” (Silliman 1978, 21). Beginning in the short-lined vertical mode of The Maintains, the text of Polaroid slowly adds terms to earlier lines until it gradually reaches the long, horizontal passages of the last third of the book; as Coolidge puts it, “each of those long-line pages is based on a seed phrase from the original set of words which it makes variations on” (1989, 18). Thus, the opening lines of the poem, “of what can it such / as which since can it not,” are altered on page 13 to “it of what can you such / as you such of a then since you,” to become on page 72 “all such do in a way can it does since.” This alteration happens repeatedly, making in Silliman’s terms a “feast of memory and desire” as the reader is referred constantly back and forth through the text but never “out” to the world. As Watten puts it, the “ ‘nounal’ emphasis of the line is undermined, first by the use of nonsubstantives and then by the breaking up of the line’s ‘equivalence principle’ ” (1985, 97). Coolidge thus utilizes the metalingual

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syntax of the code—the “that which is blank” sort of syntax—in the first part of Polaroid to gradually create an ever more pronounced horizontal dimension to the writing, just as the vertical dimension of The Maintains is slowly subsumed by the gradually stretching lines of the poem. Coolidge himself claims that the later book “was almost the reverse of [the] impulse” of the earlier: “I picked a set of words—prepositions, connectives of various kinds, which’s and that’s and conjunctions— and thought I would limit myself to those, but what happened was that after a while I began to find nouns and adjectives and brighter words creeping in, and I decided to let that happen. So, particularly at the end, the third section, those long lines have a lot of other sorts of words” (1989, 17–18). Indeed, what happens in Polaroid is precisely that “all the crystals are turned in the same direction”; all the words in the text are oriented horizontally, “toward” one another, by the metonymical syntax generated by the “prepositions, connectives of various kinds, which’s and that’s and conjunctions” that compose the “seed phrase” bases for the poem’s variations. That “nouns and adjectives and brighter words creep in” is significant, for the unidirectional crystalline particles of the text begin toward the end of the poem to expose “images.” We can begin to “read” the passage from the last page of the poem: point seem thing or never one may turn it one to matching all whole point all seem to a thing a may turning up this it can during the light of the everything single point to its seem thing its lap seat head inch truck still least due to close capper light acting here sending missing matter to a point the thing very once yet may seem. (Coolidge 1975, 100)

Through the “horizontal” language of this passage, one can begin to make out the issue: words point to one another; turning them compels them to match up; all together point to a thing; exposure to light causes things to seem; noun-things such as “lap seat head inch truck” begin to become visible due to “close capper light”; the language “acting here send[s] missing matter to a point.” Coolidge’s poem forms thus the filmic negative of an objectivist text, operating not as Zukofsky’s “lens bringing the rays from an object to a focus” (Zukofsky 2000, 12) but as the recording medium on the other side of the lens, inside the camera, the material upon, through,

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and in which images are generated. And Coolidge maintains his text at the level of the allegory he has so carefully constructed: what one “sees” is an event entirely transcoded, a writing of photography from its most basic elements to its culmination in the language of film. As in The Maintains, in Polaroid Coolidge exploits his “technique of double exposure,” this time to create a text that points to (i.e., indexes) photography in the most graphic sense—as a “blind” language dissolved into the allegorical imperative controlling the text, a “mute presence of an uncoded event”—and simultaneously creates an “image track.” Thus, while the surface of the text acts precisely as the crystalline emulsifier that coats film—as the coded units upon which or “in” which a message will be inscribed—one sees images slowly “develop” on the surface of this “film” as Polaroid concludes: see bolt think past the head the lap post a still twinning a bulk along then one then capper that’s what a capped in that deign twin what’s that stilling to say by seems to staying miss comes its nothing seeing being or let the point miss one just standing for or by and of along since the beneath never between very amidst this nothing one misses tho time and still or light of think loom place pin bulk dip tap inch. (Coolidge 1975, 100)

We “see” “bolt” and a number of other “things” brought to a focus in this passage, which reads as if it were locating us in the barreled scope of the camera, where image and lens interface; and words such as “place pin bulk dip tap inch” will develop into the images in Coolidge’s next book, Quartz Hearts, which he describes as “a hinge work, reflecting a fresh interest in sentence structure as axial armature, [that] the final movement of Polaroid had pushed me toward” (1978d, 56). The 104 short, squarish “poems” of Quartz Hearts resemble nothing so much as snapshots focused on “objects” and “views” in the environment: The mud of the bulk of the back yard. Itch of wash. The sun through a board

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crack a splinter up it. Noise or rail yards behind white sheets. A nose turned in window. Lock it up and smell off the brass shine. Two steps by a cat. Air and hewn lots. The view across and the walk back home. Blocks. . . . (1978d, 3, ellipses in original)

Perhaps the most remarkable quality of Quartz Hearts is the transparency of its language—the noun phrases in this passage construe a landscape and a subject, neither of which we are given in The Maintains or Polaroid. But Coolidge most dramatically works out the logic of his decade-long writing of photography in his other book of 1978. Own Face ([1978] 1993), published with a snapshot of Floyd Collins on the cover, contains “pictures,” as Quartz Hearts does, and includes poetry dealing directly with photography, such as “Caption to a Photograph in the Echo” and the following passage from “The Cave Remain,” which describes the actual developing of photographs: We, out, take snaps of each other, hovering at the entrance. Will these bodies do? Scraps of chemical paper guttering in a sink to be passed on. Placed next the earlier pictures of the same spaces, the younger objects in newer-older time. Caught-time aging at its own aging speed. (50)

References to photography and photographs pepper Own Face, and Coolidge extends his meditation on film to television and the movies. Perhaps the most remarkable poem in the book is “Album—A Runthru,” a seventy-line account of flipping through a photo album: I look in that one kind of dwindled. And in this, look up, a truncheon in my fist, tin pot on my head, the war. My father, I’m looking at, is my age then and thin, his pants streak to the ground, shadows of rosevines . . . (36, ellipses in original)

At the end of this poem, Coolidge even chronicles the advent of color photography:

ep istem olo gies

. . . With the poets then I’m fat and the driveway is dark, the clapboards all white in a day of all talk. This then all ends in color, my red bandana and shirt out on Devil’s Pulpit, open hand addressed to the grey where Hawthorne and Melville now view of a highschool. (38)

After the extended meditation on filmic materials in his first several books, Quartz Hearts and Own Face develop a personalized history of the camera. The second part of Coolidge’s next published work, Smithsonian Depositions/Subject to a Film (1980), painstakingly recounts the making of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, replete with descriptions of the film’s shooting locations, anecdotes of the daily production work, the effect of inclement weather on the filming schedule, press reactions to the movie, and observations on the art of acting and the “grammar” of film: “The film was taken away and edited. Some scenes were cut. Some prepositions were remaindered back into interior phrases. Others were left hanging, pointing out. Some were faded on. A scene that gradually dims to darkness has a period at the end of it” (52). Subject to a Film moves toward one ultimate telos of film—the simulacral replacement of “reality” by photography: “People are starting to call sharks ‘jaws.’ They slip. One of the alteration products in language. The film has been brought to bear on. People have been changed their minds about the island, about swimming, and about ocean inhabitants. This is not thought. Films are not thinking” (52). Coolidge thus works over the entire medium of filmmaking from its primum materium in the crystalline emulsion coating undeveloped film to its apotheosis as the premier image-making tool of postmodernity. Coolidge’s decade-long project of composing an allegorical writing of photography is unprecedented in American poetry; in both scale and allegorical depth, it perhaps stands unique in the annals of poetry altogether. Coolidge dissolves and then reconstitutes poetic language under the sign of photography, as he says, to “invent his own language,” a language at once elastic and accurate enough to treat the issues of aesthetic representation and mechanical reproduction central to the epistemologies of postmodernism. As he puts it in “Is It Wicker” from Own Face, I’ve brought myself forth in a gust to meanly moon

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over imagining one’s picture rather what’s behind.

([1978] 1993, 9)

No other writer that I am aware of has attempted such a thorough remapping of medial frontiers—indeed, in imagining what’s “behind” one’s picture, the allegorical scope of Coolidge’s writing is altogether remarkable.

3

A=L=L=E=G=O=R=I=E=S Peter Inman, Myung Mi Kim, Lyn Hejinian The militant syntax of the surrealists has begun to froth. —Ron Silliman, “Lit”

Clark Coolidge disclaims any interest in politics when it comes to his poetry, although he does acknowledge in an interview his “helpless involvement” with the term language poet: Some of those poets have said that my work has been an influence, and I can see how in certain cases that’s true. One difference between myself and writers like Ron [Silliman] and Barry [Watten] is that I don’t read a great deal of semiotic or political writing. I just don’t see the connections they make so easily between the analytic or political point of view and the art form. It may be generational. (Coolidge 1987, 12–13)

In this chapter, I examine what happens when the allegorical impulse that Coolidge so brilliantly put to use in his poetry of the 1970s assumes overtly political overtones in the poetics of language writing and in the poems of Peter Inman, Myung Mi Kim, and Lyn Hejinian. In their works, the “connections made between the political point of view and the art form”— and the emphasis here is on form—are explicitly the point. According to Charles Bernstein, because Inman “fully semanticiz[es] / the so-called nonsemantic features of language,” his poems’ “formal dynamics . . . are the most overt, identifiable feature, / they have the weight of ‘content’ in a more / traditional poem” (1992, 10, 15–16). Kim similarly states that “form

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is fascinating because it is enunciatory” (2000, 84, italics in original), and for Hejinian “it is form that provides an opening”: “Writing’s forms are not merely shapes but forces; formal questions are about dynamics—they ask how, where, and why the writing moves, what are the types, directions, number, and velocities of a work’s motion. The material aporia objectifies the poem in the context of ideas and of language itself ” (2000, 41, 42). The idea that a poem’s formal elements can be “semanticized”—can say things and weigh in literally as “objectified” content—makes for the allegorical crux in these poets’ works. In all three, form unambiguously becomes, to quote William Carlos Williams, “one of the words of the poem.” Inman and Hejinian were contributors to the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, one of the original venues for the language poets, whose run from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s paralleled the interest in allegory that I have chronicled in this book. And although the term allegory rarely appears in the movement’s literature, this is not to say that the trope plays no role in language writing. In this chapter, I argue that allegory is a primary trope of language poetics, although it was not until recently named as such. In this sense, language poetry is symptomatic generally of larger developments in postmodern aesthetics, its own version of the “allegorical impulse” deriving not so much from surrealism as from a theoretical grounding in the principle of the poetic function as described by Roman Jakobson. Allegory enters language poetics via the back door— or, better perhaps, via the ground floor—of Prague school formalism. This derivation of allegory as a working mode from structuralist rather than from surrealist sources makes for differences between the works of the language writers and the works of Niedecker, Ashbery, and Coolidge. The latter three were inspired by visual artists such as Dali and Tanguy to experiment with poetry in painterly and sculptural ways. I have shown that this experimentation led to new senses of poetic form as allegory when surrealist techniques of disjunction, fragmentary juxtaposition, and montage were driven out of narrative registers and into levels of stanza, phrase, sentence, line, and syntax. Whereas earlier generations of writers looked to surrealism for means of opening poetry up to new modes of composition, the language poets inherited a more skeptical attitude toward the movement informed by the deconstructive impulses of poststructuralism. For these later writers, surrealism remains implicated in a mystified notion of the integrity of the subjective self, what Charles Bork-

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huis calls its “philosophy of essence . . . continually searching for its transformational object” (2000, 244).1 David Arnold (2007), who exploits earlier work on the issue done by Borkhuis and Peter Nicholls, has recently studied the language poets’ critique of surrealism in some depth. I do not intend to revisit Arnold’s argument—which to my mind very competently treats the issue of the reception of surrealism not only by language poets but also by Williams and the objectivists, by Michael Palmer, and by others—except to point out that what remains of surrealism after the language poets have submitted it to their antitranscendental and materialist critiques are precisely those formal strategies that critics beginning with Walter Benjamin describe as being innate to allegory.2 A more direct route to allegory derives from the legacy of Jakobson and the Russian and Czech formalism that Americans first encountered during the late 1960s and early 1970s: the language writers were among the first U.S. poets to take the lessons of the new Continental critical theory to heart. Ron Silliman rightly calls the famous conference at Johns Hopkins University in 1966, “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man,” “the formative post-structural rupture” (1998, 41), and the proceedings of this conference, published in 1970 as The Structuralist Controversy (Macksey and Donato 1970), introduced many American scholars and poets to Barthes, Derrida, Lacan, and others. Although Jakobson was not present at the conference, he was the controversy’s presiding spirit. He was the only member of the Prague Circle who was mentioned at all during the proceedings; cited by seven of the fifteen participants some eighteen times, he was unanimously hailed as a founding pioneer in the study of poetic language.

Grammaticalizing Metaphor No language in the world appears to grammaticalize metaphor. —Antony Jappy, “Iconicity, Hypoiconicity”

It is not until later in the 1970s that any language poet mentions Jakobson’s work, however, and we first read of the importance of Russian and Czech formalism to the new writing in essays published by Silliman and Barrett Watten in the early 1980s. Silliman counts Jakobson’s book Six Lectures on

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Sound and Meaning (1978) as one of the works that influenced him and his colleagues early on,3 and in The New Sentence (1989) he treats Jakobson as a herald of postmodernist poetry, suggesting that it is precisely Jakobson’s proposition that the poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination that accounts for his prescience. Silliman argues that the poetic function is not a constant but varies according to historical circumstances: Barthes suggests that Jakobson’s projection of the paradigm is not a constant, but that history has seen the movement from a syntagmatic focus to a paradigmatic one, and that a break has occurred at a point when some critical mass—not specifically identified by Barthes—rendered it impossible for units to continue to integrate beyond grammatical levels, e. g., the sentence. It is just this breach—when the signifier, freed suddenly from its servitude to an integrating hierarchy of syntactic relations, finds itself drained of any signified—that Fredric Jameson identifies as the characteristic feature of postmodernism. (1989, 76)

According to Silliman, then, the formal strategies of postmodern poetry are historically determined and are characterized precisely by their proclivity for “the primacy of the paradigmatic to the extent that it imposes itself on the combinations of the syntagmatic” (76, italics in original). Although he does not make the obvious connection between Jakobson and allegory that critics such as Owens and Fineman were establishing at the time, Silliman describes the trope obliquely in his discussion of the formal features of the “new sentence,” which is produced by what he calls “torquing,” where “poetic form [moves] into the interiors of prose. . . . Torquing, the projection of the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into that of combination, yields . . . sly and carefully-honed incommensurabilities. . . . [T]he torquing which is normally triggered by linebreaks, the function of which is to enhance ambiguity and polysemy, [moves] directly into the grammar of the sentence” (1989, 89–90). In such writing, “the convolutions of syntax often suggest the internal presence of once-exteriorized poetic forms” (87); that is, the poet literally projects the principle of metaphoric equivalence into the syntagmatic chain in order to produce the “incommensurabilities” of postmodern writing—what in essence are the juxtaposed and transcoded units of allegory, now operating at the level of syntax rather than at the level of narrative. In other

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words, what is new about such syntax is that in it language grammaticalizes metaphor: the projection of the principle of metaphorical equivalence/ substitution into grammar itself produces the torqued strangeness of language poetry. Silliman goes on to distinguish such writing from “the prose poems of the Surrealists, which manipulate meaning only at the ‘higher’ or ‘outer’ layers, well beyond the horizon of the sentence” (87): “this is not the systematic distortion of the maximum or highest order of meaning, as in surrealism” (90). The “systematic distortion” that the surrealists used to torque the images and the narratives of their writing occurs instead at formal levels in the new poetry. Thus, allegory is the central trope of Silliman’s method, although he traces it back to Jakobson and Jakobson’s poetic function rather than to surrealism. In the same vein, in “Russian Formalism & the Present” (1980) and “The Politics of Poetry: Surrealism & L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E” (1981), Barrett Watten makes broad claims regarding formalism and language poetry while distancing himself and his colleagues from surrealism. Although acknowledging in the latter essay that “method in American art after the war incorporated numbers of Surrealist concepts” (in Watten 1985, 48), he distinguishes between surrealist and language methodologies along the same lines as those lain down by Silliman: In the development of method in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the increasing reflexiveness of the writer occurs parallel to a new value given to exterior fact. The dialectic that [André] Breton saw as somehow taking the poet away into the clouds of a final realization (as in the state of mind achieved by Nietzsche) arrived at a stasis of method at the exact point where exterior reality itself underwent a change. . . . The failure of Surrealist method was prefigured, and this perception from the outset was part and parcel of the absoluteness. That foreknowledge does not appear in the positions taken in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, possibly because the scale of foreknowledge at this point is simply beyond that of the individual. Rather there is a day-to-day reality in which the extremes of identification partake, and on which method builds, through the means, either referential or purely linguistic, of writing itself. (1985, 59–60)

In other words, the surrealists’ “absolute self ” historically gives way to “writing itself ”—“the beginning for further extension of [surrealist] method is in the reflexiveness of ‘the self ’ ”—because in language writing

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“the differentiation produced calls into question the person at the center. The mediator ultimately is directed to a larger scale”: “Here ‘the self ’ has become generalized as ‘language,’ or, put another way, ‘the self ’ has exploded and disappeared” (1985, 50, 52).4 Watten’s key term when criticizing the surrealists is reflexiveness: the historical moment of high surrealism, he argues, did not permit writers such as Breton to conceive “reflexively” of the self as a construction of language.5 In “Russian Formalism and the Present,” Watten declares his opposition to “what the Formalists called the ‘subjective aesthetic approach,’ in which writing takes its basic values from psychology or biography” (in Watten 1985, 1). As Bruce Andrews puts it, for the language poet the “author dies, writing begins” (1996, 54). In his essay “Olson in Language,” Watten digs deeply into Jakobson’s theory, demonstrating how the poetic function might operate in postmodernist poetry: “If statement in a poem is imagined to be given along a temporal line, the poetic would be the principle that extends the values of the poem (ranging from sound to content) into the materials at large” (in Watten 1985, 123). According to Watten, Charles Olson’s axis of selection is his notion of “the initial”—that is, the fact of the inherent value of initial acts as such: “Olson’s poetics are to project this value onto all other events; in his attack, he takes on numerous hitherto divided series and orders them on an ‘axis of combination’ in the poem, which uses an in-time romance of self as its basic structure” (124). In deriving his idea of the value of initial acts from his own experiences as an amateur historian, Olson represents for Watten a kind of transitional figure, a poet whose work retains a strong element of romantic subjectivity while simultaneously intuiting the formal strategies of postmodern writing. In essence, according to Watten, Olson projects himself into the materials of his writing, thereby causing the formal elements of his poems to enact the very hesitancy, abruptness, and continual stopping and starting of his own rather haphazard approaches to studying history: John Smith is the paradigm of the “initial” in American history, with which Olson identifies in the work. Smith both described and named Cape Ann “so it stuck” and wrote the first poem “as an American”— “The Sea-Marke,” quoted in full in [The Maximus Poems]. There are a number of rhymes between Smith, the “Sea-Marke,” the discovery of

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Cape Ann, and Olson’s poem—leading from the discovery of Olson’s place, one of the first American acts, to Olson’s own discovery of John Smith and, by analogy, of the world. The simultaneity is reflected in the excitement of the poem—the shortness of line, the breathlessness; one imagines Olson reading [“Some Good News”] as if there were something he had to say. There is a great deal of variation in the kinds of emphasis possible in the short line—rather than any parallelism of syntax, a twisting and turning is the intended effect. The content likewise shifts, in rapid cuts through a series of referential planes. . . . [T]he avoidance of direct statement motivates the argument of contiguity in the work. (1985, 133)6

As Watten explains, “Part of Olson’s role as a polymath involved his ability to incorporate, almost physically, masses of ‘evidence’ and yet still come up with the essential scenarios of romantic subjectivity” (1985, x). Precisely as polymath, Olson is a key precursor of the language poets: part modernist, part postmodernist, he is an author who, although not yet “dead,” creates out of the habits of his own intellectual life a formal allegory for the Poet at work. Watten quotes Olson’s famous motto, taken from Keats, “that a man’s life be a perpetual allegory” (1985, 156): it is when the “man’s life” variable falls out of the equation that we enter postmodernism proper. In other words, according to Watten and Sillliman, postmodern poetry will be characterized by (1) the absence of a particular unified, subjective, authorial voice and (2) the presence of metaphorical armatures operating at various formal levels in the poem. Key to both writers’ conceptions of contemporary poetry is the Jakobsonian formula of the projection of the principle of equivalence from the metaphoric axis into the axis of combination or metonymy—that is, the allegorical impulse as described by Owens, Fineman, and Jameson: C:

ice on plussed a pile of books at their appearance writing too nearby quota kiva pinetar drim splits tine. Number otioner cezanne mere to my time radio listener minus indirect objects

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L:

pegger . knock bley edge scolds drosp (revlon all of ocean) (castic) leans point after than last painting on rye history within crawl (“nimr,” in Inman 1986, 11)

The initial shock of encountering a text such as Peter Inman’s “nimr” is caused by two features of the writing: the poem’s studious avoidance of conventional modes of address—the poet’s “voice” has crumbled into linguistic rubble—and the baroque intricacies of its overall form, which I describe in detail in the next section.7 It is as if the author has retired from the work’s diction and syntax, only to reappear as the motivating intelligence behind its elaborate formal structures. Accordingly, reading such a text requires carefully examining its form, for it is there that we locate any coherence—any potential message or “meaning”—that the piece may carry.8 The poem is not designed to index Inman’s site-specific struggles with recalcitrant historical records: it is not the creation of a projectivist self agonistically casting his mental warfare into archival materials. The poem nevertheless does treat history (“within crawl”): instead of formally demonstrating the idiosyncrasies of the author’s working procedures, however, it figures that history according to a meticulously designed allegorical conceit.

“Work[ing] the Front Lines”: History/Scroll/Assembly Line Hardly anything seems strange enough anymore—“reality. as. a. normative. effect,”—at least P. Inman still works the front lines. —Bruce Andrews, jacket blurb for Peter Innam, at. least

Like most of the language poets, Inman came of age as a writer during the mid-1970s, and in “a different table altogether ” he traces his aesthetic roots to minimalist and Black Mountain influences: The Folio series ran 1976–1980 & was shaped by Doug [Lang’]s wideranging interests & tastes, which ranged from Black Mountain (Fielding

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Dawson read) to still evolving “Language” (Lyn Hejinian read as well). Folio exposed those of us who attended to a mind-bending concentration of avantgardist work—this was, of course, before us Americans had been schooled by Lyotard, Baudrillard… et al. & learned that things like history & avant-gardes had become passé. That brief period was crucial to a number of us; both to those of us who were pretty well launched toward a more exploratory writing & to those of us who still needed a few more nudges in that direction. (2003, 18–19)9

More to the point, Inman explicitly poses his own practice against Olson’s projectivism: “I think a lot of us were probably dissatisfied with the Olsonian line of breath. What my work has dealt with for a long time is, well, how do you organize things on the page?” (2003, 46). Maybe • it’s apparent that Olson’s sense of the • line as a unit of poet’s breath • won’t hold here either Too anthropomorphized The • general organizational push to my stuff becomes • page-specific I tend to write in pages • (unlike other people?) not in stories or • poems, though the structural possibilities offered by • one page freq. need following pages to • play off of (aka. I work via • series The pages are, to consciously quote • Sixties minimalists, modular & the modules are • most often one page long (1988, 204)10

As opposed to Olson’s “anthropomorphized” lines—that is, the writing’s measure as an index of the poet’s body (or, as Watten suggests, as a map of the dynamics of his scholarly habits)—Inman proposes a page-based, nonnarrative, serial text mobilized entirely by the “structural possibilities” of the language under hand. As Bernstein suggests, such a text requires a different grade of reading. Instead of scanning the writing for evidence of its author’s voice or speech, one moves outward from its materials, reading the poem’s formal dynamics semantically: “they have the weight of ‘content’ in a more / traditional poem.” The language poets typically formulate their revisionist models of reading and writing by thus switching the rhetorical poles along which literacy itself has conventionally been conceived. In Artifice of Absorption ([1987] 1992), for instance, Bernstein strategically reverses key critical terms in his call for a “criticism of desire”: criticism is supposed to deal with truth, not

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desire; poetry is the traditional site of desire, of tentative equations of truth with beauty, of subject-centered vision and creativity. Like many of his language colleagues, Bernstein couches his discussion in larger debates concerning the alleged politics of language, declaring that “writing might be exemplary—an instance broken off from and hence not in the service of this economic and cultural—social—force called capitalism. A chip of uninfected substance” (138). In the same vein, Inman says that language can exist “outside the pervasive ideolanguage of advanced capitalist society”: “free language exists in a critical relation viz. capitalist superstructures” (1984, 154). Bernstein argues that poetry can operate as a mode of “epistemological inquiry” that in its very “otherness” acts as a critique of dominant discourses ([1987] 1992, 18) and states that the goal of his writing is to induce visionary experiences that replicate the hallucinations caused by psychedelic drugs: Something powerfully absorptive is needed to pull us out of the shit, the ideology in which we slip— mind altering as the LSD ad used to put it. & poetry does have a mission to be as powerful as the strongest drug, to offer a vision-in-sound to compete with the world we know so that we can find the world we don’t. ([1987] 1992, 76)11

It is the tensions in such hallucinatory poetic language—“unimplicated,” “self-concerned,” “idled,” rhetorically disengaged, yet politically engaged —that torque language poems and account in some measure for their “difficulty.”12 Given, then, these poets’ political agendas, what might be the nature of the “epistemological inquiry” of a work such as Inman’s “nimr,” included in his collection Think of One (1986)? Where exactly in the text do its politics inhere? Bernstein claims that “the dynamics & / contours of [Inman’s poems’] formal proceedings may suggest . . . a metonymic model for imagining experience” ([1987] 1992, 10). In other words, poetic form can usurp the metonymical relations that Jakobson reserves for prose: “The principle of similarity underlies poetry. . . . Prose, on the other hand, is forwarded essentially by contiguity. Thus for poetry, metaphor—and for prose, metonymy—is the line of least resistance and consequently the study of po-

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etic tropes is directed chiefly toward metaphor” ( Jakobson 1987, 114). According to Jakobson, the prose writer, not the poet, typically establishes metonymic connections between literary texts and other systems “in the world,” the critic, for instance, unriddling “vertical” metaphors of poetry into “horizontal” metonymies. Conversely, the “criticism of desire,” Bernstein says, will be “intoxicated with its own metaphoricity” ([1987] 1992, 16): the “desiring” critic constructs metaphors out of her reading, operating after the manner of the poet (i.e., as a constructor of metaphors). Using Jakobson’s definitions, then, we can say that the language poet is a “realist,” the language critic a “romantic”13 because the “criticism of desire” is first and foremost a creative, not an analytical, activity: the reader of language poems must be prepared to hallucinate. Instead of analyzing the poet’s hallucinations and in the process discovering a hidden politic, as a reader might do when reading Shelley or Blake or Yeats, the reader of language poetry hallucinates the poet’s politics. Hence, in his discussion of Inman’s poem Waver, Bernstein insists that the form of such poetry be read before its content: In a sense, the procedure of dialectical paraphrase Must be reversed in reading this poem. An attempt Must first be made to elucidate the “nonsemantic” Elements of the poem (“to write noise/a white/ Out of between”), but the reading should not stop There (“piled holster”), as it all too often might. The first survey must be dialectically contrasted With how the noted devices might have been Used to different ends, what type of overall Architecture is constructed by the particular Sequence of devices (“curved say”), what semantic Associations can be attributed to the specific “nonsemantic” elements & which ones are relevant in the particular context of the poem.

([1987] 1992, 15)

A reader coming upon “nimr” (Inman 1986, 1–30) must first address the fact of the poem’s overall formal architecture and its “sequenc[ing] of devices”: Do we read top to bottom of a page, left to right of a book? Or should we instead follow the alphabetical ordering of the poem’s sections,

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reading the top half of each page to the section’s end then swing to the bottom half of the last page and read “backward” through the text? The four stanzas of section 6 in “nimr,” which are spread over two pages, illustrates the problem: 6. F:

I:

plud glazed adobe slung to mute ——————————— lug ploes write of potato mound pomp percentage canto

G:

H:

mist minus the people on couches kilt —spilloi ——————————— red ink to indicate caution all the long between it (1986, 28)

Inman forces the reader to figure out how to proceed before actually beginning to read the poem, and the question then becomes, What does the form of the work say—what does it “enunciate”—and what sort of “metaphor” is one accordingly encouraged or compelled or invited to imagine—or to hallucinate, as it were? What, in other words, is the form an allegory of ? In an interview in the journal Aerial, Inman discusses his use of “numerically based procedures [and] page specific mapping strategies”: Typically a lot of my work centers itself around the problem of how to get things into motion on the page. I mean that literally. If you’re not going to use standard literary organizational devices you have to decide how you’re going to organize things. . . . There’s a whole set of assumptions (increasingly less hidden) behind straight-line narration. . . . The links between narrative & teleological models have been sufficiently enough brought out by now. What’s interested me lately is the connection between various “hard” production models & narrative line. The assembly line, Taylorist work-flow programs . . . what Gramsci termed Fordism. (1991b, 71)14

We can use these statements as a critical hook into “nimr,” which works precisely as a kind of Fordist assembly line. The poem’s chaotic language

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is systematically measured into a formal device of impressive complexity: the poem is made up of seven main sections, labeled A, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7. Section A comprises seven pages; section 2 comprises six; section 3, five pages; section 4, four pages, and so on; finally, section 7 is only one page long. Each page is bisected by a black line, with single stanzas above and below the line. Each stanza in each section has the same number of lines as the section has number of pages—thus, section A has seven pages of seven-line stanzas; section 2 has six pages of six-line stanzas; section 5 has three pages of three-line stanzas; and so on. The stanzas above the line are alphabetized in sequence; at the end of each section, the alphabetical sequence swings down to the stanzas below the line and continues backward to the first page of the section, suggesting that one read the top half of each page in sequence, A through G, then at H swing down to read backward through the text to N. This reading creates a curious doubling effect: it feels as though the text somehow has twice as many pages as it actually does. The sequencing of the poem thus invites a series of localized circular readings, although this series works against both the larger numerical sequencing of the sections as well as the text’s most curious formal feature: the stanzas’ scrolling effect as one moves from left to right through the poem. The top and bottom stanzas of each page formally mirror one another, each section starting off with two stanzas of staggered lines comprising mirroring rhomboids of print. As the poem progresses, however, the lines slowly reorient: if we watch the top stanza of section A, for example, we see that the bottom line indents to the left margin in stanza B, and the block of text above it simultaneously shifts to the right: B:

sky will mump line dilm whiten think (paean opposite the skin) “red via” ever her pines spont each lent ought stonewall red hair of who I am

In stanza C, the bottom line indents a few spaces to the right, and the penultimate line indents to the left margin; again, the block of text above

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that shifts to the right. This process is repeated in stanzas D and E, which I include here along with their page counterparts K and J by way of illustration: D:

traits,,,,,trung E: prine liken. Head larns to shortstop fields can of elastic dry descript tauket irred crick off of deadpan lents thick at joke place iote syndicalism as i believe, the side to white implies a world filled with waves coming up against her bookcase (plimn nod) druff slick cemts ago mandan by subtracts theme parchman float of cume ____________________________

K:

craw peag (plod sameness) color chart akinned Tetley distance can’t get through cling of events her favorite color beer a matter of iotas lemp synod sucked up trove hymn pined over problem ethylene

__________________________ J:

insides * over that answer saws clan. “lamper”. bone does to downs it’s neither green as you did soda woolery whitened to thinks un else legs everything odd of pour stillnesses went size

In stanza D the fifth line and in E the fourth line have shifted to the left margin; lines below and above these two lines have accordingly shifted to the right. Stanzas K and J operate exactly in reverse. This scrolling process is repeated in section A six times, until at the “end” of the section (or what in another sense is its “middle”), we see seven lines in the same order as at the beginning of the section, except that the top line has been shifted six times to the right: G:

hard of version hairline of a sudden (loom mem) talkeokuk cup—drem cemt red cornwall. mile these kootenay back else to fews (rue in a sentence) quoitb. scraw entire

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The first line will then “disappear” when sections shift. Section 2 begins again with the initial regularly indented rhomboid of print, but with only six lines. Not only does a line scroll out of the text, but a page drops out as well: section 2 begins with B and ends with M. This prosodic device eventually reduces the text to the single lines of section 7: 7. G:

belong Crashaw’s hairline by a half _________________________

H:

one off its gray

There are other consequences of the poem’s form as well: the top and bottom margins of the pages grow from section to section as the text appears to scroll into itself and finally to vanish entirely after section 7. Or does the process lead ultimately to the capitalized imperative “THINK OF ONE,” the title of the poem that faces the last page of “nimr”? The left margins of the print rhomboids also shift farther to the right from section to section. Two features of this poem’s formal procedures are open to “metaphorizing” by the hallucinating critic: first, there is a gradual movement of the text “to the right”; and second, there is a gradual reduction of text to what may be construed either as the single line of section 7 or as no line at all (the disappearance of text) or as the monomaniacal imperative to “think of one.” The poem’s form literally scrolls the text from left to right in an ineluctable process of shrinkage: in a concise, hermetically lockedand-sealed, precision-machined formal process, generated by strict adherence to numerical and alphabetical orders, the text is reduced to a kind of Blakean state of single vision. This is hardly the utopian space of free play advocated by Bernstein or the disengaged language imagined by Inman: locked in a model of assembly-line production, the freedom and play of language are dramatically circumscribed as the poem progresses. When we turn, however, from the work’s overbearing sense of formal rigor to the shreds and patches of language, mismatched syntax, damaged

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words, exotic vocabularies, unidentifiable and alien terms, and chunks and slices of treated speech that make it up, we find a significant contrast—that is, language in what appears to be a state of multivocal, multicultural, utopian free play, subjected to a tyrannical, voracious, and totalizing form—a monster of absorption in the act of digesting a resolutely antiabsorptive text.15 And it is here that we locate the politics of “nimr”: for the domain of the text, as it turns out, is American and New World history. Inman deploys carefully circumscribed areas of discourse and vocabulary to create a kind of wordscape marked by politics, culture, and geography. A certain “Indianness” (for lack of a better term) pervades the poem: we hear the names of several Native American tribes, including the Mandan, Sauk, Pequot, and Olmec of the poem’s first line.16 Native American words such as kiva and kootenay or Indian-sounding words such as mand and oughk pepper the text: the last word here evokes white “Indian-speak,” the sort of guttural speech one hears in bad Hollywood Westerns—James Fenimore Cooper’s Indians say things such as “Waugh!” In stanza G at the end of section A, we find the neologism talkeokuk, a wonderfully suggestive word in the context of the poem: Keokuk was a chief of the Sauk tribe who collaborated with the U.S. government against Black Hawk in the War of 1812. He is buried under a statue of himself in the city in southeastern Iowa that bears his name: a depressingly fitting image, perhaps, for the fate of Native American peoples, who, eventually absorbed by the ferocious hegemonic culture around them, in many cases were reduced to little more than an icon or a place-name on the American map.17 In fact, names serve to locate the poem geographically: we also find the word moines in several places, and the city of Keokuk sits on the Des Moines River. Other American place-names—“Catskills,” “erie,” and “Memphis”—and even New World vegetables—corn, beans, and potatoes—are also mentioned. If nothing else, then, the form of the poem scrolls Native American tribal names, words, and histories out of itself—the “move to the right” here effectively erases the “red man” in its move from “slag, Olmec” to “Crashaw’s hairline”: a process describing an historical arc from the Native American “castoff ” or “slag” of New World industrial culture to—to what exactly? European civilization emblematized by the receding hairline of a seventeenth-century English poet?18 The text, at any rate, does so move as we watch “dusk round off Indian.”

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In other words, “This is a red country full of book leather,” as the poem puts it in a statement that succinctly captures the historical progression I have outlined. Several other colors besides red as well as the action of coloring in general figure in “nimr.” Red, white, black, and gray appear repeatedly in a metaphorical process of coloring that parallels the absorption of a “red country” into “book leather” and hence of the peoples and places of the New World into aesthetic registers of literature and painting. The text begins “red” and ends up “gray” and “white,” and its permutations occur frequently in the interim: “druther had a whitewall” we hear after “slag, olmec” (one of Keokuk’s major industries is tire manufacturing). One can “whiten think” and even be “whitened to think.” Lines such as “think locked in black week,” “kilter in chapter black,” and “all the black lines in vowels / each enter a fixed editorial ocean” associate the color black with print: the whitening of the red country represented in black ink produces a gray text. “Red” also resonates with Inman’s Marxist predilections: twice we hear of syndicalism (“syndicalism as i believe, the side to white implies”), another “red” original that has effectively been absorbed and digested by the Machine. Inman’s surreal transcoding of American history and assembly-line production thus produces a fully enunciatory form as the shape and the logic of the movement of “nimr” allegorize “historical process” in the American context writ large. The metaphorical conceit at the root of “nimr,” American history = industrial assembly line, is projected into the writing’s formal registers in order to make the “curiously inwrought,” moving figure that the poem is. The reader of such a text is compelled to reverse and to revise categorical assumptions—as Bernstein puts it, Inman’s poem “destabilizes the polarities of form and content” (1992, 15)—in order to consider its nonsemantic elements, its overall architecture, and the sequencing of the devices that make up its form, in conjunction with, if not prior to, the scrambled language that these devices organize. “nimr” is political critique operating through fully motivated forms: a startling and disconcerting “realism” that requires a new mode of reading. It is “about” the process that is enacted by its formal devices, which may be allegorized as “American colonialism.” It is also about margins, a word that it doesn’t include but a metaphor that it works over: not only do the poem’s physical margins collapse in an inevitable move to the right, but also in the process

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marginalized peoples and languages are displaced and finally elided from the scrolls.

“implications for a lyric notational yet flesh”: Myung Mi Kim and the Politics of the Press Misery and terror . . . have their armature in allegorical perception. —Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

Fredric Jameson explains the postmodern penchant for allegory as a reaction to economic and political changes that occurred after World War II: the trope becomes the aesthetic mode, he claims, of the “whole global, yet American, postmodern culture [that] is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and terror” (1991, 5). This passage brings us close to the poetic world of Myung Mi Kim, whose work concerns itself with the turmoil induced by such political conditions: the formal allegories in her poetry figure the alienation and upheaval caused by late-twentieth-century civilization—or barbarism, as the case may be. Her writing recalls Adorno’s claim that the founding myth of modernism—that modern society becomes increasingly “formless”—is exactly wrong: modern social formations instead are characterized by rigorous organization—the chaos is choreographed—as the productive forces are unshackled and privatized and police and prison systems are expanded in order to contain the disorder of a social fabric fraying in the name of personal freedom. Like Inman, Kim organizes her radically distressed language into elaborate allegorical forms to produce moving pictures of New World orders. A first-generation Korean immigrant to America and nonnative speaker of English, Kim writes of the condition of language under such circumstances. Her poems treat of displaced and nomadic populations; porous and amorphous national borders; exacerbated problems of race and ethnicity, class, and citizenship; and the dissolving of older colonial systems under the stress of an aggressive transnational capitalism. War and the casual brutality of the police state are never long out of sight in her poems

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and form an outer limit of violence to the questions of legitimacy and legality they raise. Kim hearkens back to her native Korea while situating her writing in contemporary American settings, and her dense yet delicate collages of landscape, language, history, and private memory include fragments of official documents, newspaper reports, snippets of television news, and other variously found texts. As she puts it, her poetry appears there where “Two tongues instruct. Slippery imminent mutable. Neither native, either mutating”: Colonial acquisition, colonial dissolution. Origin. Derivation. ———— Disruption and returns. This book or that On the shore of America. . . . Fissure. Silence. Propertyless. to enter the “new world”/skin/form/ hair that grows daily

(1993, 175–176)

I am interested in tracing here who it is exactly that “enter[s] the ‘new world’ ”—a subject immediately displaced into a series of synecdoches: “skin/form/hair that grows daily.” This fragmented figure embodies an approach to the subject of the Subject that is different from that generally found in language writing. Kim says that her work examines “the implications for a lyric notational yet flesh” (1993, 175): hers is a hybrid writing explicitly designed to explore intersections of writing and personal identity, treating as closely as it can the lived experience of the postcolonial subject: “notational yet flesh” (italics added). As an incarnation of the flesh in the letter, this is a classic figure of allegory, manifested in Kim’s writing

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as a transcoding of body and written history into a kind of allegorical chronicle. How, then, might flesh and notation conjoin to write the immigrant refugee’s lived experience?

“the subject in the making” Christopher Beach tells us that “Myung Mi Kim’s closest stylistic affiliations are with Language poetry” (1999, 185), but her relations to the latter are oblique at best: Kim has said that she was not aware of the language writers until relatively late in her career. It is more accurate to think of her style as deriving from similar sources: she cites in particular George Oppen and Charles Olson as early influences (Kim 2000, 83–84). Her work certainly looks like language poetry, adhering generally to what Bob Perelman calls the “loose set of goals, procedures, habits, and verbal textures” shared by the language poets, which he describes as follows: “breaking the automatism of the poetic ‘I’ and its naturalized voice; foregrounding textuality and formal devices; using or alluding to Marxist or poststructuralist theory in order to open the present to critique and change” (1996, 13). Although it is unclear how committed a Marxist Kim is or how extensive her background in critical theory might be, her poems nevertheless certainly suggest stylistic “affiliations” with the language poets. The difference lies in what she does with Perelman’s first criterion— that is, with what happens in her work to the “poetic ‘I’ ” once its “automatism” is broken. As in much language poetry, the “personal voice” is not easy to locate in Kim’s writing, which most often utilizes short, fragmentary, anonymous-sounding phrases or recites the equally anonymous “official” languages of newspapers, textbooks, and bureaucratic documents. As an immigrant, however, Kim necessarily approaches the issue of the subject from a different orientation. Three lines in “Field of Inquiry” are telling in this regard: Erosion of the enunciating subject. Language places the subject in process—plural, shattered. Subject in the making. Subject on trial

(1993, 175)

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My point is this: as a native speaker of English and a fully realized product of American socialization, the language poet is in prime position to interrogate his or her own subjectivity. The refugee immigrant, however, is precisely a “subject in process—plural, shattered” (italics added), a “Subject in the making.” Kim does not pose her writing as a critique of the subject in language; instead, her poems work to articulate a subject in the process of emerging from an already radically disturbed sense of identity. Fresh from traumas of war or domestic terror, confronted with an unfamiliar tongue and expected to navigate a strange and complex system of cultural signs, the refugee immigrant is more often than not faced with (re)assembling her subjectivity, not with attacking it.19 Kim thus approaches the issue of the self from a lived experience fraught with an anxiety that one does not often encounter in language poetry. This approach accounts for the most glaring difference between Kim’s work and the latter: its almost total lack of any comedic element. Bernstein or Perelman or Andrews will employ a savage humor to jangle the piety of the lyric and rattle the personal subject upon which it insists, but there is something unrelentingly stressful and urgent about Kim’s poetry in its obsessive returns to scenes of crisis and violence. The language poets’ freewheeling facility at manipulating American linguistic codes is replaced in her work by a hesitancy and an awkwardness that she describes as “ordinary speech and faltered”: “Asked to display—her body, agent of labor, produce, labor, meanwhile enter absence drain plug hole(d)—right to inhabitation/supreme ownership/superfluous ownership/at that boundary/at that degree/to speak. She shows her teeth and tongue that haven’t command” (1993, 176). Kim speaks of “the question of putting into motion that which is one’s experience. There’s this amazing interplay between subjectivity, the world, your intellect, [and] your cultural bearings” (Kim 2000, 83). This is a compelling set of terms to describe a poetics: experience, subjectivity, world, intellect, cultural bearings—but it is not the set that a language poet would recite, and the issue of language as such is not even alluded to in Kim’s list. Kim is obviously interested in the mechanics of notation—in the materiality of language and text—but in her work “experience,” “subjectivity,” “world,” “intellect,” and “cultural bearings” come before the writing—or at any rate before the writing in English. This marks a crucial difference from language poetics: the “flesh” that is one-half of Kim’s equation for a

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writing “notational yet flesh” is something other than the prison house of the language poet’s beleaguered ego. It is precisely Kim’s sense of an incarnated writing—the figurative descent of “flesh” into “notation”—that marks her writing as allegorical. In 1998’s Dura, Kim invents a series of “enunciatory” forms—forms that, as in Inman’s “nimr,” insist on being read as full-blown signs. In the poems in this book, Kim transcodes the two sides of her poetic equation into a metaphor, writing = flesh, which she goes on to project into the formal registers of the poem in order to figure the historical dynamics that are her writing’s primary subject.

the press of expression I can make this point by looking closely at “Measure,” the second poem of Dura (Kim 1998), each of whose seven sections has highly systematic formal features. Taken as a whole, Dura traces a progress at once spatial—from Asia or the Old World to America the New—and temporal—the poems move in roughly chronological sequence from a preindustrial and even prehistoric Korea to eventually include references to colonial America, the American frontier, the arrival of African slaves in Jamestown, the arrival of later groups of immigrants, the U.S. wars in Korea and Vietnam, the race riots in Los Angeles, and finally to what Kim calls “Bodies in propulsion. Guatamalan, Korean, African-American sixteen year olds working checkout lanes. Hard and noisy enunciation” (73). Page 1 of the book announces “the beginning of things.” In “Cosmography,” the first section of Dura, Kim mentions the materials of archaic record keeping, such as parchment, bark, and skin, as well as scribes and “Kingslists”; preindustrial technologies and materials including wagon wheels, viaducts, farm animals, stone, and copper; and fragments of what reads like a mythopoeic account of the origins of culture: First flute cut from bamboo First fabric dye from snails Five tone and seven tone scales

(13)

The rhyme here neatly aligns economics and culture. These phrases are followed by four Korean hanja, the first representing “a short lyric poem

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or, the founder of a family”; the second “an ancestral tablet”; and the third, significantly, “a new world”: this signals a shift in the middle of this first section to a fragmented account of leave taking. We are repeatedly referred to the ocean and to boats, to “supplicant and mendicant,” to “opening spaces” and to travel. “Measure,” which follows “Cosmography,” is the most carefully organized piece in the book, its highly structured form proposing an ineluctable historical logic and acting as a sort of writing machine for producing or, perhaps better, “publishing”—or, better yet, expressing—the postcolonial subject. This poem begins with an epigraph from The Travels of Marco Polo, that originary text for Western commercial and colonial encounters with the East, and we are immediately brought to “Motion on the seas / Larded ships,” followed by “So writ the purpose / Voyage lay bare” (23) on the first page of the poem. As in Inman’s work, in Dura we are also immediately brought to the question of the meaning of the poem’s form. “Measure” is a carefully composed six pages, each of the first four comprising six lines: the first two lines and the last two of each page are situated flush left and frame the third and fourth lines, which are indented and preceded by colons. Here for example is page 3: Irrigation channels blasted from rock Mulberry’s inner bark beaten and matted : One flower when first my eyes : One blossom first eyes open Load tied, properly claim Paper follows the trade route west

open

(25)

The top and bottom couplets of each page either describe scenes of commercial or industrial activity—including the opening and plying of trade routes, the extraction of metals and salt, the traffic in silk, and the construction of large-scale public works—or refer to writing, printing, and the manufacture and marketing of paper, which “follows the trade route west.” We begin with a generalized “Motion on the seas” and end with “Ships of trade accompanied by ships of war”: Kim is sketching here a history of the opening of the Far East to commercial interests via full-scale economic imperialism facilitated by the technology of the printing press:

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Screw, lever, press Moveable face : :

Reed stems, red dates Grown fat and sleek

Dandelion sea belched the lending Ships of trade accompanied by ships of war

(26)

It is the unholy conjunction of “Screw, lever, press / Moveable face” and the ships of militant commercialism that forces the break on the next page, where we find the following remarkably oblique passage: A way is open(ed), a hole is made : Introduce Introduction (Capital)

single horse ride alone (fight alone)

turnback make a turn

(27)

A hole is made, but in what? And why the colon floating unattached in the middle of the page? If we go back to the beginning of “Measure” and read the framed third and fourth lines of each page, we notice that they derive from a wholly different range of discourse: “Gather soil and water / Morning risen evening fallen mushroom” (23); “One flower when first my eyes wake / One blossom first eyes open.” Surrounded by or embedded in the world of global commercial adventure—the “irrigation channels blasted from the rock,” the busy mines and larded merchant ships, the world where “paper follows the trade route west” to “write the purpose” (25): that is, the world of “notation”—“flesh” is here construed as the human body in direct and immediate contact with the land and its own senses. It is this “subject” who is finally expressed—both “notated” and literally squeezed out—by the conjoined forces of the war ships and the moveable face of the press. Appearing previously on the receiving end of a colon with no “notation” as such to produce her—the culmination of a kind of prewritten blank—the subject is on the poem’s final two pages

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entirely colonized: she disappears literally into the small black “hole” of the colon and figuratively into postcolonial history, where one rides and fights alone. “Measure” ends in a scene of total “notation”: To speak of another region and its goods : Figure judgement, abutment : That even invisible currency : Transported as goods travel to gladdened hands : Off the hook trammel : In semblance of order anoint appoint : Gift not its own : Signets to authenticity and foremost authority

(28)

By the end of the poem, the “flesh” has vanished entirely, goods and invisible currency circulate under the sign of the “Figure judgement,” and commerce has been let off the hook to pursue its various semblances of new world orders. The text concludes with the standard marks of legitimacy and power, “Signets of authenticity and foremost authority.” The formal dynamics of Kim’s poem thus fully express a postcolonial subject in the making, “skin/form/hair”—flesh—dissolving into notation as she enters the “fissure” in the New World. In “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality” (1987), Hayden White distinguishes three traditional forms of history writing: the annals, the chronicle, and the history proper. The annals form, a mere list in chronological sequence, is a mode of record keeping characteristic of prehistorical societies. This mode is alluded to in the scribal lists of kings in Dura’s “Cosmography.” White’s third category, the history proper, is wholly given over to narrative, its purpose being to “reveal to us a world that is putatively ‘finished,’ done with, over, and yet not dissolved, not

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falling apart” (21). Such a mode, in which experience is subjected to narrative closure and thereby implies a moral meaning, is not present in Kim’s book at all. White places the chronicle between the annals and the history proper, calling it “something less than a fully realized history”: “The chronicle, by contrast, often seems to wish to tell a story, aspires to narrativity, but typically fails to achieve it. More specifically, the chronicle is usually marked by a failure to achieve narrative closure. It does not so much conclude as simply terminate. It starts out to tell a story but breaks off in media res, in the chronicler’s own present; it leaves things unresolved, or rather, it leaves them unresolved in a story-like way” (1987, 5). As an unfinished history, the chronicle typically focuses on questions of authority and legitimacy as opposed to the uncontested orders of the annals or the fully moralized narrative of the history proper. This is the mode Kim uses in “Measure,” a postmodern history poem whose formal dynamics enunciate the subject in the process of being “acquired” and “dissolved” by colonizing powers. By being written into a chronicle, the postcolonial subject inevitably becomes allegorical; rewriting that chronicle from the perspective of the oppressed is one way to gain purchase on a bad fate. White puts it best: “the chronicle must approach the form of allegory . . . in order to achieve both narrativity and historicality” (1987, 22).

Lyn Hejinian’s Sentences of the Alphabet There is a female creature who hides in her womb unborn children, and although the infants are voiceless they cry out across the waves of the sea and over the whole earth to whomever they wish and people who are not present and even deaf people can hear them. The female creature is a letter and the infants she carries are the letters of the alphabet: although voiceless they can speak to those far away, to whomever they wish whereas if someone happens to be standing right next to the reader he will not hear. —Antiphanes, Comicorum Atticorum fragmenta

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Alphabetical script, as a combination of atoms of writing, is the farthest removed from the script of sacred complexes. —Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama apple is shot nod —Lyn Hejinian, Writing Is an Aid to Memory

C. S. Peirce’s semiotic principle that “all words, sentences, books, and other conventional signs are Symbols” (1955, 112) holds as well of course for the individual letters of the applebet—I meant to write alphabet, shoot me for nodding!—which as everyone knows is made up of arbitrary symbols designated by convention to signify sounds. It also goes without saying that the alphabet is finally what writing is and that, as such, it is the primary material means by which ideas and knowledge and information, broadly speaking, get recorded and disseminated. As Lyn Hejinian tells us elsewhere, Writing Is an Aid to Memory ([1978] 1996) “starts with an ‘apple’: apple for A, the beginning of writing; apple for knowledge”: apple is shot nod The apple is on William Tell’s head. I remember picturing it there—a goofy image, but one not lacking in pathos. This is a writing of sensation, and from the outset, knowledge is vulnerable. (2007, 57, 60)

Tellingly, she says “apple for A,” not “A for apple.” A different order of literary knowing is being proposed here: Which came first anyway, the chicken of the word or the egg of the letter? Like Gertrude Stein in Stanzas in Meditation, Hejinian “caught a bird which made a ball”: 3. apparent doubt face in speech baby birds in proportion to seek and suckle chic on wax of another ball scat chic and hence go round is not a shape

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distinction suck speech those swimming animals should be swimming ([1978] 1996, poem 3)

Are baby birds suckled by (a)parent—do chics even have cheeks? The distinction sucking speech in this passage is all adoubt face, chicks waxing into chic-ons. An obvious musical analogy is scat—words seek slips to suckle shape chic speech. And although balls of scat can be round, “round” isn’t necessarily a shape, although the last line of the stanza is a round—swimming animals swimming. Truly, knowledge is being rendered vulnerable, if not downright vertiginous, in this “writing of sensation.” These sorts of readings—fun; fanciful though motivated; far-fetched at times (it’s hard to tell!); provoked by writing at once intensely disjunctive and carefully patterned; rooted in pun and ambiguity—are critical stockin-trade when it comes to language writing.20 Like most of her colleagues, Hejinian declares her poetry “open to the world and particularly to the reader. It invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies. . . . The ‘open text’ often emphasizes or foregrounds process, either the process of the original composition or of subsequent compositions by readers, and thus resists the cultural tendencies that seek to identify and fix material and turn it into a product; that is, it resists reduction and commodification” (2000, 43).21 In what is by now a wellworn formula, the freshly empowered reader, intellectually stimulated by the charged leaps and dissociations of the disjunctive writing under hand, becomes a co-creator of the text in an activity construed as an analogy for a generalized politics of resistance. Impossible as it may be to determine whether this idea is true or not, it is central to early language poetics and has everything to do with the alleged power of writing to effect real social, political, and psychological change, primarily by challenging the official standards of well-formed English.22 Hejinian, however, downloads this project into a literary register few poets pay attention to: in Writing Is an Aid to Memory, the allegorical impulse that Craig Owens locates as the armature of postmodernism operates at the level of the alphabetic letter. In this text, the vertical principle of equivalence is projected not into the narrative level of the poetry or only into the writing’s syntax, but deeper yet into the horizontal “combi-

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nation of atoms” that make up words themselves—and hence, given the logic of substitution operating here, L literally equals A equals N equals G = U = A = G = E, or “a parent” equals “apparent,” and “chics” are “baby birds.”23 The series of equivalences, all figures of substitution, that anchor language poetics—letter equals sound, word equals thought, writing equals thinking24—motivates the logic of combination that situates letters, words, and lines of words into the orders and forms of Writing Is an Aid to Memory. The poem is an exercise in epistemology at the “atomic” level, where normal logics of cause and effect don’t apply—where “apple is for A,” the alphabet is for knowledge, and “writing constitutes the mind of the/theorist in the mind” (Hejinian [1978] 1996, sec. 24).25 In other words, what is allegorized in Hejinian’s version of language poetry is language—or at any rate written language—understood broadly, again, as Jakobson’s double procedure of symbolic substitution, occurring along the metaphoric axis and based ultimately on the arbitrary relations of sound to meaning and script to sound, and syntagmatic extension, the casting of such figures into syntactical combinations. If what writing finally actively does is organize into linear sequences alphabetic figures that represent sounds, words, and thoughts—if every word already is, in its equation of arbitrary sound and meaning, formally speaking a metaphor, if, in other words, language is always a matter of extending metaphors into metonymic chains—then projecting this principle into poetic writing itself creates an allegory in which language recursively reflects on “language.” In essence, Hejinian writes “writing” by redoubling Jakobson’s poetic function: she treats the equation poetry = the axial projection of metaphor into metonymy as itself a metaphor, and then she projects that metaphor into a “new” metonymic axis to make an allegory out of the poetic function itself. When the principle of the sign as arbitrary equivalence is used to govern the contiguous relations that compose the line—when substitution itself is projected into combination—grammar is transfigured, or, better, grammar becomes figured. The logic governing the formation of the word becomes the logic governing the formation of the line; system becomes structure; metonymy becomes metaphor; metaphor becomes grammaticalized; syntax becomes allegory; and the sequencing of the letters of the alphabet operates as the logic behind the organization of the lines of the poem. Hejinian complicates all this by claiming that Writing Is an Aid to Memory enacts “the active phenomenological capacity of writing”; the book,

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she says, is “a medium for thinking” in which she is “interested in epistemology: in consciousness, in knowledge, in the ways that knowledge is organized and structured” (2007, 57). Hejinian writes a kind of phenomenological allegory:26 in her work, knowing is always a matter of unriddling allegorical figures;27 reading is conceived as an ongoing process of bridging the gaps “posed to thinking by the awareness of incommensurable distances within its object of thought” (to quote Jameson [1991, 168] on allegory again);28 literacy and knowledge are organized and structured by the symbolic letters of the alphabet; and Writing Is an Aid to Memory is “a medium for dialogic and dialectical processes, a medium for being there and knowing that that is happening” (Hejinian 2007, 68, italics in original). It speaks volumes that Hejinian uses almost the same italicized phrases to describe surrealist writing: “It is at points of linkage—in contexts of encounter, at what Andre Breton called pointes sublimes—that one discovers the reality of being in time, of taking one’s chance, of becoming another, with all the implicit understanding that this is happening” (2000, 3). In this section, I situate Hejinian’s work within and against surrealist and formalist models; she traffics in both, and unlike for many of the language poets, her relationship with surrealism is relatively uncomplicated. She has also recently turned overtly to allegory as a critical tool for understanding her own writing as well as the poetry of her contemporaries. I say “recently” because the term allegory never appears in The Language of Inquiry, her book of collected essays published in 2000; it is not until the last installment of The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography (part 10), which appeared in 2010, that she treats the trope in any sustained way (Hejinian 2010).29 I argue that Hejinian’s work has nevertheless always been allegorical: that it is precisely allegory working at the level of form—“form” here implying the characters that make up writing itself—that makes her work “postmodern” in the ways that I have been suggesting. My argument boils down to this: driven at the level of the letter, Writing Is an Aid to Memory enacts what Hejinian calls in The Language of Inquiry an “active phenomenology”: a poetry “offering a picture of knowledge underway [sic]” (2000, 22) and founded on a theory of reading as ongoing temporal negotiation of semantic and syntactic gaps fixed in fractured alphabetical structures.30 It is through the symbolic lattice of the alphabet that, according to Hejinian, “formations of knowledge [can] be made per-

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ceptible” (2000, 22). A materialist epistemology is operating here. I quote at length from “The Quest for Knowledge in the Western Poem”: To say that language “lays down paths” is to offer a metaphor which has several possible interpretations. . . . Knowledge, in other words, is transitive. It is also transient, though recurrent, occurring in situ, in experience. One doesn’t know something constantly or continually, but only episodically, in the event. The following of the paths in the metaphor requires a knowing how. . . . Knowledge is based on the experience of the disjuncture between what’s seen and what’s thought—on the alterations cast by reflection, on thought’s own alterity. In fact, if it weren’t other, at least momentarily, we wouldn’t experience it at all, because we wouldn’t notice our noting it. It is in and amid the interconnections—or as Tolstoi put it, the “linkages”—between certainties and uncertainties, as between parts and their wholes or, in poetry, between grammar and semantics, that meaning and its concomitant knowing abides. (in Hejinian 2000, 226, 227, italics in original)

“Knowing” occurs in the transient experience of reading itself, understood as an episodic, transitive encounter with the linkages that make up writing—between letter and sound, sound and syllable, syllable and word, word and phrase, phrase and sentence, alphabet and meaning and thinking. The disjunctive metaphors of surrealism cast into combinatory grammars in an alphabetic mesh make up the allegorical text in which Hejinian composes her “picture of knowledge underway.”

“surrealism, or, the ho oves of clattering trolleys” Hejinian grounds her concept of poetic metaphor in the surrealist mode of the arbitrary juxtaposition of unlike images: hence, for instance, horse hooves and trolley tracks come together in “Surrealism, or the hooves of clattering trolleys” (2000, 11) to make a “figure . . . of action in motion, yet the movement is not what is seen” (2000, 11). As in my earlier example of the shoe on the foot of the mountain (here it is trolleys with hooves),

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Hejinian’s metaphor does not resolve into its component parts—the movement is not what is seen—or maybe the pun at its root is not so resolvable.31 In a recent talk about her poetics, Hejinian expands on her earlier comments regarding Breton: I’m very interested in the absolute, radical unsettling of places that a poem can exemplify. I’m interested in maximal heterogeneity and unassimilability. . . . In any case, the point or the place that I would want to point to as absolute interiority of a work of writing is what Andre Breton called the point sublime, which is the point of encounter in which unlike things encounter each other and create an extraordinary, albeit usually a very momentary place within a work—if that makes any sense. And I think you hear it in the Stein, in those copulas that she puts of: “an elephant and a strict occasion,” and if you linger on that juxtaposition, there is a moment in which an elephant and a strict occasion are absolutely in place together, logically. And then the logic explodes. (2008)32

In Writing Is an Aid to Memory, we witness many such “points of encounter” between unlike things, unassimilable juxtapositions demonstrating maximal heterogeneity: bond vegetables binder whereof for thread and no crisp fogs spice quilt mix know shipping pivot sprinkle with a little melody nor blot past this dot mix now for a bit and fog of bath rain do dot goats swift whipper of rice

([1978] 1996, sec. 28)

Oxymoronic “crisp fogs” we can perhaps visualize, but what is a “spice quilt mix” or a “shipping pivot”? And although such odd objects might well appear in a surrealist poem or painting, a line such as “bond vegetables binder whereof for thread” demonstrates a more intensive “unassimilability.” This statement seems to want to skirt various meanings. Is a “vegetable binder” maybe a cookbook? Is it somehow “bonded” with thread? Again, critics have worked hard to shoehorn such lines into one

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meaning or another, but it is always a bit like Cinderella’s sisters amputating their toes as they try on her glass slippers. In this line, Breton’s points sublimes operate literally in the “absolute interiority” of the writing, word to word, exploding the logics that organize phrase and clause: How, for instance, are we to understand the adverb whereof here? This writing does not so much present a surrealist image as it enacts a surrealist syntax. And this pushing of the principle of surrealist figuration into the grammar of the sentence is precisely the step that classic surrealism never took: this is what Silliman means when he says that the surrealists “manipulate meaning only at the ‘higher’ or ‘outer’ layers, well beyond the horizon of the sentence” (1989, 87). Because “discontinuity,” according to Hejinian, is “that fountain of postmodernity and anxiety” (2000, 147), then it is by projecting such discontinuous figures along the axis of combination that she composes her postmodern allegory. In Writing Is an Aid to Memory, Hejinian dips well below the horizon of the sentence and into the alphabetical ground of poetry itself.

“combination, or, the metaphor” Like Silliman and Watten, Hejinian attributes the crucial change in her writing in the early 1970s to her encounters with Continental theory: “Thanks to the ideas and information I was discovering in Russian Formalist theory and French structuralism and poststructuralism, I made ‘the turn to language.’ In this regard, these two bodies of theory are of supreme importance to my work—informing it fundamentally and pervasively” (2000, 170).33 She goes on to explain that from Saussure she picked up the “basic tenet [of] the arbitrariness of language”—a tenet we have seen that she also learned from the sublime points of surrealist metaphors, “the strongest [of] which,” Breton says, “presents the highest degree of arbitrariness” (quoted in Ernst 1970a, 130). Here again we meet evidence for the surrealist/structuralist nexus posited earlier by Roland Barthes: both he and Hejinian in their different ways intuit surrealism as a primary “experience of structural literature” (Barthes 1972, 214). And in an intertitle phrase from the essay “A Thought Is the Bride of What Thinking,” “Combination, or, the metaphor”(in Hejinian 2000, 11), we encounter a crucial paradox: by definition, metaphor operates along the

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axis of substitution, not combination. In this tightly welded formulation, Hejinian in effect collapses Jakobson’s axes by designating metaphor as the trope of combination. This is precisely the equation for allegory that Craig Owens and others stipulate, and in a parallel to Bernstein’s strategic reversal of Jakobson’s axes vis-à-vis literary modes of romanticism and realism, Hejinian writes that “metonymy is the most consistent form of ‘logic’ in my writing” (2000, 195–196). Accordingly, then, it is the logic of realism that gets “exploded” by discontinuity in her poetry: If one posits descriptive language and, in a broader sense, poetic language as a language of inquiry, with analogies to the scientific methods of the explorers, then I anticipate that the principle trope will be the metonym, what Roman Jakobson calls “association by contiguity.” The metonym operates within several simultaneous but not necessarily congruent logics, oscillating inferentially between induction and deduction. . . . Or, again, an object may be replaced by another adjacent one, the cause by the effect or the effect by the cause, spatial relations may replace temporal ones or vice versa, an action may replace the actor or vice versa, and so forth. Metonymy moves attention from thing to thing; its principle is combination rather than selection. (2000, 148)34

In its power to move attention, metonymy functions as “a cognitive, perceptual, logical unit” for Hejinian (2000, 152), who describes the trope as the motor of literary thinking: “For a writer, it is language that carries thought, perception, and meaning. And it does so through a largely metonymic process, through the discovery and invention of associations and connections” (166). Going on to acknowledge her debt to Russian formalism, Hejinian posits metonymic poetic thinking as “thinking of thinking,” and what makes this recursive thinking possible, she says, is the placement of the image: “What is basic to poetry then is not the image (the unfamiliar rendered in familiar terms), but rather an unusual placement or usage of it.” [Poetry’s] meanings—its very meaningfulness—reside within the context of poetry’s peculiarities; poetry’s devices (to use a Russian Formalist term), its foregrounded formal properties, form thoughts—they constitute the thinking of thinking.

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These devices are diverse. They are not confined to rhyme and meter. Nor are they limited to the invention of imagery. . . . The image does indeed have its place in poetry—but that is precisely the Formalists’ point. The specific placement, context, implementation, the use to which the given image is put—this is what should be given prominence. All that is formal must also be dynamic. (2000, 300–301, italics in original)

Here we have Hejinian’s formula for allegory in a nutshell: in order to construct the disjunctive logic that invites the sort of “episodic” thinking that the formal dynamics of poetry can provoke, the poet’s primary task is to misplace images—which themselves are already surrealist juxtapositions “in which unlike things encounter each other”—into syntagmatic chains, such that “several simultaneous but not necessarily congruent logics” can operate. In other words, the surrealist principle of discontinuity plays out in all of the formal dimensions of Hejinian’s writing, not only producing syntactic fracturing in “the interiors of language” but also, as I explain in the next subsection, motivating the organization of the poem’s larger overall form.

“numerical the alphabet” My argument throughout this book has been that postmodern poetry is marked by allegory operating at the level of form. Using Craig Owens’s formulation of allegory as the extending of metaphor into continuous series, I have shown how several poets have organized their poems according to allegorical conceits. Thus, Coolidge uses the metaphor of writing as film to compose Polaroid, where he conceives the text as a literary transcoding of photography’s materials and technical procedures. Likewise, Inman uses the metaphor American history = Fordist assembly line to create the baroque formal machinery of “nimr”; and Myung Mi Kim imagines colonialist politics as a printing press, casting this surreal configuration into the axial armatures of “Measure.” In each of these cases, the dominant metaphor in question stipulates the specifics of the larger, systematic forms that control the organization of the poem. As I noted earlier, poetic allegory is created by the transcoding of two dissimilar objects or images into a metaphorical figure, which is then projected into sequence either

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by being extended into narrative or, in its postmodern iteration, by otherwise contributing the logic to how the formal elements of the writing in the poem are construed. Put most simply: allegory is metaphor motivating sequence. The metaphor that Hejinian uses to motivate the sequences of Writing Is an Aid to Memory is writing = landscape: in this text, she says, she “posited a language landscape, regarding words and phrases with as much specificity as one grants particular rocks, trees and condition of sky” (2000, 179). In her essay/talk “Grammar and Landscape,” Hejinian derives this metaphorical figure from Gertrude Stein, for whom “landscape was an empty form, or rather a form free of prediction, a vibrational field of reversible effects”: “One can read [Stein’s works from the 1920’s and ’30’s] . . . as a ground for the examination of temporal and of spatial scales in the world of things and person and in language, which determines just as much as it reflects our sense of measure and scale. Cows, roses, shadows, exclamations in appreciation, rivers, spouses, poplar trees, fences, conversations, and sentences in description, for example” (in Hejinian 2000, 106, 109).35 This list can apply equally well to Writing Is an Aid to Memory, which Hejinian explains was written in the context of her family’s move from rural Mendicino County, California, to the Bay Area in 1977, “away from the landscape of mountains and ranch lands (what is called chaparral) to that of city streets and social space” (2000, 179). Much of the poem accordingly draws on pastoral vocabulary: not only do we read about cows, roses, shadows, rivers, trees, and fences, but goats, horses, barns, farmers, crows, dogs, and a host of other barnyard denizens and rural vignettes also appear: grammar a copy cate deal little volume with a look which said the actual words was a farm the farm of spelling the name smudge a work hug ironing lettuce money west cock settled the hem of the hearts smug hog dozer the country word pitching cooking over the flat country ([1978] 1996, sec. 32)

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Here we see “words and phrases [treated] with as much specificity as one grants particular rocks, trees and condition of sky” (Hejinian 2000, 179); the reader of this text comes across language seemingly strewn haphazardly about the page in the same way that a hiker might casually take in the random elements of a landscape with a glance. But of course no landscape is haphazard or random, especially a rural Californian one, marked as it is by geographical forces, climate and weather, as well as by human history, politics, and commerce. If Writing Is an Aid to Memory is an allegory of writing as landscape, then there must be a linguistic system behind the mapping of its lines, words, and phrases. And in classic Jamesonian fashion, Hejinian transcodes writing and cartography in order to organize her textual landscape—and thereby deepens her allegory: if writing = landscape, then language = mapping. She explains how the poem was constructed: “One of the structuring principles governing Writing Is an Aid to Memory is alphabetical, in imitation (or acknowledgement) of that of standard reference books. The text was written on a typewriter, with its nonproportional spacing—all lines beginning with a are placed flush against the left hand margin, lines beginning with b start one space in, lines beginning with c start two spaces in, etc.” (2007, 62–63). In other words, Hejinian conceptualizes the horizontal sequence of the alphabet (A B C D E F . . . ) as one of the two spatial coordinates of a map, the other coordinate being number. This is a common cartographic system (the aptly named “number–letter” system), the standard alternative being the division of the map into lines of latitude and longitude. A poetic line is thus located on the page in Writing Is an Aid to Memory according to the alphabetic letter beginning its first word: all these ways painting, modeling guage means general will push straction one day to the left carried out on the pebbles drops of water of light off of abstraction in the other way but the order big things weigh quite thoroughly primitive as that one children sticks for the smallest sticks

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plus the other birds plus more birds bigger than smaller and make several trios eyes can’t fix full circles ply to quire walked or moved flew flying farther along than as far one ception tory ysis even a pile of blue tokens ([1978] 1996, sec. 5)

In this passage, the two lines beginning with a—the first and the twelfth— are aligned flush left; the sequential lines beginning with b—“but the order” and “big things weigh”—are indented one space; lines beginning with c are indented two spaces; the final line, beginning with “ysis,” is indented the most. The reader must imagine the lines of the poem as vertically coordinated according to an invisible alphabetic grid spread horizontally across the page. The language of the text is thus mapped according to the very graphic system that makes it legible: “Apple is for A” is a physical fact of this poem. The map’s second coordinate axis is the sequential numbering of its forty-two sections (neither of the two editions of Writing Is an Aid to Memory—from The Figures in 1978 and from Sun & Moon in 1996—is paginated). In effect, Hejinian involutes the traditional book–object. Instead of leaf-based numerical sequencing and the individual page as frame for justifying margins, this book’s margins are determined on a line-by-line basis according to initial alphabetic letter and its numerical sequencing fixed by stanza number. It’s as if the text’s margins and pagination have collapsed or have been folded into the poem itself to become integral parts of its very procedures. The “book” as such is effectively turned inside out: if I want to locate a line in this textual landscape, I do so by letter sequence and stanza number: hence, “5 G” gives me “guage means general”; 19 N, “numerical the alphabet.” This coordinating of line to alphabetical sequence determines the form of Writing Is an Aid to Memory as a deeply recursive allegory. By definition, the letters of the alphabet are units of substitution (they are substitutes for sounds) selected in order to form words (cat versus mat), which are letters placed in horizontal combinations (c-a-t). Hence, any word is an initial projection of selection into the axis of contiguity, a projection of verti-

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cal equivalence into horizontal combination. Hejinian treats the equation word = horizontal alphabetic combination as itself a metaphor and projects that metaphor into the horizontal axis of her poetry in order to orient the lines of her text. In a spatialized enactment of Jakobson’s poetic function, she “drops” the alphabetical letter vertically down the page in order to determine where any line situates horizontally. By comparing Charles Olson’s projective verse with Hejinian’s practice, we can highlight the differences between indexical and allegorical poetics. In Olson, the typewriter is used to score the poet’s breath and hence to compose a text that functions as an index of the writer’s body. Thus, the projectivist poem’s form is motivated: it points back to the body that generated it, acting as the trace of a particular moment in the writer’s writing (or thinking). For Hejinian, the typewriter is not used to score the breath or index the body; instead, the poem’s formal parameters are determined by the very system of its inscription. In essence, language poetry replaces the body with writing—or, as I explain later, it replaces the map with mapping. And because, as Peirce says, the alphabetic letter is symbolic—and hence arbitrary and unmotivated—then projecting the principle of the arbitrariness of the sign into the horizontal axis of the writing makes the poem’s form arbitrary but motivated—motivated precisely by arbitrariness. “Writing” is what the form of Writing Is an Aid to Memory “enunciates.” Hejinian’s poetic transcoding of the procedures of cartography and poetry makes this poem an allegory for alphabetic writing itself, its form enacting the metaphorical conceit language = mapping that is its base.

time tr avel The allegorical would be to do time travel. —Lyn Hejinian, “A Conversation with Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian.”

In a recent essay, Hejinian discusses the relations between allegory, mapping, reading, knowing, and time: “Allegory . . . 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

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consciousness, an act of temporal contextualization and/or projection” (2011b, 285). Again: allegory is metaphor stretched into time—that is, metaphor narrativized or otherwise “introduced into continuous series”; the metonymic or horizontal axis is the axis of temporality.36 As I explained earlier, this is what makes for the difference between (Dadaist) collage and (surrealist) montage; as Rosalind Krauss (1993) argues, the latter has a temporal dimension that the former’s purely spatial fragmentation lacks. And Hejinian explicitly formulates her writing as montage, which she makes clear in the following answer to an interviewer’s question concerning Writing Is an Aid to Memory: From a time (prior to 1978) I intended to use the term collage loosely and generally to refer to all art works created or assembled out of diverse materials—works of art emphasizing contiguity, contingency, juxtaposition, realignment, relationship, and unlikely pairings, etc. The problem with the term, as I saw when I became more precise, is that it suggests (or can suggest) an unmotivated or unnecessitated groupings [sic] of materials. Things in a collage are like letters of the alphabet—when you put some of them together they will always appear to be seeking meaning, or even to be making it. The term montage, however, as it was used by and in the tradition of Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein, is better. In montage, all the above values are maintained (contiguity, contingency, etc.), but the result reflects decision more than happy chance. Also collage is a predominantly spatial technique (developed in paintings), whereas montage (deriving from film technique) employs devices that are related to time. In this sense montage preserves its character as a process. (2000, 190–191)37

Here we see just how “fundamentally and pervasively” the lessons of structuralism, formalism, and surrealism inform Hejinian’s work: down to the level of the letters of the individual word, she conceives of writing as experimental montage, a driving of juxtaposed fragments into various “unlikely” logics of combination. To return then to the difference between map and mapping: Hejinian conceives of her writing as an ongoing mapping of a language landscape—in other words, we encounter in her poetry not the static iconicity of the map, but the cartographic procedures of mapping transcoded into

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and as the procedures of writing. Just as Coolidge transcodes the mechanics of photography into his text, producing an allegorical form that mobilizes his poetry, Hejinian takes what a cartographer does (i.e., projecting coordinates and locating schematic features of landscape along them) and extends that into her poem as its formal procedure. Counterintuitively, she terms this practice “description”: I propose description as a method of invention and of composition. Description, in my sense of the term, is phenomenal rather than epiphenomenal, original, with a marked tendency toward effecting isolation and displacement, that is toward objectifying all that’s described and making it strange. Description should not be confused with definition; it is not definitive but transformative. Description . . . is a particular and complicated process of thinking, being highly intentional while at the same time because it is simultaneous with and equivalent to perception, remaining open to the arbitrariness, unpredictability, and inadvertence of what appears. Or one might say this it is at once improvisational and purposive. (2000, 138–139)

But if what Hejinian writes can be called “description,” then what exactly does it describe? In other words, what material is disposed by the cartographic procedures of Writing Is an Aid to Memory? If, as she says, “poetic form is . . . always a poem’s self-commentary” (2000, 356), then how does the content of this poem relate to what is “enounced” by its form? We have already seen that Hejinian’s poem treats of the rural countryside that she and her family were moving away from when the poem was being composed; this treatment logically fits the writing = landscape metaphor and the cartographic allegory that follows.38 But a great deal of other material appears in the poem, and here Hejinian’s larger theme of the relationship between language, writing, reading, knowing, and temporality comes into sharper focus. She describes her method for finding materials for her book: The book is built of phrases, some generated out of my imagination, others culled from books as I was unpacking and organizing onto bookshelves in the house we were slowly moving into. . . . I opened books at random, scanning the left margin for suggestive words or phrases and

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writing them down on sheets of paper or on index cards, along with phrases of my own that came to mind. There was no conceptual motive for restricting myself to the phrases along the left margin of the pages, but it had the practical benefit of keeping my attention on phrase units rather than on larger semantic units (the ideas being articulated in the books). It’s because I was scanning only along the left margin of pages that Writing Is an Aid to Memory includes a number of part words, many of them suffixes: “ness,” “civious,” “glish,” “cerns,” “duce,” “mena,” etc., and morphemes like “deed,” “chant,” and “poses,” that are words as well as possible word-ends. Whether words or not, these are memes of a sort— small bits of cultural, as well as linguistic, information. Memes were the building units out of which the work was composed. (2007, 60–61)

The poem maps not only a landscape but a bookscape. The “memes” that writing aids memory in recalling include montaged fragments of texts—in fact, of the margins of specific texts: the poem reproduces the very edges of other books’ margins within the shifting dynamics of its own. This writing thus “remembers” not just other writing but a particular history of reading. Out of its montage of fragments, it creates a prompt for new “knowing”: as Hejinian explains, “The part words, which became nonce words in effect, are elements of discontinuity—structural discontinuities, ruptures, occurring by chance although not irrationally. Discontinuity occurs just as much as continuity in experience and in consciousness. And contiguity (of the sort that collage and montage foreground, for example) is as productive of meaning as other logics. In Writing Is an Aid to Memory I took advantage of chance. Indeed, writing is an aid to chance” (2000, 63). Thus, in Writing Is an Aid to Memory we read “reading”; in fact, we read a reading: the poem is a mapping of a reading, the shifting coordinates of which are determined by the very “memes”—the letters of the alphabet and the fragments of found writing that those letters at once discriminate and construe—that make inscription and memory possible in the first place. If we return to section 5 of Writing Is an Aid to Memory quoted earlier as my example of the poem’s alphabetically determined margins, we witness Hejinian’s allegory of knowing through linguistic experiencing come full circle. Much of the text here, it turns out, is taken from Jean Piaget’s Genetic Epistemology (1970),39 a work in which Piaget argues that people

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learn by what he calls “reflective abstraction.” Through a process of “coordinating actions,” children, he says, derive new knowledge by the ongoing application of more primary modes of thinking to new circumstances; for example, the complicated conceptions we come to have of time are based on more primal experiences of speed. Knowing is thus based on direct experience: “human knowledge is essentially active . . . knowing an object does not mean copying it—it means acting upon it” (15). This goes for language as well: although Piaget agrees with Noam Chomsky that language is “based on a kernel of reason,” he disagrees with him on the “innateness” of that rational kernel: “Chomsky goes so far as to say that the kernel of reason on which the grammar of language is constructed is innate, that it is not constructed through the actions of the infant as I have described but is hereditary and innate. I think that this hypothesis is unnecessary, to say the least” (47).40 For Piaget, the faculty of language is itself “constructed” through a continual process of ever more complicated reflective abstraction built on primal sensory-motor experiences. Accordingly, he argues, there are no innate categorical or cognitive structures— everything we know comes from our direct encounters with the world, encounters from which we “abstract” models of intelligibility that we then accommodate to new situations as they arise. Much of this theory jibes with Hejinian’s notion of knowing as an ongoing negotiation of discontinuities: we learn by constantly coordinating, recalibrating, and abstracting what it is that we know of the world—the world in writing—as we confront it unfolding before us. It makes sense, therefore, that the fragments Hejinian selects from Genetic Epistemology to provoke the reader to his or her own “reflective abstraction” while reading Writing Is an Aid to Memory are taken from passages in which Piaget describes specific experiments where children are set tasks such as counting pebbles in different configurations to determine how it is they learn to generalize about number (“carried out on the pebbles”) or arranging sticks by lengths (“children sticks for the smallest sticks”) or birds in groups (“plus the other birds plus more birds”) to figure out how people conceive categories of count and amount. This, Piaget claims, is what human beings do: it is how we learn, remember, reflect, and come to know things. In a parallel way, the reader of Hejinian’s poem is continually called on to bridge gaps, to think across and with fragments of words, texts, memories—and descriptions of people doing exactly what it is that one does when reading.

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Enmeshed in what Hejinian calls the “solid and mighty alphabet” (1996, stanza 23, letter s), her poem thus demonstrates precisely how writing can be an aid to memory. In language writing and its successors, form can operate explicitly as part of the politics of a poem—the formal machineries I have described insist on being read as fully articulated signs. Allegories of the content they organize, these transcoded figures or conceptual metaphors are projected into the dynamics of the writing as it unfolds in its horizontal and vertical dimensions. Neither icons nor indices, they stipulate systematic procedures for formal construction and the working out in time and space of the conceit at the poem’s base: American history as assembly line, colonial politics as printing press, the alphabet as the material ne plus ultra of the contested ground of who knows what and how. By struggling with such formally “difficult” and often willfully obscure work, the language argument goes, the reader is posed as a political being, put to building the world as he or she encounters it. Hejinian explains: “According to [Fredric Jameson’s] version of the allegorical, it is the purveyor of a known and purportedly well-understood code whose field of meaning it relocates. But it is the puzzling, even obscurantist, rather than over-determining aspect of the allegorical that has the greatest political—and, perhaps, artistic—potential. And, at the very least, the code may be one over which marginalized, rather than ruling, elements may have mastery” (2011b, 285).

4

Semiologies Susan Howe I am, as far as I know, a pioneer, or rather a backwoodsman, in the work of cleaning and opening up what I call semiotic, that is, the doctrine of the essential nature and fundamental varieties of possible semiosis. —Charles Sanders Peirce, “Pragmatism in Retrospect,” in Philosophical Writings of Peirce

Were any contemporary writer to imagine Charles Sanders Peirce as a frontier backwoodsman, it would have to be Susan Howe. Figuring the nation’s most neglected philosopher and the inventor of semiotics as an intrepid Daniel Boone bushwhacking through the American “word forest” fits almost too neatly Howe’s poetic praxis and her preoccupations with early American literature, which is robustly allegorical from its Puritan roots down to its mid-nineteenth-century “Renaissance.”1 It is curious that no critic has systematically approached Howe as an allegorist treating allegory, and although her inventive formal structures have been described as emblems and metaphors, only Charles Bernstein has labeled them allegories: in My Way he writes that “form in Howe’s work is allegorical, the lineation miming (mining) the themes of the poems” (1999, 100).2 Howe makes an interesting test case for my thesis because she doesn’t really fit it, although at first glance it looks as if she would or even should. Upon closer inspection, it is not at all certain that her work is allegorical at the level of form. Bernstein’s description more closely matches the definition of iconic form—where “form mimes meaning”—than of allegorical form as I have described it—that is, where a transcoded figure or metaphor systematically motivates a poem’s formal procedures. Rachel Tzvia Back tells us that “Howe’s poetic texts are themselves marked icons, whose textual marks are self-reflexively foregrounded” (2002, 3), and Craig Dworkin writes that “the visual surface of [Howe’s] pages illustrates at a

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literal, physical, spatial level the . . . lessons of the text’s thematic, semantic and conceptual planes” (1996, 396). Surely both are right. Howe’s is a visual poetics, derived ultimately, she has said, from painting; in much of her work, form bears some marked similarity—pictorial, analogical, or diagrammatic—to its subject matter: a poem’s form makes a picture or an image of its theme. Howe’s poetry thus differs categorically from the poetry of the writers whom I have discussed so far: although Coolidge’s poem Polaroid, for instance, behaves like a camera, it doesn’t depict one; the writing doesn’t form an image of film—it operates after the manner of it. In the works of each of these poets, form does not “resemble” content; it works out the logic of a metaphor. Such poetry systematically “introduces a metaphor into continuous series” at the level of form, the specifics of which are entirely prescribed by the metaphorical transcoding at its base. Thus, the form of Writing Is an Aid to Memory or of “nimr” is dictated by an ironclad formula that neither can be (nor at any point is) transgressed: the poet has set up a formal procedure that automatically unfolds according to the specifics of its own logic. There is nothing so globally systematic in Howe’s poetry, where forms are pictures rather than procedures, although she does deal more explicitly with allegory at the level of theme than any of the writers I have discussed—one might say that she writes about allegory but not through it. In this chapter, however, I examine a text that, although perhaps formally less adventurous than much of Howe’s work, nevertheless offers the occasion for a study of allegory when read from the theoretical perspective that I have been elaborating. Pierce-Arrow (1999) is the most extensive treatment in American poetry of Peirce and his science of semiotics (as far as I know, it is the only treatment). Deriving her poetics not so much from Prague school formalism or from Russian constructivism or from structuralism or surrealism, but instead from Yankee philosophical varietals such as pragmatism and transcendentalism and homegrown brands of phenomenology and semiology, Howe reaches back and behind the theoretical programs of Jakobson and Barthes and Benjamin to their foundations in nineteenth-century American philosophy. Rooting around in the origins of the critical linguistics that I have been examining, PierceArrow, I argue, is one of Howe’s works that repays being read as formally allegorical.

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In what follows, I treat each of the three sections of Pierce-Arrow as an instantiation of one of Peirce’s three types of sign. My thesis is that the tripartite form of the book mirrors Peirce’s division of the sign into index, icon, and symbol: “Arisbe” examines and demonstrates indexicality; “The Leisure of the Theory Class” does the same for iconicity; and “Rückenfigur” treats of the symbolic. I argue that Howe’s book thus allegorizes Peirce’s semiotic system itself and that by taking as its subject matter the conditions of its own coming into being, Pierce-Arrow demonstrates the mechanics behind allegory making and semiosis altogether. Hence, Howe’s interest in Peirce’s phenomenology, or what he calls “phaneroscopy” (1955, 74): that is, the science of appearance and of appearing. “Phenomenology asks what are the elements of appearance,” Howe writes in “Arisbe” (1999, 14, from this point cited by page number only), and Peirce says that the business of phenomenology is “to unravel the tangled skein [of] all that in any sense appears and wind it into distinct forms” (1955, 71). This is precisely what Pierce-Arrow does: it winds tangled skeins of bibliographic and archival materials into poetic forms, explicitly taking as its immediate subject matter the scholarly process of its own appearing. Accordingly, I take each section of the poem in sequence, treating the book as a single, sustained allegorical narrative. A dense amalgamation of different sorts and types of writing, Pierce-Arrow is a complicated work: aside from first-person prose narrative and passages of meditative lyric poetry, the text is a pastiche of literary anecdotes; citations from dictionaries and encyclopedias; passages from historical studies and biographies; bibliographical citations and records; parts of other book’s indexes; and quoted materials from novels, poems, diaries, journals, letters, collected papers, manuscript drafts, essays, and Alexander Pope’s translation of Homer. It also includes reproductions of a photograph; a silhouette; an autograph; and all manner of ephemeral Peirciana, including hand-drawn charts, graphs, diagrams, and cartoons and doodles from Peirce’s notebooks. These materials appear in wildly paratactic configurations in a dynamic montage of fragments run together at the levels of line, phrase, sentence, paragraph, stanza, and page. The book’s dedication poem begins with the word “Constellation,” evoking Benjamin’s comment that “ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars” (1998, 34).3

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By any standards, Pierce-Arrow is an odd read: front-loaded with bibliographical information and editorial details followed hard upon by Howe’s first-person sketch of the course of her research “in the bowels of Sterling Library,” it ends with a sustained lyric meditation on the Tristan and Iseult legend as allegory—but as allegory for what? This is the question that “Rückenfigur” poses at its outset: Iseult stands at Tintagel on the mid stairs between light and dark symbolism Does she stand for phonic human overtone for outlaw love the dread pull lothly for weariness actual brute predestined fact for phobic falling no one talking too Tintagel ruin of philosophy

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Does Iseult stand for “outlaw love”? For “weariness actual brute predestined fact”? For “phobic falling”? For “phonic human overtone” (whatever that is)? If Tintagel is an allegory for the ruin of philosophy, does the poem advocate for allegory as a way of proceeding? What might the tale of the two lovers be an allegory of ? Maintaining this interrogative pressure throughout the third section, “Rückenfigur,” Howe implies that this last question may ultimately be unanswerable and, indeed, that that might finally be the point. Although “there will always be a secret affinity between symbolic logic and poetry,” as Howe says in her preface (ix), Pierce-Arrow suggests that poetry is ultimately less the genre in which to resolve questions of history, phenomenology, and semiology than it is a literary mode for raising questions about questioning—or questing—altogether: How does one make meaning from archival materials or make meaning at all for that matter?4 Indeed, Pierce-Arrow might best be understood as an allegory for the limits of poetic meaning making itself: “In poetry,” Howe writes, “all things seem to touch so they are” (13). It is the nature of the “touching” between the “things” in poetry—the ways in which poetry’s words, phrases, and juxtaposed fragments invite or compel one another to

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speak or to “be” or to “appear” in one another’s company—that Howe’s poetry explores.5 This is also what both phenomenology and semiology in their own ways study, and Peirce, as the original pioneer of “the doctrine of the essential nature and fundamental varieties of possible semiosis” (Peirce 1955, 284), is the logical avatar for Howe’s poem. Hence, I read Pierce-Arrow as an ongoing, multifaceted allegorical narrative: the book begins in a scene of archival research and ends with the writing of the poem “Rückenfigur”—an apt figure, the person seen from behind, for a work that is “looking back” at the scholarly and artistic deliberations that made it possible. As Howe moves from index to icon and finally to symbol, she traverses the landscape of Peirce’s semiotics, allegorized in the text as the windy plains and ruins of Troy: the Iliad, the Nostoi, and other plays in the Epic Cycle as well as the Tristan and Iseult story operate as itinerant allegories for Peirce’s life and work. Meanwhile, a host of other characters—many themselves writers—are brought into the mix: Algernon Charles Swinburne; George Meredith and his wife, Mary Ellen; Charles Dickens; Edmund Husserl; and a number of other more or less obscure figures. This motley fare accounts for the text’s fascinating kaleidoscopic effect: one senses some sort of compelling logic in the way that all of the shards fall together into their “constellations” (think here of Angus Fletcher’s description of allegory’s “curiously inwrought” texture characterized by “an idealizing consistency of thematic content [in which] the relations between ideas are under strong logical control” [1964, 105]).6 I argue that the logic in question in this case is the logic of allegory, in which metaphorical figures of equivalence motivate the poem’s formal features: in its recursive rigor, Pierce-Arrow stands as a metadiscursive allegory of semiology itself.

Thundering in the Index A rap on the door is an index. Anything which startles us is an index, in so far as it marks the junction between two portions of experience. Thus a tremendous thunderbolt indicates that something considerable has happened. —Charles Sanders Peirce, “Logic as Semiotic,” in Philosophical Writings of Peirce

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It thunders —initial entry in existential graph from Peirce’s notebooks, reproduced in Susan Howe, Pierce-Arrow

“Arisbe” begins with a nine-line poem referencing the Iliad, Phenomenology of war in the Iliad how men appear to each other when gods change the appearance of things

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and six short poems dealing with the Trojan Cycle finish it. Together, the beginning and end frame some twenty pages of prose. In the first two of these pages, Howe comments on her experiences researching in the Sterling Library; in the subsequent eighteen pages, she treats of Peirce’s life and work and especially of his enigmatic second wife, Juliette. This part of the text includes two short poems apparently collaged out of bibliographic materials (5, 6), as well as three pages in which Howe once again recalls scenes in the Iliad (14–16) and compares Peirce to Alexander Pope— especially Peirce’s country house, Arisbe, to Pope’s villa at Twickenham. This collaged material sits precisely in the middle of “Arisbe,” acting as a kind of fulcrum for the writing around it. But the main theme—and the mode—of “Arisbe” is indexicality itself, in several ways. To begin with, the text explicitly treats of archival indexes and the science of scholarly indexing—Howe mentions bibliographies, encyclopedias, dictionaries, genealogical records, library archives, manuscript collections—and even includes a fragment of an actual index, titled “Index: 413,” in the middle of the poem. Indexical call numbers from the Peirce archive at Harvard (“MS 1572”) periodically punctuate “Arisbe”; and, of course, before even reaching the poem proper, the reader encounters the editorial front matter of Pierce-Arrow itself: the requisite annotated list of illustrations, followed by a three-paragraph commentary by Howe and a scrupulously detailed acknowledgments page indexing the book’s many citations. According to Peirce, an index “is a sign, or representation, which refers to its object not so much because of any similarity or analogy with it, nor because it is associated with general characters which that object happens to possess, as because it is in dynamical (including spatial) con-

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nection both with the individual object, on the one hand, and with the senses or memory of the person for whom it serves as a sign, on the other” (1955, 107; from this point, in quotations from and references to Peirce I cite Peirce 1955 unless otherwise noted, giving page number only).7 Examples he cites include sundials, clocks, barometers, weathercocks, plumb-bobs, yard sticks, and he says that even “the pole star is an index, or pointing finger, to show us which way is north” (108–109). Indices are signs that point to their objects because they bear a causal relation to them: “An Index is a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of being really affected by that Object” (102). Again, a classic example is smoke from a fire: “the index is physically connected with its object; they make an organic pair” (114). There are grammatical indices as well: deictic words in general, including demonstrative, relative, possessive, and personal pronouns; “selective” pronouns such as any, every, all, no, none; “particular selectives” such as some, somebody, a, a certain, some or other; prepositions and prepositional phrases; and even terminal word inflections.8 Peirce also includes texts such as the Coast Survey’s “Notice to Mariners,” “giving the latitude and longitude, four or five bearings of prominent objects, etc., and saying there is a rock, or shoal, or buoy, or lightship” (110–111, italics in original): “Psychologically, the action of indices depends upon association by contiguity, and not upon association by resemblance [icons] or upon intellectual operations [symbols]” (108, terms in brackets mine). The title page of “Arisbe” features the only reproduction of a photograph in Pierce-Arrow, a black-and-white shot of Peirce’s house, Arisbe, circa 1888. Peirce is careful to point out that a photograph is an index, not an icon. Although photographs resemble their referents like icons do, they are actually physically connected to the objects to which they refer due to the manner in which they are produced: hence, they are caused by their referents and therefore “point” to them (106). Much of “Arisbe” deals with photography, especially archival forms of photographic reproduction and storage such as microfilm and photocopying. Howe at times goes into minute technical detail about these media: “A microphotograph is a type of photograph nearly as old as photography itself, in which an original document is reproduced in a size too small to be read by the naked eye so here the human mind can understand far from it. Film in the form of a strip 16 or 35 millimeters wide bearing a photographic record on a reduced scale of printed or other graphic matter for storage or transmission in a

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small space is enlarged to be read on a reading machine combining a light source and screen together in a compact cabinet” (6). At such moments, we are brought face to face with the mechanical technology of archival indexing itself—indeed, with the index of the index, with the indexical media that make modern indexing at all possible. As a “type of photograph,” microfiche is already inherently indexical; inside an archive, it points both to its ghostly original and to the other pieces of evidence around it. The question of what any index “points to”—what it remembers, figuratively speaking, and how it inflects and qualifies other information—is a major preoccupation in “Arisbe,” for, as Peirce says, “the indexical sign is in dynamical (including spatial) connection with the senses or memory of the person for whom it serves as a sign” (107). Read “scholar” for “person,” and the stakes in Howe’s investigation of the mechanics of indexing become clear: as a pointer, an index indicates directions and associations; it combines things and creates contiguities; it suggests histories and networks of affiliation. Peirce aligns his trichotomy of signs with phenomenological categories, or what he calls “modes of being” (75):9 the icon is a “Firstness”; the index a “Secondness”; the symbol a “Thirdness” (104, 108, 114).10 (I treat each of these categories in turn as it becomes relevant in my discussion of its respective sign.) Peter Nicholls suggests that, “of these categories, it would appear to be that of Secondness that primarily interests Howe” in Pierce-Arrow (2002, 446); I would qualify this by saying that in “Arisbe” Secondness is explicitly what interests Howe, whereas in the subsequent two sections of the poem Firstness and Thirdness respectively do so. Secondness for Peirce is the realm of actuality and “brute fact”: “Let us begin with considering actuality and try to make out just what it consists in. If I ask you what the actuality of an event consists in, you will tell me that it consists in its happening then and there. The specifications then and there involve all its relations to other existents. . . . Actuality is something brute. . . . The second category of elements of phenomena comprises the actual facts” (75, 76, 77). Note the role that deixis plays in Secondness (cf. “then” and “there”); “the idea of second is predominant in the ideas of causation and of statical force. . . . Constraint is a Secondness” (79). The index is a second because it bears a causal, constrained, locative, contiguous, and dynamic relationship to its object: “The second category . . . is the ele-

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ment of struggle. . . . By struggle I must explain that I mean mutual action between two things” (89). “[W]e feel facts resist our will. That is why facts are proverbially called brutal,” Peirce explains and then asks, “What is a fact?” It is, “first, the contingent, that is, the accidentally actual, and second, whatever involves an unconditional necessity, that is, force without law or reason, brute force” (90, italics in original). Peirce also aligns Secondness with heredity, matter, and “sense of reaction” (323): all three resist our will and are factually if not brutally actual. Ultimately, even death is a second: “the thread of life is a third; that fate that snips it, its second” (80). Much of all this is cited, evoked, or otherwise exemplified in “Arisbe”: “Constraint is a secondness” (25), Howe parrots in the first line of the first of the six short poems that end this section of the book; two lines later, the phrase “Between an interpretant and / its object” is drawn from a passage in Peirce (275–276) explaining how to interpret indices. “What is the secret nature of fact? What is the fact that is present to you now?” the poem asks: “Peirce calls secondness all naked feeling and raw life” (14). Naked raw facts, we recall, are brutally actual, as Howe again quotes Peirce at the very end of “Arisbe”: “Actuality is something brute” (29). Secondness and indexicality literally appear all over this first section of Pierce-Arrow. Brute is one of the key terms that Howe uses to marshal her figuring of the Iliad as an allegory for Peirce’s work: the violent contests between the heroes of Homer’s epic are equated with the “element of struggle” and the “brute force” of Secondness. After likening Patroclus to “brute Apollo,” Howe winds a tangled skein of bibliographic and archival materials into poetic form: Strip away Patroclus’ armor Achilles-Patroclus’ helmet crusted in horsehair off too But the ink is scarcely dry Ramping brute force know Hector was the third slayer Actuality is something brute Unspelled Firstness is first Move the shuttle-thread give ghostly instruction ferryman

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Here episodes from the Iliad intertwine with the scene of writing (“the ink is scarcely dry)” and the rhetoric of Secondness: actual facts are brutal, and Greeks and Trojans are actual facts.11 Patroclus’s encounter with Hector is an allegory for that phenomenological mode of being that involves confronting a fact that resists our will. Even Second’s role as the fateful snipper of the thread of life is evoked in the final two lines of the poem. The battlefields of Troy also allegorize Peirce’s personal “struggle” with phenomenology itself, with his working through the brute facts of actuality to the philosophical principles underlying them—or, more accurately, underlying the appearances of brute facts. Only one of the lineated poems in “Arisbe” explicitly invokes Peirce’s philosophy, suggesting thereby a formal analogue to the scenes from the Trojan cycle that appear in the short poems at the beginning and the end of this section: A person throws a stone as fact through air not fact but appearance of fact floating in vacuua Blind existential being may possibly not occur at all we know nothing with absolute certainty of existent things not even the single “word” the

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In this remarkable montage of quotations, we catch Peirce at various moments, engaged in working out the philosophical terms of his thinking.12 The stone-throwing warriors in the Iliad are distantly evoked in the first line, but the poem has migrated their scenes of aristeia to the agon of the existential philosopher struggling with his facts, about which he ultimately can “know nothing / with absolute certainty”—not even about the indexical word the. Peirce’s famous neologism for this doubt about the final state of one’s knowledge is fallibilism, a principle that he argues is fundamental to sound scientific method: “fallibilism is the doctrine that our knowledge is never absolute but always swims, as it were, in a continuum of uncertainty and of indeterminacy” (356). In an early essay, he criticizes what he calls “infallible scientists”: “Though infallibility in scientific mat-

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ters seems to me irresistibly comical, I should be in a sad way if I could not retain a high respect for those who lay claim to it, for they comprise the greater part of the people who have any conversation at all. When I say they lay claim to it, I mean they assume the functions of it quite naturally and unconsciously. The full meaning of the adage Humanun est errare, they have never waked up to” (3). Howe winds this Latin phrase into her description of Iliadic battle— ruin lust lechery humanum est errare Patroclus’ armor three times he charges with the force of a running war god brute Apollo

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—suggesting once again an homology between Homeric warfare and the work of the philosopher-scientist. Both the Iliad and phenomenology deal in their own ways with “how men appear to each other when / gods change the appearance of things” (3)—or, indeed, when men change them: we recall that Patroclus disguises himself as Achilles by donning his friend’s armor—Hector doesn’t know the identity of the brute fact he combats and slays. As Howe puts it, “Iliadic heroism another situation of unstable identity” (26), which suggests another allegorical dimension to “Arisbe”: Howe works out an equivalence between the ever-shifting fates and fortunes of the warriors at Troy and her own scholarly difficulty in nailing down facts about Peirce’s life from the “traces” left in the various indexes she consults. Sifting through the archive’s “rumors and slanders,” she cannot determine basic details about Peirce’s life: why he was dismissed from his lectureship at Johns Hopkins, for instance, or even what sort of a person he was (8–9). His wife, Juliette, is even more of an enigma: the authenticity of her name itself is controversial, and her biography is at best a matter of “hints, rumors, embellishments, contradictions, erasure, negations, fictions” (9). She may or may not have been previously married; she may or may not have been a countess or part Gypsy; she may or may not have been Peirce’s second wife: Howe quotes (the third) Henry James to the effect that “there is enough here to lay the foundations for a mystery story” (11). Clues, hints, and traces are classic examples of indices; Peirce cites as a prime example of an index “a piece of mould with a bullet-hole in it

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as a sign of a shot” (104). Detectives, like academic researchers, are great readers of indicies.13 It is in the midst of meditating on all this mystery that Howe places “Index: 413” with its two truncated columns of page citations: index: 413 41–55; Lowell Institute lectures by, 298 317–325, 387n.276:42; marriage to Harriet Melusina Fay (“Zina”), 199, 213, 250–254 284–285, 291; marriage to Juliette, 213, 291–292; memorial service in Milford for,

Peirce, Juliette Froissy Pourtalais (Fabiola de Lopez, third wife of CSP): at Arisbe (Milford, PA), 6, 12, 47, 48, 49, 52, 66, 274; background of, 274–275, 279–284; condolences sent to, 14, 22, 32, courtship of,

Here it is as if we are abruptly brought to Howe’s struggles with the brute fact of indexicality itself: this passage from the index points us to pages that point us to facts, but then the facts are, as we have seen, little more than rumors and anecdotes. After two more pages examining such “fictions” (in the middle of which we find “Rumor is a story passing from one person to one person without an original authorized relation” [13]), Howe writes, “Phenomenology asks what are the elements of appearance. In my nature (cross out with) it is a sort of instinct toward (slash to) a solid (cross out visible) instinctive attraction for living facts. Microreproduction gives the trace of someone or something. Pens are noisy pencils quiet. What is the secret nature of fact? What is the fact that is present to you now? . . . Peirce calls secondness all naked feeling and raw life” (14). Again here we have a montage of quotations on Secondness and the nature of appearance and fact and on the role of the index in marking traces; we even see traces of Peirce’s manuscript revisions in Howe’s parenthetical annotations. Microreproduction may give the trace of someone or something, but of whom or what? As with Homeric heroes and phenomenology generally, “we know nothing / with absolute certainty”: neither facts nor fates nor identities nor names nor “even the single ‘word’ the.” This issue of names and naming is especially fraught in “Arisbe” and becomes another opportunity in the poem for staging allegory, particularly around the figure of Peirce’s country house, Arisbe, whose name links Peirce both to Pope and to Homer. From pages 16 to 18, Howe interweaves material involving Pope and his Iliad, Twickenham, Arisbe, and Peirce’s financial troubles, constructing in the process a complicated allegory entailing economics, writing, and scenes of ancient warfare. “I think Peirce named the house for Homer’s ‘brilliant’ or ‘shining’ Arisbe. Arisbe mark

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of mortality” (15), Howe writes, followed by a ten-line passage from Pope’s Iliad describing the doomed Trojan Axylus’s native seat (i.e., Arisbe). This passage in turn is followed by a remarkable set of linked passages: first a paragraph detailing the economic motivations behind Pope’s translation of Homer (“Only when he was sure of making a profit did Pope begin this work” [15]), followed by a quotation from Joseph Addison likening reading the Iliad to “traveling through a Country uninhabited” (16) (recall Peirce imagining himself as a pioneer backwoodsman), then a paragraph describing Twickenham’s “fantastic grotto” and its “constant stream of brilliant visitors” (16) and a prose retelling of an episode from book 21 of the Iliad and several verse lines recounting the death of Lyakon (who comes to Troy from Arisbe) at the hands of Achilles: Lyakon sits back and spreads his arms wide Achilles catches him by the foot and slings him in the river Scamander to drift Xanthus chief river of the Trojan plain free blossoming meadows and murmuring waters of Scamander (16)

The bucolic scenery of this last line leads directly to the following description of Peirce’s Arisbe: Charles and Juliette Peirce find themselves owning property in order to secure a bourgeois existence. The house fronts on the old Milford Road, which follows the contour of the Delaware River from Port Jervis to Milford. The scenery and delightful summer climate have made the nearby Delaware Water Gap a delightful summer resort. Alexander Pope: Consult the Genius of the Place in all; That tells the Water or to rise or fall, Or helps the’ ambitious Hill the Heav’ns to scale

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The two writers’ country houses and the Homeric city of shining walls are clearly being triangulated here, but Howe immediately qualifies the analogy between Twickenham and the American Arisbe: “We are almost here but in a false position. There is no artificial grotto with an aquatic effect (plates of looking glass in an obscure part of the roof and sides of the

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cave, every object multiplied), no busts of Homer and Virgil to simulate a visitor’s thought. The picturesque in its late American stage is awkward and cut up. Something is wrong with the scale. Where are the visitors?” (17). This “false position,” the jag of the “almost” in the fit between Pope and Peirce, leads to the crux of the allegory, which rhymes Lyakon’s manner of death in the Iliad with Peirce’s economic fate as an American, for in America “Arisbe [is] imagined as a business transaction”: [Peirce’s] free school never materializes. The end of the Survey salary is shocking. Staring it in the face the material the unreal real thing that is in money enters into language by determining it. Recklessly they acquire more land, apple and nut orchards, a slate quarry. Both of them are very nervous very often very ill. An authentic modern tragedy if we think of gold as being money. A capitalist who loses everything is hurled headlong into the enormous wave of a money-fed river. (17)

Just as Lyakon is slung into the river Scamander, Peirce is hurled into the river of Capital, that brutal “unreal real thing,” and the consequence is that, like Pope, “Forced to earn . . . what he could gain by various temporary means, Peirce produced an extraordinary number and variety of book reviews and essays” as well as encyclopedia and dictionary entries and translations. Toward the end of his career, Peirce lists his profession as ‘bucolic logician’ ” (18), a phrase again remembering Pope in his country house. The allegory comes full circle—or at any rate, it circles. Howe prepares the ground for these allegorical circumlocutions earlier in the text, when she treats of Peirce’s name itself: directly after the poem addressing the uncertainty of our knowledge of existent things, she ruminates on “Peer/se pronounced Purrse”: PIERCE v: to run into and through as an instrument or pointed weapon does. PURSE n: a small bag closed with a drawstring and used to carry money. (7)

Here we already have two of the principle themes of the allegory that I have been describing—PIERCE leading to Homeric warfare, PURSE to

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economic matters—reflected through twin puns on Peirce’s name, which has itself become an unstable index, pointing to increasingly fantastical and unlikely analogies. “Can a name be a prediction?” Howe asks. Does the name “Peirce” somehow point to “pierce” and “purse”? Does naming one’s country house “Arisbe” predict a Homeric fate, fetched from however far? How closely do these poetic “things” touch, and in their touching do they make something actually appear or be? What finally are the limits of the inevitably “false positions” of allegorical thinking? Howe writes, Between an interpretant and its object in playspace the heart’s free interim

(25)

suggesting the possibility of a kind of interpretive freeplay, but these lines blend immediately into “Macbeth’s / crude sacrilege deeper even.” Who can say what an index such as a rap on the door or a knocking within—or an allegorical object such as a bleeding dagger—will point to or marshal us toward? “Arisbe” the text is named after Arisbe the house, and Howe’s transcoding of home and poem makes an allegorical figure for the flawed and haunted architecture of semiotics itself, based as it is on the uncertainties of linguistic reasoning: we know nothing with absolute certainty of existent things not even the single “word” the

(6–7)

“Arisbe mark of mortality” (15), Howe writes, ratcheting Peirce’s house and her poem into yet another allegorical register, for the section “Arisbe” is framed by scenes of a journey to the underworld, figured as an infernal archive of texts. Howe starts her poem by describing Sterling Library as underground and “cryptlike” (5); the noise of the machinery of its airconditioning generators resembles “roaring or loud sobbing” (5), which evokes both Dante’s Inferno and Homer’s katabasis (as well as the opening strophes of Pound’s Cantos), and Howe likens her reading of documents there to hearing the voices of the sleeping and the dead.14 “Arisbe” ends with the death of Patroclus, the moving of the Fates’ “shuttle-thread,” and the giving of ghostly instructions to the “ferryman” (29), no doubt Charon

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at the banks of the Styx. Homer’s shining city Arisbe with its doomed warriors, Peirce’s country house Arisbe with its doomed philosopher (and his ghostly wife), and Howe’s poem “Arisbe” with its doomed archival project are constellated here; all point to one another in an unsettled, unsettling, and finally melancholic allegory, a ruined house that is also a wounded man and a fallible science, a composite figure made up of nothing but “bits” that finally resolve into an allegory straight out of Isaiah: . . . people being blown to bits one hand clutching bandages next bit proverb and byword

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“Arisbe” ends abruptly in a cryptic montage of bibliographical, literary, and phenomenological fragments: Through mined copyhold we are all here Realism Is hidden escape possible One mind as what-is-not

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This stanza strains to pose and answer the question, How do we know what it is that we know? Through information “mined” from the archive—one can’t help but hear “through mind” here as well—“we are all here,” but is “Realism . . . hidden”? Or rather: Is hidden escape possible? Why seek to escape “Realism”? Because the mind is not One, Howe suggests, and fallibility and errare (and Arisbe) are all marks of mortality, perhaps all the scholar-poet can do is thunder in the index.15 Finally, why is “Arisbe” the only part of Pierce-Arrow that is partially written in prose? This first section of the book formally fits the Peircian mode of the indexical sign: Peirce affiliates the index with metonymy because both are based on contiguity, contingency, and combination. In Ramon Jakobson’s terms, the horizontal axis of language is indexical (words pointing to one another), whereas the vertical axis, based on metaphorical substitution and resemblance, is iconic (a metaphor is an icon [Peirce 1955, 105]).16 Jakobson famously ties metonymy to realism and thus to prose, which is “forwarded essentially by contiguity. Thus for poetry, met-

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aphor—and for prose, metonymy—is the line of least resistance” (1987, 114). Howe writes “Arisbe” in prose because prose offers “the line of least resistance” to the text’s themes of indexicality and Secondness—of pointing, contiguity, constraint, causality, and dynamic connection. “Arisbe” is written in what Jakobson calls metalanguage, or language speaking of language, which he describes as “a necessary scientific tool utilized by logicians and linguists” that as such is the “diametrical opposite” of poetry (1987, 69, 71). “Whereas in poetry the [metaphorical] equation is used to build a [metonymical] sequence,” states Jakobson, “in metalanguage the sequence is used to build an equation” (71). Poetic language speaking of poetic language projects the horizontal, metonymical axis of contiguity and combination into the vertical, metaphorical axis of substitution and resemblance to produce a recursive and self-reflexive prose or poetry. Howe’s metadiscursive study of Peirce’s study of language—her language about his language about language—must needs appear as a poem in the form of prose, the literary mode of the index.

Thought-Signs and Silhouettes Cleopatra was arrayed in full dress, with the diamonds, short-sleeves, rouge, curls, teeth, and other juvenility all complete; but Paralysis was not to be deceived, had known her for the object of its errand, and had struck her at her glass, where she lay like a horrible doll that had tumbled down. —Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son

Cleopatra Skewton has suffered a “Paralysis.” Dickens savagely details the mental and physical dissolution of the decrepit dowager into a terrifying senility leading to a pathetic death. Although her decline is relentless, it is gradual: after an initial period of catatonia, Mrs. Skewton slowly recovers her abilities to communicate: At length she began to recover consciousness, and in some degree the power of motion, though not yet of speech. One day the use of her right hand returned; and showing it to her maid who was in attendance on her, and appearing very uneasy in her mind she made signs for a pencil and some paper. This the maid immediately provided thinking she was going

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to make a will, or write some last request; and Mrs Dombey being from home, the maid awaited the result with solemn feelings. After much painful scrawling and erasing, and putting in of wrong characters, which seemed to tumble out of the pencil of their own accord, the old woman produced this document: “Rose-coloured curtains.” (Dickens [1848] 2002, 574)

Dickens’s portrait of his patient fits contemporary medical protocols: Mrs. Skewton has suffered a classic stroke to the left hemisphere of the brain, affecting her linguistic abilities and the use of her right hand. Her recovery is signaled not only by the return of her ability to write but also by the reappearance of her acidic vanity, the outstanding feature of her personality, for her maid quickly realizes that the old woman wants the red curtains in order “to be provided for the better presentation of her complexion,” and the “ghastly” Cleopatra “was soon able to sit up, in curls and laced cap and night-gown, and to have a little artificial bloom dropped into the hollow caverns of her cheeks” (575). Dickens’s Dombey and Son appears three times in Pierce-Arrow: first, late in “Arisbe,” where Juliette Peirce in a quoted manuscript passage mentions her husband reading the book toward the end of his life and remarking “that it was the only book of Dickens he knew not ending so gloomy” (24), and then, second, in a poem in “The Leisure of the Theory Class”: Peacock had no followers he lived through nearly thirty years of the Victorians Among contemporary authors he most enjoyed Dickens and re-read him in his last year “continually in fits of laughter” Swinburne also loved reading Dickens aloud—Mrs. Skewton in her bath chair Dombey and Son

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Finally, in what is surely one of the oddest “poems” in this second section of Pierce-Arrow, Howe quotes Mrs. Skewton herself, along with bibliographical reference:

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“We are dreadfully real, Mr. Carker,” said Mrs. Skewton, “are we not?” Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son: Wholesale, Retail, and for Exportation First published in book form in April 1848 —Charles Dickens17

Clearly, one reason Howe finds it fit to include these obscure references to Dickens’s book is the coincidence that three of the nineteenth century’s most neglected authors shared a fondness for it: Howe presents the careers and biographies of writers George Meredith, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Thomas Love Peacock as counterparts to the sad history of Peirce that she so meticulously scrutinizes in “Arisbe.” Like Peirce, for instance, “Peacock had no followers,” and after all C. S. Peirce is not the only example other masterminds knocked at academic portals and were refused entry

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Part of what is going on in “The Leisure of the Theory Class” is the ongoing allegorizing of the figure of the Neglected Genius through the composited and paralleled lives of its exemplars. As Howe puts it, “What I see is the image / or hidden correspondence” (75), a passage that again raises the phenomenological question of things seeming to touch and thus to be. The issue of the epistemological limits of such poetic “constellations” of historical coincidences, “hidden correspondences,” and more or less vague and uncertain—if not downright willful—analogies is at the crux of Howe’s project. But Cleopatra Skewton’s stroke can give us another and different purchase on the semiotic themes of Pierce-Arrow: as the old woman’s decline continues, it becomes clear that she suffers from what Jakobson calls an “aphasic disturbance.” Stroke-induced aphasia is marked, he says, by “the disintegration of sound pattern. This dissolution exhibits a time order of great regularity. Aphasic regression has proved to be a mirror of the child’s acquisition of speech sounds: it shows the child’s development in reverse”

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(1987, 96). Compare Dickens’s description of Cleopatra’s deteriorating condition: Without having undergone any decided second attack of her malady, the old woman seemed to have crawled backward in her recovery from the first. She was more lean and shrunken, more uncertain in her imbecility, and made stranger confusions in her mind and memory. Among other symptoms of this last affliction, she fell into the habit of confounding the names of her two sons-in-law, the living and the deceased, and in general called Mr. Dombey, either “Grangeby,” or “Domber,” or indifferently both. But she was youthful, very youthful still; and in her youthfulness appeared at breakfast, before going away, in a new bonnet made express and a traveling robe that was embroidered and braided like an old baby’s. . . . “Now my dearest Grangeby,” said Mrs. Skewton, “you must posively prom,” she cut some of her words short, and cut out others altogether, “‘come down very soon.” ([1848] 2002, 618–619)

Certainly we might construe Cleopatra’s clipped words, confounded names, and jumbled phrases as well as her doll-like wardrobe, which Dickens says has become “more juvenile than ever, to repair the ravages of illness” (578), and her increasingly “girlish” and “foolish” giggling (620) as reversions to infancy; toward the end of her life, the old woman, now “at all times juvenile” (622), is physically confined either to her bed or to a carriage and eventually becomes altogether dumb and immobile—although at her very end, in a ghoulish parody of resurrection, the “old baby,” “with her girlish laugh, and the skeleton of the Cleopatra manner, rises in her bed” (635). More interesting is to work out the ramifications of Mrs. Skewton’s symptoms in terms of Jakobson’s “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” the famous essay in which he elaborates his theory of the metaphorical and metonymical poles of language. He begins by “distinguish[ing] two basic types of aphasia—depending on whether the major deficiency lies in selection and substitution, with relative stability of combination and contexture; or conversely, in combination and contexture, with relative retention of normal selection and substitution” (in Jakobson 1987, 100). The first type of aphasia, “similar-

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ity disorder,” is marked by the patient’s difficulty with operations involving naming, substitution, and understanding metaphorical constructions: such a person, for instance, is “incapable of utilizing the substitution set bachelor = unmarried man as the topic of a sentence because the ability for autonomous selection and substitution had been affected” (102). In the language of aphasics with similarity disorder, “words syntactically subordinated by grammatical agreement or government are more tenacious, whereas the main subordinating agent of the sentence, namely the subject, tends to be omitted” (101). Alternatively, “contiguity disorder” “tends to give rise to infantile onesentence utterances and one-word sentences” ( Jacobson 1987, 107). Jakobson characterizes this disorder as “agrammatism,” a typical feature of which is the abolition of inflection: there appear such unmarked categories as the infinitive in the place of diverse finite verbal forms and, in languages with declension, the nominative instead of all the oblique cases. . . . The patients under discussion are either inclined to drop . . . derivative words, or the combination of a root with a derivational suffix, and even a compound of two words becomes irresolvable for them. If an aphasic becomes unable to resolve the word into its phonemic constituents, his control over its construction weakens, and perceptible damage to phonemes and their combinations easily follows. The gradual regression of the sound pattern in aphasics regularly reverses the order of children’s phonemic acquisitions. This regression involves an inflation of homonyms and a decrease of vocabulary. If this twofold—phonemic and lexical—disablement progresses further, the last residues of speech are one-phoneme, one-word, one-sentence utterances: the patient relapses into the initial phases of an infant’s linguistic development or even to the prelingual stage: he faces aphasia universalis, the total loss of the power to use or apprehend speech. (109)

Cleopatra’s aphasic symptoms fit this second type of disorder: she speaks in what Jakobson calls the “telegraphic style” characterized by simple one-sentence units that eventually degrade into silence; she drops parts of words, suffixes, prefixes, and inflections; and although she is able to remember compound names, she has difficulty “resolving” their individual

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syllables into their proper places. But she preserves the capacity to substitute names and nouns for one another: “Begad, Ma’am, you don’t ask old Joe to come!” “Sterious wretch, who’s he?” lisped Cleopatra. But a tap on the bonnet from Flowers seeming to jog her memory, she added, “Oh! you mean yourself, you naughty creature!” (Dickens [1848] 2002, 619)

In Jakobson’s terms, Mrs. Skewton retains the ability to manage vertical relations of similarity, but not horizontal relations of contiguity. In other words, she can “do” metaphor but not metonymy because “metaphor is alien to the similarity disorder, and metonymy to the contiguity disorder” ( Jakobson 1987, 109). Cleopatra can select words—she can substitute one for the other correctly—but she has difficulty combining or conjoining them into proper syntagmatic units or sequences. To take this analysis a step further: Mrs. Skewton can comprehend iconicity but not indexicality; she can recognize resemblances in iconic signs— the basis for metaphor—but cannot figure out what indexical signs point to—the crux of metonymy. This combination is forcefully demonstrated toward the end of her life in her recurrent hallucinations of a stone arm—part of a figure off some tomb, she says—[that] is raised to strike her. At last it falls; and then a dumb old woman lies upon the bed, and she is crooked and shrunk up, and half of her is dead. (Dickens [1848] 2002, 634)

What sort of a sign is this disembodied stone limb? A tombstone is both an index and an icon—it at once bears a causal relationship to its object— it indicates or “points” to a grave and to the corpse in it—and, especially when mounted by a stone angel or other figure, it signifies death by figuratively resembling some metaphorical aspect of it. The stone arm is both a metonym—“part of a figure off some tomb”—and a metaphor, a signifier of impending doom, and although Cleopatra seems to understand what it means, she doesn’t understand what it points to—herself, her own death. The iconic aspect of the vision is not a problem for the old woman; the indexical aspect is.

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The “dreadfully real” of Mrs. Skewton, therefore, is categorically different than the “brutally actual” of “Arisbe” and the Secondness of the index: “The Leisure of the Theory Class” concerns itself with iconicity, Peirce’s Firstness. Put simply, an icon, according to Peirce, is a sign that represents its object in resembling it: “Anything whatever, be it quality, existent individual, or law, is an Icon of anything, in so far as it is like that thing and used as a sign of it” (102). Icons are substitutes that work on the basis of similarity; they are, strictly speaking, images of things and include pictures, diagrams, metaphors, and even algebraic formulae and arrays of equations: “The reasoning of mathematicians will be found to turn chiefly upon the use of likenesses, which are the very hinges of the gates of their science” (104). Iconicity is aligned with the phenomenological category of Firstness, which is associated with feeling, chance, and mind, and involves “the conception of being or existing independent of anything else” (322–323); it “comprises the qualities of phenomena” (77). Peirce uses his idea of Firstness as a base from which to attack philosophical conceptualism and nominalism: What, then, is a quality? Before answering this, it will be well to say what it is not. It is not anything which is dependent, in its being, upon mind, whether in the form of sense or in that of thought. Nor is it dependent, in its being, upon the fact that some material thing possesses it. That quality is dependent upon sense is the great error of the conceptualists. That it is dependent upon the subject in which it is realized is the great error of all the nominalistic schools. A quality is a mere abstract potentiality; and the error of those schools lies in holding that the potential, or possible, is nothing but what the actual makes it to be. (84–85)

A quality is thus entirely independent of thought: it exists whether we perceive it or not or even whether it is actualized or not. Peirce’s examples include the redness of a red object in the dark and a piece of iron’s power to resist pressure when not actually under pressure (85). If Secondness and indexicality have to do with contiguity, causality, constraint, and the dynamics of remembering, Firstness and iconicity have to do with substitution, resemblance, “possibility,” and ultimately reasoning, for “every assertion must contain an icon or set of icons, or else must contain signs whose meaning is only explicable by icons” (105).

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Just as references to Secondness and indexicality predominate in “Arisbe,” “The Leisure of the Theory Class” draws heavily on Peirce’s writings on iconicity and Firstness. “There are realities / independent of thought,” we read in the second section of Howe’s book; “nominalism we’re got to / frame another logic” (40), “Nominalist law is pre- / established by author” (121): no a priori philosophy before we go free as fresh love halfenchanted for finding out may prove fallibilism to be fallible

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According to Peirce, “The idea of First is predominant in the ideas of freshness, life, freedom. The free is that which has not another behind it, determining its actions” (78), in contrast to Secondness, which exists only in relation to something else. As Howe does in “Arisbe,” in “The Leisure of the Theory Class” she winds her poetic skeins into distinct forms, but instead of entangling episodes from the Iliad with Peirce’s rhetoric of indexical brute force and actuality, she blends Peirce on icons surrealistically into scenes from the Epic Cycle: Andromache cry out it winged words take up the glittering reins it is early morning the gates are categories Predicate

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Peirce writes, “The idea which the set of icons . . . contained in an assertion signifies may be termed the predicate of the assertion” (105); shortly thereafter in the same essay we hear of the mathematicians’ iconic “hinges of the gates” (106). In the preceding lines from “The Leisure of the Theory Class,” it is literally at “the gates” that the Greek text turns (verse, from the Latin vertere, “to turn”) into the American: Homeric Troy blends with Peircian categorical predicate (the stanza ends with Peirce called “The Kant of America”) as the two discourses—epic poem and phenomenology—are transcoded. This is iconicity—form miming meaning—performed at the levels of syntax and line enjambment. We also encounter allusions

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to Firstness in Pierce-Arrow’s references to algebra and “the rule of algebra” (79, 80)—Peirce says that “an algebraic formula is an icon” (105)— and Howe includes reproductions of a mathematical diagram and a page of arrayed equations (114, 115) from Peirce’s notebooks in this section of the poem. There are also linguistic icons. Pierce explains: “Icons of the algebraic kind, though usually very simple ones, exist in all ordinary grammatical propositions. . . . In the earliest form of speech, there probably was a large element of mimicry. But in all languages known, such representations have been replaced by conventional auditory signs. These, however, are such that they can only be explained by icons. But in the syntax of every language there are logical icons of the kind that are aided by conventional rules” (106). Howe treats these sorts of auditory icons in several places in “The Leisure of the Theory Class.” For instance, Elocutionists are at odds as to whether there should be a slight pause after the subject of an assertion or downright silence unless an actual sheet is a surface upon which any graph may be scribed to the purpose

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Here Peirce’s claim that “every assertion must contain an icon or set of icons” opens up to the question of elocutionary icons such as verbal pauses and silences, which Howe blends into comments about another kind of icon, the graph. Counterintuitively linking auditory and visual icons, Howe creates a kind of Möbius strip effect with “unless”: Does the conjunction here create the pause after the assertion about pauses after assertions? In the poem about the iconicity of grammatical forms, the grammatical forms are icons of the iconicity of grammatical forms. After all we want to get our thought expressed in short meter somehow

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says the poem, expressing its thought in short meter. In the poems in “The Leisure of the Theory Class,” form mimes meaning—form is iconic—in just these ways. This text is not about how signs point to their objects but about how they resemble them. If the photograph, along with its archival forms microfiche and photocopying, make up the indexical mode of “Arisbe,” the picture, more narrowly defined, is the iconic mode of “The Leisure of the Theory Class.” Peirce says “every picture (however conventional its method) is essentially a representation of [the iconic] kind” (105). Drawing, painting, and sculpting all produce icons (105–106), and accordingly, in this second section of Pierce-Arrow we read of portraiture (32, 96), copies (81, 83, 112), and sketching (100), and we see examples of Peirce’s drawings and doodles (31, 70, 117)—but no photographs. The technical means of reproduction and representation that appear here are altogether different from the microphotographic technologies treated in “Arisbe”; for one thing, they tend to be manual rather than mechanical. Instead of treating photography, “The Leisure of the Theory Class” focuses on pens and pencils and on the stylophile E. D. Brooks, busily “gathering up pens / of the famous dead” (41) and in the first poem of the sequence acquiring both Meredith’s fountain pen (and maybe even his last pencil [41]) and a Dickens pen (Howe’s laconic comment is “Fantastic lyric material” [33]). Brooks and his collections of pens and other literary ephemera (he is also called a “bibliophile” [58]) appear periodically throughout this second section of Pierce-Arrow, and we even hear of “Husserl’s / last pen” (86) later in the first poem of the second section. The pen is the tool of the icon in the same way that the camera is the tool of the index. This interest in all things pen leads to an interest in penmanship, to the idiosyncratic flourishes of handwriting, and to the signature, the autograph, and the autograph manuscript, treated here not as indexical signs, as they often are, but as literary icons: forfeit architectonic all his handwriting to me shows logic of this poetic tradition

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Handwriting here does not point back to the body that produced it but stands for a whole poetic tradition, and Howe includes in this part of

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Pierce-Arrow reproductions of Swinburne’s autograph as well as several pages from his autograph manuscripts. As a personal signature, an autograph is an index because it points to and was caused by the person who wrote it; but as an object that substitutes or stands in for or otherwise represents an Author, it functions as an icon.18 Like famous authors’ pens, autographs are icons to be collected—the upper-right-hand corner of the reproduction of Swinburne’s manuscript draft for “Atlanta in Calydon,” reproduced on page 43 of Pierce-Arrow, is stamped Autograph Collection of Dr. Max Thorck Chicago

In this regard, Howe asks, Why did someone erase the name of the secret recipient of an autograph inscription signed by the famous author A. C. Swinburne First in relation to a second Thirdness

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“First in relation to a second / Thirdness” might stand as a Peircian description of an autograph, which has at once a symbolic component in its alphabetic letters (its Thirdness), an indexical component in its causal connection to the person who wrote those letters (its Secondness), and an iconic component in the way that it substitutes for the author (its Firstness). It is foremost, however, a First. Another type of picture appears in “The Leisure of the Theory Class” in the form of a silhouette of George Meredith. A silhouette, too, is an icon with an indexical component. It bears a dynamic relationship with the object that it represents—although this relationship is at one remove in that it is not directly caused by that object; someone actually had to do the drawing itself (unlike a photograph, which is directly caused by the object, the image of which it records simply by virtue of being exposed to it). Hence, a silhouette is an iconic sign based on pictorial resemblance—as

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opposed to smoke, for example, an indexical sign that is caused by and indicates fire but does not resemble it. Indices such as smoke and photographs are figuratively speaking touched or otherwise caused by their objects and point back to them; the silhouette resembles its object and copies or doubles it by tracing its shape or outline. If the photograph and the index are the formal model and mode of “Arisbe,” the silhouette and the icon serve the same functions for “The Leisure of the Theory Class.” Opposed to the former section’s loping, metalinguistic prose, the latter section’s formally monotonous, centered, chiseled poetic blocks cut a strong visual iconography in Pierce-Arrow, as if their rigidly justified left margins and ragged, fluttering right edges were creating silhouettes or “outlines” of poetry, just as the silhouette of Meredith traces the outlines of his face and head. But it is not only the poetry’s visual and physical aspects that can be likened to silhouettes: there is a sense in which the content—the subject matter—of these poems might be said to operate like silhouettes, as profiles of the process of poem making. The poems often feel unfinished, as if they were caught in the act of coming to be; there is little in the way of association or logic holding them together: Mr. Brooks is a bibliophile it doesn’t matter to Hume a practist must understand being cut up by executors A curator is a nit-picker I can’t find a signal-tree What do you mean by a sign

(58)

Here the bibliophilic poet-curator’s nit-picking cutting up is demonstrated formally in the poem’s spliced lines of clausal non sequiturs: this is a cutup about cut-up, a poem about culling lines of fragments from archives written in lines of fragments culled from archives. It reads like an outline of a poem or notes for one. Like Mr. Brooks, Howe is a collector; she accumulates and reframes snippets of archival materials and other literary ephemera. As such, Pierce-Arrow reads like a collection—a literary version of a Victorian curiosity box, with items placed next to one another in care-

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fully framed rectangles. Again, these poems’ formal elements operate as icons, miming meaning not only at the levels of line break and syntax but also in the writing’s larger shapes, contours, and profiles. As Howe puts it, Evidence commentary scholia Ransack thought-signs a thousandth silhouette

(59)

These lines evoke both the writing and the reading of the kind of poetry we find in “The Leisure of the Theory Class”—that is, the writerly process of assembling materials from archival sources and then the readerly process of interpreting those materials once they are organized into a poetic “picture.” Ransacking thought-signs and parsing poetic silhouettes are what both the poet and the reader of this poem are called upon to do. In short, both “Arisbe” and “The Leisure of the Theory Class” enact or demonstrate in their formal dimensions the Peircian categories of sign that they respectively treat as their primary subject matter. The first part of Pierce-Arrow concerns itself with the nature of the index, exploring the modality of this type of sign both in its content, derived largely from Peircian texts on the index and Secondness, and in its prosoid form emphasizing metonymical relations of causality, contiguity, and contingency. The second part treats of the icon, drawing its sources from Peirce on iconicity and Firstness and exploiting analogies between iconic signs such as silhouettes, algebraic formulae, and drawings as well as elements of poetic form such as stanza shape and line enjambment. Both texts take as their primary theme the dynamics of their own coming to be: both deal explicitly with questions of archiving and collecting, citation and appropriation, by means of archiving, collecting, citing, and appropriating. Howe uses Peirce to explore the phenomenological questions that underlie all semiosis and all poeisis: What sort of meaning is made when unlike things touch one another? What does an index point to? What might an icon resemble? And how do these types of signs permit or invite us to organize what we know? Perhaps the most intriguing icon to appear in “The Leisure of the Theory Class” is the grotesque cartoon face under the scrawled word “Epistemy” in a drawing reproduced on page 70 of Pierce-Arrow. Peirce discusses the term:

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The first subclass [of philosophy], that of necessary philosophy, might be called epistemy, since this alone among the sciences realizes the Platonic and generally Hellenic conception of επ ιστημη. Under it, three orders stand out clearly. The first of these is Phenomenology, or the Doctrine of Categories, whose business it is to unravel the tangled skein [of] all that in any sense appears and wind it into distinct forms; or in other words, to make the ultimate analysis of all experiences the first task to which philosophy has to apply itself. (71)

It is this ultimate analysis that the poet carries out as she unravels the appearances of things and then winds them into new and distinct forms— into texts that only poetry can produce, where forms operate as fully motivated signs.

Symbolism “on the mid stairs” Thirdness pours in upon us through every avenue of sense. —Charles Sanders Peirce, “Perceptual Judgements,” in Philosophical Writings of Peirce

We come finally to Peirce’s third phenomenological category and his third type of sign, the symbol, as well as to the third part of Pierce-Arrow, “Rückenfigur.” According to Peirce, the concept of Thirdness is more difficult to grasp than Firstness or Secondness—“the ideas in which Thirdness is predominant are, as might be expected, more complicated, and mostly require careful analysis to be clearly apprehended” (80)—largely because it involves a mental component of thought that is missing from the first two categories. Peirce nearly always explains the third category in terms of the first two: “The third category of elements of phenomena consists of what we call laws when we contemplate them from the outside only, but which when we see both sides of the shield we call thoughts. Thoughts are neither qualities nor facts” (78). Unlike thoughts, qualities (Firsts) neither grow nor change—they are “eternal, independent of time and of any realization” (78)—nor do they have “reasons”: they simply are. Alternately, thoughts are not facts (Seconds) because thoughts are general, “referring

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to all possible things, and not merely to those which happen to exist,” and they concern themselves with laws and “the potential world of quality,” whereas facts concern “the actual world of actuality”: “Just as action requires a peculiar kind of subject, matter, which is foreign to mere quality, so law requires a peculiar kind of subject, the thought, or, as the phrase in this connection is, the mind, as a peculiar kind of subject foreign to mere individual action. Law, then, is something as remote from both quality and action as these are remote from one another” (78).19 Because thought works with generalized laws, it is predictive (76); it both “means” to do things and creates “meanings” (91). Thirdness is “synthetic consciousness, binding time together, sense of learning, thought” (95). It comprehends principles of continuity and mediation and in fact serves as the connecting bond between Firstness and Secondness: “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” (322). Thinking, then, is the means by which to bring a quality and a fact into relation with one another and thereby to determine predictive laws: Thirdness “is that which is what it is by virtue of imparting a quality to reactions in the future” (91). Hence, Thirdness is aligned with “the process whereby accidental characters become fixed,” “the tendency of habits,” and evolution (323); it is “the being of law that will govern facts in the future” (75) and is affiliated with ideas of “generality, infinity, continuity, diffusion, growth, and intelligence” (80). If the (First) conception of quality arises from singular consciousness and the (Second) conception of relation comes from dual consciousness, “the [Third] conception of mediation springs out of the plural consciousness or sense of learning” (95). Accordingly, Peirce aligns his third type of sign, the symbol, with Thirdness: A regular progression of one, two, three may be remarked in the three orders of signs, Icon, Index, Symbol. The Icon has no dynamical connection with the object it 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,

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but the interpreting mind has nothing to do with this connection, except remarking it, after it is established. The symbol is connected with its object by virtue of the idea of the symbol-using mind, without which no such connection would exist. (114)

Symbols are different than icons or indexes in that they are unmotivated, arbitrary, and conventional signs based on thought, habit, laws, and ideas, and they operate through “replicas”: A Symbol is a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of a law, usually an association of general ideas, which operates to cause the Symbol to be interpreted as referring to that Object. . . . It is thus itself a general type or law. . . . As such it acts through a Replica. (102) All words, sentences, books, and other conventional signs are Symbols. We speak of writing or pronouncing the word “man”; but it is only a replica, or embodiment of the word, that is pronounced or written. (112)

Notice that the replica, unlike the icon, does not resemble its object; it replicates it in some other “embodiment.” All verbs and nouns are symbols, as are conventions and contracts, watch fires and watchwords, standards and ensigns, badges, creeds, expressions of sentiment, and even theater tickets: “Any ordinary word, as ‘give,’ ‘bird,’ ‘marriage,’ is an example of a symbol,” and “every intellectual operation involves a triad of symbols” (113–114). Symbols are first and foremost conceptual and are the primary means by which we develop our thinking and learn: Symbols grow. They come into being by development out of other signs, particularly from icons or from mixed signs partaking of the nature of icons and symbols. We think only in signs. These mental signs are of mixed nature; the symbol-parts of them are called concepts. If a man makes a new symbol, it is by thoughts involving concepts. So it is only out of symbols that a new symbol can grow. Omne symbolum de symbolo. A symbol, once in being, spreads among the peoples. In use and in experience, its meaning grows. Such words as force, law, wealth, marriage, bear for us very different meanings from those they bore to our barbarous ancestors. (115)

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Finally, just as Thirdness mediates between Firstness and Secondness, the symbol mediates between the index and the icon: “A Symbol is a sign naturally fit to declare that the set of objects which is denoted by whatever set of indices may be in certain ways attached to it is represented by an icon associated with it” (112–113). A symbol is the way to get from an index to an icon, and Peirce aligns it with travel through space: “By the third, I mean the medium or connecting bond between the absolute first and last. The beginning is first, the end second, the middle third. The end is second, the means third. . . . Position is first, velocity or the relation of two successive positions second, acceleration or the relation of three successive positions third. But velocity in so far as it is continuous also involves a third” (80). Hence, in the third section of Pierce-Arrow, “Rückenfigur,” “Dual on verso one who has / obeyed acceleration velocity” (133). Observing the continuities of the symbol—the dynamics of the Third mediating between the icon and the index—is very much what “Rückenfigur” is about; this section of Pierce-Arrow begins with Iseult stand[ing] at Tintagel on the mid stairs between light and dark symbolism

(129)

posing the question, as I intimated earlier, of what it is that Iseult stands for: Does she stand for phonic human overtone for outlaw love the dread pull lothly for weariness actual brute predestined fact for phobic falling no one talking too Tintagel ruin of philosophy here is known change here is come crude change wave wave determinist caparison Your soul your separation

(129)

It appears that Iseult might stand for many things—love, weariness, falling—including Peirce’s index itself, “actual brute predestined fact,” as well

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as his icon, here alluded to in its auditory and phonological aspect as “phonic human overtone.” The issue, it would seem, is not what Iseult stands for, but that she stands for things—potentially for all sorts of things. She ultimately stands for standing for things: she symbolizes the symbol—and symbolization—itself. There is a sense in which the symbol not only mediates between the icon and the index but also comprehends them; according to Peirce, the category of Thirdness includes the sign itself: “The easiest of [the ideas in which Thirdness is predominant] . . . is the idea of a sign, or representation. A sign stands for something to the idea which it produces, or modifies. Or, it is a vehicle conveying into the mind something from without” (80, italics in original). This is precisely what the figure of Iseult does—she suggests meanings in the ways that Symbols, Thirdness, and Signs generally do. The issue in “Rückenfigur” then is not the dynamics of iconic resemblance or the indexical fact of pointing, but the phenomenology of representation: we don’t ask what Juliette Peirce “stands for” in “Arisbe” or what George Meredith “symbolizes” in “The Leisure of the Theory Class,” but in “Rückenfigur” we are immediately called upon to interpret the figure of the woman standing “mid stairs / between light and dark symbolism”: What does she mean? Peirce tells us “a symbol is a sign which would lose the character which renders it a sign if there were no interpretant” (104). “A Symbol is a Representamen whose Representative character consists precisely in its being a rule that will determine its Interpretant” (112): hence its basis in convention, habit, law, ideas, and thoughts. Without the interpreting mind, the symbol does not signify, whereas the icon and the index signify regardless of whether they are apprehended or not. Pitched in the interrogative (“Does she stand for X?”), “Rückenfigur” concerns itself explicitly with the issue of interpretation and the category of the symbolic. Accordingly, signs, symbols, and semiotic systems are freely alluded to in this section of Pierce-Arrow. They include augury—“avifauna an arsenal of stories,” as the poem puts it (141)—in Howe’s recounting of the “remarkable bird list in L’Orphée”; her retelling of the fable of the silent linnet (139–140); and the figure of “Prometheus’ eagle,” which Howe tells us is actually a vulture the vulture passions go to a predator tricked up

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forever unexpressed in halfeffaced ambiguous butterfly disguises

(141)

Everything in “Rückenfigur” is subject to interpretation: “tricked up,” “half-effaced,” “ambiguous,” “disguise[d],” the signs in this poem beg to be read—to be thought about, that is, and not merely remarked (as Peirce says, “the interpreting mind has nothing to do with [the index], except remarking it, after it is established”) or sensed as an analogy (“[the icon’s] qualities resemble those of [its] object, and excite analogous sensations in the mind for which it is a likeness,” although Firstness “is not anything which is dependent, in its being, upon mind, whether in the form of sense or in that of thought”). Howe includes a catalog of heraldic stones as well: Emerald jacinth sapphire chalcedony lovely Isolt Topaz sardonyx chrysolite ruby Sir Tristan the Court sees only the beauty of their persons that they appear to be represented

(138)

Other Peircian symbolic systems are evoked—“spurious etymolog[ies]” of character and place-names ask to be unriddled (130–131), for instance, and questions of contract, law, and sympathy are posed in lines such as “Mark’s moral right to Iseult” and “David’s relationship to Saul” as well as in references to Antigone (as Peirce states, “such words as force, law, wealth, marriage, bear for us very different meanings from those they bore to our barbarous ancestors”). But perhaps the weightiest symbol in the poem is the black sail of Iseult’s ship, taken from an episode in the legend that Howe conflates with the parallel story of Theseus and Aegeus: There is a way back to the misinterpretation of her message TheseusTristan is on the ship AegeusIseut is a land watcher she is

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a mastermind her frailty turned to the light her single vision twin soul half

(137)

This passage again foregrounds interpretation—or, in this case, misinterpretation: What does the light and dark symbolism of the sail stand for or “mean,” and, more importantly, how might the sign misrepresent what is actually the case? These questions and the last line of this passage point to another issue: Peirce writes in several places that the symbol always “acts through a Replica.” There is an inevitable doubling that occurs in the category of the symbolic: when I write or pronounce the word man, I produce “a replica, an embodiment of the word,” because “the word itself has no existence although it has a real being, consisting in the fact that existents will conform to it,” according to Peirce (112, italics in original)—hence the symbol’s determination of the “interpretant” that Peirce insists on as such a critical aspect of Thirdness. Unlike an index or an icon, a symbol always means something that it literally is not. As Peirce puts it, the symbol is a “vehicle” for meaning: a bird is a bird and a stone merely a stone until they are taken up by a semiotic system that is itself a product of convention, habit, or thought, and then they stand for something; they become symbols, objects that carry meanings that don’t have anything necessary to do with them. The symbol bears no organic relationship to its object, its meaning: it is neither caused by it, like the index is, nor does it resemble the object in the way that the icon does. The relationship between the symbol and its meaning is entirely arbitrary, which is precisely why it requires interpretation. This issue of symbolic doubling lies at the heart of “Rückenfigur,” which is replete with images of counterfeits, dualities, shadows, disguises, double identities, and doppelgängers. In a dense network of “secret correspondence(s)” (131), Howe alludes to a host of doubles: there are the two Iseults—“Soft Iseult two Iseults one,” “Iseult’s mother and double,” “the counterfeit Iseult / Iseult aux Blanches Mains” (131). And we hear of the “double identity” of Tristan (132); Mark’s “shadow in water” (132); and sundry literary characters, settings, and narratives, all of which “echo,” “recall,” and “remember” each other in a virtual house of poetic mirrors (130, 132, 137, 139, 142). Reality itself is divided—or, at any rate, “Realism

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still exists is part / of the realist dual hypothesis” (133)—and ultimately the self itself is split: in “Rückenfigur,” “a soul also has two faces” (130), “Your soul your separation” (129). All of the confusion around what anyone “stands for,” what anything or anybody “means,” what a symbol signifies or represents, “in thought or other sign” (134), finally comes to a head in the theme of the split self, soul, mind—as if the thinking human being were by virtue of her thinking inexorably sundered from herself: Saw the mind otherwise in thought or other sign because we are not free Two thoughts in strife

(135)

These closing lines lead immediately into the next poem’s opening salvo: “Separation requires an / other quest for union” (136). “Rückenfigur” at this point becomes a quest for the resolution of the classic paradox of consciousness and for all of the complexities expressed by the line “single vision twin soul half ” (137)—for the romantic trope of spiritual and psychological integration, as mirrored in the organic integrity of the Coleridgean symbol: Ysolt’s single vision of union Precursor shadow self by self in open place or on an acting platform two personae meeting Strophe antistrophe which is which dual unspeakable cohesion

(143)

The “cohesion” longed for by Ysolt is “unspeakable” because all language is by definition symbolic and hence instantiates the very gap between signifier and signified that she wishes so ardently to close. For Howe, “Rückenfigur” becomes a kind of staging ground for this dilemma, an “open place” or “an acting platform” where personae and shadow selves meet in a “single vision of union”—that is, the vision of the duality is single, although the duality that is the object of the vision remains double—in a provisional resolution of the paradox made possible only within the paradigmatic frames of Art.

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And this leads to this last section’s central trope: “Rückenfigur” names itself as that “Motif of retreating figure / arrayed beyond expression” (144)—a text whose back is figuratively turned to us, whose expression we cannot see, although we see what it is that this figure sees. The writing stands between us and some further ground in the same way that the figure in Casper David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog interposes between the viewer of the painting and the sublime scene in the background. How does a text see? What does it “look” at, and how do we look at what it “sees”? Like the photograph in “Arisbe” and the silhouette in “The Leisure of the Theory Class,” the rückenfigur acts as a model for the formal mode of this section of Pierce-Arrow, for its poesis. The rückenfigur poem, like the painting, teases us with a “single vision of union” that is intractably double: we see someone seeing; we watch someone watching; we read reading and interpret interpretations. We catch Iseult as if from behind, on the stairs at Tintagel, spying the sail out at sea, her “expression”—both her face and her words—hidden from us. She is interpreting the sail: What does it signify? Howe is interpreting Iseult: What does she stand for? We are interpreting “Rückenfigur”: What does it mean? In Peirce’s Third “mode of being”—the mode of thinking with symbolic replicas—these sorts of semiotic nested-doll perspectives are the order of proceeding. What anything finally means is subject to interpretation, and any vision of unity is always “arrayed beyond expression”: cohesion being unspeakable because the word—as symbol, as a replica of meaning—is inevitably different from it. “Rückenfigur” ends with a classical invocation of the lyric muse, here in the guise of either Euterpe or Apollo himself. Howe supplicates the Poet to come do what only poets can do: Lyrist come veil come lure echo remnant sentence spar never never form wherefor Wait some recognition you Lyric over us love unclothe Never forever whoso move

The Lyrist is entreated to veil and lure—the music of poetry is sensuous; poetic language “clothes” and “unclothes” meanings in a kind of erotics

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of covering and revealing. Poetry lures us with its echoes and remnants; its sentences spar with meanings (or act like spars? for drowning sailors? for ships with black sails? is poetry built from the wreckage of ships?). But what might “never form wherefor” mean? Never make reasons? Poetry, instead of rationalizing, always “awaits some recognition”—we love what we recognize in the teasing, echoing, beautiful body of poetry. And whoever moves by it or is moved by it changes: there is no “forever”—or is never forever?—in the ceaseless symbolic exchanges of Thirdness.20 Two other echoes are pertinent here. First, the placement of the invocation to the muse at the end of Pierce-Arrow instead of at its beginning suggests less the epic tradition than it does the biblical: the plea for the Lyrist to “come veil come lure” (or for the Lyrist to come and the veil to come) evokes the end of the Book of Revelation more than does Paradise Lost or the Homeric poems: “The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come.’ And let him who hears say, ‘Come.’ And let him who is thirsty come, let him who desires take the water of life without price” (22:17). Hence, in the two lines in the middle of the final poem of “Rückenfigur”—“Theomimesis divinity message / I have loved come veiling” (144)—the Lyrist mimes the Deity who at once veils and reveals. The speaker of the poem has loved the divine message and supplicates the Lyrist to come veiling. Come with your “echo remnant sentence spar”! But never “never form wherefor.” The second set of echoes can be heard in the prosody and versification of “Rückenfigur,” particularly in its final poem’s final lines. As opposed to the prose of “Arisbe” and the irregular block poems of “The Leisure of the Theory Class,” every poem in “Rückenfigur” has exactly fourteen lines, each of which contains six to nine (occasionally ten) syllables. The sonnet tradition, with its themes of romantic love and self-reflection, is obviously being evoked here, although with their truncated lines these poems read like half sonnets—they certainly don’t sound like conventional decasyllabic sonnets. Are we somehow “hearing” the epistemological split that preoccupies Iseult and by extension “Rückenfigur” itself ? Does a halfsonnet imply a halved subject? And what about the insistent trochaic tetrameter of the poem’s last six lines? The line “echo remnant sentence spar” itself echoes and spars with any number of visionary poems, from Blake’s “Tyger” to Shelley’s “Men of England.” Howe appears to be drawing on a long tradition of vatic poetry stretching from the Bible to Yeats’s “Under Ben Bulben.” If the Lyrist’s music is the affective part of the art, then in

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“Rückenfigur” we are figuratively lured by veils of sound draped over the lines of the poem. Just as “Arisbe” and “The Leisure of the Theory Class” enact respectively the dynamics of the index and the icon, “Rückenfigur” plays on the unmotivated signifiers of the poetic symbolic: the fourteen lines of the sonnet and the trochaic tetrameter of the romantic visionary lyric are as habitual and convention bound as any arbitrary sign.21 Pierce-Arrow thus constitutes a large-scale allegory of the process of poetic making and by extension of the operations of semiotics altogether. By formally enacting Peirce’s three categories of the sign, the poem takes a probing look into the dynamics of “phaneroscopy.” The metaphor projected into continuous series here is writing = semiotics, an equation that looks suspiciously tautological, but there is something profoundly recursive in Howe’s poetry, which can be especially challenging in the ways that it deals so relentlessly with its own procedures, her poetic projects in general often reading as records of their own coming into being. This is especially true of Pierce-Arrow, concerned as it is with the dynamics of sign making and the stories of Howe’s encounters with Peirciana and other archives; the poem is intensely inward looking as it turns Peirce’s semiotic principles back on themselves. In this balancing act, “Surveillance is a constant / theme in lyric poetry” (138): perpetually noting what the poet is up to as she is up to it, the poem meditates on its own manners of proceeding. This constant backward gazing of the text into the phenomenological conditions of its own appearing produces a complicated allegory in which poetry and semiosis are metaphorically transcoded, with Peirce’s three categories of sign respectively providing the formal logics of the three parts of Pierce-Arrow. From being a collector of literary fragments, Howe becomes a Benjaminian brooder, one who “not only meditates a thing but also meditates his meditations of the thing. . . . Brooder and allegorist are cut from the same cloth” (Benjamin 1999, 367). Says Benjamin: “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” (1999, 368).

5

Fictocritical Postlude The Melancholy of Conceptualism For Michael Taussig Argonite in the carburetor. Stein in the sea. —Clark Coolidge, A Geology All conceptual writing is allegorical writing. —Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place, Notes on Conceptualisms

Allegory is deep shit—or is it really just the surface crud of writing, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing? Along with its cynical twin, irony, it presides over some of the more troubled literary sensibilities of the past several centuries. Traditionally signaled by its predilection for initial capital letters, allegory always brings us blankly to the surfaces of texts—to ink and to alphabet—as if to demonstrate the flat and final conventionalisms of writing and thinking—and to a philosophical miasma stretching back along the sightlines of Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, from the disarticulations of postmodernism to the melancholia of the baroque. It periodically rises like the grotesque fish depicted on antique maps, agitating literary waters, muddying transparencies and sending ripples over quietist surfaces, distorting and making palpable its chief opposite, the Mirror held up to Nature. Allegory surfaces in conceptualism, which is the first American avantgarde poetry movement explicitly to embrace the trope. For the conceptualist, allegory no longer operates in formal registers, as it does in the poetry that I have been describing. Instead, it rises to the level of content and even to metalevels—idea, concept—altogether beyond any “content” in the text as such, in part because in conceptualism the “matter” of language no longer matters: it is generally taken for granted that nothing can happen at the level of the syntagm, or, at any rate, whether anything

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can or cannot happen there is no longer the point. The conceptualist poet generally does not micromanage grammar, syntax, phrases, or sentences. Conceptualist writing is rarely actually written: it more often is copied text that is shifted, sifted, resituated. Meaning takes place in the framing of whatever material is being treated and in the appropriative gesture itself. Unlike language poetry, conceptualism has no hard linguistics at its base: this is not a utopian writing busy exploring new ways of knowing by conscientiously transgressing the rules of standard English. Technical terms such as metaphor and metonymy play at best a cosmetic role in conceptualist poetics—or, better, they are used to discriminate meaning above the level of the sentence, to use Ron Silliman’s formulation. Conceptualist allegory, then, is a kind of a return of the repressed: if American poets generally dismissed or ignored or even forgot allegory during the long twentieth century—if the trope migrated into the formal registers of writing following the descent of surrealist impulses there—it has roared back to the outermost crust of conceptualist poetry, whose practitioners pronounce it their principal mode of proceeding. Part of this resurgence has to do with the free and generally uncritical application of postmodern theory on the part of conceptualist poets, who are post-theoretical in the way one understands people being postfeminist: the vocabularies of Lacan and Derrida and Kristeva have been absorbed altogether into the very textures of exposition and poetic performance. One hears more of Walter Benjamin than of Roman Jakobson in conceptualist poetics, of Marcel Duchamp than of William Carlos Williams or Ezra Pound, of the high baroque than of the high modern. Oulipo and proceduralism are the new old standards; full-blown appropriation, in the form of straightforward copying, has come entirely into its own; the writing is pitched as studiously uncreative. Morticia Place dolefully officiates over the death of poetry, like Keats’s Queen Ops presiding over the waning Titans. The wings of Benjamin’s melancholic angel have turned to stone. The conceptualists’ bête noire is the same romantic lyric subject—or “sobject,” in the parlance of Notes on Conceptualisms (Place and Fitterman 2009)—that has been the target of one branch of the avant-garde at least since Arthur Rimbaud’s “Je est un autre.” In the 1950s essay “Projective Verse,” Charles Olson wryly announces that subject’s incipient passing;

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the language poets repeatedly and roundly condemn it; and the attack is ongoing in conceptualist “compleynts” against writing workshop staples such as the cultivation of personal voice, self-expression, and originality. Whole staedels of sobjects have been liquidated in the flattened fields of Poemland, but Echo keeps on mirroring Narcissus, attentuated into contours of the literary landscape as she may be. Some of us are getting tired of the tenacity of this holy ghost—or maybe tired of the incessant whining about that tenacity—but what are we to do? Some form of the subject always seems to slip in the back door. Genius, although now Unoriginal, is after all Genius still: from the Latin genius, “a quasi-mythological personification of an immaterial virtue” (OED). This sounds like the classical definition of allegory itself: Can the poet never stop seeing the Reflection in the Pool? When Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place begin their book Notes on Conceptualisms (2009) with the statement, “conceptual writing is allegorical writing” (13), they align contemporary conceptualism with traditions in classical and biblical literature, medieval marginalia and mystery plays, Trauerspiel melancholy, Frankfurt school theory, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and recent trends in the arts stretching from surrealism to minimalism and beyond. This move might be seen as purely strategic—conceptualism, in classic baroque fashion, scrupulously trimming the Lawns around its institutional Mausoleum, replete with all of the bibliographic Melancholy that such a Project implies. Like Allegory, conceptualism is a morbid, museal, dead Thing, with its shit-eating Grin—and entirely happy to be so. Interlude 1: Periplum by the Lime-Tree Bowery My Prison: or, The Tempest in a Teapot Scene: On an antique map, an island somewhere between the Hudson and East Rivers. The wizard Kenneth, goldsmith alchemist, is at work in the still cave of the witch Poesy, where he spends his Day turning literary Gold into Lead. He is assisted in his labors by the bad-tempered structuralist dwarf Meme, who thirty years ago gave up his subjectivity in order to acquire the Helmet of Transparency, a fedora that renders him invisible. Kenneth uses Meme to harass the older native inhabitant of the island, the Bruce, whose profit on learning Kenneth’s speech is that he knows how to curse. As the curtain rises, the Bruce is creeping toward Kenneth’s cave [pronominal Andrewsiana (s)talks without]; the wizard and Meme

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are distracted by a magical vanishing banquet that Kenneth has designed for the confusion of his nemeses, the usurper Flarfists. To make an allegory, I elaborate a metaphor into a narrative—St. Paul’s allegorical retooling in Letter to the Galatians of the Genesis story of Hagar and Sarah, whom he construes respectively as figures for the Old and New Testaments, might be classified as an early instance of conceptualist transcoding. Likewise, the metaphor language = geology, subjected to narrative extension, becomes Craig Dworkin’s conceptualist text “Shift,” in which he “replac[es] a handful of words in the introductory chapter of a geology textbook with terms from the introductory chapter of a linguistics handbook” (2005, 109), to come up with formulations such as the following: “Tectonic Grammar is a unifying model that attempts to explain the origin of patterns of deformation in the crust, asemantic distribution, semantic drift, and mid-morphemic ridges, as well as providing a mechanism for language to cool (in simple terms, language is just an immense spheroid of magmatic inscription which has crystallized into solid words where it has been exposed to the coldness of space)” (9). Here we have a textbook example of Jameson’s allegorical transcoding. “Shift,” concerned as it is with the relations between the textual surface (the outer “crust” of the text) and the dynamics of various tectonic “lexical plates” (semantics as magma; “morphemic ridges,” “underlexicalized slabs”), might itself be read as an elaborate allegory of the rising to the surface of allegory in conceptualist poetics, as in one passage from the section “CRUSTAL STRUCTURE AND PLATE BOUNDARIES”: “The boundaries between lexical plates are dynamic features, converging, diverging, and melding from one type to another as they migrate through the language’s surface. In addition, lexical boundaries can disappear as two plates become part of the same lexical mass, and new lexical boundaries can be created in response to changes in stress regimes in the text” (14). Does this passage not both enact and describe Jameson’s “setting into active equivalence of two preexisting codes, which thereby, in a kind of molecular ion exchange, become a new one” (1991, 394)? In allegory, lexical boundaries disappear as discursive registers converge to make new semantic objects. “Shift” then can be read as marking the historic shift in postmodern poetics to an overtly and transparently allegorical mode: unlike Coolidge’s poems, which, having “crystallized into solid words where [they have] been exposed to the coldness of space [or Space],” carry their allegorical heft in their axial armatures and

ficto critica l p ostlu de 18 9

formal “arrangements,” Dworkin’s conceptualist allegory lies entirely on the surface, the outermost crust, of his text. Dworkin’s book Strand (2005, cited by page number only from this point) is itself a showcase of conceptualist method and technique: its five works—“Shift,” “Ar,” “Legion,” “Strand,” and “Dure”—each based on some preset procedure, illustrate the allegorical dimensions of conceptualist practice and in the process revisit many of the surrealist, baroque, and art historical themes that I have examined in this book. Predicated on a transcoding of linguistics and geology, the tectonic grammar of “Shift” acts as a wry commentary on Coolidge’s appropriation of Smithson and on Owens’s essays on minimalism and earthworks as well as the theory of postmodernism’s allegorical impulse that Owens derives from them. In true conceptualist fashion, Dworkin writes the allegorical conceit underlying Coolidge’s and Smithson’s projects: “Shift” can be read as the blueprint for the schematics of works such as Space (“grammar a granite” [Coolidge 1970]) and “A Mound of Language” (Smithson 1979, 104). Dworkin’s text is, properly speaking, “conceptual” in that it doesn’t produce an art object or a poem so much as the rationale for an art object or a poem. This is what I mean when I say that in conceptualism allegory surfaces: instead of a transcoded constellation of words that behaves according to the logic of a crystal, “Shift” is a literal description of the act of transcoding as such. Interlude 2 Scene: Surfacing on the margin of the antique map, the Loch van Nessa monster declaims: “Consider the materiality, horizontal and vertical, of words themselves. The double-aught or emptied eye sockets stuck in the middle of book and books, the heave in Heaven and god’s huff in Hell”: paranoiac-critical skull, grinning through the lattice of the alphabet. . . . Meanwhile, pilgrim Christian Bök—a fitter man was never known—sails from the north bearing a new testicle, written into a paramecium, in which St. Paul demands the allegorical imperative, declaring Arab Hagar the Old, Hebrew Sarah the New, Covenants. Christian reads Allegory where Judah reads history. Bök reads book; books read Book, umlaut eyes over staring O’s. Already in ancient times allegory was associated with the alphabet and hence with written as opposed to oral literature: there is no allegory in Homer, so the story goes, but Hellenistic scholars used allegoresis to interpret the Iliad and the Odyssey. No literary trope more readily invokes

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the dust of the archive or the dour St. Kenneths of literary production. Conceptualism is the art of the heart of the scribe. In the second poem in Strand, “Ar,” Dworkin transcodes the figure of Louis Aragon and the element argon, both of which “appeared” in 1897, the year the surrealist poet was born and the element isolated. On the first page of the first section of “Ar,” titled “Articles of Faith (Indefinite),” Dworkin explicitly develops this pairing as a classic example of the surrealist uncanny coincidence: • In 1894, Lord Rayleigh and William Ramsay conceived of a new constituent of the atmosphere. • This new substance was not isolated as an element until 1897, when Louis Aragon was born. • As appeared by the manner in which paper, impregnated with a solution of it, burnt. • There is no record to suggest that the confinement of Mme Aragon lasted twenty-seven months, but it is in that discrepancy between terms that surrealism gestates. (31, italics in original)

The discrepant metaphor in which the surrealism at the root of this conceptualist allegory gestates is that Aragon = Argon, or, by extension, that poetry works like a gas. The indefinite article, of course, is a, the first letter of “Ar,” which is the symbol for argon (although it was “A” until 1957), and part of what motivates Dworkin’s poem is the continual reappearance in the text of variations of the two syllables ar and gon: we go from “article” to “an oar goes” to “Are a Goan” to “or / gone” to Argus and Arcadia, but we also encounter embedded references to the Argonauts and the argonautica (genus name for the paper nautilus, which appears in the poem’s second section). Even Coolidge’s trilobite makes a ghostly appearance, hidden in “arges,” the name of a particular genus of this fossil (I can’t help but hear Coolidge’s line “Argonite in the carburetor. Stein in the sea” from A Geology here [1981, n.p.]). It is as if the last line of Dworkin’s poem “Ar”—“one liter of Argon was returned to the atmosphere” (43)—is a description of the poem’s method: Dworkin figuratively releases ar and gon, argon, throughout the pages of his text, creating a kind of poetic “atmosphere” out of the particles of the word that denotes the gas.1 The puns and references multiply to generate all manner of

ficto critica l p ostlu de 19 1

swift graspings branchiæ flaring out

(35, italics in original)

The lines an oar goes swift, bright, and glancing over the water

(32, italics in original)

lead to Virginia Woolf ’s The Waves and André Breton’s Soluble Fish (“fish spill soluble in the sun” [Dworkin 2005, 35]), thence to the Spanish kingdom of Aragon, sponsor of Columbus’s trans-Atlantic New World voyage, and finally to William Reich’s orgone. The name for the inert gas argon derives from the Greek term argon, “inactive” or “lazy”—hence the second part of “Ar,” titled “Te Deum” (i.e., tedium). This phrase is contracted at the end of this section: t’

‘d

‘m

the words refusing to work “for they are of a most astonishingly indifferent body”

gilt lidded or lashed, moneyed eyes idle

swift, bright, and glancing

Boredom is always counterrevolutionary

(38, italics in original)

Here inertness, tedium, laziness, striking (“refusing to work”), and the idle eyes of the moneyed end in Guy Deboredom’s situationist slogan, and all these, together with Virginia Woolf ’s glancing, point to “the Virgin

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Nyctalope,” the third section of “Ar,” where we find the hundred-eyed Argus (“insomniac, dream[ing] devoutly of sleep” [39]; “Argus” is also the name of the builder of Jason’s ship, the Argo, and the name of Odysseus’s dog) and a fresco of the Virgin in Siena that weeps black tears in her night blindness: Nyctalope (“Night Blindness”) is the name of a famous French science fiction hero—of the sort beloved of the surrealists—who can see in the dark. Argus points to argo, which points to argonaut, which points back to agonautica, the Paper Nautilus, characterized by its large eyes, and thus to the Nautilus proper, with its gas-filled chambers of argonitic shell (and its very poor eyesight). The various objects and images that the poem brings into conjunction swirl around one another like the whorls in a Nautilus shell. The fourth section of “Ar,” “Arcadia,” brings together many of these themes: the title evokes the Paris arcades, philosophical home of Benjamin and the surrealists, including Aragon in Paysan de Paris (Paris Peasant [1994]). This final section of “Ar” starts off with The incandescents that

replaced the gas lamps

in the Passage de L’Opéra”

(40)

Argon gas is used in incandescent lights, so Aragon is looking at the arcades through argon (the invisible gas itself, then, is the material medium of “profane illumination”). Benjamin consequently looks at the arcades through Aragon by way of argon. The spiraling shell of the Nautilus reappears in the line “A slow charybdis circles, spiraling the shell lake” (40); like Odysseus, Jason and the Argonauts have to pass the monster whirlpool Charybdis on their journey. “Shell lake” evokes “shellac,” the material used to make phonograph records, which spin around like whirlpools or Nautilus shells, and earlier in the poem we hear of “an angel with a stylus loung[ing] in the round” (38), referring to the “Recording Angel,” the famous picture of such an angel used as a trademark on early records. Like Aragon’s peasant flaneur strolling the arcades, observing the arbitrary jux-

ficto critica l p ostlu de 19 3

tapositions of commodities in shop windows illuminated by argon gas in incandescent lamps, “the stroller finds a pantomime / of shallow ridge and shadow” (42) throughout “Ar”: a surreal confluence of half-seen objects, made up of word particles expanding through poetic atmospheres. Poetry is a gas! Allegory: allos, “other” + agoreuei, “to speak.” Allegory is “other-speech”: hence to read like St. Paul through a gas darkly, shadowy pantomime: Latin reading Greek reading Hebrew. In allegory, characters become books: Hagar and Sarah are mirrors strolling down the road to Damascus. Hamlet holds his glass up to Nature; Yorick’s shitty skull grins back (“And smelt so? Pah!”). Shelley whorls; Blake tells us that Satan is the Limit of Opacity: no reflection in the mirror, le Vampire, Baudelaire’s “Infamous bitch to whom I’m bound / Like the convict to his chain”, Shelley’s antiPromethean tyrant, Jupiter, the great Mime, Who wrought his lips in truth-entangling lines Which smiled the lie his tongue disdained to speak; Who, with firm sneer, trod out in his own heart The sparks of love and hope till there remained Those bitter ashes, a soul self-consumed, And the wretch crept a vampire among men, Infecting all with his own hideous ill

Beginning in the 1960s, allegory washes up on the shores of America like a plague of (rafts of ) Medusae, and in translations of works such as Benjamin’s Illuminations in 1968 and St. Paul De Man’s work from 1969 on, the beach hits the art machine running. Benjamin’s Trauerspiel appears in English as The Origin of German Tragic Drama in 1977; Maureen Quilligan and Stephen Barney publish books on allegory in 1979, and de Man’s Allegories of Reading appears; 1981 sees Morton Bloomfield’s Allegory, Myth, and Symbol, which includes essays by Quilligan, Murray Krieger, and J. Hillis Miller, as well as Stephen Greenblatt’s Allegory and Representation, another collection of important articles. Tzvetan Todorov’s Theories of the Symbol is translated in 1982, the same year that Paul Smith’s article “The Will to Allegory in Postmodernism” appears, and in 1985 Carolyn Van Dyke publishes The Fiction of Truth: Structures of Meaning and Narrative in Dramatic Allegory, a study that examines deconstructive angles of the isle.

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Interlude 3: K. Firefiz Silem Mohammed, gentle Flarfist knight of the Deer Head Nation, pricking on the plane, confronts the dragon Errour, foul mother of foul texts: Therewith she spewd out of her filthy screen A floud of information horrible and blacke, Full of great lumpes of text and websites raw, Which stunck so vildly, that it forst him slacke His grasping hold, and from her turne him backe: Her vomit full of blogs and twitters was, With loathly quietists, which eyes did lacke, And creeping sought way in the weedy gras: Her filthy parbreake all the place defiled has.

Alphabet as Dragon Mother, hiding in her womb unborn children: writing as the birthing of l(ink)s; the text as Ventous (OF ventose, a cupping glass): an apparatus used to assist in the delivery—or is it the abortion?—of a voiceless sobject, consisting of a cup that is attached to the fetal letter by suction and a chain by which traction can be exerted in order to draw it out. Truth-entangling links: Craig Owens’s essays “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” parts 1 and 2, are published respectively in issues 12 and 13 of October in 1980, and Joel Fineman publishes “The Structure of Allegorical Desire,” also in issue 12. Allegory quickly becomes what Fineman calls the “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). Allegory comes to be understood as the fundamental trope underlying everything from critical interpretation to reading itself, which is seen at its most basic level as an act of allegoresis (Northrop Frye had already said as much in the late 1950s). The famous melancholy of the allegorist, which Benjamin describes as a consequence of contemplating the unhinging of the sign from its referent, is considered the primary fact of the postmodern condition. Throughout the 1990s, work on allegory continues to appear—N. A. Halmi’s essay “From Hierarchy to Opposition: Allegory and the Sublime” in 1992; Deborah Madsen’s book Rereading Allegory in 1994; Gordon Teskey’s Allegory and Violence

ficto critica l p ostlu de 19 5

in 1996; Sayre Greenfield’s The Ends of Allegory in 1998. And it continues to do so on into the twenty-first century—Bill Brown publishes his essay “The Dark Wood of Postmodernity (Space, Faith, Allegory)” in 2005, and it comes round full circle to Angus Fletcher, whose essay “Allegory Without Ideas” is published in boundary 2 in 2006 and whose groundbreaking book Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode, first published in 1964, is reissued in 2012. Bibliographic masonry showing through Golgothian hill of rubble: the premier allegorical object is the human skull, with its double-aught or emptied eye sockets and its shit-eating grin. Fitterman and Place: “5c. In The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin identified the skull as the supreme allegorical image because it ‘gives rise to not only the enigmatic question of the nature of human existence as such, but also of the biographical historicity of the individual. This is the heart of the allegorical way of seeing . . . ’ The skull is the heart” (2009, 26, ellipses in original). The skull is the heart of the eye—that is, of “the allegorical way of seeing.” The sobject peers through an Eye that is a Heart that is a Skull, hence through its toothy grin. Adorno: “As through the crenels of a parapet, the subject gazes upon a black sky in which the star of the idea, or of Being, is said to rise” (1995, 139–140). Conceptualism is the shit-eating Grin on the Skull of Art. Bök: Conceptual writing is about the screw, not the driver. Testimonicles 1. Gordon Teskey reads Jupiter’s rape of Leda as the archetypal allegorical event: the violent imposition of homological order on recalcitrant materials: Leda the mother of Helen the whore of Babylon the Dragon in the Sun: Spenser’s foul dragon Errour is the mother of inky imps. 2. The Allegory of Plato’s Balls: “As historical genre, allegory may be likened to the tale of Cronos, who overthrew his father, Ouranos (the sky), by castrating him and throwing the testicles—the Platonic forms— into the sea, whence the goddess Aphrodite was born. The tremulous undulations in the veil of allegory are the turbulence that remains after the work’s violent creations” (Teskey 1996, 163). Allegory as ball froth. 3. Allegory eats deep shit. Teskey again: “For the world that is devoured by Man escapes him as waste, as that which he has failed to convert into himself, and this waste is the substance of history, of a past that

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the analogy of microcosm and macrocosm cannot absorb. The material remains of the past are the evidence of our failure, which is already inevitable, to coincide with the world. As the microcosm increases in size, however, this evidence is squeezed into the narrowing space between the limits of the body and the limits of the real, until the evidence is brought around in front of our mouths” (1996, 167). Conceptual writing is about the paper, not the toilet. Benjamin: Allegory the armature of modernism, surrealist dreaming. Jameson: Allegory the sign of postmodernism, surrealism without the unconscious, surrealist writing. Fitterman and Place: Allegory the signature of conceptualism, allegory without melancholy, postmodernism without surrealism, surrealist signing. In the city of Lost Angles, along Van Ness, a place close to the ocean, the Medusa turns her readers into stone.

notes

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).

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Introduction 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),

in troduction 19 9

5. 6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

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). See especially Hal Foster’s The Return of the Real (1996). 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. See, for example, Josh Cohen’s book Spectacular Allegories (1998). 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). 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. 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). 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. 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

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13.

14.

15.

16.

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). 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). 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. “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. 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 troduction 2 01

17. 18.

19.

20.

in that he “goes very far in the direction that I have called the de-construction of the transcendental signified” (1998, 49). 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). 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). 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). 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

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22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

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). See, for example, Ron Silliman’s introduction to In the American Tree (Silliman 1986b). “On Speech” (Grenier 1986) was originally published in the first issue of This (Winter 1971), the journal that Grenier cofounded with Barrett Watten. Bohn writes that visual poetry “differs from ordinary poetry . . . in the extent of its iconic dimension” (2001, 15). “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). 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 avantgarde accomplishments and had become the dominant movement” (2001, 232). 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;

in troduction 2 0 3 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

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31.

32.

33. 34.

35.

36.

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). 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). 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 avantgardiste 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). See Grossman 1992 for a history of the publication and critical reception of Benjamin in America. 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). 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). Sayre Greenfield writes of “the allegorical recuperation of associative disjunctions” (1998, 87).

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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

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42.

43. 44.

45.

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). 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). 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. 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. 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

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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

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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 rela-

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tionship 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

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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 dispa-

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rate 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).

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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.

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9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

Niedecker’s first appearance in a Norton anthology was in the 2003 third edition of The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. To this end, see especially Marjorie Perloff ’s essay “ ‘Barbed-Wire Entanglements’: The ‘New American Poetry,’ 1930–32” ([1995] 1998). “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 is a painter’s show / what fahrtin literature has it got” (March 6, 1935, in Zukofsky 1987, 162). 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). 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). 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).

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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

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23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

and consequently spawning within every mind the same affective tendencies and primordial passional conflicts” (Caillois 1990, 85). “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). “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). 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. 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. “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). “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

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29.

30. 31.

32.

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). “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). For a reading of the politics of Dali’s painting, see Mendelson 2003. 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.’ ” 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).

2. e pi st e molo gies: cla rk co olidge 217

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”: manipulation of language particles →

resultant new aggregates of “meaning” elements

→

forces of all aspects of language structure as “metaphor” for (as-yet-unseen?) physical states-ofmatter

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4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

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. See, for instance, interviews of Coolidge by Barrett Watten in This (Coolidge 1978b) and Lee Bartlett in Talking Poetry (Coolidge 1987). See, for instance, Longenbach 1997 on the “two different kinds of poems in The Tennis Court Oath” (112). 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). 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). Perloff calls “Europe” “a kind of Surrealist cadaver exquis” (1981, 269). “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). “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). 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”). 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

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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 wordto-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

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2.

3. 4.

5.

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). 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). See Silliman’s blog for Friday, August 8, 2008, at http://ronsilliman.blogspot .com/search?q=six+lectures. “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). “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

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6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

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). “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). 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). 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). “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). Several critics have also speculated about Inman’s debt to surrealism. According to Benjamin Friedlander, “P. Inman in like manner comes out of surrealism.

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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).

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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).

224 3. a=l =l= e=g = o = r = i = e =s : pet e r i nm a n, my u n g m i kim , ly n hejin ia n

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

3. a =l= l =e= g= o =r =i =e = s : pet e r i n m a n, m y u n g m i kim , ly n hejin ia n 2 2 5

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

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). “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). 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). 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). “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). “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). 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

226 4. sem i o lo g i es : s u s a n h o w e

37.

38.

39.

40.

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). “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). “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). 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. 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

4 . sem iolo gies: su sa n howe 2 2 7

2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

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). 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). Peter Nicholls concurs but hears an allusion to Theodor Adorno in the use of this word (2002, 441 n.). 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). “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). 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). 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. 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

228 4. sem i o lo g i es : s u s a n h o w e

9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

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). Indexes, icons, and symbols compose Peirce’s second trichotomy of signs; see Peirce 1955, 101–102. 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). 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). 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. “The so-called natural signs, such as weather signs, symptoms of diseases or Sherlock Holmes’s clues are typically indexical signs” (Nöth 2001, 18). See Montgomery 2010, 136–137, for a discussion of Howe’s “Orpheus-like descent” into the library. 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 PortisWinner, “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). 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). 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 PierceArrow (1999, 24, 48, and 73). The final reference—the Skewton quotation—ap-

5. fi c to c r i t i c a l po st lu d e : t h e m e la n choly of con ceptua lism 2 2 9

18. 19.

20. 21.

pears precisely in the center of the 144-page book: Does the figure of the stroke victim somehow function as the poem’s fulcrum? For an illuminating discussion of the signature as both iconic and indexical, see Bal and Bryson 1991, 190–191. “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). For a different but related reading of this passage, see Nicholls 2002, 450. 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.

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index

Adorno, Theodor, 35, 118, 195 Andrews, Bruce, 106, 108, 121 Aragon, Louis, 33, 36, 190–192, 210 Arnold, David, 76, 103, 203n29, 203n30, 220n2, 221n5 Ashbery, John, x, 7, 15, 30, 46; and The Tennis Court Oath, 76–80; 102 Back, Rachel Tzvia, 145 Baker, J. Robert, 199n4, 209n59 Barney, Stephen, 193, 199n9 Barthes, Roland, 2, 4–7; on structuralism, 30, 31, 32; 33; 38, 93, 103, 104, 133, 146 Beach, Christopher, 120, 223n19 Benjamin, Walter, ix, x, 1, 2, 5, 7, 8, 10; on the Baroque, 16–18; 30, 32; on melancholy, 38–39; 40, 41, 42, 103, 118, 127, 146, 147, 184, 185, 186, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 200n12, ; 205n42, 207n46, 207n47, 208n48; on allegorical form and the commodity fetish, 210n52 Bernstein, Charles, 14; on language and thinking, 22–24; 90, 101, 109–111, 115, 117, 121, 134, 145 Bloomfield, Morton W., 193

Black, Joel D., 198n1 Bohn, Willard, 24–26, 202n26 Borkhuis, Charles, 102–103, 219n1 Breton, André, 33, 47, 105, 106, 130, 132, 133, 191 Brown, Bill, 10, 195 Buck-Morss, Susan, 206n45 Bürger, Peter, 37, 204n32, 204n34 Caillois, Roger, 45, 46; and the praying mantis, 48–52; 61, 214n22, 215n23, 215n24 Cézanne, Paul, 69 Coolidge, Clark, ix, x, xvi, 7, 10–11, 13, 15, 16, 17, 28, 30, 43, 67–100; Space, 70–74, 81–86; The Maintains, 86–93; Polaroid, 93–97; Quartz Hearts, 97–98; Own Face, 98–99; Smithsonian Depositions/Subject to a Film, 99; 101, 102, 135, 141, 146, 185, 188, 189, 190 Crane, Hart, 15 Creeley, Robert, 20–22, 24, 37, 201n19, 201n20 Crisp, Peter, 5, 10, 208n49 Culler, Jonathan, 207n47

246 i n dex Dali, Salvador, 33, 43, 45, 47–49, 52, and the praying mantis, 53–55; 57, 60, 61, 63, 64, 102, 215n26, 215n27, 215n28, 216n29 Davidson, Michael, 51 Davis, Robert Murray, 2, 3 De Man, Paul, 2, 3, 37, 193 Derrida, Jacques, 103, 186 Dickens, Charles, 149; and Dombey and Son, 161–167; 170 Dorn, Edward, 15 Duncan, Robert, 20 Dworkin, Craig, ix, 7, 17, 31, 145; and “Shift,” 188–189; and “Ar,” 190–193 Eburne, Jonathan, 45, 76, 212n3 Eigner, Larry, 22 Eliot, T. S., 15, 27 Ernst, Max, 33, 34, 36, 47, 49, 62, 133, 205n37 Fineman, Joel, 2, 7, 104, 107, 194, 199n8, 200n14, 211n56, 224n27 Fitterman, Robert, ix, 30, 185, 186, 187, 195, 196, 215, 204n31 Fletcher, Angus, ix, 2, 3, 7, 10, 30, 32–35, 36, 81, 149, 195 Foster, Edward, 93 Greenblatt, Stephen, x, 193 Greenfield, Sayre, xi, 195, 206n41, 211n54 Grenier, Robert, 23–24 Halmi, N. A., 194 Hassan, Ihab, 17 Hejinian, Lyn, ix, 3, 7, 8, 37, 101, 102, 109; and Writing Is an Aid to Memory, 126–144 Higgins, Mary Rising, 12–13, 14, 28 Honig, Edward, 2, 3 Howe, Susan, x, xiii, 3, 7, 8, 15, 145–184; and “Arisbe,” 149–161; and “The Leisure

of the Theory Class,” 161–174; and “Rückenfigur,” 174–184 Inman, Peter, 7, 11–12, 13, 14, 16, 28, 101, 102; and “nimr,” 108–118, 122, 123 Jakobson, Roman, x, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10; and the poetic function, 28, 30, 41, 85, 90, 102–107, 110, 111, 129, 134, 139; 146, 160, 161; and aphasia, 163–166; 186; on the dominant, 203n28 Jameson, Fredric, ix, x, xii, 5, 6, 7, 14, 18, 30; and allegorical transcoding, 40–42, 210n53; 64, 75, 80, 82, 94, 104, 107, 118, 130, 137, 144, 188, 196 Jappy, Antony, 103 Kiparsky, Paul, 202n27 Kim, Myung Mi, x, 7, 12, 14, 16, 28, 101; and “Measure,” 118–126; 135 Krauss, Rosalind, on photography and Surrealism, 36–37; on photography and the index, 93–94; 140 Lally, Michael, 83 Levy, Julien, 47, 48, 216n31 Lippard, Lucy, on photomontage, 34–36 Madsen, Deborah, xi, 208n48 Masson, André, 49, 62 McGann, Jerome, 74, 84, 87, 92 McHale, Brian, 9, 14, 15 Middleton, Peter, 9 Miller, J. Hillis, 207n47 Nicholls, Peter, 103, 152 Niedecker, Lorine, ix, x, xiii, 7, 43, 46–48; and the surrealist praying mantis, 59–66; 102 Nougé, Paul, 33 Olson, Charles, 20–23, 27, 106–109, 120, 139, 186

in dex 2 4 7 Oppen, George, and “From a Photograph,” 67–68; and The Materials, 92–93; 120 Owens, Craig, ix, xiv, 1–7, 28, 30, 39; on allegory, 40–42; 82, 93, 94, 104, 107, 128, 134, 135, 154, 189, 194, 204n35 Peirce, Charles Sanders, x, 7, 10, 18; and index, 19–24; and icon, 24–26; and symbol, 26–31; 127, 139, and semiotics in Pierce-Arrow, 145–184 Perelman, Bob, 120 Perloff, Marjorie, 4–5, 8–9, 14, 68, 92–93, 200n13 Piaget, Jean, 142–143 Place, Vanessa, ix, 30, 185, 187, 195, 196 Pope, Alexander, 147, 150, 156–158 Pound, Ezra, ix, xii, 18, 25, 28, 47–48, 51, 54, 55, 60, 159, 186 Pressly, William L., 49, 54, 214n18 Quilligan, Maureen, xi, 10, 30, 34, 193, 198n4, 206n41 Rasula, Jed, 198n2 Saroyan, Aram, 90 Scroggins, Mark, 44, 217n37 Shklovsky, Viktor, 83 Silliman, Ron, 3, 84, 90, 91, 95, 101, 103–105, 133, 186 Smithson, Robert, 4–5, 76, 81, 82, 84–85, 91, 189

Spivak, Gayatri, 2–3, 7 Stein, Gertrude, 83, 127, 132, 136, 185, 190 Stevens, Wallace, 15 Stick, Sidra, 48 Tanguy, Yves, 76–80, 102 Tashjian, Dikran, 45–46, 213n11 Teskey, Gordon, 7, 194, 195, 208n47, 223n17 Tiedemann, Rolf, 38 Todorov, Tzvetan, 193 Tynianov, Juri, 81 Vanderborg, Susan, 44 Van Dyke, Carolynn, 37, 193 Watten, Barrett, 3–5, 14, 82, 95, 101, 103; on surrealism and Charles Olson, 105–107; 109, 133; on The Constructivist Moment, 198n3 White, Hayden, 125–126 Whitman, Walt, 18–19 Wilson III, Raymond J., 209n50, 209–210n51 Williams, William Carlos, x, xiii–xiv, 8, 17, 20–21, 23, 25, 27, 60; and “The Red Wheelbarrow,” 69–70, 73; 77, 102, 103, 186 Zukofsky, Louis, xiii, 7; and the surrealist praying mantis, 43–66; 67, 83, 96