Читать книгу The Constructivist Moment - Barrett Watten - Страница 9

Jackson Mac Low’s question for T. S. Eliot, whether the word Coronamatic could under any circumstances have occurred in poetry as Eliot understood it, marks an important paradigm shift in American poetics. While Mac Low was not the first American poet to consider language itself as a material for the construction of poetry rather than as a medium of communication, his poem is an explicit formulation of a historical shift from a paradigm of Anglo-American criticism known as poetic diction to one of poetic vocabulary. The concerns of poetic diction are Coleridgean, normative, and finally prescriptive; its modernist interpreter, Owen Barfield, bases his account of it on Coleridge’s dictum that “poetry is the best words in the best order,” i.e., “the best language.”¹ In its capacity to incorporate “a steady influx of new meaning in language,” poetic form will give the rule for what meanings we can accept (181). Mac Low is thus accurate in asking whether Eliot would have “allowed ‘Coronamatic’ in his verse.” While poetic diction begins with the question of le mot juste, of the unification of diction and good sense as providing standards of style and efficacies of communication, it ends with a distinction between what language is appropriate to poetry and what is not. By virtue of poetic diction, poetry separates language into hierarchies of appropriateness: at the one end, not only a judicious choice of words but language separated from particular interest; at the other, jargons, dialects, and idioms whose interested discrepancies are beyond the pale of poetry as it is normally understood.² In moving to a paradigm of poetic vocabulary, evident everywhere in the construction of his work, Mac Low registers the historical emergence of specific vocabularies: When did Coronamatic become a word, and how many years would it take for it to become available for poetry? Aligning the historical fact of emergence with different critical standards than have come down through the Anglo-American tradition since Coleridge, he queries the circumstances of the use of a word such as Coronamatic in terms that address poetry to a wider horizon of language. Language is no longer to be judged in terms of its appropriateness for poetic diction; rather, poetry will be judged by its relation to language, seen as more capacious than its form.

Poetry as a result becomes a site for asking questions about language rather than an enforcer of communicative norms. Poetry’s linguistic difference from the norms of transparent communication, of course, has been one of the most debated assumptions of twentieth-century literary theory. The turn to cultural studies, in one genealogy, begins here, with an attack on the cultural norms assumed in the autonomy of poetic language. In her account of the “poetic language fallacy,” Mary Louise Pratt argues that the opacity of poetic language, as a reinforcement of literary and cultural hierarchies by virtue of the presumed superiority of poetry to ordinary language, merely distorts or foregrounds the structural defects of normative communication.³ Proposing an ethics of communication that accounts for differences of usage, on the other hand, Michael J. Reddy claims that norms of transparent communication are linguistically embedded in habitual metaphors that poetry’s resistant language may expose and contest.⁴ Such views beg for a synthesis in which the difference of poetic language from the presumed transparency of ordinary language may be explained by a notion of linguistic agency that is historically contingent, rather than formally immanent. The opacity of poetic language enacts, in such a synthesis, a purposive deformation of communicative norms that may, in turn, change norms embedded in language (or provide new ones). In this sense, poetic language does not merely reinforce literary and cultural hierarchies but provides both vehicle and agency for a language-centered critique of meaning. Such a criticality may move beyond poetry to participate in processes of communication not restricted to literature as it identifies the making of new meaning with the kind of linguistic opacity we find when new terms are introduced in a lexicon. The shift from poetic diction to poetic vocabulary thus points toward a wider cultural frame for the constructive use of poetic language.

The constructive use of poetic vocabulary, the notion that a poem literally can be made from a predetermined, objectified lexicon, is a unique and historical contribution of American modernism and postmodernism. Examples of constructive devices based on language seen as exterior to poetic form exist in many literatures, but the notion that a poem can be made from a preexisting, objectified lexicon arose with American modernism. The claim I will make, not to be overstated, is that a notion of poetic vocabulary, not simply a matter of poetry’s linguistic materiality, emerged with American modernism, specifically in the work of Louis Zukofsky. There are, of course, many examples in the European avant-garde in which poetry is made from linguistic materials; consider Tristan Tzara’s notion that cut-up newspapers can be assembled in a poetic text that will, ultimately, resemble its nonintentional author. In the work of the French OuLiPo, language games may involve restricted lexicons and rules for their use, but this is not the same as making a poem from a preexisting, objectified lexicon.⁵ An important bridge between the two approaches is Anne-Marie Albiach’s French translation of Louis Zukofsky’s “A”–9, using a pre-existing vocabulary taken from the Everyman edition of Marx’s Capital.⁶ The argument that follows undertakes a kind of thought experiment to chart the emergence of the use of poetic vocabulary from its origins in the English romantics (better known for their promulgation of poetic diction) through a series of American modernist and postmodern poet/critics. There is a literary history of almost two centuries, exemplified in romantic, modernist, and postmodern moments, of how poetic language seen as object provides a linguistic means for cultural critique. Poets representative of each period — from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Louis Zukofsky to Laura (Riding) Jackson to Jackson Mac Low to a number of poets of the Language School — variously foregrounded the materiality of poetic language, both in explicitly critical terms and implicitly in their work.⁷

For the romantic poets, to begin with, poetic language was the locus for a negotiation between culturally emergent meanings and the stabilities of literary form. The inclusion of vernacular speech in Lyrical Ballads, as part of a larger cultural project of ballad collecting, is one example of such an aesthetic response to expanded cultural borders. The nuanced vocabularies of philosophy (as with the opaque terminology of the German romantics) and of science also put pressure on normative theories of meaning. Such a contestation may be seen in the contradictory insights and incomplete realization of the form of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. Revisionist readings of the Biographia show how its attempt to reconcile language, literary form, and cultural value reflects an instability of meaning as much as it promotes conservative ideals of poetic autonomy. The instability of Coleridge’s account of poetic language is a part of an epistemological uncertainty that is at once historical and cultural. This uncertainty (also the source of its capacious possibility) is reflected in the many ways poetic language in the romantic period takes on values of opacity in relation to transparent norms of communication (as with the neoclassical conventions of the eighteenth century). Such foregrounding of linguistic devices — from Chatterton’s archaisms, Blake’s neologisms, Scott’s use of both archaism and dialect, Clare’s incorporation of regional usages, and Wordsworth’s objectification of common speech — reveals the unstable, expansive cultural moment of romantic poetry behind the concerns for language, meaning, and form in Coleridge’s account.

Coleridge ultimately wanted to stabilize the epistemological uncertainty of language by casting poetic form in the mold of transcendental reflection. While Coleridge’s anxiety about language led to a program for the inculcation of communicative norms and cultural values by means of literary form, one legacy of his poetics involved a reversal of this movement (even as much modernist poetry, from Yeats to John Ashbery, preserves the autonomy of form as the site for the identification of language with value). At the modernist moment of epistemological uncertainty, a theoretical concern with language tends also to place under erasure Coleridge’s privileged locus of critique, poetic form, in order to access more directly the relations between language and culture. An example of such a movement — from an assumption of the transparency and universality of poetic form to a critique based on the relations between language and culture — is evident in the invention and promulgation of C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards’s BASIC English (seen as a complement to Richards’s parallel development of a normative account of poetry).⁸ As a vehicle not only for the contestation of received ideas about language and meaning but also for the use of linguistic norms as social control and imperial politics, BASIC bypassed the mediations of poetic form at the heart of the romantic (and much of the modernist) project. In so doing it acted out, in a historically significant manner but to a virtually absurdist degree, the linguistic legacy of romanticism even while reversing its polarities of language and cultural change. Where the romantic period saw an expansion of language that led to Coleridge’s valorization of poetic form as a solution to questions of value, BASIC’s restricted vocabulary would reduce possible meanings within ordinary language as a standard of value as well, but without the mediation of poetic form.

In polar opposition to the romantic fascination with linguistic expansion, BASIC (an acronym for “British American Scientific International Commercial”) wanted to stabilize questions of meaning not through the authority of literary form but by reducing the number of terms used in the language — the number of substantives, morphological inflections, and what it called verbal “operators” (fig. 1). Its goals were to restrict language to an optimal economy and transparency in order to simplify and clarify meanings; in the words of Richards (and in BASIC): “Basic English is English made simple by limiting the number of its words to 850, and by cutting down the rules for using them to the smallest number necessary for the clear statement of ideas. And this is done without change in the normal order and behavior of those words in everyday English.”⁹ In so doing, BASIC adapts Standard English for use as an international lingua franca; according to Ogden, English is the natural candidate for such a task because it “is the only major language in which the analytic tendency has gone far enough for purposes of simplification” — a conflation of morphology with linguistic history in the fact that, with a low proportion of morphemes to words, English developed as a “relatively analytic” language.¹⁰ Conveniently, English’s analyticity (and thus its object status and availability for poetic vocabularies) make it a perfect vehicle for international commerce, its high correlation between word and thing reflecting the reification of commodity capitalism. A summary of the structure of BASIC describes how it compresses meaning in a standardized vocabulary (which can optimally be printed on the endsheets of its instruction manuals):

The syntax was accompanied by a reduced vocabulary of 850 words in sets: 400 general words and 200 picturable words (600 nouns), 150 adjectives, 82 grammatical words, such as across, all, can, and 18 operators (such verbs as get and put). Operators had three roles: to replace more difficult words . . . to form phrases that would obviate other verbs . . . and to be part of a phrasal verb. . . . By such means, [Ogden] concluded that his operators could stand in for some 4,000 verbs.¹¹

While BASIC advocates a transparency of communication in ordinary language rather than critically adjudicates the opacity of poetic language, its Coleridgean origins are clear — and not simply in the substitution of its language’s more available opacity for the difficulty of poetry. Coleridge wished to stabilize meaning in poetic form so that judgments of value could be grounded in a commonly held set of objects (the canon, in other words). The Coleridgean tradition continues, somewhat modified, in the demand for standard meanings of common terms that become, in turn, the basis for BASIC’s promulgation of a technocratic elite, a secular extension of a Coleridgean clerisy, who would undertake the inculcation of norms based on its adjudication of language and meaning.¹² In extending the presumed benefits of the administered control of meaning to the world at large (not simply the then-English-speaking world but the expanding worlds of international and colonial capitalism), Ogden and Richards attempted a modern interpretation of the paradigms for meaning that Coleridge tried to resolve in the Biographia and elsewhere.¹³

BASIC, of course, failed both in its semantic claim to reduce the number of terms necessary for transparent communication and in its proposals for a new world order based on the efficiencies to be gained by such linguistic condensation.¹⁴ Responsibility for this failure may be located squarely in the Coleridgean notion of desynonymy (as will be developed below), an imperative for the finer distinction of terms that was Coleridge’s response to the epistemological uncertainty of new meaning. Rather than achieving its goal of controlling the expansion of meaning by standardizing terms, BASIC’s resynonymy of vocabulary simply further confused the relation of language to meaning. As one historian of language has commented, “The Basic words, mainly common, short words like get, make, do, have some of the widest ranges of meaning in the language and may be among the most difficult to learn adequately. [It was] reported that for the 850 words the OED lists no fewer than 18,416 senses.”¹⁵ BASIC spectacularly failed to control the proliferation of meaning; rather, only an increase in undecidability and thus imprecision could result. In the end, BASIC takes its place within a pantheon of failed utopian projects for language in modernism, from Wittgenstein’s Tractactus to Esperanto to Louis Zukofsky’s “doing away with epistemology” to Laura Riding’s critique of “rational meaning.”¹⁶

But this failure, which took until the 1980s to be finalized with the discontinuance of Ogden’s General Basic English Dictionary, led to some exemplary modernist literary responses (parodic as much as serious) by admirers of both the advantages and defects of BASIC’s restricted semantics. As a direct response to the challenge of the increased vocabulary in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, for example, the international avant-garde magazine transition ran a translation of Joyce’s prose into BASIC, “the international language in which everything may be said,” with an explanatory note by C. K. Ogden, in its March 1932 issue.¹⁷ Ogden later compared Joyce’s lexicon of “500,000 words” with BASIC’s core vocabulary of 850; there is evident fascination here not only with BASIC’s ability to translate Joyce but also with the juxtaposition of two languages representing each half of the modernism/modernity dyad. Bringing together literary modernism and rationalized modernity would highlight the experimental and progressive natures of both: “The normal process of putting complex ideas of men of letters into Basic English is through the use of foot-notes. . . . But Mr. Joyce was of the opinion that a comparison of the two languages would be of greater interest if the Basic English were printed without the additions necessary to make the sense more complete. In this way the simplest and most complex languages of man are placed side by side” (135) — with no loss in translation and even some justice to the rhythms of Joyce’s prose:

1. The BASIC English Word List.

Well, you know or don’t you kennet or haven’t I told you every story has an end and that’s the he and the she of it. Look, look, the dusk is growing. Fieluhr? Filou! What age is it? It saon is late.

Well are you conscious, or haven’t you knowledge, or haven’t I said it, that every story has an ending and that’s the he and the she of it. Look, look, the dark is coming. . . . ‘Viel Uhr? Filou! What time is it? It’s getting late. (136-37)

Where for Ogden this meeting of “simplest and most complex languages” showed BASIC’s ability to turn Joyce’s opacity into transparency, modernist readers may have come to other conclusions about the experiment. Two disjunct and equally opaque passages seem the result of this effort at transparency, and modernist writers could identify with either — they could continue their literary experiments (as technological innovators) while being confirmed in their elite cultural perspectives (as “men of letters,” members of the modernist clerisy whose “obscure meanings” are valorized by Ogden’s attention). It is not surprising that the perceived opacity, rather than transparency, of language in BASIC’s translation of Joyce would lead, over the next fifty years and in several schools of writers, to experiments with the constructive effects of restricted vocabularies in poetry.

The radical discontinuity between Coleridge’s critique of poetic diction and postmodern constructions of poetic vocabulary, then, is connected through their mediation by a modernist project of linguistic reform that Richards later called a technocratic process of “Language Control.”¹⁸ The seemingly strained juxtaposition of BASIC English with Joyce’s “Work in Progress” in transition shows a modernist fascination and horror with the social hygiene of restricted vocabulary as a rational counterpoint to the possibly contagious avant-garde poetics of Eugene Jolas’s “Revolution of the Word.” Epistemological concerns with new meaning, reflecting a tension between progressive rationality and modernist experiments, were at the center of Jolas’s program for modernism, to the extent that the same issue of transition that printed Joyce’s text in BASIC also ran a section titled “Laboratory of the Word,” which called at once for “A New Symbolical Language,” reflecting poetry’s spiritual concerns, and “A New Communicative Language,” related to questions of new meaning. While transition argued for the “pre-logical functions” of language, it also lamented “a vocabulary that statically retains now obsolete words and is unaware of the enormous changes in meaning that have occurred,” concluding, “We need a twentieth-century dictionary!” (297). This Jolas supplied in the form of a “Revolution of the Word Dictionary” that listed neologisms taken from modernist authors such as Joyce, Bob Brown, Abraham Lincoln Gillespie, and himself and that also retired words such as humanism, democracy, and nightingale from “active service” (fig. 2). While generally hostile to technology (“Transition is against the mechanical language”; 322), Jolas encouraged a wide range of investigation into linguistic phenomena, including an essay by Jean Paulhan on words as signs, speculations on the language of dreams and the unconscious, examples of the trans-sense language of Hugo Ball and Kurt Schwitters, and transcriptions of the rhythms of African-American language. Transition’s focus on language “as such,” of course, was a part of a wider concern in Anglo-American modernism with language as a site of social modernity that began, arguably, with Gertrude Stein and that extended to the Harlem Renaissance. The Objectivist poets, particularly Louis Zukofsky, further articulated this debate from its moment in transition through the 1930s and onward, shifting the formal paradigm of language to constructivist goals that would lead to the possibility of making poetry out of preexisting vocabularies, a project later taken up in the chance-generated work of Jackson Mac Low and the work of the Language School. The encounter between the avant-garde use of “language as such” and the emergence of new technical senses, evident in transition’s translation of Joyce into BASIC but also its dictionary of new meaning, thus arrives at a historically unique development in modern writing, the making of literary works from a pre-given vocabulary.

2. “transition’s Revolution of the Word Dictionary.” From transition 21 (March 1932).

As Joseph M. Conte has shown, there have been any number of poetic strategies in which literature is generated by virtue of what he calls procedural form, from early modern sestinas to the linguistic and formal constraints of the French OuLiPo.¹⁹ Procedural form in the modernist and postmodern period shares with the literary use of poetic vocabulary an open approach to the construction of meaning, in Umberto Eco’s sense of an open work; as Conte writes, “Procedural form is a generative structure that constrains the poet to encounter and examine that which he or she does not immediately fathom, the uncertainties and incomprehensibilities of an expanding universe” (16). But the notion of poetic vocabulary moves beyond the expressivist uses of much open work (as, for example, in the process poetics of New American poets such as Charles Olson and Robert Duncan, whose work depends on open horizons of meaning) in granting a predetermined, objectified language an autonomous existence whose ultimate meaning will be engaged but not determined by the poet. If the consequences of Coleridge’s notion of poetic diction were great for the development of a pedagogy of practical criticism, the methodological stakes of poetic vocabulary, seen as a paradigm for making meaning, may turn out to be equally so. A new ethics of meaning, which combines the interpretive openness of open form with the preexisting objectification of a fixed vocabulary, leads to a result that is not reducible to the suspension of authorial intention in procedural form.

Language poet Kit Robinson’s The Dolch Stanzas, published by This Press in 1976, is a clear example of the project of making a poetic text from a preexisting poetic vocabulary. Stanzas comprises a sequence of twenty-two poems in short-lined tercets; its formal procedures, in other words, are relatively consistent but not entirely rule-governed. It is based on the Dolch Basic Sight Word List, a vocabulary for sight comprehension at the second-grade reading level, but again Robinson does not adhere to poetic vocabulary in a rule-governed way. From this list of about two hundred words, and allowing himself poetic license in selectively augmenting it, he explores possibilities of a language-based poetic argument where meaning effects are constructed in the poem’s interpretation:

XII

how did these

get here I wonder

what’s small always does

now come away

said a piece of one

once to please

upon that best

and warm hold

I will become only

and not take of

what’s given

together or not

but come back

said the one

take a look at these

XIII

you stop only

to go

hard

against black wood

pull it down

into the cold saw

and get that

going again

which is sharp

so to cut out so much crap that’s put up with

make this out

as just like always

and you’ll walk to help²⁰

Given that Robinson is using a reduced vocabulary of two hundred words appropriate to a second-grade reading level, it is surprising that so many divergent semantic frames can be set off against one another in these poems. This effect points out again BASIC’s failure to restrict meaning to combinations of the most common words, as these words are the most polysemous. Polysemy, thus, is the key to Robinson’s attack on normative poetic diction. If one were to play Coleridge to Robinson’s Wordsworth, one might begin by criticizing his ambiguation of the common language of everyday speech — as in “so to cut out / so much crap / that’s put up with” — through the disjunct frames of experimental poetry. But it is precisely Robinson’s point that he can locate such private embedded semantics and culturally dissonant idiom chunks within the normative semantics of a second-grade reader. Robinson’s work is a demonstration of a theory of meaning that begins with the way poetic vocabulary at once constructs and interprets interlocking frames of language and experience. As can be seen in how meaning is made in the poem, such a pre-given vocabulary brings its own semantic preconditions, even as it engages interpretive frames that can only be read through the total form of the poem. Basic assumptions about person, agency, and event are involved at the Dolch lexical level — “how did these / get here I wonder,” the poem asks, anchoring vocabulary in deixis and thus establishing a world that assumes speaker, hearer, and reference in contexts built out from their irreducible identities. “What’s small always does,” on the other hand, demands difficult, high-end processing to reconcile disjunct and competing interpretive frames.²¹ Robinson’s point is to show how the use of poetic vocabulary engages conflicts between inherent presuppositions of language (both its own and those of interpreters). Objectivist assumptions, which ground meaning in reference to the world outside and which relate the self-evidence of objects to the practical task of learning to read, provide only one scenario among many. Robinson seems to comment on the limits of ostensive definition in a line such as: “but come back / said the one / take a look at these,” which offers a reductive schema of communicative action where the self-evidence of pointing to things is parodied as it becomes a source of comedic effects in the poem’s hypertrophic sequence of interpretive frames.²²

3. Kit Robinson, front cover, The Dolch Stanzas (San Francisco: This Press, 1976).

It is equally up to the reader to “make this out / as just like always / and you’ll walk to help,” assuming a competence in decoding poetic vocabulary that may be identical to its prior inculcation — or not. The possibility of the failure of communication is equally being taken into account. Idiomatic constructions cluster around word-to-word frame shifts in the poem’s syntactic chain, and these are thematically engaged as meaning effects that may not be entirely warranted even as they are pushed into the foreground. Thus the “meaning effect” of the woman’s profile on the cover of the This Press edition (fig. 3) reveals a superimposition of illicit interpretive frames onto rationalized diction. At the moment of the poem’s original composition, likewise, Robinson may not have meant to invoke the visual hypertext of a help menu as we “walk to help,” but it may be engaged later in the open-ended construction of just what such a metaleptic help could mean — a reference to what could be seen as part of the computer desktop we refer to for help but which at the time could be understood as making a plea for understanding or, more particularly, as asking for help to decode the poem. In this sense, the language of the poem does not predict all experiential frames brought to it: The Dolch Stanzas is both an essay on and experiment in making meaning out of language that unfolds in subsequent historical horizons. The use of poetic vocabulary is a device to create new meaning, not stabilize it, that has ethical consequences — showing how an action can be taken whose horizons are provisional even as it constructs new meanings. Robinson’s poems celebrate the constructive possibilities of a moment of epistemological doubt in the meaning of words — in a way that is open to linguistic and cultural change.