The Poet Dreams of Power: Part Two

When last we checked in with our hero, The Poet Who Has Lived Through All of History, he'd come some distance in his dreams of power.  In the Elizabethan era, he actually had power, but not through his capacity as poet: the literary elite and the power elite were, generally, one and the same.  Poetry was mostly an ornament, a game, a semi-private meditation, a pastoral escape, or an attempt to get laid.  When we next checked in with The PWHLTA of H, it was the eighteenth century.  By this point he was beginning to learn how to work in the marketplace, but for the most part he hung on his aristocratic patron, and envisioned his relation to power in quite immediate, face-to-face terms, as the guide and gentle advisor to His Lordship.  By the Romantic period, though The PWHLTA of H found himself alienated, an on-the-run semi-bohemian, radically critical of the world that seemed to have no place for him.  He dreamed that posterity would come to his rescue, and that his works would slowly become the foundations for how everyone thought and felt.  This went on until the Victorian period, when for various social reasons the poet was recruited by the middle class to speak their values back at them.  The poet worried a bit over this, since the values of the bourgeoisie were only partially his (he also had the values of the aesthetic producer).  But they offered him a lordship and a lot of praise, and he felt he was defending the responsible classes against chaos, so on her wrote.  Then further changes in publishing, literacy, and the valuation of poetry lost him his big public, and in a new, modernist guise, the poet (now going by the name Ezra Pound) picked up the old Shelleyan idea of being a kind of unacknowledged legislator.  Well, that's the story so far — full of lacunae, deeply oversimplified, but not entirely wrong, I hope.


To add just a little subtlety to the picture of the modernist poet's dreams of how he might relate to power, let's increase our sample size from one (Pound) to two, and take a quick look at how Eliot dreamed of the poet's relation to power.  In his quiet, understated, uptight way Eliot actually dreamed of immense power for poets — or, at any rate, for the right kind of poet, the poet who, like himself, was a kind of Christian intellectual.  Like Pound, he dreamed of having enormous cultural authority, and like Pound, he had to find some kind of way to get past the enormous fact of poetry's relative marginalization after it's brief Victorian high-water mark.


I suppose I should pause here and say that it's probably not a good idea to uncritically valorize the high Victorian period just because it was the last period in which an Anglo-Saxon country put poets on a pedestal and, en masse, turned their yearning eyes to poetry for moral guidance.  The idea is enough to make many poets drool, but we have to remember that the conditions that created such reverence for poetry involved things like the lack of working-class literacy, the lack of inexpensive books and mass education, a deep insecurity on the part of the middle class about their status vis-a-vis aristocrats, and the absence of the social sciences as a means of gaining knowledge about society (if you're interested in this kind of excruciating minutia, you might be the few who will actually want to read my essay "The Discursive Situation of Poetry," which is coming out right about now in The Monkey and the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics).

Anyway.  Eliot had to deal with the question of the relative decline of poetry's importance in Britain and America in the twentieth century.  He felt deeply that intellectuals should have some kind of leading role in culture, but, as he said in a letter to Philip Mariet: "the whole question of the popularization of ideas (and the avoidance of perversion of them) deserves our consideration, and I don't know where to begin."  What to do, in a modern age that seemed (as his pal Pound put it) to demand "a mould in plaster,/Made with no loss of time,/A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster/Or the "sculpture" of rhyme"?  


Rather than face the problem of modernity full-on, Eliot does a kind of end-run, and dreams of a return to the kind of pre-modern world where (he imagines) the poet and man of letters could take a leading role in culture and society.  Eliot's most notorious presentation of this dream of premodernity comes in his weird little book of criticism After Strange Gods.  Here he tells us that "stability is obviously necessary" in society, and that the most stable kind of society is the agrarian.  The modern industrial world is too fraught with perpetual change, and too prone to creating a culturally fragmented world. "The population should be homogenous," says Eliot, and "what is still more important is unity of religious background." He then makes his odious comment about not wanting too many Jews around (this, in 1934, is even harder to excuse than it would be otherwise).


Why is this social and religious homogeneity so important to Eliot?  Not everyone is aware of how much commentary Eliot wrote for the specifically Christian press, but if we root around in this considerable body of work, we can come up with quite a clear picture of what a Christian society meant for Eliot.  One thing it meant was this: a society that was to be guided, ultimately, by humanistic intellectuals.  As he said in a 1945 issue of the Christian News Letter "expert and authoritative theological minds" should be final judge of goals of a society, and other kinds of experts (economists, say) should stick to working out the means to those ends.  Eliot's book The Idea of a Christian Society makes if even more specific.  Here, he tells us that the general populace should be thought of as a "Christian Community," and this community should be led by a "Community of Christians" composed of "the consciously and thoughtfully practising Christians, especially those of intellectual and spiritual superiority."  This all sounds a little bit like the guardians in Plato's Republic, but Eliot hastens to clarify the informality of this community: 

The Community of Christians is not an organization, but a body of indefinite outline; composed of both clergy and laity, of the more conscious, more spiritually and intellectually developed of both.  It will be their identity of belief and aspiration, their background of common culture, which will enable them to influence and be influenced by each other, and collectively to form the conscious mind and the consciousness of the nation.[if you want to know more about this, check out Stefan Collini's chapter on Eliot in Absent Minds, to which I am indebted here].

Like Pound and Shelley, Eliot dreams of influencing the consciousness of the masses, of being a kind of unacknowledged legislator.  But instead of dreaming of an unrealistic power within the existing society, Eliot dreams of an entirely plausible kind of power — in a society that doesn't exist.  That is: Shelley and Pound were aware of their social conditions, and decided, despite evidence to the contrary, that poets had enormous unseen influence.  Eliot dreamed of a society where a poet could, by being part of an informally ruling elite, have an important role, but the society he dreamed of simply didn't exist.  Not in his time, and probably not at any time.  I'm sure his desire for a kind of cultural authority is behind his crackpot-ish theory of a time before a "dissociation of sensibility," and behind his relocation to England, where the mixing of literary and social and political elites did — and, to a very limited degree, still does — exist more than in the United States.


Robert Pinsky makes for an interesting contrast with Eliot, in that the kind of ideal society he imagines couldn't be more different than Eliot's.  In contrast to the Eliot's stable, homogenous, theologically oriented society, Pinsky celebrates the now-old ideal of the American melting pot.  Pinsky's poem "The Figured Wheel" is all about cultural syncretism, and his poem in praise of the saxophone is really a poem in praise of cultures mixing and melding (it is, after all, the tale of how a Belgian instrument became a jazz instrument — that is, an African-American instrument).  This is progressive, compared to Eliot.  Some might argue that it's a bit reactionary in the age of identity politics: Pinsky is not about celebrating particularist identity, except at the scale of the nation as a whole.  He's interested in the idea of America as a modern, polyglot place of cultural melding.  It's not quite a utopia, though, especially because of the racial inequities.  And it's in the discussion of race in the book-length poem An Explanation of America that we can see Pinsky trying out different ideas of how the poet might relate to power.  


Racial division, says Pinsky in An Explanation of America, makes America “as Malcom X once said,/A prison.”  “Living inside a prison,/Within its many other prisons, what/Should one aspire to be? a kind of chaplain?” he asks.  The role of chaplain, the comforter of the people, appeals to him, but only momentarily.  His faith in that role soon fades: “But chaplains, I have heard, are often powers,/Political, within their prisons, patrons/And mediators between frightened groups.”  Consoling will solve nothing.  Indeed, the very possibility of consolation seems beyond reach:

No kind of chaplain ever will mediate

Among the conquering, crazed immigrants

Of El Camino and the Bergen Mall,

The Jews who dream up the cowboy films, the Blacks

Who dream the music, the people who dream the cars

And ways of voting, the Japanese and Basques…

The chaplain idea — the notion of being a kind of mediator between different groups with conflicting interests — comes straight out of Matthew Arnold's ideal role for cultured people in Culture and Anarchy (Lionel Trilling nailed it when he said what Arnold really wanted was for intellectuals to serve as a kind of "umpire class" mediating social conflict).  But if Pinsky dreams of having such a role, he's also skeptical of it, thinking it both impossible and prone to co-optation.  Here we see a self-critical side of Pinsky that his detractors don't often mention.


In actuality, I think Pinsky tries to act out a kind of Tennysonian role as public moralist, but he does so in both literary and cultural circumstances that limit the possibilities for success. Firstly, the public moralist is didactic, and we live in a literary climate radically at odds with the notion of the didactic.  Pinsky's early critical book The Situation of Poetry sets out to defend statement-oriented, discursive, and even didactic or moralistic poetry against fragmentation, hermeticism, and communication by image (the old modernist premises), but this is a reactive move, and no matter how much more didactic and discursive Pinsky is than the norm of our time, he doesn't come close to the didacticism of the public side of Tennyson.  Everything has a bit of negative capability to it, even a trace of inconclusivity — which makes public moralism difficult.  But the more serious factors limiting Pinsky's ability to take on a kind of Tennysonian role are social: the reading audience, now, is more fragmented than in Tennyson's day, and one cannot speak to it with the confidence that one is voicing its views for it.  If you want to speak of and for a group, now, you kind of have to specify which group (hence the success of identity-politics oriented poetry, at least for a while).  I once went to some length arguing that Pinsky pitched his work to not to poetry-professionals, but to the professional wing of the upper-middle class (you know: psychiatrists, lawyers, professors of things other than English, that sort of thing).  I still think I was mostly right.  Anyway: I think one thing Pinsky's career shows us is the limited degree to which one can now succeed at the Tennysonian game.  Compare their sales figures (especially in relation to the size of the book market), the degree to which they were talked about, the meaning of their laureateships, and then stack the pile of awards Pinsky has received from foundations up and see if they even reach knee-high on Tennyson's lordship.


Pinsky, we should remember, has a seemingly unlimited supply of hustle (we were talking, once, about how much he traveled, and when I asked him how long it had been since he'd slept anywhere but a hotel, he had to stare off into space for a while, brow furrowed while he tried to remember).  If the Tennysonian game won't work for him, under current conditions, it isn't likely to work for anyone.  And most poets don't seem to want to try, anyway.   For reasons that I once tried to pin down in an essay, most poets in America (among other places) now feel quite alienated from power, and are prone to the kinds of worries Pinsky raised in his passage about the complicity of chaplains.  And for many, the old Shelleyan solution seems to be back in vogue: the notion that somehow (how one doesn't know) the work will get out there and have an influence.  I once argued with some of the people who'd written on Jeremy Prynne, and claimed that his poetry (read by a tiny but often intense audience) had smashed the public sphere and had an enormous political impact. I suppose I was arguing against this kind of semi-Shelleyean view.  It made a bunch of people angry: Simon Howard, for instance, asked "Even if you are 'right' about the limits of what poetry can achieve in the world, why so important to insist upon it? Or to quarantine poetry in this way? Why can't poetry be part of a series of actions, interventions?"  I thought this was interesting — in that Howard seemed to think that the fact that I was saying there was no evidence of poetry acting as a political powerful entity was what kept it from being so.  I mean, it's not like I'm the one stopping Prynne from influencing public discourse.


Anyway.  What I think we really need is a way of understanding the situation of poetry that explains why it functions the way it does, why it has the capabilities it has and why it lacks the capabilities it lacks.  I'd also like to understand more why so many poets want so badly for poetry to have powers of the kind it so rarely seems to have had in modern metropolitan societies.  I suppose what we need, really, are answers to Howard's questions about actions and interventions.

The Poet Dreams of Power: Part One

The critic Robert von Hallberg has retired from the faculty at the University of Chicago, and the editors of the Chicago Review have marked the occasion by running a series of essays on poetry and poetics in his honor.  In true, inimitable Hyde Park style, they honor von Hallberg by beginning the feature with a short essay picking him to pieces, saying the claims of his book Lyric Powers "are extraordinary, even irresponsible."  I like this, mostly because it embodies the best spirit of the Chicago Review: serious about the life of the mind, and a bit unworldly and impolitic.  I think this must have something to do with the fact that the journal has always been edited by graduate students: they're not in charge long enough to become too complacent, and they're not hooked into networks of mutual academic or literary obligation that might keep them from saying what they mean when they disagree with someone.


One of the essays dedicated to von Hallberg, Keith Tuma's "After the Bubble," speculates on the fate of poetry after the financial crisis, and its inevitable effect on the university creative writing programs where so many American poets currently find themselves employed.  In the course of pursuing some larger points, he makes a comment about Robert Pinsky that got me thinking about the relationship between poets and power — or, more precisely, that got me thinking about how poets have dreamed about how they would like to relate to those in positions of power.  Here's Tuma's remark:

In Robert von Hallberg's recent book Lyric Powers (2008), Pinsky's poetry, which is rooted, von Hallberg thinks, in "imitation of speech," is linked to "the premise that civil, secular values properly govern cultural life." While von Hallberg admits that some readers find Pinsky's poetry boring, he views Pinsky's "patient hypotactic style" as a credible and considered alternative to modernist juxtaposition and speed.  To take on a claim like that would make for serious debate.  Von Hallberg is not shy about identifying Pinsky with power.  But without a critical discourse about poetry and power and these other matters, criticism of Pinsky will continue to operate like gossip...

I'm in agreement with Tuma that we need some kind of a deep, non-anecdotal understanding of the relationship between poetry and power, something that gets beyond claiming that one or another poet is resistant to, or complicit with, the powers-that-be.  I hope the book I've been working on, formerly called The Aesthetic Anxiety, now called Poetics and Power — a social history of the idea of aesthetic autonomy in poetry — will be a contribution to such an understanding, but I'm only about halfway done, and by no means assured that the outcome will be of interest to anyone.  So, in the absence of an understanding of the actual relations between poetry and power, let me offer instead a brief, highly selective history of the way some poets writing in English over the past two centuries have dreamed about how they would like to relate to power.  Robert Pinsky certainly appears from some perspectives (von Hallberg's and, I think, Tuma's) to have a somewhat cozy relationship with power.  But seen in historical perspective, things change a bit: compared to some poets, Pinsky is neither close to power, nor desirous of such proximity.  Compared to others, he just appears more successful in realizing his dreams.


It's tough to know where to begin a discussion of the poets and their dreams of how they might relate to power.  I suppose some small gesture to an era when the differentiation of literary elites and power elites had not yet occurred is in order.  Consider the Elizabethans: Sir Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Sir Edward Dyer, Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, Sir Walter Raleigh, William Shakespeare, Thomas Campion, Sir Henry Wotton, John Hoskins, Edmund Spenser.  All those "sirs" give a pretty clear picture of the situation: for the most part, the literary elite and the power elite were one and the same.  Of the non-knighted and non-nobel, Spenser was a big landowner in Ireland, and Hoskins was a member of parliament, so they too were members of a power elite.  Campion was a successful physician, and therefore an exception to the power elite rule, as were the two playwrights Marlowe and Shakespeare, who were part of the fledgling world of commercial writing.  As for how they dreamed of their relations to power: well, it varied.  But for the most part they saw their roles as poets as subordinate to their roles as movers-and-shakers, and poems as either pastoral escapism or as the jewels on the pommels of the weapons they used in the cut-and-thrust of courtly life.  Spenser did try to convert The Faerie Queen into a big cash payment from the sovereign (the idea was nixed by Lord Burghley, with the famous comment "all of that for a song?"), but even here it was less a matter of trying to influence power with poetry than of trying to put poetry at the service of power (huge, now-unread, tracts of The Faerie Queen are dedicated to Church politics, and propagandizing against Catholicism).


There's a long, slow differentiation of elites in the centuries that follow.  But let's fast-forward to Alexander Pope in the Augustan eighteenth century.  Pope's interesting for all sorts of reasons, not just for the snazzy hats he wore.  For one thing, he was among the first English poets to make a lot of money by selling poetry in the marketplace.  He lived at a kind of liminal period, when the system of relying on aristocratic patronage hadn't yet died off, and the market system was just kicking into gear.  The relation he had with power may, in fact, have been as a kind of housecat (one noble patron liked to stop Pope during readings and revise lines, such being the patron's prerogative).  But he dreamed of himself as a kind of spirtitual and moral advisor, not speaking so much on matters of immediate political urgency, but offering general principles that might inform the decisions of the powerful at a more abstract level.  Consider the opening of "An Essay on Man":

Awake, my St. John! leave all meaner things
To low ambition, and the pride of kings.
Let us (since life can little more supply
Than just to look about us and to die)
Exatiate free o'er all the scene of man;
A mighty maze! but not without a plan;
A wild, where weeds and flowers promiscuous shoot,
Or garden, tempting with forbidden fruit.
Together let us beat this ample field...

The "St. John" is Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, and one of Pope's most powerful friends.  Pope envisions himself as a companion of the good Viscount Bolingbroke, and envisions the two of them engaged in aristocratic activities together (to beat the field was to send runners out into it with sticks to scare the birds, who would then fly up to be shot by the noble hunter and his companions).  The tone is friendly, if a bit deferential, and the relationship to his Lordship is as philosophical guide: the word's a maze, but not without a plan — a plan the poet will explain to the Great Man in ways that will enable him to carry out his duties of state in a philosophically informed manner.  If the deference might make some of us cringe, now, the proximity to power would make more than a few poets blanche with envy.


We start to get closer to a recognizably modern relationship of poetry and power with the Romantics — if only because the Romantics were often either radical bohemians with no direct influence on power (think Shelley) or government-sponsored former radicals whose views now seemed less threatening (think Wordsworth).  The document of the time that seems most representative of the poet's dream of his relation to power is Shelley's "Defense of Poetry." It was never published in his lifetime, but has had a huge allure for generations of poets since — and why wouldn't it?  It really lets you have your cake and eat it too.  On the one hand, the poet is responsible only to his private vision, not the demands of the market or the audience of any kind of patron, none of which were much available to Shelley anyway.  On the other hand, the poet has enormous influence: his ideas shape the consciousness of the ages to come.  All of this has its origins in Shelley's arguments with his father in law, the philosopher William Godwin: Godwin said philosophers were the primary thinkers of society, and poets should serve as publicists for philosophical ideas.  Shelley turned the relationship around, saying that poets inspire everyone, including philosophers, to think in new ways.  The process is gradual, spreading bit by bit through readers of the poet to those who are influenced at second or third or fourth hand — the original viral marketing.  Hence the unacknowledged legislator: sure, no one knows you influenced the world, but that's not important: what's important is that the influence happens.  Of course there's no proof that the influence really takes place.  As Lou Reed might put it, you need a busload of faith to believe in this sort of thing.  But poets tend to have a lot of faith in poetry: when I was arguing about the political impact of poetry with Andrea Brady in the pages of The Cambridge Literary Review last year, I couldn't help but think she was a bit of a Shelleyan, and that I was a bit of a nay-saying grinch.  Anyway, the point is this: Shelley's dream of enormous influence is the product of a kind of alienation of the poet from power: Sir Walter Raleigh didn't look for such indirect influence on politics.  When he wanted to make things happen politically, he schemed with other courtiers.  Nor did Alexander Pope look for some secret, long-term, possible-but-unprovable political influence: if he wanted political influence, he buttered Lord Bolingbroke's toast and made some subtle, inoffensive suggestions.  You have to be pretty removed from actual legislators to pin your hopes on small scale, but just possibly viral, influence on public opinion.


It's not quite a straight line from Shelley to us, though.  I mean, think about Tennyson.

“Tennyson,” Eliot once wrote, was “the saddest of all English poets, among the Great in Limbo, the most instinctive rebel against the society in which he was the perfect conformist.” Eliot is certainly right to sense a conflict at the heart of Tennyson.  But to explain the dissonance in Tennyson in psychological terms — as a matter of rebellious instincts and the urge to conform — is to miss the way those very instincts were conditioned by Tennyson’s peculiar moment in the history of English society and the history of poetry.  His was a time when social disorder and growing middle-class power — both products of industrial development — weighed on every thinker’s mind.  It was also a time when ideas of the autonomy from power, fully developed by the Shelley and other Romantics, were bequeathed to new generations of writers.

Tennyson, in ways more instinctive than calculated, came to embrace a role on offer to many writers of his time: that of public moralist.  Literary public moralists both propagated the values of the middle class and urged the amelioration of those values in an effort that, collectively, made a major contribution to the cementing of a social order beneficial to the middle class.  This public moralist is the Tennyson most famous in his own day, the teacher of domestic order in The Princess and Idylls of the King, the prophet of self-denial in Maud and Enoch Arden, the instiller of faith in progress in “Locksley Hall,” and the obedient servant of empire in “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”  The public moralist acting on behalf of the bourgeois order did not, and could not, sit at ease with another side of Tennyson, the late-Romantic poet who’d loved Keats’ poetry, and who had carved “Byron is dead” into stone when, as a youth, he’d heard of the great Romantic’s passing.  Part of Tennyson was always loyal to one of the big Romantic ideas of the poet — as an alienated outsider creating works that sought not so much to speak to the world but to form themselves into mysterious symbolic wholes, or to hover in the delicious indecisiveness of negative capability (this isn’t the Shelleyan idea — it’s more Coleridge and Keats).  Tennyson spent a lifetime at war with himself, his intellectual and aesthetic inheritance ever at odds with the social role he was asked to play, and was so richly rewarded — in sales, in status, in honors — for playing.  His path is that of the poet divided.

Tennyson was, I should stress, far from insincere in his moralism, however much at odds it may have been with his equally sincere aestheticism.  He was, after all, connected to the powerful class on whose behalf he wrote, and he had seen enough of the social disorder of the 1830s and 40s to understand the value of an orderly society.  The authentic Tennyson, then, is not a figure on one side of the aesthete/moralist rift: the authentic Tennyson is the rift, and the product of very specific, and quite contradictory, socio-aesthetic conditions.  So: on the one hand, he was close to, and spoke for, power.  But that was only part of his dream, the fulfilled part.  The other part of his dream was to be withdrawn from the world of power, and to exist in a world of art for its own sake.

That's probably more on Tennyson than anyone wants to read, but I spent all of last summer writing about him, and you know how it goes: anything shorter than three paragraphs seems like too little of an explanation when you think you really know what you're talking about.

Anyway.  The coziness between Tennyson and some other Victorian poets and the newly-powerful middle classes ends, for a whole host of reasons  — the economics of publishing in the era of mass literacy, the relative growth in authority of the social sciences at the expense of the authority of the man of letters, the lessening sense of social crisis in England after the 1850s, the slow loosening of bonds between social, economic, and cultural elites, and other things, most of them dealt with very well in T.W. Heyck's astonishingly informative The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England, which is indispensable in understanding what happens to poetry between Tennyson and the modernists.  So we end up with poets once again alienated from power and dreaming of ways that their work might have importance or influence.


Ezra Pound makes for an interesting case in point.  He was always concerned with the social role of the poet: in the essay "The Wisdom of Poetry" he said "in former ages, poets were historians, genealogists, religious functionaries."  But in his own day the role seemed rather more unclear.  Mass culture, Pound intuited, had something to do with the change.  "Hugh Selwyn Mauberly" expresses the alienation of the poet in the age of mass communications, incipient mass consumption, and the economic importance of the masses whose tastes were so different from the elites poets had once served:

The age demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace,
Something for the modern stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;


Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries
Of the inward gaze;
Better mendacities
Than the classics in paraphrase!


The "age demanded" chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the "sculpture" of rhyme.

That was from 1920.  A year later, Pound offered his dream of a solution to the problem of the poet's role in modern times.  As it turned out, it was a remarkably Shelleyan dream of indirect influence.  Here's a passage from the article I'm thinking of, "How to Read," which — perhaps ironically — ran in the very kind of mass media vehicle that was so dislocating poets: The New York Herald Tribune:

The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati...when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot.

In this dream of poetic influence on power, the "governor or legislator" probably has no idea that his language, and, by implication, his mental framework has been conditioned by the poet.  But in controlling the meanings of words, poets have an enormous power as unacknowledged legislators.  One might well argue that it isn't the literati who control the meaning of words, since their contribution to these matters is quantitatively minimal in relation to the products of mass culture.  But arguments are for reasoners, and Pound isn't reasoning here so much as he's dreaming of a way for the things he loves to be important not just to him, but to the polity at large.  There's will-to-power here, for sure, and a compensatory gesture — the sort of thing Seamus Heaney, in a very different context, would call "pap for the dispossessed."  The dispossessed here being poets in modernity.

Egad.  It's time for me to hop a train, and I haven't talked about Eliot, Pinsky, some comments by Larry Sawyer, or Jeremy Prynne.  I'll try to pick up where I left off with my next post, probably tomorrow.  I mean, the new semester is about to begin, and I've got some print writing deadlines coming right up — conditions that always seem to drive me to blog instead of doing any kind writing or thinking that feels like an obligation.


{Here's part two}


{Update Jan. 11: The good people at the Poetry Foundation raise a crucial point about this discussion}

On Not Tearing Down MoMa: Or, What's Bernstein's Game, Anyway?

If you'd wandered into the garden lobby of the Museum of Modern Art early last February, you might have met the sight (and considerable sound) of Charles Bernstein declaiming from Marinetti's 1909 "Fururist Manifesto." It might have been a bit unnerving, since in addition to calling for new types of beauty the manifesto cries out for the glorification of war, and nationalism, the denigration of feminism and of women in general, and the destruction of libraries and museums. As this last call echoed forth, you'd have been forgiven for looking nervously around you to see if the black-clad New Yorkers were responsive to this line of rhetoric, ready to rise from their poses of studied torpor and tear MoMa, brick by brick, to the ground.

There was no need to worry, though. The crowd remained docile. Neither they nor Bernstein seemed to want to actually act on Marinetti's words (for which I'm grateful — I like museums, and women, and I'm not keen on war). In fact, Bernstein followed up by reading from a feminist manifesto by Mina Loy, presumably as a kind of penance for having belted out Marinetti's misogynist remarks. Bernstein then read a manifesto of his own, though one with a curious origin for the manifesto genre. It was commissioned by Poetry magazine, and composed by Bernstein alone, not on behalf of some rag-tag group of outsider malcontents sulking in a garret in some low-rent arrondissement. Even more curious than the origin of Bernstein's manifesto, given the properties of the genre, was the curious lack of agenda, the absence of emphasis on any kind of collective program (Bernstein's manifesto defined language poetry as "a loose affliation of unlike individuals"), and the lack of the genre's usual stress on some kind of aesthetic/political newness. The manifesto opens by drawing attention to this last lack: "I love originality so much," says Bernstein, "I keep copying it."  Later he adds "I’m the derivative product of an originality that spawns me as it spurns me. "


So what's Bernstein's game? Marinetti's Futurist manifesto was many things (including bellicose and misogynistic), but first and foremost it was an avant-garde statement, with everything that implies: it was for aesthetic newness, but also for smashing the institutions (like museums) that separated art from the rest of life.  "A roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace," said Marinetti, and part of the meaning of his claim was that the truest beauty exists outside the halls dedicated to hallowing aesthetic appreciation and reverence for tradition.  And whatever else we may say about Bernstein's reading of the "Futurist Manifesto" at MoMa, it wasn't an avant-garde event.  The crowd didn't rise up to topple the sculpture behind Bernstein, nor was he disappointed that they didn't.  After all, he still had Loy to read from, and the piece he'd written at the behest of the Poetry Foundation.  And it's not just that Bernstein seemed comfortable in the kind of institution Marinetti loathed.  In reading Marinetti and Loy, Bernstein was doing something else Marinetti despised: honoring the literary past.  Not only did Bernstein do his level-best to read from Marinetti with the requisite passion: he later spoke in defense of the genre of the manifesto itself, praising its chief anthologist (Mary Ann Caws) and attacking those who think poetry can do without the genre (a set of straw men, I think, since they went unnamed and the arguments attributed to them seemed incredibly simple).


If the game wasn't avant-gardism, what was it?  I don't think there was anything so simple as a smug irony, though there was certainly opportunity enough to make one had that been Bernstein's intent.  After all, he was reading from a document calling for the destruction of museums in a museum.  It would have been easy to turn the reading into an event that said "ha ha, you lost, we museum-lovers are still here, and we can read your words without fear," like a bunch of GOP plutocrats chuckling over a copy of the Communist Manifesto that somehow turned up at the country club.  But the reading of Marinetti served as prelude to a defense of the idea of manifestos, so ironic smugness wasn't Bernstein's game, either.

The name of Bernsteins' game is, I think, arrière-gardisme.  The term arrière-garde has been used in a number of different senses, but the one that pertains here is the one articulated by William Marx and the contributors to the collection of essays he edited in 2004, Les arrière-garde au XXe siècle (the idea has also been used with reference to American writing in Marjorie Perloff's recent Unoriginal Genius).  Marx's idea is that much experimental writing from the middle of the twentieth century onward bears strong affinities to the historical avant-garde, but has an difference as well: unlike the original avant-garde, arrière-gardistes  show a reverence for the history of avant-garde writings and actions, and wish to preserve or extend them.  While a poet like Marinetti dreamed of the destruction of traditions and museums, a poet like Charles Bernstein reveres the avant-garde past, seeking to revive the literary and cultural energies that were lost during the First World War. 

If Bernstein is seen as an avant-gardist, it’s hard to explain why he read from Marinetti’s manifesto in the Museum of Modern Art: from an avant-garde perspective, reading Marinetti in such a context seems at best like an irony, at worst like a betrayal.  But when we see Bernstein as a member of the arrière-garde, the picture changes.  An arrière-gardist, after all, has something an avant-gardist did not have: an avant-garde tradition behind him.  And a museum is a perfectly appropriate place to revere tradition.


[Update January 5, 2011: Joyelle McSweeney takes issue with this post in interesting ways]

The Liberal Arts as Archimedean Point

The seasons govern us, we professors, just as surely as they governed our agrarian ancestors.  Like farmers, we find the nature of our work determined by the flux of seasons, although we seem somehow to have lost a season in the transition from the cultivation of the soil to the cultivation of the liberal arts.  If we teach on the American semester system, our year divides into spring, summer, and fall.  While those of us in the northern tier of the country certainly shiver from December to March, we don’t recognize winter as a full season, instead relegating it to a brief “winter break.”  Our real seasons consist of the spring and fall semesters — each with an arc of its own from the “here’s a syllabus” moment through the real teaching and on to the terrible grind of end-of-semester grading — and the impossibly glorious summer, when, unless we’ve resigned ourselves to post-tenure intellectual rust, we rev the engines of research as high as they’ll go, and see how far they’ll take us.  So for me, the fall just ended a few days ago, with the essays and exams done and the grades turned in to the registrar.  And I find myself asking some of the same questions I ask every year around this time: what is it we’re doing, anyway, and in what possible way can it matter?

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not cynical.  In fact, my instinct is to believe in what we in the liberal arts do, at least in principle.  But what, exactly, is it, and why is it worth believing in?  I took a stab at an answer in one of my notebooks while my students were writing their exam on Romanticism.  Here, in slightly cleaned-up form, is what I came up with.


*

First of all, there’s no such thing as the liberal arts — or, to put it in a less showy way, there’s no absolute consensus about what the liberal arts are, nor any consensus on how or why they’re taught.  In fact, let’s begin with a moment of dissensus: a faculty meeting many months ago, during which I nearly ground my teeth into a fine white powder while a much-respected colleague held forth passionately on the education of new students.  “With first-year students,” he maintained “we should remember that we’re teaching skills, not content — so by all means be willing to let the content slide while you concentrate on building fundamentals like the capacity for critical thought.”  He continued in this vein for some time, with the usual response from the end-of-day crowd: a combination of nodding (some ostentatious, some not) and tired-eyed staring into space, followed, at his oratorical terminus, by polite applause.  Maybe it was my background in literary studies, where the simple distinction between form and content is generally rejected; maybe it was my pathological anti-authoritarianism (my inner anarchist punk grabbed me by the shoulder of my dingy corduroy blazer and noted that the speaker was some kind of dean and, therefore, wrong — Q.E.D.); maybe it was an orneriness introduced into my system by the digestive acrobatics required to process a cafeteria calzone.  Whatever the reason, I took quiet exception — loud exception being, as I have slowly learned, a sure way to prolong the very meeting from which one years to escape.

The basis of my exception-taking was this: the speaker’s assumption that critical thinking was in some way abstractable from what he dismissed as the mere “content” of study.  This struck me as entirely false, possibly damagingly so, and very much at odds with my personal sense of the liberal arts.  To my mind, there can be no such thing as disembodied or contextless critical thinking.  To think critically one needs some kind of Archimedean point outside of one’s own inherited assumptions, some introduction to a mode of life or way of thinking that is other and alien, that doesn’t operate with reference to the coordinates to which we reflexively refer for guidance.  There are a limitless number of such points, but in whatever version, they all fall into the seemingly inert category of “content.”  Much of the thinking that went into multiculturalism, and into the old triad of race/gender/class, makes an argument of this kind: by understanding, say, the complexities of how gender has been defined, codified, and normalized in different times and places, one can step outside one’s inherited assumptions; by reading the imaginative literature of an ethnic group not your own, one can suddenly find oneself seeing the world of one’s understandings from the outside; by looking into the systems by which social groups seek to establish status one can gain critical insight into one’s own social being.


On a good day, the study of “content” can even give one an Archimedean point outside one’s own categories of analysis, categories like race, gender, and class.  I had the privilege of being in a room where this happened to about a hundred people at once.  It was at a conference on postcolonial literature, when the Tanzanian scholar Joseph Mbele rose up and interrupted the American speaker who’d been impressing us all with talk about how we needed to get beyond generalizations about the postcolonial, and introduce into it the subtleties of race, gender, and class.  “When,” asked Mbele, “will my village matter?”  He continued by explaining, in some detail, the methods for identity-construction and categorization in his hometown, many of which revolved around excruciatingly complex notions of kinship obligation.  Our categories were interesting, but they were definitely Western categories, and we needed to think of them as such, rather than as timeless and placeless universals.  Had Mbele not walked us, however briefly, through the “content” of Tanzanian notions of identity, we wouldn’t have been able to step outside the assumptions of what we’d mistaken for a rather cosmopolitan point of view.

To my mind, historical study of any kind (literary, artistic, scientific, mathematic, political, what have you) is one of the most powerful means of stepping outside one’s inherited assumptions and gaining a critical perspective on them.  The remoteness of things, the utter alienness of the ways people from other periods thought and lived and embodied their subjectivities — this is no inert pile of facts, “content” that one must unfortunately get rid of on the way to gaining the skill of critical thought.  Historical knowledge is, instead, the vehicle by which we may move from where we are, in our understandings of ourselves and the world, to where we might be.  Get to know how people thought about economics before we even had the word “economy” in anything like the modern sense of the term, and you’ll be positioned to understand the contemporary financial crisis in ways you never would have been able to otherwise.  Get to understand how an ancient Greek saw his or her relationship to the obligations of the polis, and you’ll see everything about how we operate as a body politic as if for the first time.


I made the mistake, once, of proposing to the faculty that we consider historical difference a category as important as gender or ethnic difference when we give students credit for taking required cultural diversity courses. Most of my students are American women born within the last quarter century.  Strangely, they can get diversity credit for a course on the modern women’s novel, but not for a course on, say, Beowulf.  And one could reasonably argue that Beowulf comes from a set of cultural assumptions more different from those students' own than, say, the assumptions informing the work of Joyce Carol Oates.  I think people assumed I was trying to argue for the reinstatement of Ye Olde Literarie Canone, though, and it didn’t fly.  It was probably my fault for not coming at it differently.  I mean, I was young enough to believe that the way to get something done was to introduce the idea in a meeting, then sit back in arm-folded Righteousness and await acceptance by the throng.  Politic I was not.

*

These were the things I thought about, as I watched my students writing their exams.  And I wondered, too: had the students in my seminar on Romanticism been learning critical thinking?  I certainly hadn’t stopped with the Hazlitt and Keats all of a sudden to say it was time to work on our critical thinking skills.  Nor had I started every day with an injunction to critically interrogate the texts before us, seeking out their odiously out-of-date assumptions and holding them up for criticism — I actually attended a course like this when I was a student, a course in which a fellow student once confessed to the fresh-from-Yale-in-the-90s professor that she didn’t know what to say about the text, but she knew "there must be something wrong with it, or we wouldn’t be reading it.”  In fact, I think that kind of “critical thinking” is hardly critical at all: it’s just an imposing of our present views onto the past, in order to find the past wanting.  It’s not much different than the kind of smugness Joseph Mbele exploded at that postcolonial conference I’d attended.  The best kind of critical thinking, I suppose, is the kind that comes when we let the culturally different interrogate us as much as we interrogate the assumptions of the culturally different.  It’s in the meeting of the two different cultural horizons that some of the most powerful critical thinking can occur.  And that’s a matter of content.