Showing papers in "Contemporary Literature in 1980"

Psychic Geography in "Gravity's Rainbow"

Abstract: In its use of a symbolic and psychic geography, Gravity's Rainbow recalls romantic novels in which a region of adventure and magical possibility exists apart from ordinary, civilized "reality." Scott's scheme of wild Scotland to the north and orderly England to the south was simply turned on its side by Fenimore Cooper, locating America's magic, its mythology, to the west, and its prosaic daily business in the east. Similarly, Emily Bronte, in Wuthering Heights, makes Thrushcross Grange the place of social order and rationality, and Wuthering Heights synonymous with a psychic energy that opposes and levels the social order and transcends the boundaries of "reality" itself when that energy demands consummation by ghosts. In postromantic novels such as Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" ironic variations are worked upon this kind of geography: the magical country of possibility becomes a "dark continent," a Hell of vast and transcendent suffering, cruelty, terror, and depravity. The mythic alternative to common social reality is shown to be nightmare as well as dream, as Huck Finn discovers when he escapes from the genteel domestic trap of the widow's home to a dream river traveled after dark that carries him

The Central Line down the Middle of "To the Lighthouse"

Abstract: Shortly after he had read To the Lighthouse, Roger Fry wrote to Virginia Woolf praising the novel but confessing confusion over the "symbolic meaning" of the lighthouse. She replied with some irony, "I meant nothing by The Lighthouse. One has to have a central line down the middle of the book to hold the design together."' The curious thing about her explanation of the lighthouse as "a central line" is that she used much the same words to describe the completion of Lily Briscoe's painting and the novel: "She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With sudden intensity, as if she saw clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished."2 On the basis of the wording of the letter quoted above, it seems reasonable to assume that Lily's line represents the lighthouse. Avrom Fleishman, working from the same letter, has made the appearance of the line a matter of visionary point of view; that is, Lily sees the lighthouse in the far distance of the scene she has been painting and paints it, so that "the distant perspective is joined to the

An Interview with A. R. Ammons

Abstract: In "Grace Abounding," A. R. Ammons remarks, "Ah, what an abundance is in the universe." His work suggests that abundance both in its multiplicity-he has already published fourteen books of poetry and won the National Book Award for the Collected Poems 1951-1971-and in its inclusiveness. Refusing to limit himself to any single, static viewpoint, he prefers diversity and motion, seeking to "lean in or with or against the / ongoing so as not to be drowned but to be swept effortlessly / up upon the universal possibilities." In his attempt to explore "everything," Ammons not only experiments with a variety of forms that range from the tiny, circular "Small Poem" to the book-length, linear Sphere, but also willingly surrenders perfection to a wholeness that accommodates garbage, weeds, and rust:

Visible Poetry: Metaphor and Metonymy in the Paintings of Rene Magritte

Abstract: The relationship between verbal and visual images is explored in the painting of Ren6 Magritte, the Belgian surrealist who said that "the function of painting is to make poetry visible." I Magritte uses some of the poet's tools, notably figurative language, as he translates metaphor and metonymy into visual form. The work of structural linguist Roman Jakobson, whose interest in metaphor and metonymy is well known, facilitates an examination of Magritte's images. Metaphor and metonymy are terms usually applied to literature, but by showing that these two types of figurative language are based on relationships of similarity and contiguity which exist outside of verbal realms, Jakobson made those terms applicable to visual expression. Jakobson notes that "the internal relation of similarity (and contrast) underlies the metaphor; the external relation of contiguity (and remoteness) determines the metonymy."2 For example, the stimulus of the word hut might produce "the following substitutive reactions: the tautology hut, the synonyms cabin and hovel; the antonym palace, and the metaphors den and burrow.... [A]ll these responses are linked to the stimulus by semantic similarity (or contrast). Metonymic responses to the same stimulus, such as thatch, litter, poverty, combine and contrast the positional similarity with semantic contiguity."3 Metaphor associates entities on the basis of their similarity or dissimilarity, while metonymy associates entities on the basis of a spatial or temporal relationship. Roland Barthes points out that Jakobson pioneered the use of the terms metaphor and metonymy in extra-verbal realms by

Some Versions Of Modernist Pastoral: Williams And The Precisionists

Abstract: Of all the poets who have been influenced by the visual arts, William Carlos Williams may present the most complex case. Blake, Rossetti, and Pound turned paintings into poems and saw poems become paintings. But none seems able to match the combined range and depth of Williams' involvement in the arts. Blake's work represents a one-man movement in both painting and poetry. Rossetti and his fellow Pre-Raphaelites had a much more uniform style and subject matter than did the artists Williams knew. Pound's artist friends were certainly as diverse as those of Williams, but they exerted a more problematic influence, and it is not surprising that the single most important visual influence on Pound-the ideogram-is largely his own invention. Williams, on the other hand, paid close attention to three quite different art movements. He followed the innovations of Stieglitz' school of "straight" photographers and of the American Precisionist painters, such as Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler, who were influenced by Stieglitz. He also was aware of European cubism and John Marin's American adaptations of the style; studied Dada and surrealism through 291, Duchamp, and later little magazines like Contempo and transition; and kept track of the experiments of a younger generation of Americans who had been influenced by surrealist automatic writing and his own Kora in Hell. Bram Dijkstra was the first critic to take seriously Williams' debt to the visual arts, and he extensively documented Williams' connections with Stieglitz and the artists and intellectuals in his circle.'

An Interview with Robert Duncan

Abstract: been on a great twenty-five-year adventure, and he also saw that I was excused and was at the end of that adventure." Despite his sense that the "Movement is no longer current," Duncan holds that its "spiritual imperative is one that even today will be felt." The following pages suggest the poet's own literary program, his place in his poetic generation, and make clear the romantic and spontaneous character of Duncan's temperament. He analyzes the relationship between his homosexuality and his choice of poetry as a career, emphasizes that he "read Freud straight across," offers his unique view of Olson and the Black Mountain Movement as well as his

Allen Ginsberg's Paul Cezanne and the Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus

Abstract: In 1948 Allen Ginsberg was completing his last year as a student of literature at Columbia University. The previous summer he had experienced several visionary illuminations under the spiritual guidance of what he perceived as the poet William Blake's raised-fromthe-dead, spectral voice. Ginsberg had heard a God-like, cosmic voice; his body had become suffused with supernatural light; and he had, willingly or not, undergone extraordinary, irreversible changes in his personality and his powers of understanding. One of the many vows he had taken that fateful summer (the mystical experiences were interspersed over several vision-haunted weeks) was the dedication of himself to the investigation of unusual modalities of consciousness. In particular, he wanted to explore states of mind that helped alter one's mundane perception and habits of thought. He began then, at twenty-two, a pursuit of mind-altering experiences that would come to have profound impact-not only on his own psychology, but also on his poetry and poetics.2 This was Ginsberg's state of mind when he enrolled in Professor

The Public Monument and Public Poetry: Stevens, Berryman, and Lowell

Abstract: In his study of classical monuments, Philipp Fehl calls the commemorative statue "a work of fiction which serves a public purpose." The sculptor accomplishes this purpose, both commemorative and didactic, when he elevates a public memorial to the level of a moral lesson, becoming, in Fehl's words, "a preceptor of mankind."' As Fehl implies, these monuments are essentially literary, giving expression and shape to public values as much as they decorate a public space. Certain poems that are essentially inscriptions, such as Emerson's "Concord Hymn," adopt this model consciously. But even where it is not taken as a model, the public monument occurs as the symbol of a kind of literature which achieves an intimate public connection. Even Henry James, who rarely felt unequal as a critic, confessed almost wistfully before the monument to Robert Gould Shaw in Boston, "There are works of memorial art that may suddenly place themselves, by their operation in a given case, outside articulate criticism ...." They do so, as James observed of the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, by touching "the general heart. "2 This might seem to be a phenomenon purely of the past. First of all, the character of monuments has changed. As Lewis Mumford declared in 1938, "The notion of a modern monument is veritably a

From Experience to Discourse: American Poetry and Poetics in the Seventies

Abstract: Given the rapid changes in taste, fashion, and values that seem to characterize contemporary culture, it would be surprising not to find contemporary poetry undergoing similar shifts. I cannot promise such a surprise. Instead I shall posit a general opposition between a poetics of immediate experience and a poetics acknowledging its status as discourse in the hope that this distinction can clarify the work of many younger poets only now developing mature voices. By setting their work in contrast to the self-consciously postmodern poetry of the sixties, I hope also to establish some specific ways of speaking about literary change and its relation to cultural change. And finally I want through my analyses to express a personal problem which I hope is a representative one: it seems to me that despite, or perhaps because of, these two different orientations, the poetry of the past two decades leaves us with an unresolvable dichotomy. Either poets recover religious dimensions of experience by invoking an immediacy that fails to voice the full ironic and self-reflexive play of mind or they dramatize their mastery as reflective, judging sensibilities by reducing the subject matter and scope of our lyric traditions. Religion comes to appear trivial or delusive and mature judgment to lack the impassioned self-dramatization of our most compelling lyric voices. A recent essay by Stanley Plumly provides a helpful basis for distinguishing the basic modes of the sixties and the seventies. Speaking for his generation of poets, Plumly characterizes the most problematic trait of their predecessors as a desire to make poetry capture "experience in capital letters." Implicit in Plumly's critique is

Why Beckett's "Enough" Is More or Less Enough

Abstract: "Reduce, reduce, reduce!" wrote Marcel Duchamp, proclaiming a new credo for artistic composition.' Beckett has taken the manifesto at its word, for in his short prose pieces to construct means quite literally to reduce. Ideas collapse into words, contemplation backslides into sensation, and stories revert to color, texture, sensibility, and sensuality. Definitively incomplete, Beckett's formal condensation undermines the elusive and sometimes suspicious relations between his minimalist prose and all other things: "Objects give us everything," Duchamp continued, "but their representation no longer gives us anything. "2 Disengaged from representational imagery and therefore not emblematic, Beckett's work makes us discover in residual prose the literary potential of compressed and frequently abstract patterns, their human overtones, their fleshy colors, and, above all, their pervasive texture of "mucous membrane." As early as Imagination Dead Imagine Beckett offers us a story without the intrusion of any proper subject: "No trace anywhere of life, you say, pah, no difficulty there, imagination not dead yet, yes, dead, good, imagination dead imagine. Islands, waters, azure, verdure, one glimpse and vanished, endlessly, omit." Beckett asks his reader to imagine a totally white world in which imagination itself has finally died. Given such an impossible situation, anything so baroque as a landscape should be logically impossible for any reader

James Merrill: "Revealing by Obscuring"

Abstract: The term "confessional poetry" has earned widespread skepticism: as a generic term, it is mainly misleading.2 Yet it would be hard to trace the development of recent American poetry without reference to the influence of Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956), Robert Lowell's Life Studies (1959), W. D. Snodgrass' Heart's Needle (1960), and the poems collected in Sylvia Plath's Ariel (1966). Whatever claims may be made on behalf of "confessional poetry," it is plain that these books all contributed to the reinstatement of two closely related literary conventions: the notion that poems originate in their subject matter, and the corollary that poets mean, at least literally, what they say. These are of course not "facts" about literature (nor even about these four books) but conventions, rhetorical rules whereby poems

Melodrama in Proust

Abstract: In The Melodramatic Imagination Peter Brooks has shown how a popular nineteenth-century art form such as melodrama was adapted to the novel by such writers as Balzac, Hugo, and, later, Henry James.' In this new literary context, melodrama underwent considerable transformation, becoming what Brooks terms the "melodramatic mode." It is the purpose of the present study to show how Marcel Proust finds his place among these writers and how he used melodrama and the melodramatic mode for his own purposes. Melodrama seems to have appealed to these novelists because of its very excess, its radical polarities, its patent oversimplifications, its unrestrained exploitation of the emotions. Specifically, it allowed a lively contention betwen clearly delineated forces of good and evil, although obscuring the wellspring of the motivations or moral elements at work so that the antagonists had the ambiguous luster of enigmatic symbols, their battles the mythical dimensions of cosmic struggles. Melodrama, once transformed in the novel into the melodramatic mode, lost much of its naive oversimplification but retained the capacity to indicate, beyond the problematical surface of reality, the presence of a deeper reality. This reality the surface appearances could only denote through signs which in themselves did not carry a clear or transcendent meaning. At first sight, a scene such as the drame du coucher might seem scarcely to offer any of the heady stuff just reviewed. It is, of course, more than just a domestic argument over the somewhat rigorous program the parents have devised for their high-strung child. From

A Dithering of Presences: Style and Language in Stevens' Essays

Abstract: Stevens' theories on style and on poetic language, developed in his essays, focus on analogy and figure, as well as on ornamentation, digression, and excess. One cannot, however, find a systematically formulated poetics. The essays, like the poems, are full of apparent contradictions and prove exasperating to the reader who expects to discover Stevens' position defined or argued in logical, unequivocal terms.

Feminine Endings. And Beginnings: Margaret Drabble's "The Waterfall"

Abstract: Margaret Drabble has called her fifth novel, The Waterfall (1969), "the most female of all my books."' In it, she tacitly refutes Simone de Beauvoir's contention that there is no such thing as "the feminine." This is particularly interesting in light of Drabble's early attraction to de Beauvoir's feminism, which she first encountered as an undergraduate at Cambridge in the sixties where she read The Second Sex and was "profoundly" affected by it.2 Indeed, Drabble's first three novels A Summer Bird-Cage (1963), The Garrick Year (1964), and The Millstone (1965)may be read as a translation into fictional form of Part II of The Second Sex, which charts the typical development of a woman in a patriarchal society. In those novels, says Drabble, "I wrote about the situation of being a womanbeing stuck with a baby, or having an illegitimate baby, or being stuck with a marriage where you couldn't have a job."3 De Beauvoir's classic analysis of the situation of women denies the ontological validity of the concept of femininity. Instead, as Patricia Meyer Spacks has pointed out, The Second Sex insists that

Samuel Beckett's Art Criticism and the Literary Uses of Critical Circumstance

Abstract: Samuel Beckett's first publication was a critical essay on James Joyce's Work in Progress, and his first book was a study of Proust. Beckett has frequently spoken of his oeuvre as a "series,"' and since the beginnings of his career the pattern of that "series" has been initial consideration of aesthetic problems and principles in critical prose and subsequent integration of them into his creative work. Beckett's early criticism was exclusively devoted to literature; More Pricks Than Kicks (1934) and Murphy (1938), in particular, testify to this generic bias in their progressive rarefication of eclectic and derivative literary devices and dependence on various types of literary allusions. At the end of World War II, Beckett returned to his flat in Paris and began the period of intense creativity which produced, most notably, Three Novels and Waiting for Godot, a period to which Beckett himself refers as "the siege in the room."2 The work produced during these years was a radical departure from his earlier fiction: enigmatic rather than ironic, reductive rather than allusive, first-person rather than third-person narratives, and written in French rather than in English. As he had earlier, Beckett found critical prose a useful form for working out his ideas. During this crucial period, however, his essays were exclusively devoted to painting. Not often used as an approach to his fiction, possibly because they remain relatively inaccessible and

The Double Image of Modernism: Matisse's Etchings for "Ulysses"

Abstract: What we know of the circumstances surrounding the Limited Editions Club 1935 publication of Joyce's Ulysses, illustrated with line drawings by Henri Matisse, is sketchy-legend having supplanted meager fact. Richard Ellmann's account of the proceedings in his biography of Joyce suggests that the artistic crux of the matter is to be found in Matisse's ignorance of the text. In contradiction to this suggestion, George Macy (then publisher of Limited Editions) recorded his surprise at Matisse's announcement to him in 1934 that after a quick page-through of Stuart Gilbert's translation of the novel, "he had observed how Joyce's Ulysses was divided into episodes corresponding to Homer's Odyssey and would Macy agree therefore to his making six etchings based on Homer's Odyssey which could then be published in the Joyce volume."' Joyce would have liked to believe (perhaps did believe) that Matisse knew "the French translation very well," as he wrote to T. W. Pugh in August, 1934. Wherever Matisse came upon the Homeric correspondences in Ulysses (perhaps from Gilbert's study of the epic backgrounds to the novel), he did not know the novel well, and to the extent that he needed to know about it to begin work on the line drawings, he consulted Eugene Jolas during a week-end visit to Jolas' summer residence in Utelle. Ellmann relates that after a brief introduction to

The Reader Is the Medium: Ashbery and Ammons Ensphered

Abstract: Canonized in mid-career by Harold Bloom,' John Ashbery and A. R. Ammons elaborate in contrasting manners Stevens' correlative attempts to project a "festival sphere" (An Ordinary Evening in New Haven) and to rival "the plentifullest John" of Revelation (Description without Place). Both first published in 1974, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and Sphere project communities as inclusive and articulate as the Psalmist's heavenly Temple and the apocalyptist's

Joseph McElroy and the Art of Excess

Abstract: The most interesting and often the best American novels of the 1970s are excessive. The art of excess, as the word itself suggests, is relative and quantitative, different but not altogether new. The works of Joseph McElroy, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, and others I mention below are often called experimental, but they do not claim a purity of invention or neutrality of intention as, say, the works of Stein and Robbe-Grillet do. The excessive novels of the seventies