Manifesto of a Tenured Radical. Cary Nelson

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      I was prepared to read the poetry in this way by a number of theoretical developments. Marxism had long struggled to define the social and economic determination of art. Poststructuralism, on the other hand, had in other ways broken the links between the image of an organically unified text and a comparably coherent human subject; indeed, it gave us many reasons to stop thinking of people as consistent and unified subjects at all. Postcolonial theory has since taken our sense of the fragmented, conflicted nature of subjectivity still further. Detaching poets’ names from poems helps us recognize as well that many of the discursive elements of poems reflect and contribute to diverse cultural processes. Linking poems with their authors, conversely, sustains a romanticized notion of individual creativity that a wider sense of texts published in a given period tends to undermine. More importantly, to be confronted with texts that are no longer taken to be vehicles of self-expression is to be drawn to consider what other cultural functions poetry may have served.

      It is this effort to rethink the social meaning of poetry that required the most elaborate negotiation of multiple theoretical traditions. Combining in particular the poststructuralism of Derrida and the Marxist cultural studies of critics like Hall and Laclau and Mouffe, I tried to work out a position that I think of as a kind of politicized Saussurianism. From the poststructuralist radicalization of Saussure I drew a semiotics that is differential but also mobile and partly unpredictable. From Marxist cultural studies I drew the recognition that differences are a site of political contestation, that various interests compete to gain power over images and meanings and integrate them into a common persuasive enterprise. The politicized Saussurianism that results is one in which meanings are recognized to come not from inherent and essential identity but from a structured and differential field of struggle. A politicized Saussurianism recognizes the linguisticality of the cultural field but tracks meaning as a discursive struggle involving the continual rearticulation of all discursive domains to one another. Literature, politics, religion, law, all struggle over the limits of a relative autonomy in which all these discursive domains are defined in relation to one another and in which potential social functions are both lost and recaptured. Not only the meaning of poems but also the meaning and social functions of the notion of literariness and the genre of poetry are constructed, I argue, by this sort of cultural process. Far from a book that simply adds a number of poets to the ongoing conversation of the profession, then, Repression and Recovery argues for a reconsideration of the shifting, unstable, and contested meaning of poetry.

      In the end, while pursuing that wider inquiry into the social meaning of poetry, I decided to retain authors’ names and to present biographical information about them. I did so in part because the sheer quantity of unfamiliar poets cited in the book can, on its own, persuade people that the narrow story of modern poetry we constructed and now repeatedly retell is wholly inadequate. Moreover, the citation of this wide range of interesting modern poets suggests that the slow process of reevaluating individual poets for possible recovery is insufficient; we need as well a more thorough critique of our cultural memory and of the role literary scholarship plays in constructing and maintaining it. Finally, authors’ names remain one of the major ways we select and recover texts of interest from the almost overwhelming number of texts actually published. Tracking an author through journals, books, and archives was one of the major ways I worked, so I preserved that structure for the reader. But that is not a disinterested decision, and I still feel the project of writing about modern poetry—and about literature in general—without authors’ names remains unfinished.

      How to realize that goal, however, remains quite another matter. I gave a draft of the book that excluded poets’ names to a few friends to read, and all of them found it intolerable to read large numbers of quotes unmoored to any writer’s identity. A year or so later I wrote an essay on 1930s political poetry without any authors’ names linked to the quotes and had the same results. The sense of literary discourse as inherently and necessarily authored is so strong now that people are generally unwilling to process it in any other way. For a critic to withhold a writer’s name is, in any case, clearly an affront, one for which I have not yet found a way to gain a hearing.

      Some other deliberate aims and strategies were probably more successful. One of these was to make it clear that this historiography could never actually contain or fully represent the history it engaged. The actual literary history of the times would remain elsewhere, outside our grasp. I was not, therefore, aiming to invoke the familiar claim that texts are primary and commentary secondary. Neither in any historical reconstruction nor in the original poems would we find the lived time of history. It is no longer available to us. Conventional literary histories often aim for a confident sense that history is effectively relived within their narratives. I wanted to make it clear that I consider that goal impossible and that effect of narration either illicit or misleading.

      One simple way to register the inadequacy of the presence of history in my narratives, I decided, was to limit most of my quotations to fragments, rather than complete poems. For the most part, the texts I discuss are always elsewhere, sometimes in an elsewhere difficult to recover, since many of them are out of print. That was frustrating to some readers, but it had partly the disabling effect I wanted. My book would thus always display a certain lack.

      Another deliberate strategy was to be inconsistent about what kinds of information and what sort of prose I placed in the text and the notes. I once read a reader’s report on someone else’s manuscript that expressed annoyance that the text and notes were not devoted to different kinds of writing and different categories of knowledge. A reader has a right to know, the report argued, what to expect in the main body of the book versus what to expect in the notes. I wanted to take that “right” away, to overturn the implicit hierarchical relation between text and notes. I did not want the sort of confident relationship of mastery between these textual domains that prevails in most academic writing. So while I did put most bibliographic information in the notes I also deliberately saved some particularly enjoyable stories for the notes and included in the text information about some authors that in other cases was relegated to notes. Some reviewers have found this frustrating; others have recognized what I was doing. One recognized that my decision to place one illustration in the notes was a way of signaling my intentions about their status. In any case, the overall aim was not to deny the presence of hierarchized domains of knowledge but to put them into question in terms of both the book’s argument and its structure.

      A more complex historiographical strategy was built into my decision not to break the book into chapters and to mix chronology with a spatial presentation of different texts and styles. In part this reflects my conclusions about the diverse and often distinctly nonlinear nature of literary influence during the modern period. Modern poetry, in other words, did not develop in a clear progressive fashion. Some of its most radical innovations—notably in Gertrude Stein’s poetry—came almost immediately and took decades to gain wide influence. All its familiar traditions and styles overlapped and interpenetrated. There were, moreover, recoveries of earlier styles under new names and conservative count-erreactions along with unexpected experiments. Dividing literary history into chapters tends to segregate discursive impulses that should be seen relationally. When the resulting categories—minority poetry, women’s poetry, imagism, political poetry—become mutually exclusive, the effects are both political and discriminatory. Eliminating chapters and mixing chronological narration with cultural and stylistic groupings spanning several decades made all our descriptive categories unstable and subject to contemporary critical intervention. Nothing was to be taken as given to us unproblematically.

      In some cases, I chose both to imitate and undermine standard critical structures. The decision to have notes at all, while making them distinctly textual, was one choice of that sort. Another was the choice to include an introduction but let the separation between the introduction and the main body of the text be somewhat arbitrary. Though physically divided, the introduction and the main body of the text in fact flow together. None of these decisions, however, carries with it a moral or political imprimatur for future work. These may be exemplary strategies, but they are СКАЧАТЬ