Louis Cabri's Blog - Posts Tagged "ron-silliman"
Paradigmatic Garfield
“Theory drips at the edge of a cartoon.”
“Garfield” the title
The meanings of the title exemplify a dissipation or cross-purposing of what I'm going to call abstract "types" or categories, a process that in my reading of Garfield seems to be integral to the unfolding exploratory character of the text’s language.
Starting with the title: “Garfield”? I casually think, okay, the comic strip. I begin to doubt myself however, on reading the dedication — since two proximate cartoony names (Garfield and Alto) seems incongruous, unless the text is going to be about cartoons (and it’s not). I’m sitting up a bit by now, thinking the title just can’t be referring to an assassinated 19C president, that’s too bio-fictional. But then how is Garfield the cat not more fictional? Or will the word “Garfield” be deployed as an index of mass cultural attachments?
Nothing prepares me for this note about Garfield found at the back of the Alphabet: “Written In a giant Garfield drawing notebook on deeply colored construction paper.” So: none of the above.
It’s not the name (“Garfield”) but the thing (Garfield drawing notebook used writing Garfield), not the idea (“A cynical, lazy, lasagna-loving, Monday-hating, dog-punting, mailman-mauling fat cat” [gocomics.com]) but the circumscribed act (of writing ((imagine writing — or are you drawing — on red, green, yellow, blue construction paper, every time having to flip past a Garfield image on the cover — and where are you when you’re doing this, are you alone, or who with?)).
Two Ways of Reading
We can read for Garfield’s patterns in two ways. These are ways of reading that are connected to each other, one way useful for much of Ron Silliman’s writing (he theorized it as the New Sentence), the other way specific to his text Garfield collected in Demo to Ink and in the Alphabet.
First and primary way: finding interlocking meanings between sentences within each stanza-paragraph. We can do that with Garfield and with almost any Silliman text — even those that aren’t in prose-sentence form. This way of reading is often fuzzier than the tightly scripted outcome of an implicature. Two successive sentences from Garfield’s second stanza-paragraph: “Spider plant’s new shoot seeks a window. Four wings are less efficient than two.” What’s their connection? They bristle with contrasts — between plant/animal, new/old, slow/fast, ontogeny/phylogeny, absolute/relative, organic/inorganic (inorganic if “wings” refers to those of a plane). Is that it, though, potential forms of contrast? What have wings to do with plants? A reader is encouraged to make an interpretive leap. Evolutionary theory and the mode of scientific observation seem to connect them: window means light means growth, and efficiency can be thought of as an evolutionary measure of success at flight or pollination.
The second way of reading for patterns, a way specific to Garfield, involves finding meaning-echoes across sentence types from stanza-paragraph to stanza-paragraph. H.G. Widdowson explains the token/type distinction which strikes me as useful to make in this literary context: “To identify an element as a token […] is to recognize it as a particular and actual instance of a general and abstract type” (Linguistics). There are 21 sentences in each of the 21 stanza-paragraphs of Garfield, and there are presumably 21 token sentence variations on each of 21 sentence types.
The 21 token sentences of a given type will be different from each other in every stanza-paragraph. These tokens will also be differently ordered in each stanza-paragraph according to how the writer configures patterns for the first way of reading — the interlocking meanings between sentences. Sentence #1 in stanza-paragraph #1 may have its type-associated other token sentence to be found in the #5 position in the next stanza-paragraph, etc.
Sometimes the type is quite perceptible: recipe (token e.g.: “Serve at room temperature.”); poet/poetry mention (“There, it was Tom who freed the line.”; ); “word salad” sentence (“Stereo koala penetrates breath of math.”); dog mention (“Snarling, baring its teeth.”); x vs. y structure (“Steaming vs. cancelled.”); x and y structure (“Spiral and inky.”); art/artist mention (“Picasso’s line was manic.”); use of first person pronoun in an autobiographical sentence (“The name on my first book was Ronald.”); radical left political faction mention (“The then Trotskyist SWP.”); names mention (“This is called a Phillips.”); employment mention (“Working as a nurse or cabbie, studying anthropology (art).”
But in some cases, the token becomes difficult to slot into a type (i.e., there is no aspect of language beyond the reach of change, no Archimedian still-point of reference). Reading one stanza-paragraph after another, a reader in this circumstance will continue revising how best to name (and thereby identify) the type in question, sometimes arriving at the last stanza-paragraph inconclusively, the type having dispersed all identifying markers — and this is reflexively part of the text as well, I think: theorizing tokens versus types. Linguists, too, wonder: “The question arises as to what the grounds are for distinguishing different types?” (Widdowson). Identification requires recognition; but language doesn’t.
So: the token “old webs” (taken from stanza-paragraph 1, Sentence 2) suggests a meaning-connection to token “spider plant” (sp2, S5) which suggests spider (sp3, S5) which suggests web-“mummified” fly (sp4, S6) which suggests figural beyond literal meanings for arachnid behaviour (sp5, S6) which suggests fly as a machine (sp6, S5) which suggests — here I’m going to quote entire sentence to give idea of how a web associated with spiders combines with spider plant that implies potted whose pottedness is then embellished upon — “A potted pine webbed with tinsel” (sp 7, S19), etc.
The tokens can vary from their type such that some token sentences apply to more than one type, sharing words previously identified with another type, as in: “There was Littlebit, talking to Spider.” This token sentence suggests both the names mention type (Littlebit, Spider) and the spider mention type (spider). A number of the sample sentences listed above also intersect type categories.
Compositional Structure
The second way of reading Garfield for patterns suggests that we take a guess at how its composition was conceived or begun. The text (as is often the case with Silliman) drops a metacomment which can be taken as a hint about this: “This is not the sequence of composition,” but I am speculating.
I imagine a grid, where columns identify types, and rows describe tokens of those types, so that in column 1 there is one type (say, spider mention) for which, in row 1, the writer creates 21 token sentence variations on that type. Once the grid is filled out like that, Silliman begins to compose his paragraphs by drawing down the sentences and combining them in an order that best induces the first way of reading. As he transcribes, he might have to change some of the sentences as needed. Gradually, some results subtly diverge from model, sometimes a lot, sometimes a little.
The Paradigmatic
I’m tempted to think of Garfield paradigmatically, aware that Silliman takes farthest a fundamental lesson from modern linguistics — about how meaning is created out of difference — that exceeds any proposed paradigmatic case.
What I’m after, though, is the paradigmatic itself, the axis of association from which selection is made for syntactic combination. The slot in the syntactic combination “Close the _____ door” could be paradigmatically filled and substituted for barn, oven, fridge, car, garage, cargo, office, cabin, green, wood, damn, etc.
Garfield’s second way of reading for patterns encourages reading for the paradigmatic, which gives its form a gem-like, fine watch (!) quality.
A paradigmatic reading is a substitutive one, one token for another of its type. There is combination creating variation within the sentence and between sentences, but combination overall, in the second way of reading for patterns, is subordinated to the greater associational movement of substitution which exists at a structural level of the text. In a modernist and pre-modernist text, if I generalize wildly, that greater substitutive movement exists at the structural level at which the text integrates into “literature itself.” In a postmodern text such as Garfield, I’m not convinced that the paradigm is Literature, although inevitably Garfield is a literary text and will be absorbed into literature. What I mean is that there is no motivation I can find in the text for creating meaningful resonances with cultural tradition (language understood as system allows for a break with cultural tradition); I feel no inclination to substitute the spider mention type for some archetypical literary spider, for example.
Instead, the words remains tokens of a language (itself a somewhat nebulous category), and the relationship to the extralinguistic world (“things”), though deliberately troubled, remains present throughout the paradigmatic reading of Garfield. The text floats unanchored above the extralinguistic world, but that world is unmistakably there. What’s absent is the habitual directional signage gaining privileged access to it.
Where does the idea of structure come from in Garfield, which allows for the idea of a paradigmatic reading? As Barthes might put it, there is no proairetic code (acts in sequence): recipe instructions that by the twenty-first paragraph haven’t cooked anything yet; etiquette instructions that don’t eventuate in a layed table; one could go on listing how types don’t obtain outcomes. Perhaps the only narrative that progresses is the one about the writer writing, for “Midcareer, I opened the door to the ocean.” is the last sentence, suggesting a reminiscence about the moment of conceiving the Alphabet project.
General Point
A general point about a Silliman text: Any enactment in a sentence is, at the same time, an example of an enactment in a sentence. Exemplarity is paradigmatic.
Exemplarity predominates over enactment in a paradigmatic reading. The compactness of the paragraphs and of the sentences (most of them are under fifteen words, and the longer ones have a crisply demarcated style) also contribute to the paradigmatic structural effects.
The Fine Watch
“Keep the tone even and soothing.”
Garfield’s surface presentation to the reader is of a jeweled perfection, a splendidly accurate mechanism for linguistic measurement.
Garfield has a stately, procedural cadence, due to paradigmatic design. Each sentence is well-turned, well-considered, well-placed. Tokens to enter the slots of types — three cherries! The formal satisfaction of its world is the pretense of an experiment.
The experiment belies its own textual world.
Just the way a product belies its manufacturing process. Old-timey Marx has some wonderful pages on watchmaking (“that classical example of heterogeneous manufacture”), naming the micro-divisions of labour imposed on the making of the hundreds of parts of an analogue watch by many separated workers with nontransferable specialized tools, “[f]ormerly the individual creation of a craftsman from Nuremberg….” But Silliman isn’t “a craftsman from Nuremberg” in some nostalgic throwback sense of the writer prior to large-scale manufacturing; nor is a sentence analogous to a watch part if that watch stamps temporality with a unified (and universal) measurement. But my speculation on a structural grid of composition for Garfield and argument for a paradigmatic reading evocatively place the text for me in some soberly distant but still salient relation to this theoretical history of reification.
To return to Garfield’s tone: it is one of testing out the expanse of an unruffled, even attention over its world, personal, social, ideological, political. As if the question that each of its sentences posed was the following: What would it be like to live in a sort of “even and soothing” state where no violent disturbances penetrated so deeply as to tear the veil?
From this perspective of testing out a “world tone,” Garfield is to me a somberly and tenderly amusing exercise in trying to control that part of the world the happy-meaning text means to shut out. As it proceeds with its new tone and cadence, it must balance as best it can all that frets at the edges, frays the borders, knocks and fidgets about, itches, bends and twists. But inevitably even the types decay, as the tokens mix.
The text will take heart and inspiration from an undisclosed peer: “Her work is lush and peaceful, measured and textured, as if conflict had never been encountered.” Let’s try to emulate that, with the full admiration it deserves! Yet, in every stanza-paragraph appears only threats — from inside and out — emotional disappointments and alienation, political dead-ends. To mention only one. Garfield is dedicated to a pet cat. Yet only mostly threatening dogs appear in the text (and one cat named Trouble — the text is dedicated to Alto: more token slippage).
Trying to show ease and harmony, the text succeeds at putting up linguistic windows between that other world, which, paradoxically, it fully inhabits, and its own, the way the news gets through, even when most distorted for control by communications media. Yet the news gets through.
“Garfield” the title
The meanings of the title exemplify a dissipation or cross-purposing of what I'm going to call abstract "types" or categories, a process that in my reading of Garfield seems to be integral to the unfolding exploratory character of the text’s language.
Starting with the title: “Garfield”? I casually think, okay, the comic strip. I begin to doubt myself however, on reading the dedication — since two proximate cartoony names (Garfield and Alto) seems incongruous, unless the text is going to be about cartoons (and it’s not). I’m sitting up a bit by now, thinking the title just can’t be referring to an assassinated 19C president, that’s too bio-fictional. But then how is Garfield the cat not more fictional? Or will the word “Garfield” be deployed as an index of mass cultural attachments?
Nothing prepares me for this note about Garfield found at the back of the Alphabet: “Written In a giant Garfield drawing notebook on deeply colored construction paper.” So: none of the above.
It’s not the name (“Garfield”) but the thing (Garfield drawing notebook used writing Garfield), not the idea (“A cynical, lazy, lasagna-loving, Monday-hating, dog-punting, mailman-mauling fat cat” [gocomics.com]) but the circumscribed act (of writing ((imagine writing — or are you drawing — on red, green, yellow, blue construction paper, every time having to flip past a Garfield image on the cover — and where are you when you’re doing this, are you alone, or who with?)).
Two Ways of Reading
We can read for Garfield’s patterns in two ways. These are ways of reading that are connected to each other, one way useful for much of Ron Silliman’s writing (he theorized it as the New Sentence), the other way specific to his text Garfield collected in Demo to Ink and in the Alphabet.
First and primary way: finding interlocking meanings between sentences within each stanza-paragraph. We can do that with Garfield and with almost any Silliman text — even those that aren’t in prose-sentence form. This way of reading is often fuzzier than the tightly scripted outcome of an implicature. Two successive sentences from Garfield’s second stanza-paragraph: “Spider plant’s new shoot seeks a window. Four wings are less efficient than two.” What’s their connection? They bristle with contrasts — between plant/animal, new/old, slow/fast, ontogeny/phylogeny, absolute/relative, organic/inorganic (inorganic if “wings” refers to those of a plane). Is that it, though, potential forms of contrast? What have wings to do with plants? A reader is encouraged to make an interpretive leap. Evolutionary theory and the mode of scientific observation seem to connect them: window means light means growth, and efficiency can be thought of as an evolutionary measure of success at flight or pollination.
The second way of reading for patterns, a way specific to Garfield, involves finding meaning-echoes across sentence types from stanza-paragraph to stanza-paragraph. H.G. Widdowson explains the token/type distinction which strikes me as useful to make in this literary context: “To identify an element as a token […] is to recognize it as a particular and actual instance of a general and abstract type” (Linguistics). There are 21 sentences in each of the 21 stanza-paragraphs of Garfield, and there are presumably 21 token sentence variations on each of 21 sentence types.
The 21 token sentences of a given type will be different from each other in every stanza-paragraph. These tokens will also be differently ordered in each stanza-paragraph according to how the writer configures patterns for the first way of reading — the interlocking meanings between sentences. Sentence #1 in stanza-paragraph #1 may have its type-associated other token sentence to be found in the #5 position in the next stanza-paragraph, etc.
Sometimes the type is quite perceptible: recipe (token e.g.: “Serve at room temperature.”); poet/poetry mention (“There, it was Tom who freed the line.”; ); “word salad” sentence (“Stereo koala penetrates breath of math.”); dog mention (“Snarling, baring its teeth.”); x vs. y structure (“Steaming vs. cancelled.”); x and y structure (“Spiral and inky.”); art/artist mention (“Picasso’s line was manic.”); use of first person pronoun in an autobiographical sentence (“The name on my first book was Ronald.”); radical left political faction mention (“The then Trotskyist SWP.”); names mention (“This is called a Phillips.”); employment mention (“Working as a nurse or cabbie, studying anthropology (art).”
But in some cases, the token becomes difficult to slot into a type (i.e., there is no aspect of language beyond the reach of change, no Archimedian still-point of reference). Reading one stanza-paragraph after another, a reader in this circumstance will continue revising how best to name (and thereby identify) the type in question, sometimes arriving at the last stanza-paragraph inconclusively, the type having dispersed all identifying markers — and this is reflexively part of the text as well, I think: theorizing tokens versus types. Linguists, too, wonder: “The question arises as to what the grounds are for distinguishing different types?” (Widdowson). Identification requires recognition; but language doesn’t.
So: the token “old webs” (taken from stanza-paragraph 1, Sentence 2) suggests a meaning-connection to token “spider plant” (sp2, S5) which suggests spider (sp3, S5) which suggests web-“mummified” fly (sp4, S6) which suggests figural beyond literal meanings for arachnid behaviour (sp5, S6) which suggests fly as a machine (sp6, S5) which suggests — here I’m going to quote entire sentence to give idea of how a web associated with spiders combines with spider plant that implies potted whose pottedness is then embellished upon — “A potted pine webbed with tinsel” (sp 7, S19), etc.
The tokens can vary from their type such that some token sentences apply to more than one type, sharing words previously identified with another type, as in: “There was Littlebit, talking to Spider.” This token sentence suggests both the names mention type (Littlebit, Spider) and the spider mention type (spider). A number of the sample sentences listed above also intersect type categories.
Compositional Structure
The second way of reading Garfield for patterns suggests that we take a guess at how its composition was conceived or begun. The text (as is often the case with Silliman) drops a metacomment which can be taken as a hint about this: “This is not the sequence of composition,” but I am speculating.
I imagine a grid, where columns identify types, and rows describe tokens of those types, so that in column 1 there is one type (say, spider mention) for which, in row 1, the writer creates 21 token sentence variations on that type. Once the grid is filled out like that, Silliman begins to compose his paragraphs by drawing down the sentences and combining them in an order that best induces the first way of reading. As he transcribes, he might have to change some of the sentences as needed. Gradually, some results subtly diverge from model, sometimes a lot, sometimes a little.
The Paradigmatic
I’m tempted to think of Garfield paradigmatically, aware that Silliman takes farthest a fundamental lesson from modern linguistics — about how meaning is created out of difference — that exceeds any proposed paradigmatic case.
What I’m after, though, is the paradigmatic itself, the axis of association from which selection is made for syntactic combination. The slot in the syntactic combination “Close the _____ door” could be paradigmatically filled and substituted for barn, oven, fridge, car, garage, cargo, office, cabin, green, wood, damn, etc.
Garfield’s second way of reading for patterns encourages reading for the paradigmatic, which gives its form a gem-like, fine watch (!) quality.
A paradigmatic reading is a substitutive one, one token for another of its type. There is combination creating variation within the sentence and between sentences, but combination overall, in the second way of reading for patterns, is subordinated to the greater associational movement of substitution which exists at a structural level of the text. In a modernist and pre-modernist text, if I generalize wildly, that greater substitutive movement exists at the structural level at which the text integrates into “literature itself.” In a postmodern text such as Garfield, I’m not convinced that the paradigm is Literature, although inevitably Garfield is a literary text and will be absorbed into literature. What I mean is that there is no motivation I can find in the text for creating meaningful resonances with cultural tradition (language understood as system allows for a break with cultural tradition); I feel no inclination to substitute the spider mention type for some archetypical literary spider, for example.
Instead, the words remains tokens of a language (itself a somewhat nebulous category), and the relationship to the extralinguistic world (“things”), though deliberately troubled, remains present throughout the paradigmatic reading of Garfield. The text floats unanchored above the extralinguistic world, but that world is unmistakably there. What’s absent is the habitual directional signage gaining privileged access to it.
Where does the idea of structure come from in Garfield, which allows for the idea of a paradigmatic reading? As Barthes might put it, there is no proairetic code (acts in sequence): recipe instructions that by the twenty-first paragraph haven’t cooked anything yet; etiquette instructions that don’t eventuate in a layed table; one could go on listing how types don’t obtain outcomes. Perhaps the only narrative that progresses is the one about the writer writing, for “Midcareer, I opened the door to the ocean.” is the last sentence, suggesting a reminiscence about the moment of conceiving the Alphabet project.
General Point
A general point about a Silliman text: Any enactment in a sentence is, at the same time, an example of an enactment in a sentence. Exemplarity is paradigmatic.
Exemplarity predominates over enactment in a paradigmatic reading. The compactness of the paragraphs and of the sentences (most of them are under fifteen words, and the longer ones have a crisply demarcated style) also contribute to the paradigmatic structural effects.
The Fine Watch
“Keep the tone even and soothing.”
Garfield’s surface presentation to the reader is of a jeweled perfection, a splendidly accurate mechanism for linguistic measurement.
Garfield has a stately, procedural cadence, due to paradigmatic design. Each sentence is well-turned, well-considered, well-placed. Tokens to enter the slots of types — three cherries! The formal satisfaction of its world is the pretense of an experiment.
The experiment belies its own textual world.
Just the way a product belies its manufacturing process. Old-timey Marx has some wonderful pages on watchmaking (“that classical example of heterogeneous manufacture”), naming the micro-divisions of labour imposed on the making of the hundreds of parts of an analogue watch by many separated workers with nontransferable specialized tools, “[f]ormerly the individual creation of a craftsman from Nuremberg….” But Silliman isn’t “a craftsman from Nuremberg” in some nostalgic throwback sense of the writer prior to large-scale manufacturing; nor is a sentence analogous to a watch part if that watch stamps temporality with a unified (and universal) measurement. But my speculation on a structural grid of composition for Garfield and argument for a paradigmatic reading evocatively place the text for me in some soberly distant but still salient relation to this theoretical history of reification.
To return to Garfield’s tone: it is one of testing out the expanse of an unruffled, even attention over its world, personal, social, ideological, political. As if the question that each of its sentences posed was the following: What would it be like to live in a sort of “even and soothing” state where no violent disturbances penetrated so deeply as to tear the veil?
From this perspective of testing out a “world tone,” Garfield is to me a somberly and tenderly amusing exercise in trying to control that part of the world the happy-meaning text means to shut out. As it proceeds with its new tone and cadence, it must balance as best it can all that frets at the edges, frays the borders, knocks and fidgets about, itches, bends and twists. But inevitably even the types decay, as the tokens mix.
The text will take heart and inspiration from an undisclosed peer: “Her work is lush and peaceful, measured and textured, as if conflict had never been encountered.” Let’s try to emulate that, with the full admiration it deserves! Yet, in every stanza-paragraph appears only threats — from inside and out — emotional disappointments and alienation, political dead-ends. To mention only one. Garfield is dedicated to a pet cat. Yet only mostly threatening dogs appear in the text (and one cat named Trouble — the text is dedicated to Alto: more token slippage).
Trying to show ease and harmony, the text succeeds at putting up linguistic windows between that other world, which, paradoxically, it fully inhabits, and its own, the way the news gets through, even when most distorted for control by communications media. Yet the news gets through.
The Social Visual
“Words are blind.”
Charles Olson offers that statement as counsel to Raymond Souster in a 1955 letter.
He’s wanting to dissuade him from using what I’ll try calling “social visuals” in his poetry, as in “What Can I Say”’s appraisal of a drunk couple seen Monday morning on the street, in Souster’s For What Time Slays (1955), that he had sent Olson, who responds, directly and frankly.
What Can I Say
by Raymond Souster
What can I say except that they were drunk,
that it was Monday morning—
the day after Sunday,
long, endless Sunday,
boring, restless Sunday.
What more can I say except that the woman
could walk no better than the man,
that they held each other up as they walked,
that the woman took the lighted cigarette
out of the man’s mouth, dragged hard on it,
as if that could make everything right again,
which of course it couldn’t,
which of course was impossible.
What else can I say except that I felt sick
as they turned out of sight along the little street
leading to the railway tracks,
Which could mean either, I suppose, that I have a weak stomach
or else so much pity to waste on the people of this earth.
Olson’s saying, in the letter: Don’t sacrifice the personal (“[...] and I don’t mean person as personality). I mean Souster the man, like the rest of us, with much coming at him, coming from him, the which is more complex than even any verbal composition can declare”), that is, don’t sacrifice the personal for a societal, humanist ideal that, as just one individual, you can’t deliver on anyway, poem thereby ending up reinforcing the very norms your poetics, Ray (aligned as they are with mine) intended to sidestep or even reject.
“You,” Ray Souster, poet! “is Yonge Street. Exactly what you despise,” Olson declares. “You is staying pavement (instead of the crack in it). You is linoleum.”
Turning Souster’s poem in Olson’s direction would mean assuming an equal footing — I’m going to press further meaning into that phrase — between the drunk couple and the speaker. Recognizing a shared ideal plane of humanity isn’t enough to create equal footing.
Notice it is their social differences cut in relief between speaker and couple. Presumably the speaker is going to work on a Monday morning, and the couple indifferent to the calendar. Presumably the speaker is sober and reasonable, has survived another Sunday in Toronto the Good. Presumably the speaker is somehow secure in their own life, their livelihood, enough at least to mock the established bourgeois in other poems of this collection — and all this, presumably, the couple has lost, or never had, and are now destined to be, or become, Outsiders (not Hipsters, Beats, or Dharma Bums).
Consider also the rhetorical address. What can I say — but to whom? for whom? Is this the proverbial water cooler chat among bank clerks the reader is invited to? Souster must have been working in the bank by '55. The speaker never directly engages with the couple, who remain observable at a distance, as if behind a glass of perception — a social visual. Nor do we learn anything about the I — it's a function, the liberal subject. What can I say remains an idiom on which to hang the incident. Given the speaker’s emotions (seeking “sympathetic magic,” as Olson puts it, with the social surround), that idiom could not be spoken to the couple within the scene, without great hypocrisy. Uh, gee, it happened. It’s done, is it. No take backs. I feel such pity for you I’m sick to my stomach. What can I say.... As to the emotion itself, pity, Olson probes the last line of the poem for its limits, countering them: “It just ain’t true. Number 1: no man has enough. #2: it ain’t pity anyhow anybody wants[…].”
Except for his very last book (dictated bed side, I believe), Souster really never veers that far or develops from the poetics imprinted in “What Can I say,” even while Souster endures over the years a litany of criticisms in hundreds of letters from Cid Corman pitched along the same Olsonian lines as Olson's 1955 letter articulates.
The Olson position re: Souster comes to this (from the letter):
“Society is no more than what is outside. Thus there is no more generalizing possible (sex crime sentimentality) as of the hoomins, than as of how nature happens to you — which is surely not as a tabloid falls down in the street.”
By generalizations Olson must mean not those based on facts but on mores (not quite the fully adequate word for this, however). Generalizations from facts are correctable (with facts). Mores are beyond error, can legitimize inequality, can run Portuguese sailing families out of Gloucestor.
Now top press further meaning into "equal footing." Olson practices equal footing variously, such as above: when he writes “I mean Souster the man, like the rest of us […],” it isn’t a blanket negation of the general in favour of the singularity of Souster, for he offers also a positive version of of the general on his terms (namely in the phrase: “like the rest of us” — we are all singularities).
The drunk couple is wanting in something, and for Souster, a way to think of it through a social visual. So let’s compare want in Olson. Olson brings about an equal footing between states of want in the opening letters of The Maximus Poems, particularly among lines where the negative apostrophic address to Vincent Ferrini resurfaces, also in “The Songs of Maximus.” This equalizing footing is slyly placed, because while he’s deliberately arguing against Ferrini’s Whitmanian rhetoric for a poetry of “the masses,” of “the people,” he’s also arguing for his own version of same, of “my people,” of “the many” (“the many” as “the few”: “It is not the many but the few who care”) — hence the need to show equal footing: so that for every negative, there's a positive offered on/with different terms.
In “The Songs of Maximus,” Song 5 sets up the negative; and in Song 6, there's enacted a positive — equal footing.
“Song 5
I have seen faces of want,
and have not wanted the FAO: Appleseed
‘s gone back to
what any of us
New England”
Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), founded out of WWII, in order for liberalism to connect health (food, particularly malnutrition) to class (economics especially poverty). The “want” in lines 1 and 2 aren’t the same, nor possibly their situations: to “have not wanted the FAO” is likely not spoken by one of the “faces of want.” Is it: I have seen, and I have not wanted the FAO; or is it: I have seen, and they have not wanted the FAO. Or is it really: they agree with me! "and have not wanted the FAO." The Appleseed reference: seems so strikingly inapt, tending to mythify? Is there a pun on new/knew? Almost Frostian nativism?
The “faces of want” are specific faces; the generalization is the FAO, and the unquestioned belief that its bureaucracy can work.
Then comes Song 6, the equal footing:
“you sing, you
who also
wants”
Poet’s song has wants, too, so, hey, face of want. The personal is objectified via second and then almost third person. Done.
It can be taken as a sort of indulgence, this equal footing example from “The Songs of Maximus,” one that you don’t ever get in Souster.
Having dressed down Souster in Olsonian terms, let me now suggest another way to imagine Souster’s poem. I’m going to very simply cut it in two, in two aspects, calling the first, the social visual, and the second, the expressive I function (where lies Olson’s hope for drilling down to “Souster the man, like any of us”).
"What Can I Say" Cut In Two
Cut One: poem as social visual
they were drunk,
it was Monday morning
the woman
could walk no better than the man,
they held each other up as they walked,
the woman took the lighted cigarette
out of the man’s mouth, dragged hard on it
they turned out of sight along the little street
leading to the railway tracks,
Cut Two: poem as expressive I function (in Souster, as personal as it gets)
What can I say except
long, endless Sunday,
boring, restless Sunday.
What more can I say except
as if that could make everything right again,
which of course it couldn’t,
which of course was impossible.
What else can I say except that I felt sick
Which could mean either, I suppose, that I have a weak stomach
or else so much pity to waste on the people of this earth.
When you read Cut Two at face value, you get: boredom its theme (stanzas 1, 3, 4); and the speaker holds no faith whatsoever in the agential effectiveness of speech to change the world (stanza 2).
When Cut One's tense is changed to the present, the social visual becomes a rudimentary, or residual, Objectivists' text.
As editor of the Canadian double, Contact, from Toronto, Souster fared much better under Olson’s scrutiny than did Vincent Ferrini as editor of Four Winds, from Gloucestor, Mass. As poet, however, Souster fared no better before Olson than Ferrini did.
“Lyric’s instinct, // in our generation, derives value / from conflict,” writes Ron Silliman in Hidden, the eighth section of the Alphabet. I’m stretching “generation,” but the comment obviously applies. Later in Silliman's poem: “Thus an absence of conflict // is not peace.”
But what has Silliman to do with Olson and Souster? I suspect USAmericans aren’t used to having their poetry coming at them horizontally through another’s history. It is curious that I don’t start with the Objectivists, and instead, work through one Raymond Souster. Elsewhere, I’ve argued that poetry in Canada has a metacommentarial role in a broader crossborder poetics. Positions simplify themselves up here in a way that they don’t down there where they often stay complicated. This can be useful.
So I am temporarily proposing that what one often finds in Silliman is the “return” of the social visual, and therefrom, the general based on facts. That sort of Sousterian social visual in Cut One one finds everywhere woven into Silliman’s text, except — hold it! — there are undoubtedly enormous differences at all levels too, so great they will cancel my proposal. Dialectics!
For now, let me end this by saying that, in a dialectical mode, and literally, blind people outside are described in many passages of the Alphabet, and in Hidden, for instance, there is a colour-blind man, an optometrist’s carpet, and many references to eyes as both objects and portals.
Charles Olson offers that statement as counsel to Raymond Souster in a 1955 letter.
He’s wanting to dissuade him from using what I’ll try calling “social visuals” in his poetry, as in “What Can I Say”’s appraisal of a drunk couple seen Monday morning on the street, in Souster’s For What Time Slays (1955), that he had sent Olson, who responds, directly and frankly.
What Can I Say
by Raymond Souster
What can I say except that they were drunk,
that it was Monday morning—
the day after Sunday,
long, endless Sunday,
boring, restless Sunday.
What more can I say except that the woman
could walk no better than the man,
that they held each other up as they walked,
that the woman took the lighted cigarette
out of the man’s mouth, dragged hard on it,
as if that could make everything right again,
which of course it couldn’t,
which of course was impossible.
What else can I say except that I felt sick
as they turned out of sight along the little street
leading to the railway tracks,
Which could mean either, I suppose, that I have a weak stomach
or else so much pity to waste on the people of this earth.
Olson’s saying, in the letter: Don’t sacrifice the personal (“[...] and I don’t mean person as personality). I mean Souster the man, like the rest of us, with much coming at him, coming from him, the which is more complex than even any verbal composition can declare”), that is, don’t sacrifice the personal for a societal, humanist ideal that, as just one individual, you can’t deliver on anyway, poem thereby ending up reinforcing the very norms your poetics, Ray (aligned as they are with mine) intended to sidestep or even reject.
“You,” Ray Souster, poet! “is Yonge Street. Exactly what you despise,” Olson declares. “You is staying pavement (instead of the crack in it). You is linoleum.”
Turning Souster’s poem in Olson’s direction would mean assuming an equal footing — I’m going to press further meaning into that phrase — between the drunk couple and the speaker. Recognizing a shared ideal plane of humanity isn’t enough to create equal footing.
Notice it is their social differences cut in relief between speaker and couple. Presumably the speaker is going to work on a Monday morning, and the couple indifferent to the calendar. Presumably the speaker is sober and reasonable, has survived another Sunday in Toronto the Good. Presumably the speaker is somehow secure in their own life, their livelihood, enough at least to mock the established bourgeois in other poems of this collection — and all this, presumably, the couple has lost, or never had, and are now destined to be, or become, Outsiders (not Hipsters, Beats, or Dharma Bums).
Consider also the rhetorical address. What can I say — but to whom? for whom? Is this the proverbial water cooler chat among bank clerks the reader is invited to? Souster must have been working in the bank by '55. The speaker never directly engages with the couple, who remain observable at a distance, as if behind a glass of perception — a social visual. Nor do we learn anything about the I — it's a function, the liberal subject. What can I say remains an idiom on which to hang the incident. Given the speaker’s emotions (seeking “sympathetic magic,” as Olson puts it, with the social surround), that idiom could not be spoken to the couple within the scene, without great hypocrisy. Uh, gee, it happened. It’s done, is it. No take backs. I feel such pity for you I’m sick to my stomach. What can I say.... As to the emotion itself, pity, Olson probes the last line of the poem for its limits, countering them: “It just ain’t true. Number 1: no man has enough. #2: it ain’t pity anyhow anybody wants[…].”
Except for his very last book (dictated bed side, I believe), Souster really never veers that far or develops from the poetics imprinted in “What Can I say,” even while Souster endures over the years a litany of criticisms in hundreds of letters from Cid Corman pitched along the same Olsonian lines as Olson's 1955 letter articulates.
The Olson position re: Souster comes to this (from the letter):
“Society is no more than what is outside. Thus there is no more generalizing possible (sex crime sentimentality) as of the hoomins, than as of how nature happens to you — which is surely not as a tabloid falls down in the street.”
By generalizations Olson must mean not those based on facts but on mores (not quite the fully adequate word for this, however). Generalizations from facts are correctable (with facts). Mores are beyond error, can legitimize inequality, can run Portuguese sailing families out of Gloucestor.
Now top press further meaning into "equal footing." Olson practices equal footing variously, such as above: when he writes “I mean Souster the man, like the rest of us […],” it isn’t a blanket negation of the general in favour of the singularity of Souster, for he offers also a positive version of of the general on his terms (namely in the phrase: “like the rest of us” — we are all singularities).
The drunk couple is wanting in something, and for Souster, a way to think of it through a social visual. So let’s compare want in Olson. Olson brings about an equal footing between states of want in the opening letters of The Maximus Poems, particularly among lines where the negative apostrophic address to Vincent Ferrini resurfaces, also in “The Songs of Maximus.” This equalizing footing is slyly placed, because while he’s deliberately arguing against Ferrini’s Whitmanian rhetoric for a poetry of “the masses,” of “the people,” he’s also arguing for his own version of same, of “my people,” of “the many” (“the many” as “the few”: “It is not the many but the few who care”) — hence the need to show equal footing: so that for every negative, there's a positive offered on/with different terms.
In “The Songs of Maximus,” Song 5 sets up the negative; and in Song 6, there's enacted a positive — equal footing.
“Song 5
I have seen faces of want,
and have not wanted the FAO: Appleseed
‘s gone back to
what any of us
New England”
Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), founded out of WWII, in order for liberalism to connect health (food, particularly malnutrition) to class (economics especially poverty). The “want” in lines 1 and 2 aren’t the same, nor possibly their situations: to “have not wanted the FAO” is likely not spoken by one of the “faces of want.” Is it: I have seen, and I have not wanted the FAO; or is it: I have seen, and they have not wanted the FAO. Or is it really: they agree with me! "and have not wanted the FAO." The Appleseed reference: seems so strikingly inapt, tending to mythify? Is there a pun on new/knew? Almost Frostian nativism?
The “faces of want” are specific faces; the generalization is the FAO, and the unquestioned belief that its bureaucracy can work.
Then comes Song 6, the equal footing:
“you sing, you
who also
wants”
Poet’s song has wants, too, so, hey, face of want. The personal is objectified via second and then almost third person. Done.
It can be taken as a sort of indulgence, this equal footing example from “The Songs of Maximus,” one that you don’t ever get in Souster.
Having dressed down Souster in Olsonian terms, let me now suggest another way to imagine Souster’s poem. I’m going to very simply cut it in two, in two aspects, calling the first, the social visual, and the second, the expressive I function (where lies Olson’s hope for drilling down to “Souster the man, like any of us”).
"What Can I Say" Cut In Two
Cut One: poem as social visual
they were drunk,
it was Monday morning
the woman
could walk no better than the man,
they held each other up as they walked,
the woman took the lighted cigarette
out of the man’s mouth, dragged hard on it
they turned out of sight along the little street
leading to the railway tracks,
Cut Two: poem as expressive I function (in Souster, as personal as it gets)
What can I say except
long, endless Sunday,
boring, restless Sunday.
What more can I say except
as if that could make everything right again,
which of course it couldn’t,
which of course was impossible.
What else can I say except that I felt sick
Which could mean either, I suppose, that I have a weak stomach
or else so much pity to waste on the people of this earth.
When you read Cut Two at face value, you get: boredom its theme (stanzas 1, 3, 4); and the speaker holds no faith whatsoever in the agential effectiveness of speech to change the world (stanza 2).
When Cut One's tense is changed to the present, the social visual becomes a rudimentary, or residual, Objectivists' text.
As editor of the Canadian double, Contact, from Toronto, Souster fared much better under Olson’s scrutiny than did Vincent Ferrini as editor of Four Winds, from Gloucestor, Mass. As poet, however, Souster fared no better before Olson than Ferrini did.
“Lyric’s instinct, // in our generation, derives value / from conflict,” writes Ron Silliman in Hidden, the eighth section of the Alphabet. I’m stretching “generation,” but the comment obviously applies. Later in Silliman's poem: “Thus an absence of conflict // is not peace.”
But what has Silliman to do with Olson and Souster? I suspect USAmericans aren’t used to having their poetry coming at them horizontally through another’s history. It is curious that I don’t start with the Objectivists, and instead, work through one Raymond Souster. Elsewhere, I’ve argued that poetry in Canada has a metacommentarial role in a broader crossborder poetics. Positions simplify themselves up here in a way that they don’t down there where they often stay complicated. This can be useful.
So I am temporarily proposing that what one often finds in Silliman is the “return” of the social visual, and therefrom, the general based on facts. That sort of Sousterian social visual in Cut One one finds everywhere woven into Silliman’s text, except — hold it! — there are undoubtedly enormous differences at all levels too, so great they will cancel my proposal. Dialectics!
For now, let me end this by saying that, in a dialectical mode, and literally, blind people outside are described in many passages of the Alphabet, and in Hidden, for instance, there is a colour-blind man, an optometrist’s carpet, and many references to eyes as both objects and portals.
From Social Visual to Novelism to Perceptual Unconscious: On Hidden
Maybe one day Ron Silliman's the Alphabet will be released as a fully manipulatable digitized text, enabling readers, following their own patterns, to imagine ways of comparing sentences — by re-ordering them, by plugging them into exotic English grammars, by quantifying recurring structures and features, and more. Significant discoveries will be made about the surface of the text.
Now juxtapose that scenario with a second one, with The Alphabet’s own procedural techniques of composition, which have suggested to some readers that there is more than a manipulative procedure to be discovered beneath or behind the expressive text, and if only it could be torn out, like an alien, from inside the living and breathing skin of perception, then the text’s truth, a depth coherence, would be identifiable, and the text stitched back together, whole for the first time.
But part of the Alphabet’s project is, as I understand it, to decoy that hermeneutic impulse that seeks beneath or behind a text and which can mis-take the Alphabet’s construction as a result. Garfield is a good example of this second scenario’s suggestive powers, because its hidden procedure of selecting 21 sentences for each of 21 paragraphs is so much a dominant feature of the text (see my earlier post, Paradigmatic Garfield).
“Meanings are not hidden / save as repressed,” says Hidden (Hidden is the Alphabet’s eighth book). If meanings are not hidden, not hideable even, then in such a text-world “meaning” doesn’t create levels, or layers, of symbol and of symbolism. If you take these lines to be broadly applicable to Hidden and not only to their immediate context in this poem of 336 couplets, then you should arrive at whatever is symptomatically “repressed” in Hidden simply by reading the text as is. No disclosure of a manipulation internal to the text (i.e., its procedure) or externally applied (i.e., the first scenario described above in opening paragraph) is required. This quotation from Hidden is, in other words, an admission that authorial control goes only so far, upon the textual experience of which readers then exert their own historical forces.
Especially since: the Alphabet’s inter-relations between sentences are inferred and imagined by readers upon the productive psychic grounds of techniques predominantly of implication, “gap,” elision, and repetition.
That is, while hermeneutic decoys prevail to disrupt narrative, there is also a hermeneutic affirmation in Hidden due to a perceptual unconscious created by the text (I will introduce this below).
One larger point here for me is that Silliman sentences both are and are not like Lego pieces, the sentence not a universally transposable unit, even though a reader can certainly break one off and apply it elsewhere to make it assert something — as I do above with two lines. Granted that the generalizable application of these specific lines needs to be qualified by other uses of the word “hidden” in Hidden, and that there are other uses of the word “meaning” in the Alphabet too, my point bears on syntax. I prefer syntactic string to sentence as the better abstraction for the unit of composition frequently found used in highly variable forms in the Alphabet, because the supposedly 120-or-so definitions of "sentence" really aren’t present in that word’s everyday use, whereas "syntactic string" implies no common sense of correct and proper grammar. You can have a syntactic string that is "ungrammatical." Like types versus tokens in Garfield, or the helicopter motif in Engines, or like other recurring features in books of the Alphabet, variation doesn’t necessarily build meaning vertically (toward hidden symbols) — they pattern it and disperse it horizontally extending the text, and in the plural (meanings).
A reader who imagines a lot of the Alphabet as a Lego Land Discovery Centre is able to do so not solely because of the sentences themselves, though it is that too (for example, the pithiness of the two lines quoted above gives them citational appeal and relevance for a metatextual claim). the Alphabet may induce the mirage that we’re in Lego Land because of the indeterminate relationships between sentences, as compared to the determinate periods at the ends of them, "weak" (hidden) and "strong" (manifest) respectively, a period suggesting that each sentence constitutes a complete thought that is, therefore, capable of being dislodged from its present place and context.
Why did Silliman go with a period at the end of the sentence? Yes he’s obviously thinking through the idea of the sentence, in all its variation, as a unit of composition. But he could have used two or three spaces instead. Two spaces instead of a period would have made it less tempting to break it off as a sentence, perhaps.
In other words, it would seem that Silliman is thinking about how the sentence both is and is not like Lego, analogy of a reified grammatical norm. the Alphabet often reflexively acknowledges contradiction as part of its working into more and more of the / its world.
The Novelism
I call a novelism that fictional prose sentence taken as verisimilitude (often of 19C realist derivation) which Silliman inserts into his verse and prose poetry in such a way that the new context transforms the sentence into a social visual with a closer affinity to lyric perception than to fictional prose. “There is no third person,” Silliman writes (in Ink); or in other words, there are only novelisms.
A novelism is a sentence perceived no longer as figuration appropriate to a realist novel. Instead, it is a sentence the reader perceives as being the perception — embodied truth — of lyric.
But for all that, the sentence retains its novelistic past, hence a novelism.
From Hidden:
“[…] Realism,
so-called, alienates, by virtue
of the shell posed around objects.”
I read “objects” here — the objects — as already encoded by language. Two “levels” of encoding are play out. As if, at a “primary” level, there is the social visual of an embodied perception (the perception of a perceiver in relation to situated objects); then, as if at a “secondary” level, there is taking those perceptual materials and wrapping a “shell” of figural language around them — the codes of realism.
Cause and effect have been reversed in these lines. As a discourse genre, realism needs to come first, in order that it can then be transformed into lyric perception in Silliman’s text. But in Silliman’s text, what comes first is freshly embodied perception in the now of the perceiver. In Silliman, the discourse apparatus of realism, its codes, conventions, institutions, history, comes after.
The next lines to those quoted above provide a demonstration of how realism alienates:
“The eye, neither flesh nor hair,
absolutely other, glistens.”
Here the codes of realism with which the text wraps the object — the eye — are those of descriptive science.
Hidden explores realism, what it is, for whom, and under what circumstances, and when, and what it needs — such as organized and hierarchized details — to create effects of verisimilitude, and what are its elective components such as verb tense.
Most interesting are the inevitable imprints of the cultural passage of time on how the realness of reality effects is received, effects which are only partially controllable. A novelism reflexively captures a tint of archaism by virtue of choosing 19C realist models.
Soon after the lines above comes Hidden’s first novelism:
“[…] Blonde hair turning gray,
a woman in a short skirt
walks in the rain. […]”
Instead of reading this lineated sentence as the work of a narrator staging the beginnings of a dramatic episode to be unfolded before the reader’s eyes in subsequent sentences — which, perhaps, will tragically reveal this woman’s identity as the protagonist’s childhood friend turned street walker feeding a bad habit . . . — instead, what we have is, in simplest terms, and in just one discrete sentence, a poet’s social visual of available external information concerning a stranger noticed passing on the street.
That is, we have the semblance of a truth, not of a fiction.
But at the same time, nothing guarantees that this novelism is not fictitious. After all, the description’s truth might be staged as truth. Is the poet really on the street watching this woman pass? We cannot know for sure.
Like wave and particle, the novelism waivers between truth and fiction, along the spectrum of which, from truth to fiction, there is a gradation of examples to choose from. Compare the novelism above, which is at the truthiness end of the spectrum, to the novelism “Old surgeon’s / slow gait across hospital campus” at the fiction end due to its contextual placement right after mention of car accident. The two lineated sentences are sufficiently thematically continuous to undercut the reality effect of the second sentence and to dub it a contrivance of fiction instead. When two successive sentences are sufficiently thematically discontinuous from each other, the effect is rather of the truth of a lyrical perception.
The incongruities between graying hair and youthful skirt, and between pleasure and need, cue us to further read contextually into the social visual. The prior sentence ends with the word “speed” which appears as the first word of the line that includes “Blonde hair turning gray.” Speed suggests locomotion, but, when re-read after the next sentence about the blonde haired woman, ambiguously refers to locomotion and methamphetamines. Etc.
Perceptual Unconscious
Unlike Souster and Ferrini (see my post, The Social Visual), Silliman is, to use an Olsonian boat analogy, “precise about what sort of bottom your vessel’s over”; and by “bottom,” and other references to the deeps in the opening letters of The Maximus Poems, I hear, beyond the dead reckoning and the character analysis, invocation of the need to recognize the perceptual unconscious of the text — I hear, rewriting Olson’s line: precise in the facts about your language being located over a perceptual unconscious. Olson tries to reflexively systematize it with Jungian terms, whereas Silliman leaves it completely open, so long as “it’s there” in the text (and it so often is).
It is by way of the marked presence of a perceptual unconscious in Silliman’s writing that I have come to understand the idea of writing as coming from the back of the mind, as Robert Grenier puts it and as I believe Silliman affirms it. A poetic language that issues from, is located by the perceptual unconscious, locates almost every couplet of Hidden, every statement, every observation.
A perceptual unconscious often organizes the most exciting hinges between lines and sentences, grounds the social visuals in autobiography (including the fictive elements), and propels a fundamentally class-based analysis of social being.
Now juxtapose that scenario with a second one, with The Alphabet’s own procedural techniques of composition, which have suggested to some readers that there is more than a manipulative procedure to be discovered beneath or behind the expressive text, and if only it could be torn out, like an alien, from inside the living and breathing skin of perception, then the text’s truth, a depth coherence, would be identifiable, and the text stitched back together, whole for the first time.
But part of the Alphabet’s project is, as I understand it, to decoy that hermeneutic impulse that seeks beneath or behind a text and which can mis-take the Alphabet’s construction as a result. Garfield is a good example of this second scenario’s suggestive powers, because its hidden procedure of selecting 21 sentences for each of 21 paragraphs is so much a dominant feature of the text (see my earlier post, Paradigmatic Garfield).
“Meanings are not hidden / save as repressed,” says Hidden (Hidden is the Alphabet’s eighth book). If meanings are not hidden, not hideable even, then in such a text-world “meaning” doesn’t create levels, or layers, of symbol and of symbolism. If you take these lines to be broadly applicable to Hidden and not only to their immediate context in this poem of 336 couplets, then you should arrive at whatever is symptomatically “repressed” in Hidden simply by reading the text as is. No disclosure of a manipulation internal to the text (i.e., its procedure) or externally applied (i.e., the first scenario described above in opening paragraph) is required. This quotation from Hidden is, in other words, an admission that authorial control goes only so far, upon the textual experience of which readers then exert their own historical forces.
Especially since: the Alphabet’s inter-relations between sentences are inferred and imagined by readers upon the productive psychic grounds of techniques predominantly of implication, “gap,” elision, and repetition.
That is, while hermeneutic decoys prevail to disrupt narrative, there is also a hermeneutic affirmation in Hidden due to a perceptual unconscious created by the text (I will introduce this below).
One larger point here for me is that Silliman sentences both are and are not like Lego pieces, the sentence not a universally transposable unit, even though a reader can certainly break one off and apply it elsewhere to make it assert something — as I do above with two lines. Granted that the generalizable application of these specific lines needs to be qualified by other uses of the word “hidden” in Hidden, and that there are other uses of the word “meaning” in the Alphabet too, my point bears on syntax. I prefer syntactic string to sentence as the better abstraction for the unit of composition frequently found used in highly variable forms in the Alphabet, because the supposedly 120-or-so definitions of "sentence" really aren’t present in that word’s everyday use, whereas "syntactic string" implies no common sense of correct and proper grammar. You can have a syntactic string that is "ungrammatical." Like types versus tokens in Garfield, or the helicopter motif in Engines, or like other recurring features in books of the Alphabet, variation doesn’t necessarily build meaning vertically (toward hidden symbols) — they pattern it and disperse it horizontally extending the text, and in the plural (meanings).
A reader who imagines a lot of the Alphabet as a Lego Land Discovery Centre is able to do so not solely because of the sentences themselves, though it is that too (for example, the pithiness of the two lines quoted above gives them citational appeal and relevance for a metatextual claim). the Alphabet may induce the mirage that we’re in Lego Land because of the indeterminate relationships between sentences, as compared to the determinate periods at the ends of them, "weak" (hidden) and "strong" (manifest) respectively, a period suggesting that each sentence constitutes a complete thought that is, therefore, capable of being dislodged from its present place and context.
Why did Silliman go with a period at the end of the sentence? Yes he’s obviously thinking through the idea of the sentence, in all its variation, as a unit of composition. But he could have used two or three spaces instead. Two spaces instead of a period would have made it less tempting to break it off as a sentence, perhaps.
In other words, it would seem that Silliman is thinking about how the sentence both is and is not like Lego, analogy of a reified grammatical norm. the Alphabet often reflexively acknowledges contradiction as part of its working into more and more of the / its world.
The Novelism
I call a novelism that fictional prose sentence taken as verisimilitude (often of 19C realist derivation) which Silliman inserts into his verse and prose poetry in such a way that the new context transforms the sentence into a social visual with a closer affinity to lyric perception than to fictional prose. “There is no third person,” Silliman writes (in Ink); or in other words, there are only novelisms.
A novelism is a sentence perceived no longer as figuration appropriate to a realist novel. Instead, it is a sentence the reader perceives as being the perception — embodied truth — of lyric.
But for all that, the sentence retains its novelistic past, hence a novelism.
From Hidden:
“[…] Realism,
so-called, alienates, by virtue
of the shell posed around objects.”
I read “objects” here — the objects — as already encoded by language. Two “levels” of encoding are play out. As if, at a “primary” level, there is the social visual of an embodied perception (the perception of a perceiver in relation to situated objects); then, as if at a “secondary” level, there is taking those perceptual materials and wrapping a “shell” of figural language around them — the codes of realism.
Cause and effect have been reversed in these lines. As a discourse genre, realism needs to come first, in order that it can then be transformed into lyric perception in Silliman’s text. But in Silliman’s text, what comes first is freshly embodied perception in the now of the perceiver. In Silliman, the discourse apparatus of realism, its codes, conventions, institutions, history, comes after.
The next lines to those quoted above provide a demonstration of how realism alienates:
“The eye, neither flesh nor hair,
absolutely other, glistens.”
Here the codes of realism with which the text wraps the object — the eye — are those of descriptive science.
Hidden explores realism, what it is, for whom, and under what circumstances, and when, and what it needs — such as organized and hierarchized details — to create effects of verisimilitude, and what are its elective components such as verb tense.
Most interesting are the inevitable imprints of the cultural passage of time on how the realness of reality effects is received, effects which are only partially controllable. A novelism reflexively captures a tint of archaism by virtue of choosing 19C realist models.
Soon after the lines above comes Hidden’s first novelism:
“[…] Blonde hair turning gray,
a woman in a short skirt
walks in the rain. […]”
Instead of reading this lineated sentence as the work of a narrator staging the beginnings of a dramatic episode to be unfolded before the reader’s eyes in subsequent sentences — which, perhaps, will tragically reveal this woman’s identity as the protagonist’s childhood friend turned street walker feeding a bad habit . . . — instead, what we have is, in simplest terms, and in just one discrete sentence, a poet’s social visual of available external information concerning a stranger noticed passing on the street.
That is, we have the semblance of a truth, not of a fiction.
But at the same time, nothing guarantees that this novelism is not fictitious. After all, the description’s truth might be staged as truth. Is the poet really on the street watching this woman pass? We cannot know for sure.
Like wave and particle, the novelism waivers between truth and fiction, along the spectrum of which, from truth to fiction, there is a gradation of examples to choose from. Compare the novelism above, which is at the truthiness end of the spectrum, to the novelism “Old surgeon’s / slow gait across hospital campus” at the fiction end due to its contextual placement right after mention of car accident. The two lineated sentences are sufficiently thematically continuous to undercut the reality effect of the second sentence and to dub it a contrivance of fiction instead. When two successive sentences are sufficiently thematically discontinuous from each other, the effect is rather of the truth of a lyrical perception.
The incongruities between graying hair and youthful skirt, and between pleasure and need, cue us to further read contextually into the social visual. The prior sentence ends with the word “speed” which appears as the first word of the line that includes “Blonde hair turning gray.” Speed suggests locomotion, but, when re-read after the next sentence about the blonde haired woman, ambiguously refers to locomotion and methamphetamines. Etc.
Perceptual Unconscious
Unlike Souster and Ferrini (see my post, The Social Visual), Silliman is, to use an Olsonian boat analogy, “precise about what sort of bottom your vessel’s over”; and by “bottom,” and other references to the deeps in the opening letters of The Maximus Poems, I hear, beyond the dead reckoning and the character analysis, invocation of the need to recognize the perceptual unconscious of the text — I hear, rewriting Olson’s line: precise in the facts about your language being located over a perceptual unconscious. Olson tries to reflexively systematize it with Jungian terms, whereas Silliman leaves it completely open, so long as “it’s there” in the text (and it so often is).
It is by way of the marked presence of a perceptual unconscious in Silliman’s writing that I have come to understand the idea of writing as coming from the back of the mind, as Robert Grenier puts it and as I believe Silliman affirms it. A poetic language that issues from, is located by the perceptual unconscious, locates almost every couplet of Hidden, every statement, every observation.
A perceptual unconscious often organizes the most exciting hinges between lines and sentences, grounds the social visuals in autobiography (including the fictive elements), and propels a fundamentally class-based analysis of social being.
