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.