The map is not the territory - Korzybski
Regardless of the style or
mode of a poem, regardless even of the stated intentions of the poet, who may
vociferously deny his or her own voice, a ‘voiceless poem’ is an impossibility
– the phrase “a voiceless poem” is simply a flat contradiction in terms. To be
clear, there is no such thing as a voiceless poem.
Notwithstanding the inherent difficulties of
defining the ‘voice’, you cannot surgically remove the individual (‘voice’)
from the creative process without destroying the mechanism of the creative
process itself. Beyond all the textual analysis and critical theory that can be
directed towards a specific poem, the ultimate defining characteristic of the work
is the unique ‘signature’ (strong or weak) of the author; it is always the
product of unique sensibility. The essential criterion of difference between a
poem by one writer and another is ultimately a difference of personality; it is
matter of psychology, irrespective of literary theory. This is self-evident. It
is also true of poems written by poets who tell us they deny the voice – all you
hear is their voice.
The existence of an
authorial voice does not imply interpretative exclusivity. In principle, the
potential for plural meanings in a text and the creative involvement of the
reader remains unaffected by the presence of an authorial voice. The ideal poem
will always resist, or subvert, clear-cut interpretations or didactic messages;
it is unlikely to conform to expectations derived from the received wisdom of
either traditional dogma, or fashionable orthodoxy. Of course any given poem
may be less than ideal.
In the Sixties, British
poetry was divided into two symbiotic warring camps: conservatives and
radicals. The conservative anti-modernist counter-revolutionaries can be epitomised
by publications such as Encounter
magazine (1953-1967), and by poetic ‘schools’ such as The Movement and the
Confessional Poets. The ‘radicals’ comprise what is now known as the BPR (British
Poetry Revival), but was recognized in the Sixties as the Underground, or the
Children of Albion. We can refer to the latter as the Albion Underground.
The abuse of the word ‘radical’ to mean
‘progressive’ is endemic when looking back at this era and its immediate
aftermath. There is an assumption that experimentalism must be ‘radical’ by
definition but that is not necessarily the case. Poetic movements of the Left
tend to monopolise this terminology, conflating the meaning of ‘progressive’
and ‘radical’, terms sometimes used as a synonym for ‘militant’. Radicals like
to think of themselves as working to a ‘progressive’ political agenda, often
involving ideas such as social justice and even ‘revolution’ (not just any
revolution but The Revolution), hence the somewhat spurious notion of The
Underground (in The West no poetry movement was really Underground in the
strict sense). Most ‘radical’ poets fall into this category along with, for
example, ‘protest poets’ who often are neither innovative nor experimental in
the avant-garde sense (‘avant-garde’ here being another vague synonym for
‘radical’).
Surely the term ‘progressive’ (if it means
anything) must be related to freedom and – in a literary context – to freedom
of expression. Freedom of expression depends upon the concept of ‘the authorial
voice’; consequently, if you deny the voice, you deny the agent of expression.
To deny the voice is, thus, a reactionary and not a ‘progressive’ position; essentially it as an anti-Romantic
moralistic backlash, or often poses as such.
The
cultural climate of the later half of the twentieth century was very different
from that of the Second World War or the period of Late Modernism. The Beat
Generation of 1945-1960, haunted by the ghost of Rimbaud was among the last of
the ‘Romantic’ groupings defined by the image of the artist-poet as mystical
prophet, seer, wandering visionary and popular shaman. Ann Charters has observed
that the Beat Poets ‘relied on autobiography’ because their marginal identity
leads them to insist ‘on the validity of their own experience instead of accepting
conventional opinions and the country’s common myths’. Jack Kerouac defined
himself as ‘actually not ‘beat’ but a strange, solitary, crazy Catholic
mystic’.
From the 1970s onwards, in the UK, in
Continental Europe and in North America, we see, with local variations in
chronology, the continuing and ever-expanding influence of academia.
‘Literature’ became an almost exclusive domain of the universities, resulting
in most ‘innovative’ poets becoming functionaries in the Academy while most
‘radical’ poets outside the academy still maintained an affinity with the
Academic Left, regarding open-neck-shirt scholasticism as the guarantee of the
credible. Consequently, the traditional metaphor of the poet as wandering
troubadour, alienated ‘genius’, or tortured outsider was replaced by the
‘academic expert in loco parentis’ drawn from the post-Structuralist
intelligentsia. A new fashionable orthodoxy was born – Postmodernism.
Postmodern Theory (a
diffuse and ambiguous phenomenon full of internal self-contradictions) was a
consequence of the French universities general strike of May 1968 (‘the May
Events’) in which academics became disillusioned with the traditional Left
after the Unions and the Communists sided with the Gaullist Establishment.
Displeased by this turn of events they decided that all the Grand Narratives of
the Modern or Proto-Modern past (the Enlightenment) were worn-out or invalid –
the ‘condition’ was Post-Modern, the ‘situation’ was new. At the same time,
Roland Barthes proclaimed The Death of
the Author, a Marxist attack on bourgeois individualism, one of the first
assaults on the idea of the integral authorial voice.
By the 1970s there were, roughly, two strands or
varieties of ‘difficult’ poetry trying to maintain the status of the avant-garde
in a post-avant-garde cultural landscape. There was the Euro-centric strand,
inspired by Neo-Dada movements such as Fluxus, and there was the American
academic (Black Mountain) variety inspired by Charles Olson’s Projective Verse
and the Objectivism of Louis Zukofsky.
Fluxus was an early Sixties Action Art movement
initiated in 1961 by George Maciunas. It was concerned with the integration of
art with life and the negation of social hierarchies. Allen Fisher, a poet once
associated with Cobbing’s Writers Forum, is the most noted exponent of
Fluxus-inspired poetics in the UK, as can be seen in his publications Place (1974-1981) and Scram (1971-1982). Objectivism was an
offshoot of Imagism promoted by Ezra Pound. British Objectivism imported by
Basil Bunting, came to be identified with the Northumbrian School centred on
Barry MacSweeney, and the Cambridge School whose most famous exponent is J. H.
Prynne. Prynne is also an enthusiast for the philosophy of Martin Heidegger (as
you might expect Heidegger’s philosophy is both notoriously ‘difficult’ and
prone to ultra right-wing interpretations). One aspect of Black Mountain
doctrine was the eradication of the ego. Ironically, and despite this, the
Post-Albion Underground experimentalists were addicted to huge, grandiose,
self-important projects emulating the Cantos,
Patterson, Zukofsky’s A and
Olson’s Maximus.
Academic poetry differs
from the writing of the pre-Albion Underground era in that it substituted
theory for personality in the creative process. This was, above all, a Poetics
of Process. As a Poetics of Process it paved the way for the next style of
American poetry to arrive: the Language Poets.
Like Olson (who, in Proprioception (1964), demanded ‘Wash
the ego out.’) the Language Poets were explicit in their denial of the
individual ‘voice’ and by their concern to exclude all ‘autobiography’ and ‘ego
psychology’ from writing. This stance, (a continuation of the ascetic morality
of renunciation, an obvious hallmark of the righteous) which coincided with contemporary
debates in the academic sphere about the role of science, identity politics and
knowledge epistemology, assumed the illusory nature of the ‘Lyric I’, and the
non-existence of facts beyond language as unchallenged givens. These debates
were in fact symptomatic of a wider crisis in higher education and the sphere
of philosophy. It was Wittgenstein who said that ‘the sole remaining task for
philosophy is the analysis of language’. Cynics have argued that this state of
affairs had risen out of the widespread view that ‘philosophers’ were out of
their depth when it came to confronting the scientific picture of the world (or
even the universe). As Stephen Hawing said, science had become too technical
and mathematical, so philosophers were impelled to reduce the scope of their
enquiries. Language was the last bastion of knowledge, the final frontier for
the professional thinker who was not a scientist.
In many respects these ideas have now become
entrenched as key doctrines of ‘radical’ experimentalist poetry in both the US
and the UK. In reality it was another generational revolt: they used the denial
of the ‘voice’ and the principle of linguistic determinism as tactics to
challenge the established status quo and assert their own ‘radicalism’ – just as
all ‘new’ movements seek to do. In their 1988 group manifesto the Language
Poets said: ‘Our work denies the centrality of the individual artist’. This
statement suggests an authoritarian tendency in operation. Nothing is more
authoritarian than the denial of, or marginalization of, individual
‘expression’. As an aesthetic or poetic this is entirely retrograde and reveals
a mistaken view of the creative process. Furthermore the negation of the
individual (Olson’s ‘Wash the ego out’) is the very reverse of ‘radical’, if by
its use one means to imply a form of anti-establishment non-conformism. The
principle of the ‘unegoistic’ is the basis of the worldwide, culturally
dominant morality; an ascetic morality which preaches the selfless ‘unegoistic’
virtues of self-loathing, self-denial and self-sacrifice. These are virtues
which, for thousands of years, have been gilded, deified and
transcendentalised; glorified as articles of faith whereas, in fact they are
nothing but altruistic social conventions; conventions that have evolved by
chance to enhance group survival among many animal species, including Homo sapiens.
These various innovations had a major influence on non-mainstream British poetry which, prior to this, had shared, to some extent, a Beat poetry aesthetic, founded on an authorial voice. In Britain the Academic Left consolidated a position based on Post-Structuralism and similar tendencies (e.g. Social Construction Epistemology, Reader Response Theory) influenced by the later writings of Wittgenstein, flawed interpretations of Nietzsche, and an enthusiasm for Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). This latter in particular, together with a wilful misreading of Nietzschean Perspectivism, had a tremendous impact and precipitated what is known as the ‘science wars’. A key idea was the denial of objectivity and the view that the individual is a ‘cultural construction’. There can be no established facts, only incommensurable ‘paradigms’ afloat in a sea of relativistic viewpoints where no given viewpoint is any better or more useful than any other. However, significant transformative action in the real world requires the participation of an integrated unified, human individual/subject. By extension, the same is true of artistic creativity in all forms. Postmodern Theory usually denies this possibility; a convenient doctrine for those zealots of identity politics for whom all tradition and cultural baggage – however inimical – is sacrosanct.
The continuing rise of the mass media since 1945 has consolidated an already incipient post-cultural state. This is a state in which former cultural values have evaporated and ‘high culture’ has lost its historic dominance. It does not follow that the evaporation of ‘high culture’ vindicates the historical claims of Postmodernism – that would require an agreement on the nature of Modernism and a clear distinction (perhaps) between Modernism and ‘modernity’ in order to define ‘post-modernity’ as a viable chronological category. Postmodernism is a worldview or a doctrinal outlook: a limited (but diverse) quasi-philosophical tendency intrinsic to the late Cold War period. The era 1968-1989 saw the rise and fall of ‘Postmodernism’ in this narrow, doctrinal sense. The emergence of post-culture on the other hand can be dated back to the mid-to-late nineteenth century (for Barthes the historical turning point was 1848), a period that saw the publication of the Communist Manifesto, the rise of mass circulation newspapers, department stores, celebrity culture and popular mass entertainments such as Cabaret and Music Hall; the period that saw the first use of plate glass, the Singer sewing machine, the emergence of photography and the first moving pictures.
In the twenty-first
century the state of post-culture continues to evolve at an ever-increasing
rate of acceleration, rendering the old, nineteenth century ‘vanguard’ model of
literary and artistic self-definition superfluous. A crisis of self-definition
on this level has created an alienated intelligentsia still clinging to notions
of high cultural value. These values have no viable place in a ‘new world
order’ of globalised mass ‘infotainment’. We now inhabit a world where hitherto
‘profound’ masterpieces stand revealed as propaganda; a world where a tabloid
headline or a refrain from a pop song may well possess more aesthetic value
than a poem by J H Prynne or Basil Bunting.
It is ironic that the
position we are describing has lead an alienated literary class to deny the
value of the authorial voice, not only the voices of others – but their own as
well.
Bibliography
Barry, Peter.
Poetry Wars: British Poetry in the
1970s and the Battle of Earls Court. Salt Publishing, 2007.
Barthes, Roland.
Writing Degree Zero. Hill and Wang, 2012.
Charters, Ann (ed.).
The Penguin Book of the Beats, Penguin Books, 1993.
Hawking, Stephen. A
Brief History of Time. Bantam Press, 1988
Kerouac, Jack.
Lonesome Traveller. Penguin Books, 2000.
Leiter, Brian.
Nietzsche on Morality. Routledge. 2002.
Silliman, Ron et al.
Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry: A Manifesto. Social Text, 1988.
Sokal, Alan/Bricmont, Jean. Intellectual Impostures Postmodern Philosopher's Abuse of Science. Profile Books, 1998
Wilson, Edward O. Sociobiology. Belknap Press, 1980.
Illus: Fear of Mirrors, 1975
