Voices In Denial

 

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

Neither Here nor There

A Memoir of Subtopia

The bizarre is not a matter of choice. It is a matter of discovery.

- Georges Franju

 In those far-off days I was living on the outskirts of South West London, in what may be defined as a kind of ‘Subtopian Landscape’. West Barnes, Motspur Park and the immediate locality (bounded to the west by Beverley Brook and The A3 Kingston Bypass; to the north by South Western main line), seemed a kind of in-between place, neither here nor there. Shannon Corner (before the flyover), with its Art Deco Odeon (Saturday Morning Pictures for local kids) functioned as a dramatic intersection and quasi-industrial focus for perturbation and random incongruities.

These are my ‘missing years’; the years when I did not know how to relate to others, years when the mundane routines and distractions of family life took priority. But my inner, subjective existence was very different.

I ‘escaped’ into all types of paraxial if solipsistic fantasies, often inspired by Hollywood – or magazines devoted to horror and science fiction films. I might dream about Natalie Wood in Gypsy. I might daydream about Ursula Andress as Honey Ryder, or I might fantasize about the sinister but doomed Sylvia Lopez as Queen Omphale in Hercules Unchained. Any one of them might be a facet of my Dark Anima, the prototype for which was a macabre photo I found in a book of the dancer Mona Inglesby in The Masque of Comus.

Yet the epicentre of my little world was, perhaps, the West Barnes Lane level crossing or, possibly, the Carter Bridge signal box on the Raynes Park to Motspur Park line (Dorking Branch) where on my way to and from school, I used to cross the tracks to reach the junction of Barnscroft and Westway Close, next to the Alliance Sports Ground.

At the eastern edge of my private domain, my very own terrain vague, was Cannon Hill Common, a historic  site associated (we liked to think) with stories of Roundheads and Cavaliers, while to the south was the quite remote destination of Motspur Park, itself bisected by the further reaches of the Brook. I tended to think, in an imprecise way, of this entire area as ‘West Barnes’. This imprecision was further compounded by a lack of official clarity: one thought of ‘living in Raynes Park’ due the proximity of the station, shops and the Rialto cinema, yet the postal address was ‘New Malden, Surrey’. On the other hand West Barnes/Motspur Park sat on a boundary between Kingston and Merton and the entire area, known until 1965 as the Merton and Morden Urban District, was obviously part of the Greater London ‘urban fringe’ where those ubiquitous red trolleybuses ran between the Fulwell Depot and Wimbledon Town Hall until as recently as 1962.

This ‘urban fringe’, this indeterminate zone of playing fields, commons, sports grounds, putting greens, rarely-used tennis courts, branch lines, risky level crossings, traffic roundabouts, empty car parks, allotments and bypass embankments; with its numerous notice boards and hoardings; with its wire fences, rows of respectable semis built in the 1930s; blocks of flats and various light industrial ‘works’ (Shannon Typewriter, Venner, Decca, Bradbury & Wilkinson, Champion Timber ) might have appeared the materialization of a kind of cultural void. To the critical observer it was an anonymous tract of anomic space lacking in distinctive character or ‘spirit of place, an interstitial ‘middle state neither town nor country’. In hindsight it seems that this ‘Subtopia’ was an incitement for the imagination; although it might also have been that the bizarre strangeness I experienced in solitary moments was not a subjective projection but more an act of discovery.

Subtopia is bizarre in itself. Most streets were named as ‘something Avenue’, or ‘so-and-so Drive’, or ‘whatnot Lane’. Some streets were called ‘Greenway’, ‘Linkway’, ‘Kingsway’ or ‘Crossways’. There were also streets with feminine names, like ‘Estella Avenue’, and there were similar ‘Avenues’ called Phyllis, Adela or Marina. There were a couple of Avenues with boy’s names like Douglas or Arthur, but I didn’t like those. Estella and Marina sounded like giggling harem girls – I visualized them clad in diaphanous veils, decked out in tinkling bracelets and chandelier earrings – ‘cheesecake’ extras in down-market Hollywood epics or even those imported Italian ‘neo-mythological’ sword-and-sandal ‘peplum’ films. These streets were deserted during the day and there were very few cars parked by the side of the road. Occasionally a little boy or girl (not at school?) might whizz by on a bike.

As I recall, the nearby Bushy Road bypass embankment was a mixture of scrub and uneven terrain, ideal for gangs of local kids to build ‘dens’ and play around with bows and arrows. There were sandy track-ways and a steep flight of concrete steps lined with poisonous laburnum; there were metal milk crates hidden in the grass and there were treacherous patches of nettles.  On this inclined embankment strange finds were made, such as discarded scaffolding poles or stacks of old newspapers and sleazy magazines (Tit-Bits, Parade, Reveille, Famous Monsters of Filmland, The Sunday People). It was noticeable that many of these disreputable publications were mutilated with numerous rips, tears, and missing pictures. In the forbidden pages of Reveille and Parade I found further inspiration for my fantasies. In my imagination famous stars like Natalie and Ursula, now competed with pin-ups known only as Donna, Vicky, Debbie or Carla. On one occasion we uncovered a cache of old 78 shellac records mostly smashed and covered in mud. One disc remained intact: ‘Lawdy Miss Clawdy’ by Elvis Presley.

The nearest recreation ground, just on the other side of the branch line, was guarded by rows of very tall poplar trees. During hot heat-haze summers, around the nearby roads, there was often the smell of melting tarmac. Local allotments were littered with shards of broken terra-cotta flower pots and small plastic windmills. Here, neat grass pathways zigzaged between tall rows of runner beans and bundles of canes. During winter snow covered the Trial Grounds of Carter’s Tested Seeds and gathered on the neo-classical semi-naked statue of Venus that graced the large, round fishpond at the driveway entrance to this imposing building dominating the area just north of the concrete road bridge with its dual carriageway. That elegant, dignified statue of Venus, with her fully-exposed, marble-white bottom, was, ‘for all the wrong reasons’, something of an attraction for many local boys, myself included.

‘Subtopia’ (‘inferior place’ from the Greek word topos) was a technical term originated by Angry Young Architect, critic and campaigner Ian Nairn in a special edition of the Architectural Revue entitled Outrage: On the Disfigurement of Town and Countryside (1955) and later in the book Counter Attack Against Subtopia (1957).

Nairn deplored the disfiguring, environmental blight of the semi-urban, quasi-suburban ‘desert’ of ‘wire, concrete roads, cozy plots and bungalows…a universal Subtopia, a mean and middle state…’ Certainly not as sinister as ‘The Wasteland’, this kind of place was simply bland and uninteresting. Lacking the seedy appeal of the inner city or the glitz and prestige of The West End, Subtopia was the epitome of postwar banality, the result of lazy town planning or the outcome of a kind of apathy where construction rules, culture and taste evaporated into vague, misty indifference. Concerns for important social issues withered away in Subtopia, a realm whose inhabitants appeared to live a charmed life, subsisting in a kind of lower middleclass coma. Even a performance by Bill Haley & His Comets on stage at the Shannon Corner Odeon failed to create more than a minor scandal: ‘Cinema Seats Ripped Up By Thugs!’ a local paper huffed. The event was soon forgotten.

Was my Subtopia more genteel than that derided by Nairn and the conservationists?

Perhaps… or perhaps not; those ‘shabby’ shop fronts and murky corner shops selling newspapers, antiquated postcards, comics, Classics Illustrated, Sherbet Fountains, Liquorish Allsorts, edible Flying Saucers, Gob-Stoppers peanut brittle and vanilla ice cream cones, seemed to hint at all kinds of perverse diversions and subterranean mysteries guaranteed to incur parental disapproval. While those odd, light industrial installations, electricity substations and pylons became a distinct subjective, spectral presence. There were also imposing buildings of unknown use with locked gates, high hedges and security patrols; there was one ‘works’, for example, that made parking meters.

Girl-friends, some from school were never far away: there was Lesley (a keen ice skater) who lived in a nice house over by the Common with its wooded copses and green swards and a football pitch. Or there was perky Babs (brother with an elaborate model railway) who lived on the quiet road called Linkway. Before Babs there was a mischievous little lady known as Pinky who lived in our flats. On school holidays I used to visit the recreation ground with Lesley, who showed me her lace-trimmed knickers one idyllic afternoon. We would sit and watch the distant main road traffic... or drift through wooded walks in an immersive frame of mind that cannot be recreated from this distant perspective.

According to Bob Kindred of the Association of Conservation Officers, Nairn’s campaign of outrage, his crotchety ‘counter attack’ against  Subtopian blight was aimed at such horrors as: concrete lamp standards, ‘Keep Left’ signs, municipal rockeries, chain link fencing, truncated trees, ‘garish’ shop-fronts, ‘pretentious and intrusive’ outdoor advertising hoardings, wires, poles, and ill-sited public utilities. ‘Many of these targets seem eerily familiar but the indignation now seems lacking‘, bemoaned Bob writing in the 1980s. ‘Has familiarity blunted our ability to see how tawdry many of our surroundings still are?’

But then, perhaps for some of us, nostalgia has superseded indignation.