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Crossroads Poetics

2016; Penn State University Press; Volume: 53; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/complitstudies.53.3.e-5

1528-4212

Renée M. Silverman,

Digital Humanities and Scholarship

Gaining a surer grip on the poetics of the twenty-first century means assuming the Janus-faced perspective proper to the turn of the century and the start of a new millennium. In Crossroads Poetics, Michel Delville adopts such an at once retrospective and forward-looking vision so as to both define twenty-first poetics and throw into question the meaning of “poetics” itself. Delville takes up the most salient views of the field as revealed by watershed 1990s works, in particular Charles Bernstein's A Poetics and Marjorie Perloff's Poetry On & Off the Page: Essays for Emergent Occasions,1 turning them into lenses for examining current issues in poetry and poetics. The simultaneous analysis of textual with non- and para-textual art forms in Bernstein and Perloff, and the interdisciplinarity theorized by Julie Thompson Klein,2 together inspire Delville's “comparative, intermedial poetics” (6). Likewise the characteristically twenty-first-century poetics that results from this admixture, which Delville terms “transversal” (5), derives inspiration from Cultural Studies' underlining of the mutual impact of “high” and “low.” Delville finds the potential for radical social and poetic transformation in the “popular-avant-garde,” which turns the productive exchange and mutual antagonism between popular culture and the vanguard into potent critique (7).3 At the same time, he is careful to leave room for the close reading of all forms and genres. In sum, Delville sheds light on the role and effect of society's discursive practices on cultural production, as well as on our conception of aesthetics and aesthetic autonomy, while maintaining the rigor of traditional literary scholarship.Delville's vision is framed by interdisciplinarity, intermediality, and the incorporation of “popular” into “high” cultural production on one level, and a critical interpretation of cultural practices on another level. In her Introduction to Poetry On & Off the Page, Perloff explains that she has “sought to describe the formations and transformations of literary and artistic discourses, as these discourses have evolved in their dialogue with history, culture, and society.”4 Bernstein takes the idea of the back-and-forth between cultural and aesthetic discourses a step further; in A Poetics ideology always already shapes poetry's language and references. Delville connects the dialogical interpretation that remains part and parcel of contemporary poetics, and the breakdown of disciplinary borders in today's intellectual world, with the ideological and political labor of challenging the author's supremacy and resituating authorial voice in the larger discursive network of a given culture. For poetics inevitably emanates from the conversations that occur within society at large, and these conversations are shaped by popular voices and popular cultural production; put differently, the popular and the elite cannot be separated into discrete and identifiable strands in the course of social dialogues. Delville indicates the considerable heuristic potential of situating poetics in the great web of social discourse, which consists in opening closed, “high” art forms to many kinds of cultural production and their nonelite sources, thereby exposing their popular origins and giving access to formerly excluded groups.The ten chapters comprising Crossroads Poetics can be categorized into three major sections: the first part (Chapters 1–4) deals primarily with intermediality and generic crossing; the second (Chapters 5 and 6) focuses mainly on the detail and the “transversal poetics” that come from high–low exchange; and the third (Chapters 7–10 [the epilogue]) concentrates on the “popular avant-garde” and the consequences of radical interdisciplinarity, and cross-generic cultural and artistic production. Delville contends in Chapter 1 that the generic instability of the prose poem increases with its approximation toward silent film. According to him, by aspiring “to the literary equivalent of filmic movement”—the reiterative action of Charlie Chaplin's early (silent) films—Gertrude Stein's cinematic prose poems maximize the undermining of traditional narrative forms that happens naturally in this genre (13). Delville relates the locomotive repetitiveness that he identifies in Chaplin and Stein to the massification of hysteria and bodily trauma during World War I. Comparable to Chaplin and Stein, the deliberate confusion between fiction and poetry in Max Jacob's Le cornet à dés (The Dice Cup; 1917), among other works, and Louis Feuillade's proto-surrealist aesthetics, evince an obsessive interest in simultaneity, dislocation, and juxtaposition, as expressed through bodily movement and perception. Like in Stein's prose poems, for Delville, Jacob's and Feuillade's representation of repetitive movement creates an ironic perspective on narrative genres. Following Marshall McLuhan, Delville suggests that the ironic thrust produced by intermediality and generic crossing in Stein, Jacob, and Feuillade serves to highlight and debunk the favorite myths and pretentions of high modernism.This is the point that Delville makes with special emphasis in Chapter 2: both in spite and because of Stein's lack of musical knowledge, the reiterative quality of her Sonatinas exposes high modernism's antipathy to the affective and familiar in melody. Yet the “melodic” in the Sonatinas is simultaneously revealed as a constitutive part of the repeated architectonic structure so dear to her fellow modernists. It is for diverging from such a meta-generic posture that Delville criticizes poet Charles Tomlinson—justly or unjustly—in Chapter 3. Instead of converting the patterns established by formal repetition into an ironic problematizing of genre and, by extension, genre's ideological bases, as Delville might wish, he finds that Tomlinson employs rhythm and meter to turn dissonance into consonance. What Delville sees as Tomlinson's insistence on resolution translates, in his view, into a political interest in unity and the integration of the self in the community at the expense of diversity and individuality.The arguments made by Delville in Chapters 1–3 reach their apogee in the fourth chapter—one of the most important for understanding his position. Fittingly, Chapter 4 is itself an example of generic crossing, as it examines a series of critical books on the subject of poetry in prose, the prose poems of “language” poets Bob Perelman, Charles Bernstein, and Rosmarie Waldrop, and eight contemporary American writers, before concluding with a quasi-manifesto. The key can be found in Delville's analysis of Jonathan Monroe's critical book, A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem and the Politics of Genre,5 which expands on his treatment of the prose poem's destabilization of genre in the first part of Crossroads Poetics. According to Delville, the prose poem “enacts a symbolic confrontation of ideological conflicts which every historical period necessarily maintains, sometimes in contradiction to its own self-proclaimed homogeneity,” as well as becoming “a writing practice that integrates a network of public and personal voices into a complex poetic idiom that allows each of them to be heard” (80). From the crossing of genres, we get the democracy of ideas and attitudes.In the second major part of the book, Delville explores the various ways in which the representation of the detail in verbal and visual art generates the transversal poetics that he advocates. In Chapter 5, he delves into how contemporary writers and artists have used the detail to go against the grain of conventional literary realism. Whereas in the nineteenth-century novel, as Delville points out, the detail typically served to describe, and thus elucidate, the characters' psychological and social circumstances, recent narrative has moved in the opposite direction, toward obfuscation. That which he calls “non-descriptive materiality”—the essential thingness of matter—bottoms out into an aporia that constitutes a radical challenge to the mimetic function of realism's narrations (153). Such a strategy fits with experimental modernism's disjunctive vision—the logic behind techniques of fragmentation, simultaneity, and multiplicity. Delville takes a similar tack in Chapter 6, with regard to Joseph Cornell's collage aesthetics and Rosalind Krauss's notion of the grid, in studying modernism's shift from mimetic to anti-mimetic models and its related insistence on art's autonomy from the outside world.The crossing between high and low becomes crucial in the chapters composing the third and final part of Crossroads Poetics. Here Delville explains that the exchanges that occur between high and low are what give experimental art work its socially transgressive charge. It is in this section also that considerations of class occupy center stage; the book's background in Marxian theories of culture (particularly those of the Frankfurt School and Walter Benjamin) come to the fore. For example, in Chapter 7, Delville argues that the changes brought about in audience perception by composer and musician Frank Zappa's techniques—collage, close miking, bruitism, sped-up voices, as well as the inclusion of found spoken material and bits from rehearsals and backstage conversations—by disturbing our idea of direct self-expression in music and lyric, defy common thought about the nature of subjectivity and, as a consequence, the situation of the individual in society. Continuing his exploration of perception's role in the conception of subjectivity and intersubjective relations, in Chapter 8 Delville analyzes how poet-architects Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins create spaces that play with the senses so as to construct a parallel between the body's interaction with the built environment, and the subject and the external world in terms of social organization. In Chapters 8 and 9, likewise, Delville delves into the defamiliarizing aspects of the repetitive loop with respect to memory—the core of subjectivity—in the video art of Bill Viola, Marc Atkins, and Douglas Gordon. For Delville, both the approximation of the void—death—in Arakawa and Gins, and the looping repetitions in Viola, Atkins, and Gordon, rupture with the perception of temporality that remains an integral part of our understanding of the self and its limits. Delville, just as Benjamin in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”6 regards problematizing the position of the observer relative to the perception of art as comparable to challenging the situation of the subject in society; dissipating conventional notions of aura and authenticity creates potential apertures for social mobility and liberation. Crossroads Poetics concludes with an epilogue that connects recent art work dealing with the eschatological to the examination of poetry, music, the visual arts, and film in previous chapters. The epilogue focuses particularly on “eat artists” and the way in which “the ingestion of food inevitably questions the boundaries of self and world, nature and culture” (242). As in the rest of the book, Deville forges links among works of art and poetics—where “poetics” is conceptualized in the widest possible sense—with the ideologies that underlie the construction of subjectivity, and the relation of the subject to the Other as well as to society.Behind Delville's analyses we recognize Benjamin's idea that “theses about the developmental tendencies of art under present conditions of production” can become powerful weapons in ideological warfare—which for Benjamin of course meant the epic battle between Communism and Fascism.7 In a similar way to Benjamin's use of such theses to combat traditional thinking about value, genius, and creativity—according to him, subsequently appropriated and distorted to aid the Fascist cause—Delville converts poetics into his principal munitions in the struggle for democracy, individual freedom, heterogeneity, and diversity. Poetics, from his standpoint, constitutes nothing less than the foundation of who we are, how we relate to each other, and the way in which we choose to organize ourselves in society. Delville's erudition, and innovative integration of interdisciplinarity and generic crossing into his writing, as well as his original, albeit highly ideologically charged perspectives, make for a compelling read. Although the jury is still out on to what extent weapons of the sort identified by Benjamin and taken up by Delville are effective in battle, certainly Delville has made a strong case for the relationship between poetics and art works on the one hand, and ideology and politics on the other hand. Whatever the verdict we eventually pronounce, Crossroads Poetics makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of this relationship, and to scholarship in the fields of comparative poetics, Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, and Comparative Literature.