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Frankfurt on the Farm: Southern Agrarianism Meets Adorno & Co.

The American south really is another country, or so I’ve thought from time to time.  And I thought it again earlier today, when a guy I know who recently took a teaching position in Mississippi told me how everyone at the university with a PhD insists on being called “Doctor,” and on signing emails with their full names followed by “PhD.”  It’s been my experience at my home institution, and at other colleges and universities in the north, that only a few professors insist on doing this, and that it tends to provoke a little behind-the-back eye-rolling on the part of their colleagues.  I’ve generally filed all this under the heading “cultural differences that don’t really matter but that probably reflect the more hierarchical social background of the south, with its roots in the agrarian world of the plantations” (the only other item in this slim file, with its elephantine heading, is “they do tend to call you sir or ma’am down there, don’t they?”).


The gentility I’ve encountered in the south probably is left over from a pre-industrial social order that would strike a Chicagoan, whose heritage is industrial mayhem, and whose future is the post-industrial unknown, as entirely alien.  But what about the intellectual traditions indigenous to the south?  What, more specifically, about the Southern Agrarians, that group of poets and literary intellectuals who made the 1930 collection of essays I’ll Take My Stand their manifesto?  They’ve often seemed distant to me: New Critical, conservative, and nostalgic for a vanishing social order based on the morally indefensible slave economy of the plantation — what could they have in common with the kind of left-wing, critical theory-devouring, Europhile with whom you and I sulk around the coffee joints and bookstores of big cities and college towns?


More than one might assume, it turns out.  While they certainly trafficked in nostalgia, when one looks at their actual writings, as often as not one finds significant overlap between what they believed and what the Frankfurt school critical thinkers — darlings of my sullen people, the liberal arts professoriate—believed.  I’m not saying that the two groups would want to amalgamate, but I do think they had many of the same ideas about what was wrong with the world in which they lived.


Consider a few examples.


Against Commodification and Exchange Value


“A farm is not a place to grow wealthy,” says Andrew Nelson Lytle in his contribution to I’ll Take My Stand, “it is a place to grow corn.”  He is appalled by the notion that the individual qualities of the products of life on a farm can be erased and replaced by a numerical, and easily manipulated, dollar value.  This erases the true use-value of the object, but more than that, it destroys the individuality of objects, reducing them to exchange value, and turning them into commodities.  “What industrialism counts as the goods and riches of the earth the agrarian South does not, nor ever did,” said Lytle, taking aim against industrial capitalism’s emphasis on the commodity as the means of measuring true wealth.


One hardly needs to quote Marx or Adorno for the similarities in outlook to be apparent.  But if Dr. Lytle and Drs. Marx and Adorno agree on their diagnosis (“the patient has a bad case of commodification!”) they disagree radically on the nature of the proper treatment.  No critical theory for Lytle, still less any form of labor organizing.  Rather, he calls for an economic and cultural movement, in which the people of the south “return to our looms, our hand crafts, our reproducing stock.  Throw out the radio and take down the fiddle from the wall!”  It’s more like what one would find in the writings of William Morris than in the works of Max Horkheimer, but even so, we should remember Morris wasn’t just a great wallpaper designer and furniture maker: he was a committed socialist.


The Nature of Utopia


The Agrarians were famously backward-looking, but when we look at why they yearned for the past, we see that it was generally as a way of criticizing the industrial capitalism of the present.


Robert Penn Warren, at a 1956 reunion of the Agrarians, said the past is “a better rebuke” to the present “than any dream of the future,” because “you can see what some of the costs were, what frail virtues were achieved in the past by frail men." For other Agrarians, there was an even stronger emphasis on the critique of modernity over any positive vision of what Utopia ought to be. As Lyle Lanier put it not long before the reunion at which Warren spoke, “I don’t feel overly confident now that I can have anything to say about what I stand for in these dismal times.  As in 1930, what to stand against seems much easier to identify.”  And that enemy was modern industrial capitalism. Lanier claimed to read the Wall Street Journal only “to keep up with what the enemy is up to,” and the opening statement of I’ll Take My Stand, attributed to all of the book’s contributors, says “it is strange…that a majority of men anywhere could even as with one mind become enamored of industrialism: a system that has so little regard for individual wants.”  One might attribute some of this anti-modernity to the culture around the Vanderbilt Agrarians: Nashville was undergoing a belated but rapid industrialization, establishing a mode of life very much at odds with the Agrarian ideal: it was as if the poets were surrounded by countless versions of Faulkner’s Flem Snopes on the make.


Of course any orientation to the past is fundamentally at odds with the Frankfurt school, which made much of futurity. As Simon Jarvis put it, Adorno wanted “to resist the liquidation of the possibility of really new experience,” and saw Utopia as a necessarily unachievable aspiration, a yearning for a newer, better world, beyond exploitation and oppression. But here, too, the emphasis is on Utopia as a critique of the present, rather than as an achievable reality in some particular form. Utopia, in Adorno’s view, could never be fully embodied, nor even formulated.  Irreducible to concept, let alone to political realization, it was an absolute for which to yearn. But we must walk in fear of anyone claiming to have produced it, in blueprint or in actualization.


Moreover, even in the disagreement about whether to look forward or backward in time, we can see a certain similarity: both Robert Penn Warren and Theodor Adorno approach Utopia with caution, with an eye open to the frailty of the vision and the human costs paid in attempts to embody it.  There’s caution to both visions, Agrarian/reactionary and the Marxian/radical.  This puts both on a moral footing well ahead of many ideologues of the mid-century right and left.


Obligation to the Lost Cause


A strange mournfulness hangs, mist-like, over the essays of I’ll Take My Stand: a mournfulness over the sacrifices of so many soldiers in the Civil War. A good part of the nostalgia for the past, and the sometimes hard-to-read defense of the old plantation society (John Crowe Ransom writes of slavery as “humane in practice” if not theory), is a powerfully felt sense that the sacrifices of one’s ancestors must not have been in vain.  While, with the exception of an essay by Allen Tate, there’s little in I’ll Take My Stand by way of calls for violent political action, there’s a real sense that one must remain loyal to the past, and keep the flame alive until conditions once again become propitious for one’s cause.


This sense of one’s place in history is surprisingly close to some moments in Negative Dialectics, where Adorno speaks of the revolutionary moment predicted by Marx as having come and gone, contained and defused by capitalism. In 1966, the year Negative Dialectics was published, Adorno saw capitalism more dominant than ever, and felt that critical thinking was the best way to maintain a kind of critical consciousness that will be essential for any future action on behalf of the great cause.  Both Adorno and the Agrarians looked back at lost opportunities and failed causes, and saw themselves as keepers of the flame.


The Group and the Individual


The Frankfurt school was unexceptional in Marxist thought in being deeply skeptical of the claims of individualism and individual agency, emphasizing the power of large social and economic forces, and the actions of classes rather than charismatic individuals.  On the surface, the Agrarians seem to believe in very different things.  They make much of the term “individual,” and can at times sound almost like Margaret Thatcher when she claimed “society does not exist.”  The opening statement of I’ll Take My Stand, for example, claims “the responsibility of men is for their own welfare and that of their neighbors; not for the hypothetical welfare of some fabulous creature called society.”  But even in the rejection of the notion of society, we see something other than individualism at work: there’s a notion of mutual obligation in much Agrarian thinking, albeit one based not on class solidarity but on family and region.  Lyle Lanier, for example, despised industrial capitalism for creating “personal isolation, and a fractioning of life functions.”  He feared capitalism would dissolve the bonds of extended family which formed a kind of social support network, leaving people uprooted, deracinated, and subject to the “convulsions of a predatory and decadent capitalism.”


Agrarian talk of individualism often masked an emphasis on social forms larger than the individual.  These social forms were by no means egalitarian, and they were based on a system of racial oppression, but they were far from individualistic.  As the historian Paul V. Murphy put it, the old southern social order “demanded of members, white and black, not only conformity to written and unwritten rules but also loyalty to an often informal but clearly defined social hierarchy.  In return, the white southerner gained a deep sense of community, identity, and family connection.  Black southerners,” Murphy continues, in deep understatement, “gained quite a bit less.”  Be that as it may, it wasn’t an individualist order the Agrarians promoted, despite their love of the term “individual.”  It was a form of group-consciousness they wanted to protect, against the atomizing forces of capitalism.


Art, Alienation, and Social Life


Another way the Agrarians distanced themselves from individualism was in their view of the proper social position of art.  Donald Davidson, for example, demanded art be integrated into the social world around it, growing out of and contributing to the life of a community, rather than serving some private vision or languishing in the aesthete’s private garret of l’art pour l’art.  “What is a picture for, if not to put on a wall?” asked Davidson.  A true artist, in his view, doesn’t produce work in which “the aesthetic experience is curtained off” but rather makes work that will be “mixed up with all sorts of instruments and occupations pertaining to the round of daily life.”


I suppose one could try to work out some relation to the Frankfurt school insistence on the social nature of all art, perhaps invoking Adorno’s well-known claim, in “Lyric Poetry and Society,” that even the seemingly private form of expression that is the lyric poem, a form of expression at odds with any social pressure represents a kind of shared social experience.  “The lyric work of art’s withdrawal into itself, its self-absorption, its detachment from the social surface,” says Adorno, “is socially motivated behind the author’s back.”  But that’s not where the really striking connection is.  The really striking connection is between Davidson’s Agrarian thinking and the avant-gardism of Dadaist and Surrealist thinking. 


Consider this: Davidson wants to return art from its ivory tower to the world of daily, lived experience, integrating it into daily life.  While his particular paths to this goal differ from those of Tristan Tzara or André Breton, his general goal is exactly that of these considerably freakier figures.  Dada and Surrealism were dedicated to breaking down the barriers set up by aestheticism, and by institutions like museums, between art and daily life.  For Breton, this was the true path of revolution.  For Davidson, it was a return to a more genteel past.  But for both, the goal was to end the alienation of the poet or artist from society.


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In the end, we can think of figures as diverse as Allen Tate and Donald Davidson, on the one hand, and Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, on the other, as people working in good faith with the different traditions they inherited to fight the excesses of the global system in which they found themselves.  Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that they have not only profound differences but very real similarities.


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[Note that I am having a secret argument with myself here: an article I wrote some time ago, "Aesthetics as Ethics: One and a Half Theses on the New Criticism" begins with the claim "no one would confuse the political dreams of the Fugitives with those of the Frankfurt School."  If you want to see that line of reasoning, it'll be out in 2012 in a book called Re-Reading the New Criticism, edited by Miranda Hickman and John MacIntyre (Ohio State University Press)].

Seeing Red with Nietzsche

Fret not, gentle reader: though the title of this post might make it sound like I'm about to embark on a rage-fueled rant against all the untermenschen getting in my way at the salad bar, I'm not here to talk about seeing red—I'm here to talk about seeing Red, John Logan's wonderful play about Mark Rothko, which opened last night at Chicago's Goodman Theatre.  Logan makes Nietzsche's distinction between Apollonian and Dionysian art in The Birth of Tragedy central to the story, and he's helped me see not only Rothko but also Nietzsche in a new light.


I'm often a fan of the work of the director, Robert Falls, although sometimes he goes too far into big spectacle for my taste (his King Lear featured a sawn-in-half car on stage, for example).  I've been less enamored of John Logan's work, though like most people I know him more for his movies—Gladiator, say, or Sweeney Todd—than for his plays.  But there really was no way I was going to miss Red, which just hit too many of my buttons: as a provincial art school brat in the 1970s I grew up surrounded by painters still working in the then-aging abstract expressionist mode, with all the brainy, butch swagger of Rothko, Pollock, and company; and Rothko was known for his love of exactly the literary and philosophical works that sit close to my heart: the Romantics, the German Idealists, and the existential wing of modernism.  When a colleague of mine, who'd seen the New York production, told me the play was all about aesthetic theory, and that it had only two characters "an earnest young bumpkin and a cynical old intellectual wreck—that is, your origin and your destination," I knew I had to be there on opening night.


When the play began, I knew right away that, whether it went well or poorly, whether it would succeed or fail by more objective lights, it would speak to me. The cavernous set, depicting Rothko's studio, came to me straight out of my youth: stacks of paintings leaning on one another, unframed in stretched canvasses; paint mixed in steel buckets; a big sink spattered with god knows what chemicals; a hot plate used for  in-studio cooking and the alchemy of paint mixing; a big adirondack chair from which the artist could stare at his work in progress; high-wattage floodlights; a battered old record player spinning classical LPs. I remember this as the stuff of the Aladdin's caves in which my dad and his colleagues made their art.  It will always be my image of the sort of place where the real, serious work gets done.  And then, in one of Rothko's first speeches to Ken, his new, young, naive intern, he rolls through a list of writers that pretty much comprises the syllabi of my seminars—Wordsworth, Beckett, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche—before thundering "you have to be civilized before you can paint!"  I don't believe it's true that all artists need this required reading list, but it's the stuff that's meant the most to me, and it's the background of the work for which I care the most.


The play never bogs down into a mere matter of talking heads: it makes much out of small movements and long silences, and there's an energetic scene of Rothko and his apprentice painting.  But talk there is, plenty of it, and it shows that Logan knows the big issues in aesthetics.  The action centers on the creation of what became known as Rothko's "secret paintings" — a series commissioned in the late 1950s to hang in the then-new Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building, but that Rothko refused to hang there.  Rothko, who came of age at a time when there really were no collectors or institutions for his kind of art, believed in the autonomy and integrity of the artwork, in its status as a stage in a personal struggle, in what amounts to its spirituality.  He believed these things with the intensity possible only for those almost totally removal from the forces of the art market.  But his paintings were supposed to hang in a place whose closest parallel would be the Vanity Fair of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress: a restaurant where the rich and status-hungry of Manhattan came to see and be seen, to establish themselves in a social order.  These people needed expensive, aesthetically profound art on the walls to show that they had both economic status and cultural capital, but they didn't really care about the paintings except as tokens in a game of status.  Rothko found himself crucified on the contradiction between the religion of art and the commodification of art.  His young assistant confronts him about this, throwing a new generation of artists in Rothko's face, saying "at least Andy Warhol gets the joke!"  (He's right, of course: Warhol saw just how art became a prestige commodity, and he cranked out visually shallow, repetitive work in a place called "The Factory" as a way of underlining the point, though it's by no means clear his many avid collectors understood, or understand now, that they were being punked, and that Warhol's real medium wasn't the slipshod silkscreen, but the apparatus of the New York art world, which he played as well, and as flashily, as Pagianini played the violin).


Logan also treats the matter of artistic generations with real sensitivity.  Near the beginning of the play Rothko speaks with a little glee about how he and his abstract expressionists did in an earlier generation of painters, and how it's "impossible for anyone to paint a cubist picture now."  Revere the fathers, he tells his assistant, but murder them.  There's a bit too much relish in how he says this, and we know he's being set up for a reversal, which comes when he later returns to his studio choking with rage at a show by Warhol, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, and other pop artists.  After this, Logan shows us Rothko moving from an initial glee at the destruction of the old, through anger at his own aging, to a kind of acceptance of the inevitability, even the rightness, of change.  Near the end of the play he dismisses his assistant, telling him that, having learned enough from the old master, he should be out in the world with his own generation, making an art that speaks to their experience.  It's an interesting moment, in which the young man's growth is acknowledged, and the old man grows through acknowledging the passing of all generations, including his own.  I wish Falls hadn't had Rothko put his hand over young Ken's heart at this point, though: it was too literally a benediction, and one of the few moments in the production to fall a little flat.


The real aesthetic center of the play, though, isn't a matter of artistic generations, or even of commercialization.  It's a riff on Nietzsche's Apollo and Dionysus.  Early in the play, the young Ken tells Rothko that his favorite painter is Jackson Pollock.  Rothko rolls his eyes, but later, after Ken's read Nietzsche on Rothko's advice, Ken comes back with an explanation for his admiration of Pollock, and for Rothko's reservations about the man.  Pollock, says Ken, is Dionysus: passion, the loss of self-control, the life-force itself coming through in all its disorder; whereas Rothko is all self-possession, analytic mindfulness, limit, restraint. Pollock threw paint down in a trance-like dance, says Ken, while Rothko stares at his canvasses for weeks on end, wondering what they need, and how to provide it.  Rothko rightly rejects this as shallow, and as too easy a division, and challenges Ken to think harder.  He does, and he comes to see Rothko's canvasses as an opposition between the two Nietzchean forces.  The luminous reds seem to represent Dionysus, and we hear Rothko and Ken shouting out the various associations we have with red—blood, warmth, anger, fire, Santa Claus, Satan— signs of life in its excess and passion.  Ken speculates about Rothko's colors as Dionysian and his form, all those containing rectangles, as Apollonian, but he soon moves on to interrogate Rothko about the meaning of another recurring color in his work, black.  Rothko's black is death, but also limit, and inadequacy, and self-doubt: the various antitheses of passion.  But red wouldn't make sense without black, just as passion, desire, abandonment and the like wouldn't make sense, wouldn't even register to our sensibilities, without their negations.  Ken calls this a conflict, but Rothko, gesturing at his paintings, tells him "conflict" isn't the right word for the relationship of red and black,  Dionysus and Apollo.  Rather, the right word for the relationship is "pulsation," the beautiful, living heartbeat of the colors in relation to one another in Rothko's luminous paintings.


This idea, I think, is the strongest part of Logan's script.  It's a real insight into Rothko's paintings: I'd always thought of them as icons of aesthetic autonomy, as color in relation for purely formal reasons, proud in their removal from the world of morality, commerce, political actions, and the like, assertions of the value of things as ends in themselves.  But there's a slightly different angle, in which the formal relations are seen as living things, experienced through time by the viewer as the necessary, pulsating oscillation of differences.  Think of them this way, and you can see them as meditative instruments, as the sort of thing that might reconcile a man to the pulsating change of time—to, for example, the rhythm of changing artistic generations.


The notion of the pulsating interrelation of the Apollonian and the Dionysian is more than just an insight into Rothko, though: it's also an insight into Nietzsche.  I think I can best explain what I mean with reference to a recent exchange I had with a sociologist colleague.


Not long ago, my sociologist pal, who is passionate about the Chicago Cubs and has written a book about how fans of this team form communities based on their enthusiasms, directed my attention to an article in which an editorialist complained about people doing "the wave" in Wrigley Field.  His objection was that "the wave is the very embodiment of groupthink, the surrendering our individuality in order to follow the rest of the lemmings..."  My pal agreed with this position, but I didn't.  I don't mind the wave, and in a way it's just a version of Nietzsche's Dionysian feeling, in which the division between spectator and participant dissolves, and (to quote Nietzsche), "every man feels himself not only united with his neighbor, reconciled and fused together, but also as one with him, as if the veil had been ripped apart, with only scraps fluttering around in the face of the mysterious primordial unity.  Singing and dancing, man expresses himself as a member of a higher community."  The crowd, moving together, is a harmless manifestation of Dionysus.  What could be wrong with that?  My colleague came back at me, saying "you know that I refer to the Cubs using the first person collective pronoun, and when we do something good, of course I want to be screaming and cheering and feeling that good old collective effervescence.  For me, the wave isn't about connection with the team."  In fact, "the wavers are disrespecting my team."  Ah! I thought.  This is neither an endorsement of the respectful, intent Apollonian spectator, nor of the Dionysian erasure of the hierarchy between crowd and the performers.  Rather, I thought, this is the moment of synthesis that Nietzsche sees as the birth of drama out of earlier ritualistic gatherings. The drama privileges the performers over the crowd, who are not equals in performance, except very intermittently.  But they're not isolated or passionless, either: they're united by a collective, focused passion.  It's about what's happening on the stage (or the baseball diamond), and one is restrained and reserved compared to the participants in a Dionysian ritual, but there are real foci of collective passions, and the form of the drama (or of the ballgame, as my colleague conceived of it) provides a kind of balance or synthesis of the Apollonian and the Dionysian.  Or so I thought.  But now, thanks to Logan's Red, I think that's not quite it.


After seeing Red, I'm more inclined to think of the relation between Apollo and Dionysus as a pulsation, rather than a balance or a synthesis.  That is: I don't think it's a matter of finding some ratio of the two, or some fusion, so much as it's a matter of letting the two modes of experience alternate, interact, and combine in patterns that make up a living, changing whole.  Rothko's paintings aren't a matter of balance, but of a living relation that changes for the viewer over time.  And watching the Cubs isn't a matter of intense, analytic spectatorship (although that's a part of it), nor is it a matter of enjoying one's unity with the gathered crowd (though that's a part of it too).  Nor is it a matter of finding a combination of these things, allowing for certain forms of collective experience (cheering together) but excluding others as illegitimate because they're not focused enough on spectatorship (doing the wave).  Instead, the experience of watching the Cubs, like the experience of looking at a Rothko painting, is a matter of letting these different kinds of moments come together in pulsating patterns that change over time.  I think, now, that's more in line with what Nietzsche was getting at.  It's certainly the version of Nietzsche Logan's Rothko presents to his apprentice Ken, but we're left with some question as to whether it is a vision he can live up to.

Rimbaud Notebook: The Sequel

John Ashbery is such a perfect translator of Rimbaud, so thoroughly plugged in to the right kind of French sensibility, that one really wonders why his version of Illuminations didn't come into being earlier.  In fact, the nature of Rimbaud as the eternal enfant terrible leads one to wish a translation of Illuminations came at the start of Ashbery's career, not in that career's final movement.  But it's a wonderful translation, and it offers the occasion to think, once again, about the miraculous and monstrous phenomenon that was Rimbaud.

I posted a few thoughts on Rimbaud back in 2009 — outtakes from a more formal piece of writing.  So I suppose what follows here is really my second Rimbaud notebook.  I'm amazed and humbled to think the two year span between that post and this constitutes a period equal to one half the duration Rimbaud's entire writing career.

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Thesis: Rimbaud is Tracy Flick.

Tracy Flick—Reese Witherspoon's character from the 1999 film Election—is uncannily similar to Rimbaud.  Consider:

Both Rimbaud and Tracy Flick come from households fraught with bitterness and anger caused by an absconding father.  Rimbaud's father, a Captain in the French army, was often away, and at one point went off to Algeria for good.  His mother was quietly furious, calling herself the "Widow Rimbaud."  When we see Tracy Flick's house in Election, it becomes clear that she is a child of divorce.  Like Rimbaud's mother, who converted her own frustrations into academic ambition for her son (she was a little league parent avant la lettre, with ambitions for her son compensating for her own thwarted life; he was a star student, even a prodigy), Tracy Flick's mother has created, out of personal frustration, an over-acheiving child, bent on winning all honors the school has to offer.

Both Rimbaud and Tracy Flick aim to escape the confines of provincial life and make good in the capital.  Both court their mentors sexually (Rimbaud goes after Verlaine, Tracy Flick after a hapless teacher), and both bring ruin onto the lives of mentor figures.  Both Rimbaud and Flick attain versions of their dreams, and destroy other lives to do it.  Only one left us extraordinary poetry, and if one is the sort who thinks that poetry is more important than kindness, one can make excuses for Rimbaud.

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Thesis: Rimbaud's revenge on his family is more twisted than the pages of The New Yorker have portrayed it to be.

Daniel Mendelsohn, in a very good article in a recent issue of The New Yorker, says "It's tempting to see, in the wild divergence between his parents' natures, the origins of Rimbaud's eccentric seesawing between literature and commerce."  It's a nice thesis in that it's clean and clear, and makes sense of the abandonment of poetry for the life of a merchant (in guns, among other things) in Africa.  Rimbaud's father, in addition to being an army officer, was something of a literary man, translating the Koran and compiling a humorous anthology, while Rimbaud's mother was much more concerned with material advancement.  But there's surely more to the Rimbaud family romance than a rebellion against the pragmatic mother through emulation of the literary father, followed by a rebellion of a literary father through the embrace of the mother's profit motive.  Consider:

—Writing may have been an emulation of the father, but so was running off to Africa, so we can see the African venture as an emulation of the father and a rebellion against the mother.

—Selling guns to Africans, when one's father worked to colonize Africa for France, can also be seen as a rebellion against the father.

—Rimbaud's mother was certainly a materialist, but in a dour, conservative, provincial way.  Not for her the longshot, not for her the risking-it-all-for-one-big-score.  She was more the type to die with a small fortune, slowly hoarded over the years, stuffed in a sock behind the vanity.  So the African capers of Rimbaud's later years, astonishingly risky and ultimately fatal, were also a rebellion against the mother.

Many critics have seen Rimbaud's abandonment of poetry for gun-running in Africa as a betrayal of his true self.  But this is to mistake poetry for the essence of Rimbaud.  And Rimbaud, astonishing though he may be as a poet, wasn't a poet first.  He was a rebel.  He was a universal rebel.  He didn't just rebel against his mother for a while, then against his father.  He rebelled against everyone, everywhere, always.

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Thesis: Pater and Rimbaud take different trains to the same station.

In 1871 Rimbaud wrote some of his most famous letters, including the famous "Seer's Letter," in which he told his old teacher Izambard "I'm now making myself as scummy as I can.  Why?  I want to be a poet, and I'm training myself to be a Seer..."  He also came up with his famous assertions "Je est un autre" ("I is another") and "I am present at the hatching of my thought."

What's happened here is that Rimbaud has tapped into some of the same things that Walter Pater would get at two years later in his study The Renaissance.  That is, Pater was about to offer us his sense of aesthetic experience (and, by implication, the poet's vocation) as something for-the-moment, something almost utterly asocial, without utility, without commercial or ideological aims: as a matter of letting one's sensations come to one brightly and clearly, so that one burns "with the light of a hard, gemlike flame."  Rimbaud, too, intuited that the poet no longer had a clear social position—had no meaningful role in the market, no role to speak of in making public opinion.  The poet is a dropout from society's main values (hence "scummy") and he perceives powerfully and afresh (hence "a seer").  Both men arrived at the truth of the poet's condition in the West as the nineteenth century entered its final decades.  The one came to his conclusions by scholarship, the other by a kind of preternatural feat of adolescent intuition.  They were both right.

In addition, Rimbaud has grasped another truth of the nineteenth century apprehended by Pater: the truth of the determination of the self by forces larger than that self.  It was the era of the Naturalist novel, with its protagonists formed by heredity and environment (Zola began publishing his magnum opus, the Rougon-Macquart saga, the same year Rimbaud wrote his "Seer's Letter").  It was also the era of early economically deterministic social theory (the first volume of Das Kapital came out in 1865, the second posthumously in 1885).  Like these other thinkers, Pater and Rimbaud came to see the self as the product of forces beyond the self.  But unlike Zola or Marx, they both put emphasis on how one can become subjectively aware of one's own determination by large forces.  Pater's famous Gioconda passage in The Renaissance (which first came out in the Fortnightly Review in 1869) depicts the Mona Lisa as the product of centuries of Greek, Roman, and medieval Christian forms of beauty and perception—a kind of palimpsest of the entire cultural experience of Europe from classical times to the moment Leonardo painted.  He also, in a clever fit of style, portrays the lady in the painting as someone who has lived all of this experience, and whose smile is the smile of knowingness: she knows she is the product of a long past and many forces, she knows that values and notions of the absolute, the good, and the beautiful come and go, she experiences all this as a kind of music of history.  Hers is the smile of detachment, of the consciousness of a historical relativist who knows that even her own relativism is the product of specific historical circumstances.  Rimbaud lacks Pater's learning, but he's got, much more immediately, the gist of the situation: I is another.  I am made by things that are not me, but I can watch this, I can see my own thoughts hatch ("hatch" is significant: the thoughts are the products of others who are absent).  In both Pater and Rimbaud there's a wonderful doubleness of consciousness: one is the thing that has been constituted by large forces; one is also the thing that knows this about itself.

*

A tradition:

With the emphasis on observing the self as it experiences things (watching one's own thoughts hatch) Rimbaud takes us away from the objective world and into the world of experience as filtered through subjectivity.  Hence the strangeness and the distortions of Illuminations.


One can see him holding a place in the great movement inward that is such an important part of the European long nineteenth century (from around the time of the French Revolution to around the time of the first World War).  Consider:

—Romanticism in the "Tintern Abbey" mode: that poem is 5% Abbey, 95% how-I-experienced-the-Abbey-then-vs.-how-I-experience-it-now.  We're on a road to the subjective, the interior.

—Modern fiction as Virginia Woolf defined it in her 1919 essay of the same name.  Modern fiction wouldn't be concerned with externals, claimed Woolf, but with the "halo" of subjectivity that surrounds each of us, and through which the world must be filtered.  We've arrived at an apotheosis of subjectivity.

Rimbaud fits, here, right in the middle.  He may be a rebel, but as he intuited, he's the product of forces larger than himself, including the tide of literary history.  Knowing this may have been part of what made him such a total rebel.  It may even have been a part of his abandonment of the literary for the very real, very material world of the African gun-runner.  His first heart of darkness was, like Conrad's, figurative. His second journey to an unknown interior was much more literal.

The Monkey, The Wrench, The Salt Companion

My first book, published back in 1998, was Word Play Place, a collection of essays I edited about the poetry of John Matthias.  I'm happy to report a new book of essays, picking up where Word Play Place left off, is about to appear: The Salt Companion to John Matthias, edited by Joe Francis Doerr.  Contributors include Gerald Bruns, Keith Tuma, Linda Kinnahan, Mark Scroggins, Joyelle McSweeney,  Peter Robinson, Christopher Merrill, Herb Leibowitz, John Peck, John Wilkinson, and others, including the present humble blogger.  Here is what the Salt website has to say about the book:


"The years 1995-2010 were particularly fertile for John Matthias. In that time, he published five critically acclaimed books of poetry, two pamphlets, two collaborations (a translation and an anthology); and some two dozen poems in various international print and online journals. With such additions to an already remarkable bibliography, Matthias, long-time co-editor of the Notre Dame Review, has confirmed his status as a major American poet — albeit one that many anthologists, critics, and readers tend to overlook. His poetic modes are wide-ranging: the anecdotal, the wryly subversive, and the experimental find purchase in the familial, the historical, and the lyrical. Working in a variety of styles unified by their sources in modernism, Matthias engages the arts, politics, and (primarily) Western culture while acknowledging a past that continues to unfold in the present. In this book, eighteen fine contemporary writers working in essay, interview, and poetic form offer penetrating insight into Matthias’ work — work that is sometimes allusive and difficult, sometimes transparent and clear. This volume begins where the previous selection of essays on Matthias’s work, Robert Archambeau’sWord Play Place, left off in 1998. It will be an invaluable companion to the poetry of an important American author."


In other news, Choice has reviewed another book to which I contributed, The Monkey and the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics, edited by Mary Biddinger and John Gallaher.  Here's what the reviewer had to say:


"…Biddinger and Gallaher have compiled an exceptionally fine sampling of reflections on contemporary American poetry. The first selections are playful, pithy examinations of noteworthy trends; the last section is devoted to ongoing debate in the field on attempts to classify American poets and their work into distinct schools—a debate to some degree launched in Cole Swenson's "American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry"… Less experienced audiences, including lay readers, will find the essays refreshingly clear and the threads of discussion easy to follow, and they will appreciate the wealth of illustrations and suggested further reading. At the same time, practicing poets and instructors in MFA programs will find the critique of such programs invaluable. Delightful in terms of style, broad and perceptive in subject and treatment, this book is a must-read for those interested in writing poetry. Though not exhaustive in coverage, it represents the current conversations of some of the most prominent writers and critics publishing today."


In still other news, I'll be speaking at the conference of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW) in Boston this October.  The full schedule is up online.  The seminar with which I am involved will take place at 9:30 on the morning of October 16th.

"American Poetry Has Entered Its Big Hair Phase"

Daniel Nester interviews Micah Robbins.


Nester: My latest shibboleth—I’d like to run it up the pole here for you and see what you think, and I am sure I am wrong, because I usually am and I’m, like old now—is that we have reached a period of late style, where the already bankrupt aesthetic battles of yore—lyric versus narrative, Ron Silliman’s Post-Avant versus School of Quietude, subjective versus written-for-the-ages—have all been decided on. We’re all to be lyric, subjective, post-avant poets now, and that’s that. Baudelaire used the term “Rococo Romanticism,” and I think American Poetry has entered its Big Hair Phase.

Robbins: I find this both depressing and hilarious! And I don’t disagree with your assessment. I’m imagining Charles Bernstein, Kenny Goldsmith, Christian Bök, and Ron Silliman in leopard print spandex and frilly boas dancing around to “Rock You Like A Hurricane”! Ahhhhh. No! Someone make them stop!

OK. So what do we do about it?

Read more here.

When Poetry Mattered: Notes on Andrei Voznesensky

Although it's been over a year since the death of Andrei Voznesensky, I've only just heard the news.  Voznesensky was one of the best-loved Russian poets of a generation called "the children of the 60s."  These were poets who came of age in the late 50s and early 1960s, the most famous of whom was Yevgeny Yevtushenko.  Both Voznesenksy and Yevtushenko were born in 1933, a good year for a Russian poet to be born.  Not only were they too young to be sent to the horrible slaughter that was the Second World War in Russia, they began to come into their own as poets just in time for the Khrushchev Thaw, a relaxing of repression following the death of Stalin and the removal of much of the apparatus of the Stalinist police state.  The period is also known as the False Spring, since it came to an abrupt end in 1963 and 1964, as Krushchev was replaced by that icon of dreary stagnation, Leonid Brezhnev.


During the brief thaw, though, it was good to be a poet in Russia, at least if you were the kind of poet who wanted attention.  Readings in stadiums were commonplace, in a way they never have been in the United States.  T.S. Eliot may once have delivered a lecture in a mid-sized university basketball arena, but these were actual poetry readings, in for-real stadiums: by 1962 Voznesensky was drawing crowds of 14,000 or more, and more than half a million people signed up to buy copies of his collection An Achilles Heart before it was published.  Other poets saw high levels of interest, too, and Yevtushenko was even more popular than Voznesensky.


What accounted for this enormous interest, even mania, for poetry?  I'm reminded of one of my critical touchstones, a passage from Declan Kiberd's Inventing Ireland where he speaks of the relative popularity of poetry in conditions of colonization and repression: when the national institutions don't represent the broadly-held values of a people, the people often turn to poetry as a vehicle for the articulation of those values. One can see why: if the theaters and newspapers and educational institutions are in the grip of oppressors, one can still take up a pen and write poems that say things unpalatable to the powers that be. And for a brief time in the Krushchev Thaw, poetry and other arts were liberated from the kinds of restrictions that still bound cultural institutions like museums and universities.  You could go to a poetry reading—as so many did—and hear a version of things that rang truer than the official accounts.  As my father, who studied Russian literature before becoming an artist, put it, "those readings in stadiums were the only place a Russian could go and not feel he was being bullshitted."


And what was it that Voznesensky had to say that didn't sound like bullshit to those crowds?  Well, a lot of it was an affirmation of the individual conscience.  In the 1959 poem "Who Are We?" for example, Voznesensky answers the title question by saying :


Under the cold stars, I wander alive
With you Vera, Vega, I am myself
Among the avalanches, like the Abominable
Snowman, absolutely elusive.


Against all the big, overwhelming forces, the little self remains, free and authentic to itself: there's a kind of individualistic sublime at work here.  The poem wouldn't be a Big Statement in the United States of the 1950s, even though Senator McCarthy's reign of terror over the intellectuals had come to an end only two years earlier: the level of repression just wasn't comparable to what Russians had seen, and Cold War America always defined itself against Russia by emphasizing the ideology of individualism.  But in Russia, where collectivism was an official ideology and individualism had been actively, and violently, discouraged, people heard in words like these a message of liberation.  


It's no wonder that Voznesensky wrote the kind of individualistic poems for which people were thirsting: as a young man he was a disciple of Pasternak, having moved out to Peredelkino to be near the grand old man in his last days.  Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, the great testament of the individual conscience against Czar and Commissar, was a kind of sacred text for Voznesensky. 


I sometimes wonder whether Voznesensky's individualism was made more palatable to the authorities by virtue of its being tempered with doses of nationalism.  Voznesensky's most famous poem, "I am Goya," with which he used to begin all of his readings, is many things: a harrowing picture of Russia during the Nazi invasion, a great piece of anaphoristic verse, a veiled remembrance of his father going off to war with a book of Goya reproductions in his backpack, an ekphrastic poem dealing with Goya's paintings of the Napoleonic invasion of Spain, and a testament to the achievement of the Russian people in throwing back the better-armed, better-fed, better-organized forces of Hitler's Germany.  It ends like this:


I am the gullet
of a woman hanged whose body like a bell
tolled over a blank square
I am Goya


O grapes of wrath!
I have hurled westward
          the ashes of the uninvited guest!
and hammered stars into the unforgetting sky—like nails
I am Goya


That last bit, about sending the Germans packing, or scattering their dead ashes on a wind that will take them back to whence they came: that's some hard-core Russian patriotism that no General or Commissar could condemn, and no Russian of the war years could hear without a deep, heart-felt response.  And the victory is portrayed as being as great, and as unlikely, as the hammering of stars into the sky.  Great stuff!


Even his patriotism couldn't really save Voznesensky when the False Spring came to an end.  He was subjected to the fate of so many Russian liberals, from the Decemberists on, and sent into a kind of internal exile, wandering in the remoter provinces of the Soviet Union.  His poems from this era take on a slightly different tone, emphasizing hope in the form of a kind of small, saving remnant of Russian society.  Here's one I particularly like, "To B. Akhmadulina."  It gives us a small group, on the move:


We are many.  Four, perhaps, altogether,
spinning along in our car devil-may-care.
The girl at the wheel flaunts her orange hair,
the sleeves of her jacket yanked up to the elbow.


Ah, Bela, though your driving leaves me limp,
you look angelic, out of this world;
your marvelous porcelain profile
glows like a white lamp...


In hell they bang their frying pans
and send scouts up to the gate to watch,
when you, as the speedometer runs wild,
lift both hands off the wheel to strike a match.


How I love it, when stepping on the gas
in your transparent tones you say,
"What a mess!
they've taken my license away...


"I swear they've got me wrong!
     You'd think I was a reckless driver!
            Why! I was just poking along..."


Forget it, Bela.  To argue with a cop,
you know, is a losing proposition.
He can't appreciate your lyric speed—
it's past the power of his transmission.


A poet owes it to himself
not to be trapped in miles-per-hour;
let him resound at the speed of light
like angels choiring in the stratosphere.


No matter, taking light-years as our measure,
if we should vanish like a radiant star,
with not a creature left behind to earn the prize.
We were the first to crack the sound-barrier.


Step on it, Bela, heavenly friend!
Who cares if we're smashed to bits in the end?
Long live the speed of poetry,
the most lethal of all speeds!


What if the maps ahead are enigmatical?
We are only a few.  Four, perhaps, altogether;
hurtling along—and you are a Goddess!
That makes a majority, after all.


We've got the exile's self-affirmation (no one will ever give us any recognition for breaking the sound barrier, but we recognize ourselves), and we've got a nice turn on the old trope of describing a woman as a goddess: here, her divinity makes the small group more than equal to any forces that oppose it.  This would be mere sentimentality if it weren't balanced against the earlier assertion that there's no use arguing with a cop.  Voznesensky is well aware that, in the realm of real power, he and his friends are no match for the authorities.  But in the realm of art, they maintain a kind of freedom, where the police can't match their speed.


There are a lot of things to admire in Voznesensky, including his revival of the Mayakovsky era breeziness and confidence that fell out of Russian poetry in the 30s and 40s.  One of my favorite moments of this kind comes at the end of "Fire in the Architectural Institute."  The poem is based on one of Voznesensky's experiences: he'd been an architecture student, and just before he was to defend his thesis the institute burned down, destroying all of his work.  But like Mayakovsky, he's got a seemingly unlimited, irrepressible buoyancy: "Everything's gone up in smoke/and there's no end of people sighing," he writes, "It's the end?/It's only the beginning./Let's go to the movies!"


But whatever his fine qualities as a poet may be, the reason Voznesensky mattered to most of his readers was that he spoke back to them their own values when those values weren't affirmed anywhere else.  I think about this when I hear people say, of one or another contemporary American poet, "he deserves more readers," or "she deserves an audience."  I think about it, too, when I hear suggestions about how to get more people interested in poetry (by adding music to readings, by putting little placards with stanzas on them in the subway, etc.)  These are supply-side solutions to a demand-side problem.  They try to make something available, in hopes that this availability will create demand.  But if we really want giant audiences, stadium-filling audiences, we'd need social conditions that drive people to need what is on offer in poetry, and conditions that prevent it from being offered in other venues.  History has been a bit too kind to us for that.

An Impossible Position

So there's this, an account in the Chicago Tribune of how people feel about what's been going on at the Poetry Foundation.  If you click through to the third page, you'll find that the last of the people is me.