Foreword
We do not dwell on our mortality, yet we conduct our lives as we do because of it. Ordinarily we behave the same toward other less dire realities that we might wish were not so. Indeed, we think delusional those who ignore them. This essay makes the case for similarly recognizing in our discourse and behavior the factuality of a proposition that today exists in neither. The argument is difficult to judge calmly and fairly, because it seems to undermine long-standing assumptions about who we are, what we are doing, and what we may hope to accomplish. My purpose, however, is just the opposite, not to undermine self-confidence but to found it on current reality.
Foreword
We do not dwell on our mortality, yet we conduct our lives as we do because of it. Ordinarily we behave the same toward other less dire realities that we might wish were not so. Indeed, we think delusional those who ignore them. This essay makes the case for similarly recognizing in our discourse and behavior the factuality of a proposition that today exists in neither. The argument is difficult to judge calmly and fairly, because it seems to undermine long-standing assumptions about who we are, what we are doing, and what we may hope to accomplish. My purpose, however, is just the opposite, not to undermine self-confidence but to found it on current reality.
*****
Though many of its once defining voices have been as absolutely deposed as they once reigned, postmodernism is still very much with us, its persistence not doctrinal but metaphysical. I think one can formulate that metaphysic in one word: “Now,” endlessly repeated, and from that infer the continuation “happening to and/or through us, for whom it is dogma that we are wholly in and of this happening, nonce units of a nonce mass, mutual mirrors self-consciously un-self-conscious, and individuals careful not to be one, because to be one implies perpetuation of something that is not momentary, that has moments because it is perpetual, infinite.”
What is interesting about this is that the proposition “I can not fundamentally alter or control the time in which I live nor, within certain limits, the kind of life I lead” has never before called forth a metaphysic whose adherents wall themselves off from everything but the here and now, and do it in a way that reduces even that consciousness to a factoid, as if there were no values and therefore neither responsibility nor past of any present relevance. In short, the modern problem of assimilating history is not, it seems, exclusively German. Yet history is there. It is always there. And now it is also us. Who are we?
Well, as to that we have the following from Joseph M. Conte [“Introduction” to Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry, Joseph M. Conte (Cornell University Press, 1991)].
…The humanism that Petrarch was so influential in spreading has given way to a post-humanism in which man is no longer the measure of all things; the reasoning mind is cast into shadows by celebrated irrationalities, and the individual ego finds itself to be at the periphery rather than the focus of modes of order.
…the New Age offers us either the comic confusion of a hundred cajoling, admonitory sources, or a sublime but empty ‘space music’ of planetary motion and interstellar dust…The postmodern artist has little confidence in suprahuman orders, and…will readily concede that whatever order may be apparent in the world is largely a projection of the human mind…arbitrary and occasional.
…all orders that make a claim for hierarchy or orthodoxy are seriously challenged…
[Quoting Umberto Eco in “The Poetics of the Open Work”] “...a…devolution of intellectual authority to personal decision, choice, and social context” is marked by “a general breakdown in the concept of causation.”
All of which is to make the case for a solidarity in—denial of solidarity. For belief in—non-belief. For community centered on—my doubts about thee, thine about me. What can one conclude about an argument with such an outcome? That at best it describes the mindset of an interim self-identified by its (once newly) discovered alienation and offering, in the last analysis—alienation.
Some observations: the “lapse of governing orders in our existence,” we are told, is rooted in the (presumably objective) perception that “whatever order may be apparent in the world is largely a projection of the human mind” and “consequently, postmodern artists consider human orders to be arbitrary and occasional…” Yes, but then so too are human perceptions of lack of order. Ergo, the argument is circular: we say it is, because it is; but also, it is, because we say it is. The real question, I submit, isn’t whether this or that view of reality is a projection of the human mind. It is. It always is. The question is whether it’s worth anything; whether, that is, anything of value can come of it.
We might, as regards the present dispensation, find an answer to that question by first locating the present in history. In that context postmodernism acquires a meaning it does not impute to itself. Consider: the birth of a great culture is in fact the birth of a profoundly distinctive metaphysic that manifests itself over the lifetime of the culture as a self-consistent evolution of style in all aspects of society, a consistency that identifies that culture for all time and in time, i.e., when it begins and when it ends. While it is living, its vision of what it is and what it has been changes, but always with a sense of the oneness of both. Only when at last that kinship bond is broken, when the new generation can no longer imagine perfecting the vision of the old, when the living identify themselves with themselves alone, only then can the culture as a form-creating entity be said to have died in its own inheritors. That, I submit, is the point we have reached today.
But in the first decades of the twentieth century the reality of a living Western literary tradition could still be taken for granted. The great writers of that era acknowledged, indeed asserted, their position within it and were celebrated for their contributions to it. What can we today take for granted in this regard?
First, since Western literature arose, as did the idea of the West itself, in, through, and over that of its constituent nationalities, a weakening of those national identities, such as I believe we have been seeing since World War II, connotes a weakening of the idea of the West, as well.
But, you ask, where is the evidence that contemporaries of whatever Western nationality see themselves differently, less clearly, with less passionate regard for their historical and cultural destiny, than did their forbears? The answer lies not in what we can observe today vis-a-vis some other time, but in what we can no longer even imagine observing: that release of energy upon the appearance of a radically new work of art, such as greeted the publication of, say, Ulysses—any earnest, in fact, of a people that still has, as it had then, the capacity to transform its vision of itself.
Further to the point: it was T. S. Eliot’s dictum that great literature, from the earliest works worthy to be called such to the most recent, exists as a unit in which the earlier inform the later and are themselves altered by them. In saying as much Eliot, I think, was less intent on edifying you and me than on exercising his powers of suggestion in the interest of consolidating his own myth, of conjuring up and breathing life into that constellation in which his sense of himself demanded he be seen. For of course his vision applied particularly to what, in his own poetry, he was doing: heaping the great past on its pyre, which immolation along with his own he celebrated. If therefore he had to fix that conflagration in a concept, it was because he saw himself as its last ember, cause and effect of its dying moment.
The implication, then, in an approach to writing poetry whose first rule is “not ol’ X” (that X is unequal to current conditions) conceals another: that current conditions are unequal to X, i.e., that something great and venerable has passed away. But whatever our stance vis-à-vis “tradition,” what do we mean by it? In what sense are, say, Dante and Yeats—separated by 600 years, nationality, language, beliefs, goals, and literary style—kin, and does that differ from the relationship between Yeats and poets since? Simply put, the two named poets, insofar as each created the style of his epoch, made explicit a stage of that idea whose unfolding in history we call Western culture. Hence to call any poetry “nontraditional” is to locate it outside of that unifying idea.
What does this permit us to say about contemporary poetry? I will answer that question by considering the work of one of the most, if not the most, celebrated of living poets, John Ashbery, because as such his work necessarily embodies current values most precisely and completely. In Ashbery’s poetry these values find expression in “difficult” (indeterminate) poetry; poetry so seemingly indecipherable, in fact, that dismissive, disparaging voices nevertheless persist. The result, for those who pay all voices heed, is the current spectacle of incompatible, or incompatibly grounded, valuations of the same object. Yet, more “accessible” contemporary poetry of comparable stature is hardly to be found.
One needs to ask, then, what there is in unremitting indeterminacy to arouse such intense scrutiny cum approbation/rejection. The answer, I think, is to be found in history.
One observes from medieval times on into the 18th century a working consensus as to society’s fundamental structure. But in the 19th century, the nostalgic, individualistic, idealistic passions in which the Romantic era recognized itself bespeak another world than the then actual one of industrialization, empire building, and Realpolitik. Though reactionary at its core, it is noteworthy that Romanticism began by appealing to the model of ancient Greek freedom and, reincarnated as Modernism, ended by appealing to that of medieval hierarchy, whether religious, as in Eliot’s case, political, as in Pound’s, or mystical, as in Yeats’, but throughout refusing to accept the present as its own measure. In this last sense Ashbery is in the direct line of the Romantic-Modernist tradition, but whereas the Modernists reshaped the substance and trappings of Romanticism’s reactionary idealism, Ashbery rejects in Modernism everything but its reactionary impulse and so ends by denying idealism altogether, his work thus amounting to a rigorous (i.e., ideal) counter-idealism. From this self-contradiction arise the mutual contradictions his work inspires, some prizing it as a sui generis epiphany, others rejecting it for the consequence: experience as vacuity.
A corollary is Ashbery’s inverse parallel with Shakespeare, who, as he (Shakespeare) told us, gave “to airy nothing a local habitation and a name,” names indeed that have persisted to this day—until, that is, the advent of the “postmoderns” and their cultural countermarch, and of these the most universally implosive, John Ashbery, whose gift it has been to strip from every habitation and every name any intimation of incorruptible essence, to return all to airy nothing.
The following observations on Ashbery’s (perhaps) most famous poem, “Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror,” take us closer, I think, to the heart of his poetry and thus, mutatis mutandis, of postmodern poetry itself. The line length and discursive tone of this poem might be said to have been born in, or to be a continuation of, the same in various passages of Four Quartets [“East Coker,” II, III, and V; “The Dry Salvages,” I and III (part); and “Little Gidding,” I and III (part)]. Both poems are alike too in the ultimate nature of the matters they ponder. And each turns, one as its starting point and fulcrum, the other only near its end and climax, on a figure of the Italian Renaissance. But here the resemblance ends. Ashbery’s “figure” is Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola (Parmigianino), a minor painter of the 16th century; Eliot’s, the poet Dante Alighieri. Eliot’s poem is a mystical Christian (hence ultimately positive) vision of life; Ashbery’s, a nihilistic one. Eliot’s encounter with the spirit of the dead poet works to affirm the organic unity of his (Eliot’s) life work with the great tradition that includes them both. Ashbery encounters no one and asserts no connectedness with anything, only the ultimate emptiness of all spiritual expedients. So, in a spiritual sense, this is the distance we have traveled since Eliot’s (indeed, since Dante’s) day without, in a formal sense, ever having left the station (except perhaps to divest ourselves of a good many modal choices).
The argument demands, I think, corroboration from the text of Self-portrait itself. Here I need first to say that this landmark work in the poet’s career is in one interesting respect atypical: its narrative logic (and therefore its language) is not indeterminate. It states the poem’s gravamen—its version of the indeterminacy of the self—clearly and precisely. Such clarity, as I have noted, is not the rule in much of the rest of the poet’s work. In the first 258 (of its 544) lines the poem primarily states and explores the meaning attributed to Parmigianino’s painting, the name of which is the poem’s as well:
…the soul is a captive… (l. 29)
The soul has to stay where it is,… (l. 34)
…It must move
As little as possible. This is what the portrait says. (l. 38-39)
…the soul is not a soul,
Has no secret, is small, and it fits
Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention.
This is the tune but there are no words.
The words are only speculation
(From the Latin speculum, mirror):
They seek and cannot find the meaning of the music.
We see only postures of the dream,
Riders of the motion that swings the face
Into view under evening skies, with no
False disarray as proof of authenticity.
But it is life englobed.
One would like to stick one’s hand
Out of the globe, but its dimension
Which carries it, will not allow it. (l. 44-58)
But suddenly, at line 258, we are in time present New York
Making you notice life and its stresses… (l. 282)
in, as it were, a rectilinear (i.e., non-convex) Euclidean world:
…Your argument, Francesco,
Had begun to grow stale as no answer
Or answers were forthcoming. If it dissolves now
Into dust, that only means its time had come
Some time ago… (l. 292-296)
But no, to the contrary, we are immediately alerted:
…but look now, and listen: (l.296)
And we learn that Francesco’s argument is also ours:
It may be that another life is stocked there
In recesses no one knew of; that it,
Not we, are the change; that we are in fact it
If we could get back to it, relive some of the way
It looked, turn our faces to the globe it sets
And still be coming out all right:
Nerves normal, breath normal. Since it is a metaphor
Made to include us, we are a part of it and
Can live in it as in fact we have done,
Only leaving our minds bare for questioning
We now see will not take place at random
But in an orderly way that means to menace
Nobody—the normal way things are done,
Like the concentric growing up of days
Around a life: correctly, if you think about it. (l. 297-311)
With the last two lines of this passage a new metaphor has clanged shut on our days, now no longer, as were those of Marley’s ghost, a long linear chain, but rings “concentric [emphasis added] growing up/Around” us, like the rings of a tree trunk, retaining us everyone in Francesco’s impenetrable, inescapable convexity.
As for the poem itself (as opposed to the painting itself), it exists to tell us that the painter’s plight (our plight)
…is the tune, but there are no words. (l. 47)
that words
…seek and cannot find the meaning of the music. (l. 50)
At the end we have learned that every self (soul) is “englobed,” in a prison, its pathos its perpetual apartness from the perpetual repletion of evanescence which is experience. This—the (non)content of the self—is “experience as vacuity.”
I think, however, that but for the fact of America’s existence, the phenomenon of literary postmodernism would have taken different forms (as well as been differently named). There is a radical quality to American postmodernism, which stems, I would argue, from the “postmodern” quality of American life from the outset. The roots (and a consequence) of this are visible in the following:
Before an impulse that is dying dies, it undergoes its last transformation and appears in its purest form. What began in 1620 on the site that became Plymouth, Massachusetts, ended in 1929 with the publication of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. Somewhere in its overwhelming nostalgia are the indeterminate latencies of three hundred years of half-suppressed, half-indulged primitivism finally obsolescent and displaced (in Wolfe) by the mirror image of inner emptiness due, not to primitivism, but to the felt disinheritance from the spiritual body, Europe. The pioneering, an accidental idyll, concealed the barrenness beneath its idiosyncrasies of adaptation until, become superfluous, they underscored the barrenness. Wolfe lived the dying moment. [From the author’s (unpublished) Collected Epigrams.]
But the postmodern as well as the Modernist literature of the last hundred years was profoundly conditioned in still other ways by the “American way of life.” The immigrant to America has always had to abandon, repress, or ghettoize whatever
“foreign” construct he came with. In line with this, American egalitarianism has always rejected behavior that flaunts personal divergence and idiosyncrasy beyond a narrow permissible range. In consequence, most Americans live by at least two mutually impermeable sets of internalized symbols, one for use in the larger community, and another or others for use when only those of like ethnicity, culture, race, religion, or other private persuasion are present. Another way of saying this is to say that American nationality is less indicative of a deeply held community of shared symbols than is any other nationality on earth.
Given this rootlessness, inner divergence, and constant self-reinvention, it is not surprising that America should have produced, first, at the turn of the twentieth century, two poets (T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound) who looked at the present through the lens of the (European) past, most of which predated America’s existence and the rest of which occurred largely without reference to it, and then, a half century later, the generation that invented postmodernism, in which that past, if it exists at all, does so only through the lens of that present. Thus the peculiarly American sensibility would seem to have given another world’s endpoint its elegy and the succeeding time its name and shape.
In one sense, of course, the past always and only exists through the lens of the present. But, since every present also recedes into the past, to be seen through the lens of yet another present, no rearward look is permanently definitive. We might then ask whether still another evaluation of the past and therefore still another direction for the present is now in order. At any rate, with regard to the immediate past, the following observation seems pertinent: the relation of present to past, always a fantasy (“projection of the human mind”), is animating when it both connects and distinguishes the two. Lacking either contingency, the present is maimed; lacking both, inert. By this measure the postmodern present is maimed.
J. P. Greene is an ex-New Yorker who, in his 9-5 days, was an editor-writer for technical, business, and financial periodicals; and on the staff of a management consultant in industrial plant location; on deciding to "go literary" full time, moved to Spain; lives now in Northern California. Married, two children