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THE SELF AND ITS SOCIAL CONCERNS IN CHARLES BERNSTEIN’S POETIC WORK
M. BRITO
Кафедра английской и немецкой филологии Университет г. Лагуна Кампус де Гвахара, 38071 Ла Лагуна Тенерифе Испания
The American critic Hank Lazer suggests there are two large areas in American poetry that are overlapping at present. «The first is the dissemination of the ‘subject,’ accomplished variously by formal innovation, theoretical argument, and multicultural studies. The second is the politics of poetry as resistance to appropriation: resistance to the official verse culture, the marketplace, the dominant culture, and hegemonic ideologies» (1998). Charles Bernstein participates in both currents, introducing multicultural and social issues and distancing himself from official verse, with special emphasis on the role of the Other. His poetry and poetics show a clear «aversion of conformity» (Poetics 1), showing new forms and approaches with which to agitate and provoke individual action to affect society. This intention can clearly be seen in his primary works like: Senses of Responsibility (1979), Poetic Justice (1979), Controlling Interests (1980), Disfrutes (1981), Stigma (1981), Islets/Irritations (1983), Veil (1987), The Absent Father in Dumbo (1990), Rough Trades (1991), Dark City (1994) or With Strings (2001), and of course in the concepts developed in his essayist works: Content’s Dream (1985), A Poetics (1992) or My Way (1999). His work reflects the direction of his thought over these years and how he has acted as a catalyst in the socio-cultural changes he has been involved in. His innovative poetry, as I call it, rather than categorizing it exclusively within the language group, is active within the literary field, but also adorned with political motifs, taking us through sometimes undecipherable lines to stimulate reflection and enthusiasm for both personal discovery and social implications.
Without reductive power to continually generate possibilities, Bernstein’s poetic works do not show such presence of a voice to give greater power to the text, inspiring action and reflection. For this, the emphasis is on composition rather than trying to show the coherence of the self or seek appraisal for the technique used. Centering on writing as such is sure to receive multiple evaluations, discourse and reaction, and also to be conscious that the author/reader and their hierarchization involves «structure, social context, genre method, politics» (Bernstein 1986a: 409). In this sense, his poetic production is difficult to categorize as normative, as reading is an experience free of mannerisms, requiring one to find out why and how it was written. This has implications for individual interpretation and its social aspects. His intellectual position allows one to read the Other and start a debate about its differences from the self. This is one of the reasons this poet thinks that the strongest emerging force in current
American poetry is indeed multiculturalism with its clear effects on issues of race, gender, and social class, which generate a situation «quite different than the «academic» versus «New American» poetry of the fifties» (Bartholomae 1996: 59).
My own concern is that poetry and poetics for Bernstein involve matter and transcendence, both appear with changing forms determined by social and political factors. He even thinks in categories like «form, process, tradition, communication, subject matter, abstraction, representation, concreteness, expression, emotion, intellectuality, plainness, voice, meaning, clarity, difficulty, content, history, elegance, beauty, craft, simplicity, complexity, prosody, theme, sincerity, objectification, style, imagination, language, and realism have no unitary or definitive sense within poetics; they are, like the personal pronouns, shifters, dependent for their meaning on the particular context in which they are used» (1990). All these elements are strategic factors that are reformed inter- and intra-textually and are inserted in a process that requires outside participation. There is however no doubt that they allow a clear affinity with Julia Rristeva’s concept of the subject-in-process to be glimpsed, «a self continually fluctuating and reconstituting itself, continually being shaped by its intercourse with all forms of language, events, and instinctual drives» (Parsons 1994: 174). Reader and writer participate in the unavoidable process of language. Though let us remember that Bernstein has distanced himself from the deconstructionist radicals and shares the more Wittgensteinian view of a social self immersed in a continuous process of formation, that must arrive at verbal agreements and interactions with the Other.
In fact, Bernstein’s fundamental role within the innovative language group as editor and theorist is an obvious sample of his interest in writing, not merely establishing an arbitrary logocentrism but to have a historical projection and social influence in a wider context. He points out that they developed a poetics that insisted on rejecting «received and beloved notions of voice, self, expression, sincerity and representation» (Bartholomae 1996: 42). If we take the magazine L=a=n-g-u=a=g=e as an objective reference due to its appearing as his organ of expression, the group as such did not last very long, in fact only 1978-81, but its activities reach back to the magazine Tottel's edited by Ron Silliman, the talks and meetings at Grand Piano and the famous essay «On Speech» by Robert Grenier, both around 1970. The literary production of the group has continued to spread since then, despite the gradual officialization of most of its members by absorption into academic institutions or respectable established journals. In any case, the most stimulating aspect of this collective is that they always expressed their desire to blur the limits of what is literary. Ron Silliman’s example is how the poet Joanne Kyger, who was closely linked to the Beats but also attached to Jack Spicer’s circle, had been one of Hugh Kenner’s students and exerted an obvious influence on Robert Grenier and several poets related with the Naropa Institute and its Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. This ultimately brought Silliman to the simple conclusion that Kyger must be read like any language poet: «one word at a time» (Silliman 1998: no page given).
Within this context of exciting interchange and participation during the 1970s and 1980s, formal requisites were not necessary, except one pointed out by Bernstein himself, «to insist on particular possibilities for poetry and poetics» (Glazier 1996: 42). In my view, language poetry and poetics fall naturally within the American tradition beginning with Dickinsonian poetry and carried on by the Modernism of
Pound and Williams, passing through Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen and Charles Olson, until one arrives at Jackson Mac Low and John Ashbery. On taking these literary references into account, in the particular case of Bernstein other philosophical, linguistic and aesthetic sources must not be forgotten: Russian Futurism, Surrealism, Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell, Marx and Gertrude Stein’s experiments in the psychological perception of language. As a more obvious formal model used by all of them, we have fragmentation and insistence on the absolute value of the word as an imprint of human history and culture. If Pound already used montage as the first step to fragmentation, in his case in search of a poetics in opposition to Swinbume and the symbolists, in the case of Bernstein and his companions we find an insistence on using words that do not contribute directly to perception. Now the current American poetics has responded with language that does not illustrate coherence but rather a sense of provisionality awarded it by the changing social context of each historical moment.
An example of this care shown towards language itself, highly recurrent in Bernstein as his variant of the theoretical orthodoxy of some members of the language group, is his attention to poets who approach English from another language - even if they have later made it their own, with special emphasis on their awareness that there is no natural relationship between words and things. This is the case of Stein, Zukofsky and Williams who had to invent as Silliman suggested earlier, one word at a time. The other example Bernstein considers in his essay, «Time Out of Motion: Looking Ahead To See Backward», carries on this trend towards fusion deriving from a linguistic influence, when he quotes the anthology: A Prophecy, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and George Quasha, to which must be added those that the former has continued publishing: Technicians of the Sacred and more recently Poems for the Millennium, maintaining an internationalist character where different poetics and forms of language are combined. Here again, we are speaking of limits. Flouting of the rules is a constant in Bernstein’s work, whether by using different devices, like exposing his social concerns (Controlling Interests), use of humor and parody {Islets/Irritations), his constant desires to reify the imagination (Stigma) or playing with sounds as in Disfrutes. In all these cases the etymological (connotative and symbolic) and associative levels (more abstract and typical of free verse) are overlapped to produce a poetic mode that questions the self and the author-ity of the poem.
In his recent essay «Warning: Poetry Area», Bernstein wonders if poetry is created by its public or vice-versa (1999: 304). This recurring question speaks of the enigma of deciphering the public and private aspects of a society which has so rapidly had to assimilate new roles and acceptance of ethnic, gender and class issues; especially in the last few decades. Here, poetry has acted as a vehicle of communication of this new status, attempting to group together minorities who exchange values that mass society finds difficult to assume. This is despite this type of avant-garde poetry having been treated as elitist. This open eclectic sense of both form and content is one of its most valuable assets, sustaining the liveliness of its proposals through volumes of essays, lectures, and congresses, and whose importance has grown proportionally to the furious diatribes of official media like The New Criterion or Partisan Review. In all their published works, like for example those special issues devoted to this poetry in Social Text, Open Letter, Boundary 2, Change, or
anthologies like Legend, In the American Tree, The L—a-n-g=u=a-g-e Book or O, the members of the language group have always laid emphasis on the mode of poetic composition that sets off from an exploration to get in touch with the Other, always in search of new experimental forms. For instance, Bernstein has used idiosyncratic structures in Islets/Irritations, the implications of idiomorphicity, or genres and types so as to pose questions to himself about the value of truth as in The Sophist. The language group as such represents the public side of these poets and their dilemma was always whether to break with the notion of a group to give free rein to the latent and not convert the Other into one’s own double. Seen today in a historical perspective, this group revitalized and reformed certain well-worn habits of 1970s poetic writing. But the common element they shared, the poem as an artifact that resists the conventional, is still observable in the greater part of their poetic productions. In the same way as their continued commitment to practice in exploring and questioning the role of ideology within our culture.
Indeed, although Christopher Beach tells us the notion of intertextuality in Bernstein has clear correspondences with Barthes’ and Foucault’s theories (1992: 244), he acknowledges that Bernstein does not go so far as regards the disappearance of the I, mainly because, as Bernstein himself leaves it clear in his essay, «So I hope the reader does feel implicated because I want to show that / as a social construction, a product of language and not a pre-existing entity outside it; that I is first a we. We’re implicated in each other from the first!» (1986a: 410). Bakhtin’s dialogic structure could also be applied to Bernstein’s poetic proposals, but in our poet’s work the voice is individual and collective with an orientation «that pushes the limits of what can be identified, that not only reproduces difference but invents it, spawning nomadic syntaxes of desire and excess that defy genre (birth, race, class) in order to relocate it» (Bernstein 1986c: 88).
To examine the self and the social element in Bernstein we must resort to one of the foundations of his poetics, namely Wittgenstein. For both, literature and philosophy support each other as they refer to disciplines that reflect and analyze the possibilities of human knowledge. When both disciplines are excluded for methodological reasons, it is usually to establish that philosophy adheres to consistency, while poetry should be related to language and emotion. However, for Bernstein, both take part in «the project of investigating the possibilities (nature) and structures of phenomena» (1986a: 219-220) and he justifies this drawing on Aristotle via Wordsworth, «Poetry is the most philosophic of all writing... Poetry in the image of [humanity] and nature» (Bernstein 1986a: 229). The differences between these disciplines might be attributed to reasons of professionalization or segmentation, but in fact both coincide in explaining phenomena (events, objects, selves, realities) and the human consciousness above them. They both also explain aesthetic and social relationships, providing an ideological and political approach to reality, a commitment observed by Linda Reinfeld as generalized in the language poets, when they defend the close connection between literary theory and social reality. In the case of Bernstein specifically, she alludes to the attraction he feels towards some of Theodor Adorno’s works e. g.: Aesthetic Theory, or Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, precisely for not separating aesthetic questions from political commitment and ideological critique (1992: 53). Bernstein’s position against the Balkanization of theory is a consequence of perceiving methods of interpretation like feminism,
psychoanalysis, materialism, sociology or romanticism as worldviews that tend to defend a territory or specialization. This is why all the modes of language in the twentieth century are liable to appear in his poetry, from computer language or T.V. jargon to more classical poetic diction, in a tour through the most intimate and undecipherable to the most complex philosophical imperative.
For Wittgenstein, literature was an event to be shared and thus needed a nexus for the multiplicity of individual interpretations to come into contact. Despite the apparent nihilism and instability of meaning, it is easy to find frequent references in this philosopher’s work to the importance of the context and the use of meaning within language «the meaning of a word is its use in the language» (Wittgenstein 1958: 43), in order to insist on language as laden with historical meanings and uses we cannot escape from. The same history or how it is narrated must be revised, not from the rhetorical point of view but by emphasizing that its role is to represent. It would be at this point when poetry and philosophy explore and facilitate multiple possibilities in constructing not a fixed theory of the individual and the social, but one bounded by the necessary critical distance. The core connection between Bernstein and Wittgenstein is given by considering language as the motor of that consciousness for interpretation. There is no automatic correspondence between signifier and signified and it is language itself that initiates us into knowledge and experience of society. Within this context, Stanley Cavell is another significant source to substantiate this position. The continual references made by Bernstein in his essay, «The Objects of Meaning: Reading Cavell Reading Wittgenstein,» serve to make us appreciate once more that the foundations of knowledge are not to be found in a preexistent world but in our shared conventions and the uses we make of language. In particular, I think Bernstein is attracted to the Wittgenstein that explains how language is associated with the nature of knowledge and the importance he gives to those images of our culture and community that restate us as individuals in society. From Cavell he selects the political character of all interpretations on entering into a dialogue with the text, the Other and reality, that leads us to a self-scrutiny or questioning of ourselves and the world that surrounds us. It coincides with what Gadamer calls a «hermeneutical experience» (1986: 356). However, in the same essay on Wittgenstein and Cavell, Bernstein tries to go a little further, to insinuate that our relationship with the world is not just that of knowing, but of being there and acting. From this arises his enormous interest in uniting the literary with the social.
When Wittgenstein points out that «language is itself the vehicle of thought» (1958: 329) he is but stating that writing is self-knowledge and the imprint of human presence in the world. Language is also the central point for Bernstein, it is not just knowledge but action, especially for the today’s multicultural world where it is necessary to face up to and accept the divergence that so repels mass culture. For him the medium of poetry with its atmosphere of uncompleted suggestions is suitable for quoting from Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals, capable of converting margina-lity into a moral question (the rebellion of the slave), considering it as an acceptance of the Other, up to recurring to the ethnic, social or gender differences in order to be prepared to accept it. Therefore, the concept of writing in Wittgenstein’s or Barthes’ sense is an individual literary action inscribed in a variable context full of contingencies. Indeed, Bernstein’s books on poetics, Content’s Dream, A Poetics and My Way, show a succession of ideas adhering to a language conceived as the pivotal
point of human experience, living it and confronting its alternatives. This offers the reader the chance of contemplating the doubts and solutions of an individual immersed in his or her context. It is also true that part of Bernstein’s production is rather schizophrenic because of the multivalency and variety of devices used, where fragmentation is one of the most recurrent resources for offering multiple values for the signifiers that are constantly being reconstructed. However the desire to solidify this practice with concrete philosophical arguments is useful to evaluate the consistency of modem poetic discourse, where truth, if it exists, lies in the phenomena arising around it does «not approximate a displaced ‘physical reality. They are the product of a mediation by the membrane of consciousness, which is language, and hence actualizations of such a reality» (1986a: 123-124).
On emphasizing the importance of the context and the social in order to avoid skepticism in apprehension of meanings, Wittgenstein observes that «consequences and premises give one another mutual support» (1993: § 142). We must not forget that Bernstein is aware of his being included in a poetic line that starts off with Pound, to whom he responds by trying to supersede Modernism, investing literature and literary language with an autonomous self-referential practice, reducible to specific codes by individuals but constantly open to reinterpretation. Thus, the purpose of poetic language is discovery, but leaving an arduous task to the reader, who feels obliged to decide how and in what direction the elements of language can be combined with the categorizations to which we are accustomed. The response does not include a re-composition of the fragmentation as in Pound, to find the creative self, but rather that language has a long history of premises and consequences that could occupy a central position as true protagonist; establishing a scenario of meanings conceived as options. The most obvious reward and conclusion when faced with this attitude is that it submerges the reader in an open progression of language that reflects one of the most outstanding motifs of poetic experience: to experience words as raw material to be deciphered.
This literary game Charles Bernstein offers the reader is full of hidden forces and meta-commentaries between the different voices in his poems. The reconstitution of what is lost into the Derridian dijferance has as its objective the liberation inherent to life-experience, not just literature. In this sense we are reminded of what Julia Kristeva points out regarding Joyce’s Modernism in Finnegans Wake. He uses language free of «didacticism, rhetoric, dogmatism of any kind» (1980: 92). And I say ‘life’ because the term ‘language’ in Bernstein is not limited to the literary world but extends to visual, verbal, gestural and tactile dimensions with a clear projection into the individual’s life history or biography. It is evident that this language transcends the mechanical sense of history to lodge itself in a more discursive communication. Although characterized by deliberate opaqueness, the mode of expression itself makes us more aware of its forms and structures. Kristeva applies the concept of redemption to Joycean opaqueness, in that the experimental and radical is a source of new meanings, sometimes unexpected. In Bernstein’s case, his obscure language proceeds from the everyday world and his imagination, which is capable of altering conventional reality by using a lexical organization that begs for another reading. Such organization is defined by his opposition to what is ordered from the outside, that is, to deterritorialize signifiers by altering grammar, syntax or spelling to reclaim the idiosyncratic and personal, which will stimulate greater attention to language
itself and to our awareness of its ideological-political role. For Bernstein, word order and its servility to convention answers to a social order that limits the potential of the human being, whether in the interests of capitalism or of totalitarian communism.
By preferring the suggestions and interpretations generated by formal resources like alliteration, asyndeton, puns, assonance and consonance, parataxis or synesthesia, Bernstein counter-balances the repressive effect of the macrostructure of language on our experience of the word. This is reflected in the alliterations in some lines of Disfrutes, «sand/ and/ sane/ an» (1981: no page given), or in the couplets in section 9 of his long poem «Locks without Doors» published in Dark City, in which two lines form a complete whole, whether through a mechanical rhyme relationship or their meaning: I got/ no eyes/ all ears/ tear verbs/ for very long/ had no song/ give me day/ to make my sway/ glow and rasp/ will not last/ be kind/ slow mind/ go blow/ fill holes/ come clean/ go away/ in summer/ get butter/ floor plan/ poor slant...» (1994: 53). Non-narrative de-contextualized lines multiply the associations in which more experimental books or poems like Islets/Irritations, Veil, Controlling Interest or The Sophist may be defined as ‘syntactic,’ understood by this author in these terms: «The pleasure in hearing syntax is like the pleasure in tasting food... It follows, that is, by dint of: a demonstration that we live in a world made content a posteriori-, an age of huts (series makes syntax) not bits» (1985: 186). A third equally clarifying example would be the Bernstein’s homophone games played with foreign languages that have their precedent in Louis Zukofsky’s Catullus, translating each word according to its homonymous sounds in English. This type of exercise shows his interest in widening the possibilities of poetry, surprising himself with results that show how the creation of a self contrasts with those of other writers. Bernstein’s poetic and analytic discourse is integrative and unifying despite its often fragmentary character, and involves an interdisciplinary application of aesthetics, ethics, culture and politics, so that there can be sufficient interaction between everyday reality and whatever transcends it.
Many of his poems say something about the clear correspondence between practice and theory. «Artifice of Absorption» would be one of the most illustrative cases of this connection where that basic concern of writing is made clear: an area of research with communicative intentions and social power. It is difficult to distinguish if «Artifice of Absorption» is a poem or an essay, formally it would be poetry as it is written in verse, but the rhythm and content are those of a prose essay with footnotes added. It has incidentally been included in his essayist book A Poetics published by Harvard University Press. Defining the terms of the title, Bernstein offers us the keys to understanding this text: «‘Artifice’ is a measure of a poem’s/ intractability to being read as the sum of its/ devices and subject matters» (1992: 9), «By absorption I mean engrossing, engulfing/ completely, engaging, arresting attention, reverie,/ attention intensification/ rhapsodic, spellbinding,/ mesmerizing,/ hypnotic,/ total, riveting,/ enthralling: belief, conviction, silence» (1992: 29). He uses numerous examples and literary references throughout this poem/essay that help to perceive the paradoxes of both language and the human condition. The names with the strongest presence are Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Steve McCaffery, Jerome McGann, Emily Dickinson, Bruce Andrews, David Antin, Samuel T. Coleridge, Ezra Pound, Helen Vendler, Donald Wesling, Robert Kelly, Velimir Khlebnikov, Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, Louis Zukofsky, Clark Coolidge, Ron Silliman, Georges Bataille, Robert Grenier,
Nick Piombino, Leslie Scalapino, Samuel Beckett and Merleau-Ponty. His quotes and explanations have concrete names and are also a sample of the poetic debate that has led him to varied critical and creative compositions. His main idea is that the anti-absorptive, less transparent techniques he uses are also capable of absorbing the reader, perhaps more powerfully than traditional methods, «non-absorptive means may get the reader/ absorbed into a more ideologized or politicized space» (1992: 53). Fascinated with form and its many shadows, Bernstein exhibits a concept of poetic language as witnessing and questioning individuality, obscuring it for us to judge it, be stimulated by it and use it as a tool in the construction of our selves. Even the form this 89 page long poem/essay ends in has been altered, if we compare the first version in Paper Air with the latest included in his book A Poetics. In the first we read a clear exposé of his intentions: «We can try to/ bring our relationship with readers to/ fruition,/ that the site of reading become a fact of value» (1987: 65). The end that appears in the latter version differs slightly but with the same interactions in a more poetic tone «Do we cling to/ what we’ve grasped/ too well, or find tunes/ in each new/ departure» (1992: 89). In this way, Bernstein joins together poetry and essay, practice and theory, offering the reader a vision of being a carrier of values to be explored in the composition itself.
The implications of this position with regard to language, whether in his poetry or poetics, lead us to consider the role of the self and try to decipher its social articulation and values. From my point of view, this type of literature widens the horizon and leaves behind the romantic self, on not blinkering or narrowing its vision from its own exclusivity outwards, but associating and contrasting it with the Other, the author and the reader intermingle in this aesthetic new order as a privileged mode of discourse since they wander between the subjective and non-subjective (the shared and the transcendent) as the main characteristic feature of what the text itself demands. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, on analyzing modem society in response to poststructuralism in Sources of the Self, again speaks up for the values found in literature, ardently defending the idea that language and form cannot be autotelic but rather must mediate between man and perceived reality. His main contribution is the recognition that both art and literature take part in the concept of ‘epiphany’ which makes them go beyond reality (though still belonging to it) so that they become authentic. His definition: «The epiphany is our achieving contact with something, where this contact either fosters and/or itself constitutes a spiritually significant fulfillment or wholeness» (1989: 425). What I mean is that Bernstein’s approach to language allows this identity of the modem self to debate between the realism of its social position and that which transcends it, by allowing a sense of totality, normally only attainable through art or literature.
This idea enables us to connect Bernstein with other American poets who have used random, operational and experimental techniques to make their literature open out into a more transcendentalist consciousness. Let us briefly remember the cases of Jackson Mac Low and John Cage where the use of dice or pentagrams was a means to achieve a style of writing that would not only potentiate the materiality of the text but also connect it to a universal or cosmic consciousness and the true role of the self. For example, Mac Low found no obstacle to establishing a correspondence between Zen Buddhism or Taoism and anarchism, since for him both consider the individual as the most valuable entity, capable of cooperation with other individuals to achieve the
common good: «the elementary actions of the world itself and of «all sentient beings» are regarded as being on a level with those of human beings in the narrower sense.» This statement was made by Mac Low in 1965, in a period in which the concept of author was definitively established in his poetics, as the instigator of situations to invite other people and the world in general to be co-creators: «He [the poet] does not wish to be a dictator but a loyal co-initiator of action within the free society of equals which he hopes his work will help to bring about» (Mac Low 1973: 385). Obviously his intention is to evade the heavy presence of the self. He travels parallel to other literary-artistic movements of the seventies like the Black Mountain School, the New York School and especially the theories of John Cage. Cage’s music, with that of Christian Wolf, Earle Brown and Morton Feldman was decisive for Mac Low to begin to get his teeth into a poetry characterized by the coincidental and fortuitous, where the individual appears as a privileged being. His non-intentional methods stem from those years and he recognizes they are connected with those of John Cage:
By «nonintentional methods» I mean all methods through which artworks are produced with relatively little direct input from the artists. They include the many systematic methods that employ one or another type of «chance» to determine details of artworks — methods for which John Cage coined the term «chance operations,» e.g. randomization, «reading-through» methods, including my acrostic and «diastic» text-selection methods and Cage’s mesostic method, in all of which one finds and successively appropriates linguistic units that have certain letters in specified places; and «translation» methods, wherein one uses features from one universe or discourse, e. g., a musical score, to determine elements in another, e. g., a poem (Mac Low 1992: 6).
Here, the author does not impose anything but rather invites us to participate and so involve ourselves in an aesthetic, ethical or political experience. At the end of the 1950s, Mac Low had performed his «simultaneities» in the classes with John Cage at the New School for Social Research, but in the sixties he delved into a poetry with a greater emphasis on random or chance composition, sharing the same interests with other composers, «happening» artists and writers involved in the same environment and intentions as Cage. As a consequence of these experiences, many of the resultant poetic forms characterizing his poetry in the 1960s are a license for the reader to intervene and sort out meanings for him or herself. Asymmetries, for example, began to be written in 1960 and is a book which illustrates the intentions of that period with the inclusion of ‘acrostic’ poems whose haphazard criss-crossed reading is not subject to any specific stanzaic form, nor centers on the representation of a particular idea or reality in their content, which must be deciphered by the imaginative and creative capacity of the individual.
I do not mean to say that Bernstein has this sense of cosmic consciousness or any connection with Buddhism as his primary intention. However, there is no doubt that his heavy emphasis on the material projection of language and its ontological character can also lead us to the idea of the self realizing its own transcendence by paying special attention to creativity and imagination. What is more, there are very few references in his work to the religious sense in the human being. When there are, as in «Pockets of Lime», published in Rough Trades, or the more explicit «Why I Am Not a Christian» in The Sophist, the Creator is seen as having left the human race waiting for a reward it never obtains. In any case I am referring more to a trans-
cendence which tends to unite mankind in solidarity, to a sense of universal community where the individual is able to reach beyond the materialism in day to day affairs. An illustrative example is his poem «Matters of Policy», belonging to Controlling Interests, where he refers to everyday experiences, transcending them by suggesting their poetic side. This is actually a revision of what might be his ordinary day without a precise narrative. We are faced with a network of his independent perceptions that begin by drinking Pepsi and asking someone the time. He then walks through the parking lot hearing people talking about the «affaires de la monde» (1986b: 2), buys flowers for the vase at home and is capable of quoting someone who connects religion with feelings, «If the/ great things of religion are really understood, / they will affect the heart» (1986b: 3). The reality before him centers on the city and its physical features of summer and winter, with the Subway and its water and electricity piping, that runs through it underground, «But we have/ higher hopes» (1986b: 3). All the sophisticated New York culture and its gastronomic variety, its allusions to exotic geography like Madagascar, Paraguay or Australia, serve once more to focus on the Other and feel within the community, «You looked/ into my eyes & I felt the deep exotic textures of your otherworldliness» (1986b: 5). The conclusion to this poem is the literal image of buildings, but the poet evokes sensations that go beyond the physical and lodge in his remembrances and in a clear sense of transcendence that so delights us all, «The surrounding buildings have a stillness/ that is brought into ironic ridicule by the pounding/ beats of the bongo drums emanating from the candy/ store a few blocks away» (1986b: 9). The motif of the poem is the presence of an individual who is alert to perceive the complexity of the city, but he also leads us to reflect on ourselves and the complex matrices that follow on from the superimposition of proper names, places and quotes that also belong to the collectivity and the cosmic sense of life, with definite implications and distinctions between public and private worlds.
Faith in individual perception is the starting point for his world-view. This attitude is shared with his contemporaries, whose work is also constructed as self-discovery or learning and as an expression of the multiple influences on our perception of the social world. This non-absorptive poetry is a continuation of similar forms within the American poetry tradition preceding it. From Gertrude Stein to John Cage, such experimental poetry has reconstructed and motivated a new concept of the self, in order to observe its mysterious nature and the changes it has gone through when compared with what is considered rational. On proceeding this way, the signifier-signified relationship has been questioned, and therefore the role of univocal referentiality. Structure, form and meaning constantly overlap in lines that intersect with so many possibilities that the mysteries multiply. This is one of the main reasons why Bernstein is a rule-breaker and interpreter, stimulating the reader to re-examine and question human culture from new angles. Ultimately, this approach is not limited to just the exclusively individual, since his texts expand through those of other authors and experiences and also require a resolution to shed light on our social definitions. Linda Reinfeld makes it clear that Bernstein is a writer that needs a down-to-earth presence rather than Derridian insubstantiality, preferring Wittgenstein and Cavell for their commitment to meaning with intentions, to responsibility and even a certain coherence that makes him «personally committed to maintaining the possibility of a reasonable, politically enlightened discourse, a project he considers better
served by Stanley Cavell’s The Claim of Reason than Derridian disclaimers and dissemination» (1992: 57).
The form used in composition with the aim of putting this poetics into practice is far from being a modernist collage, resembling an assemblage of pieces functioning organically, «I’m interested in a work composed of a number of autonomously distinct pieces that nonetheless functions as a whole - that is, has an overall configuration whose music is composed of differences» (1985: 189). At first sight, it is easy to see an accumulation of poetic forms and rapid perceptions in his poetry, working towards «Making writing, the activity itself, an active process, the fact of its own activity, autonomous, self-sufficient» (1986a: 72). The poetic structure this author has put together makes new relationships possible within his poetry itself, which are also poured into his lecturing work at the State University of New York at Buffalo, «My imagination of teaching composition is working in and on a series of different language projects, employing different shapes, styles, and forms, and exploring how these make for different meanings, where meaning is understood as something socially and aesthetically - as much as logically or lexically- determined» (1996: 51).
This poetic architecture where images are stuck together without any explanation, often without connectors, is called parataxis. It is a technique whose most noteworthy American forerunner can be found in Emily Dickinson but it has been taken up again strongly by the language poets. This poetic form makes us think beyond the literal use of language, for us the reference closest to hand, leading us to perceive first the autotelic-inherently purposeful-nature of the poetic form and then helping us to transcend its materiality. I actually think it urges us to action in comprehending and seeking responses to the crisis of the relationship between signifier and signified. What is more, it will lead irremediably to the inertia of reading to dialectical discourse, aligning itself in Bakhtinian terms with discourses characterized by a plurality of voices, where the dominant voices and others opposed to them can be heard at the same time in a continual dialectic interchange. We recognize the Other, and the complexity of our situation. This intellectual attitude provides what I would call an aesthetics of collapse with respect to a conventional one based on the narrative of the self or the topic in question which paradoxically takes us not to disjunction in communication, but to being aware of having to break through the limits. There are similarities with the semiotic dimension that Kristeva finds in the most experimental modernist texts, where the physical text is liable to show its shortcomings: «in so doing... [it refers] to a signifying disposition, pre- or trans-symbolic, which fashions any judging consciousness so that any ego recognizes its crisis within it. It is a jubilant recognition that, in «modem» literature, replaces petty aesthetic pleasure» (1980: 141).
The formal and subject matter framework Bernstein operates in is clearly eclectic, characterized by inclusion and operating from and beyond literalness. We might describe his technique as assemblage. Though, of course, it is clearly excentric, a term he uses often when he repeatedly associates the impact of his poetry as intimately linked to ethnic, linguistic, racial, class, sexual and regional issues. Its common nexus is rooted in challenging the conventional. The formal network is usually complex in Bernstein’s work. We need do no more than take a glance at Controlling Interests, The Sophist, or Islets/Irritations and observe the formal varieties that resist any defining categorization. Long and short poems, arbitrarily split
lines, some in prose, and empty spaces or capitals to attract more attention, configure a poetry superficially considered as just an aesthetic object intended to seduce, but which really has a more complex nature. We are speaking here of absorption and the non-absorptive object and by extension of tensions between institutions and the self who breaks down the limits. If there was a narrative in these poems it would not be telling one story but many, through monologues and dialogues that seem chaotic and make us advance and retreat in reading them, so as to continually discover new approaches. The poem cannot be allegorical in the symbolist or surrealist sense, of course it may be self-revealing but not to construct the psyche, rather to follow the direction of Stein, Zukofsky, Laura (Riding) Jackson, Samuel Beckett or Robert Creeley, akin to what I have been describing with regard to the alteration of form and where writing projects a worldview. Furthermore, poetic reading demands a closer attention for him since «Poetry is harder to consume at that level. It’s hard to get a sense of what the poem is at all. There’s not really an image. Either it looks the same as all poetry has looked with stanzas and so on, or it looks like words scattered on a page. It’s hard to get that immediate hit off what it is; it’s missing a certain immediate flash some of the other arts have» (Andrews 1981: no page given).
Normally the formal arrangement of a poem involves the development of metaphors and relations between images. Together with this, its external arrangement is given by its rhythm, stanzaic construction or the lines themselves, which all show the nature of the poetic text. In Bernstein’s work, both modes are intrinsically related, as they are subject neither to causality, chronology, character nor thematic development, nor do they stick to just the etymological meaning of the word ‘narrate,’ i.e. tell a story. For Anne Mack, Bernstein’s poetry is a system of language that requires discourse, a «generative discourse» between text and reader that reveals a tension between public and private worlds (1991: 457). Therefore, let us return to the main argument of this essay, based on the intrinsic nature of Bernstein’s poetry and poetics that lead the reader on the self and the multiple views of the social world. Bernstein’s literary discourse, from the double perspectives of form and content is also extra-literary with connotations and suggestions derived from his ideological discourse. It thus greatly expands beyond the textual opportunities of the formalist tradition. Grammar, syntax or poetic diction itself are not static notions here. On the contrary his anti-absorptive subversion dissolves the elitist concept of literature. If the principal idea is to explore, it is no surprise this assembled poetry with frequent non sequiturs appears so radical. However, the conclusion to the formal architecture of his poetry may be explained through a poetics that does not lead automatically to an appropriation of the poetic medium. Neither can we forget that employing different forms in a disruptive way gradually creates a multiplicity of voices and selves that in the end refer to values or relationships as much as their artistic possibilities. This is why the Bemsteinian assemblage conceptualizes what is literary in a centripetal way, in order to speak of the connection between writing, the self and the world.
Therefore it is not strange that political and ideological questions have so much to do with this attitude to literary activity. This author states in one of his most definitive essays on the topic, «The Dollar Value of Poetry», that poetry should not be at the service of the cultural social and economic force called capitalism. Bernstein’s links with politics date back to the 1960s when his generation were doubting whether
to use the means to power as one of their strategies. They were very sensitive to the authoritarian discourse of the system in human communication, science and philosophy. For him, ideology «everywhere informs poetry and imparts to it, at its most resonant, a density of materialized social being expressed through the music of a work as well as its multifoliate references» (1992: 2). Writing implies holding a political position as it inevitably takes place within a culture, involves the Other in both harmonious relationships and our differences and of course because it utilizes as its instrument the language belonging to a particular community. In this sense, the notion of authority plays a frequent decisive role in his writings, questioning the self and the person. We can observe this in the dialogue with Ron Silliman in Legend or his book Controlling Interests, in which the self is a product of language, inserted in a wider context, «Formally, the ‘I’ allows the language’s formative capacities to be scanned. - So I hope the reader does feel implicated because I want to show that ‘I’ as a social construction, a product of language and not a pre-existing entity outside it; that ‘I’ is first a ‘we’. We’re implicated in each other from the first» (1982: 42). Bernstein draws attention to participation with the intention that the reader should not just decipher the self but also observe the repressive manipulative role of institutionalized language. We see here a clear decision to challenge the individual who tries to unequivocally communicate his self, question the message to be transmitted (his attack on the emotions and experiences is especially violent) and lastly to reject language that attempts to be clear and transparent.
This political attitude is in consonance with his opposition to traditional closed verse, with his rejection of the lyrical voice that commands such possibilities and even the narrative of the text, and with its questioning of the model of production and reception of the poetic text in itself. His wager is political, preferring to center himself on how meaning is produced. George Hartley analyzes some of these issues in his book Textual Politics and the Language Poets as a collection of poets centered on showing the politics of poetry, by taking authors like Althusser, Jameson or Marx, to explore «the possibilities for meaning-production» (1989: xiii), and in carrying out a critique of bourgeois society. In the case of Bernstein it is necessary to point out the variation that his attraction for Marx is different to the traditional sense of Socialist Realism, since I insist his main interest is to show that language is not neutral and can change our perception of reality. Postmodernism and other philosophies akin to it complete the unfinished proposals of European nihilism by potentiating the ideology of hedonism, based above all on a process of desublimation and disenchantment when confronted with the prudential capitalist project of Hume and Althusser (1999: 306-307). This presents no obstacle to the continuing tension between the social and the moral in literature. I think Bernstein shares the idea put forward by Jiwei Ci that the present-day hedonism is subject to the ««market’s progressive exploitation of human hedonistic potential for profit-maximization» (1999: 305), and for this reason this poet makes us progress continually through questionings in order to attain a historical perspective of our social situation and the means we use to be ourselves. Language is revolutionary when it is based on this perception, with a dynamics that involves fields as wide as psychology and sociology. Authority requires convention and acceptance, and it is precisely at that point where Bernstein and his companions reject authority and try to subvert patriarchal discourse that «may be read in terms of sexual and racial politics as well as in terms of structural innovation in the abstract. At the same
time, normative discourse practices need to be read in terms of the political meaning of their formal strategies» (Bernstein 1992: 221).
From Walter Benjamin and Julia Kristeva’s approaches to Modernism, considering it as an aesthetics with undoubtable political and revolutionary projection, to the recent experience of these innovative modem poets, the literary medium has appeared as the most appropriate to realize the importance of the signifier-signified relationship; also to recognize that language is much more than a transparent transmission medium, taking on a discursive function where the individual’s social contact begins. Besides this, these features do not exclusively determine the materiality of language but also have a transcendental component that invests it with symbology, diverse relationships and connections with real life, showing it not to be empty but replete with the same qualities as the process of life itself. Lukács interpreted the power of art as an ideological seduction, art itself as a beautiful appearance that masks the true evils of the industrial age: alienation and reification, but at the same time paradoxically, for its cathartic value and for being soteriological as Koenraad Geldof suggests, it «receives this value in the context of the thesis of alienation and of strictly evaluative hierarchy of forms of knowledge and of being in the world. Politics or science do not bring about the emancipation of man - art does» (1999: 331). It is from this perspective that the language poets have appreciated art and literature as political activity, whose function is to free us, containing enough ideological awareness to speak to us of the self society.
From this viewpoint, Bernstein and his companions have been labeled as critics, ideologists or naive revolutionaries. If authority and convention are historical constructions, whether appropriated by the divine right of kings or by capitalism as suggested by Bernstein in A Poetics (1992: 223), the duty of the present-day creator should be to formulate and present political projects directed towards seeking alternatives to defy and defeat the dictatorial values of the market. This model of intentions needs a representation that subverts the previous compositional rules, running the risk of lacking sufficient audience or public. It has however met with the contrary, Bernstein and his companions have found allies in the field of literary criticism, philosophy, and progressively, in the academic world in general. One thing these authors teach us is that resistance and marginalization are two necessary conditions to face the discourse of dominance. Today its effects are not limited to the subjective rhetorical field of the isolated individual, but has political implications for society in general.
It is obvious that all new literary movements are responses to the previous authority, questioning earlier conventions and dictates. In Bernstein’s poetic work classical continuity has been replaced by discontinuity. He has not denied the self but has decided definitely to accept otherness. In this sense, there are peak moments in his work combining clarity and darkness through the use of discontinuous forms, in which the self does not impose a presence. His book Veil for example, is a collection of overlapping lines that obscure each other and where some blocks are intended to be poems reflecting the phantasms of the reader. They are deliberately obscure to seek clarity. In this sense, Bernstein is an epigone of Nathaniel Hawthorne - not in vain does the book start with a quote from «The Minister’s Black Veil» - who made Father Hooper hide his face under a veil to illuminate the community. In the same way, in his poem «A Defence of Poetry» Bernstein introduces spelling games or
tricks that have a revealing role in the writing process in continual conflict and with projection in the Other «insisting on anti-mastery in a self-contaminating way», proposing from a political viewpoint the role of sense and nonsense to convert «А Defence» finally into «an attack on all evaluative judgments» (1996: 88-89). It is the same challenging spirit of innovation that Bernstein finds in the possibilities of Internet, where the public is willing to experiment with the different forms that can be created. Apart from his participation in discussion groups, bulletins or talks in the Net, Bernstein shows himself to be convinced that in cyberspace: «the public that will be constructed by it will return poetry to its hard-core» (1999: 308). Such varied examples are but a sample of his interests in the possibilities of the poetic medium to provide models without a base in the lyrical self but rather rooted in a text that provokes and obtains responses, «an interpolation» (1986a: 236) that is the «hardcore» of his poetry.
Bernstein’s poetry demands to be read as his true poetics; these two aspects of his work do not have an abstract relationship but one of clear concomitance, reinforcing each other. His ideas and creativity have the clear intention of presenting the self clearly rooted in society, utilizing different poetic forms and permitting the most daring interpretations. He is conscious of fitting into a community in which he himself recognizes having reacted in a Puritan way, «I have a technique of bathing people in that cold, a Puritan conviction that people should know the world is hard, and they should face it strong and stem... and show that one shares that hardness with others, who care. That I am one of them. One of us» (1986a: 22-23). Bernstein is aware of belonging to the literary (Stein, Zukofsky, Creeley), philosophical (Wittgenstein and Cavell especially), or artistic (Pollock or Kandinsky) communities who have shared the ordinary everyday language of the Other, where present and past coexist and the limits are challenged. If Bernstein’s poetry and poetics are obscure, difficult or polemical it is because they speak to us of the unresolvable complexities of language, self and society. His poetry and poetics are in constant dialogue/interaction with the old forms, in order to supplant them and believe that the priorities are before us, pushing us on to continue with history, sometimes unknowingly. An exceptional history, played out in each human being.
WORKS CITED
1. Andrews, Bruce and Charles Bernstein 1981: «Pacifica Interview on Politics». L=a=n=g=u= a=g=e Suppplement 3: no page given.
2. Bartholomae David, Lynn Emanuel, Colin MacCabe and Paul Bove. On Poetry, Language, and Teaching: A Conversation with Charles Bernstein //Boundary, 1996, 2 23.3: 45-66.
3. Beach Christopher. ABC of Influence: Ezra Pound and the Remaking of American Poetic Tradition. - Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
4. Bernstein Charles. Disfrutes. Needham: Poets & Potes, 1981:
5. Bernstein Charles. Interview // The Difficulties. 1982,2.1, p. 29-42.
6. Bernstein Charles. Whole to Part: The Ends of the Ideologies of the Long Poem // Open Letter [Sixth Series], 1985, 2.3, p. 177-190.
7. Bernstein Charles. Content’s Dream: Essays 1975-1984. - Los Angeles: Sun & Moon. 1986a.
8. Bernstein Charles. Controlling Interests. - N. Y.: Roof, 1986b.
9. Bernstein Charles. Time Out of Motion: Looking Ahead To See Backward // American Poetry, 1986c, 4.1, p. 78-90.
10. Bernstein Charles. Artifice of Absorption // Paper Air, 1987,4.1, p. 5-71.
11. Bernstein Charles. The Nude Formalism. - Los Angeles: 20 Pages, 1989.
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14. Bernstein Charles. Dark City. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1994.
15. Bernstein Charles. My Way: Speeches and Poems. - Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999.
16. Ci Jiwei. Disenchantment, Desublimation, and Demoralization: Some Cultural Conjunctions of Capitalism // New Literary History, 1999, 30.2, p. 295-324.
17. Gadamer Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. - N. Y.: Harpercollins, 1986.
18. Geldof Koenraad. The Unbearable Literariness of Literature // New Literary History, 1999, 30.2, p. 325-349.
19. Glazier Loss Pequeno. An Autobiographical Interview with Charles Bernstein // Boundary, 1996, 2 23.3, p. 21-43.
20. Hartley George. Textual Politics and the Language Poets. - Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.
21. Kristeva Julia. Desire in Language / Ed. Leon S. Roudiez- - N. Y.: Columbia University Press, 1980.
22. Lazer Hank. The Politics of Form and Poetry’s Other Subjects: Reading Contemporary American Poetry. Artifice and Indeterminacy: An Anthology of New Poetics / Ed. Christopher Beach. - Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1998.
23. Mac Low Jackson. Statement: The Poetics of New American Poetry / Ed. Donald Allen and Warren Tollman. -N. Y.: Grove, 1973, p. 384—385.
24. Mac Low Jackson. The Poetics of Chance and the Politics of Simultaneous Spontaneity, or the Sacred Heart of Jesus (Revised and Abridged): Talking Poetics from Naropa Institute / Ed. Anne Waldman and Marilyn Webb II Boulder: Shambala, 1978. Vol. I, p. 171— 192.
25. Mac Low Jackson. Talk at ‘The Disappearing Pheasant’ // Talisman, 1992, 8, p. 5-9.
26. Mack Ame J.J. Rome and Georg Mannejc: «Private Enigmas and Critical Functions with Particular Reference to the Writing of Charles Bernstein» // New Literary History, 1991, 22.2, p. 441-464.
27. Parsons Mamie. Touch Monkeys: Nonsense Strategies for Reading Twentieth-Century Poetry. - Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994.
28. Perelman Bob. The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History. -Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
29. Reinfeld Linda. Language Poetry: Writing as Rescue. - Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.
30. Silliman Ron. Uncle Mark’s Fables (The L Word) // Online posting, 1998, 18 Nov. Poetics List, 19 Nov. <[email protected]>.
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32. Wittgenstein Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. - N. Y.: Macmillan, 1958.
33. Wittgenstein Ludwig. On Certainty. - N. Y.: Continuum, 1993.
THE SELF AND ITS SOCIAL CONCERNS IN CHARLES BERNSTEIN’S POETIC WORK
М.БРИТО
Кафедра английской и немецкой филологии Университет г. Лагуна Кампус де Гвахара, 38071 JIa Лагуна Тенерифе Испания
