G E NDER S, R ACES A ND RELIGIO US C U LTU R ES I N M ODER N A MERICAN P O ET RY, –
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G E NDER S, R ACES A ND RELIGIO US C U LTU R ES I N M ODER N A MERICAN P O ET RY, –
In Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, Rachel Blau DuPlessis shows how, through poetic language, modernist writers represented the debates and ideologies concerning New Woman, New Negro, and New Jew in the early twentieth century. From the poetic text emerge such social issues of modernity as debates on suffrage, sexuality, manhood, and AfroAmerican and Jewish subjectivities. By a reading method she calls “social philology” – a form of close reading inflected with the approaches of cultural studies – DuPlessis engages with the work of such canonical poets as Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and H.D., as well as Vachel Lindsay, Mina Loy, Countee Cullen, Alfred Kreymborg, and Langston Hughes, writers, she claims, still marginalized by existing constructions of modernism. This book is an ambitious attempt to remap our understanding of modern poetries and poetics, and the relationship between early twentieth-century writing and society. is Professor of English at Temple University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Writing Beyond the Ending (), H.D.: The Career of that Struggle (), The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice (); she is also editor of The Selected Letters of George Oppen (), and coeditor of both The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics () and The Feminist Memoir Project (). She is a widely published poet.
Editor Ross Posnock, New York University Founding editor Albert Gelpi, Stanford University Advisory board Nina Baym, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Sacvan Bercovitch, Harvard University Ronald Bush, St John’s College, Oxford University Albert Gelpi, Stanford University Myra Jehlen, Rutgers University Carolyn Porter, University of California, Berkeley Robert Stepto, Yale University Recent books in the series . . Poe and the Printed Word . . The American Puritan Elegy: A Literary and Cultural Study . Writing America Black: Race Rhetoric and the Public Sphere . Imagined Empires: Incas, Aztecs, and the New World of American Literature, – . Blacks and Jews in Literary Dialogue . Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian, Inc. . Afrocentrism, Antimodernism, and Utopia . Blackness and Value: Seeing Double . Mark Twain and the Novel: The Double-Cross of Authority . Dos Passos and the Ideology of the Feminine . Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture . . Sublime Enjoyment: On the Perverse Motive in American Literature
GEN DERS, RACES, AND RELIGIOUS CULTURES IN MODERN AMERICAN POETRY, – R AC H E L B L AU D U P L E S S I S Temple University
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge , UK www.cup.cam.ac.uk West th Street, New York, –, USA www.cup.org Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne , Australia Ruiz de Alarcón , Madrid, Spain © Cambridge University Press This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge Typeface Monotype Baskerville /. pt System QuarkXPress™ [ ] A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library hardback paperback
To Robert Saint-Cyr DuPlessis
Contents
Acknowledgments
page xi
Entitled new: a social philology of modern American poetry
“Corpses of poesy”: modern poets consider some gender ideologies of lyric
“Seismic orgasm”: sexual intercourse, its modern representations and politics
“, , ”: some episodes in the construction of modern male whiteness
“Darken your speech”: racialized cultural work in black and white poets
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
Notes Works cited Index
ix
Acknowledgments
A full-year research and study leave from Temple University in – helped this book into being; I am very grateful for it. The remarks and responses of audiences to some of these materials were instructive; I would like to acknowledge such sites of my continuing education as University of Maryland, College Park; the Columbia University Seminar in American Studies; University of Kansas; Tulane University; Université de Montréal; Drew University; St. Mark’s Poetry Project; University of Wisconsin; more than a few meetings of the Modern Language Association, and the inaugural conference of the Modernist Studies Association (). Temple University’s graduate students in modern and contemporary poetry were lively co-conspirators for some of the ideas in this project. Susan Stanford Friedman, my friend and long-distance colleague, deserves deep thanks for her sustaining remarks and vision, her encouraging sense of the contribution this book might make, and for an incisive one-word mantra. She took time from her unremitting schedule to give the first chapter a crucial reading. Both Lorenzo Thomas and Aldon Nielsen offered informative encouragements to my explorations of Africanist representations. I am also indebted to serious scholars of Mina Loy, among them Carolyn Burke, Roger Conover, and Marissa Januzzi (as well as being indebted to Loy herself for three of the chapter titles). An anonymous reader of this book for Cambridge University Press jostled me in several important ways, and provoked me whether I tried to assimilate or had to resist the remarks offered. Ross Posnock deserves my gratitude and respect for his approval of this book as the guard changed. I also owe a note of thanks to Susan Chang who first acquired this book and special thanks to Ray Ryan, the editor at Cambridge on whose watch this was finally published. At Temple University, I have drawn upon the wisdom and theoretical incisiveness of several of my colleagues in the English Department. xi
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Lawrence Venuti gave a penetrating and discerning reading to the first chapter. Miles Orvell read an early version of chapter and offered warm and pointed comments. Daniel O’Hara reminded me of a reference it would have been rather odd to forget. Lynda Hill and I have talked fruitfully about African American traditions. As for the person to whom this book is inscribed, my partner in so much, on a long and spirited journey, I thank him with deep gratitude and love, with this dedication. A number of these chapters were published in an earlier (sometimes more discursive) form, with thanks to readers and editors, especially Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller, Kathy Mezei, Cathy Davidson, Michael Moon, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, and Ralph Cohen, as well as an anonymous reader for American Literature. None of these colleagues is responsible for my ways of proceeding. All of the chapters have been first considerably revised and expanded, and then reduced and cut severely, since their first publication. Chapter . “‘Corpses of poesy’: modern poets consider some gender ideologies of lyric” in an earlier form as “‘Corpses of Poesy’: some modern poets and some gender ideologies of lyric,” in Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory, eds. Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, : –. In Chapter , there are a few elements from “No Moore of the same: the feminist poetics of Marianne Moore.” The William Carlos Williams Review (special Marianne Moore issue, ed. Theodora Graham), , (Spring ): –. Chapter . “‘Seismic Orgasm’: Sexual Intercourse, Its Modern Representations and Politics.” As the seed article for this book, this work went through two permutations in its prior forms, first as “‘Seismic orgasm’: sexual intercourse, gender narratives, and lyric ideology in Mina Loy,” in Studies in Historical Change, ed. Ralph Cohen. Charlottesville, Va.: The University Press of Virginia, : –. Subsequently, and considerably revised, as “‘Seismic orgasm’: sexual intercourse and narrative meaning in Mina Loy,” in Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers, ed. Kathy Mezei, University of North Carolina Press, : –. This also appears in Mina Loy: Woman and Poet, eds. Maeera Shreiber and Keith Tuma. National Poetry Foundation, : –. Chapter . “ ‘, , ’: some episodes in the construction of modern male whiteness” appeared in an earlier form as “ ‘, , ’: some episodes in the construction of modern whiteness.” American Literature , (December ): –.
Acknowledgments
xiii
Chapter . “‘Darken your speech’: racialized cultural work in black and white poets” appeared in an earlier form as “‘Darken your speech’: racialized cultural work of modernist poets,” in Reading Race in American Poetry: “An Area of Act”. Aldon L. Nielsen, ed., Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, : ‒. Chapter . “‘Wondering Jews’: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts” contains material on Eliot from my “Circumscriptions: assimilating T. S. Eliot’s Sweeneys,” in People of the Book: Thirty Scholars Reflect on Their Jewish Identity. Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, eds, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, : –. Grateful acknowledgement is given to the following publishers, holders of copyright and estates for permission to cite from the following works: Gwendolyn Bennett. “To Usward,” in Maureen Honey, ed., Shadowed Dreams: Women’s Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance. Rutgers University Press, , Copyright © by Rutgers, The State University. Countee Cullen. Poems are not cited beyond fair use – three or four words per poem. They were originally published as follows: “Incident,” “Yet Do I Marvel,” “Heritage,” “Tableau”: from Color by Countee Cullen. Copyright © by Harper & Brothers; copyright renewed by Ida M. Cullen. “Colors” and “Uncle Jim”: from Copper Sun by Countee Cullen. Copyright © by Harper & Brothers; copyright renewed by Ida M. Cullen. “To Certain Critics”: from Black Christ and Other Poems by Countee Cullen. Copyright © by Harper & Brothers; copyright renewed by Ida M. Cullen. T. S. Eliot from Collected Poems, – by T. S. Eliot, copyright by Harcourt Brace & Company, copyright © , by T. S. Eliot, reprinted by permission of the publisher. Excerpts from “Ballade pour la grosse Lulu,” from Inventions of the March Hare, Poems –, by T. S. Eliot, text © by Valerie Eliot, Editorial matter and annotations copyright © by Christopher Ricks, reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc. H.D., Collected Poems –, Copyright © by The Estate of Hilda Doolittle, reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. Langston Hughes from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel. Alfred A. Knopf, .
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Copyright © by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf and Faber & Faber, Ltd. Helene Johnson, “Bottled,” pp. –, Maureen Honey, ed., Shadowed Dreams: Women’s Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance. Rutgers University Press, , Copyright © by Rutgers, The State University. Citations from Mina Loy, The Last Lunar Baedeker, ed. Roger L. Conover (Jargon Society ), by permission of Roger L. Conover, for the Estate of Mina Loy and Jonathan Williams for The Jargon Society. Citations from Mina Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedeker (Farrar Straus Giroux, ), by permission of Roger L. Conover, for the Estate of Mina Loy and Farrar Straus Giroux. Permission for the quotations from Observations by Marianne Moore (The Dial Press, ) granted by Marianne Craig Moore, Literary Executor for the Estate of Marianne Moore. All Rights Reserved. From Ezra Pound, Personae, Copyright © by Ezra Pound. Material by Ezra Pound used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America. Copyright © Random House, . Boston: Beacon Press, . Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, and Opus Posthumous, . Copyright © and by Alfred A. Knopf and Faber and Faber, Ltd. William Carlos Williams, Collected Poems –, Vol. I, copyright © by New Directions Publishing Corporation. Copyright © , by William Eric Williams and Paul H. Williams. Material by William Carlos Williams used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. Louis Zukofsky, Complete Short Poetry, pp. –; lines, Johns Hopkins University Press, . Copyright © Paul Zukofsky.
Entitled new: a social philology of modern American poetry
It’s a very long and difficult job . . . to see how, in the very detail of composition, a certain social structure, a certain history, discloses itself. This is not doing any kind of violence to that composition. It’s precisely finding ways in which forms and formations, in very complex ways, interact and interrelate. Raymond Williams (), The Politics of Modernism,
This book situates itself within modernist studies, trying one way of relating modernism to modernities.1 Propelled by the scintillating critical practices from feminist, ethnic, and other materialist critics and poetic communities, my reading of poetry within modernist studies probes works of art by people struggling with formations entitled new – New Woman, New Black, New Jew.2 Part of the “newness” of modernity lies in its representation of the urgencies and contradictions of these modern subjectivities. By a method I call social philology, I propose a reactivation of close reading to examine in poetry the textual traces and discursive manifestations of a variety of ideological assumptions, subject positions, and social concepts concerning gender, race, and religious culture. It is the purpose of this book to offer reading strategies that can mediate between the historical terrain and the intimate poetic textures of a work. Certainly the materials and themes of poems involve discursive elements (allusions, diction, tropes) and depict issues traceable to particular social subjects. But this book will also propose that modern poets construct cultural narratives and articulate social debates around emblems and idioms of subjectivity, within the texture and using the resources of poetry – line break, stanza break and other segmentivities, caesurae, visual image and semantic image, etymology, phonemes, lateral associations, crypt words, puns – including translingual puns, its own particular genres, the diegesis with its actors and pronouns, and the whole text with its speaker or persona.
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
Within modernity, some people entitle themselves “New,” articulating entitlement, the right of claim to full personhood, full citizenship, and some control of their deeds. These “new” social subjectivities engage with various projects of emancipation and possibility, hoping that in modernity there can be a “qualitative transcendence,” a time “better than what has gone before” (Osborne , , ). “New entitlements” are formations compounded of social claims for change in the legal, political and economic status of a given group that, while incomplete in the time frame this book concerns (about –), were nonetheless motivating and transformative, with many cultural implications.3 New Woman, New Black, New Jew constitute emergent formations and diverse sites of conflict and affirmation in the modernizing projects of modernity. The subject locations entitled “new” sum up a considerable amount of social desire, political debate, and intellectual ferment, contributing, for instance, to passionate politics of rectification in the suffrage or the anti-lynching campaigns. These new subjectivities are also spoken in and through literature. The formations entitled new do not begin simultaneously: New Woman is talked of before “New Negro” and is reemergent during the teens and twenties; New Jew, a person modernizing Judaism through nineteenth century Enlightenment thinking (Haskalah), is still active in the immigrant populations in the U.S. and Britain. These liberatory discourses put clear pressure on the manifests of a United States democracy: the New Black in emerging from slavery and serfdom, the New Woman with claims for suffrage and for sexual and professional independence, and the New Jew, provoking, as did other immigrant populations, many anxieties about difference and the issue of surfeit and containment of access to the United States. The formations New Woman, New Black, New Jew also engage with, debate, and help give shape to discourses of maleness/masculinity/manhood, homosexuality, virility, whiteness and “souls of white folk” (in Du Bois’ phrase), preEnlightenment Jew, and Christian/Gentile; these formations also emphatically occur in modern poetry and are often part of the entitlement of poets (Du Bois , ). One might take some closely fitted dates in the s to be symbolic indicators of these entitlements and their debates.4 The crisis about sexuality and gender, about forms of masculinity in debate was focused in , as the Oscar Wilde trial both opened and endangered debate about sexual fluidity; the so-called “invention of heterosexuality” in relation to the newly articulated homosexuality has been wittily dated, by
Entitled new: a social philology of modern American poetry
Jonathan Katz (), to . Women’s modernity within modernism, their social struggles and intellectual debates were focused by the term “New Woman,” coined in by Ouida from a phrase by British novelist Sarah Grand, a descriptor for a variety of emancipatory reforms in the female condition: higher education, living wages, changes in marriage law, access to the professions, woman suffrage, and sometimes birth control (Fitzsimmons and Gardner , vii; Tickner , ).5 Indeed, by , “the New Woman has been in poetry and drama and fiction for close to sixty years,” and could be seen, fondly – or not – as the “Old ‘New Woman’” (Kenton , ). Social and ideological struggles about elements of New Woman subjectivity and gender ideologies of masculinity as refracted in poetry are the subject of two of my chapters.6 A cluster of “incipit” dates in the s marks the formation of a black modernity. One point of origin for a New Black stance within modernity and modernism was the militant campaign against lynching begun by Ida B. Wells in . The debate over citizenship for Americans of African descent was focused by the Supreme Court decision of , Plessy versus Ferguson, designating a legal second-class quasi-citizenship for those defined (no matter their visible color) as black; this decision gave forceful mandate to discrimination and racial segregation for at least another half century. Given this “dismantled Reconstruction,” “the ‘newness’ of the New Negro, then, stemmed largely from an aggressive claim to political inclusion, economic and cultural participation, and fundamental equality” (Sanders , xi). As Du Bois proposed in introducing the anthology The New Negro (Locke ), the “new” formation involved changes of consciousness and incentives to cultural production interdependent with social struggle and political agency. The “New Negro” was, as Houston Baker argues (, ), a formation well underway in Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta address, making the Harlem Renaissance of the s the culmination of political, social and cultural debates about the status of blacks in the U.S. This black entitlement evoked a complex of responses. A Wallace Stevens letter of shows identification with black troops leaving for World War I; he resists and consciously comments upon the patronizing attitudes of most white observers (Stevens [May , ], ). And yet two years later, he remarks sourly of the sight of his hometown Reading, “It was much like returning from the wars and finding one’s best beloved remarried to a coon” (ibid. [May , ], ). This text indicates the difficulty Euro-Americans had in consistently acknowledging the “New Black” as social citizen. Sociologist Charles S. Johnson
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
remembers the postwar period as the “reassertion with vigor of the old and shaken racial theories” from the “gaudy racial philosophy” of the time immediately post-Reconstruction, allegations of the inferiority of “the Negro and other darker peoples,” restrictions of immigration, “race riots, dark foreboding prophecies of the over-running of the white race by the dark and unenlightened hordes from Asia and Africa, in Lothrop Stoddard’s [] Rising Tide of Color” (C. Johnson, in Lewis, , , , ). My two chapters involving the New Black subjectivity will discuss the poetic marks of insurgent African-American political and cultural presence in relation to Euro-American uses of racialized discourses. African-American modernity was faced with a suppurating pseudoscience about race differences affecting at least blacks and Jews, but also Irish, Slavs, and Italians. In both Britain and the United States, immigration in the s of Jews displaced by the pogroms in Russia sharpened debates about “mongrel races.” The year focused a general Gilded Age anti-Semitism because of a public health crisis in New York caused by highly contagious diseases attributed to Jewish immigrants (Markel , –). The New Jew, an enlightenment figure of Jewish modernity, was caught among assimilation, secularization, and a variety of Semiticized and mongrelizing discourses. For example, Ezra Pound, in a letter to William Carlos Williams, mentions “mixed race, Semitic goo,” intermingling mongrel and Jew as part of a discussion of race, poetry, and his proclaimed transnationality (Pound , ). My chapter called “Wondering Jews” discusses mongrelization, and notes the aggressive claims for order and Christian civilization that capped modernism in the late s and early s. Modern poetries process many elements of these “new” social insurgencies involving race, gender, nationhood (and nativism), religious culture, and class. Poetry is the repository and expression of subjectivity, a site where the materials of social subjectivity are absorbed and articulated, where pronouns, personae, speaking positions are produced. Poetry does not necessarily construct a seamless subjectivity, consistent between the inside speakers and the poet’s artifact (the enounced and the enunciations), but a subjectivity whose very articulation in language reveals organized multiplicities, contradictions, and projections.7 Many modern poets were fascinated with these newly entitled subjectivities; some modern poets hold these positions, some appropriate them, some struggle with them in parody and resistance, others claim them, but also critique them, and still others want to work in a contradictory site of
Entitled new: a social philology of modern American poetry
engagement and resistance. This book is not about a postulated fit between persons and identity. Indeed, a productive tension within the “New” social subjects between embodying group identity and enacting an individualist separation, between allegiance and resistance to category marks the work of many writers discussed here. One sees this tension in Loy’s interpretations of both the New Woman and the New Jew position, in Cullen’s negotiation with New Black. Other writers claiming some relationship to galvanic “New” subjectivities produced irruptive and grotesque identificatory works: Lindsay’s “The Congo,” Eliot’s “Sweeney Agonistes,” and Pound’s “Yiddischer Charleston Band.” The productive and critical consolidation of a period and field of study called “modernism” during the s through the s or s was made, and was maintained as virtually gender and race exclusive (Elliott and Wallace , , ). This book stands with many others to demolish that inadequate paradigm. It became increasingly clear through such feminist studies as the pioneering work of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar and work on individual authors – Jane Marcus on Woolf, Susan Stanford Friedman on H.D., Carolyn Burke on Loy, that “modernism’s stories of its own genesis” were deeply flawed by significant exclusions of women writers, and of such issues and figures as the New Woman (Ardis , ). For example, Gilbert and Gubar argue that modernism can be reconfigured around the “woman question” and around a variety of responses – they emphasize the intemperate and misogynist – to the newly emergent authority of the woman writer (Gilbert and Gubar , , ).8 Before the gynocriticism of the s and s, we knew so little about women writers and how social differences could manifest in cultural products that much work was needed to bring women writers up to judicious and informed scrutiny. A parallel point can be made about the resurgence of cultural studies concerning ethnicity and AfricanAmerican writers. As Griselda Pollock has argued, there is no linear progress out of early forms of feminist analysis, but rather a “synchronic configuration” of feminist critical practices (Pollock , ; see also Friedman , ). Gynocriticism is not an outdated or surpassed move in its goals of formal, biographical and textual recovery, nor in its goals of exploring female agency in texts and in their creation, but its critical assumptions and thus its findings have now to resist, or use with greater self-scrutiny, the gender binarism on which it was originally built. So too the tendencies in such criticism toward identificatory readings mirroring
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
oneself need to be tempered. Situationist reading, what Susan Friedman has called “locational feminism” will argue instead that “subjectivity is not only multiple and contradictory, but also relational” and that any “axes of identity are not equally foregrounded in every situation” (Friedman , , , ).9 “Gendering modernism” is one crucial act in producing some enriched and transformed literary histories of modernism. Yet one might want to distinguish between the interpretative finding of a “female modernism” and the interpretative position held in this book exploring diversity within modernism by encouraging feminist reception and gender-oriented analyses of all producers. However, why would one want only to “gender” modernism, without “sexing” it, “racializing” it, “Semiticizing” it, “classing” it? While gender has certainly done powerful service, it is not alone as an ideological nexus and materialist and culturalist practice. Indeed, modernist studies, or modernism under the rubric of cultural studies, forwards contextualizations of all kinds. These involve a variety of critical engagements. A critic might discuss the materiality of texts, involving bibliographical and editorial studies, construction of editions and the various presentations of text as a physical (and aural) object.10 There are strong and widespread critical practices contextualizing the nature of specific works – their interior themes, images, narratives, and the social, personal, historical debates they encode, pursue, and hint at; this is an engagement generally most comfortable with prose fiction and its poetics.11 Finally, critics have studied institutions and interactions enabling the short- and long-term production, reception, and dissemination of texts – including such modes and mechanisms of literary assertion as muses, geniuses, groups, manifestoes, editing practices, publishing houses, “little” magazines, avant-gardes, and critical interventions.12 For example, poetcritics writing from the contemporary practice of language poetry (and its surround) have, in their critical writings, developed acute analyses of the politics of literary reputation, of dissemination and its institutions, and of the forging, stabilizing, and destabilizing of a literary hegemony.13 Critics have recently studied the nature and social control of “canon” and “cultural capital” in the politics of reception, have discussed the various “social transactions” surrounding the reception of a text, and have scrutinized the longer-range institutions of dissemination, such as universities, anthologies, translation practices, critical schools, “masterpieces,” and critical texts such as this one (Kalaidjian , xii).14 The potential weak point of any kind of contextualization is its thin textual specificity. Contextualization and cultural studies sometimes do
Entitled new: a social philology of modern American poetry
not resist an extractive attitude to texts and may elide or erase the specificity of linguistic texture. This issue is particularly acute and meaningful where poetry is concerned. There the challenge is both to contextualize poems and to mediate between their historical and social dimensions and their textual specificity, so that a critical, culturalist reading attends to the detail and can analyze dissonances, slippages, affirmations, and quirks within a range of verbal acts from discourses and semantic layering to the phoneme. That is, one wants any study of poetry to engage with poetry as such – its conventions and textual mechanisms, its surfaces and layers – and not simply to regard the poetic text as an odd delivery system for ideas and themes. As Jean-Jacques Lecercle reminds us in his theory of the opacities of the “remainder” (, ), there are culturally evocative, apparently excessive materials beyond the semantic meaning created by a word.15 These ideas about the density and layeredness of texts point to a post-formalist, yet formally articulate cultural analysis of poetry. There are readers of poetry who have pioneered the kind of analysis affirmed in this study. Certain critics, notably Jonathan Monroe and Jerome McGann, and sometimes Marjorie Perloff have found in the texture of a text questions about the “interplay of lyric poetry” with its historical situation – for example, the technological revolution of the twentieth century itself impressed through advertising images on a community of consumers (Perloff , xii and , on Oppen). Discussing the prose poem as a genre, Monroe has located the ways its language “does not serve merely to ‘reflect’ ideological and material struggles in society; it is itself the very locus of such struggles” (, ). Jerome McGann has continuously proposed a subtle, exacting “materialist hermeneutics” showing, for example, “how the Cantos executes its historical, political, and ideological meanings” in part through the rich allusiveness of its material text (McGann , ). Certain poet-critics have long offered post-formalist contextualizing theories of the poetic text. Barrett Watten has foregrounded the idea of a cultural poetics as a reading and production strategy. In Total Syntax, he proposed to reread and reposition Russian formalism, claiming it back from neo-formalist New Criticism for a critical practice of articulating the relation of text to context through formal inventions and precisions (Watten ). He also calls for a thoroughgoing examination of the meanings and definition of the phrase “cultural poetics” in its potential and implications both for producers and for consumers and critics of poetry (Watten , ). Watten also introduced the suggestive coinage
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
“social formalism” in the title of an article, locating how “the social exists in and through its [textual] forms” (Watten , ). Charles Bernstein has articulated similar propositions, so that “the project of particularizing, historicizing, and ideologizing the interpretation of poetry must especially, even primarily, address itself to the stylistic features of the work”; this would involve a way of reading “the formal dynamics of a poem as communicative exchanges, as socially addressed, and as ideologically explicit” (Bernstein , , , and also in Bernstein ). He too sums this up as a “social formalist” position (Bernstein , ). We can appreciate that the study of literature must involve the dialectical analyses of texts and “social processes” intersecting in their material, ideological, discursive, and historical import (Wolff , ). This is the proposition of the anthology Aesthetics and Ideology, edited by George Levine (): to develop – citing Stephen Greenblatt – a “cultural poetics”/“poetics of culture.” Yet despite Greenblatt’s generalized use of the term poetics, poetry, with many conventional exemptions built into our sense of the genre, is rarely read with these claims in mind.16 Poetry, most particularly the lyric, has generally been construed (in its university and critical reception) as opposite to society and its discourses. As a mode (and a conglomerate of genres), poetry is often positioned as untainted by the social, in pursuit of higher things, a bastion of transcendence and the aesthetic, privileged by the expression of timeless, universal emotions, set apart by specific conventions in its language, and, in its versions of romantic subjectivity, by non-participation in, non-compliance with historical debate. Poetry serves expressivist goals in which the apparently ahistorical speaking subject is explored and exposed. Culturalist readings of poetry must struggle deeply and continuously against these institutionalized paradigms concerning both the nature of poetry and its critical reception, in which poetry is widely perceived as not, or only crudely, assimilable to contextualizing critical positions. Therefore few people attempt “historicizing a poem’s deployment of artifice,” not as a formalist narrative only, nor as a social narrative only, but in some conjunction (Bernstein , ).17 These ahistorical, anti-culturalist assumptions about poetry are discussed in Theodor Adorno’s famous argument against the separation of poetry and social forms.18 Adorno shows how most critics of poetry have maintained a traditional resistance to any analyses of any poetry’s political and ideological representations. Indeed, as he proposes, it has seemed critically gross to think otherwise, a symptom of a lack of refinement and
Entitled new: a social philology of modern American poetry
reading nuance when faced either with the finesse and charm, or with the complexity and irreducibility, of poetic texts. Adorno’s position is further complicated because he makes an argument that dialectally assimilates (and thus half-agrees with) the assumption he also questions. Thus he says indeed, yes, lyric poetry leverages you out of the real world, evoking a life free from constraint, contingency, and materiality, and, moreover, that this evocation of pure untrammeled spirit is its social meaning. Material constraints and the real world are “imprinted in reverse on poetry,” so the poem is a site of in-gathering negativity, an other side obdurately resistant to the social claims that pressure it, yet marked by its own historicity (Adorno / ). A lyric poem is a utopian site, reacting to reification and commodification; it is a protest against the world and it foreshadows a changed world, as if a tiny post-revolutionary or predictive spot in a prerevolutionary situation. This towering and compelling argument for a poem’s utopian Otherness, for the way it makes a social protest ontologically, by its very being-a-poem, seems curiously to argue against its real analytic propositions. The way Adorno deploys assumptions of a transcendent “beyond” of art – in the suggestive term negativity – clings to lyric and shorter poetry making it difficult to see any cultural work done by poems except a generalized resistance (“renunciation” or refus: / ). And except for something quite interesting, if also general: a use in poems of erotic narratives as encodings of social stories proposing a “free humankind” by virtue of the idealized Self-Other relations in such works, a proposition that cries out for feminist critique ( / ). Reading poetry over the past fifty-plus years of literary studies in the U.S. was so thoroughly an activity mandated by the formalist elegances of New Criticism that contemporary context-oriented moves, however synoptic and brilliant, are decidedly wary of the texture and the nature of poems and are much more comfortable with narrative. Many of the people who offer materialist readings show how fiction represents historical contradictions and contesting social ideologies in clashes between characters, or in rifts and fissures in a text – positions exemplified by Raymond Williams, Jameson, Macherey, Eagleton, and Said.19 How then can one make culturalist readings of poetry? Since this question was apparently blocked by anti-contextualist strategies of close reading developed within the era of New Criticism, it appeared to some as if one needed to get “beyond new criticism” in order to engage this issue (Arac , see , ).20 One path is a reading strategy for poetry
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
intertextual with philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the rejection of totalizing metaphysics in general that Richard Machin and Christopher Norris characterize by the rubric “post-structuralist readings of poetry.” In their anthology, they have also made the polemical claim against New Criticism more intense by providing readings of hyper-canonical poems. Christopher Norris emphatically rejects formalist propositions: that poetry emanates from a “sovereign” autonomous language rather than using discourses the ways other fields and arguments do, that poetry preserves a special literariness, creating “a self-sustaining allegory of aesthetic transcendence,” and that poetry occasions a transhistorical meeting place of poetic minds, a “purely synchronic cultural order” (Machin and Norris , , , ). Thus the anthology speaks for a concept of poetry as impure, historical.21 This is both useful and helpful, yet a further step needs to be taken. For just rhetoric and narrative do not account for all the effects a poem may produce, and “ideology” as an imagined conglomerate speaker must still choose specific poetic means, like line break. In an earlier anthology “beyond New Criticism,” and in the afterword, critically situating the anthology that claimed, but did not fully achieve, that move “beyond,” Jonathan Arac challenged critics to discuss ways in which poetry is related to “sociocultural codes” and called for an enhanced and strategic use of historical scholarship in criticism. Noting that rhetorical figures and genres can hardly be assumed to have transhistorical meanings or functions, he proposes the development of a “historical semiotics” bound to a Bakhtinian examination of “the historical study of the orders of language,” or “interdiscursivity” to see how poetic genre, rhetoric and textual materials relate and respond to “sociocultural codes” (, –). Arac’s call opens the possibility of understanding poetry by an exploration of its social discourses. At the same time, one must find in these observations a way of factoring in the codes of poetry, its panoply of forms, its own generic conventions. Hence my reading strategy does not reject the rich formal investigations and textual intimacies of New Criticism, but rather repositions them. A remark by the romanticist Susan Wolfson sums up the interests at stake: “‘close reading,’ as a practice of attention, need not be complicit with the methods and agenda of the New Criticism in which its skills were first exercised and refined”; hence she proposes to study “the construction of forms in relation to subjectivity, cultural ideology, and social circumstance” (, ; , ). She means by poetic form pre-
Entitled new: a social philology of modern American poetry
cisely what I will propose here: “the events of form – rhyme, wordplay, syntax, and the play of the poetic line” (Wolfson , ).22 All in all, this book wants to join these and other readers “to see how, in the very detail of composition, a certain social structure, a certain history, discloses itself,” as Raymond Williams says; it wants to accomplish this task by enhancing, not draining our sense of “the composition” (Williams , ). Hence this book is animated by a specific assumption in method: social meanings and debates, textual irruptions of subjectivities, contradictory or self-consistent, must be examined not just in poetry but as poetry. I will call this attentiveness to “the events of form” – in the service of social identifications, social entitlements, and possibly ideological critique – a “social philology.” Nothing, it has appeared, could be less appropriate as a critical technique than philology. Students of modernism generally reject, with Pound, “the slough of philology” – those “rags of morphology, epigraphy, privatleben and the kindred delights of the archaelogical or ‘scholarly mind’” (Pound , v). The hell-bent crime of “obscuring the texts with philology” – Pound’s charge in Canto – reminds us that the word is under heavy suspicion. Students of a materialist approach have had a similar revulsion from philology, construed as the study of “dead, written, alien” languages and “isolated, finished, monologic utterances” (Volosinev , ). An “intrinsic” study of literature such as New Criticism emerges in large part to resist scientistic and positivist philologies, and the terse one-paragraph “obituary” of philology, written by Wellek and Warren at the beginning of chapter of Theory of Literature, apparently rejects the term as being too “divergent” and various in meaning, but this is a pretext for a strategic encirclement to choke off its influence (Nichols , ; Welleck and Warren, , ). Julia Kristeva (, –) could not be more dismissive of the philological undertaking in part because its positivist fixing of meaning, and in part by the “obliteration of the density” of both sign and speaking subject. Modern reading strategies, and modernist readings of modernism began by the displacing of the philologist by the literary critic (Guillory , –). But perhaps a “philology” that enhances the understanding of the social density of both sign and subjectivity can be constructed. For philology begins, etymologically, in “love of words” and their density; the method examines what words do contextually, what they gather up, what they layer, how they are gapped and positioned syntactically, and what is suggested by specific structural trajectories. As Karl Uitti has observed in his history of philology, the development of a high
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level of critical and textual philology (in editing, for instance) and the Viconian use of texts and documents as primary to the human sciences offers the stances of intellectual “skepticism” and interest in “particulars” that are part of the discipline I propose (Uitti : –). When in “What is the history of literature?” Jonathan Arac () tries to balance the dialectical claims of the political and literary, the national and aesthetic (), he hints that a repositioning reassessment of the tasks summarized by the word “philology” would not be amiss (–). To claim back an enhanced and modified philology is one motive for this book.23 I use the word philology in order to sum up a concern for the textures and fibers of poetic language, for the “detail of composition,” “the events of form,” the “deployment of artifice,” for “the remainder.” A social philology claims that social materials (both specific and general politics, attitudes, subjectivities, ideologies, discourses, debates) are activated and situated within the deepest texture of, the sharpest specificities of, the poetic text: on the level of word choice, crypt word, impacted etymologies, segmentivity and line break, the stanza, the image, diction, sound, genre, the “events” and speakers selected inside the work (enounced), and the rhetorical tactics of the thing on the page (enunciation). All the materials of the signifier are susceptible of a topical/topographic reading in a social philology. The attentiveness that poetry excites is a productive way to engage ideologies and contradictions in texts, while honoring the depth and complexity of poetry as an intensive genre. So by a social philology, I mean an application of the techniques of close reading to reveal social discourses, subjectivities negotiated, and ideological debates in a poetic text. In this articulation of the word “social” with the word “philology,” I must, with all respect, keep this position distinct from the “return to philology,” proposed in by Paul de Man. His essay, in part an intraCrimson struggle, enlists the New Critical, pragmatic practice of “reading texts closely as texts” by Reuben Brower as a literary engagement comparable to the later poststructuralist theory that de Man defends from Walter Jackson Bate (de Man , ). How can close reading and poststructuralism possibly coincide? They are both seen by de Man as pre-ideological, since “in practice, the turn to theory occurred as a return to philology, to an examination of the structure of language prior to the meaning it produces” (). But it is unreasonable to seek that moment “prior to meaning,” or even to claim to have found it, since any such moment is already filled with expectations and practices. It is a tempting, if impossible emptiness. Rather than postulate that
Entitled new: a social philology of modern American poetry
there exists any blank spot prior to meaning, or claim the critic as tabula rasa upon whom language simply wields its witchcraft, I would hardly be alone in assuming that a “rhetoric and a poetics” can never be “prior to a hermeneutics and a history” (, ). What I would therefore mean by a “social philology” is precisely the opposite of de Man’s wish that close reading can be separated from social inscriptions. Instead, as Terry Eagleton has noted with reference to Walter Benjamin, any “individual phenomenon [of text] is grasped in all of its overdetermined complexity as a kind of cryptic code or riddling rebus to be deciphered, a drastically abbreviated image of social processes which the discerning eye will persuade it to yield up” (Eagleton , ). Social philology draws on pragmatic cultural materialist analyses identifying debates, discourses, and relationships sedimented in formal features of poems in the “sociological poetics” that Bakhtin/Medvedev propose in The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: a Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics (Eagleton and Milne ; Bakhtin and Medvedev , ).24 This perspective first insists that all authorship participates in the creation and extension of ideology, but that formalist critics correctly articulated the key issue: “How, within the unity of the artistic construction, is the direct material presence of the work, its here and now, to be joined with the endless perspectives of its ideological meaning?” (Bakhtin/Medvedev ). The mediating concept to link “the material presence of the word with its meaning” is “social evaluation” (). Every utterance articulates values and evaluations; each word choice is filled with social understandings; conventions are read through the map of prior uses; discourses are not static but have different valences in changing historical location and function. In a key formulation: “Every concrete utterance is a social act. At the same time that it is an individual material complex, a phonetic, articulatory, visual complex, the utterance is also part of social reality . . . When the poet selects words, their combination, and their compositional arrangement, [s/he] selects, combines, and arranges the [social] evaluations lodged in them as well” (Bakhtin/Medvedev , , ).25 Note the emphasis on agency of the maker. Evaluation involves judgment motivated by an implicit argument or debate; choices have complex motivations, including struggles, resistances, confrontations. The acts of selection and combination (rhetorical and intellectual activities creating the poem) that Roman Jakobson pinpoints are already social and ideologically motivated practices.26 This evocation and arrangement of social evaluations (ideologies, assumptions, judgments)
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inside specific words and syntaxes are cues to historical discourses and debates. These emerge in a poetic text not only in theme (signified) but also in technique and rhetoric (signifier), not only as communication, but also as inscription (Venuti , ). And, as Bakhtin and Medvedev intimate, not only words, but any textual forms used in poetry – line break, diction/word choice, imagery, syntax, stanza organization, punctuation, spaces – could be analyzed as the arrangement of social evaluation. This enhanced kind of close reading with culturalist aims is what I mean by a “social philology.” A social philology is also informed by the poetics of the detail in Walter Benjamin. His poetics of the detail is, perhaps, too deictic for explanatory critical practice, given its ecstatic apostrophe to simply showing or exhibiting the odd bits of matter (with an end, in Benjamin, of constructing a montage of citations). His moving call to examine “the trivia, the trash” is, however, evocative and inspires the politics of my critical practice: a philological look at signifiers, in order to “build up the large constructions out of the smallest, precisely fashioned structural elements,” although I shall be agnostic as to whether the critic can or should “detect the crystal of the total event in the analysis of the small, individual moment” (Smith , ).27 Benjamin’s “dialectical images” that “define both the form and the content of historical knowledge” (as Richard Sieburth explains) are part of the inspiration for such a study (Sieburth , ). A social philology will attempt to articulate the layering of ideological nuance in particular statements in poems; it can do this by attention to the historical discourses that poetry summarizes, condenses, and arranges. Social philology is, then, also indebted to a British and materialist practice of close reading later absorbed into a more neutralized United States New Criticism, excluding, pedagogically, issues of context, biography, discursive formations, and even notably, overt political/ideological statement, at least from the pedagogy of reading texts.28 That is, such a work as William Empson’s The Structure of Complex Words () suggests, with its enlargement of the Freudian sense of condensation, that words can indicate “compacted doctrine” as if they were the presenting symptoms of certain social histories that had been squeezed tight within them, and whose implications and resonances create the aura of meaning (). It is clearly true that such a method – itself poised febrilely between the social and the aesthetic – would want to seek precisely the way poetic forms (and not simply statements in poetry) become sources of knowledge, the ways poems become acts of cognition.29
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Adorno’s essay “Lyric poetry and society” notes that that in every poem the relationship of subjectivity in its historical form to society in its historical form can be found ( / ). (He says in the lyric; I shall now silently expand, possibly against his intent, and use the word poem.) The relationship of subjectivity to historical moment is crystallized as “a social antagonism”; that is, social debates and cultural narratives pressured through and pressuring a subjectivity speak through the poem as texture ( / ). “Thematic elements” and “formal elements” interpenetrate; “it is only by virtue of such interpenetration that the lyric poem actually captures the historical moment within its bounds” ( / ).30 Because form helps to produce the poem’s historical information such materialist analyses must, in Adorno’s words “lead not away from the work of art but deeper into it” ( / ). The essays of Antony Easthope offer a penetrating encapsulation of the issues of subjectivity in poetry. Easthope articulates, drawing on Roman Jakobson, an apparently stolid, but potentially flexible, staging of four points in the poem’s makeup to which I shall have occasion to turn (Easthope , –; see Jakobson , –). These are the narrated event(s) inside the poem, that is, the poem’s diegesis, and the speaker of and participants in these events (any characters and pronouns inside the poem). In the somewhat weighty terminology applied, this set is called, respectively, the enounced (“narrated event”) and the subjectivity of the enounced. Then one turns to the whole speech act or speech event as a work or text within language – what one might call the extradiegetic, the thing on the page. Following Easthope and Jakobson, this is sometimes called the enunciation. This may be anything about the poem aside from its interior action; it might be a stanza break, or a pun. There is also a “participant of the speech event . . . whether addresser or addressee” (Jakobson , ). The semi-imaginary person articulating the total statement as object is called by Easthope the subjectivity of the enunciation; I am not just willfully trying to avoid the simple word “poet,” but trying to honor fabrications and productions, the dramatic construction of voicing made in any individual poem. Further no poet uses all of herself in a particular poem; that portion that speaks is the subjectivity of the enunciation. In many poems, there is a confluence between the subjectivity of the enounced and of the enunciation, as the poem’s speaker (inside the diegesis) seems to be the poet making the words of the enunciation. Easthope sees this confluence as creating the humanist illusion of personable presence – a poet really speaking to us directly.
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Presumably, but temporarily, the subjectivity of the enunciation was once some part of the poem’s author, but in the actual processes of repeated reading, the author is not crucial. Easthope follows Jakobson and Benveniste in extending that privilege of enunciation to the reader/addressee, that is, to whomever produces that work by reading it in the present, a present that is always alive, potential, and shifting. This privileging of the reader is of special interest to Easthope, as it indicates his commitment to the specificity and historicity of reception. However, it comes at a cost, the relative loss to this theory of the social subject as author, the loss of the first creator of the signifieds. There is agency within discourse and ideology, within a social space acting to make any particular poem as such; there is, I mean, agency that produces in the first place what used to be called the “speaker” or “persona” of the poem and here would have (antiseptically) to be called the subjectivity of the enunciation. And there is a third space – the subjectivity of the agent making the work, itself not necessarily coterminous with the subjectivity of the enunciation. Further, as Lawrence Venuti has argued in his closely reasoned elucidation of the mechanisms and politics of “symptomatic reading,” any materialist reading necessitates a theory of subjectivity that does not hold the author to being “determined” but also “determining” in relation to material conditions and the medium (, –). But Easthope is rather disinterested in individuals as authors. He is emphatic on the rejection of “the unnecessary and impossible search for a transcendental subject – the ‘real man’ ‘behind’ the text” (Easthope , ); this is presented as an attack on the humanist privileging of “presence” in Easthope’s “Poetry and the politics of reading” (, –). Yet not all (authorial) subjectivities producing texts aspire to unified, ahistorical, universalizing subjectivity; they just, let us say, aspire to some positions that function validly, that have necessity. Hence, while hardly claiming “real” anyone as its findings, this book will not deemphasize agency so forcefully as Poetry as Discourse does by its concerted attack on biographical impressionism and by its post-Foucauldian burial of individual authorship.31 First, for me, discourses and thematic statements are not freefloating atmospheres (unattached to situation), but are tools, sometimes quickly, and even contradictorily, grabbed by persons, whether in the spirit of intellectual system or of bricolage. I maintain interest in agency and authorial choice: the “career of that struggle” constructs authorship as ongoing struggle with the social materials forming authors and their production, and forming reception and dis-
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semination, as well as a struggle with the materials of the text, including the semiotic materials semiconsciously emerging (DuPlessis ).32 Indeed, “dead author” or “author function” claims seem to be made precisely to ignore the social and material relations of literary production, the issues of dissemination and reception that are foregrounded by feminist, ethnic and other materialist social criticism. The “dead author” claim is a way for the critic to avoid noticing or commenting on those relationships of dissemination that still make certain texts, like Orwell’s famous pigs, more hegemonic than others. In any event, writing is made by the engagements and choices of people who, with various motivations, conscious and unconscious, create speaking figures and subject positions, who propose in their work (to echo Fredric Jameson’s extension of Marianne Moore) imaginary solutions to real and invented conflicts, doing so precisely by concerted choices, mixes, articulations, and appropriations of words, syntaxes, and discourses. An example of a reading based on these principles might look at Countee Cullen’s “Incident” from his first book Color (). The poem is a three-quatrain ballad about the trauma of racial naming for a child.33 The title word means event, but an event contingent upon or related to another, one small or minor occurrence which implicates or precipitates a public crisis. The word is used precisely to link personal and political meaning; the personal meaning is the blanking out, or blocking out, from memory of any other thing that happened one summer in Baltimore, once the decisive rupture of happiness has occurred by the ferocity of the white gaze. The political trauma is blanking or blocking because of blacking. Because it means “something contingent upon or related to something else,” the title also links the subjects of the enounced (two boys) and the narrated incident inside the poem with the subjectivity of enunciation, creating only a “minor” poem. The poem presents the blow of social learning of one’s place in a racial/racist order, a moment discussed in many autobiographical and fictional materials – by Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, and James Weldon Johnson – as a turning point for black children. This moment is usually unmarked in white writing. Cullen’s central quatrain proposes the equality of the children in size, demeanor, and in age, indeed, in every way but one. The stanza, as is well known, contains a notable insult, as it moves from smile, to rude tongue gesture layering “poke” as thrust and “poke” as a blow struck, finally to a name calling that interpellates both children into the racial system of the U.S., to the despair of the one and the satisfaction of the other. When the word
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
“nigger” is spoken, it is carefully quoted from the white child; it is not in free indirect discourse. Cullen has engineered a pause before the decisive word, to call our attention to its being spoken (it is capitalized), to freeze-frame it. This moment of racialization is a sociopolitical equivalent of oedipalization, for it creates two unequal racial castes from polyvalent children, as oedipalization creates two gender castes. The space issues of the central quatrain further represent this social inequality: each child owns one of the first two lines, but in the second two lines of the quatrain, the black child then only possesses a hemistich, while the white child takes up a line and a half. This stanza emphasizes the narrated event (the enounced), and the other subjectivity of the enounced (“I”) has been fixed by the derogatory word of the white child (Easthope , ). But the poem, as an enunciation (speech event created by Cullen), struggles against this derogatory term, by offering a different speaking subject, one in retrospective control of the narrated event. Cullen does so by proposing, in the texture of the poem as enunciation, a suggestive confrontation of the overt, low word “nigger” and the more muted, elegant one, “whit.” The word “whit” examined by a social philology is the point at which cross both lateral metonymic associations and a vertical semantic coring to make a sedimented argument against the subjectivity ascribed to the African-American child. The word means a particle or iota: one child is not a bit bigger than the other – they are equals in size. The word is a variant of “wight,” which means a person or human creature. Hence the buried narrative or crypt narrative that etymology offers in whit/wight is the affirmation of the full personhood and equality of both children denied by the incident. Additionally, “wight” means “valor” or bravery, a meaning that evokes the ethical evaluations of courage/cowardice at play here, especially insofar as valor for the black child may involve (unspoken, unnarrated) repression of the urge to fight or answer back, leading perhaps to an anger or pain so intense as to create a trauma of memory. Hence this incident is all that the speaker remembers of this sojourn. Horizontally, “whit” also irresistibly suggests both “white” and “wit.” Though the white child is no whit bigger (and no bigger in “wit” – another connotive slide), his social power gives him a bigger impact. To describe white as socially bigger than its obnoxious rhyme word, although no whit/wit personally or morally larger is indeed a compressed political allegory tamped into the word choice, the rhyme choice, and the finality of the quatrains. The negative word, offering a subject place for
Entitled new: a social philology of modern American poetry
African-Americans, was, incidentally, common enough in white writing in this period, including in works by Carl Van Vechten, Sherwood Anderson, Mina Loy, Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, and many others; its dangerous impact on African-Americans is registered in a poem countering the epithet with brave black heroes – Frank Horne’s “Nigger: A Chant for Children.” In this reading of Cullen’s “whit,” I hunted shadow words “behind” the statement, coring down into etymologies, pursuing metonymic associations, sound shifts, and denotive auras, reading visual suggestions, and identifying the narratives and metaphors buried in the texture of a work that allowed for a simple, belittled subjectivity of the enounced and a fierce, proud, judgmental subjectivity of the enunciation. These readings of the signifier (by association, etymology, syntax, connotation, denotation, segmental position) in relation to the discursive and political field is some of what I mean by social philology. It is allegorically appropriate that my poetics of the detail has been exemplified by a word – “whit” – that means particle or iota, and has involved allusion to a very derogatory word – indicating that words and their “social evaluations” are no small matter. A second example of a reading based on a social philology draws on Gertrude Stein’s “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene” (written in – or ; published in ), a work of resounding poetic prose repetitions.34 “She was gay there, not gayer and gayer, just gay there, that is to say she was not gayer by using the things she found there that were gay things, she was gay there, always she was gay there” (Stein , ; Stein , ). The much repeated word “gay,” with its condensed, implosive meanings brought under the scrutiny of a social philology, suggests three directions, three discourses, three possibilities, and the open pathways between them; all involve seeking pleasure and all are sexually suggestive. These meanings are not sortable and remain in permanent slippage across the work, by conscious manipulation on Stein’s part. The first meaning of “gay” is mirthful, charming, brilliant, showy, joyous; this is also the meaning of the word gai in French, a language on which Stein repeatedly draws for everything from verbal nuances to translinguistic puns. Women become “gay” as they enter social space and leave the dour family house, a site emphatically “not gay.” Department stores attract them, shopping and the urbane pleasures of city life are enticing. As women, they are supposed to be gay: not too serious about “cultivating” their talents, but consciously cultivating their decorative flair, their consumerist bent, their personal pleasure.
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In “cultivated” Stein takes up the question of work for women. Cultivate is a term with two prongs – toward tilling the soil, and toward educational refinement and formation. The women never became professionals in their cultivation: “The voice Georgine Skeene was cultivating she did not cultivate too much. She cultivated it quite some. She cultivated and she would sometime go on cultivating it and it was not then an unpleasant one . . .” (Stein a, ; , ). The flux of the diction – between “not too much” and “quite some” and “go on cultivating,” and then the creating of “a quite richly enough cultivated one” – does suggest that some debate about female professionalism has been encoded as a socially shifting condition. How much effort is consistent with personal pleasure, with not being bored, with being part of a community in which “there were many cultivating something,” with the possibility of working further to perfection are questions all in flux (Stein a, , also ). The second, related, meaning of “gay” (dating from about , well within early “New Woman” discourse) is fast or sexually active. The “gay life” was a euphemism for prostitution, or, softened, for a sexually active life without marriage, as in “gay divorcée” or “Gay Paris,” the city of sexual access; a “gay blade” or “gay dog” is used as an indicator of a male seducer or gallant. This meaning of the word “gay” is someone (gender unspecific) who conducts a nonmarital sexual life, but the word has a special punch when applied to women, for it indicates sexual promiscuity as opposed to some understood sexual standard of (premarital) chastity and/or (postmarital) monogamy. The culture of sexuality, sexual expressiveness, sexual experimentation, and sexual knowledge grew in general importance in the early twentieth century; the “modernization of sex” was a remarked upon phenomenon: “the modernists were sexual enthusiasts” (Evans , –; Robinson , ). This second meaning of gay as (probably hetero)sexual liberation is drawn in a section in which Miss Furr and Miss Skeene “sat with . . . dark and heavy” men: “They were regular then, they were gay then, they were where they wanted to be then where it was gay to be then, they were regularly gay then” (Stein , ; , ). This second use of the word “gay” marks public displays of sexuality – lack of chaperones, sexual expressiveness, seduction rituals, brazen behaviors. The third meaning of “gay” is homosexual, a thoroughly plausible, if not thoroughly provable, denotation.35 It is difficult to identify beyond doubt whether this usage is applicable to a work written in , with dictionaries drawn up within the gay community dating the word rather
Entitled new: a social philology of modern American poetry
earlier than not.36 Indeed, “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene”’s use of “gay” (dated – or ) may be registering, in a seismographic flutter, the moment when the lesbian bond was factoring off from female friendship. But the ambiguity of usage is also important. Stein moves “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene” forward by nuance and innuendo, exchanging and substituting among meanings of gay. Certain sentences might be paraphrased: it’s not gay (amusing, joyous, blithe) to live in a certain place as a woman because you can’t be gay (sexually active, and/or lesbian and/or happy) there. Despite publishing this work, three months later (in October ), the magazine Vanity Fair also set out, as Laura Behling has shown, a parodic advertisement based on Stein, an advertisement whose insistence on heterosexual conformity (“When Helen Furr got gay with Harold Moos”) suggests that Vanity Fair and its audience well knew, at least in , what the word “gay” might imply, and wanted to pare down those meanings to heterosexual sexuality and sophisticated charm, excluding lesbianism (Behling , –). Could Mr. Moos give our heroine a “cow”? Sexual boldness, sex-radical thinking, sex as health are all part of a certain strand of New Woman thinking. Certainly sexual expression by these “Misses” (whether alone, with male partners, with each other) is not lurid, criminal, demonized, a torment, a punishable offense, a sin, a disgrace, a fall, an outrage, nor does it issue in any formerly conventional accompaniments: psychic anguish about loss of chastity, pregnancy, venereal disease, social opprobrium, death.37 Stein wittily extends health to all forms of sexuality, and expresses this in two names, that, as Marjorie Perloff points out, suggest the sensual: “fur and skin” (, ). Further, gay existence (as a predicate adjective) creates more gay activity, both sexual and pedagogic. The final line is: “[Miss Furr] told many then the way of being gay, she taught very many then . . . and was telling about little ways one could be learning to use in being gay, and later was telling them quite often, telling them again and again” (Stein , ; , ). Not content with being it, or doing it, Miss Furr must proselytize and teach it, a tongue in cheek comment upon the spreading of various socially beneficial gospels by settlement workers from the new female educated cohort.38 The word “again,” pronounced by some with the second a emphasized and lengthened, is therefore an extension of the word “gay” into “gain,” a strong assertion. The transegmental drift of gay to gain infuses Stein’s own rhetorics/poetics of repetition – of “beginning again and again,” as she later outlines in “Composition as Explanation” (Stein
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
, ). “A gain” is also a word that suggests the fruits of gainful employment. It is one of two words deep in the linguistic texture of the work that links the optimistic ethos of striving and achievement – the New Woman success story – to gayness. The other word is “regular.” “They were regular in being gay, . . . they were gay every day, they were regular, they were gay, they were gay the same length of time every day, they were gay, they were quite regularly gay” (Stein , –; , ). If to be “gay” is “a gain,” if one does it “regularly,” and “for the same length of time each day,” “gay” is like employment. So a cluster of associations about work for women is evoked, flirtatiously, comically – and applied to sexuality in general, and lesbian sexuality in particular. Stein afforded pleasure as her work. The insistence on “regularity” and the habitual strongly suggests that sexual activity for women as an important, positive, necessary part of all adult life (Robinson , ). In a letter to New Freewoman, a (perhaps staged) correspondent remarks on the “sexual needs” of women, deciding we must “perform with reasonable regularity all our animal functions,” ending with the ringing statement: “God save us from sexual constipation!” (February , ). Given the texture of her poetic prose, Stein is surely saved from this fate. “Regular” is a very important concept in this work, for the issue with the varieties of “gayness” is as much its regularity as its object choice. Insofar as Stein depicts sexual pleasures for female characters without marriage, (in this work) without domesticity, and sometimes without men, the normalcy and health implied in the word “regular” – customary and usual, methodical, correct, and proper – takes on a robustly critical dimension. The word “regular” is the site at which bourgeois regulation is spoken semi-ironically. To discharge one’s responsibilities, to do one’s duty, to act correctly are notions witty enough when applied to non-normative sexuality (masturbating, sleeping around, lesbian sexuality, oral sex), but the solemnity of these discharges of duty is further disturbed when anality and regular bowels hover in the background.39 A third point about the uses of a social philology must be noted. We learn from Frank Lentricchia’s exploration of a “decisive scene for modern American poetry” that a poet – Wallace Stevens – can cross and double cross his gender and class allegiances in the making of his career, “the author as economic as well as sexual transvestite” (Lentricchia , ). “Modernist poetics in Stevens is a feminization of the literary life motivated by capitalist values, and, at the same time, a struggle to overcome this feminization” because it trivializes literature ().40 To extend
Entitled new: a social philology of modern American poetry
this reasoning, one might see that many cross-vested investments can be made by poets; other “conglomerate titles” are possible. As William Carlos Williams said to Marianne Moore in , putting the title Al que quiere! in Spanish appealed to his “mixture of two bloods, neither of them particularly pure” (Williams , ). He meant Puerto Rican and English, but he also amusingly proposes himself as both aristocrat and democrat, adding a class component to the mix. To the defiant message of the Spanish, he added an English phrase, remarking “Now I like this conglomerate title!” “Architecture,” a notable early Stevens poem predicting the poetic career, offers evidence that poetry involves a “conglomerate title” to a variety of suggestive social materials, not necessarily fixed by one’s most obvious social subjectivity, whatever that is thought to be (Stevens , –; ). “What manner of building shall we build?” Stevens asks; and “In this house, what manner of utterance shall there be?”; “And how shall those come vested that come there?” The word “vested,” like the word “titled,” offers assumptions of proprietary authority in the poetic act. “Architecture” designs, builds, and enjoys a shimmering, metaphoric edifice of multiple (different, yet coexisting) social locations and tones – for example “heavenly dithyramb” and “niggling forms of gargoyle patter.” The edifice has a playful phallic part in which towers are “push[ed] up . . . to the cock-tops” and another part where “our chiefest dome [is] a demoiselle of gold.” The poet speaks from an already executive space of designer and contractor, though he also imagines hewing, as a worker. The illustrative patches of language linked to a conglomerate architecture (domes, shafts, kremlin, plazas, chastel, pillars, blocks, and nicks) are each suggestive of a particular country, style, or form all of which are playfully, but imperially, available to Stevens. This poem shows how one’s sense of entitlement may sometimes come by seeking a conglomerate title to poetic authority, mixed between, or investigatory of, more than a single subject position. There are other readers of poetry using a reading strategy similar to social philology. I would like to signal a few of the contemporary critics to whose readings I feel indebted and with whose projects I feel allied. Garrett Stewart, exhibiting an intense, resolute, and catholic ear, constructs shadow words laterally, by “pronounced defects” (effects) and “rhymed treason” (reason): a “phonemic reading . . . a double taking, one sound overtaking another in sequence.” He names this “trans-segmental drift” (Stewart , ix, ). For Stewart these phonemic slippages, the “microparticulars of the poetic word,” seem to be a deconstructive property of
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
the literary itself, an otherness of eccentric meanings created by any text “in excess of semantic necessity, sometimes of semantic capacity” – precisely like Lecercle’s concept of “the remainder” (, ). This kind of reading will bring out third words created in an elision of the two the author wrote, will catalogue resistance in “phonic counterplays,” will notice buried puns sparking across, mocking, invigorating surface meanings, may incorporate a countertext of commentary of the poet on the work, can emphasize thematic problems and crises, and in general will create enrichments to the field, a “junctural pressure upon lexical structure” (, , ). “Thirst unslaked” for example, has a concealed, thirst-quenching lake; the gaze is evoked, for in the shadow behind “Behold her” is the word beholder (, ). Stewart argues that these effects create residual meanings or forms of overload that, in effect, can do anything, even contradictory things, with semantic meaning – can undercut, dissolve, or complicate it – so the refractions of sound are studiedly ludic and anti-reductive, although they may also create “micropoetic drift” that is linked to plot, structure, paraphrasable meaning, or to whatever issues occur in a given work (). Given these bravura deconstructions via motivated overreadings for their own sakes as telling what the medium language can do (and does do – had we ears enough to hear), it seems plodding and unimaginative to wonder whether there is any more function or reason for these constructions than the sheer excess of the untransparent possible. With all respect for the labile solicitations of Reading Voices, for the extreme charms of its contrarian readings, and for the dissolution of poetry’s authors into language itself, I will treat instances of transegmental drift in relation to the social philology proposed here, although Stewart probably would not. Also indebted to Stewart’s idea of “phantom locatives,” and to a psychoanalytic study of the “crypt” (trauma and its potentially masked expression) by Maria Torok and Nicolas Abraham, John Shoptaw has proposed a technique of “studying the impact of unwritten words and phrases” which involves reading for “crypt words” and “crypt phrases” in a poem (Stewart ; Shoptaw , ). Recently, Shoptaw has used the cryptographic tactic as a form of “productive reading” that “renovates close reading” (Shoptaw ; See also Shoptaw , ). This position has resonance and connection with mine; it has helped me to focus the claims here.41 The strength of Shoptaw’s suggestion lies in its simultaneous apprehension of a textual fact (the compact detail), a rhetorical representation (often at least a double meaning), and a bidi-
Entitled new: a social philology of modern American poetry
rectional but “chemically” fused motivation – from “psychology” of the author and from “social history” of the author’s location. An example of a crypt word might be Ezra Pound’s attentiveness to the trauma of the Somme (in which , soldiers were killed on the first day of battle) by the pedal-point repeat of Somme turned into “some”: “Some quick to arm, / some for adventure, / some from fear of weakness, / some from fear of censure . . .” (Pound , ) – the point is from Margot Norris (, ). “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” also contains a passage filled with venom and grief about the sacrifices of young men in World War I to the allegorical female Britannia (a figure subsuming male political power and “old men’s lies”). They have died “For an old bitch gone in the teeth, / For a botched civilization” (Pound , , ). A reading via a social philology finds that Pound vividly maneuvers the aural drift from “bitch” to “botch,” whereupon the undertone Boche – a contemporaneous disparaging term for German – floats up to excoriate all.42 Such a reading would argue that the verse uses sound and appositive construction to propose that “old bitch” is the presenting symptom of the “botch / Boche.”43 A poet’s motivation for such a crypt phrase may range from the discovery of a shifted or deepened meaning emerging from that shadow word; a psychological revelation – not necessarily hidden or concealed; a deliberate misrepresentation for reasons of both concealment or revelation; a political encoding. Michael Davidson is also one of the critics of twentieth century poetry who has engaged with social and textual nuance together. In Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word (), Davidson puts into circulation the umbrella concept of “palimtext” (his own invention, merging the words text and palimpsest) to focus discussions of the material text, visible/visual page, and typographical interventions, as well as a whole set of paratextual practices including marginalia, gloss, document, and translation. He sees the material manifestations of palimtexts as part of the “objectivist continuum” in modernism: “the sense that language is fatally connected to (even constitutive of) social materiality” (). He too seeks to understand the “ideologies of form” in poetry, “the socially and culturally coded meanings attached to formal features” (). These critics are precursors and partners in social philology to the degree that they pursue culturalist interpretations that arc among the psychoanalytic and the biographical through to the social and historical without foregoing a sense of the irreducibility and quirkiness of the signifier. In this book, I shall situate the poems by using contemporaneous debates in texts of a variety of sorts: social comment, social prescription,
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
banalities and analysis. Some of these texts will appear in the same journals in which the poets showed their work: The Dial, Nation and Atheneum, Others, Blast, Crisis, New Freewoman, and Egoist. Some of the books will be the normal, or sometimes trend-setting work of semi-analytic fare. Sometimes the reading can proceed by identification of historical crises, some local and small in scale, some based in larger trends, like the fluctuations of the struggle for women’s suffrage in England. A third way to identify social text in poetry is to read ancillary writing by the poets themselves (letters, manifestoes, essays) to try to identify the “ideological lexicon” on which they draw (Spivak : ). I generally make a “Perloffian” claim to resist the consideration of “poetry” as synonymous only with the lyric poem or the romantic ode (Perloff ).44 The book will thereupon reflect upon a variety of analytic lyrics: problem poems, in the manner of problem plays. For this reason, the book draws mainly on the “logopoeic” aspects of modernism, and does not engage particularly with what Suzanne Clark has called “sentimental modernism” (). Since this book is concerned with the intersection of two “news” – the rhetorical/stylistic (modernism) and the ideological/political (modernity) – it engages with writers who tend to stylistic innovation. Hence, although both exemplified a New Woman elan, I will err on the side of Mina Loy rather than Edna St. Vincent Millay. But even within its “logopoeic” category, I have made motivated choices, trying to rebalance our attention by bringing underscrutinized texts and authors into some relation to more scrutinized ones. It is already amply clear that this work is not a history or survey but a suggestion of reading strategies for poetry, to offer a way of engaging the social meanings imbedded in poetic texts not only thematically, but in the deep texture. Its findings should be applicable to poets whose work is not discussed here. This book is mainly about United States poetry, but saying it that way makes for some intellectual discomfort.45 This book is neither national nor nationalist; the poets themselves varied in their attitude to nation. But the uncontingent consideration or placement of a writer by national origin or first citizenship might do some damage to Eliot, Loy, Pound, Stein, H.D. and sometimes Williams and Hughes. Many spent their adult years living, by choice, in countries other than their national birthplace, drawing upon the art and culture of those places for their work. Some of them had fanatasies about other societies, as Stevens did about Cuba (Eric Keenaghan ). All of those writers responded culturally to and participated in at least two societies, including the United States,
Entitled new: a social philology of modern American poetry
but also British, French, Mexican, and Italian societies, and Caribbean and African milieus. When Pound responds to a specific suffrage struggle, it is the British community that is his reference point. And if one addresses the material, quotidian impact of racial prejudice, other national allusions if not allegiances might save you. James Weldon Johnson once acted Cuban, in a “Jim Crow” situation of enforced segregation and menace on a United States railroad, using his fluency in Spanish to pretend that he was a foreigner in his own country (Johnson , –). Mina Loy, British by birth, an American citizen in after many decades of living in the United States, suggests the bicultural Americanness that I am suggesting is characteristic of this period in U.S. writing. This book resists using national boundaries as analytic barriers, for in talking about contexts, backgrounds, influences, impacts, tracked through biographical and intertextual evidence, one can sometimes discern sedimentary layers of social stuff from two nations or more. It appears, then, that “national” literature is a concept only partly suitable to modern writing, no matter the specific allegiances and hopes of the writers themselves.46 Though it is certainly a sorting, discussing, receiving and curricular device, it is also certainly a kind of fiction. Thus to say Modern American Poetry (in the title to this book), means a kind of nomadic shimmer inside specific civic and political locations, some of which might not be the United States. Hence I am offering the notion of a creolized “Unitedstatesness,” or of bicultural displacements and engagements to mark the place in this study that is usually reserved for a discussion of – or just an assumption of – National Culture. But since a book, joining others in a library, must be filed under some existing (that is, hegemonic) rubric, I have used “American” in the title, but with, as T. S. Eliot has averred, a chuckle spread from ear to ear. Another critical rule worth questioning is the firm segregation by genre. Critical studies of poetry are usually limited to poems and poets and poetics. Yet people whom we may emphasize as poets worked in several genres: Williams, H.D., Lawrence, Loy, Hughes, Stein, Cullen, Edna St. Vincent Millay, e.e. cummings, and James Weldon Johnson all wrote novels, stories, and fiction-like texts, and several wrote what may be similarly fictional – that is, their autobiographies. Further, some of the authors of poetry – Stevens, Loy, Eliot, Kreymborg, Stein, Hughes, H.D., Williams, Millay – also wrote poetic theater: plays, masques, Socratic dialogues, Senecan closet drama, puppet plays, artsy symbolist drama. Then too, poets did not segregate their reading of, their interest
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
in, envy of, influence by, or concern for other genres. For these reasons, I will, upon pragmatic occasion, incorporate some discussion of fiction, poetic fiction, or poetic drama in a book predominantly on poetry. So to begin. The ways the modernist poem traverses the new entitlements in culture, society, and subjectivity, and the pertinence of social philology as a reading practice are what I shall pursue.
“Corpses of poesy”: modern poets consider some gender ideologies of lyric
Speaking in the s of his poem “To a Young Housewife,” William Carlos Williams states “Whenever a man sees a beautiful woman it’s an occasion for poetry – compensating beauty with beauty” (Williams , ). The genre “poetry” activates notable ideologies, myths and implicit narratives around sexuality and gender (Barthes ). Certainly poetry is always to be beautiful, and in these beauties linked to the beauties of Woman. Love, also, will be poetic. One of the key narratives that constructs traditional lyrics is “masculine, heterosexual desire,” with its interests in a silent, beautiful, distant female object of longing (Homans, , ).1 Inside the enounced, there is often a triangulated situation in the lyric: an overtly male “I,” speaking as if overheard in front of an unseen but postulated, loosely male “us” about a (Beloved) “she” (Grossman , ), articulating a homosocial triangle (Sedgwick ). This foundational cluster concerns voice (and the silent), power (of appropriation, envelopment, transcendence), pure beauty (not formation and culture), gaze (framing, specularity, fragmentation), and the sources of poetic matter – narratives of romance, of the sublime, scenes of inspiration, the muse as conduit (Vickers ). And as lyric poetry positions female figures in the feminine, it resists the possibility of effeminacy. While other aspects of lyric exist, this cluster contributes to the “political unconscious” of poetry in general, and of the romantic lyric in particular (Jameson ).2 This cluster of foundational materials has also been central to definitions of poetic vocation. That is, poets committing to their vocation take up some position in relation to these materials. These lyric ideologies are not timeless; positions and investments in genders and sexualities are learned and reinforced. If these materials are recurrent in romantic lyric, it is because they have been, like any ideology, renewed and reasserted. To deploy, examine, reassume, investigate, play with (jocularly, happily, critically), to select from this cluster, or to comment on these
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
materials would be acts motivated by a particular poet’s sense of cultural responsibility and vocation and by a poet’s attitude toward debates about gender. Pound jokes about this cluster in a young letter to Williams from as the “list of facts on which I and ,, other poets have spieled endlessly,” emphasizing “. Men love women. (More poetic in singular, but the verb retains the same form.)” (Pound , ). The parodic tone hardly conceals the self-positioning (). At the same time, these poetic covenants were confronted by the historical emergence of new entitlements around gender and sexuality: debates over the nature and theory of sexuality, the rise of sexology as a scientific study, a show trial of an English homosexual, increasing definitional and psychological interest in the “intermediate sex,” “transitional men,” and same-sex object choices, a heritage of mannered, deliberate gender fluidity and effeminacy in the work of the “decadent” Victorian poets, a newish subject position called the “New Woman,” agitation about controlling births and other debates on sexuality without reproduction, divorce legislation, and finally a militant feminist campaign for the vote in both the U.S. and Britain (Weeks ).3 Poets work out the contradiction between foundational covenants of the romantic lyric and historical militancy from certain new entitlements; in this chapter, the poems studied cluster around . Some of these contradictions emerge thematically, in poetry; but by the reading strategy I call social philology, I shall emphasize those also inscribed in poetic texture – as poetry. H.D.’s “Sheltered Garden,” a signature poem from Sea Garden () (H.D. ), critically defines beauty as rupture with the contained feminine. The desirable concept of beauty for the female or gender-neutral speaker comes in an explicit rejection of the bounded, cosseted “borderpinks” of the feminine. The poem functions as an allegory of female education to ladyhood, of female literary education as poetesses, and of a forced ripeness for consumption in the marriage market.4 Fruits in this garden are “wadded” and “smothered” with protection against frost, not allowed to ripen naturally, not allowed to develop the bite or kick that natural ripening would give them. For social philology, the crypt words “wedded” and “mothered” create psycho-social protest in the layered poetic language. The speaking character of the enounced opens the poem with a cry of suffocation, declaring that protected “beauty” must be rejected: “for this beauty, / beauty without strength, / chokes out life” (H.D. , ). The dramatic action in the poem, indicated by the pileup of verbs in the penultimate stanza (“break,” “scatter,” “snap off,”
“Corpses of poesy”: modern poets consider some gender ideologies of lyric
“fling,” “hurl”), is the future plan to smash the garden with a storm, crushing the flowers with torn tree limbs. The aim is “to find a new beauty / in some terrible / wind-tortured place” (). It is an ideologically motivated protest against the foundational lyric cluster to make harsh “beauty” substitute for loveliness. H.D.’s speaker does not reject beauty – the concept is quite important to H.D. – but she alters its nature and function. Of the myriad flowers in H.D.’s first book, Cassandra Laity argues that hard-edged, resistant flowers (like “Sea Rose” and “Sea Poppy”) are a gender-ambiguous version of decadent aestheticism, a kind of cruelty in beauty (Laity , –). In this particular poem, making a more modern beauty out of fragmentation, dissociation, and even destruction is like a futurist explosion in the feminine. To move the female over into a place of gender ambiguity (as a rejection of “Woman”) seems one keen motivation; another might be a New Woman critique of smothering femininity and containment. But after the pile-up of action verbs, H.D.’s apparently weaker, though climactic verb is “blot,” in the apostrophe “O to blot out this garden” (H.D. , ). The word “blot” suggests the power of the foundational cluster; for although the denotation of the word “blot” includes to obliterate, hide, or obscure, the connotation is ink spills and erasure by a dark stain. To say this attacks literary convention is not, however, to minoritize the concern: it is precisely the force of gender ideology within the foundational cluster of poetry that H.D. confronts. Williams’ poem “Transitional” (), shows his critical interest in gender and his wary elucidation of the scene of writing. The opening of the poem, “First he said: / it is the woman in us / That makes us write” is an attention-grabbing proposition; one friend argues to the other (a WCW, or “I” is the more dubious) that their writing is enabled by gender mobility and doubleness. “Dare you make this / Your propaganda?” is the shocked response (Williams , ). Provocatively: “We are not men / Therefore we can speak.” “We” are “conscious / (of the two sides)” – gender being imagined as a binary formulation that artists weave together selectively and androgynously. “We” are accurate (like men, not women); we are “unbent by the sensual” (as women would be). This third space is “transitional” – that is, built of an oscillatory movement across terms, combining the benefits of maleness and the powers of femaleness. Bruce Clarke suggests that “Transitional” alludes to the subtitle of Edward Carpenter’s Intermediate Sex: a Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women (). Such a subject place is a gender “tertium quid” that has a good deal in common with the vitalist and evolutionary
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
androgyne of Dora Marsden and some of her Freewoman contributors (Clarke , – and ). The disturbing force of a man who says “we are not men” and the anxiety about effeminate, third, or new sex subjectivity are expressed, for social philology, in the etymological reaches of the word propaganda, which, down through propagate and disseminate, returns to issues of sexual authority, spiritual power (the Catholic Church has a specific arm called Propaganda), heterosexual manhood, and ability to inseminate. The interlocutor brings himself into being with Yawehesque flair, “Am I not I – here?” but the question of potency remains. For a man to identify as and with women, or with the feminine, was both powerful and suspicious; this poem dramatizes (in the enunciation) the startled stalemate between two positions held by the two characters in the enounced: transitional androgyny and traditional fears of any mobility across gender binaries, fears of erasing the “binary” itself. Yet the shifts of gender positionality in the enounced are part of the labile attractions of early Williams. He makes crossovers to “the female in us” but depicts gender mobility only in situations in which heterosexuality and homosociality are elaborated or taken for granted. This split identification – and its tension between sex and gender – is seen in a January Williams letter to Viola Baxter Jordan: “What am I? I am to a man what you are to a woman – one might say an autoglove inverted; the inside, skin-side, outside” (Williams , ). With the bold image of “inversion,” of whose meaning in sexology Williams could not be ignorant, Williams proclaims his gender dualities exposed. However, in his sexual identity, he emphatically resisted feminine identifications (male “inversion”). Phallic manhood is richly bigendered until sexual expression is at issue. Conglomerate titles have a limit in Williams; the limit is fear of, and a sometimes tolerant, but more often contemptuous pity for homosexuality (seen as effeminacy). Williams’ position parallels a debate in Freewoman, in which two men discuss the propositions of Otto Weininger. One of the two “informs” the other “Genius is androgynous, but it is never homosexual. A man of genius may be feminine, but he must not be effeminate” (Clarke , ; quoting Freewoman I, [Jan. , ], ). H.D.’s assumption of authorship involved female resistance to a certain gender position inside the lyric seen as a site of weakness, minority, and compliance; Williams’ assumption of authorship could claim a “conglomerate title” to enriched gender positioning (Williams , ). Thus Williams works through a double female and male subjectivity for
“Corpses of poesy”: modern poets consider some gender ideologies of lyric the speaker of some of the poems, a gender mobility under the sign of heterosexuality. The cluster female–feminine–woman has different meanings to the poets: a woman poet is more likely to find, in the feminine, various problems. Williams’ statement about “The Young Housewife” indicates some of his long-term investments in the foundational cluster central to poetry: that beautiful women often inspire the poetry that it is men’s task to create. H.D. early modified this issue: some beauty is still important, but it is the dramatic, violent beauty that emerges when femininity as a site is ripped apart. This creation of an “anti-feminine” position is generally not sought by the male poets; judging from Williams, they want a pro-female (possibly pro-feminine) but anti-effeminate position. Williams suggests that, for male writers, poetry is a reparation to women for their beauty, which is culturally appropriated by men for their poetry via the mechanism of “the gaze” (Mulvey ). This polemical concept of gaze, itself the product of the hyperbrave binarist stage of gynocritical thought, may have serious uses for the analysis of lyric poetry in helping to identify elements of the diegetic relations depicted. Mulvey proposes two key moves, both of which have their analogue in many poems in Western culture: voyeuristic investigation/demystification of the female figure, and overvaluation of the figure turned into a fetish.5 Williams in general demystifies women, a tough-minded, realist strategy, but the possessive and appropriative aspects of “poesy” intermingle with demystification in a poem such as “The Young Housewife” () (Williams , ). In this poem, by virtue of his responsibility of compensation, a male speaker is paradoxically both freer and more constrained than the depicted woman. He has the power to resist, yet remark on, the sexual undertext when she, “uncorseted” and “in negligee,” “comes to the curb / to call the ice-man, fish-man. . . .” In a sense, she hails these chapmen into their position of (semi-sexualized) service to her, but the speaker–observer then “calls” her into her new calling as housewife. For of the wispy young female, the Williams-speaker states – with great power in his deliberateness and connoisseurship – “I compare her / to a fallen leaf.” The “fallen leaf / fallen woman” image, read via a social philology, indicates social debate. The “fallen leaf ” metaphor of use and loss is a poetic post carpe diem allusion, a link of woman to nature, fatalistic in implication. But it also draws upon the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century tendentious comparisons of marriage to “parasitism and prostitution” (in Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Olive Schreiner, for
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
instance, and echoed in Mina Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto”). This “leaf ” metaphor also follows from “the wooden walls of her husband’s house,” sympathetic lines suggesting her mild imprisonment and the husband’s clumsy stolidity. Williams proposes the fate of that one leaf in an implacable image of destruction (corresponding to Mulvey’s findings that one punishes the demystified object), as The noiseless wheels of my car rush with a crackling sound over dried leaves as I bow and pass smiling. (Williams , )
The speaker, destroying her for her evocation of sexual desire in him, has the control of two subject places, both the destructive “wheels of my car” and his rueful dismissive nod from within it. The poignancy of traditional gender cluster undergirding poetry has been reaffirmed in this work about the relation of female beauty to male power. Female beauty, vulnerable beauty exert a magnetic force in another of the seminal poems of modernism. Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” (), occurs, he explains, when in Paris he “saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child’s face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to be worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion” (Pound [] , –). The terms of the inspiration are well within the foundational cluster: beauty/woman/child/lovely/[poetry], plus the sentimental choking up at his inadequacy, but Pound resists and attempts to erode the tactic of “symbolist” and “representational” art and their gender ideologies by the invention of an abstracting tactic that resists the gender materials.6 The poem from this struggle between realism/symbolism and abstraction is well known; in my analysis, the formal poise of the poem – its haiku confrontation of one line against another, seen through the lens of social philology, is motivated by a dual answer to debates about the gender cluster in poetry. The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals, on a wet, black bough. (Pound [] , )7
The first noun, “the apparition” condenses the bidirectional tension of this poem; the word ranges between its transrealist meaning of specter or ghost (and the corresponding etymological charge from the abstrac-
“Corpses of poesy”: modern poets consider some gender ideologies of lyric tion – epiphany), and its meaning of a sudden or unusual sight, a realist observation. “These faces in the crowd” is a realist evocation of urban multiplicity. The symbolist or metaphoric leap is “Petals, on a wet, black bough” equated with faces. The word “Petals” may be said to deliver the “feminine”; at least it evokes all the loveliness and vulnerability of faces seen by chance. Two discourses – documentary/social (which is abstract or realist) and lyric/poetic (symbolist) are brought into one configuration and are made to interact. “The ‘one-image poem’ is a form of superposition, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another” (). One idea is that beauty/the feminine matters in the construction of poetry; the other is that it does not. Hence part of the force of the juxtaposition that constructs this brief work comes from the simultaneous affirmation and denial of the foundational cluster in a poised contradiction. Pound (like Williams) develops a variety of attitudes to the gender cluster and narratives of conventional poetry. The most striking poems in Lustra () have an energetic absolutely anti-effeminate sexual narrative. The “lustrum” or expiatory offerings for sins, made by censors, are ironically twisted with the title allusion to “lust,” for if censors typically disapprove of lust, in Pound it is lack of lust that is the real sin. Poems, his Pan-like offspring, are “impudent,” and they “dance the dance of the phallus” (Pound , –).8 Lustra is punctuated with apostrophes to their defiant attractions and to their capacity for épatisme. The readers, presumed to be shocked, are placed by Pound in a feminine–squeamish role as “timorous wench” fleeing from “centaur” – mythological male – or “centurion” – historical man (). Note how the detail of the poetic text delivers masculinist affirmation: the sound-pun lengthens one with the other. The timorous “people” inside the enounced are taxed repeatedly with prudishness, while in contrast the songs and their speaker own up to their sexuality with fervor. The real audience for the poems are the “free kind” who indulge in free love; unwilling readers (in “their virgin stupidity”) and those critics who “procure” them are rejected, a confrontation between free love, freely chosen, and marriage market/prostitution. The extended trope of this work links mating (heterosexual intercourse) with reading, and makes writing a lusty practice of exposing “verisimilitudes.” Good modern sex and good modern poems work together; this involves a critique of “poesy,” for these realist poems stand “without quaint devices” and “with nothing archaic about them,” a way for them to avoid both medievalism and effeminacy (). Unlike the male figure who can accommodate being both centaur and centurion, the female figures depicted in Lustra cannot be both attractive
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
and sexually aggressive. For some female figures, even their “satieties” makes their souls “delicate” (). When the female figures are urban and contemporary, they are shown with a cinematographic clarity by Pound as obliquely expressing sexual yearning or tension about “the new morality” (). One might say that the poems of Lustra are frank and modern with their enunciation (the poem as such), but the total impact of the enounced (the narration inside the poem) often reinforces the double sexual standard. The poems argue that no moderns should exhibit sexual repression or the “enslaved-by-convention,” yet they also assiduously appreciate the Women waiting for the poet’s sexual freedom to free them (). Indeed, the sexual narratives of Lustra make a decisive claim for the masculinity of the poetic enterprise. Despite rejecting the “stupid” elements of the masculine for the feminine, Pound says in “The Condolence” that he and his works get more virile, more red blooded. Happy condolence! By poetry a male becomes even more manly than he was (Pound , ) All Pound’s “songs” help make a compound, homosocial male subjectivity inside the enounced: his songs, addressed “We, you, I!” – are “Red Bloods” – boon rough-rider companions in the quest away from asinine maleness. Hence this kind of male poet may break with “male stupidity” (unglossed in “The Condolence”) and play in feminine fields of delicacy and imagination. It is a strong position to be both male oneself, masculine, and sometimes identifying with the feminine in one’s writing, but avoiding three dangerous places of writing practice – the “male but stupid,” the feminist, and the effeminate.9 When in , in “Sacred Emily,” Gertrude Stein first announces “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” “Rose” emerges charged up sexually: “Pussy pussy pussy what what” (Stein a, ). The “rose” motto also appears in the extended appreciative epistle about orgasm, “Lifting Belly,” from – (Stein , ). Stein’s famous tautological definition punning on “Eros,” “arrose” (French: to water, sprinkle, spray), and “arouse,” was sometimes typographically presented in a circle, which is, as the old word has it, a “poesy.” In a reflection on poetry and on this phrase, about twenty years later, Gertrude Stein discusses the foundational cluster of poetry. “Poetry and Grammar” expands her “rose” to a definition of the relational plot that drives poetry. Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that and doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing
“Corpses of poesy”: modern poets consider some gender ideologies of lyric
nouns. That is what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a great many kinds of poetry. (Stein [] , )
She proposes that all genres of poetry (not just the lyric) involve intense erotic attention, making love (“caressing”), and a passionate calling of nouns (“more violently more persistently more tormentedly”) as if each were the name of a beloved (; ). Love, sex, and poetry are certainly hitched in Stein’s theory, but in her passage, the object of attention is neither man nor woman, but any noun and all nouns. The subjectivity speaking inside the work is twin: the caressing “I” is sometimes a lover but sometimes “Poetry” itself, loving nouns. Stein provides an x-ray of the ideological mechanism of poetry. When I said. A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. And then later made that into a ring I made poetry and what did I do I caressed completely caressed and addressed a noun. ()
The rhyme of “caressed” and “addressed” in the enunciation clarifies the link between the romance plot and poetic vocation, but the object of attention is a grammatical unit. For social philology, “address” shows a dynamic taking of linguistic power. The “courteous attentions, or wooing” that show “skillfulness and tact” (to cite the dictionary) also move in transegmental drift between a dress and un dress, shadow words adding to the female site and its sexual possibilities. Stein concludes that “any poetry all poetry” is like this, and “anybody” can see it, thus calling attention to the common knowledge (ideology) of poetry as a genre, as based fundamentally on the sexual activity of caressing nouns. One might debate whether, by making the caress lesbian, Stein does or does not secede from the foundational cluster. Stevens’ poem “The Worms at Heaven’s Gate” () is a rather disaffected probing of a male response to the foundational cluster love, sex, woman, poetry. Stevens resurrects a gigantic female figure out of the tomb, whose parts, as listed, suggest a blason (“the lashes of that eye and its white lid”) (, ). Stevens’ poem chips apart the female, going all the way down to “the bundle of the body and the feet,” in an appreciation that scatters now impotent power, with an Ozymandian irony, “finger after finger” across the landscape. The poem also leaves the sonnet to which it alludes in its nine lines in fragmented condition. But his tone is hardly worshipful; it mocks poetic habit.
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
The name of this monster tells much to a social philology: Badroulbadour. Must we still drag forth (or wheel out – roule) the figure that makes of us bad troubadours? Is this the “rule” for the male poet? Or alternatively, given the title, must we still act like “worms” digesting and composting the corpse-like, neo-Baudelairean woman, and perpetually pulling her forth again and again? But as well the “troubadour” function is in contestation. Her name may encode a teasing response (“bad troubadour”) to women writers who teem with “the genius of that cheek.” For this poem may be Stevens’ engagement with the Women’s Number of Others and its interest in seeing women “play troubadour,” in Kreymborg’s eager words.10 The [male] pregnancy of the persons who bring this female figure out of the tomb (she is “within our bellies”) suggests a male appropriation of all creative functions, yet only as servants of this giant female corpse. Stevens’ image of joining other males in transepochal worship of Woman evokes the homosocial basis of this convention. But the very pageantry of gigantism in Stevens’ poem reflects a situation in which the monstrous woman dwarfs the female’s handlers. Because poetic conventions about gender are in some contradiction with the entitlements of New Woman thinking, an intellectual, analytic poetry (logopoeia) was invented by Moore and Loy, and appreciated/assimilated by Pound as a significant modern solution. Often and correctly approached as the desire to bring into poetry the density of social analysis in the “prose tradition” (from such writers as Flaubert and James), or to translate the heteroglossic urban blues of a Laforgue, logopoeia can also be approached as originating in an intense debate with the cluster of gender materials foundational to poetry. Logopoeia began, in Loy and Moore, as an attack on the gender narratives of lyric poetry: femininity, beauty, a certain gaze on female objects, female assumption of the role of poetess, unironic sexual yearning and the denial of female aggression or judgment, the underlying lyric narrative of romance.11 That is, logopoeia originated in a feminist analysis of the gender assumptions of lyric, a critique of the foundational cluster of poetry itself. I discussed Pound’s review of Loy and Moore in the article on which this chapter draws; I will not include this material here, but rather emphasize the critique of the gender covenant of the lyric in which social philology can be exemplified.12 The New Woman position in poetry was, historically, formed in opposition to the romantic lyric and to the female role as poetess – excessive display of feeling, lack of genius, infatuation with love (or, in Svetlana
“Corpses of poesy”: modern poets consider some gender ideologies of lyric Boym’s words “excessiveness, obsessiveness, and passion”); a resistance to normal poetic pleasures was its most radical effect (Boym , ). The desire not for beauty or femininity but for diagnosis – a diagnosis that undercuts “poesy” – is most imperiously a diagnosis of poetry’s own gender assumptions. But it is crucial to see logopoeia playing with sentimentality (expressions of yearning, outcries) as one of its discourses; “feminine” excess is not extirpated but surrounded, exposed, and sometimes sympathetically explored. Logopoeia continued, in Pound and others, as an analytic lyric, but one that erased the feminist critique. When Pound absorbs logopoeia, it is also reframed by him, especially in the long poem “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” (), to reposition women, the feminine and traditional beauty, as a vibrant source for poetry. Putting the challenge of Loy and Moore to Pound in its chronological place makes clear that “Mauberley” was written to soften a feminist critique of the lyric, not only to stiffen (as it were) a mushy and feminized imagism blamed on Amy Lowell.13 In this work, the critique of social institutions and the sexual implications of writing still ends by eulogizing beauty, whether at the end of the poem’s first section, “Envoi,” (dated ) “Till change hath broken down / All things save Beauty alone,” or at the second ending, “Medallion,” that describes an exquisite woman singing an exquisite song as the absolute talismanic object (Pound , ). The appeals to beauty at the end of each section are not ironic, but are the only value to recuperate from a dying civilization. The aftermath of the failures of political power represented by World War I involved a turn back to traditional gender values in which men were men (and the poem shows male struggles with impotence and effeminacy) and women were beautiful. Pound’s reframing meant that the critique of romance and gender relations, and the challenges to the beauties of poetry as a genre did not remain constitutive of logopoeia; this critique became contested territory within logopoeic practice. Seen through the lens of a social philology, this cultural dialogue about gender and poetry is brilliantly played in “Mauberley”’s management of rhyme, for Pound accomplishes multiple instances of “feminine” rhymes without falling into lightness, inconsequence, or comedy, and he continuously rhymes masculine (monosyllabic) and feminine (polysyllabic) syllables with each other, or as cross-rhymes in one stanza in such a way as to bring the polysyllabic diction under the authority of the “masculine” monosyllable. Rhyme functions to clinch the case being made, so Pound’s sociology of culture, in verse, uses verse form to establish order and to
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
reorder the relation of male to female. It is also notable that the only free verse in “Mauberley” occurs in the two sections mourning the war dead, as if the vers libre line were a contributor to the social decay that sent young men to the trenches. My title phrase, “corpses of poesy,” comes from “Poe” by Mina Loy which constructs a logopoeic critique of poetry’s foundational cluster via Edgar Allen Poe’s remarkable statement “. . . the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world” (Poe , ). In his essay, this conclusion is a triumphant synthesis, with the glue being Woman, of some of the emotional and thematic markers of poetry – death, melancholy, and beauty. Best poetry draws (with vampiric precision) on best death. Loy’s poem “Poe” comments a lyric elixir of death embalms the spindle spirits of your hour glass loves on moon spun nights sets icicled canopy for corpses of poesy with roses and northern lights Where frozen nightingales in ilix aisles sing burial rites14
This poem is a parodic examination of the accouterments and props of conventional lyricism. Loy’s poem is both imitative of a sentimentalized funeral scene and satiric of it, for the phrase “corpses of poesy” means female figures traditional to poetry, but both killed and eulogized by it. The archaic “poesy” is, of course, an especially loaded choice of diction. It is a poetical or literary term for poetry, and in Loy “poesy” satirizes the inadequacy of the dual conventions of the literary and sexual gender materials that fuel the lyric. As a romantic – indeed, as a Keatsean word – its use cuts into a whole religious romance about poetry worshipping female figures. Williams echoes the Keatsean use in his early sonnet, “The Uses of Poetry,” () which was possibly written to H.D. “For I must read a lady poesy / The while we glide by many a leafy bay” it begins, and continues “On poesy’s transforming giant wing, / To worlds afar . . .” agreeing that courtship, archaic diction, and sexual/imaginative voyages are part of the institution of poetry (Williams , ). Mocking and rejecting “corpses of poesy,” Mina Loy opens poetry to analytic and ironic considerations that unmask some gendered institu-
“Corpses of poesy”: modern poets consider some gender ideologies of lyric
tions on which “poesy” is built. In the poem “Lunar Baedeker” (written before ), the moon – patron of women, poetry, the night, and sexuality – is examined, anatomized, and found to be a modernist cabaret stage upon which many genders in several combinations play out many sensual dramas that realign the foundational materials beauty–love– sex–poetry–Woman (Loy , –). The imagery is decadent in a mannered, circusy way, as if the phases of the moon (on which the poem is arguably based) are best imagined as a sequence of amoral poses: “A silver Lucifer / serves / cocaine in cornucopia // To some somnambulists / of adolescent thighs / draped / in satirical draperies” (). There are a number of puns and portmanteau constructions read through a social philology that offer critique. The work’s discontinuous flashes, fanzine snapshots or “flock[s] of dreams” take as model the flashing neon lights of advertising (“— — — Stellectric signs”). These signs make “beauty” something urban, commercial, and modern, verbally fusing the “Stella” or woman of poetic tradition, “stellae” or stars in nature, and the word “electric.” This has the effect of ripping apart the association in poetry-as-usual of woman and nature, substituting woman and modern technology.15 “The eye-white sky-light / white-light district / of lunar lusts” are lines that acknowledge sexuality and its undersides in terms that deromanticize it familiarly, decadently (i.e. not love, but lust; not purity, but prostitution – punning on the red-light district of sex workers). In the lines “Delirious Avenues / lit / with the chandelier souls / of infusoria / from Pharoah’s tombstones // lead / to mercurial doomsdays,” Loy offers an apocalyptic history of the world, with the word “mercurial” removed from questions of love to questions of species survival.16 Here, as elsewhere, Loy tries to assimilate the findings of Darwin into love poetry, challenging the poetic with theoretical findings of sexual selection and survival of the fittest for an environment, ideas that de-idealize sex and love. A key move of the critique of this foundational material of poetry is made at the end, in the final four stanzas. Onyx-eyed Odalisques and ornithologists observe the flight of Eros obsolete And “Immortality” mildews . . . in the museums of the moon
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry “Nocturnal cyclops” “Crystal concubine” ——————— Pocked with personification the fossil virgin of the skies waxes and wanes — — —
()
It should not be forgotten that “bird” is British slang for young woman, and that “ornithologists” are “bird-watchers.” But their gaze has, in this retracking, been directed away from “Odalisques.” Unlike the female figures most characteristic of the languid and orientalized image (like Man Ray’s Kiki picture, “Le Violon d’Ingres,” roughly contemporaneous with the poem, and like Matisse’s endless paintings of “haremized” women), here, “in the oxidized Orient” sharpened by wit, the Odalisques are not being looked at, but are looking – like scientists or journalists watching trends. They are neither gazing inwardly upon their own beauty, nor being gazed at by the bird-watchers. Together the former denizens of the romance plot, its significant male and female characters, study “Eros obsolete.” The whole complex of romance and the conventions on which their very names draw are done for, passé. Although the moon is scarred (“pocked”) by the personifications of it, the conventions surrounding poetry and art (fame, or “Immortality”) “mildew” at the very site in which they used to flourish – ”the museums of the moon,” a phrase that suggests muses and traditional art. Although Loy has a thoroughly demystificatory project, she rarely states her critique of the cluster around Woman–love–romance–beauty–lyric–sex without marking her complicity and quondam attraction to that same conventional plot. The moon is described as male and female, cyclops and concubine, parodically phallic, parodically available, and virginal as well. The moon is variously gendered and sexually interested at various phases, ambiguously desiring, desired, disinterested, and uninterested. This multidirectional, “cubist” quality of the object of sight arrests the one point perspective of male-looks-at-female specularity on which “poesy” generally rests. The “moon” becomes the cosmic androgyne, a new modern subjectivity. The very plurality, discontinuity, and unfixability of the descriptors of the moon suggest Loy might be discussed under the Irigarayan rubric of plethora or “heterogeneity” which is Irigaray’s theoretical response to the term “castration,” and suggests how “‘the’ gaze” might be modified in another economy of understanding (Irigaray a, ).
“Corpses of poesy”: modern poets consider some gender ideologies of lyric It is clear that logopoeia verges dangerously on being “anti-beauty,” or, to cite the Pound review of Loy and Moore: it has “an arid clarity, not without its own beauty . . .” (Pound , ). Pound finds challenging the lack of conventional beauty (in melody, in diction), but he does see a rare intellectual precision in their work. He thinks of these women writers as intelligent, educated, cool customers. “If they have not received B.A.s or M.A.s or B.Sc.s they do not need them.” Notice how the hard-won higher education of females is both affirmed and disparaged. Pound links the educated woman and this poetic resistance to the feminine. The New Woman, entering historical time (with social agitation and political claims) was the opposite of the mythic and archetypal Woman who was often to be proposed by male modernists as a solution to the problems of sexuality, of emasculated men, and so on. One can construct, reading early modernism, a sub rosa struggle between women and men poets over the ideologies of poetry, beauty, the feminine, and the female figure. Transitional Men writing poetry attempt to depict Women as naturally feminine, while versions of New Women poets torque, criticize, or reject the link of the feminine with women. As T. E. Hulme remarks (before ), evaluating the periods of achievement and decadence throughout literary history, the period of decay, or “imitative poetry” is a time in which “women whimper and whine of you and I alas, and roses, roses all the way. It becomes the expression of sentimentality rather than of virile thought” (Hulme , ). The establishing of effective “virile thought” is an unconcealed motive: one must avoid effeminacies and keep women in the feminine while making modernities. Given that some of the modern is (arguably) born out of a conjuncture of entitlements of the New Woman and the New Homosexual, Hulme’s remarks are proactive. Thus he argues that women writers “own” the sentimental downside of this foundational cluster in allegedly starchless, mizzling verse. However, a glance at cummings or Millay as opposed to Loy and Pound shows that sentimentality in poetry is hardly coded by gender. Pound began noticing Moore in , mainly positively, and began corresponding with her in . The Moore he read included pert poems anatomizing various people, usually addressed to “you,” or to animals (“My Apish Cousins,” later called “The Monkeys”) and expressing a lot of resistance to being overrun or colonized. In , he produced an amazing statement for her (a statement that later influences material in his Cantos) comparing the male and the female in no uncertain terms:
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry The female is a chaos, the male is a fixed point of stupidity, but only the female can content itself with prolonged conversation with but one sole other creature of its own sex and of its own unavoidable species the male is more expansive and demands other and varied contacts. (Pound , –)
Females are monogamously homosocial (and unquestionably heterosexual) here; males are promiscuously polysexual and polysocial. Pound seems to have been negotiating to go “beyond” the two inadequate genders (even one inadequate species) in these remarks. Despite this advantage, the letter goes on to express, archly, a good deal of male vulnerability. But for Moore, “the female is a chaos” would certainly stick in the craw. Aside from the universalizing insult, Moore was prone to dislike gender polarities, and hoped to avoid argument based on banal binaries. Moore’s early reviews for The Dial, all of which postdate this letter from Pound, evince admiration for the erasure of gender binaries, mentioning in , for instance, “Giotto’s superiority to interest in masculinity or femininity per se; the inadvertent muscularity and angelic grace of his male figures – the faces of his madonnas and female saints, like the faces of stalwart boys” (Moore , ). Clearly stereotypes of masculine and feminine were coming under her increasing scrutiny, and she was trying to build a gender-blurring tertium quid between the polarities of masculine and feminine and their problems for poetic representation. Given the dates of all this work – Loy’s poems on romance in –, Pound’s linkage of the two women in as arid, emotionless, and fascinating purveyors of logopoeia, his gender-thumping letter of , “Mauberley” (published ), and then Moore’s work in the s – one is left with the possibility that Moore’s poems of the s, which do constitute a thematic cluster involving the critique of romance, are a response to being linked with Loy in the Pound review, and to being on the receiving end of such Poundian statements as “the female is chaos.”17 The works are also in dialogue with H.D. Marianne Moore’s poems from the s make a direct critique of such romantic lyrical conventions as beauty, the love plot, and carpe diem motifs.
“Corpses of poesy”: modern poets consider some gender ideologies of lyric The poem “Roses Only,” uncollected except in Moore’s Observations (), is a frontal consideration of a flower widely associated with beauty, the feminine, love, and carpe diem injunctions. The rose is addressed directly in the poem, which begins “You do not seem to realise that beauty is a liability rather than / an asset . . .,” and ends as if in syllogistic proof, “your thorns are the best part of you” (Moore , ). Essentially, the poem argues that the rose’s intelligence exists (“you must have brains”) and is an emanation of its beauty, yet that it is not its sexual availability and beauty that distinguish it, but rather its resistance to the tropes and the assumptions that would place it in the lyric tradition of unsurpassed and peerless gorgeousness. That’s why “your thorns are the best part of you” (ibid.). This approval of female resistance attacks carpe diem motifs. Carpe diem poems typically see thorns as the problem to overcome: the female’s sexual prickliness and virginity are genially reproached. Or, as in the Williams, female beauty is projected through an elegiac lens – the leaf is already fallen. Conventional carpe diem poems separate the rose from her thorns; Moore’s “Roses Only” reunites them. And of course the carpe diem poem readies the “virgin” for sexual initiation in the guise of memorializing her beauties, while Moore remarks in a countermove that “it is better to be forgotten than to be remembered too violently,” plucked by a “predatory hand” (Moore , ). Moore’s educational advice tries to resocialize the rose, to turn it away from such haunting background lyrics as “Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing, / Then Beauty is its own excuse for being” and “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may. . . .”18 For as we know, a rose is often sent as a message to decode within a seduction framework, an image for female beauty at its peak of perfection, and a displaced object of sexual desire. In one of the poems from Spring and All (), Williams tries to negotiate both the desire and its critique in a poem which begins “the rose is obsolete,” but ends by finding that if it is reimagined as somewhat technological (made of steel or copper, exploratory), and capable of “penetrat[ing] spaces,” it can claim for itself more than just passivity. He makes it a dual sexed image (Williams , –). A similar recuperation of a rose occurs in his poem written to Pound in . In “La Flor,” Williams rejects the “ingenious tapestries” and “soft perfection” of other poets in favor of Pound’s work (Williams , ). He describes Pound “himself surpassing flowers” in relation to other writers: “and certainly his verse is crimson when they speak of the rose.” Praising Pound’s writing as the very essence of crimsonness makes a tribute to his flowering that brings the
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
rose over into a complex of maleness and masculine abilities, rejecting “softness” and quaintness as the property of lesser poets. So too H.D., in “Sea Rose” (the first poem in her first book, ) recasts the convention of roses in poetry by positing another rose, neither lush nor “precious.” This rose is not an iconic object of erotic veneration; instead it is resistant, hardened, harshly treated, but free. “Rose, harsh rose, / marred and with stint of petals . . .” challenges the conventional flower: “Can the spice-rose / drip such acrid fragrance / hardened in a leaf ?” (H.D. , ).19 H.D., however, produces a poem with a perfection of mellifluous lyrical markers, including a succinct sound, interior rhymes, assonance, and consonance. In her “Roses Only,” Moore makes diction choices highly resistant to the poetical beauties which are linked to female beauties. Indeed, she seems to delight in anti-mellifluousness in “Roses Only,” using unpoetic, awkward, and turgid turns of line break and hyphen: “But rose, if you are brilliant, it / is not because your petals are the without-which-nothing of pre-eminence. You would, minus thorns, / look like a what-is-this, a mere // peculiarity” (Moore , ). H.D. fights the foundational gender cluster with a critique of feminized imagery of beauty in her flower poems. Moore fights the foundational gender cluster by a further anti-poetic resistance to beauty in poetic texture and theme. In her short poem “Radical” (Others ; Observations , not collected further), Moore also proposes a symbolic vegetable – no flower, and certainly no rose, a compound subjectivity of the enounced that offers a third way between polarized binaries of gender. This figure has much in common with the independent New Woman heroine, and may, indeed, be equally as “radical.” From this carrot-haired poet comes a poem which memorializes strong-minded, independent growth in the figure – of a carrot. “Tapering / to a point, conserving everything, / this carrot is predestined to be thick” (Moore , ). The carrot is a keeper; it compresses impressions, and while it may seem “thick” in the slang sense (slow-witted), it is enlarged with its concentric growth. The carrot has a politically radical heritage of singular power: With ambition, imagination, outgrowth, nutriment, with everything crammed belligerently inside itself, its fibres breed monopoly – a tail-like, wedge-shaped engine with the
“Corpses of poesy”: modern poets consider some gender ideologies of lyric
secret of expansion, fused with intensive heat to color of the setting sun and stiff.
(Moore , )
The poem, like many of her others, is written according to Moore’s syllabics, the only sustained practice in English of this prosody. By creating syllabic stanzas, Moore conformed to the demands of poetic tradition for fictiveness and unnaturalized language, while relocating her writing outside the long traditions of metrical prosodies that make up the bulk of anglophone poetries.20 The odd hyphenated words of “Radical” that dramatically mark the line segment are created by syllable count; the half-words thereby isolated can be semantically suggestive for a social philology. “Mon- / opoly” can be understood not only by its connotative meaning of exclusive possession or control, its denotative meanings within economics of sole commercial rights, but also its segmental meaning. This meaning may be translated as my (“mon”) manifoldness, for while “poly” comes from “selling” in the Greek word monopolion, when that word is split, the term “poly” floats free, to suggest the prefix which means more than one, many, or much. As presented in the poem, the carrot is claiming my many-ness as its radical (root, extreme) title. These readings of segmented phonemes within a social philology suggest Lecercle’s concept of the “remainder.” In the lines just before these, Moore describes the carrot triumphing over the givens of “circumstance”: The world is but a circumstance, a miserable corn-patch for its feet.
Again, syllabic counting and segmentivity combine to offer words behind the word, a double semantics. “Mis-” a prefix indicating error, failure, lack buries “miss” in it, for a comment on the limitations of the female gender that can be overcome, that are “[a]rable” or cultivatable. This links to an allusion later to “slavery [being] easy and freedom hard” (Moore , ). By the end of the poem, the carrot has offered a strong message to its farmer: “that which it is impossible to force, it is impossible to hinder.” The carrot is an “engine” – it is something that works, and whose work cannot be stopped. It is also “belligerent” in its own defense. Its message is pure growth and pure momentum, and the images propose access to powers through the fusion of two genders into a self (“im” as “I’m) both
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
assimilative and expansive, both pregnant and potent. “Impossible” produces an encrypted “I’m possible” by analogy with im-/agination earlier in the poem. This claim might be the history of the female freelance of modernity. This carrot of independence and activity is the site of a New Woman subject position in Moore; it is a position that transcends the limits of “Woman.” The emphases on singularity and work as compacted power are Moore’s solutions to the problems in poetry’s traditional positioning of women. She invents, here and elsewhere, in place of conventional female or male subjectivities, a more encompassing position, a tertium quid – intellectual freelance as a bold carrot – rather feminist in implication, synthesizing and sublating both genders. In “Radical,” the male imagery of erectile stiffness and the female imagery of engorgement and expansion combine in a pregnant poem of potency unsheathed.21 Moore’s confrontative poetic texture raised the hackles of Harriet Monroe, who, in the same way that Pound queried Loy, takes Moore to task on the subject of resisting beauty in poetry. Monroe diagnosed Moore “in terror of her Pegasus; she knows of what sentimental excesses that unruly steed is capable, and so her ironic mind harnesses down his wings and her iron hand holds a stiff rein” (Monroe : ). This disciplinary harshness of the woman poet “flouts the muse” (ibid.). Monroe is disturbed that this struggle of a woman writer with the challenges of the foundational cluster and the place of the feminine yields only “prose” and sometimes “the hard reluctant beauty of a grotesque” (). It is clear that Monroe saw, and resented, the high level of Moore’s resistance in diction to the charge of sentimentality and the role of poetess. Monroe championed an eclectic vision of American modernism, a place in the poetic mansion for Teasdale, Wylie, and Millay, and policed Moore for her (tacit) denunciation of, and contempt for the poetess. Indeed, this question of what to do with the “poetess” had implications for Moore’s and H.D.’s readings of each other, causing both to slant certain evidence interestingly. They are brilliant misreaders of each others’ work. In a review, H.D. asserted that Moore wants beauty, “frail” but “hard,” and is fighting the same battle as H.D. “against squalor and commercialism” with her “curiously wrought patterns, these quaint turns of thought and concealed, half-playful ironies” (H.D. , –). The term “quaint” is surely an escapee from the pretty poetry world by which H.D. is, sometimes, tempted. For, though H.D. did not see it, “squalor and commercialism” are thoroughly viable sources for Moore in : “all the physical features of // ac-/cident –
“Corpses of poesy”: modern poets consider some gender ideologies of lyric lack / of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns / and /hatchet strokes.” (Moore , ). In the poem () she stood first in her Complete Poems she announces “it is a privilege to see so / much confusion.” The line break is pointed; it is about her vision (Moore [] , ). We might wonder whether in these early works, beauty was important to Moore at all; certainly the works I’ve cited twist theme, moral, and diction away from conventions of beauty. Poetry is dogged, pert and alert: “‘a right good / salvo of barks,’ a few strong wrinkles puckering the / skin between the ears, are all we ask” (Moore , ). Moore’s review of H.D. in does not avoid her “instinctive ritual of beauty” but retracks it from softness and availability to hardness: “an aesthetic consciousness which values simultaneously, ivory and the chiseled ivory of speech.” (Moore , ). Aesthetic distance is a version of gender resistance. Moore is trying hard to make H.D. into a writer allied with logopoeia: with a “wiry diction,” “the clean violence of truth,” and “the firmness of the intelligence” (, ). In a striking last paragraph, she suggests that the book in which H.D.’s masque-poem “Hymen” appears (a work lush with beauty, a lavish depiction of a marriage ritual, complete with bridal-torches, and “honey seeking lips” and “honey-thighs”) gives evidence of a “martial, an apparently masculine tone” (H.D. , ; Moore , , ). As applied to “Hymen” itself, this comment would seem like wishful thinking, so misconstruing as to be revelatory. In fact, Moore is exploring the harsher lyrics in that book, rather than the honeyed marriage ritual. But by avoiding that title poem, she mutes her difference from H.D. The terms Moore proposes show what is on her mind – a way of breaking and remixing some of the conventions around Woman and the feminine. “Women are regarded as belonging necessarily to either of two classes – that of the intellectual freelance or that of the eternally sleeping beauty, effortless yet effective in the indestructible limestone keep of domesticity” (Moore , ). This fairy-tale image is one that Moore will repeatedly reject; the New Woman subject position of independence and analytic acumen is, instead, invoked. In H.D., Moore says admiringly, one finds even a third possibility: “the intellectual, social woman, non-public and ‘feminine.’” This synthesis takes the best from both sides. “Feminine,” isolated in quotation marks, may mean a non-passive yet non-aggressive interest in beauty as an aesthetic. H.D., in Moore’s view, combines the best of New Woman and old. As well, she resists stereotypes of masculine and feminine: having an “absence of subterfuge, cowardice, and the ambition to dominate by brute force” (ibid.). These two
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
reviews are certainly self-portraits or self-projections of H.D. by H.D. and Moore by Moore. Both reviews show how much gender, mingled with the demands of the lyric, was on their minds; both reviews show that each was concerned to establish some attitude to part of the foundational cluster (beauty–the feminine–sexuality) in the lyric.22 Moore’s “New York” () continues the resistance to the foundational cluster of the lyric. It is a far cry from the “queen full of jewels” and the beau with the muff, from the gilt coach shaped like a perfume bottle, to the conjunction of the Monongahela and the Allegheny, and the scholastic philosophy of the wilderness (Moore , )
As in many of her poems, when faced with something like the Cinderella romance with its peculiar feminine and masculine, Moore proposes a third place for herself to stand, not inside the gender binaries of fairytale romance but inside “the savage’s romance” of collage, heteroglossic diction, and tumbled together objects, variety, and accretion (ibid.). She takes the word “romance” (with its implications of idealized love) and reassigns the word wholly to adventure and mystery (the other definition of the word romance).23 It is a move in keeping with the feminist origins of logopoeia. “Novices,” first published in , is a rather funny and cutting poem about young men who write working entirely from the foundational materials of romance: “in the sense in which Will Honeycomb was jilted by a duchess, / the little assumptions of the scared ego confusing the issue . . .” (Moore , ). Will Honeycomb, a character in The Spectator “who looks upon Love as his particular Province,” is a foppish commentator on the many foibles of the fair sex (Addison and Steele , –). He is “jilted” by Lady Betty Single only by virtue of never having asked her hand, contenting himself with public inquiries about her fortune. Moore satirizes the erstwhile satirist, associating these modern pretenders both with unmodern attitudes toward women and with impotence.24 This is a poem skeptical of the posings of the “good and alive young men,” who think that “their suavity surmounts the surf – ” (Moore , ). They cannot confront the majestic challenges of real sources – the ocean and the language of the Bible, both of which Moore describes happily as a “chaos” or an “abyss” of conflictual angles and energies, whose vibrant forces have the last words (ibid.). Claiming boredom (something which only exemplifies their jejune qualities for
“Corpses of poesy”: modern poets consider some gender ideologies of lyric
Moore), the young men cannot cope with satire as a genre or the antique as a source. Far from real potency, they turn to romance materials and “write the sort of thing that would in their judgment interest a lady; / curious to know if we do not adore each letter of the alphabet that goes to make a word of it – / according to the Act of Congress, the sworn statement of the treasurer and all the rest of it – ” () The terms “lady” and “adore” are satiric markers of the poets’ inadequacies; punning Acts of Congress and treasurers are comments upon marriage’s sexuality, politics, and economy at once. Outflanking and outpacing the young poetasters, Moore makes a place for herself in the scene of writing, not courtship. The romance plot gets skewered, along with its adjunct – stereotypical polarized genders: stupid man; men are strong and no one pays any attention: stupid woman; women have charm, and how annoying they can be. (Moore , )
A central statement of her poetics is mixed up with a critique of normal gender narratives. It is tempting to see this double dose of stupidity as Moore’s answer to Pound’s attack on the genders. Moore equalizes the genders while rejecting both; Pound had made their flaws unequal, different (stupid male, chaotic female). For Moore, romance in poetry is banal, ungenerative. It is, to return to Loy’s terms, “Eros obsolete.” Loy and Moore produced a distinctive intellectual, analytic writing fueled by their articulate suspicion of foundational assumptions of gender in poetic texts and traditions. Moore interpreted H.D.’s work as embarked on the same project; she was partly right. This move and its fallout did not go unremarked by one of the central players in modernism’s production and consumption. Pound’s task was ambivalent. He sometimes cushioned poetry from that feminist critique with its blows to the gender norms of poetry, in order to make poetry safe for beauty, treatment of the feminine, and normal pleasures once again. He also appreciated, up to a point, the work Loy and Moore were doing, so long as it did not displace his. He thus alternated between the phallocratic and the “pal-ocratic.” More generally, it is clear that attitudes to the foundational assumptions of gender in poetic texts were challenged in a variety of ways by the subject positions of New Woman and Transitional Man, offering differential possibilities that were worked through by both male and female poets coming to a poetic vocation in the years around .
“Seismic orgasm”: sexual intercourse, its modern representations and politics
The only point at which the interests of the sexes merge — is the sexual embrace. Mina Loy, “Feminist Manifesto” ()
No human act is natural in an unmediated way, and even the most apparently basic and primal, sexual acts, have been constructed of political and ideological meanings. From New Woman and other investigative perspectives, autonomous female desire, the nature and importance of orgasm, possible dangers and pleasures in sexuality were probed from before the very beginning of modernism.1 For depictions of heterosexual intercourse and sexual desire in modern poetry, Mina Loy’s “Songs to Joannes” has both intellectual and historical primacy. It is the work of a certain New Woman subjectivity – “the modern, investigatory, subtly alive, defiantly free woman” (Gregory , ).2 Loy’s satiric, ironic, wickedly learned, and passionate voice goes far to destabilize lyric assumptions about the romance plot, female silence, and objectification. The first four sections were published in Others in , and their pretty explicit allusions to lust, to “Pig Cupid . . . rooting” with its crypt word rutting, to scrotum and testicles (the male “skin-sac”), and to “abortions” startled and scandalized many readers. Loy sees sexuality as a complex of events and meanings, as a site of struggle between genders and among various historically situated desires. Other works besides Loy’s – works by Stein, Lawrence, and Pound – draw on the discourses of New Woman/free love and narrate acts of sexual intercourse and even orgasm. Because these representations focus intensely on sexual activity, we can read sexual intercourse as a site wherein various agents and cultural processes are exposed: redefinitions of morality, questions about the independence of women, the loss of verbal taboo, the exploration of female sexuality, agency, and, sometimes, maternity, issues concerning pleasure and danger, and the rejection of any part of feminism that hinged on female passionlessness. Some depictions of male sexuality are also treated here. In this, Dora Marsden’s theoriz
“Seismic orgasm”: sexual intercourse, its modern representations and politics ing also played a role, as she “explicitly connected sexual emancipation, evolutionary progress, and libertarian politics” with “anarcho-feminist” bravura (Clarke , ). Mina Loy’s “Songs to Joannes” contains a unique representation of sexual intercourse, and many also imaginatively graphic descriptions of specifically sexual apparatuses. Of thirty-four sections, fourteen (comprising about forty percent of the poem) are arguably centered on different occasions of/acts of sexual intercourse, or may be said prominently to mention sex. And this representation is drastically aconventional, a challenge to prudes, and, more interestingly, to the hegemonic romance narratives of the lyric genre, but equally well a challenge to modernist libertarian thinking. Loy’s poem is filled with sex-radical evocations of pleasures both sexual and intellectual, and the equal meeting of the partners on a sexual terrain. As Michel Foucault remarks: “It is no longer a question simply of saying what was done – the sexual act – and how it was done; but of reconstructing, in and around the act, the thoughts that recapitulated it, the obsessions that accompanied it, the images, desires, modulations, and quality of the pleasure that animated it” (Foucault , ). Some of this is possible in readings of poetry based on social philology, especially the understanding of conflictual thoughts in what Empson calls “compacted doctrine” – those images that condense contradiction and historical debate (Empson , ). Loy’s “Songs to Joannes” will be read here to exemplify how poetic texture represents social debate, “how, in the very detail of composition, a certain social structure, a certain history, discloses itself ” (Williams , ). “Songs to Joannes” opens with a frequently cited section, in which “Pig Cupid” presides over the writing and instigates the erotic and its critique. Spawn of Fantasies Silting the appraisable Pig Cupid his rosy snout Rooting erotic garbage “Once upon a time” . . .
(Loy , )
“Pig” makes a greedy, lurid, id-filled muse, rooting “erotic garbage” rather than shooting arrows, a drastically anti-conventional figure with neither the whimsy of echt Cupids nor the androgyny and elegance of Eros. Pig Cupid, however, condenses intercourse and its product as the “Spawn of Fantasies,” both the ovum from which fantasy arises and the offspring of reproductive encounters. He is as well a phallic or lusty dis-
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
turber of the peace, sticking his snout into “erotic garbage” – those nice fairy-tale narratives of “‘Once upon a time.’” Pig is, in short, a symbolic fusion of male–female–child, an image of Loy’s erotic-satyric holy family annealing her maternalist hopes and her erotic desires with a strong dollop of critique. From the beginning of the poem, Loy creates an excessive, exaggerated attention to the one act hidden in the carpe diem convention of lyric tradition, although its constant point. She makes a new kind of gender narrative, validated by historical struggles around sexuality, sexual expression, and female desire. By excess in a female voice, she swamps the convention’s dependency on a certain delicacy, feminine resistance, or reluctance. She overrides the poetic convention of romance both by a sense of aggression where she represents herself continuously as a sexual woman, and by a sense of judgment, where she represents her skeptical, damaging analysis of what can happen after the “achievement” of bliss or completion promised in the convention of romance. A short list, well-depicted in the poem, includes impotence, unsatisfied desires, awkward, ill-paced consummations, betrayals of trust, “ephemeral conjunction[s],” jealousy, the apparently “superhuman” man reseen as a “weak eddy,” “Little lusts and lucidities / and prayerful lies” (, , ). In short, Mina Loy produced a work whose depiction of sexuality is a provocation to conventional codes of the lyric and to female place.3 As Janet Lyon states, “Loy proffered the experiential female body as a laboratory of creativity” – including orgasmic, artistic, and maternal (Lyon , ). In a little noted observation, Dorothy Richardson – that doughty (but also sometimes doughy) critic and writer of fiction – remarks how close is the interest of most novels to the “frothy excitement” of sexuality, and how the plot of the novel, its pace, tempo, shape involve arousal and climax, secrets and disclosures. She postulated, proposed, and proselytized an alternative narrative model from on: an erasure of any elements of story based on “the sex motif as hitherto seen and depicted by men,” attention to a multi-pointed narrative middle (quite comparable to Stein), critique of telos, sequence, causality, and, along with these, of gender polarization and gender asymmetry (Richardson , ; Gregory , ). Richardson associated narrative-as-expected with gender-as-mandated (DuPlessis , –). Richardson’s vehemence about the ideological link between narrative and sexual conventions indicates how intensely these questions were under debate in early modernist work, in which the construction of a new womanhood, sometimes a new manhood, and new attitudes to sexuality seemed plausible and
“Seismic orgasm”: sexual intercourse, its modern representations and politics productive. The invention of the serial poem in early modernism (possibly by Loy) helps to rupture insistent narrative telos by telling a set of intersecting or mutually suggestive narratives, having a variegated subjectivity or point of view engaged on a multi-vectored intellectual–ethical–political–spiritual quest through a ruptured social terrain, making thematically and narratively suggestive vignettes without articulating a specific or clear plot, mixing lyric modes with evaluative and narrative statement (not to speak of mixing memory and desire). These are familiar in such works as Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” (), Eliot’s The Waste Land (), both of which seriously engage with the depiction of sexual acts and sexual desire. To show by implication, to narrate “lyrically,” honoring gap and fragment, to make poetry by an imagist condensation of the novel – these modern tasks were pioneered in Loy’s “Songs to Joannes.” “Songs to Joannes” is a mediation with narrative hints; since it does “make a progression of realizations,” sequence (if not story) is vital to it (Kouidis , , citing Loy). Loy traces the course of a love affair. She narrates her sexual desire, her active, somewhat shamed pursuit of an apparently flagging partner, the complex of satisfactions and dissatisfactions centering on a split between sexual urges and suspicious analyses, an apparent break from her lover about which she is both cynical and wounded, and finally she offers a passionate consideration of sexuality and reproduction. The early part of the poem shows the “Loy” figure enthralled and pursuing her lover, traveling to him, even stalking him through city streets at night, at once exhilarated by her passion and debased by it. In one of these sections, the female figure is a marionette of passion who “knows the Wire-Puller intimately” (Loy , ). If (as Nancy Cott summarizes) free-love advocates “assumed that free women could meet men as equals on the terrain of sexual desire just as on the terrain of political representation or professional expertise,” they found instead sexual exploitation, inequality, thralldom, and the ambiguities of serial monogamy leading to jealousy (Cott , ). “Songs to Joannes” (–) with its companion piece, “Feminist Manifesto” (), a heady work written just before the poem, together negotiate the conflicts between sexual pleasure and sexual/emotional danger.4 These terms characterize two different feminist discourses about sexuality: sex-radical and social-purity ideologies, both of which emerged, though in different generations, as New Woman discourses. “In defiance of superstition I assert that there is nothing impure in sex – except in the mental attitude to it.” Loy’s forthright critique of female consciousness – not to speak of her forthright willingness to discuss sex
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
(sexuality, gender, but, especially, sexual intercourse are all mingled in the term) – articulate one New Woman position (Loy , ). In her “Feminist Manifesto” Loy is insubordinate, sexually blunt, eager to transcend and eradicate (by the power of individual agency and will) any prior world history of female servility – what Dora Marsden would call Bondwoman in opposition to the modern Freewoman behavior, and what earlier feminists Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Olive Schreiner called parasitism and prostitution – meaning the private ownership of women in marriage as a form of sex work.5 Indeed, Marsden argued that female purity and passionlessness was compelled by men, retro moralism, and the marriage market. Modern women are waking to “sex-love” and the visionary experiences to which it gives rise (Clarke , ). And yet Loy fiercely rejects the program of much contemporary feminism. In Loy’s view, “the feminist movement as at present instituted is / Inadequate” because it depends on social reforms calling for “equality,” among them, female suffrage, equal education, and professional opportunity (Loy , ; font and line break in Loy). “Cease to place your confidence in economic legislation, vice-crusades & uniform education,” she enjoins in a rhetoric of high-manifesto (ibid.). This liberal feminist agenda is an inadequate sop when nothing short of “Absolute Demolition” will change the sex-gender system (ibid.). The issue is not collective reform of institutions, but individual reform of consciousness, which impacts upon the behaviors within and attitudes to sexuality. Incidentally, this is a feminism that wants to change women, not one that claims to change men, and it is not a feminism of complementarity but, at least verbally, of a take-no-prisoners claim of female agency. “Leave off looking to men to find out what you are not. Seek within yourselves to find out what you are” (). To facilitate this discovery, to solve the woman question, including issues of freedom, chaperonage, the overvaluing of virginity, marital choicelessness, and sexual manipulation, Loy proposed the annihilation of “the principal instrument of [female] subjugation” (–). That is: the hymen. Whether to mock, to provoke, or to outrage, Loy suggested “the unconditional surgical destruction of virginity through-out the female population at puberty –” (). This preemptive strike on the hymen prevented virginity from being a bargaining chip in the exchange of maidenly “virtue” for marriage and home. This little chip, imbedded in the female body, also prevented the free exploration of (penetrative) sexuality.
“Seismic orgasm”: sexual intercourse, its modern representations and politics This liberatory feminism is in dialogue both with general ideology and with a specific kind of Victorian and modern reforming feminism called the Social Purity movement that combined claims for the moral superiority of women with a denial of active female sexuality. Both sex radicals and Social-Purity reformers called themselves feminists, and each tendency might have different reasons for support of issues affecting women, like campaigns for contraception (Lyon , –). As Dubois and Gordon summarize, feminists have acted within two conflicting traditions about sex, one committed to analyzing its dangers, its victimizing potential – frequent pregnancy, venereal disease, exploitation. Those who interpreted sexuality as danger sought protection by enforcing sexual controls over men that women (in the double standard) had already internalized, by insisting on chivalric honor in men and consensual sex, and by campaigning against vice (prostitution), this last often a campaign for the “containment of female sexuality within heterosexual marriage” no matter how oppressive (Dubois and Gordon , ). The other set of feminists, the sex-radicals, committed to pleasure and encouraged female autonomy and sexual expression, but did not see, or thought they had transcended, power relations, and the “male construction of the sexual experience available to most women” (). Many radical ideas were suggested by both groups. For example, Dora Marsden argued that when “womanly women abandon the ‘privileges’ which enable them to make a corner in a commodity [virginity and free sexuality] the demand for which they sedulously stimulate, [then] the pirate brigs [prostitutes; sex workers] which ply on the outskirts of the trade will become purposeless” (a: ). QED. Social Purity was hegemonic in the suffrage movement (between –), but not unchallenged. Libertarians and utopian socialists, as well as feminist sex radicals rejected the “purity” argument; these would find chosen sexual unions (free love) a moral and ethical kind of sexual behavior, and would urge the end of sexual repression. Most dramatic was the claim that women had rights to and capacities for (hetero)sexual pleasure, that women’s sexual drive was equal to men’s, that there was no physiological basis for the double standard.6 In contrast to these sex radical claims, Social-Purity feminists made urgent allegories of gender division in sexual matters: men were lustful, women were spiritual; men needed their sexual (and the synonyms were bestial, animal) instincts curbed by women as asexual guardians of an evolutionary superiority, glossed as a minimal need for the “sexual embrace” (Mort , ).7
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
In his poems in Lustra, Pound held a number of positions on sexuality, but one of them was a moving defense of those attempting to exit from sexual repressions of all sorts, especially those who needed sexual expression to become whole or renewed. That is, he was a kind of sex radical, and his title puns on that position, arguing that lust is pure and purificatory, and that orgasm is liberatory for whomever might say (as does Eliot’s woman in “A Game of Chess”) “my nerves are bad tonight.” Pound sends his poems as missionaries to both genders: “Go, my songs, to the lonely and the unsatisfied, / Go also to the nerve-wracked, go to the enslaved-by-convention, / Bear to them my contempt for their oppressors” (Pound , ). An ideological strike for free sexuality and fulfillment. Among these, women and wives are singled out: “Go to the bourgeoise who is dying of her ennuis, / Go to the women in suburbs. / Go to the hideously wedded . . . / Go to the bought wife, / Go to the woman entailed” (ibid.). This last word suggests woman as property, woman unable to inherit property, woman bestowed as possession, and a person carved upon or sculpted into a shape imposed upon her. In Pound’s list, and in the richness of “entailed,” the “Parasitism and Prostitution” argument about marriage finds some resonance. In the double position as subjectivity of the enounced and the enunciation, Pound invites his songs to help others by this defiance, taking on the modern task of chivalric rescue of women and adolescents from “mortmain” – their ownership by the family (). In this, Pound’s views are consonant with the sex-radical arguments of feminism. However, men faced with a different feminism, with the Social-Purity position that threatened the female vote would be used to curb male lust, might well be found protesting, affirming sexuality, turning upon women the weapons of resistance and satire. Doggerel circulating on the fringes of high art poetry among strongly bonded men evinced jocular discomfort that did not distinguish the two feminisms, attacking both sex radicalism (female agency that did not need chivalric rescue) and social purity (female passionlessness). In the mid-s Pound finally felt that with all this feminist politics and gender theorizing about sex, simple “fucking” (as an act of non-ideological nature, so to speak, or at least of male assertion) had been left out of the equation. He was prepared to stick up for it, with a quatrain in his “Amurikan” cracker-barrel vein: “Oh the Henglish wuz so stoopid / They’d fergotten how to fook / Till Mrs Doktor Mary Stoops / Com to skow them wid her book” (Pound , ).8 The “Henglish” seem to be orthographically henpecked; the doctor in question, Marie Stopes, “stoops” to conquer with
“Seismic orgasm”: sexual intercourse, its modern representations and politics her Married Love: a New Contribution to the Solution of Sex Difficulties (), an exhortation to attend to the tidal periodicities of female desire in order to have an effective sexual love and achieve orgasms whose lack, in Stopes’ view, led to neurosis in modern women (, , ). Such a theory made the female body a third player in the sex life of men and women, something to be consulted and respected: or, in Pound’s irreverent summary of : “O Jhon [sic] do mind the moment / When her oviduct is full . . .” (Pound , ; see also version in Pound , ). But sex talk, Pound avers, seemed to theorize the self-evident, to give advice where none was needed. “Alas, eheu, one question that sorely vexes / The serious social folk is ‘just what sex is.’ / Though it will, of course, pass off with social science / In which their mentors place such wide reliance” (Pound , ). While sex will not pass away, this satiric farrago (/) certainly seems to resist the policing of, channeling of, or even analysis of sexuality by social reformers. Also in the doggerel line, Eliot is inventive, although his comic poems are even more about race than about the New Woman, as much about homosexuality as heterosexuality, and as much scatological as sexual. In ditties on King Bolo, Columbo, Isabella, and the Big Black Kween, Eliot makes several aggressive remarks on sexuality, inventing a topos and topography in which all assertions are verbally possible, with a bounce upon “Words Ending in -Uck, -Unt and -Ugger,” as Lewis remarked to Pound (before July , Pound , ; see Eliot , , –). These doggerel works in circulation (and the posturing rhetorics of some letters exchanged among male modernists) are important as identifying an underside, the intense ambivalence expressed by young male modernists to female agency – whether sexual or artistic, and to joining the artistic “big wigs,” the kind of ambivalence through which the male and female members of a notable artistic family are denominated “ [sic] and Shitwell” in a letter that in fact offers up some of the doggerel poems as an antic and spit-in-the-eye reading suggestion (Eliot , , to Pound, Oct. ). This jealousy and sense of poetic rivalry makes problematic such a thesis as Gilbert and Gubar’s that male modernists invented avant garde strategies and disjunctive poetics (Peter Quartermain’s phrase) to differentiate themselves from the broad stream of (often prose) realism dominated by female masters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the variety of modern rhetorics and functions cannot so easily be divided into experimental versus realist nor male versus female (Gilbert and Gubar , ). Indeed, the notion of formally radical writing as a “men’s club” effectively
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
marginalizes Moore, Stein, Loy, H.D., Sitwell, Woolf, Barnes and numerous others (). The fallout from debates about female sexuality is expressed in a bitter poem by Alfred Kreymborg called “Icicles,” in which women manipulate men in the manner of a puppeteer, and men suffer phallic depredations: “Other men have been known to tighten into buds, only to loosen to spreading lotuses. / To assume the outer corrugations, only to wilt to the inner sweetness, of pineapples. / To twist into cactus shapes, only to flower toward purple mist” (Kreymborg , ). The striking metamorphic androgyny of phallus to flower is, nonetheless, deeply resented, since “Milady” holds total power over these changes. The poem ends fiercely with a bravura moment of misogyny and projection: “Milady is indigenous to every soil and climate, every star and planet. / In enlightened America, a fetich more prevalent than God the Almighty. / In darkest Africa, they club her to death” (). The ironic shifting between who is really primitive and who enlightened harnesses the narratives of race fantasy and gender privilege to take revenge on women who have, in the modern American world, somehow gotten too much sexual power, but who, Kreymborg fantasizes, are dealt with pertinently in the “primitive” world. In a backlash to feminist analysis and to the debates among feminists, men claimed that they were in danger from female sexuality (against sex-radical feminists) and, as well, from the attempt to curb male sexuality (against Social-Purity feminists). Loy would certainly have agreed on the latter point: “The man who lives a life in which his activities conform to a social code which is a protectorate of the feminine element ———— is no longer masculine” (Loy , ). Loy’s feminism of individual agency and will considers women as a group, and does, if quirkily, use the term “feminist,” a term itself contested in the Marsden circle in which several of the male poets also participated (Pound and Aldington, for example). Dora Marsden was highly resistant to any consideration of Woman-as-type, by which she meant both stereotypes of women and any analysis considering woman in the mass – that is, analyses by gender. She announces that: “‘Woman,’ spelt with a capital, Woman-as-type, had no existence; that it is an empty concept and should be banished from language” (Marsden a, ). Marsden also insisted that “‘Feminism’ was the natural reply to ‘Hominism’” proposing, in , that both were inadequate and unnecessary, because a higher and more specific individualist urge had now replaced these political positions – ”[women] can be as ‘free’ now as they have the power to be” (Marsden b, ).9 This was a powerful, if
“Seismic orgasm”: sexual intercourse, its modern representations and politics rather premature, sentiment, a pre-War optimism of the will, that clearly exhibits the productive tension between individual creative person and the social category of putative allegiance as seen in the “New Woman” milieu (See Clarke , –, –, ; DuPlessis , –). Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto” is situated within a sex-radical discourse. Loy calls, in the manifesto, for free love brought about by “intelligent curiosity and courage” in acknowledging sexual desire, in critique of “the impurity of sex,” in renunciation of the status of parasite (marriage as a “trade”), and in principled, vociferous resistance to old-fashioned marriage, called, disparagingly, “comfortable protection” (Loy , –). Another transformative proposal, an extension of her own lifechoices, was “the right to maternity” for all women, married or not, although as can be pointed out, this had a eugenicist torque (and in her life led to certain amazing childcare issues) (DuPlessis ; Lyon , ). In her forms of marriage resistance and resistance to legitimation/legitimacy, Loy absolutely holds to sex-radical positions: that highminded revulsion against marriage as women’s trade that one sees in Cicely Hamilton, the curiosity about free love in Florence Farr, or the criticism of the Pankhurst (Social-Purity) position that one sees in Dora Marsden. And yet, when the manifesto declares “Woman must destroy in herself the desire to be loved,” it continues in a pensive unfinished sentence “The feeling that it is a personal insult when a man transfers his attentions from her to another woman” (Loy , ). It is this fragmentary half-thought that “Songs to Joannes” takes up. Along with “the desire to be loved,” the manifesto claims this insulted feeling must be extirpated too. In the manifesto, Loy shows defiant desentimentalism, as if feelings associated with the ideology of femininity were downright toxic, part of the “rubbish heap of tradition” (). Thus she argues “honour, grief, sentimentality, pride, & consequently jealousy must be detached from [sex]” (). As in most manifestos, there is a ferocious prevalence of “must,” a theatrical assertion of will, New consciousness, and declamatory overstatement. Yet her absolute rejection of prior female strategies and her repeated tropes of destruction protest too much; feminine consciousness is a specter haunting “Songs to Joannes.” The narratives of thralldom and recovery, obsession, rupture, and painful isolation visible in “Songs to Joannes” do conform to certain stories of the dangers of sexuality emerging from Social-Purity feminism, from sentimentalist visions, and from the topological femininity of the abandoned woman.10 “The desire to be loved” (one of the aspects of
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female servility) and the capture of the woman “in the weak eddy / of your [the man’s] drivelling humanity” is confessed repeatedly in the early part of the poem and even seems to recur at the end (). This goes far to argue that the old feminine consciousness with its concepts such as “love,” accompanied by “honour, grief, sentimentality, pride, & consequently jealousy” spoils the brave new world of liberated heterosexuality (). The poem stands in a contradictory relation to the manifesto, considering emotions the manifesto resists. When this poem is scrutinized by a social philology, one sees that Loy condenses these passionate contemporaneous debates about sexuality in her word choice and diction. Take the word “bed-ridden”: “We might have coupled / In the bed-ridden monopoly of the moment” (). Ellen Trimberger’s studies of sex radicals confirm the realities of jealousy and pain in the open heterosexual relationships of contemporaneous free love advocates (Trimberger and ). The temporary monogamy of a potential sexual conjunction, and the possible excitements of riding the bed (meaning copulate) are qualified with a word that suggests a sickness. Or worse: that sexuality is itself dangerous, with the word “hagridden” hovering in the background, for ridden can mean controlled or dominated, even harassed and pursued. Pleasure and danger condense in this word (cf. Quartermain , ). The poet enters into her consideration of the “wild oats sown in mucous-membrane” with the clear admonition “These are suspect places” (Loy , ). “Sowing wild oats” comes from a proverbial expression; “mucous-membrane” is a medical term. The mixture of dictions in this logopoeic style has one of its origins, as I have argued in chapter two, in the feminist critique of a foundational cluster of materials about romance in poems. The main character assumes various postures for this investigation, among them a “wise virgin” pose, holding an investigatory lantern aloft so it will not be blown out by “the bellows / Of experience.” For this lantern show (like a slide show, the sections of the poem offer individual moments of a quasi-narrative montage), the poet takes her own cool, analytic “eye” as the source of light, but that analytic “lantern” is involved with inflammatory orgasmic imagery: “An eye in a Bengal light / Eternity in a skyrocket” (ibid.).11 Negotiating sexual and analytic passions, the poem often presents impacted and intellectualized languages of wit graphically describing sexual moments and apparatuses. The gaze of power (narrator’s eye as illuminating lens) rests on the man. And even – in the very first view we have of him – on his genitalia: “The skin-sack / In which a wanton
“Seismic orgasm”: sexual intercourse, its modern representations and politics duality / Packed / All the completion of my infructuous impulses / Something the shape of a man.” (ibid.). Loy yearns for the completions locked inside his testicles: the sperm to make her fruitful. As a “complete woman,” she wants motherhood and mistresshood both (). So this “wanton duality” is not simply an abstract portrait of his genitalia, but of her double impulse toward licentious, rebellious sex and desires for male fertilization. Maternalist thinking meets free love; Loy proposes – quite overriding conventional thought on these subjects – that there is no conflict between them (Weeks , –). Other sections are more comic, apparently unafraid of the game of sexual intercourse. Charming and alarming is this haiku, allusively complete in just three lines. Shuttle-cock and battle-door A little pink-love And feathers are strewn[.]
(Loy , )
The shuttle-cock of badminton bears irresistible double overtones, and the battledore, a flat wooden paddle (and the old word for badminton itself), is provocatively re-spelled “battle-door,” to suggest the site of penetration. This first line emphasizes the physical difference between the sexes, yet the sport that can be made of these differences. “Pink-love” smacks of a fond eros of knowing possession, rather than unconsummated yearning. The “feathers” signal a comic devastation of the “birdie” or cock, a triumph perhaps of the woman, or perhaps mutual release in plucking. Sex becomes a game, a sport, a cartoon. “Voices break on the confines of passion / Desire Suspicion 00 Man Woman / Solve in the humid carnage.” (). This little list of nouns can be read two conflicting ways. First, the lines suggest that both man and woman have desire and suspicion (suspicion of their relationship, and of each other; suspicion as well about what sexuality means). This equal intersubjectivity attempts to depict a non-hierarchical arrangement of the sexes. They are equal on the terrain of the sexual embrace, for they have the same border – or perhaps the same imprisonment (“confines” are both). Therefore, all barriers are “solved” in that embrace, where “solved” may mean dissolved, disappearing, or explained, emerging as a correct answer to questions about modern sexuality. Sexual intercourse, that “humid carnage,” will override the gender division based on the mutual hatred of “parasite” and male host, as the epigram to this chapter from Loy’s manifesto also suggests: in “Feminist Manifesto,” the genders can now become equal in orgasm,
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
but when women become feminists à la Loy, presumably the enmity between men and women will no longer prevail. However, the same lines can also be interpreted as following sexual purity binaries, creating two matched sets in ratio: “desire” goes with “man” and “suspicion” with “woman.” Loy’s syntactic presentation via this indeterminate metonymy calls forth both latent narratives of male–female relations; thus, in a reading undertaken by social philology sentence structure evokes these positional debates within feminism. As Nancy Cott observes, “the endorsement of heterosexual passion and pleasure was a double-edged sword for Feminists in the s” because for feminists “heterosexual liberation for women intended to subvert gender hierarchy rather than to confirm it” (). The evidence of a debate between subversion of hierarchy and confirmation of it, between female desire and female suspicion occurs in the language of this passage. With “laughing honey // And spermatozoa / At the core of Nothing / In the milk of the Moon,” and continuing for six sections (‒), Loy composes precisely on or alluding to (hetero)sexual intercourse with a striking frankness of diction, and in a great variety of registers, including terror, danger, pleasure, resistance, lust, controlling wit (Loy –). These are not, it appears from their tonal differences, narratives of one erotic encounter, but rather six separate, distinct, and precisely noted representations of activities and attitudes that go with sex, each section ending in a representation of orgasm. Loy pays special attention to the similarities between the partners at the moment of pleasure when (according to Loy) male–female distinctions dissolve, yet a moment whose social and psychological contexts draw upon the dangers of that difference: “seismic orgasm” (). For instance, the obliteration of gender distinctions seems especially keen in “humid carnage // Flesh from flesh / Draws the inseparable delight / Kissing at gasps to catch it,” “welded together” and “knocking sparks off each other” (–). “Welded” puns on the more familiar phrase “wedded together” with an industrial allusion, involving sparks. However Loy’s most distinctive phrases – “humid carnage” and “seismic orgasm” – combine words indicating pleasure with words of danger. “Carnage” reaches etymologically for “flesh” and connotively for “carnal,” with a historical pun, “dying,” but denotively for war-dead and “mass slaughter.” In “seismic,” also, pleasure and danger contend; the technical term for earthquake with its etymology of “shake” is far fiercer than the sentimental notion that “the earth moved.” So in Loy’s
“Seismic orgasm”: sexual intercourse, its modern representations and politics diction the sex-radical direction (pleasure and affirmation of female agency) meets the danger of free love – being discarded, being used, having a consciousness still “welded” to ideas of marriage and monogamy. The next main portion of the poem (sections ‒) narrates the apparent aftermath of a sexual relationship, with the tentative steps toward recovery, and backslidings into misery, pleasure in isolated identity, bitterness about betrayal. The “severing” might be of man from woman, with the “heinous acerbity / Of your street-corner smile” (, ). But it might be self-induced, a bitter self-imposed punishment of exile from him when her emotions (pride, jealousy, sentimentality, etc.) could not be detached from her sexual experience, and she violated the terms of her own brave “Feminist Manifesto.” A summary set of lines thereupon moves away from the sensuous alba of romance tradition, and divides into two categories those who wake up post coitus. The section names “some of us” still “melted” “Into abysmal pigeon-holes / Passion has bored / In warmth”; this produces an unsavory combination of the swindled female “pigeons,” their wretched domestic compartments, and the duplicitous word “bored,” summarizing both ennui and sexual penetration (). These are distinguished from “Some few of us” who “Grow to the level of cool plains / Cutting our foot-hold / With steel eyes” (ibid.). An analytic elite has waked up in another sense and will be able to scrutinize the situation of love and sex, examining Nature with intellectual dispassion, not sensual passion, misplaced morality, or curdling personal sentiments of loss. “The cerebral forager” first takes herself as a one-woman petri dish for the cultivation of sexuality, and then becomes a scientist scrutinizing the growths (). The sex-radical woman may suffer the conventional story of passion and loss, thralldom and grief, but she will rewrite that narrative by rebounding to analyze it. Nature is thereupon called “that irate pornographist.”12 “Irate” means angry, excited, incensed; “pornographist” makes of Nature itself an angry or emotional producer of texts depicting sexual intercourse. Given Loy’s poem, this would put her in precise alliance with Nature; she too is an angry writer depicting sexual intercourse who has certainly “shed . . . petty pruderies” (). Yet in what senses does she side with nature? Loy first argues, with Naturalist panache, that Nature is a presenter of materials for our sexual arousal, and we are just those human materials upon which Nature has to act for its designs. Since we are simply containers for natural forces, our individual scruples, our specific feelings, certain kinds of resistance are counterproductive, causing only
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suffering to the small speck, with its “souvenir ethics” somehow standing up in the face of these forces. Nature “knows us” with” “blind eyes” – implacable, amoral ( and ). Women and men are, in a kind of Hardyesque fatedness – controlled like cosmic puppets by the force and overwhelming character of “nature” – sexual drives. These “naturalist” feelings about sexuality (that the hard-won individualism of the New Woman stands in the way of and is swept away by cosmic natural drives) seem to be at issue when Loy bitterly calls for a new breed of “sons and daughters” who might have “some way of braying brassily / For caressive calling” and be “seduce[d]” “To the one / As simple satisfaction / For the other” (, ). Let them clash together From their incognitoes In seismic orgasm For far further Differentiation13 Rather than watch Own-self distortion Wince in the alien ego
(Loy , )
The sexual life of these active and “caressive” paragons will be simple, compared to her “own-self distortion.” They will have evolved to be more in accord with Nature than she, more like human animals (“braying”) without twinges of bourgeois individualism. As she represents sexual intercourse, the loss of individual gender binaries was an advantage and a pleasure, the place where disparate gender interests merge. But there is danger: a lust for orgasm necessarily overrides a sense of ego or boundaries. So the “Nirvana” is terrible/terrifying and terrific/exhilarating, as they “tumble together / Depersonalized / Identical / Into the terrific Nirvana / Me you – you – me” (). These metaphors of chaos or annihilation in sexual bliss show the dangerous loss of identity, perhaps reversion to a “femininity” of dissolution and passivity, defined by stereotypical gender ideas which Loy has staked herself upon resisting, perhaps the loss of hard-won female agency and human personhood, a “depersonalized” erosion. The pleasures and dangers of merging boundaries are in unresolvable circulation in the poem. In the end “seismic orgasm” has yet another function. It is necessary to the utopian building of a new female gender identity – one in which “mistress and mother” are not distinct (). For Loy, autonomous
“Seismic orgasm”: sexual intercourse, its modern representations and politics sexuality and her “freewoman” brand of autonomous feminism still involved a deeply felt claim to maternity.14 The argument toward the end of the poem (“Evolution fall foul of / Sexual equality / Prettily miscalculate / Similitude”) strongly suggests that “sexual equality” and species meliorism are at odds (). When one factors in Loy’s rejection of a feminism of equal rights and equal access, the phrase suggests that mainstream feminism is going to fall foul of natural forces, but that her eugenic feminism, proudly set forth in the “Feminist Manifesto,” will not. To build better species, the sexes should remain, in certain of their aspects, strongly differentiated – (intelligent) womanly superwomen meeting (intelligent) manly supermen; this is emphatically not the nonmaternal androgyne floating around in some sex-radical discourses (Smith-Rosenberg , ). And yet, at the same time, the linking of sexual activity with reproduction was a potentially conservative position, when the whole history of modern struggles for the acceptance of sexual practices (whether contraception, abortion, homosexual expression, or masturbation) had been to valorize non-reproductive sex, what Richard Brown wittily dubs “copulation without population” (Brown , ). So there are two intertwined narratives at the end of the poem. One is the analysis of the amorous failure of these highly developed intellectuals whose precepts and experiences don’t match. The prig of passion—– —– —– —– To your professorial paucity Proto-plasm was raving mad Evolving us —– —– —–
(Loy , )
They are ill suited to continue the race. One would not want to produce “foetal buffoons” in whom the bad patterns of the generative parents get mimicked or copied in utero. The superior candidates for “vital creation” should produce racially superior children and should “participate consciously in the evolutionary process” (; Weeks , ). But the partners in this poem are characterized as too far from the origins of life – he by “paucity” (smallness, dearth) – a kind of finicky withdrawal, and she as a “prig of passion.” But since she is assuredly no prude (“prig”), one looks to other meanings. She could be arrogant or smug, a plausible reading of the ways the poem tests and tempers her self-assured “Feminist Manifesto.” Or, interestingly, a reading of “prig” in British slang, a pickpocket, petty thief, or pilferer. She was trying to pilfer a little passion, and more, but his “paucity” prevents her.
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
Because the second narrative that structures the end, is – to summarize baldly – her rage and grief that she does not have his child, that she did not get pregnant, or that pregnancy was not allowed to happen, barred from happening by contraceptive practices, or even, perhaps, by abortion.15 This affair did not lead to “vital creation” – that is, to a child (Loy , ). As she says: “The procreative truth of Me / Petered out / in pestilent / Tear drops / Little lusts and lucidities / and prayerful lies” (). There is angry mourning for the washing away of their sperm and cyprine16 mixture, a “plastic” substance that was not allowed to become anything: The hands of races Drop off from Immodifiable plastic The contents Of our ephemeral conjunction In aloofness from Much Flowed to approachment of —– —– —– —– There was a man and a woman In the way. . . . (Loy , )
The next section with its white towel, and images of blank whiteness, characterizes his abilities at erasure. “I am burnt quite white / In the climacteric / Withdrawal of your sun” (ibid.). Not only about thralldom, although plausibly about her wounding by the loss of his illuminating central presence, this section seems specifically about “withdrawal” – a pun on an uncertain tactic of birth control, combining the shadow word “climax” inside “climacteric,” or “critical change of life.” Loy parses the resistances of the “man and [the] woman / In the way” of successful conception. Their relationship has only led to “Inconceivable concept” – a bad idea, and a non-conceptus (). The “crucifixion” section (one of the final ones) seems to criticize her self, assured as a “busybody / Longing to interfere so / With the intimacies / Of your insolent isolation.” Like much Loy, these lines are sedimented with meaning. Not just a criticism of him for narcissism or uncaringness (those familiar tropes of the end of romance) or for a selfish unwillingness to become a father, or for the aborting of “an illegal ego’s / Eclosion,” this is specifically her “crucifixion” as the bearer of a new and controversial idea (she is the “Caryatid of an idea”): that all women should freely bear the children of their lovers, and that superior women
“Seismic orgasm”: sexual intercourse, its modern representations and politics will bear superior children in a eugenic sense (). The messianic claims of the New Woman to redeem the world should not go unremarked. The final sense of loss is not between the lovers, only or exclusively, but between the speaker and the missing child. Thus aspects of her urgency and grief in the turn to reproductive sexuality at the end could be seen as radically conservative. In the “Feminist Manifesto,” Loy also produced a eugenicist codicil to her Superwoman maternalist hopes: “Every woman of superior intelligence should realize her race-responsibility, in producing children in adequate proportion to the unfit or degenerate members of her sex –” (). It is especially amusing to construe ordinary, run-of-the-mill, conformist women as “degenerate”; those who considered themselves among the elite certainly would have – given these ideas – a good deal of pregnancy and childrearing in their futures. This is also a claim that superior women like herself, through redefined sexuality and maternity, will lead the race to a “social regeneration.” As she had said, in lines I only half-glossed earlier, “Where two or three are welded together / They shall become god” (). This is not only about the new fusions in orgasm, but about a new holy family – man, woman, and fetus/baby – or perhaps just the dyadic woman and baby as a next evolutionary step. Perhaps the future paragons of “caressive calling” – more modern sex radicals than she – might be able to have sex without thinking that their combined discharges and ejaculations are “human insufficiencies / Begging dorsal vertebrae” (). But Loy mourns angrily for the lack of or loss of a child from sex, rejoining, for radical, evolutionist and eugenic reasons, sexual intercourse and reproduction. While this could be the most traditional justification for the sexual embrace, her justification is to claim the radical identity of sexual mother. Seismic orgasms also became ideological entrants into the British debates over suffrage – the extension of the franchise to all women and some men, and they also played a role in discussions of male homosexuality. The impact of transgressive masculinities and militant feminisms on the development of male subjectivity in modernism, can be seen, through Ezra Pound, as strategies of “surviving the Ibsen revolt” and “the Edward Carpenter tone.” Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” () is a poem that also significantly makes its proposals about gender, sexuality, and male subjectivity as central to cultural diagnosis. The poem criticizes the past generation, careerist uses of both poetry and the poetic career, and tries to reposition art, aestheticism, “all things save beauty alone” recuperating these from the negative and hostile aspects
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
of the s’ sensibility by a passionate appeal to poetic potency via female figures. The poem thus criticizes gender transgressiveness and female militancy in order to claim primacy for a new male subjectivity that is the real possessor of art – and of the seismic orgasm and its deployment. First the poem separates sexual ambiguity from aestheticism, so that a s’ position on the importance of art can be affirmed along with a modernist critique of effeminacy. Sexual ambiguity and inability are situated in the character Mauberley. Pound controls and manages homosexual suggestions by packing them all into the figure of an impotent, passive, yearning, sexually baffled (though apparently heterosexual) character. Thus Pound can speak from a reassembled aesthetic viewpoint precisely because the sexual problematics have been siphoned off. This modernist aestheticism is more noble than the varieties of cultural compromise and sell-out satirized in the poem. The poem argues that the “memory of the s,” Plarr, the “prose stylist” and so on deserve cultural credibility and honor. Pound assumes their mantle while warding off s’ sexual ambiguity in favor of a renewed effulgence of phallicism asserted in the de Gourmont translation that is the manifesto-like companion of this poem.17 As Pound had remarked to Margaret Anderson in : “I am fed up on the Edward Carpenter tone. Hueffer wipes Weiniger [sic, for Weininger] off the earth. De Gourmont has written ‘Physique de l’Amour’ and ‘Chevaux de Diomedes’” (, ). The most notable aspect of Carpenter’s Love’s Coming of Age (; ) is the chapter on “The intermediate sex,” a positive introduction to homosexualities as one aspect of the contemporary confluence of genders.18 Carpenter argues that numbers of masculine women and feminine men had increased. By seeing these ambiguous figures as a useful middle ground between binary genders, Carpenter differs mightily from such later interpreters of sexuality as Lawrence and Pound. Pound’s “Edward Carpenter tone” took in the (misogynist and antiSemitic) work of Otto Weininger, Sex and Character (; trans. ). Weininger’s argument begins that all human beings were in a fundamentally bisexual condition, and that homosexuality was a lively and prevalent possibility; this promising theoretical proposition took an odd turn when Weininger argued that from this plastic intermediary material an ideal, absolute type of pure Man or Woman must be constructed, precisely to avoid the saturating possibility of homoeroticism prevalent in all human interactions (Bristow , –). Carpenter differed; he did not deny the value of the spectrum of sexualities between Man and Woman, proposing that figures of gender
“Seismic orgasm”: sexual intercourse, its modern representations and politics confluence represented a positive, even evolutionary trend for the human race. Striking here is Carpenter’s sense of a continuum of gender traits and sexual object-choice, in which homosexuals/lesbians, bisexuals, and heterosexual people with a diverse range of behaviors all take their valued place in society. Indeed, Carpenter defends his yearning “Uranians” of both genders as representing a possible higher evolutionary stage of persons – as “dreamers and enthusiasts” (here he is speaking of men) and “representatives of the higher mental and artistic element” (, ; ). He also praises the possible “new sex” of women who have an “ardent social enthusiasm” but no particular adaptation for child-bearing – following a progressive interpretation of politicized women offering “social service, indispensable for the maintenance of the common life” (). In this – the finding of artistic energy and work for social good among the intermediate sex and evolving members of a new sex – Carpenter’s argument is parallel to Freud’s on homosexuals a generation later in .19 He also praises homosexuals for their bridge function as interpreters between genders – addressing both “sides,” so to speak. In contrast Pound resisted Carpenter’s substitution of feminine men and true homosexuals in the same functional place that Pound reserved for artists: as “the antennae of the race.” Further, attitudes in Carpenter toward heterosexual men are not always flattering. The “Edward Carpenter tone” regarded male heterosexual passion with a tinge of sex-purity fastidiousness (Carpenter , ). Heterosexual men are seen as blunted in sensibility, especially “at the whole spectacle of woman’s degradation” (sexual bondage, selling herself into marriage, “serf-like” service, constant unrelieved childbearing) that they regard “with stupid and open-mouthed indifference” (; ). This is consistent with Carpenter’s sentimentalized claims that women were ahead of men on the evolutionary scale: they had, as a group, a tenderer sense of love; they had more subtle ways of dealing with the sexual issues with which they were faced. Indeed, in Carpenter’s view, human evolution (Darwinian-mandated progress) will continue only when women return to their former position as animators of “sexual selection” by choosing those men with whom to mate (see Carpenter , ; ). This denial of male sexual leadership and powers might well have rankled Pound; implicitly and explicitly men like him are cast en masse as oppressors and as inadequate to lead human evolution. With his rejection of “the Edward Carpenter tone,” it appeared that Pound was consolidating, in his translation of de
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Gourmont, for instance, an increasingly intolerant heterosexuality (, ). Pound was also acutely aware of the militancy of women. In April , he declared to Olivia Shakespear: “I write with no confidence that the Griselda type has survived the Ibsen revolt and the last election” ( [April ], –).20 Pound casts his personal request for a little secretarial and research help onto a large, cultural–political stage, and makes it a question of ultimate female types (helpful and patient) with a medievalizing cast (the “Griselda type”). As a date, the year marked one notable turning point in suffragist patience, and the intersection of this fact with Pound’s evocation of “patient Griselda” shows different appropriations of the Middle Ages. The sight of pro-suffrage women marching, like female knights in neo-medieval mode or by professions in proto-industrial guilds offered a very different use of the past than Pound’s pre-Raphaelite stil novisti decor and helpmeet Griseldas (Tickner , passim, with illustrations). Pound’s poem “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” features several succinct formulations, read via a social philology, of his interests in “surviving the Ibsen revolt” and rejecting the “Edward Carpenter tone.” The nature and uses of seismic orgasm are at issue. The poem’s second section concerns “the modern stage” and contrasts Greek drama and its beauties and truths with the “mendacities” and “accelerated grimace” of popular drama. While the attack is pointed, it is also general. Yet it does appear that the “sex problem plays” of Ibsen, Shaw, and many others (with a whole category for suffrage drama) are unfortunately preferred in the modern period to poetic drama (the stylized monologues of Noh, or Yeats mythological closet dramas, for instance), whose “obscure reveries / Of the inward gaze” (Pound , ) are on the defensive. The Christ/Dionysus binary in Pound’s third section proposes a world historical shift between a culture of plenitude and one of deprivation. Christ follows Dionysus, Phallic and ambrosial Made way for macerations; Caliban casts out Ariel.
(Pound , )
“Phallic and ambrosial” links male potency and pleasure in manhood with the nectar of the gods. “Macerations” points to a culture of deprivation marked by fasting and emaciation, but also sexual abstinence. The context links sexual pleasure and food.
“Seismic orgasm”: sexual intercourse, its modern representations and politics The macerations (fasting) of the Christian world view with its sublimated or asexual stance had been recently reactivated in the macerations (fasting, or hunger strikes) of the imprisoned suffrage women. Some critics hinted that these fasts were sublimations of the women’s sexual problems, not at all a political protest, but a symptom of lack of orgasm. These problems would be solved by sex, and by the male phallus. Such claims were made by Sir Almroth Wright in a notorious letter of to the Times, answered by May Sinclair in a feminist pamphlet (also ). Sir Almroth Wright (M.D.) traced the militancy of the suffrage campaign to the “reverberations of her physiological emergencies,” a hysteria experienced by “sexually embittered” surplus women.21 Sinclair’s response, published by the Women Writers’ Suffrage League (one of many professional guild-like groups) is a scathing attack on Wright’s anatomy of four types of suffrage women, all finally reducible to “frustrated natural instincts” – that is, lack of sex-leading-tobabies. The implication of Pound’s lines in “Mauberley” is to register some palpable agreement with Almroth Wright, insofar as these macerations are linked to a degraded world in which women have lost touch with the pleasures and plenitudes of the “phallic and ambrosial.” The tawdry and commodified, or anorectic and frustrated women, and the men now cheapened by democracy are thus all mixed up in the extension of the franchise. We have the press for wafer; Franchise for circumcision.
(Pound , )
The extension of the franchise to (more) men had been much debated, since the reform bills also changed the property qualifications for male suffrage and lowered their age to vote; by Acts of and , a slender majority of British men had achieved the right to vote. The estimate is that in , percent of men were enfranchised irrespective of education, “fitness,” wealth, or social class (Tickner , –). However, as is clear, universal manhood suffrage had not yet been achieved. In , one of the blockages of the Conciliation Bill had been the attack from Lloyd George and young Winston Churchill claiming the bill was not “sufficiently democratic,” because it did not extend the male franchise (Strachey , ). In , another bill to extend the male franchise (the Reform Bill) was proposed with woman suffrage explicitly excluded (). A great parliamentary move, adding women, was debated in with renewed hope, given the carefully worked-out addition of woman-suffrage amendments; however, the Reform Bill went
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crash by a massive blunder – ”either a stupid mistake or an elaborate wickedness. And in either case the women were equally defrauded of their opportunity” (). Pound’s poem gathers up some of these historical events, arguing that even the extension of franchise to more men is an error, since it increases the chance of having “a knave or an eunuch / To rule over us” (Pound , ). The word “eunuch” is, of course, a renewed allusion to male potency, or its lack. Thus castration links up with circumcision as probably the richest condensed allusion about franchise.22 To have “press for wafer; / Franchise for circumcision” joins the democratic citizenship of the vote to marks of two distinctive religious traditions. “Press” – the compressed pieties of journalism, but also loosely the “press” of democracy with all those bodies to be accounted for – is said to substitute for the wafer of the Christian mass, considered the symbol of Jesus’ redemptive sacrifice. “Circumcision” – the distinguishing marker for (male) Jews of their entrance into a historically active Covenant with God – is contrasted to the right to vote. So far this is a brisk chiasmus deploring contemporary social degradation by weighing it against the spiritual symbols of the past. Secular versus sacred is Pound’s modernist binary. However, to call “franchise” a contemporary and degraded version of “circumcision” is to attach it verbally to a cluster of attitudes about penile matters growing in importance to Pound. “Circumcision” was widely viewed, not tolerantly as a harmless aspect of the Hebrew Covenant, but in revulsion, as a kind of castrating mutilation that, whenever practiced, gave rise to feminized men. Thus male Jews were widely considered as non-men, feminine, and despisable, the very opposite of the male subjectivity that Pound increasingly championed (Casillio , –). The word “circumcision” evokes the threatening (because enfeebling) presence of womanly men in relation to stigmatized Jews; the word “franchise” may similarly evoke the threatening manly women of anti-suffrage stereotype. The clarity and elegance of Pound’s phrase, indeed, its very chiastic definitiveness, is supported by the binary architectonics of gender, sexual, and ethnic stereotypes. In his “Postscript to The Natural Philosophy of Love by Rémy de Gourmont” (dated ), Pound offers a loose, expansive, and speculative set of meditations about gender and creativity. De Gourmont was an essayist with a particular interest in “sexual ethnography” (, ). The Natural Philosophy of Love contains a long discussion of sexual dimorphism (the existence in humans and animals of the absolute polarity of
“Seismic orgasm”: sexual intercourse, its modern representations and politics the sexes), celebrated as natural, a discussion with a clear political agenda of preserving the gender binary. It would be folly if the genders try to equalize, since “masculine work diminishes [the female’s] femininity, while feminine work feminizes the males” (de Gourmont , ). De Gourmont makes explicit the genial, “natural” anti-feminism of his position at several points: “The duty of woman is to keep and to accentuate her aesthetic and her psychologic dimorphisms” (ibid.). He disparages any feminist claim to equality, and dismisses “free-woman in free-love” as “even more chimerical than all the chimaera which have at least their analogy in the diversity of animal habits” (). De Gourmont holds that virtually any “moderate feminist” program is “unnatural,” that is, unsanctioned by any of the manifold diversity of nature whose habits he has happily collected and described, for the book is a vast compendium of the organs and copulations of a great variety of creatures, from monkeys to sparrows, from spiders to oysters (). Only “feminism in excess” occurs in nature – by which de Gourmont means the absolute physiological dominance of females and the appropriation of inseminatory functions to female creatures. As for the human social program of “equality of the sexes,” in de Gourmont’s view, the “standpoint of natural logic” makes this an irrelevant and untenable, because an unnatural claim (–). Pound’s essay on de Gourmont builds on the fascination with the “natural” to compose a work that obsessively returns to sperm in male orgasm, and the evolutionary potential in nature from male potency. The essay comes from a sex-radical position that the sexual body is a source of intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic development for both genders. In many ways, the essay retools nineteenth-century theories of spermatic discharge within an economy of rich retention, leading to images and fantasy and art, and in certain cases the discharge of “a surplus at high-pressure,” indicating genius (Pound , ). The male force is vital and life giving, “spermatophore in the nautilus” – a striking image of a complicated – and poetic – mollusk which signals power, like a semaphore; the suggestive crossing the etymologies of sign (sema) and seed (sperm/semen) brings things back to a productive root: “an extruded mass or capsule of spermatozoa in certain invertebrates and primitive vertebrates.” A Whitmanic “new up-jut” is central to male identity as a creative power (). Note the appropriation of Whitman back from the “Edward Carpenter tone”; a homosexual Whitman was, of course, central to Carpenter. In this self-portrait, Pound accepts the responsibility, the nobility and fountainous purpose of his phallus, which
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is a venturesome form-creator, and he finds the “integration of the male in the male organ” a gratifying aspect of his identity (ibid.). Many other men, he opines, are like insect drones, unmanned by business, finance, capitalism; the male artist differs because of the quality of orgasm, and thereby leads. As for the female – Pound states at least three times that he “is not writing an anti-feminist tract” or participating in a “journalistic sexsquabble” by these speculations, that only on the surface claim “disproportionate privilege for the spermatozoide” (, ). Despite this intricate, quite well-informed disclaimer, his place for females separates an elite few from the many. He suggests that females may experience an “ovular bath” from the force of their sexuality; but while a few of them “benefit by an alluvial clarifying, ten dozen appear to be swamped” (). Generally, his speculations on females are Aristotelian: the presence of “the sperm, the form-creator” offers “the substance which compels the ovule to evolve in a given pattern” (). Not only that, but male fluid, “a spermatic sea of sufficient energy” might yet help evolve a new faculty of the brain (both will and telepathy are suggested). Seminal fluid and the brain are coextensive. This provides a masculinist answer to Carpenter’s discussion of transgressive genders and evolution and Loy’s evolutionary hopes for Superwoman maternalism; heterosexual phallic manhood or spermhood is, for Pound, the force that will generate or compel the evolution of our species. The seminal fluids of male seismic orgasm have a heroic charge. In this expansively speculative context and as an aside, Pound thereupon makes a very provocative, and now much-cited, remark of “‘phallic aesthetics’” (Tickner , citing W. Lewis , , ). He explains that “man [is] really the phallus or spermatozoide charging, head-on, the female chaos,” precisely the way he has felt “driving any new idea into the great passive vulva of London.” This phrase, of a bracing vulgarity and affront, suggests Sir Almroth Wright’s analysis of what suffrage supporters really need (Pound , ).23 London is coded as a big neurotic female which hardly knows how much “she” wants the aggressively restorative act of sexual intercourse performed upon her, and cannot properly respond. The “rejuvenating power of sexual energy” in both men and women is one of Pound’s psycho-social prescriptions, but spermhood claims leadership (Bush, in Scott , ).24 Yet this rich narrative of form-giving tumescence is not so much sexually lively as politically marginal. The real politics of the moment involved suffrage struggles and war. Pound participated in neither.
“Seismic orgasm”: sexual intercourse, its modern representations and politics However, he constructed his own versions of both for the rest of his career, consolidating masculinist gender pride and refighting the war. The sex war is expressed by Pound’s growing distaste for any entity ideologically coded by him as that (apparently) passive, (apparently) mushy female genital: “female chaos,” Swinburne, Amy-gism, swamps, Jews (Casillio , –). He will then serve, for the rest of his life, in his own self-declared political war, fighting the “real” but concealed First World War: a recurrent attack on the bankers, the obstructors, the usurers, the feminized men, the controlling ideologues, of whom “Jews” swiftly became the metonym and symptom. Pound develops this antiSemitism somewhat abruptly after the invective and barrage of the Hell Cantos (–), works that condemn all these forces – warmongers, journalists, politicians, big money. Yet these cantos do not almost amazingly – as Robert Casillio has pointed out – mention Jews. His antiSemitism, certainly consistent with contemporaneous political and social analysis from many thinkers and purveyors of thought, may also be considered an extension of the consolidation of modernist masculinity, a Priapic manhood facing a female militancy disinterested in his rejuvenating offers – the “Ibsen revolt” – and facing down a claim – the “Edward Carpenter tone” – that transgressive, effeminate maleness was evolutionary and creative. Besides Loy’s and Pound’s, there is another modern sexual story from one other sex-radical author narrating sex, love, and the politics of intercourse.25 D. H. Lawrence is also keen to describe orgasm, keen for the transformation of women and men, and polemical in his frankness. As we have seen, in ways recommended by Richardson (though for another genre), Loy refuses the formal linkage of sexual climaxes and narrative climaxes. In contrast, D. H. Lawrence manifests, in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (), a formal tendency to link narrative climax and sexual climax and a political tendency toward renewed heterosexuality to regulate feminism. Sexual scenes in Lady Chatterley’s Lover punctuate the book, making each orgasm a station of a sexual via sacra and a political affirmation not only of heterosexuality but judging and distinguishing kinds of female orgasm. Sexuality is also a force programmatically set against superficial liberal meliorisms and moralities: education, regimentation, intellection, and abstraction. Lovemaking (in The Rainbow) is a dark and “subtle” exercise, in which an insinuating, “stealthy,” “relentless” and “fecund” male figure, by penetration, “shatters” certain resistances in a female figure, inducing her to leave off light, and go into the dark: “The lighted vessel vibrated, and broke in her soul, the light fell, struggled, and went dark. She was all
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dark, will-less, having only the receptive will” (Lawrence [] , , ). The willessness of Lawrence’s heroines may be construed as a response to various political assumptions and spiritual claims of female agency: it is in dialogue with feminisms.26 It is uncanny that Loy’s trope of lighting an orgasmic yet investigatory lamp is the obverse of this blackout: she creates female will, power, aggression, and judgment. Lawrence produces, during the apotheosis of the phallus in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (in its halo of light) a remarkable attempt at a New Man, because, despite the understandable enthusiasm for male potency, the New Man also absorbs much of the language of the feminine and maidenly, in the terms which serve to describe a penis (“bud-like reticence”; “tender”; “frail”; “pure”; “lovely”; “delicate”; “soft”; “sensitive”; “innocent”). Indeed the clitoral aspects of female sexuality (“bud-like”; “sensitive”) seem thereby to be transposed to the male body (Lawrence , , ). The phallus is thus a (bi-gendered) personage with a lordly, demanding aspect and a frail, tender, feminine character.27 Lawrence is aware of, eloquent and polemical about, clitoral sexuality. Mellors’ unflattering description of the orgasms of his first wife Bertha shows a fervor against the active/clitoral in woman that is deeply informative (–). Such phallic women are willful, depraved, addicted to their sensation, and in the pièce de résistance – are really “Lesbian.” Indeed, nearly all women are lesbian, if not by their clitoral “beak,” by their New Woman hyperconscious cleverness, and Mellors confesses he would like to kill them all (Lawrence , –; cf. –). This fervor could be contrasted to the careful language about non-vaginal sex, for an act of heterosexual anal intercourse, “the end of shame,” is the occluded climax of the sexual via sacra. Lawrence’s curiosity and tolerance extend only to varieties of phallic sexuality (–). The clitoris is exorcised (cf. Spivak , ). Lawrence powerfully offers a non-feminist but sexual subject position for women. He tempts women who might have been burned by free-love serial affairs with a concentration upon purity and monogamy in Mellors’ character at the end of the novel. A revolution in male sexuality will bind a new ordering of human relations that will stand against feminist and working-class revolutions – so Lawrence responds, by his narrative proposals, to the considerable contemporary changes in gender and class relations. The work is a continuation of the conduct book tradition in which novels educate women. In this novel by Lawrence, scenes of intercourse are indeed climactic: that is, they are proposed as narrative peaks. Narrative climax and
“Seismic orgasm”: sexual intercourse, its modern representations and politics orgasmic climax coincide. In contrast, Loy’s contemporaneous representations of intercourse in her serial poem occur in a loosely structured poetic plot of connection, loss, and analytic reprise. These representations are not climactic, but various, acting to influence, and influenced by, the mixture of suspicion and desire, the playing out of equations for possibilities, which is constitutive of the sexuality depicted. Because narrative climax may not exist, and certainly does not coincide with sexual climax, Loy’s mode is antiseptic, less readable (indeed – less read). Because these acts provide no “crisis” in a narrative sense, they seem rather a series of repeated behaviors, conceptualized and reconceptualized, thought and rethought. In the Loy poem, there is no “typical” or “valorized” statement about sexual intercourse. The images she does use do not concern phallic power, but, as we have seen, involve a variety of attempts to figure orgasm itself (“inseparable delight”) in which male and female are not especially differentiated. Loy does not depict a sexual–political pedagogy in which male leads female to some realization. Loy’s representations of sexual intercourse are less narrated, less sequentially filled in with a moment to moment, or play-by-play set of (“molten”) metaphors than Lawrence’s. They tend to be a fragmented narration of thought, options, or temporary, situational positions: a summary report, as if representation were precisely at issue, and there were some equation to “solve.” Representation, not conversion, is precisely at issue. Perhaps it is the syntactic fragmentation or obscurity of the poem, but in Loy sexuality seems more a problem (i.e. in math or logic); in the Lawrence novel, it has the status of solution or political proof. Her representations are determinedly secular; allusions to sex are made with the same passionate dispassion as any other topic of the poem. There is no special, magical diction for sex, in contrast to the diction of spiritual and political renewal in Lawrence. Lawrence’s sense that sexuality and sexual intercourse involve a Bildung – and the woman still needs to learn more – occurs as well in his poem “Manifesto” (from the collection Look! We Have Come Through!) (Lawrence , –). This is a Whitmanic work in eight considerations, speaking with great frankness about the hunger for sexuality, the fulfillment of sexual peace in orgasm (“actual fulfilment, / here in the flesh”), and the understanding of pure female otherness (). Lawrence wants the female partner to have a specific realization about female/male difference from the sex act: “She touches me as if I were herself, her own. / She has not realised yet, that fearful thing, that I am
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the other, / she thinks we are all of one piece. / It is painfully untrue” (). From the perspective of social philology, the comma-splice sentence in a texture of end-stopped lines, shows, inside the detail of punctuation, female misapprehension of her unity with a man. While this comment is unlikely to be an actual “answer” to Loy, it argues precisely against Loy’s point, and against a sex-radical point about orgasm: that in sexual intercourse men and women were “all of one piece” – more similar than different. Lawrence argues for a sexuality “not in mixing, merging, not in similarity” but in touching “my secret, darkest sources” knowing “she has no part in it, no part whatever, / it is the terrible other.” Another comma splice, counterintuitively, shows the ennobling split of male in isolation from female. The aim is to be “unutterably distinguished, and in unutterable conjunction” (); punctuation plays its role to achieve this end. “Manifesto” is not so much about New Women as about Newer Men: “After that, there will only remain that all men detach themselves and become unique” (ibid.). Certainly in these representations sex has a didactic quality; there is something to learn from it, some road to travel in gender improvement and respect for male specialness. Finally, in his famous novel, as Stephen Heath has argued, Lawrence confirms certain longstanding gender conventions, although acting within a libertarian sexual ideology about sexual intercourse: how the powerful magic wand of a penetrating penis (wherever it goes) transforms the female psyche.28 Orgasm is a reconversion experience to polarized gender binaries away from modern womanhood and its terrible, aggressive “beak.” In his poem, Lawrence feels that intercourse is the path, but that “merging” is a tax on the solemnity of male isolation and quest. Loy claims, unevenly, that orgasm is the only site in which otherwise socially active gender binaries are rendered inoperable, where men and women lose their suspicion and become just grasping flesh: “The only point at which the interests of the sexes merge – is the sexual embrace” (Loy , ). It may simply be that Loy and Lawrence differed on the location and consistency of gender binarist thinking, but it is interesting nonetheless that Loy exempts sexual intercourse from gender polarization. This makes sexual intercourse a radical space for newly configured persons and for the new entitlements of modernism, not “men” or “women” of the old type. In any event, unlike Lawrence and Pound, Loy hardly proposes either heterosexuality or orgasm as means to convert women from feminism.
“HOO, HOO, HOO”: some episodes in the construction of modern male whiteness
, kill the Arabs. , kill the white men, , , .
Vachel Lindsay,
And fears not portly Azcan nor his hoos. Wallace Stevens,
Hoo ha ha Hoo ha ha
T. S. Eliot, –
This chapter undertakes an analysis of “Hoo”: a phonemic bit apparently decorative, unpurposeful, and wayward, resounding in poems of Vachel Lindsay, Wallace Stevens, and T. S. Eliot. Despite looking like a meaningless sound or inarticulate syllable, the phoneme presents a cornucopia of racialized materials in order to create a powerful position for [male] whiteness; it makes a vibrant, aggressive sound of threat and promise that thrills and jolts its users.1 This reading of a poetic phoneme by social philology proceeds “by fully semanticizing / the so-called nonsemantic features of language” (Bernstein , ).2 An alternative and important reading of “hoo” in Eliot only, one that helped incite this chapter, occurs in Michael North’s work. He takes the syllable as an indicator of nullity, a “purely phatic sound” “associated with cultures outside of Europe” that Eliot uses to indicate that “language has become null” as Sweeney crosses the line, confessing the savagery of murder (North , –; , , ). In contrast, but helped considerably by North’s focus, I see the sound as having content and intertextualities. Briefly to sketch some of its effects, “hoo” draws on black agency and autonomy, which, because mysterious, inexplicable, and frightening to
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Euro-American writers, is therefore paradoxically affirmed and denied in the syllable “hoo.” The syllable also affirms white “rights” in black materials. Whiteness, or blanchitude, as Sylvia Wynter named it in a pathbreaking essay, “had been nothing else than the constituted of culture in relation to which all other cultures had been made subservient.” Her polemical introduction to the concept challenges “the fact that whiteness is taken as a given, rather than as a striking phenomenon calling for extensive research” (Wynter , ). The concept has subsequently emerged as central to understanding United States writing; here I draw on Toni Morrison’s term “Africanist” – ideological constructions of “Africa.”3 Poets using the term “hoo” in the decade or so after are responding to the enormous provocation of “The Congo.” Vachel Lindsay, now considered an anomalous backwater of U.S. poetry, had once enlivened it, fusing melodramas of American popular oratory with poetic performance. Lindsay figures talismanically and heroically in Harriet Monroe’s A Poet’s Life as the proof of an autonomous, burgeoning American modernism. T. S. Eliot, though more familiar, needs to be further contextualized within racialized, gender-laden, popular, and American discourses.4 In particular, the curiously evasive “Sweeney Agonistes” must be replaced in Eliot’s oeuvre not only as a work of transition (to Christianity, to plays) or of personal crisis (an oblique yet fierce commentary on his first marriage), but also as work seriously and logically related to The Waste Land – and “The Congo.” A similar contextualization of Wallace Stevens is in order.5 Both the “midwestern” vatic, evangelical modernism of Vachel Lindsay and the “international” ironic, confrontational modernism of T. S. Eliot use a significant drumbeat (“” in Lindsay) joined to the word “hoo,” to signal that Africa as a trope is being engaged and that both whiteness and blackness are in play. The African trope aggregates the diverse elements of a whole continent into one unhistorical mass and then absorbs African-Americans into that bolus of materials. “” and “hoo” mark a passage from modern real time and morality to nonhistorical temporality and amorality, signaling, in Johannes Fabian’s terms, a “denial of coevalness” and of ethics to Africa, a denial that propels and confirms Euro-Americans’ status both as effective historical agents and as arbiters of values (Fabian , , , ). “, kill the white men” is an especially galvanic line, ventriloquized as black statement by a white person. The evocation of tom-toms (used as a trope for
“HOO, HOO, HOO”: some episodes in the construction of modern male whiteness frenzy without form or meaning) is also a way to erase the musical complexity, learned traditions, and aesthetic innovation of African artistic and social practices in order to suggest an unmotivated loss of control and a malicious, insinuating seduction into unreason.6 Evoking “primitive” substrata apparently beneath history and reason, Lindsay’s “The Congo,” Eliot’s “Sweeney Agonistes,” and Stevens’ “Bantams in Pine Woods” were written at the historical epicenter of a crisis in the development of modern whiteness – between (the founding of the NAACP) and (The Wall Street crash) or (the Scottsboro trial), with one falling before, and two after the Red Summer of , a time of murderous post-War anti-black riots in many cities. The works are performances that allude directly to minstrelsy (white performances in blackface); both Eliot and Lindsay use drums to emphasize a primitivist order of things, and both evoke voudou and cannibalism. In Stevens’ poem the allusion to drumming occurs neither in the diction and imagery (as in the Lindsay) nor in the stage directions (as in the Eliot), but in the parodically excessive metrical stresses that compel a percussive reading. These racialized materials are fraught with complex identifications, fascinations, and anxieties that amount to a cycle of warding off, haunting, appropriation and incorporation, devouring, and a volatile final term, varying among attempted exorcism, transcendence, or confrontation. This racial vortex extends Eric Lott’s findings to the modern poetry of Euro-American writers. “Whiteness” is not a clean construct holding an impure Other at bay but a desire to distance and confront its own creolized or miscegenated markers. Now hoo is not a real word, but an allusion to, or a resistant version of the words hoodoo/voodoo [voudou]: “Hoodoo, or Voodoo, as pronounced by the whites,” writes Zora Neale Hurston, showing their link ([] , ). So too does Louis Zukofsky’s line in pop-music style from “Poem beginning ‘The’” (): “For it’s the hoo-doos, the somethin’ voodoos” (, ). The word hoodoo was first recorded in the s; its use had declined by the s, replaced by voudou, a word first recorded in the s and still current (Major ).7 Hoodoo is related to practices of voudou, perhaps a synonym for voudou itself – charms, spells, conjure, curses, and rites which hold a magical power, especially the power to change behavior – to hex and undermine, to get back what you think belongs to you. In the muted rage and desire for the redress of wrongs through voudou there is potential political as well as spiritual meaning. Given these meanings, hoo is a scare word when used by a white person, a
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word alluding to African-American and Afro-Caribbean ritual practices that have undertones of witchcraft, sorcery, and power. To say “hoo” in the sardonic mocking tones of Lindsay, Stevens and Eliot holds blacks in the posture of bogeys, wards off the political or spiritual logic of hoodoo, and practices white conjure against any sense of social guilt about white ability to control or threaten blacks. The image of power from the amalgam of African/Africanist/African-American practices was so compelling that, as Pound enthusiastically, opportunistically insists (), modern [white] artists are “the heirs of the witch-doctor and the voodoo” (cited by North , ; Pound , ).8 The function of a hoodoo as almost powerless power, the bottled rage of narrow agency is visible in a didactic poetic monologue called “Bottled” (c. ). Here Helene Johnson describes a black street musician dressed exactly as if he were an end man in a minstrel show (Honey , ). The [black] speaker in the enounced is a kind of urban skeptic and nay-sayer. I saw a darky dressed to kill In yellow gloves and swallowtail coat. And swirling a cane. And everyone Was laughing at him. Me too,
()
until s/he sees the man begin to dance on the street. The speaker is torn between mortification and wonder at the expressiveness and flair despite the dancer’s ridiculous garb, the traditional “Zip Coon” or urban dandy costume of the minstrel show. The dancer was “dignified and proud,” an artist in fact. In light dialectal diction, the speaker then observes The crowd kept yellin’ but he didn’t hear, Just kept on dancin’ and twirlin’ that cane And yellin’ out loud every once in a while. I know the crowd thought he was coo-coo.
()
In one sustained passage, the speaker imagines the dancer performing in the jungle, without the “trick clothes” of the minstrel tradition. He is beautiful – “black, naked and gleaming.” He would carry a spear “Like the bayonets we had ‘over there,’ / And the end of it would be dipped in some kind of / Hoo-doo poison” (). This is a discursively layered observation. It is first an African-American vision of Africa as a specially free and enhancing site, in which all the stereotyped jungle tropes of joke and derision are counterturned to black pride. This is a form of black standpoint ethnography, and may be set against the ethnographic visions of both Lindsay and Eliot.
“HOO, HOO, HOO”: some episodes in the construction of modern male whiteness Part of the power of this figure links pre-industrial weaponry with World War I weaponry. “Over There,” the George M. Cohan song, was a patriotic anthem for U.S. troops entering that war, with its allpurpose solution to European problems: “The Yanks are coming.” Preenslavement African power and autonomy (spears) join with an allusive reminder of the contested service of black troops in the recent war (bayonets), brought together under the rubric of secret threat – the point of the spears (but by extension the bayonets) “dipped in some kind of / Hoo-doo poison” as revenge. World War I was a time of rising power and consciousness for black Americans: they served under unconscionable segregated conditions; they helped to win a victory for “democracy” abroad, and yet were subjected to racial terrorism at home. The sickening ironies of this situation were lucidly, bitterly, and repeatedly noted. Sterling Brown’s poem “Sam Smiley,” as just one example, ends in the lynching of the black veteran. The Red Summer of , just post-War, was a ferocious unleashing of racial terror on blacks, filled with beatings, murders, mass riots including arson, and brutality of all kinds. Claude McKay’s great sonnet “If We Must Die” was composed in as a statement of sublime militancy in response. The sense of black rage is clear; one may postulate that certain post- ideologies of whiteness functioned as a strategy of containment, discrediting, or ignoring this political and moral betrayal. In Helene Johnson’s poem, the moment of rage is spoken through the hoodoo allusion. The power, pride, artistry, veiled threat – and compromise – of Helene Johnson’s dancing man is read, for a social philology, in the syntactic instability of the word “trick” and possibly the word “shine.” The man is like a bottle of sand taken from the Sahara; he, like the sand, is packaged for the consumption of others. They “Bottled him, / Trick shoes, trick coat, trick cane, trick everything.” The repeated word in the enunciation begins to function with various meanings, including fraudulent, mischievous, mannered, magical, adorned, weak/defective, trained to do little performative acts. The question who tricks whom is thus raised deep inside the enunciation. In the enounced, the figure is tricked by the powerful “they”: African power has been compromised and made pitiable by being bottled as minstrelsy inside American culture, made into a denatured souvenir. In the enunciation, the figure “tricks” main culture and is tricked by it in a ceaselessly unstable reading of the adjective. The word, in its fourth incarnation, turns adjective into imperative verb: “trick everything.” Beyond the tricked-out figure being tricked yet being trickster, the poem also uses racialized language, like
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
“darky.” The last line, “Gee, that poor shine!” is bemused and awkward, filled with pity for his loss of agency.9 In that incarnation, within the enounced, it is a disparaging word, and it also has a dictionary meaning (in the plural “shines”) – foolish pranks or tricks. But it also has a straight, central meaning of radiance or distinction that can occur as a comment within the enunciation, as if “shine” were a verb and the phrase were subjunctive. Johnson has described a black person doing blackface minstrelsy. The main practice – widespread in American society – involved whites in blackface minstrelsy: troupes in all the major cities, traveling shows, amateur performances, and finally the absorption of practices of minstrelsy into performance materials and styles in vaudeville, early cinema, and musical comedy in the early twentieth century.10 Minstrelsy was a central cultural form in the construction of whiteness and the uses of blackness; indeed Lindsay’s “The Congo: a Study of the Negro Race” () is arguably a one-man minstrel show. The poem is an overdetermined work showing the formation of whiteness. During his career, Vachel Lindsay wrote a number of performance poems to be read “in your own variety of negro dialect.” It is clear from heart-felt statements throughout his career that Lindsay wanted “love and good-will and witty conversation” between the races, that he believed strongly in and argued openly for the extirpation of race prejudice, and that he even thought his “negro” poems would help” (Lindsay , ). “The Congo” was first performed publicly on February , , the anniversary of Lincoln’s birthday, in Springfield, Illinois; it was read at a private gathering in March sponsored by Poetry in the presence of W. B. Yeats.11 The U.S. invasion () and occupation (until ) of Haiti added to the excitement of Lindsay’s early audiences and their interest in the poem, in which whiteness is affirmed as bringing order, rule, and correct government to sinister black chaos, evil, and “hoodoo.” Lindsay claimed that the poem tries to synthesize “vaudeville form back towards the old Greek precedent of the half-chanted lyric” (, ) and also spoke of it as “a rag-time epic” (Monroe , ). This marked desire to fuse ancient poetic culture with more recent Euro- and African-American performance materials is part of Lindsay’s yearning to do something helpful to extirpate racial prejudice (in the aftermath of the Springfield anti-black riots in ), a yearning which is totally swamped by the poem’s raucous, sinister primitivisms. These occur under the rubric (in the subtitle) of a “study of the Negro race,” which harnesses a social scientific word to the poem’s observations, as if they
“HOO, HOO, HOO”: some episodes in the construction of modern male whiteness were authorized by, and part of, academic studies in an ethnographic mode. A free white gaze upon blacks is part of the power of whiteness. From the first, this poem was taken, by certain readers, as an indication of the failure of white liberalism; it is a bombastic response to the history of white misrule over blacks in the first half of the twentieth century. Confronting the , or , racist riots and lynchings, Lindsay changes the subject to “Africa” and its alleged traits.12 “The Congo” is a six page poem in three sections (Lindsay , –). In “Their Basic Savagery,” the “Fat black bucks” are like the “Negroes [who] seemed eight feet high” whom Lindsay had seen in the saloons he visited on behalf of the Women’s Christian Temperance Association, men who left him with “a jungle impression” (, ). The prurient desire to appropriate and devour such a source of potency is a rich motivator for “whiteness.” Lindsay’s black drinkers inspire in his observer an atemporal Africanist “vision” of the Congo River “ , / ,” with attendant “cannibals” and “sorcerers.” The poem contains a hint of just revenge for the Belgian atrocities in the Congo, but essentially it creates the fear of demonic, unmotivated cannibalism.13 Terror of blacks seems to be a central element in this construction of whiteness, terror combined with a brave fascination at seeing the “truth” of Africa displayed, even if it threatens to eat one alive. Or, as Lindsay explained: “‘Congo, Congo, Congo, Congo, Congo, Congo,’ I said to myself. The word began to haunt. It echoed with the war drums and cannibal yells of Africa” (). The address from the “witch-doctors” is directed past the other characters inside the poem to the reader or listener. “, , ” is the sound that at once warns and threatens. “Be careful what you do, / Or . . . / Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you” (Lindsay , ). MumboJumbo is a spooky god of demonic power and reach. Lindsay is calling upon the meaning “an object or fetish believed to have supernatural power,” but his use also evokes other senses of the word – “gibberish,” “nonsense,” or “confused and meaningless activity, unintelligible incantation.”14 Lindsay fantasizes a free-floating black menace in the first section, and a free-floating black pleasure in the second. Called “Their Irrepressible High Spirits,” the second section pastiches “juba” (West African group dance), “cakewalk” (black dance performances for racially mixed audiences), minstrel (white blackface lampoons performed mainly for whites), ragtime or jazz (“the well-known tunes of the parrot band,” for
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
jazz is often visualized during this period, by Euro-Americans, as behaviors of raucous animals), and popular music – a song of racial selfmockery written by the African-American vaudeville star Bert Williams (Cooley , ). The revelry is set in an exotic never-never land like a movie set, but given the poem’s tripartite construction and the political allegory (of hell–earth–heaven) loosely underlying it, the second section becomes worldly purgatory of garish sumptuousness and profligacy. Lindsay was an enthusiastic consumer of African-American forms and persons in theater. “Then there was a song ‘My Zulu Babe,’ where [Bert] Williams as the buck and [George] Walker as the lady used to appear in black tights and brief ostrich-feathered skirts and go prancing in and out of the stage jungle in a mock wooing. They magically conveyed the voodoo power of Africa. The whole white audience turned into jungle savages and yelled with a sort of gorilla delight” (Lindsay , ). The construction of whiteness involves a positioning of blacks as the perpetually carnivalesque, authorizers of white libido – from “woo” to “voodoo” – under whose auspices whites could experience the Africanist pleasures of being “savages” and “gorillas.” It was important to the making of whiteness that license be incited by, and blamable on, African materials.15 As Gail Bederman has proposed, white “manhood” power accrued in monopolizing both the discourse of “manly and civilized” and of “masculine and savage” (, ). In her pointed exposition of the symbolic stakes in the Jack Johnson–Jim Jeffries boxing match in , during which the African-American boxer trounced the white man, and in her discussion of the racist arrangements of the World’s Columbian Exposition (), that excluded “Colored Americans” while exhibiting “the Negro as a repulsive savage” in the Dahomey village (, citing a pamphlet written by Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells ), she opens a nuanced discussion of the formation of white manhood in the early period of modernism. White manhood depended on the assertion of racial dominance of whites over blacks by appropriation of the imagined potency of the so-called “primitive” to enhance the potency of the white and civilized. This is very like what Lindsay is offering both in the above description of “voodoo power,” in his performance of this poem, and in his comments on musicals featuring blacks: “American men [playing] at being masculine barbarians themselves, savoring the visual pleasures of semiclad exotic dancers while simultaneously and inconsistently relishing their sense of superior, civilized, white manliness” (). Into this scene of revelry, the “sinister” witch-doctors interject their
“HOO, HOO, HOO”: some episodes in the construction of modern male whiteness threat. But here, the lines about “Mumbo-Jumbo” are not apparently directed to the audience but to the black “scalawags prancing there.” They are warned against their own attractive playfulness. The multiple allusions to African-American performance in this section suggest that the witch-doctors are acting for Lindsay in proposing the containment and control of African-American popular culture at the same time that Lindsay is both mimicking it in the poem and appropriating it in his exaggerated Africanist performance style (Gubar , ). He wants black mannerisms and voices for himself and also wants Mumbo-Jumbo to punish their real cultural owners. As Eric Lott argues, this “theft,” absorption, or borrowing of African-American materials caused in whites great cultural anxiety that intermingled with their envious desire (Lott , ). In the final section of “The Congo,” Lindsay proposes “The Hope of their Religion”: to extirpate this menacing and joyous–erotic black culture and society with Christianity: And they all repented, a thousand strong From their stupor and savagery and sin and wrong And slammed with their hymn books till they shook the room With “glory, glory, glory” And “Boom, boom, .” (Lindsay , )
The work overtly proposes the clearing of the jungle and the cleansing of African “temples” through the efforts of “pioneer angels,” who preside over the triumph of a blue–silver, sunny whiteness that brings “light” to Africa. The trope of African inferiority, depicting a whole continent and its diasporic peoples as indolent, sinful, lascivious, and retarded without the aid and help of imperial intervention is evident in the words “stupor” and “wrong,” yet the exciting but inappropriate use of religious books as percussion instruments (“”) makes the wrong persist even as it is apparently ended (Mudimbe , ). To argue that Christian imperialism jump starts a perpetually stalled African evolution is consistent with colonialist assumptions throughout this period. Interpreting Africa as the lowest stage of human, political, and spiritual development feeds the neo-Darwinian nativist hauteur of American whiteness (Michaels , –). One might also view this fierce disparaging of Africa as a collective ideology still attempting to justify the practices of slavery. The transfiguration of the African landscape into a “Congo paradise” through Christian imperialism is shadowed by the same menacing,
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
vibrant “Congo tune” that repeats throughout the poem (Lindsay , , ). Whispering vultures continue the hoodoo refrain at the very end, despite the poetic polemic which twice insists “Mumbo-Jumbo is dead in the jungle, / Never again will he hoo-doo you.” The repetition of this formula presents not the death of “Mumbo-Jumbo” but his persistence. Despite Lindsay’s protestations, this atavistic structure is related to the arguments of racist “science” and polemic in such contemporaneous work as R. W. Shufeldt’s America’s Greatest Problem: the Negro (). The terms Negro, savagery and cannibalism are essentially interchangeable in this work, and the words displace sexual desire and guilt engendered by fantasies of devouring made possible by the political realities of enslavement and imperialism (Shufeldt , ). Shufeldt moves into a hysterical polemic against miscegenation as racial pollution, by asking “are we now to take up into our blood a race of human flesh-eaters, who would consume human flesh again with relish were they returned to the country from whence they came?” (). This atavistic argument emerges only slightly mellowed in Lindsay’s configuration of the ideology of whiteness. However much Lindsay insisted that “the third section of the Congo is certainly as hopeful as any human being dare to be in regard to any race,” the poem reads differently (Lindsay , , Nov. , ). Through its repetitious chant and its hyper-melodramatic scare lines, the poem subverts its stated argument and “intellectual” claim. The argument says “Africa” will be transfigured and civilized with messianic imperialism. But the rhythm says that the menace and lurking evil of “Africa” can never be extirpated. Blacks embody the primitive forces of sexuality and violence; these forces are uneradicable, essentialized, in the black body: “A Negro at the North Pole is Congo to the marrow of his bones, and believe me more luxurious than Assurbanipal and more fun than a goat” (Lindsay , ; October , ). A social philology shows how the mystery phoneme, exaggerated rhythms, and repetitious rhetorics of this poetry have been harnessed to uphold the ideological formation “white manhood.” According to Lindsay, “the refrain stands for the ill fate and sinister power of Africa from the beginning” (; February , , soon after its first performance). The popular appeal of the poem is based on its judgmental participation in primitivist behavior that entertains whites by arousing them with the rhythms to which they feel superior. Lindsay argues that Africans and blacks are permanently and essentially the
“HOO, HOO, HOO”: some episodes in the construction of modern male whiteness hoodoo of the family of man, bringing the curse of primitive menace to everything. In her review of Lindsay’s work (), Marianne Moore states that Lindsay’s intention, his claimed familiarity with black dialect, and his general humanitarian urges “cannot absolve such Aryan doggerel” (Moore , ).16 Though the poem is superficial, it anneals two competing ideas about racial origins, ideas developed in the nineteenth century but still active within the racial discourses of the early twentieth century. To think of one overarching humanness, one root from which separate racial stems branched off – monogenesis – is to think of the potential (if far future) unity of all humankind, in spite of contemporary racisms and reductiveness. Monogenesis deemphasizes difference in favor of one striving human family. Lindsay claimed this was his opinion on racial matters. Polygenesis conceives of the races as separate species, separately evolved, with differential abilities (Fredrickson , Chaps. –). To speak of one race in its infancy and another as highly developed and to suggest the condescending uplift of one race by another was to stand on the seam between these positions: the social promise of monogenesis (“we” are all one humanity) abutted by the immediate polemical satisfactions of polygenesis (“they” are inferior to “us”). The self-congratulatory resolution inherent in this contradictory position (“we” help “them”) helped construct whiteness. “The Congo” claims to think of us all as one big human family, but its garish emphasis on extremes of menace and joy, both “irresponsible” or under the sway of a capricious, vengeful god, and its zoological fascination with the Other invoke a shadowy sense of polygenesis, in which Africans are permanently different, tainted, and, of course, very powerful in their inferiority. Far from being “hopeful” about those it claims to anatomize, “The Congo” goes far toward marking and blighting the “Negro Race” as a whole. Because Lindsay believed his poems could be socially effective against racial prejudice, he was stunned to find that “My ‘Congo’ and ‘Booker T. Washington Trilogy’ have both been denounced by the colored people for reasons that I cannot fathom” (Lindsay , –; Nov. , ).17 His correspondent, Joel Spingarn, one of the white founders of the NAACP, a noted editor at Harcourt Brace, and a strong supporter of black writers, tried to wise him up: “No colored man doubts your good intentions, but many of them doubt your understanding of their hopes. You look about you and see a black world full of a strange beauty different from that of the white world; they look about them and see other men with exactly the same feelings and desires who refuse to recognize
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
the resemblance” (Wintz , ; Spingarn, , –).18 Lindsay must have his exotic, his primitive, his Other, based in different social histories and cultural outcomes, polygenesis sweetened by self-delusion. Spingarn speaks from a liberal monogenetic racial theory and from the idealistic center of a progressive integrationist ethos that wants to see “colored humanity” and “white humanity” as sharing in “a common civilization in which all distinctions of race are blurred (or forgotten) by common aspiration and common labors” (, ). In his numerous, even obsessive, discussions of what inspired “The Congo,” the poet’s explanations exceed the poem and reveal a rich collection of demonizing attitudes. He begins with the “Dahomey WarDrums” and “Cannibal war dance” that he saw at the Chicago World Columbian Exposition, an exhibit analyzed by Gail Bederman as presenting an architecturally sustained ideological split between “the civilized grandeur of the manly White City contrasted with the rough savagery of the Dahomey Village” (Lindsay , – [Feb and , ]; [April , ]; Bederman , ). The eclectic list of Lindsay’s sources for “The Congo” run the gamut from romantic racialism (Stephen Forster; “Stanley’s Darkest Africa”; his interpretation of “Joseph Conrad’s haunting African sketches full of fever and voodoo and marsh”), to appreciation of monuments in the struggles against slavery (the Emancipation Proclamation, Stowe’s novel), to the work of black intellectuals (Du Bois), to politically masturbatory and personally salacious evocations of cannibals, savage power, the jungle, and the like (Lindsay , –). It is a cornucopia of conflicting Africanist materials. Despite certain noble sentiments, a crisis about race was being solved by stigmatizing African-Americans as always part animal, part jungle, part predator – a great black spot in the white imagination onto which negative, guilt-ridden, exciting emotions could be projected. Lindsay includes among the incidents that provoked his poem “the Burnings alive of negroes in the South” (; April , ). In her analysis of lynching as a ritual of exorcism, Trudier Harris reports that between and , about , persons were lynched in the United States, of whom , were black (the vast majority were black men) (Harris , ). The Crisis kept a grim running report on these crimes throughout this period; indeed, certain horrors were investigated by the NAACP, for example, the Waco, Texas, public torture and burning of a Negro in , a report on which formed a special supplement to the July issue of The Crisis. Lindsay was deeply affected
“HOO, HOO, HOO”: some episodes in the construction of modern male whiteness by the Springfield anti-Negro riots of , which ended in carnage and destruction. But in an elaboration of these remarks to Harriet Monroe on the sources of “The Congo,” he glosses the effects of the “ill fate and sinister power of Africa from the beginning” – the power of hoodoo, in his terms. He continues: “I do not say so [in the poem] – but the Civil War was a case of Mumbo Jumbo hoodooing America. Any lynching is a yielding to the power of the Hoodoo. Any Burning alive, or handcutting depredations by Leopold, is a case of Mumbo Jumbo Hoodooing Civilization” (Lindsay , ; Feb. , ). The negative and sinister evil out of Africa infected or affected (“hoodooed”) “Civilization.” This formulation blames blacks for white violence directed against them. White political terrorism occurs because white civilization has been spooked and cursed by hoodoo. Indeed, the ritual repetitions of the poem “The Congo” might be credited with proposing sub rosa the wish for such an exorcism of “black savagery” and “Mumbo Jumbo.” Whites are coterminus with “Civilization”; Euro-Americans’ falls from grace in fratricidal conflict and racial terrorism are due to their having black African witchcraft exercised upon them. The poem is thus as much a veiled justification for lynching as a criticism of it. “The Congo” was an influential poem. Louis Untermeyer remembers, “Perhaps the most memorable occasion [on a trip to England] was when, prompted by one of my remarks about recent American poetry, James Stephens declaimed most of ‘The Congo.’ Nothing like it was ever heard in that setting: a drum-banging poem by an American poet on a Negro theme chanted in an English restaurant by an Irish mystic with an accumulating brogue” [and heard by a Jewish anthologist] (Untermeyer , –). Several responses to “The Congo” can be identified, whether direct and polemical, or allusive and muted.19 Sterling Brown’s response, “The New Congo” (?), its terse epigraph “with no apologies to Vachel Lindsay,” is a double parody: of the writer of “The Congo” for his simplicity, and of racial puppets and puppeteers for their deviousness – a pox on both houses (Brown , –). Brown appropriates the familiar rhythm of “The Congo” for his disdainful portrait of inter- and intraracial manipulations and bad faith. He insists on a series of insinuations and payoffs that manage the African American masses via black “leaders” who are controlled by, yet excellently manipulate, their white masters. Black spokesmen address “big white boss paymasters” with veiled and derisory threats:
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry “Your Mumbo-Jumbo will get away from you. Your Bimbo-Sambo will revolt from you. Better let Uncle Tombo see it through, A little long green at this time will do. . . .” (Brown , , end of poem, ellipsis in original)
In this cynical polemic, Brown attributes “mumbo-jumbo” (mystification) to whites and to black mediators who play on the gullibilities of all. He attributes massive bad faith to black leaders who deploy their two stereotypes (Sambo/Uncle Tom) to control a needy proletariat and to line their own pockets. The poem attempts to transpose Lindsay’s metaphysical concepts of race into a class analysis. The difficulty of this move and the enraged pallidness of Brown’s poem measure the degree to which metaphysical ideologies of race return to haunt the arguments against them. But this is not the only emergence of Lindsay in Sterling Brown. Several times in his critical prose, one line from Lindsay, interestingly misquoted, does service as a synecdochic token of all of the insult and disrespect Brown identified in “The Congo.” In Brown’s “Negro Character As Seen by White Authors” () (Brown ) and in his “The New Negro in Literature (–)” () (ibid), the refrain of Lindsay’s “ , , ⁄ ” is given as “Then I saw the Congo, cutting through the black.” ( and ). Brown removes the melodrama of the capital letters, the implied servility and slyness of “creeping,” and the key word “jungle,” but he still emphasizes the hurtful atavism and primitivist interpretation of Lindsay’s work by the misquotation, suggesting that the African river cuts through the black collectivity and the black person to reveal the instinctual passions uncurbed. It is the “cutting” quality of the poem’s representation that Brown reveals in his slip. Twice more does Brown turn to “The Congo” ( and ). In his speech at Williams College of which he was an alumnus, he calls the poem “that monstrosity,” indicates that he uses it pedagogically (reading it to students and changing their admiration to skepticism), and finally reveals: “I tried to write a parody, with Severn cutting through the Anglo-Saxon, but I couldn’t get a rhyme for ‘Anglo-Saxon’ except ‘claxon’ and ‘claxon’ is a bad horn. So I had to give it up” (). The critique is patent in the signifying rhyme of the discarded poem, including the encrypted Klux (in “claxon”) of the Klan. The socio-cultural trauma of “The Congo” is manifest in Brown’s insistence, even sixty years later, on the necessity to confront this work.
“HOO, HOO, HOO”: some episodes in the construction of modern male whiteness Langston Hughes’ “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” () may be another response. The Congo, called by Lindsay the “Minstrel River,” and astir with cannibals and witch-doctors, is reinterpreted as a pastoral, nourishing, maternal setting in Hughes: “I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.” “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” was composed in on the train to Mexico when Hughes was still in his teens (eighteen to be exact), and published a year later in Crisis. This poem was written as an internal dialogue with his father whose “strange dislike of his own people” baffled and disturbed Hughes, and, of course, implicated his son as object of that dislike (Hughes , –; Rampersad , –). In this poem, Hughes joins affirmative blackness to a universal human quest, by putting into a global context the racial stresses and demands of the United States. The poem (as is well known) lists four key rivers, all “ancient as the world” (Hughes , ; dedicated in Weary Blues to W. E. B. Du Bois). Three of the four flow through regions of colored peoples; they are “rivers in our past” – the word “our” is marked (Hughes , ). The fourth is a river still reverberating with the past hundred years of American history; it is the river on which, Hughes says, Lincoln “had seen slavery at its worst, and had decided within himself that it should be removed from American life” (ibid.). With an “I” strongly indebted to Whitman as mediated by Sandburg, and with a diction drawn from spirituals, Hughes describes the Mississippi down which he was traveling as he wrote the poem, as having a strong racialized meaning both by its often brown appearance (“I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset”), by the possibility of a cross-race mixing or single-race affirmation of different colors (“muddy” turns more “golden” – a word appearing in “The Congo” as well), and by its historical meaning under slavery. Thus Hughes’ journey doubles Lincoln’s, and the concern with slavery, in the context of Hughes’ relationship with his father discloses a crisis of autonomy on a personal level, and a political rejection of a black man identifying with whites, for a white man (Lincoln) identifying with blacks. In contrast to the voyeurist fantasies of “The Congo,” this poem is a statement about vocation, an emancipation into blackness: “My soul has grown deep like the rivers” (Hughes , ).20 Stevens and Eliot also saw Lindsay’s poem and his popularity as a cultural problem – one to be solved by their own poetic careers. In Stevens’ “Bantams in Pine-Woods” (), “hoo” is a jaunty challenge, and its use shows the strong racialized meanings of the monosyllable. The speaker,
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
an Appalachian bantam cock, says his aggressive “hoo” to “Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan / of tan” – an exotic cock, for the speaker “fears not portly Azcan nor his hoos” (Stevens , ). The poem, with its impacted comedy of sound – “if you can,” indeed – says “hoo” back to the first strutting cock. Therefore the poet’s cock, or the cock as poet defeats both tan cock and yet another metaphoric cock playing “blackamoor to bear your blazing tail,” the servant of the “tan” opponent and part of his glory. “Bantams in Pine-Woods” is an intricate sexual maze of color through which white manhood threads its amused and puffproud way. Drawing on Frank Lentricchia, Helen Vendler suggests a possible challenge of gender from the “bantam” poet of feminized lyric to a “cock rooster” poet of masculinized epic (, ). The regal lightness of the verse and its phallic bounce should be clear, but this “funny phallic subtext” manifests a swirling racialized carnival (Cook , ). Stevens wrote this poem in direct response to Vachel Lindsay, who is cast in the role of “damned universal cock” and “ten-foot poet among inchlings!” Stevens could easily have read “The Congo,” but I think he was especially inspired by the Lindsay performance in Hartford in early April that he (apparently) attended.21 Much about Stevens’ poem can be reinterpreted given this literary historical conjuncture. Lindsay apparently acted out “The Congo” in a minstrel blackface style (Cooley , –; Ruggles , ). A racialized critical reading would note that the colorful bantam offers the swaggering display of prowess one associates with “colored” figures in certain performances. The mock shock of “blackamoor to bear your blazing tail” could then be read as a direct response to Lindsay’s representation of blacks. A white poet, with no first book, sits watching a popular, much-touted white performance poet playing black. Stevens (“an inchling bristles in these pines”) is faced with the exorbitant success of Lindsay as an American poet of racialized import. This makes “Bantams” a jealous response to a blackface situation in which Lindsay garners the supplement of African-American culture for his poetic career. In Stevens’ poem, the triumphant expostulation “Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat!” and later “Fat! / Begone!” is a comic warding off that absorbs the heft, weight, and phallic sonority of the Lindsay poem, or of Lindsay performing blacks. The word “Fat” is, of course, particularly indebted to the “fat black bucks” at the beginning of Lindsay’s poem. Stevens both affirms and conjures away the black men and their performer, Lindsay, thereby protecting his own rights in Africanist materials. To say
“HOO, HOO, HOO”: some episodes in the construction of modern male whiteness “hoo” back to the fat tan chief is to take for yourself the syllable of (his representation of) “colored” power.22 The poem is a counter conjure, an “anti-Congo,” that nonetheless uses the tools of “The Congo,” in an attempt to claim and ward off that by which it is seduced. The “hoo” of T. S. Eliot, another modernist making this Africanist sound, comes at the notable climax of his unfinished chamber musical, “Sweeney Agonistes: Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama.” This work was written in –, immediately after The Waste Land, yet not published until (in The Criterion, under the jazzy title Wanna Go Home, Baby?) nor performed until (Gordon , and ). As The Waste Land synthesized high and popular literary and poetic culture (but with a tilt toward a high tradition), so this “Sweeney” fuses and compounds performance traditions such as music hall and vaudeville/minstrel from both sides of the Atlantic. The word “hoo” occurs in the rousing final chorus, which is very like Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Nightmare Song,” a patter tune from Iolanthe: “You’ve had a cream of a nightmare dream and you’ve got the hoo-ha’s coming to you. / Hoo hoo hoo” (Eliot , ). The chorus continues: And you wait for a knock and the turning of a lock for you know the hangman’s waiting for you. And perhaps you’re alive And perhaps you’re dead Hoo ha ha Hoo ha ha (Eliot , )
Nine knocks follow and end the play. Eliot desired that “light drum taps” accompany the entire performance (Malamud , ). At least in its rhythmic insistences and use of the racialized expostulation “hoo,” the work draws on, alludes to, and trumps Lindsay, a heretofore unsuspected spur to Eliot and someone whose work, needless to say, he “was appalled by” (Eliot , , Sept. ; vide Crawford , who also suggests a link). Eliot did indeed read “The Congo” in Untermeyer’s Modern American Poetry, commenting that Lindsay’s verse had “no moral significance” (, ).23 Given the enormous success of its discursive allusions, its gutgrabbing booms, and its investment in the poet as social prophet of whiteness, it is not surprising that Eliot considered “The Congo.” For Lindsay’s work raised certain issues on which Eliot focused in the early
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
s – ”rhythm,” “the primitive,” and the meaning of drama, issues he encountered in his serious study of Francis Cornford’s Origins of Attic Comedy, given his desire to use the findings of anthropology to construct contemporary drama (Crawford , –).24 Lindsay’s much-touted but callow achievement provoked Eliot to “Sweeney Agonistes” as it provoked Stevens to “Bantams.” In “Sweeney Agonistes,” the aggressive performance style, the veiled quotation of precisely one African-American popular song, the portrait or threat of a horror, the cannibal materials, the appearance of “religion” or “mystery,” the vaudeville and minstrel sources, and the interest in rhythm all resemble “The Congo.” The preternatural popularity of Lindsay’s work, with its dynamic audience appeal suggests that there was a serious cultural need for this kind of white ideology. In Lindsay, the primitive is outside “whiteliness” and constitutes a permanent lurking menace to it (Frye ). In Eliot the primitive lives within all of us and can be developed, as on a photographic plate, by white artists in blackface.25 However, in their positioning of blacks and what blacks mean, Lindsay and Eliot are, in certain lights, not far apart. It is the position of the murderer–cannibal – the question “(w)hoo” and (w)here is the horror – that joins and splits these works. In both the allusions to blackface are a way of saying what primitive murderous thing lies inside the human (Eliot), or African (Lindsay) heart. We again see the discursive burden of the Africanist tropes.26 The anxious desire for and resistance to black materials and sites is quite visible in Eliot’s interest in universalizing; “Sweeney Agonistes” is the point of confluence of his anthropological studies, his creolizing imagination, and his Africanist prods from Lindsay’s poetry and minstrel forms. Eliot proposed a new theatrical genre, neither realist in the manner of Shaw and Ibsen nor high-toned and poetic in the manner of Yeats and Maeterlink. This new genre would go to the roots of drama, cutting beneath the differentiation between tragedy and comedy. Eliot articulated a heterogeneric melodrama: “For to those who have experienced the full horror of life, tragedy is still inadequate . . . In the end horror and laughter may be one – only when horror and laughter have become as horrible and laughable as they can be” (Eliot , ). Eliot’s evocation of the vitality of popular genres and their allusive fusion has a hint of anti-female/anti-feminist attitudes, as when he suggests that, by virtue of a primary rhythm, “the juggling of Rastelli [ – an acrobat – is] more cathartic than a performance of ‘A Doll’s House’” (Eliot , ; vide Eliot , ). That is, a circus act is more dramatic, more satisfying
“HOO, HOO, HOO”: some episodes in the construction of modern male whiteness than this flash-point New Woman drama. The remark is in equal measure sardonic, mocking of middlebrow pretense, and disparaging of the social complex around New Woman subject positions that the word Ibsen summarized – free love, the “intellectual freelance,” suffrage debates, and female disinvestments in the feminine (Moore , ). In any event, Eliot damns modern woman as deracinated and superficial, cut off from primal rhythms; the same argument would be made, in other tones, by D. H. Lawrence. The drama Eliot sought was based not in “poetry,” but in “entertainment of a crude sort” (, ). Music-hall comedy and vaudeville were the valuable sources upon which this new drama could draw. After , in The Dial and Criterion, Eliot began to limn the necessity for a creolized drama that would satisfy “the craving for ritual” (a, ). As a fusion of genres – a revue noir – “Sweeney Agonistes” compounds melodrama, tabloid shock, working class sentimental poetry, true-crime confession, bartender’s parable, religious ritual, and Gilbert and Sullivan operetta as well as minstrel and vaudeville. Through this generic amalgam, Eliot wanted to invent a popular drama that would challenge and displace cinema, evoke primitive rhythms at a subliminal level, and offer to the middle classes a bizarre and grotesque mirror of their vacuousness so they could move from superficial vulgarity to ritual awe and anti-cathartic confrontation with “the horror.” A tall order.27 In his Norton lectures at Harvard (–), Eliot proposed a version of the poetic career based on the notion that the poet was “a popular entertainer . . . having a part to play in society as worthy as that of the musichall comedian” (Eliot [] , ). This sounds droll, but it was quite serious. In the years before composing “Sweeney Agonistes,” Eliot wrote repeatedly about the music hall. A essay on Marie Lloyd in Selected Essays pays tribute to her ability to give “expression to the life” of a working-class audience by subtle exactness of representation (Eliot , ). Several other performers influence him with their “orgy of parody” (). Ethel Levey, for example, evinced “a fascinating inhuman grotesquerie . . . Her art requires a setting which (in this country at least) it has never had. It is not a comedy of mirth” (Eliot , ). The “bizarrerie” of these music-hall performers is “mature” and “cosmopolitan.” “But,” said Eliot, “the revue itself is still lacking”; that is, there is no script adequate to the combined talents and intensities of these performers. In these proleptic remarks Eliot foresees a grotesque tragicomedy in revue form – his new work.28
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
In “Sweeney Agonistes,” a bunch of bumptious male drunks pay a call on two demi-mondaines. In the course of their banter, Sweeney both flirts with Doris and tells her of a murder in which a man kills a woman and hides the crime successfully (or appears to), but is nonetheless filled with an ambiguous combination of guilt, fear, and terror called the “hoo ha’s.” The end of the play mockingly confronts the audience with the laughable, horrible possibility that such crime lurks in every man’s heart. The story could be Sweeney’s dream or fantasy, his provocative memory of a news article, his confession of his own (or “a friend’s”) already committed crime, or a menacing narrative suggesting that Doris will be murdered after the end of the play. The work shows a gender narrative undermining female sexual choices and agency; the Africanist/primitivist material occurs only in the second part of the work. The first half shows the women in lazy or sluttish control of their lives, manipulating one erstwhile lover, discussing and inviting others. The second half overtly punishes their parasitism on men, as they become the audience for and victim of Sweeney’s teasing. “O Mr. Sweeney, please don’t talk . . . I don’t care for such conversation / A woman runs a terrible risk,” says Doris, as Sweeney begins his tale of murder, with relish (Eliot , –). Swarts and Snow are absolutely fascinated, especially by the fact that the man is not (overtly) caught and punished. Sweeney is a simianized Irishman, the Irishman as a “white Negro” – a well-established stereotype in both American and British popular imagination and anthropology (Curtis ; Michie ; Pearce ). So Sweeney comes with borrowed blackness and apish qualities to ask his existential questions about crime and punishment. Sweeney’s narrative hints at the horrors that can lie behind any normal life, for while waiting for the female body to dissolve in lysol, his “friend” “took in the milk and he paid the rent” (Eliot , ). The lysol/milk combination marks a fluid exchange more than a little unsettling, especially in relation to the “cream of a nightmare dream” in the song that follows, sanitizing sexual–maternal fluids. But this allusion is not only sexual. It is also an allegory of the delivery system of whiteness that arrives both from everyday banality and from the unconscious. The arrival is mixed up with “darkness” – it is never “pure.” The white milk must be taken in to hide, with normal household activity, the evidence of a dark crime; the cream–dream is a most excellent nightmare – crème de la crème of the dark. The “Irishman” is really “Negro,” and he is also a white philosopher of the dark primitive.
“HOO, HOO, HOO”: some episodes in the construction of modern male whiteness Only the superficial (that is, the female) cannot credit this realization of spiritual horror in impure or darkened whiteness; amid sexual disgust and desire, Doris and Dusty stupidly ask, “Cheer him up?” of the murderer because they do not see that being caught in death-in-life is, or so everyone says, a fate worse than death.29 Nor do the women chant “hoo hoo hoo” with the male chorus at the end, but instead say only, in a final vain comment, “I know who” [will pay the rent]. Lyndall Gordon’s biographical interpretation connects this work to T. S. and Vivienne Eliot’s severe marital crisis; the problem of women was much on Eliot’s mind, as was his muted rage at the marriage. But Gordon also indicates that the problematic of female power for Eliot precedes his marriage and Vivienne’s impact on him (Gordon , ). In his early works female figures are very narrowly represented: quick-sprung traps, as in the poem “Hysteria”; while the fantasy of female death occurs as early as “Portrait of a Lady” () as one solution to the problem of male engulfment. The character Sweeney appears with Swarts and Snow to form a circuit of Africanist materials in “Fragment of an Agon.” Eliot uses race and gender as unifiers for the disparate classes (and intelligence levels) of his (presumed) audience. In “Sweeney,” the gender narrative of mordant misogyny, the racial–sexual narrative of cannibals (with a kind of swinging ragtime self-parody), and the racialized primitivism of the “ ” are put at the service of a cross-class address about guilt and horror lurking under normalcy. Indeed, the highest moments of Western culture – the Oresteia and St. John of the Cross (in epigraphs to the work) have the same underlying structure as voudou and witch-doctors. The apparent “heights” of white culture have the same primary structures as the apparent “depths” of black culture. The relativist shock this may be said to deliver is now shopworn, but it is a serious aspect of “Sweeney Agonistes,” a buzzer held in the hand of a superior white trickster to jolt and to mock illusions of white superiority. The opening of “Fragment of an Agon” is a “cannibal” scene in which Sweeney flirts heavily with Doris. : : : :
To a caI’ll carry you off To a cannibal isle. You’ll be the cannibal! You’ll be the missionary!
(Eliot , )
The amatory “coon song” in whiteface casts the woman as a “nice little, white little missionary stew” and Sweeney, by implication, as a colored
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
or black (Pacific Islander or African) play-cannibal, titillating and courting a white woman. Marianne Moore notes this section of Eliot’s poem in her review: “woman in the cannibal-pot or at hand to serve,” commenting slyly upon the gender issues (Moore , ). In a brisk summary of cannibal motifs as part of “the basic racial paranoia of many cultures,” Nigel Rigby catalogues the fascination with cannibalism (, ). These are reinforced by the evocation of the Grand Guignol “Sweeney Todd” in the name of Eliot’s character. Now there is far less cannibalism in the world than there are cannibal jokes and allusions. The attribution of cannibalism to others is a claim of moral superiority and a greater degree of civilization (Sanday , , noting Arens). According to Peggy Sanday, fantasized incidents of cannibalism taking “the form of a belief in cannibal sorcerers or witches” sends “messages having to do with the maintenance, regeneration, and, in some cases, the foundation of the cultural order” (, ). Our culture has this belief, particularly linked with imperial claims, a belief melodramatic and lurid (as in Lindsay or in Edith Sitwell’s extraordinary long poem “Gold Coast Customs” from ) or sardonic and playful (as in Eliot or cartoon images). The metropolitan images of tribesmen cooking the “white hunter” or “the white missionary” suggest that the political/economic and spiritual/ideological conquest of other societies is at issue; this joke about ingestion is related to metropolitan feeding upon colonies. But if other cultures are represented as “eating” us, we will help them (their men particularly) regenerate and become strong, a notion which violates our sense of the correctness of Western political hegemony. Further, if others (imaginarily) eat us, our substance will merge with theirs; we will be forced to share our identities with them (Bergman , , citing Slotkin). These crosscultural guilts and fear of syncretism are submerged in the cannibal materials.30 Expressed here as the playful fantasy of male predator and female prey, Eliot’s cannibal song is probably also a joke at the expense of the sexually active, adult woman. A powerful childhood fantasy of ingesting the mother and the fear of being eaten by her lies at the heart of some cannibal fantasies. Even if the cannibal moment in Eliot appears small and playful despite this analytic freight, it is repeated in the brooding soliloquy of Sweeney, for the rotting woman (representing death as a viscous liquid) is incorporated into the “friend’s” routine “life” until various permutations of “death-in-life” are the result. The dissolving woman watched by the murderer cannot be washed down the drain, for
“HOO, HOO, HOO”: some episodes in the construction of modern male whiteness her presence has infiltrated the murderer’s consciousness. It is Eliot’s illustration of Conrad’s premise in “Heart of Darkness”: that the West has become the dark continent.31 The second inflection of race occurs immediately after the cannibalism/South Seas scene. The stage directions read “Song by Wauchope and Horsfall / Swarts as Tambo, Snow as Bones.” Tambo and Bones are stock names from minstrel theater; Tambo was the parodically dandified urban Negro and Bones, the rustic. Further, Snow[ball] is one of the possible names for the antic “Jim Crow” figure of minstrel shows from about on (see also North , ). Swarts is a variant of the word schwartz (black) and may well be a Yiddish allusion. Thus both their “own” names (Snow and Swarts), and their ascribed names (Tambo and Bones) associate these characters with minstrel and vaudeville figures.32 Yet this blackface allusion, with its “dialectical flickering of racial insult and racial envy,” is just one among the creolized complex of other theatrical genres alluded to here (Lott , ). These characters sing lyrics in an Irving Berlin/Noël Coward mode more appropriate to a musical revue than a minstrel show: “Where the Gauguin maids / In the banyan shades / Wear palmleaf drapery” (Eliot , ). The first song is followed by a light, sentimental, but also parodic (barber-shop quartet?) ditty about the simple joys of the island: “We won’t have to catch any trains / And we won’t go home when it rains” (). This song is sung by the other two men (Klipstein and Krumpacker, more than vaguely Jewish names with a vaudeville punch), with Swarts and Snow “as before,” serving as Tambo and Bones. This minstrelsy could be read through Lott’s interpretation as an awkward and grotesque attempt to credit a black cultural presence while simultaneously mocking it. Michael North is more dismissive of the “preemptive mimicry” of African-American materials that allowed American whites to free themselves from European authority while erasing and suppressing the “other race” at home (North , , ). Yet the overloaded amalgam of generic allusions drawing on a maximum of theatrical traditions prevents reading minstrelsy as the central form and keeps the work mobile – campy, knowing, stylized, sincere, and mocking – difficult to fix or pin down. Eliot mingles Aristophanes, music hall, minstrel shows, revues, blackface, and vaudeville theater. His work is a crossover, a creolization of sources which notably include African-American ones. As The Waste Land is a class creolization, so “Sweeney Agonistes” is a racial creolization: creolizing creates cultural power. Indeed, the first song these endmen sing, which includes the lines “Under the bamboo tree / Two live as one / One live as two,” is a direct
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
citation of work by the African-American song writing team of Bob Cole, Rosamond Johnson, and his brother, the writer and activist James Weldon Johnson. Cole and the Johnson brothers wrote this particular song about “a maid of royal blood though dusky shade” wooed by a “Zulu from Matabooloo.” It was first sung by [white] Marie Cahill in Sally in our Alley, ; it became a hit, and sold over , copies in sheet music (Woll , –). (The next song the team wrote for her was called “On the Congo.”) One recalls that another “Zulu” song and parodic courtship counted among Lindsay’s numerous inspirations for “The Congo.” Eliot apparently knew whose lines he remastered; North has suggested that he heard the song in during the St. Louis World’s Fair (North , ).33 Eliot’s move parallels Lindsay’s use of an African-American popular song by Bert Williams.34 His appropriation has a number of possible motives. Respectful acknowledgement is one; blind theft might be another, the complex of desire and imitation and racial crossings, notably proposed by Eric Lott, and moved into the twentieth century by Susan Gubar. The desire for [white] men to act like savages in order to “remasculinize” themselves if they were flagging has been traced by Gail Bederman as an ideological formation (, , ). The desire to recapitulate primitive traits, to affirm and solidify claims to manliness and “white civilization” would be a very adequate explanation of the effect Eliot wanted to achieve – remasculinizing uplift through appropriation of primitive force. One might further propose that Eliot (temporarily) wanted to be, or to mimic and ventriloquize one of those black or Jewish vaudeville song writers because of the popularity of their materials. For a time these sounds contributed to his repertoire as a poet, but it gave him only an unstable and debatable advantage, both before and after this work, given his extended entertaining (at least –, possibly through ) of anti-Semitic explanations for cultural decline. As we will have occasion to see again, “the ideas and practices comprising any discourse will be multiple, inconsistent, and contradictory” (Bederman , ). Eliot can illustrate: he was in conflict about whether playing barbarian or depicting the energetic, but wrongheaded was inoculation against their virus, or was itself a symptom of their disease. He spends the twenties deciding that borrowing that sexualsocial parvenu energy with its creolizing diction and amorality came with too high a price. Eliot’s cultural analysis therefore stabilized and solidified into conservative and pietistic claims for one established religion. In this work, Eliot is experimenting with a moment of confrontation that deploys Africanist materials both as the horror and to frame the
“HOO, HOO, HOO”: some episodes in the construction of modern male whiteness horror – a use both racist and sympathetic. The end of this work scares the [white] audience with an ominous “ .” This scare word alludes to blacks and to a primitive character who is a proto-black person; the word is sung in a style designed to allude to blackface minstrelsy. Citing African-American song writers (Cole and Johnson), deploying white Africanist representations (minstrelsy, the cannibal trope), and using metonymic equivalences for blacks (Sweeney), Eliot has resourcefully bricolaged a packet of racialized materials to jolt, amuse, and sober up a white audience. He is, at bottom, scaring whites with “blacks,” with their own dark impulses, cross-coded as African, and with all that “Africa” implies, all succinctly evoked in the phoneme “Hoo.” This Africanist aspect is not fundamentally different from Lindsay’s, but Eliot as a cultural creole puts more discourses into play and creates a shimmer of irony about the meaning and location of the primitive. Where is the horror? ask both poets. Both evoke the authority of Joseph Conrad for their answer. The horror is in Africa, says Lindsay, just as Conrad said it was; this is a warding off, haunted titillation making whiteness the control of this dark thing. Lindsay’s melodrama depends on a strong racial binary. The horror is in us, says Eliot; we are Africa, just as Conrad said; this is an incorporative, haunted confrontation making whiteness an ambiguous social position filled with powerless superiority because flooded with the energies and demands of the dark instinctual. Eliot’s melodrama mingles the racial positions of black and white, producing multiple ironies. These may seem to be different opinions. Yet in both writers, Africa is left as horror, the immobilized site of pejorative meanings for these Euro-American modernists, made so by their construction of whiteness as a political and cultural position. Layers of white conjure, of primitivist discourses, and of contradictions on racial matters all constitutive of whiteness as a position have been revealed by this social philology of “Hoo”: racial superiority versus equality; identification with and warding off of blacks; desire for and fear of pleasure; noble sentiments and stigmatizing attitudes; white rights in black materials and white guilt for appropriation; denial and covert acknowledgment of black agency; the desire to extirpate racial prejudice, and to revel in its cultural connotations and the social power it offers whites. Social philology as a reading strategy has demonstrated how, with “hoo,” cultural narratives and ideological debates with large implications are articulated in the oddest and most intimate bits of poetic language.
“Darken your speech”: racialized cultural work in black and white poets
Use dusky words and dusky images. Darken your speech. Wallace Stevens () Caroling Dusk
Countee Cullen ()
In the teens and twenties of the twentieth century, New Negroes and some politically sympathetic Euro-Americans struggled to counter the staggering oppressions of blacks in the post-Reconstruction United States – “economic disinheritance,” rigid educational and professional limits, murderous terrorism, imposition of segregation, and the compromise of African-American citizenship (C. Johnson , ). Tales of Darkest America, Fenton Johnson’s blistering prose title from , puns precisely on the site of the uncivilized and primitive, given the ethical and political scandals resisting racial equality. African-Americans claimed cultural authority in the Negro Renaissance. The New Black subjectivity was a culmination of cultural and political struggles of respect for blackness, desire for social striving and affirmation, selfdetermination, debates about the uses to which African-American “folkstuff” (Sterling Brown’s term) could be put, and self-conscious focus on the decolonization of a serf population interior to the United States by an emergent educated elite (Brown , ).1 Work by African-American poets had a mix of cultural and political tasks. For example, allusions to the strains of decolonization and the question of the “maturity” of a people occur in Langston Hughes’ oftenanthologized poem “I, Too, Sing America” () whose simple diction and declarations seem superficially to concede the childishness of the “darker brother” even as the poem remarks how this brother grows strong (Hughes , ). The meal at the same dining table proposes that intimacies of equal companions – black and white – will happen “tomorrow.” The family metaphor is, however, pointed and not entirely a metaphor but a reality of genealogies. Seen via a social philology, there
“Darken your speech”: racialized cultural work in black and white poets are several fraught words. The first word is “Besides” (in the last lines “Besides / They’ll see how beautiful I am / And be ashamed – // I, too, am America”), a word that, meaning furthermore or in addition, also encodes the side-by-side companionship that is still denied. A second word is the oddly isolated one word line “Then”; so isolated, it evokes the question of time in the past (what happened “then” to split this family?), the time in the future (the teleological assurance that this will change), and the then of consequence (raising issues of militancy): “Nobody’ll dare / Say to me, ‘Eat in the kitchen,’ / Then.” Finally, the poem plays with what might be called the phoneme of assertion (am), a phoneme in “I am,” in the words “am America” that claim full citizenship, and in the semantic meaning of triumphing by strong persistence, a fact registered in the word “ashamed,” applied to white attitudes. The “am” of assertion here changes to the “aim” (as pronounced inside “ashamed”) of black modernity: equality of access and possibility. At this time, too, some black and white writers wanted to “darken [their] speech” – to represent African-American artistic creativity, black cultural agency and black voices.2 Yet even when the same terms (like “dusk” or “primitive” or “brother,” or a far worse but not uncommon word) are deployed or implied, the poetic arrangement of “social evaluations” differ strikingly both between the two racial communities, and sometimes within each racial community (Bakhtin/Medvedev , ). A social philology shows that, in the details of language, crosspurposes, contradictions, and secret narratives emerge that complicate the announced investment of both black and white writers in “darkened” speech and other verbal and ideological signs of engagement with New Black subjectivity. Extending Lecercle, this chapter shows how “ideological remainders” are expressed in specific verbal artifice. In another pronominal allusion to interior decolonization, the title “To Usward” (of a poem by Gwendolyn Bennett, ) may first be said to condense a hopeful moment: the work is spoken to us going forward – “dedicated to all Negro Youth” and especially future artists, with the pun on “upward” – the hoped for direction (Bennett , ). Yet “Us” and “ward” emerge in the visual text, with “ward” being a specially complex word, containing both custody (ward of) and parrying (ward off) as part of the political crypt words alluding to the compromises in this rising of people of color. Bennett’s poem comes out firmly on the side of social mission, supporting artists “Not self-contained with smug identity / But conscious of the strength in entity” (Honey , ). This question of the individual in relation to the race was one of the main points of
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debate among African-American artists. It intersected with the other key debate: if one declared “strength in entity,” was one also committed to support an aesthetic ideology of uplift as a key term of black modernity, or was this a form of moral sentimentalism, compromising art? What does it mean to “darken” one’s speech? Du Bois declared that “Beauty in [the black writer’s] Art” was the same as the “fight for Life and Liberty” the community was undertaking (Du Bois , ). Given unequal political power in the U.S., Countee Cullen, too, was sure that a black person should not reveal the down side of black life to those whom he viewed as prying guests in his particular house. Thus he proposed an aesthetic of uplift: “Put forward your best foot” (Cullen , ). Cullen claimed political realism in this position, a warning addressed exactly, though not exclusively, to Hughes: “American life is so constituted, the wealth of power is so unequally distributed, that whether they relish the situation or not, Negroes should be concerned with making good impressions” (ibid.).3 Hughes differed loud and long; an aesthetic realist with a broader definition of poetry as a genre, he drew his inspiration from the “low-down, jazzy, cabaret-ish, sensational, and utterly uncouth,” and remained unapologetic (Hughes, , ). At the same time, the “New Black” subject place incorporated individualist critique of and resistance to any sense of a race consciousness held in common, especially in Countee Cullen, who said repeatedly that he wanted simply to be a poet, not a black poet, mainly because he wanted to be judged by a universal, not a special, or patronizing, or stereotyping standard. Yet there was a double bind – that the “universal” was, in its current Euro-American incarnation, precisely a stereotyping ideology. In Opportunity of April , the journal listed the very negative associations with black, the very positive ones with white as a color, and cited some poems to editorialize that “the advent of Negroes to the field of letters promises the most salutary results in breaking up some of these long, and hoary associations” (Cullen , ). The word hoary, meaning both old and white, was a nice touch, along with the crypt word “whore” for the stereotypes. While the New Black writers urgently desired to control these issues and to change ideologies surrounding their race by changing representation, their community did not, finally, hold enough cultural power fully to alter representations of blacks, nor to qualify the triumphalist representation of them as creative daimons by whites. What then was the New Black subject position in poetry? The desire for black racial authority is central, whether that means the freedom to
“Darken your speech”: racialized cultural work in black and white poets explore specifically black, or general culture, or the resistance to oversimplification of any of these sites.4 As it was an attempt to examine poetic and cultural authority via racial analysis, it is not one fixed position, but a debate. There was a debate between universalism and particularism, including responses to special pleading for the warmth, beauty, rhythm, and specific culture of African-Americans. There was a debate between duty or political realism (the need for ennobling depictions of blacks) and pleasure or aesthetic realism (the need for wide-ranging, provocative depictions of blacks). The New Black could claim that there is no “Negro verse” (only black poets, diverse in mode), or, in contradistinction, could claim that “black” is a powerful and self-conscious space of emergent group identity articulated in poetry. The debate that can be reconstructed between Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes – framed by the unstable dialectic of doubleconsciousness announced by Du Bois, “to be Negro, to be American” – summarizes the shifts between individual expression and group identity on the issue what it might mean to darken one’s speech as a New Black modernist working with issues of African-American modernity. Both Cullen and Hughes stated an intransigent resistance to interventions in their aesthetic choices. In Hughes’ ringing words: “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter . . . If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either” (Hughes a, ; also in Mitchell ). This is close to a declaration of a third space – ”Negro artist” – beholden to neither race for approval. Cullen reviewed Hughes’ first book, making a clear distinction between “that select and austere circle of high literary expression which we call poetry” with its “truly beautiful poems” and Hughes’ “jazz poems,” viewed as “interlopers.” Though the review is short, this point is repeated over and over, with its controlling definition of “we” and of “poetry.” While Cullen recognizes the importance of The Weary Blues, his categorical rejection of Hughes’ vernacular and notational work (“it ought never to have been done”) draws a line between the “racial artist” and “artists pure and simple” that both reveals Cullen’s position, and his limits (Cullen, , –). Hughes’ realist representations of dialect, the settings in speakeasies, the modernist tactics of collage intercutting multiple conversations at these unpoetic sites made Cullen incredulous that this had been presented as poetry. On the high road, Cullen cautions Hughes from falling into “the gaping pit that lies before all Negro
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
writers, in the confines of which they become racial artists instead of artists pure and simple” (). The casual, the allusions to sexual licentiousness and working-class pleasures articulated in the very form and diction of Hughes’ work – so offhand and apparently improvisatory – should have been taboo. Cullen derides Hughes’ good sense as an artist and as a black person in the endemically judgmental racial situation that was U.S. society. Hughes responded a few months later with a discussion of the position ascribed to Cullen (“I want to be a poet – not a Negro poet”) which charges: “meaning behind that, ‘I would like to be white” (Hughes a, ).5 In this manifesto–essay from , Hughes links race and class issues, blaming the tight rein of black middle-class values and modes, assimilating “white manners, morals, and Puritan standards” which make certain blacks (the unnamed Cullen, the unnamed painter Henry Ossawa Tanner) guard against their folk culture (jazz, spirituals, blues) and their racial artists (Bessie Smith, Paul Robeson, Jean Toomer, Aaron Douglas) in the hopes of always appearing noble and butter-side up. In “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Hughes upholds a position about difference and diversity, in opposition to “American standardization” (the white main culture), and therefore he attacks Cullen for identifying with those class and structural norms. Cullen is quite aware that “race traitor” is the phrase Hughes here implies but never uses, for one of his answers, the poem “To Certain Critics,” sets forth the words traitor, treason, and betray in the first three lines (Cullen , ). For Hughes, “Negro” is a powerful and self-conscious cultural space of socially emergent group identity, a space that has been opened between “white” and “colored” – the latter term representing for Hughes the passivity and apparent affectlessness of a person yearning to stay out of racial trouble. For Cullen “Negro” is solely a term of description of individuals: there are individual black poets with a variety of styles and strategies, but no “Negro verse,” no necessary thematics or stance. Indeed, when Cullen alludes to Hughes’ position that race can and should be marked in literature, he uses the metaphor of illness: race consciousness is just a “new literary ailment” and dialect poems – absent from his anthology Caroling Dusk – are an artificiality (Cullen , xi, xiv). When he discusses melanin, it is just that: “this pigmentary anomaly” – something accidental, not constitutive (xiii). This debate between identification with a group identity or affirmation of an individual identity has analogues to the groups of political feminists when confronted with
“Darken your speech”: racialized cultural work in black and white poets the individualist (“egoist”) feminist ethos of a Marsden or a Loy with their sometimes quirky polemics against women. Cullen did not want people thinking about race in his poetry, but about its poetic quality and his ability to join the great tradition of Anglo-American verse on his own terms, with no prejudice working for or against him.6 But this does not mean that he wanted his work to be treated as if it were not socially articulate. Rather, he discouraged forms of condescension and demeaning double standards, for his aesthetic depended on a concept of poetry in English as one (universal) tradition, not marked by racial difference or particularist diction.7 Hence Cullen’s “To Certain Critics” overtly insists that neither pain, passion, nor trouble is located exclusively in one race, and thus poetry should not be addressed solely to that group.8 His religious and pastoral metaphor (of shepherd–poet and sheep, both suffering people and consoled readers) is, however, filled with an ideological remainder. He denies that any shepherd would care for only the “darker lamb,” rather than for all lambs, yet the denial contains the recognition, encrypted in the diction, of the special hurt status suffered by his race, alluding, in “darker lamb” to the proverbial outcast black sheep. And yet another of his condensed words, the Scots word for tribe or group, “clan,” faces in two directions. The clan is other African-American writers explicitly barred from controlling his sense of audience, meaning, diction, or poetic vocation. Cullen will always reject particulars in favor of universals (, ). But while the statement speaks on the surface of a clannish group of blacks, the shadow of Klan is unavoidable, and this crypt word makes a counter accusation to a more dreaded threat to black autonomy than fellow African-American poets. As for the question of cultural difference, Cullen would only be interested in showing how black (like white) poets differ markedly among themselves. “A survey of the work of Negro poets will show that the individual diversifying ego transcends the synthesizing hue” (Cullen , xii). Indeed, Cullen looked to the day when race as a category would be obsolete. Yet he alluded to racial color – progressively darkening – in all his titles for books of poetry from –: Color, Copper Sun (with its pun), The Ballad of the Brown Girl, Caroling Dusk, The Black Christ. For Cullen, it is clear, being a Negro artist is a contradictory task with “innumerable ramifications” (Cullen , ). Thus Cullen’s poems of poetic authority propose marked, and contradictory, black–white materials with strong bearing on defining his subjectivity and poetic practice. In certain poems using race as metaphor, Cullen makes conglomerates of social
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
identity that struggle against any one defining racial mark for Poet, but fuse the races in a Poetic Identity. In other works, he is more dour and resistant to white friendship and its cultural significance. “Tableau” (, ) is a three quatrain poem about a bond of a golden white youth and a dark black youth, metaphorically day and night, and as deeply linked together. Their homoerotic, cross-racial love and/or friendship crosscuts many social assumptions and fixed groups.9 As the second quatrain tells us, both the spying and gossiping black and white detractors are scandalized at their concord. Answering the charge of an unnatural relationship, the poem works on stable natural metaphors in conventional phrases; lightning/thunder and day/night as tropes for their bond have the effect of justifying the relationship, for these natural twains are well known, unquestionably paired, and linguistically unremarkable. The poem, a rich and determined statement, offers a political allegory, a spiritual allegory, a sexual and poetic allegory. The cross-race love (or friendship) evokes their critical violation of socially mandated paths and the actual subcultural spaces of cross-race, same-sex sexual meeting coded as marginal (as it may evoke a higher spiritual way, with the word “cross”). Their Christological concord allows them to pass unscathed through a quagmire of angry looks. The evocation of the word for racial passing suggests the formation of a conglomerate racial identity (a new space for passing) fusing and merging the two races as one, in one sexual body. Indeed, even the title, meaning a striking scene with picturesque people, contains a deep metonym for “tablet” and (with the lightning and thunder of the end) suggests a new law, or a scene of judgment. The homoerotic content is used powerfully to establish racial equipoise in a new post-racialized space, a conglomerate interior title to poetic authority for the speaker of the enunciation. The attempt to universalize poetic vocation beyond racial marking, in a poem similar to Cullen’s but earlier, is seen in a psalm-like Whitmanic work by Alfred Kreymborg that is addressed to Fenton Johnson. Here “red” is a sign of their mutually held vocations and their politically radical ideas – “songs and singers are red” (Kreymborg , ). “There are veins in my body, Fenton Johnson – / veins that sway and dance because of blood that is red; / There are veins in your body, Fenton Johnson – / veins that sway and dance because of blood that is red”: rhetorical parallelism represents absolute, but utopian, equality (Kreymborg , ). When the poets walk “arm in arm down State Street,” the “easily horrified” will cry “look at the white man chumming
“Darken your speech”: racialized cultural work in black and white poets with the black man!” (), but the poets will reply “‘We are red,’” their basic humanity and social ethos marked by this politicized and natural color (). The word “State” is not understated, either, as a claim within nation and estate. Cullen wanted to operate in this even-handed way in a universe that was (and is) absolutely not color-blind.10 He wanted to be neither compelled nor impelled by what others thought was appropriate to his race, but rather self-motivated to “do, write, create, what we will,” a claim of poetic authority – darkening his speech in his way – by transcending social markers or by studying them, but always on his own terms (Cullen , ). Therefore such a finding as “Tableau” does not cover all cases. Another poem of poetic authority whose findings are quite opposite is the sardonic four-quatrain “Uncle Jim” (Cullen , ). This figure of folk wisdom has some gnomic words to say about whiteness. The poem begins with Uncle Jim’s gnarly stupidity, pointing tautologically to the fact that whites are white. A series of definitions can be substituted – counterrevolutionary? blank? decent? (usage – ironic), but finally the message boils down to – they are totally different from you by virtue of their color. They live and act in a different world. The young man in the enounced tries to reject this, with a flippant non sequitur, describing Uncle Jim as being intensely bitter and trying to discount the wisdom offered. Yet the second two stanzas reconsider the question. Cullen describes a soul-mate, a friend (race unspecified, but as such probably the unmarked race – white). The friend is given a kind of high romantic Keatsean/Dickinsonian affect: he is so empathetic, and identifies so closely with the speaker that he experiences the speaker’s joy and sorrow with intensity. Their relationship seems an exemplary spiritual communion. Yet there is something a little inordinate about the intensities of identification, something parasitic or hysterical in such empathy.11 Thus the final stanza argues that, even as the subjectivity of the enounced lies next to his companion “face-in-the-grass,” feeling the pleasures of their bond, he thinks not of their high romantic and Keatsean communion, but “muses” on Uncle Jim and his suspicion of whites. The two men, soul-mate and speaker, are depicted in a deeply intimate posture. Yet read in a social philology “face-in-the-grass” is shadowed in the enunciation by the crypt phrase snake in the grass. A careful association bolstered by this “phantom locative” evokes a betrayal in the enunciation that is at first denied in the enounced (Stewart , ). The speaker’s allegiance to the sublime of art and sexuality as the height
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
of British poetic tradition, to the high poetic language evoking depths and heights of sadness and ecstasy had seemed compromised by the uncle and his message of racial suspicion. But the speaker identifies more than he wants to acknowledge with Uncle Jim, for “muse” not only means think or ponder, but also suggests the realm of muse figures. The intimate eroticized companionship of two men, [white] and black, thought to lead to the high emotions and investments of poetry, thought, therefore, to function as muse, is destabilized by another muse, the muse of racialized thinking, of barriers between white and black. Both of these poems arguably present a homoerotic encounter with a white man as involving a claim for black cultural authority, but the two poems come to opposing conclusions about that white muse figure. Yet at the same time “blackness” brought with it so many uncontrollable resonances that it is no wonder Cullen attempted in part to change the terms of the debate entirely, in his exchange with Hughes, to “good poetry” versus “not poetry.” Thus for Cullen to “darken one’s speech” was neither easy, nor natural, nor assumed. That very suspicion was part of New Black entitlement, as this subject position can be reconstructed from its own interior debates. Wallace Stevens seems to have “darkened his speech” with more ease and pleasure. Stevens writes a poetry peopled with blacks and Africanist materials who and which symbolize access to creative power; he does so in a way that does not credit black modernity nor those lacerating intellectual and emotional debates about blackness in modernism that have here been exemplified in the work of Cullen and Hughes. When “dusk” carols for Countee Cullen () in the title of his famous anthology, the word indicates the professional presence of a generation of African-American poets quite various in their rhetorics, similar only in their color. They are singing joyously, or caroling, dusk, a word implying twilight, shadow, and even gloom; set together, the two words make an oxymoron balancing glee and despair. Dusk is a quintessentially poetic time, liminal, pensive, and romantic: this suggests Cullen’s deep conviction that black poets’ styles, like all poets’ styles, should honor the traditional. Stevens also used dusk to evoke the romance of poetic access to a tempting dark figure. While these poets are parallel in their claims for racialized “dusk,” they differ precisely in their relation to New Black entitlement and in the crossracial encounters proposed. Caroling Dusk is ambiguous: are the poets singing about dusk, are they in the dusk (obscured, in the shade, overshadowed by main culture), or
“Darken your speech”: racialized cultural work in black and white poets are they themselves a thing, a singing dark? The title, read by a social philology, is a political allegory condensing the history of slavery and emancipation, thing and person. This allegory also occurs in Cullen’s sonnet “Yet Do I Marvel” analyzing the black poet as “curious thing” (, ). This work, filled with cunning verbal contradictions, concerns the almost paralytic encounter between blackness and universalized poetic vision. The sestet is based on a fierce, restrained blasphemy. It would be vain even to ask God, goes Cullen’s argument, why evil, cruelty, torture, and frustration have meaning. It is simply that He is so “awful” that He cannot quibble over such small questions. The repetition of the word “awful” moves from awe-inspiring to horrible, from terrific to terrifying. Indeed, the echo of Blake’s “Songs of Experience” casts God Himself as the man-eating Tyger. The speaker plots a carefully worded resistance, seeming to enhance God, and to blame the small-minded person for doubting the possibility of satisfactory explanations. The apogee of God’s uncanny ability to put dreadful pressure and frustration in the universe is to create black poets. The apparently simple phrase “curious thing” read via a social philology shows ideological contradictions. First, it means an oddity; here the speaker comments suspiciously upon God and his motives. The distance created by the commentary elaborates the promissory note of the sonnet’s opening phrase doubting God’s beneficence, wherein that very doubt, through denial, is furthered. Second, the speaker wonders that God has made such a novelty, something so rare, odd, or intricate. This praises both the nobility of God and [black] humankind. Finally, the poet, being black, is both the curiosity (thing) and the curious questioner (person). To have been both thing and person is precisely the heritage of African-Americans. This opposition is then elaborated by the confrontative rhyme of “thing” and “sing.” “Sing!” is held out tantalizingly at the very end of the poem as goal and imperative, compounding the strength of black poetic authority by seeing it as an almost impossible test of authorship authorized by God himself. In the word “bid,” God is both commanding and gambling – raising the stakes for black poets only. The word also has a tinge from the semantic surround “auction,” a sotto voce encrypting of enslavement. The poem illustrates, in poised contradiction, the difficulty, and the actuality, of African-American poetry. Wallace Stevens’ address to an ungenerous, ungendered (but “puerile”) figure is fascinated by “dusk”: “Be the voice of night and Florida in my ear. / Use dusky words and dusky images. / Darken your
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
speech” (, ). This is an imperative plea to a muse in charge of a fecund darkness to become darker still; these yearnings are sexualized, and take place in a special topographic site for Stevens, the South. Yet the poem also argues that the poem’s speaker already “spoke for you perfectly in my thoughts, / Conceiving words” (ibid.). Hence the dusky words of the puerile figure are not even necessary. Already inside the thoughts of the speaker, dusky words are generative and “conceived” – in body and idea. This ideological contradiction around black speech – evoked and necessary, but absent – will persist. This always–already status of “dusky words and dusky images” resists (though it does not totally ignore) New Black materials, for those claims would complicate his possession of “black” space. Conversely, Cullen’s “dusk” depends upon the New Black position, however much he resisted and debated the politicization of the poetic act and the deuniversalization of the role of poet. The ideological drama of differing investments in parallel materials is a finding of “historical semiotics” (Arac , ). Most white work with the “dusky” – the creative powers of Africanist figures – occurs in and as rich fantasy, not in relationships with black writers nor in particular acknowledgment of their cultural dilemmas around black creativity and poetic agency; it is a form of “American Africanism” in Toni Morrison’s terms (, ). Wallace Stevens did not comment upon actual black writers, but the various uses to which he could put a black creative figure entranced him in work from on.12 The precise gap between his loss of any historical figures and his imaginative possession of blackness is symptomatic of his turn from New Negro to Old. Stevens mined rich veins of stereotype and mythoi producing resonant, if primitivist, depictions of blackness that fused sexuality and artistic creativity. As early as , in a letter to his future wife, Stevens plays out his fantasy of being Sambo in a little vaudeville/minstrel vignette of lady and servant filled with flirtatious and scandalous possibilities of sexual desire (Stevens , ; Dec. , ).13 Sambo is a black buffoon from American folklore – merry, ingratiating, endearing, loveable, harmless in his grinning and dancing, offering a comic cornucopia of bounty without aggression (Boskin , –). Sambo makes a clownish appearance at the climax of “Sea Surface Full of Clouds,” part of the pointillist colors and joking subtext, while the main text of a cosmic reflective encounter between sea and sky “rolled as one” creates a triumphant transcendence via the poetic acts of “trumping,” “conjuration,” and “transfiguring,” after the clearing away of “motley”
“Darken your speech”: racialized cultural work in black and white poets (Stevens , ; ) .14 Sambo states sexual desire, using race to sweeten, while titillating, that desire (Boskin , ). However, before Stevens settles into generally warm-hearted depictions of black male figures, another more startling representation occurs. In his prize-winning poetic chamber drama “Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise” (), Stevens’ turn from the force of a contemporary moment in race relations is condensed and telling. In this play are three Chinese (in European garb to begin with), two (lower case) “negroes,” and a white female character with a given name (Stevens , –, ). The Chinese, philosopher–kings at the top of a racial hierarchy, speak a mannered, oblique poetry and investigate the relationship between imagination and reality. They and Anna speak and sing. The two black characters only serve; they are completely silent or gestural.15 This is so striking and so suspicious that the poet himself comments upon it in a contemporaneous letter to Harriet Monroe: “You will note that the negroes now have no speeches. I cannot well make them both servants. The negro who appears first has been searching for the [dead] man” (Stevens , ; May , ). Despite his qualms, Stevens has done exactly as he says he won’t: neither black character speaks. Some racial anxiety about African-American agency and autonomous presence, some inability to reckon with what such characters might be imagined to say vetoed Stevens’ announced goals. A flicker acknowledging New Black subjectivity comes in the letter but is ignored in the play. The contradiction between his intention and practice bespeaks a certain kind of [white] problematic: knowing as political or social fact the active presence of blacks in the world, but producing a cultural artifact that depicts blacks in silent service.16 Aside from walking back and forth on stage, aside from moving props for the Chinese, one African-American character enters the dark stage, while “the limb of a tree creaks.” He finds a hanged man: “Discerning a dark object among the branches, he shrinks back . . .” (Stevens , , all italics). The black characters are, thereafter, silent. The Chinese, seated with their backs to the “dark object, hanging to the limb of the tree” will eventually discover it, but the discovery does not deal with the sociopolitical allusion inhering in this image, which remains unresolved, casting a free-floating shadow across the play (). The anxiety and terror of lynching seem to be encoded in this body, physically visible on the stage yet emotionally and politically hidden as a concern of the play.17 The apparatus, including the tree, is quite similar to materials in many African-American poems, such as a three-line epigram/epitaph
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
among Countee Cullen’s “Colors” in Copper Sun (, ); the color is “(Black)” and proposes a lynching as a spectacle and torture at once – with the tortured man forced into a Calvary that has no redemptive outlet but that grim one-word allusion to Christian narrative. This is a “contrapuntal” reading, to evoke Edward Said’s method in Culture and Imperialism, that expands attention to socio-political allusions within works, by projecting, even in despite of the formal balance and structure of any art work, an analysis of the historical events to which they tangentially allude (Said ). For lynching was endemic during those very years. These were public spectacles confirming, by murder, white “civilized manliness” (Bederman , ). And the struggle against lynching, commencing in the s, is part of the political outrage and social resistance that contributes to New Black subjectivity. It is uncanny to have lynching present visually, but ignored narratively: a contradiction in Stevens’ presentation of the actual terms under which “darkened speech” occurred. By a detour through the love plot, this apparent allusion to a lynching turns out to be untrue; as Huck Finn might have said, the hanged man was only Italian and a suicide.18 Hegemonic art has never had any trouble dealing with unrequited romance, love plots, suicide, and personal grief. But the love plot is a cover story for a shocking political reality, and the play’s philosophical speculations about imagination and reality web further indeterminacies around that shock. Therefore one cannot help but allegorize the allegory and see this play as an attempt to mute the inassimilable, scandalous fact of contemporaneous white political terrorism by constructing an elaborate aesthetic machinery for its avoidance. In the twenties, just before and just after the publication of the first edition of Harmonium in , and parallel to the emergence of a modern African-American literature, Wallace Stevens created his own Negro Renaissance – a pretend world peopled by colored figures enacting muse-like dramas. But this “Renaissance” was not urban, northern, urbane, and analytic, nor was it realist in its use of folk sources, rural or urban. That is, it was not the Harlem Renaissance of the New Black subjectivity, but a pastoral idealization of African-American life in the South (and in the Caribbean) before black modernity, a depiction from which the speaker gets specific benefits in poetic authority. To begin with, Stevens created a tropical arena for his imagination, in which traveling “to Yucatan, Havana next, / And then to Carolina” (, ; “Comedian / Letter C,” ) offers images of peaceful (ibid. ), desirous (“O Florida, Venereal Soil,” ; Stevens , ) and
“Darken your speech”: racialized cultural work in black and white poets aggressive sensuality (“Floral Decorations for Bananas,” ; Stevens , ). The fable of the tropics in Stevens is that the general fecundity, exotic flora, and female or androgynous visitants are a spur to a magical kind of creativity. Mexico, Cuba, Florida, the American South, and the Gulf of Mexico are a space in which one may be possessed because one (in an imperialist sense) possesses it.19 Within Stevens’ general tropical topos, the American South and its black inhabitants are in a special category of address, occurring in twenty or more poems or sections of long poems in Stevens’ early career – – (with the largest cluster from –).20 Stevens is exhilarated at his invention of black figures whose imagined activities open the terrain of poetry for him; these “dusky words” were sensual, creative, fertile, potent. Thus black figures are muses, through whom and because of whom poetic authority accrues. They have all the problematic of muses as well – they are vibrant, but silent; unsophisticated, yet unconsciously creative; desirable, but appropriated; givers, not owners. Stevens’ “The Silver Plough-Boy” () is a poem of inspirational blackness that, like the play, contains muted political counterpoints (Stevens , ). By wearing a stolen sheet, a black youth (a “boy”) has turned silver.21 While silver, he is a lyric, creative, metamorphic sprite. But even before the transforming sheet, this “black figure . . . in a black field” had already been dancing. The silvery sheet only enhances the prior creativity of the black figure, making him more fecund, The moment of silvery whiteness turns labor (ploughing) into a dance. The pronoun “it” rather than “he” is attached to this plough “boy” throughout the poem. He may be gender neutral in a negative sense, his maleness voided. Or positively, once taken to represent art or imagination, the impish figure can transcend gender as well as negotiate the racebased transformation from slavery to silvery. This artless poem opens with a racialized situation – a dark figure, stealing something. The poem makes this figure wear the sheet of the Klan nightriders – a suggestion absolutely not in tune with the tone of epiphanic sweetness of the poem and yet, given its date, an irrepressible “contrapuntal” reading. Indeed, as in his play, Stevens envelops and diffuses intransigent political facts, softening the racial allusions (lynched figure in the play, nightriders in this poem), turning certain political tragedies policing African-American life into blurry mythoi outside of time or space. Modernist depictions here refuse black modernity. “Hymn From a Watermelon Pavilion” () speaks directly to “You dweller in the dark cabin, / To whom the watermelon is always purple”
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
(Stevens , ). The watermelon and cabin together say AfricanAmerican living in a glorious perpetual “now” of gratification. He possesses a “best cock” with red feathers, a green “feme” (wife), and a cackling blackbird (adding up to the colors of Garveyite militancy), that make the “dweller” “Rise, since rising will not waken.” He is in a potent sexual dream (–). This appreciative remark is part of a colonizing and stereotyping move, arguing that the rural black figure has no need of an interior life or an imagination, given that his phallic reality and sexual bliss are richer than the [white] speaker’s dream. The argument that black figures have “plenty,” especially a full sensual life, is very difficult to displace as it ascribes to blacks a bliss that seems at first glance like a benefit. However, such an ideological claim strips the figure so invested of any other emotion or human situation – thought, grief, cunning, anger, narcissism, loss. Both Sterling Brown – in “Negro Characters by White Authors” () – and Alain Locke – in “The Negro in Art” () – analyzed the obdurate persistence of stereotyped depictions of blacks in modernism. Brown argues that, even in the late s, a range of high-, middle- and lowbrow work – in Agrarian writers, contemporary poets, and prizewinning O. Henry Award stories – showed ante-bellum grotesqueries passing for realist depictions. To a sophisticated version of this “cottonpatch and cabin-quarters formula” Stevens has generally acceded in his poems (Locke , ). In Locke’s view, the South won the Civil War culturally speaking, since so-called “modern” depictions still glorified slavery, offered justifications for it, and shed fake tears over incompetent freemen. White uses of black figures may not have been entitled “New” from the perspective of modernity, but these modern Euro-American representations had a good deal of cultural entitlement. Stevens identifies with the joyous creativity of his rural black subjects in the enounced and, in a next step, proceeds to ventriloquize black folk poems (though not their dialect) in a context – Harmonium – in which the sounds of many ethnic and gendered American subjectivities are being voiced – from the Oklahoma jolt of Josie, the “old song” of soldiers, to a Poesque “Vincentine,” to the German “Mutter” and her “Liebchen,” to Hispanic “revolutionists” and the quasi-Asian obliqueness of “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” In each of these works, there is an aural appropriation/creation of a mimic subjectivity alluding to a particular social and ethnic space; Stevens creates a new nation. Harmonium seems to be a work of pluralized citizenship, in which the subjectivity of enunciation has the power, will, and desire to incorporate, or voice, a multi-
“Darken your speech”: racialized cultural work in black and white poets plicity of social songs. The work’s witty title states “harmony” – these elements pleasingly, sympathetically, unconflictually combined. There is an imperial imagination in Stevens emphatically predicted by the poem “Architecture” – claiming that “only the lusty and the plenteous” are capacious enough to assimilate all the discursive styles, rhetorical modes, and social voices that make U.S. poetic authority – and also, perhaps, to neutralize or sweeten politics (Stevens , ). Certain poems of Stevens go further in instructing blacks even as the [white] speaker participates with them and appropriates their sound, creating a magpie black–white subjectivity. In “Ploughing on Sunday” (), the speaker has become the joyous, effervescent “plough-boy”; his lyric of poetic power is irrepressible. In the work, he demands to be celebrated for his access to pleasure and force as one rural worker to another: Remus, blow your horn! I’m ploughing on Sunday, Ploughing North America. Blow your horn!
(Stevens , )
The “Remus” instructed to celebrate the Bunyanesque elan of the plough-boy has virtually no connotation but black. The wise, wily “Uncle Remus” of [white writer] Joel Chandler Harris is a paternal figure with whom the speaker of the enounced identifies. By claiming rural citizenship and addressing himself to a black compatriot, the speaker makes raced and working class affirmation bold proofs of poetic power. In “The Jack-Rabbit” (before ) and “Some Friends from Pascagoula” (), Stevens proposes making poems, as a black folk poet, and/or instructing the making of black folk poetry as a [white] éminence gris. The two positions have in common an attempt to imitate the sound of a black “maker,” in a “racechanges” manner, as both Michael North and Susan Gubar have generally proposed (North ; Gubar , passim), but these are rural, not New Black subjectivities. “The JackRabbit” contains the intensities of an Uncle Remus beast fable. The black man said, “Look out, O caroller, The entrails of the buzzard Are rattling.”
(Stevens , )
This is a unique instance of the imagined speech of a black character; in most comparable moments, Stevens instructs these inspiring characters how to speak, and in sympathetic imperatives asks for more of their speech, but does not cite them. In “Some Friends from Pascagoula,” the
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
speaker is listening to a folk singer or a folk fabulist whom he is also instructing: Tell me more of the eagle, Cotton, And you, black Sly, Tell me how he descended Out of the morning sky. ............................................. Here was a sovereign sight, Fit for a kinky clan.
(ibid., –)
Although the desire to take this material for his own may be appropriation, pure and simple, these poems also bespeak a desire, however awkward, to know the talents of American blackness. Stevens’ personal “Negro Renaissance” mainly celebrates the rural pastoral. No New Black engagements occur. Indeed, as soon as there is any urban hint, or often when black female figures are at issue, the poems jump to a crude, jocular defensiveness against even a hint of black modernity. “The Virgin Carrying a Lantern” () expresses this female American Africanist presence with a nasty, voyeuristic, precision (Stevens , ). It is a comic poem wherein the word “negress” is part of the punch line, the butt of a joke. The “negress,” in her lower-case form, is like Eliot’s predatory “Big Black Kween” in the King Bolo and Columbo poems (Eliot , ). A fair, pious [white] “beauty,” perhaps one of the wise virgins of the Bible is set by Stevens against a black figure who becomes sexually excited. The pity that her [the virgin’s] pious egress Should fill the vigil of a negress (Stevens , ) With heat so strong!
The manipulative, comic rhyme in the enunciation is the centerpiece of the poem, creating it as a jeu d’esprit archly laughing off, while expressing white erotic anxiety about the promiscuous potential of female and black sexuality. Polysexuality, lesbianism, fetishism intermingle in this visualization of cross-race, same-gender sexual desire. “Contents of a Cab” mocks a figure whose pretensions to refinement and elegance are dismantled by the poem. Victoria Clementina, negress, Took seven white dogs To ride in a cab. () (Stevens , –)
The group of dogs (or men) indicate excessive and uncontrollable sexuality, as in the decadent depictions of women and dogs suggestively
“Darken your speech”: racialized cultural work in black and white poets presented by Bram Dijkstra (, –). The poem is a luxurious imagination of a sexual black woman so tempting as to be frightening, whose sexuality – whether of the urban setting she enters with the pretence (as the poet sees it) of elegance, or of the imagined jungle where her “savage blooms” have full play – is barely contained by the poem. Joan Richardson reads the poem as a work about the role of the imagination for Stevens: “here was a metaphoric illustration of the kind of completion indulging poetry allowed” – sexual completion in fantasy and displaced of acts and desires deeply sinful and forbidden, the fuel of his poetry, in general, being desire (Richardson , ). This is clearly so, but the social and cultural contexts pointed to – urban migration and urbane blacks, changing sexual attitudes, the fantasy sexual status of black women, the twenty-five anti-black race riots of , which is the poem’s date – need not drop out or be allegorized away from specific social meaning. Stevens depicts a black female one step from savage sexuality, once the veneer of civilization is stripped from her loins. Primitivist ideology is a way of answering New Black social possibilities. Thus for Stevens, the buoyant and generous black muse figures are generally male; the threatening and dangerous black figures are females. However, both figures fulfill what Toni Morrison sees as the cultural duties of the Africanist persona for Euro-American writers (, –). Part of the entitlement of white subjectivity is to be able to shape black subjects in the enounced as fantasy fulfillments, to inhabit them, to voice for them. Stevens’ glancing, and resisted, allusions to issues for black modernity (lynching, nightriders), do not destabilize his rural, tropical golden-age paradigm of primitivism and potency through which his speech is correspondingly “darkened.” Indeed, a number of Euro-American modernists found their art was inspired and provoked by Africanist “duskiness.” Their ways of seeking that duskiness and its advantages seem quite lurid at times. When D. H. Lawrence asks, “Can you, after dark, become a darkie?” he links a libidinal time to an attitude assumed to be more fleshly. To “run up against the standing flesh of you / with a shock, as against the blackness of a negro . . .” links flesh, the unconscious, and complex feelings of white desire and need whose token or symbol are so conveniently unspecified, unindividualized black people (Lawrence , ). Blacks have often been used by whites as an image of the unconscious of whites – fecund, productive, creative, but, as it were, in a colonial relation, the raw material of blackness fueling poetic production in the
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
factory of whiteness. The conglomerate of attitudes in Euro-American Africanism shows wild, volatile, one might say “primitive” changes of white attitudes from wonder to disgust, envy to malice, fear to desire, tempted rejection to vulnerable and manipulative identification. The discussions of entitlement and theoretical analyses made in black modernity are generally unknown to Euro-American poets. In contrast, “dusky words and dusky images” already exist; they can be affirmed in powerful spurts of projection, invoking discourses, stereotypes and propositions of race, based on understandings of “Africa” as an idea, “the primitive,” racial essence, and other fraught topoi.22 The investments both white and black cultural communities made in the notion of “the primitive” (as the technical opposite of modernity) help construct black subjectivity for both white and black writers in modernism. To discuss this necessitates a turn to ideas about Africa. The de Zayas monograph African Negro Art: its Influence on Modern Art () offers symptomatic materials. Although the essay announces that the discussion of this influence will be central, actually the proposition in the subtitle is treated in only one paragraph at the end of forty pages. The rest is a bolus of scientific racism. Brain studies disparaging and final, the notion of superior and inferior races, the “fact” that Africans are like children, the sense that one has captured the first evolution of the human race in Africans are propositions outlined with absolutely no reservations. “An ethnological group can exist to-day whose brain is in a very primitive state and which, therefore, produce a very primitive art” (de Zayas , ). The brains of Africans “can be considered as being in the first state of the evolution of the brain of man” (). This lively sketch of a racist baseline (blacks are human, but not as “evolved” as whites) demands we ask why any modern Euro-American artist would desire to be influenced by African art. De Zayas then remarks that African abstraction brings us closer to “our” feelings. This is consistent with the view of blacks as a kind of case study: “human nature obscured by so little veneer” (Peterkin, Crisis, Sept. , ). The more evolved naturalistic representations of Western art offer only “the reality of the outer world.” The price of white superiority and evolutionary perfection is a modern loss of an inner world for which the “very primitive state” offers solace and replacement – again the cultural “duties” of the Africanist materials are patent. “The abstract representation of modern art is unquestionably the offspring of the Negro Art, which has made us conscious of a subjective state, obliterated by objective education” (de Zayas , ). Whites have been denatured; blacks
“Darken your speech”: racialized cultural work in black and white poets will restore them. Whites are too objective, too intellectual; an infusion of subjective mindlessness from blacks, graciously accepted despite white superiority – these are the strained explanations for the influence of African art on European modernism. Gertrude Stein did, of course, know African art, and her propositions about it were in many ways the negative – but not the negation – of de Zayas’ argument. Indeed, Stein expends serious effort to explain away both African sculpture in itself, and its impact on Picasso. In her essay “Picasso” (), Stein says was “the negro period” in his art, but she sees him essentially as having a Spanish vision. She comments, damningly, that “African art [was] like the other influences which at one time or another diverted Picasso from the way of painting which was his” (Stein , , ). Not only a diversion, but an unworthy one, for “the african is not primitive, he has a very ancient but a very narrow culture and there it remains” (Stein , ). Thus African art is caught in cultural stasis and immobility, as the universalizing singular insists; this parallels de Zayas’ conviction that “there is no evolution in Negro art” (, ).23 By arguing that such work was not primitive, she sidesteps a very controversial word and concept, but in a scandalous manner, insisting that the traditions of African art were in fact created by Arabs: and that, while it was civilized, African art was also quite limited, arrested in development.24 This perverse point is a version of the nervy and nervous disparaging of African descended people in which Stein engaged: as she said in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, “negroes were not suffering from persecution they were suffering from nothingness” (Stein , ). A. L. Nielsen has foregrounded this remark as a key expression of a central Euro-American attitude, a kind of existential and ontological erasure of black reality (, –). Primitivism is a contradictory set of findings and attitudes, an “ensemble of tropes” (in Marianna Torgovnick’s words) that form a complex of evocations from the unexamined perspective of an Us about a Them that is childlike and violent, mysterious, dark, irrational, lower, docile, and yet resistant, taboo in their lust and yet natural in sexual matters (Torgovnick , ). Nathan Huggins shows this fusion in his critical discussion the white vision of Harlem as primitive, romantic, and vitalist – a cure for white modernity. Harlem offered “a means of soft rebellion for those who rejected the Babbittry and sterility of their lives,” a rebellion conveniently involving only “a taxi trip to the exotic” (Huggins , , ). Primitivist yearnings, no matter how naive, offered inchoate critique of modernity. This anti-modernization thesis
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
is central to the argument of the art historian Gill Perry. The “positive discrimination in favour of so-called ‘primitive’ subjects and techniques” visible in the visual arts in the early twentieth century, made a serious critique of modernity (Harrison et al. , ). Perry discusses the ways in which “primitive” has at one and the same time been used “positively and pejoratively” in European discourses (–). Pejorative primitivist thinking found repugnant that which positive views sought out. These attitudes were not necessarily separated in texts, arguments, oeuvres. The confused impact of de Zayas, for instance, is the result of forty pages of pejorative primitivist thinking meeting a paragraph of positive primitivist notions. Tumbled together are negative notions of societies barbaric, uncivilized, without “cultural ‘progress,’” notions visible in Stein. These join positive vitalist ideas of primitive primalness, goodness, closeness to the wellsprings of life. We see this in Stevens’ view of black males; yet his view of black females is closer to pejorative primitivism. In discussing the uses of the primitive, it is important to remember that many of its terms are idealizing, and sometimes admiring (though never really respectful), at the same time that the terms are disparaging and dismissive. If socalled primitives are, for one example, “libidinous” or “sexually free,” the valence of these terms can extend from prurient voyeurism into admiration, through jealousy, to disgust. Primitivism always negotiates political and historical gain for its white users, for as a discourse, primitivism denies history, real time, and maturity to its native denizens, erasing the existence of tribal peoples as functioning adults and as serious artists, operating in historical and situational circumstances, in favor of infantalizing visions which preserve for Western civilization a role as capstone (Price , –). One begins to see primitivist nostalgia as expressing an unspoken guilt for imperialist claims to the land, the livelihood, and even the life of a variety of othered peoples. Modernist primitivism is both symptom and putative cure for the wounds of imperialism and related versions of appropriated labor and land, such as the American slave and sharecropper systems. In some modern works, positive primitivist tropes provide a simply irresistible mythology about Others. For whatever distressed EuroAmerican culture, blacks of all kinds and of any kind (whether these were Africans, African-Americans, persons, sculptures, rural sharecroppers, urban jazz musicians, etc.) seemed to have the cure. This interested encomium for (apparently) simple peoples, peasants, closeness to the
“Darken your speech”: racialized cultural work in black and white poets land or to nature, a folk sweetness or special wisdom, could pass into fear-laden pejorative tropes of tribal mystery, preternatural strength or perception, the thicker, resistant nature represented by “the jungle,” unusual sexual prowess, lurking rites and so on. Believers in primitivist thinking will resist the notion that any civilization, tribal or urban, is a complex webbing of forces with historical, intellectual, and social specificities, that – in Jerome Rothenberg’s dialectical aphorism – “Primitive means complex” in the same way that modern means complex (, ). Indeed, in that sense, there are no primitives at all. The whole concept is an (albeit seductive) fake. Insofar as American blacks were largely (before the Great Migration) a kind of rural serflike peasantry, and because Southern white ideological efforts had been expended in a late nineteenth century campaign of romanticization of the position of African-Americans in the slave economy, rural African-Americans were susceptible to primitivist mythologizing depictions. However, urban and middle class blacks – the New Black – endured this projection also, which thus reveals itself as an ideological free agent quasi-independent of socioeconomic realities. This projection is visible in a sour review from of Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven, Walter White’s Flight (and works by Dos Passos and Hemingway), in which D. H. Lawrence protests Van Vechten’s important resistance to primitivizing his middle-class hero and heroine (a resistance that notoriously does not extend to the other black characters in the book). Lawrence is annoyed at this failure, for he deeply desires the illusion he also sardonically criticizes, a striking ideological contradiction. “Reading negro books [White’s], or books about negroes written from the negro standpoint [Van Vechten’s], it is absolutely impossible to discover that the nigger [sic] is any blacker inside than we are . . . It is rather disappointing. One likes to cherish illusions about the race soul, the eternal negroid soul, black and glistening and touched with awfulness and mystery” (Lawrence , ). His posturing irony about this need still demands the smoke and mirrors of “awfulness and mystery.” For white writers, primitivist thinking was a way to undercut New Black modernity. Hardly a small question to begin with, discussions must account for African-American writers who also face Africa and the primitive as a discursive cluster; for them as for the Euro-Americans, the primitive is a topos of romanticized yearning. But the topos differs considerably given the racial position of its user. The notion of being wrested from an Eden, the idea of being part of a place where brown and black skin is natural,
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
unmarked, undespised, and where the bearer will not have to beat on the “leaden door” of racism (to cite Georgia Douglas Johnson) gives rise to a number of poems using primitive tropes (Hughes and Bontemps , ). Langston Hughes’ “Dream Variation” () – “To fling my arms wide / In some place of the sun, / To whirl and to dance / Till the white day is done” – is a yearning for the place where to be black and expressive and joyous is comfortable (Hughes and Bontemps, , ). Sometimes the trope of Africa asserts a reality behind a (primitivizing) mythos to contest Africa’s appropriation while appreciating its impact: “I know now” says Hughes () that “In Africa” “tom-toms . . . do beat / In village squares under the mango trees” (Hughes and Bontemps , ). The poem mentions a series of foreign places (Paris, Antwerp, Venice – and Africa) which Hughes, with his justifiable “from Missouri” attitude has seen with his own eyes and can attest to. It is also plausible that the depictions of Africa in African-American work were early explorations in the pan-Africanist mode, given early anti-imperialist conferences (from about on) spearheaded by Du Bois and analyzed by Locke. Helene Johnson’s “Magalu” and Cullen’s “Heritage” put the poetspeakers into Africa, to resist or criticize the denatured qualities of EuroAmerican Christianity. Helene Johnson asks the African “Would you sell the colors of your sunset and the fragrance / Of your flowers, and the passionate wonder of your forest / For a creed that will not let you dance?” (Hughes and Bontemps , ). Cullen’s poem offers a rich argument about the compelling contradictory emotions that the visionary fantasy of Africa sets off in him. He tries to resist these emotions, and the striking gods of polytheistic religion, in favor of Christianity. But with austere Marvellian resonance – in the urbane couplets of Marvell’s Horatian ode, the speaker claims to hear drums booming even when he stops his own ears against the tempting throbbing. He desires that his God be black, he feels an urgent dance rhythm, and, in the fierce last lines whose tri-syllable couplet rhyme is a measure of the control which the poem has elaborated, he admits such temptation from the drumming, that his head and heart have not “realized” that he is, and needs to remain, “civilized.” Primitivist tropes within New Black modernity seem to be a way of showing such self-divisions. Yet Cullen also claims not to be interested in “nebulous atavistic yearnings toward an African inheritance” (, xi). One might venture that he does not want the Africa topos to be either controlled by or provoked by the expectations of others. In many poems by African-Americans, “primitive” means a
“Darken your speech”: racialized cultural work in black and white poets kind of inner freedom, self-expression untempered by white scrutiny and white judgment, or a flare of freedom and beauty drawing deep on a racial past, and bypassing racial prejudice and pain. The eleven poems in the final section of Hughes’ first book The Weary Blues (), poems under the rubric “Our Land,” turn and return to the repressive coldness of the white world that “tortures” a variety of black people; the several “primitive tom-toms” are a straining reminder of black authenticity and autonomy. In some of these poems Africa is the body of blackness, and the black body is inscribed essentially with Africa. “Those mountains should be ours” says Arna Bontemps of the African landscape, in “Golgotha is a Mountain” (), but the work also speaks of the crucifixion of the African peoples, and the breaking of the black body; hence the poem is both an affirmation (hoping for the repossession of one’s body and one’s original land) and an elegy of total loss, for a burial after the breaking (Bontemps , ). This is seen in the social philology of the phrase “moulded glory,” said of the treasure inside the African mountains, for “moulded” means pressured, shaped, and formed, but it also means crumbled, disintegrated, and decaying – “One day I will crumble,” says the speaker, of both death and a giving way under unmanageable pressure. However, for many African-American poets, “primitive” often means an semi-ideal place where whites cannot touch or bother one, where one can resist white culture, or declare an anti-imperialist stance. For many Euro-American poets, on the other hand, “primitive” seems to mean a site in which one can capture and grasp the deepest spirit of blacks. The divergences and differences in interests in the discussions of the primitive between being untouched/autonomous, and being touched/appropriated are striking. For African-Americans, primitivism makes a pre-imperialist/pre-enslavement affirmation of power; for EuroAmericans primitivism proposes a cure for (or vacation from) the pain of, or even recognition of, their political and economic masteries. In one case, poets affirm an actually compromised power; in another, poets deny an actually patent power. The investments in figures and topoi of black creativity differ markedly in the two ethnic communities. This “primitive” material is, to say the least, a site of discursive conflict and questions of ownership between American (and interested British) writers of different races, despite the similarities of the images they use. Civilization is a social and spiritual burden (and the jungle is a free space) because “civilization” has placed exorbitant, unforgiving demands
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
upon African-Americans; it is a trope for enslavement, serf status, or extractive claims. Fenton Johnson explains the interest of “resting” in these terms: “I am tired of work; I am tired of building up somebody else’s civilization” (Hughes and Bontemps , ). Insofar as hard drinking, hard dancing, and hard gambling can make up for the pain of growing up to “find that you are colored,” as Johnson says, such activities may appear full of “primitive” license, but may have other causes than the essentialized libido so frequently touted for its explanatory value. Other New World African descendents also have written poems that signify on the question just who exactly is primitive. Claude McKay’s sonnet “America” limns as a jungle predator the vigorous new country (to which he immigrated from Jamaica): “Although she feeds me bread of bitterness, / And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth, / Stealing my breath of life, I will confess / I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!” (Hughes and Bontemps ed. , ). Langston Hughes accepts the animal analogy but in a critical way in “Lament for Dark Peoples”; the term “circus” emphasizes the constructedness of the animal trope. Now they’ve caged me In the circus of civilization. Now I herd with the many – Caged in the circus of civilization. (Hughes , )
Lillian Byrnes has a poem from in which she attempts, pushing against an intractable cliché, to invent “the ‘Great Blond Beast,’ ” a rapacious “Nordic” man, a move performed to counter, or match the “black beast” of America’s lurid racial melodrama (Honey , ). “Nordic” was the word used recurrently in this period for Anglo-Germanic white superiority in the pseudo-scientific contexts of racial classification. In his poem “Dust,” Waring Cuney offers “Ozimandias”-like reflections about “the skill / With which you [“proud ones” / whites] play this game – Civilization”: pointedly, “The Coliseum tells a story / The Woolworth Building may repeat” () – that is the decline and fall of imperial ruling powers (Cullen , ). The critique by African-American writers of the notions, and location, of the “civilized” is one response to the plethora of “primitivisms” in Euro-American work. In the “civilization” trope, African-American writers try to criticize and reconsider the locus of the “primitive” against dominant discourse. Gail Bederman has argued that the hegemonic “discourse of civilization” was, at root, a white-supremicist, male-supremicist set of ideas (Bederman , ).
“Darken your speech”: racialized cultural work in black and white poets The material about the primitive parallels the different investments in dusky words in general: while African-American writers struggle for cultural authority and for the right to comment on their situation, for the freedom to make racially marked works or not, for the leverage to work out the terms of a relationship with culture, tradition, language, a white writer such as Stevens has an already carved-out place for blacks that enhances his cultural authority. Both white and black writers claim poetic authority by the possession and use of black-inflected materials, but they do so differently. The restraint of the word “dusky” or “darken” has its correspondent in another much-used, much less delicate racial epithet. The most visible racial moment in Stevens is probably the title of his – poem, “Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery.” Very few critics have commented directly on the word choice in the title; Helen Vendler is one exception; Mark Scroggins is another. “This is Stevens’ flagrant borrowed simile for a chain of poems.” (Vendler , ; also see Scroggins , –). “Flagrant” registers the shock of a word that carries a full burden of at least careless, at most racist attitudes; “borrowed” is semi-exculpatory – the mot is cited. “The title,” Stevens notes, “refers to the litter that one usually finds in a nigger cemetery and is a phrase used by Judge Powell last winter in Key West” (Stevens , ; Dec., , ).25 However, this word choice is not a unique instance in Stevens (nor in other white writers); Stevens chose to use it several times, in several poems (see Nielsen , , for other instances). Here is an incantatory place: “Solange, the magnolia to whom I spoke / A nigger tree and with a nigger name. . . .” whose fragrance is “Almost a nigger fragment” (Stevens , ; poem from ). Such a word so obdurately repeated clearly had a tempting, even desirable, aspect for the poet. It seems to mark that deep merge of erotic and aesthetic yearning that we have already established in Stevens’ poems. It is clear that white writers of the early modern era had a kind of birthright eclecticism, born of white privilege, about their synonyms for African-Americans, with a vague pretense of not fully crediting the special force of this focal word (or crediting it only sometimes). And the word takes its revenge, for it pretty much overpowers Stevens’ poem.26 As we have already seen from a reading of Cullen’s “Incident” (in chapter one), in African-American poetry from the early modern era, the word “nigger” is not, in the main, casual; its positioning and focus differ markedly from those uses made by white poets. In a notable poem
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
by Frank Horne, “Nigger: a Chant for Children,” the poet pursues the pursued child with an ironic primer. As the child is taunted by the ugly cry, Horne counterposes five noble, mainly black, heroes who had been called “Nigger . . . nigger . . . nigger” – Hannibal, Othello, Crispus Attucks, Toussaint and – Jesus (Johnson , –). The “Jesus” material is part of a rich African-American tradition of employing the Calvary motif for torture and martyrdom, so that blacks become honorary Christ figures, and Jesus, normatively the property of white mythology, becomes an honorary black by virtue of his suffering. Horne’s poem, with its calculated repetition of the term “nigger” (three times in every stanza, four or five times in the framing stanzas, once in the title, twenty-five times in all), is an implacable mixture of consoling and bitter, a vaccine employing the ugly virus of this word to control – and expose – its effects.27 Stevens may have felt this word choice was unremarkable, just one word in his wide-ranging vocabulary, one frequent enough in [white] usage, and anyway part of the vibrant diction and flexible heteroglossia which makes his poetry, in general, so appealing. However, no matter when you track it, the word also carries a depth charge of derogation, insult, and offense. The OED gives an American usage from that makes that connotation clear: “when I say ‘colored’ I mean one thing respectfully; and when I say ‘niggerish’ I mean another, disgustedly.” Clarence Major’s Jive to Juba: a Dictionary of Afro-American Slang offers social wisdom lucidly about differentials in use based on different social locations: “when used by a white person addressing a black person, usually it is offensive and disparaging – and has been so since the end of the Civil War; used by black people among themselves, it is a racial term with undertones of warmth and good will – reflecting, aside from the irony, a tragicomic sensibility that is aware, on some level, of black history” (Major , ).28 This is a word which certainly marshalls visceral effects and psychosocial resonances; it is a bolus of hotwires. Reporting on Hemingway, Toni Morrison observes that “[the term ‘nigger’] occupies a territory between man and animal and thus withholds specificity even while marking it” (, ). It is clear that most blacks have had one view of this word choice; in this early modernist period, many whites had another.29 Different investments all over again. Euro-Americans offer a squeamish, bad-faith mixture of “just a word, no special resonance,” while they banked on its special resonance of white superiority and contempt. For example, it is a word Pound used about African-American
“Darken your speech”: racialized cultural work in black and white poets poet–critic William Braithwaite, a genteel Boston anthologist and man of letters, who reviewed Pound unfavorably and stood for a kind of poetry with which he had absolutely no patience (Pound , ; see also “coon,” , ). In short, the offensive word in Stevens’ poem was a commonplace for many white writers. The use of the word “nigger” could be seen in relation to the appropriation of black-based images; one must demean the owner to take the beloved product. I am echoing Eric Lott’s terms love and theft, in his influential work on the functions of minstrelsy in nineteenthcentury United States culture. There are, in these poems, “contradictory racial impulses” at work, the “dialectical flickering of racial insult and racial envy, moments of domination and moments of liberation” which, together, Lott identifies as “a peculiarly American structure of feeling” (, , ). The desire for what blackness meant (love in Lott’s terms) and the guilt over the mistreatment of blacks on a political and economic level led to a muted Euro-American anxiety and guilt. Stevens’ poem “Like Decorations . . .” (as it is often safely dubbed in the criticism) has been taken as an “olio” – a Caribbean-African stew; a hodge-podge medley; a vaudeville entertainment between the acts of a minstrel (or burlesque) show. It also might be a generic transposition from the decorated graves with their spiritual power and warding to the genre of the poem – each section a little grave, perhaps. The poem is a set of epigrams on a variety of cultural materials – eclectic, but not African-American (except for the overarching allusion in the title). However, because of that allusion, one could argue (rather painfully) that Stevens saw himself as analogous to a black folk artist; he too is making decorations in the aforementioned cemetery out of attractive debris and whatever comes to hand (a “man on the dump” modernism). Of course, Stevens is not (for reasons of both race and class) easily masked as a black folk artist; nothing seems further from the plausible. Yet he wants again and again to try. He puts himself into a black space, appropriates a black formal, generic, and spiritual idea, and uses a term for the process within the discourse of both races. Conversely, the poem may be addressed over the heads of blacks to the Southern judge who offered him the title – a kind of old [white] boys’ jocularity. But further, given the fact that this is not a particularly compelling work, and that it may have been made up of fragments that could not, for whatever reason, be developed into richer poems, Stevens may have chosen the title word as a term for a lot of throwaway materials that could, with
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
such a title, be unified as lesser, yet witty, work and be excusable as such. What Stevens’ title also assumes is that [white] readers would continue to read the offensive word as jaunty and amusing; this assumption is perhaps what all readers have to be able, now, to confront, for its stark revelations about different investments in racialized discourses from two social communities with different power.
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
If the anti-Semite charges that the Semitic spirit mongrelizes his national culture, the Modern Pharisee complains that the mongrelization is quite mutual . . . In fact, Jews being a minority people, they are more mongrelized than mongrelizing. Joel Blau, Atlantic Monthly, 1
In , two years after Russian terrorists assassinated Czar Alexander II, compelling (in the scapegoating and pogrom aftermath) a mass migration of Russian and Polish Jews to the U.S. and England, Emma Lazarus composed “The New Colossus.” This sonnet, now inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty, contrasts old world and new, the “brazen” Apollo at the harbor at Rhodes and the statue called “Mother of Exiles” (). “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” (Lazarus , )
Lazarus took hold of many pseudo-scientific descriptors of the immigrants of the late nineteenth century: Jews, Slavs, Italians, Irish, in such flash-point words as “teeming,” suggesting overwhelming fertility, and the enormous euphony of “wretched refuse,” connoting disease, filth, and garbage. The word “masses,” perhaps evoking the political radicalism that could plot and undermine, was neutralized by the vulnerability of “huddled.” Lazarus, an upper class, assimilated Jew, worked to contain the damage of these much-invoked negative words by the Great Mother figure, and her poem proposed that a patrician renewal of generosity would assist those “yearning to breathe free.”2 Her own social attitudes toward the new Jewish arrivals with their unassimilated
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
Orthodox oddness were less sanguine, and yet the subject of the enounced (the Statue herself) seems to coincide with the subject of the enunciation (Lazarus herself) in ways that ennoble the author (Lindemann , ). On the same topic – Diaspora and immigration, the British poet Richard Aldington produced a set of parodic, ignoble sonnets. One features an allegorical female rather different from the “Mother of Exiles.” Behold Columbia in her cosmic robes – Illimitable Eros weds Osiris now – Dagos and niggers, Polacks, Dutchmen, Jews. (, )
Here the United States becomes a sacred prostitute of the Hellenistic decadence (a triple amalgam of Isis, Eros, Columbia), promiscuously accepting “races” in rank catalogue. While all of the new immigrants were caught up in this net of pseudo-scientific politicized fantasy, Jews are my topic here, along with the emergence of these discursive nodules, the arrangement of “social evaluations” in poetry (Bakhtin/Medvedev , ). This chapter is situated just before the “melting pot” metaphor became hegemonic; the metaphor and social evaluation on which I shall focus is its alternative: “mongrel.” About a million “premodern and preindustrial” Jews immigrated from the Russian Empire (including Poland) between and , with an upsurge in immigration after the anti-Semitic laws in Russia of , after – (with new Russian pogroms), and after the revolutionary attempt was broken. Then after the Russian Revolution (–), there were other surges (Dawidowicz , ). About percent of this million went to the United States and percent to Britain. In general, the presence of Jews affected discourses of the modern, for there is a convergence, as Norman Finkelstein notes, between the Jewish crisis of modernity – “Enlightenment,” assimilation, secularization, the nature of tradition plausible in diasporic communities, including intermarriage with non-Jews – and modernity’s crisis with Jews – civil rights and “emancipation,” scapegoating, antiSemitism.3 Further, the figure of the Jew as a cultural formation in modernity is one part of a “contrapuntal ensemble,” in Edward Said’s terms, structured and maintained in relation both to Christian hegemony and to nativist proto-fascism (Said , ). Henry James had evinced a fascinated distaste in , walking through the Lower East Side, anatomizing the “Hebrew conquest of New York” (), and crossing paths, according to Louis Zukofsky’s
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
provocative self-mythology, with himself as a baby (James , ; Zukofsky , ). James runs through a catalogue of envious disgust at the vitality, teeming populations, alien qualities, and sheer materiality of Jewish immigrant bodies (James , –). Indeed many saw the new Jewish immigrants as “our Yiddish conquerors” and “our Asiatic invaders,” predicting a society “plagued” (a word condensing discourses – both bothered and diseased) as a result of this “alien immigration” (Holmes , , ). As the diction choices show, the political question of conquest and the medical/physical question of bodily plague were especially keen; these two issues fuse in mainstream fears of fertility and “teeming” on the one hand, and “race suicide” via mongrelization on the other.4 The charges against the Jews were similar in both the U.S. and England: an infestation of the social body and an infesting particular body were featured in the attacks. These prejudices enjoyed mobility; one negative stereotype seemed to evoke the other, even, as Bryan Cheyette argues, when “semitic discourses” featured contradictory claims about “the Jew,” as both modern and medieval, both socialist and capitalist ().5 In a political category, Jewish particularism and separateness led to the charge of being “a nation within a nation” with “divided loyalties,” a group whose national allegiance could be questioned (Holmes , and ). Then there were other political fears – the claim that Jews had “secret revolutionary societies” (); in any event, they often became symbols of “foreign radicalism” (Higham , ). There were fears that Jews could come to dominate society as it was; indeed, that they already did. There were fears that Jews controlled the press and finance, fears that they had an international and transnational financial network that threatened national policy decisions (keywords here are cosmopolitan, subterranean, and materialist) (Holmes , , ; Lindemann , ). In , in an economic slump and time of “political disillusion,” Henry Ford began influentially to champion the idea that “Jewish money-kings” ran the world (, ). Indeed, there were charges that Jews had both induced the U.S. to enter the First World War, and then had prolonged that war for the gain of Jews as a group (). After the First World War, the Bolshevik revolution, and a few short-lived left coups in European states, the specter of left and socialist victories were a red flag, so to speak, to isolationist and conservative strands of American politics. In the United States a strong nativist and “Americanization” movement responded to the fear that “America, Americans and Americanism are being crowded out of America” (
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
letter, in Higham , ). A series of interlocking events – the Palmerinspired deportation of “subversives” (left-wing immigrants), the resurgence of the anti-black, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic Ku Klux Klan, and the renewal of immigration from Russia (in the wake of its civil war in –), all propelled the climax of a xenophobic reaction that had been underway throughout the period from s (Dawidowicz , –). The body of the imagined Jew, its ability to stain and taint those who came in contact with it, combined with the medical ills of the poor, induced a germ theory of immigrants as bacilli, a “filthy, ricketty jetsam of humanity” (Holmes , ; from Roger Sherard – a British journalist who investigated immigration to America). The immigrants were taxed by one fierce British commentator (Joseph Banister) with being “semitic sewage” – odor, oiliness, “Asiatic” looks, and germ-carrying all added up to danger from a Jew’s touch (Holmes , ). The epidemics of cholera and typhus in New York City added to these fears, and encouraged metaphors of pestilence being applied to immigrants (Markel , , ). There were anxieties about sexuality and hegemony aroused by teeming and fertility, “a Jewry that had burst all bounds” (James , ). Yet those kinds of analyses or presentations of ruling ideas were often couched in representations filled with checkered admiration for the Jews’ energy and verve, social and reproductive. Finally, a racial purity argument emerges (paralleling eugenic ideas), a concern with “race degeneration or race suicide” proposed in both England and the States by a number of influential thinkers. If intermarriage continued, encouraged by immigration, Anglo-Americans and older immigrants would be committing “race suicide” (Higham , –). The “race” to which worried “Americans” already belonged, the “Nordics,” feared the mixing of good white stock with the Slavs, Jews, and Southern Europeans would create “a hybrid race of people as worthless and futile as the good-for-nothing mongrels of Central America and Southeastern Europe” (Kenneth Roberts [], cited by Higham , ). The fears of mongrelizing the white race, polluting it, stunting it, weakening its hegemony, destroying it were bolstered by such screeds as Alfred Schultz’s book Race or Mongrel. Schultz is succinct, presenting, before one leaves the title page, “a theory that the fall of nations is due to intermarriage with alien stocks: a demonstration that a nation’s strength is due to racial purity: a prophecy that America will sink to early decay unless immigration is rigorously restricted” (, title page). A similarly apocalyptic work, Madison Grant’s The Passing of the
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
Great Race (), enjoyed great credibility in the early twenties, influencing both journalists and scholarly writers, and popularizing the idea that the mixing of ethnic groups produced and promoted “mongrelization” and degeneracy in the “race” that counted. A third influential work, Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy (), comments that “the Nordic native American has been crowded out with amazing rapidity by these swarming, prolific aliens . . .” (, ).6 In the National Origins Act restricted immigration to the United States. The issue of “racial mixing” or mongrelization even had some interesting modulations in certain Jewish and philo-Semitic hands. Enlightenment Jews themselves debated traditionally forbidden intermarriage with non-Jews and their loss of particularism. Indeed Maurice Fishberg’s nonpartisan ethnographic study of the Jews, focusing on the processes of assimilation and the debunking of stereotypes, still contains a sudden warning against Jewish “race suicide” that echoes, with its own traditional Jewish particularism, “Nordic” thinking (Fishberg , vii). Those Jews who were pro-intermarriage had to acknowledge the “mongrel” charge; those who were against intermarriage could find themselves praised by nativist thinkers for their own “purity.” In a grand but suspect philo-Semitic gesture in his general fulmination against mixings and mongrelizings, Alfred Schultz offers backhanded praise to the Jews for not intermarrying, and thus not mongrelizing their “race”: “Promiscuous crossing reduced Greece, Egypt, the Hindoos, the Romans. Racial purity is the secret of the success of the Jews” (, ). Some Jews agreed: assimilation meant the loss of particularism, of “distinctiveness, separation, noble aloofness,” even the loss of the “Jewish soul” (Blau , and ). Thus there could be a confluence among nativist thinkers and Jews supporting traditional exclusiveness. But even so, most nativist discourse saw the Jews as destructive. Henry Pratt Fairchild suggested () that Jews, no matter how distinctive and highminded, are simply affiliated with the new (non-Nordic) immigration, raising the problem of “race mixing” (of Northern Europeans – the stable American stock – with Southern/Eastern Europeans), which leads to the creation of the mongrel (, ). Fairchild’s work is a defense of the restrictions of the immigration bill with its nationalorigin clause. Fairchild defends the bill by attacking a galvanic, influential counterweight to the mongrelization metaphor. In The Melting-Pot (), a play by Israel Zangwill, it is proclaimed: “America is God’s Crucible,
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming! Here you stand, good folk, think I, when I see them at Ellis Island, here you stand in your fifty groups, with your fifty languages and histories and your fifty blood hatreds and rivalries. But you won’t be long like that, brothers, for these are the fires of God you’ve come to – these are the fires of God” (, ). The utopian, universalizing metaphor that God Himself will melt down all traditional political and social antagonisms in the Crucible of America is repeated at the peroration of the play. In The Melting-Pot Mistake, his polemical monograph, Fairchild grouses that “The figure [of the melting-pot] was a clever one – picturesque, expressive, familiar, just the sort of thing to catch the popular fancy.” Not incidentally, each of those five adjectives is coded “Jewish.” But he goes on to call the concept of assimilation “a fallacy” because it violates racial and national “group unity” (Fairchild , , , , ). To cite a Jew against Israel Zangwill and his New Jew “mistake” of the melting-pot, Fairchild selects the anti-assimilationist essay () of Joel Blau, who sees assimilation as destructive of “distinctiveness” and particularism. Specifically the “Jewish soul” is put in danger. “This oriental soul [is what] the Modern Pharisee [the anti-assimilationist, spiritually inspired, but modern Jew] claims as his birthright, not to be traded away for the contents of any pot – even though it be the Melting-Pot” (Blau , ). The evocation of materialist Sadducees in the word “traded” is also cutting. New Jews should, in his view, avoid giving up their birthright, as Esau did, for a mess of melting-pot pottage. It is mongrelization in another guise: Zangwill’s productive–creative metaphor of “crucible” devolves to a culinary–familial trick – the Jacob–Esau incident of patriarchal blessing on the wrong Jew, evoking the muted sexual/breeding metaphor in “mongrel.” This essay shows that the entitlement of the “new” in New Jew was under debate in much the same ways we have seen in the other groups this book has discussed. Among Jews themselves, there were many social fissures and conflicts: between the established community of mainly German Jews and these new immigrants, among the very Orthodox, or the very secular among the immigrants and the nascent Reform Judaism of the already established American Jews, between the different social classes in which Jews were present. What ideology informed the position “New Jew”: was it Zionism ( saw the first Zionist conference)? Was it adhesion to the Pittsburgh platform () with its theology of reform – the tempering of Chosen People claims, for example? Was it a resurgence of neoOrthodoxy based on the practices of the pre-Emancipation immigrants
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
from Eastern Europe? Was it secular Yiddishkeit? And was assimilation a gain or a loss? (Joseph Blau , passim). The socio-cultural struggles within the Jewish community comprised Jewish modernity in the same way that debates about African-Americans and the representation of blacks were, in sum, the New Black. Yet, as Tamar Garb shows, contemporaneous racial pseudo-science argued that although Judaism could be set aside by conversion or by enlightenment/emancipation and its secularizing trends, “Jewishness” was figured as an essence, and pathologized in a variety of ways (Garb in Nochlin and Garb , ). For Jews, the struggle for civil rights, the advantages and costs of assimilation, the loss of particularism, secularist thinking – issues all emerging from post-enlightenment, modernizing Judaism (Haskalah) – could still be qualified by the evocation of this essence. Hence writers of Jewish background often had to investigate the social and personal meaning of their formation as Jews as part of their entitlement as writers. For both Jews and non-Jews, the imaginary Jew (as Linda Nochlin calls this figure, although, like all stereotypes, it wasn’t totally imaginary) played a rich ideological bogey-role and helped provoke and solidify the articulation of a Christianized high modernism. This chapter examines, via a social philology, several writers who felt entitled to semiticized materials. Diagnosing and curing “the Jew,” traveling to exile and back with “the Jew,” identifying with and against the assimilated Jew, expressing ambivalence to and fascination with “the Jew,” defending and attacking “the Jew” are all ideological activities that contribute to a significant discursive site – semiticized discourse – in some of the poetry of the teens and twenties (Identificatory quotation marks, Cheyette ). Materials constructing the New Jew – especially assimilation and secularization, ethnic character, mixing and purity all consolidated in the mongrel trope – emerge forcefully in poetry. Work of Loy and Zukofsky, modernizing, assimilated Jews, will illustrate aspects of a “Jewish crisis of modernity,” while Eliot, Moore and Pound will serve as examples of modernity’s crisis with Jews (Finkelstein , ).7 Eliot used Jews and mongrels in linked poems from Poems : “Gerontion,” “Sweeney Among the Nightingales,” and “Burbank with Baedeker: Bleistein with Cigar.” Indeed, his analysis – that the barbarians were at the gates, the vermin were boring from within, the patriciate was displaced – was indebted to The Education of Henry Adams (originally published in , but republished in and reviewed by Eliot). Adams’ perspective is consistent with Eliot’s quatrain poems: that the Jew had so fully destabilized American culture that “our lot” (patrician
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
New England or elite culture) was now minoritized. The Education begins with the trope of the shadow Jew, the double of the hero. Little Henry Adams understands that American history is seemingly the property of his own family (with its two Adams presidents); continuing to make that history seemed to be his own destiny. Adams remarks he was scarcely less branded if he had been “born in Jerusalem under the shadow of the Temple, and circumcised in the Synagogue by his uncle the high priest, under the name of Israel Cohen” (, ). The bizarre metaphor, the “circumcision of Adams,” evokes in one economic gesture both his sense of being a chosen person, elected to the patriciate, and his sense of displacement – even impotence – by the influx of a rival Chosen People. This vision of circumcision with its subtext of unmanning, feminization, and impotence is used to full advantage in Adams’ self-analysis of his lacks. This trope of the Jew reemerges when Adams considers the post Civil War period. “[Adams] had become an estray; a flotsam or jetsam of wreckage; a belated reveler, or a scholar gipsy like Matthew Arnold’s. His world was dead. Not a Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow, – not a furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the Ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish to the officers of the customs, – but had a keener instinct, an intenser energy, and a freer hand than he, – American of Americans, with Heaven knew how many Puritans and Patriots behind him, and an education that had cost a civil war” (Adams , ).8 The whole passage is a locus classicus of repulsion and attraction toward Jews: as escapees from a wreckage, as parts of that wreckage, as “reeking” and “snarling” with its animal connotations. The word “weird” applied to the immigrants’ language, the word “furtive” applied to their affect show Adams’ unmixed repulsion, qualified by a small, grudging, jealous admiration for their projected keenness and energy.9 Issues about mongrelization could be especially marked in language. In Henry Adams’ typology of national loss, “snarling” and “reeking” do not just color his argument; they produce it. The direction of the overstatement is clear: the foreign-born can easily overrun “officers of the customs”; those who are supposed to stop or to police them cannot. Thus American custom and customary culture is under alteration. “Nordic” and Anglo-Saxon American hegemony has been circumscribed by the circumcised. This argument was given credibility by Eliot’s poetic creation of figures who embody “our” culture (the Burbank figure in the one poem, the man punningly described as “the host” in the other). These have been turned from possessors to the disinherited, just as the unfit (Irish,
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
Negro, Jew and New Jew, New Women) had become possessors. The end of Anglo-American Christian culture is stingingly proposed in Eliot’s works; with two related causes: mongrelization and a Hebrew invasion.10 An evocation of these materials – and more – is offered by Eliot in his poetry in the s. Eliot professed and validated anti-Semitic representations, exhibiting a wavering graph of hostility, high in these poems, lower in The Waste Land and “Sweeney Agonistes,” high again in After Strange Gods. He also seems to have made a distinction between his use of the “mongrel” topos and his use of the “Jew.” When the Jew is part of a heteroglossic mongrel scene, Eliot maintains an interior debate through the mid-twenties on possible cultural gains and losses from the vibrant, if suspect, powers of this figure; he decides by the thirties that mongrels, too, must be rejected. But always, when Jews stand alone, without other mongrels, they are reviled. Many professional critics, reading Eliot’s poems through the years, have acknowledged specific anti-Semitic remarks in specific lines, but had seen the materials as local, not constitutive. Some readers have claimed that if anti-Semitic prejudice did get expressed, it was given up, in the main, when Eliot turned to a formal Episcopal confession. This claim is belied by After Strange Gods (); indeed this odi et amo relation settles into a chronic anti-Semitism by the time of the conversion, but in the essays sparring within Christianity in the s, Eliot’s animus is redirected against varieties of Protestantism that are not Anglican and against any forces preventing Anglicanism from fulfilling its universalistic claims. Indeed, his argument might be paraphrased as a resistance to the “mongrelization” of Anglicanism with other forms of Christianity. Christopher Ricks deplores Eliot’s anti-Semitism, yet his essential attitude is an ironized, hurt tolerance. As an unconscious moralist, but a moralist still, the Eliot constructed by Ricks makes you think about your own collusions with prejudice (Ricks ). In the past few years several critics have set forth elaborate and rich culturalist readings that address the social discourses upon which Eliot drew in his semiticized representations. In his reassessment, T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form, Anthony Julius has put to rest most of the exculpatory readings, with a sustained and passionate analysis tracking the deep textures, discourses, and uses of anti-Semitic material in Eliot, whose tactics he characterizes with dour irony as “virtuosity” – taking stale conventions and anti-Semitic clichés and reanimating them into art (Julius , ).11 Bryan Cheyette explores Eliot’s discourses among an array of “constructions of the Jews” in England during the Victorian and early modern
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
period (Cheyette ). And Maud Ellmann reviews the history of the anti-Semitic charge, contextualizing Eliot’s thought, thus honoring its ambivalences, and showing bibliographic evidence for Eliot’s textual revisions (Ellmann ). My contribution in the mode of social philology will be to elaborate how Eliot manoeuvers the timbres and strata of cultural material through poetic form and then to unbraid “the Jew” and the related figure of mongrel, black, and Irish. “Gerontion,” a meditative poem spoken by an old man in a “decayed house,” a “rented house” opens Poems with an announcement of a cultural incubus. “And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner, / Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp.” The word spawned – with its reference to the slimy eggs of fish or aquatic animals – is thoroughly disparaging. The also notable small “j” on Jew was an orthographic habit that Eliot gave up only much later.12 “Squats” makes an insult with its animal and excremental precision, because “merds,” a nearby word, and other (so to speak) wretched refuse are very much at issue. In a parallel way, Pound repeatedly associated Jews with excrement; in a resentful comment from about [“Yakobb”] Epstein to John Quinn (himself no stranger to anti-Semitisms), Pound excoriates his painting as a “merditious, excrementitious, Matisse and shitsmearish portrait” – aside from “shit,” the obvious added word, the word “smear” is notably resonant, meaning to stain by sticky, greasy, or dirty substance, and also to defeat, to destroy (a reputation) (Pound , ). “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” and “Burbank with Baedeker: Bleistein with Cigar” followed in Poems ; they were seen by Eliot as works “intensely serious,” and “among the best I have ever done” (Eliot , ; Feb. , ). “Sweeney” and “Burbank / Bleistein” are part of the human menagerie of humors creatures whose traits and interactions Eliot was parodying in early poems that parallel Sinclair Lewis in his Babbitt: satiric social anatomy (Sigg : –; cf. Eliot , ). These poems offer a thorough-going analysis of the intertwined decay of Europe and the U.S., as a visitor from the States, “Burbank with Baedeker” finds a set of rootless Jews, one nominally British, and one nominally American, have preceded him to Italy. In Italy, the plain Jamesean tourist Burbank, has fallen into the sexual and/or cultural clutches of a Venetian and venereal “Princess,” voluptuous and wolfish Volupine. The poem makes sounds which will resemble the sexual scene on the river in The Waste Land – “Her shuttered barge / Burned on the water all the day.” Sexual license of women, impotence of men, and failing historical hegemony are linked. Indeed, the regulation of women
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
and gender to achieve male potency and social health is a point that has been repeated numerous times in many modernist texts. The poem had begun with a pastiched epigraph whose exaggerated, feminized, “gay” language contrasts with the stolid quatrains of the poem. A homosexual turn of language (campy pastiche), filled with an exciting and mysterious heteroglossia, seems to offer, but to bracket another position besides that of the onlooker Burbank from which this material could be judged – the position of gossipy, scandal-monger. This position, it appears, does not lead to cultural critique, but to a renewed complicity. Eliot, in contrast, proposed the poems critically. Logopoeia – a rhetoric of heteroglossia, ironic swings, combined social levels and registers, esoteric diction – is used by Eliot in these quatrain poems to signal a critical rupture of poetic practice from debased romanticisms and from sexualities considered debased. Logopoeia can function in his work as an attack on, or a call to order for, the effete and the feminine.13 The poems’ very quatrains had an ideological cast for Eliot and Pound, who had at this era made a formal compact for this form as against “general floppiness,” the softening of vers libre, the tepid sweetness of Amy Lowell’s poetry combined with her appropriative cultural ambitions (Pound , ). That narrative of hard and soft has been lucidly and effectively gendered by Cassandra Laity; these poems, thus, not only told truth, they were, in an agreed-upon fashion, “masculine” in prosody (Laity , –). “Burbank/Bleistein” shows a significant nexus of semiticized references and discourses, set forth in the deep texture of the poetry, and available through the reading strategy of social philology.14 The paralyzed observer, Burbank, is contrasted with another tourist, Bleistein. But this or such was Bleistein’s way: A saggy bending of the knees And elbows, with the palms turned out, Chicago Semite Viennese. A lusterless protrusive eye Stares from the protozoic slime At a perspective of Canaletto. The smoky candle end of time Declines. On the Rialto once. The rats are underneath the piles, The Jew is underneath the lot. Money in furs. The boatman smiles,
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry Princess Volupine extends A meagre, blue-nailed, phthisic hand To climb the waterstair. Lights, lights, She entertains Sir Ferdinand Klein.15
(Eliot , –)
The female predator – and possibly prostitute – Volupine is located between two Jews – an American new immigrant (“Chicago Semite Viennese” ) so low in the evolutionary scale that he mimics “protozoic slime,” and a European, “Sir Ferdinand Klein,” a Rothchild figure.16 Why would Eliot depict two Jews? For one, this literalizes the sense of being overrun, the displacement of Burbank sexually, economically, and culturally. It summarizes the bicultural problem – Jews immigrating both to England and to the United States. The two Jews in turn relate to the longstanding distinction between rich and poor Jews, between (loosely) Sephardim and Ashkenazim, or between two generations of immigrants. The attack on two classes also corresponds to a meretricious question (debated in Britain) during the multi-decade debate over Jewish immigration asking whether the lower-class Jew, with his diseases and cheap pestiness, or the upper-class Jew with his cosmopolitan financial manipulations was a worse menace (Loewenstein , ). In this poem, Eliot echoes this debate, ending with a condemnation of both Jews. Bleistein does not possess anything in a directly sexual way (though his -ay rhymes take over Volupine’s), but his posture, protrusions, and slime defile an elegant depiction of Venice by his very gaze. Bleistein cum “slime” is the classic stereotyped “sheeney,” economically and sexually parasitic. The stereotype of the lecherous Jew was in play (Lindemann , ). For slime, swampiness, fungus, and other things that are somehow overfertile and verminous at once are all affiliated, in many representations, with the Jew. Robert Casillo has traced this set of images in his study of Ezra Pound, for whom the Jew became, finally, an “ultimate contamination” (Casillio , ).17 In a chapter about the regressive sexuality of slime/swamp, Casillo eloquently develops the ways slime indicates sexual promiscuity, borderlessness, and the rejection of “patriarchal restriction and authority” ().18 Given such images of Jewish bodies as impurity, one can appreciate such banal propaganda poetry as James Oppenheim’s “Hebrews” with its image of lyric flesh as clean water: “I come of a mighty race . . . mighty race! mighty race! – my flesh, my flesh / Is a cup of song, / Is a well in Asia” (Oppenheim , , ellipsis in original).19 Oppenheim attempts to
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
reposition the word “swarms” to apply to Christians: “I am of the terrible people, I am of the strange Hebrews . . . / Amongst the swarms fixed like the rooted stars, my folk is a streaming Comet” (). The poem closes with a Christological metaphor, claiming that Jews are, as a group, crucified by Christians. “And our twenty centuries in Europe have the shape of a Cross / On which we have hung in disaster and glory.” (ibid.). Eliot’s Chicago Jew, taxed with both evolutionary (protozoic) lowness and apeishness, is also, as slime, a figural representation of the (tainted) spermatic discharge of a marked or circumcised penis.20 His prop, the cigar, is a smoke that has had its tip cut off. Despite Burbank’s attempts at sexual–cultural possession and assertion, he has been preempted. Venice/Volupine have already been whored, and by Jews. Her immorality and decline and Burbank’s belatedness in visiting her seem peculiarly intertwined. Sexual contact with Volupine opens Burbank to a taint, a disease, an infection both sexually and culturally destructive. For if Burbank has been unmanned by indulging in sensual bliss, he has also been frightened by fears of infection. The poem seems to be a late reflection of a discourse surrounding syphilis, which was a social and medical issue in the s (Showalter , ).21 In European literatures, syphilis had different discursive elements. Eliot’s poem reflects two: fear of the foreign prostitute as carrier of the disease and “scapegoat for male sexual anxieties”: in Eliot’s poem the prostitute is displaced upwards to a diseased princess. And the second was the metaphor of the Jew as carrier. As Jay Geller tracks this, “historical, structural, and representational connections are drawn between Jews and syphilis, usually through the mediation of representations of the prostitute . . .; in the early twentieth century syphilis became indelibly associated with Jews” (Geller ; cited from typescript , ). The threat involved an animalistic Jew able to taint whole populations – a polluter of a well of purity that Oppenheim’s pallidly pure lyric tries to answer. Sexual offenses and offensiveness were central to early twentieth-century conceptions of Jewishness, in part through the evocation of Orientalist stereotypes. Princess Volupine is herself fundamentally diseased. The rare word phthisic literally means tubercular; her disease is consumption in several figurative as well as literal ways. She consumes things (which explains her alliance with Jews and bankers), and she consumes men. And in her diseased state, she is also a displaced version of the damaging trope of the blood-poisoning and syphilis (like tuberculosis, a progressive, wasting disease), widely represented as related to Jews and to their primary ineradicable taint. Having fallen into Volupine’s
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
clutches, Burbank will in consequence have been tainted by all her former consorts. Since they are Jews, they are carriers of infection. Thus Burbank is deeply threatened: he will be Jewified, diseased, unmanned; like Agamemnon in the related “Sweeney” poem, he is given a mortal blow in the most intimate place. Syphilis, or sexual (consuming) disease is part of Eliot’s analysis that cultural and historical decay enters through the lower body, the lower orders or classes, and lower people (here, Jews). In the veiled associations that a social philology can disengage, the transegmental drift into crypt words – sick–phthisic–syphilitic – are cultural work done by rhetorical, aural, and connotative suggestions, veiled traces and tacit allusions deep in the poetic texture that offer Eliot’s socio-cultural interpretation through his poetic practices. The Venetian lion itself has been fleeced, and be-fleaed (verminized) by association with Jews. And “The smoky candle end of time // Declines.” The corresponding pun on Klein, who is one de-kleining conjugation of the verb “to jew,” is made textually; his smallness parallels the unmanned waxy candle burning down. The association of decline with a Jew is also made by situating the internal rhyme words “Declines” and “Klein” in unusual and unusually eloquent prosodic positions. The words both occur at the very end of a sentence, yet each is doubly enjambed over a line break and at the very beginning of a new quatrain. These are the only two words to be so treated in all of Eliot’s contemporaneous quatrain poems: by this tactic, decline and the Jew are prosodically fused in the fundamental poetic texture. This reading of prosody in a social philology corresponds to the endemic analysis that linked decline to Jewish presence. To Sir Klein, this (be)knighted person, is attached the word piles. Now piles means the posts driven into a marshy (slimy) part of a river or supports for a dock, and it suggests a sinister waterfront scene compounded of vermin and commerce. Indeed, Ezra Pound used this term, in a parallel sense, in his complaint (–) in Patria Mia that the United States is being taken over: only Henry James, in Pound’s view, had “the uprights . . . the piles that are driven deep, and through the . . . floating bog of our national confusion” (Pound , ). The scene is the same as in Eliot’s poem: there is a mushy, inchoate arena whose swampy suction makes clarity almost impossible; the artist with a masculine and analytic strength drives the piles down into this swamp. But piles magnetizes an array of other interesting definitions, from spike, dart, shaft; to a heap of things; to a heap of money; to a minting (money-making) apparatus; to a downy hairy wool, itself a pubic trope (recalling, in Woolf ’s The Years,
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
the epiphany around the hair of the Jew in the bath). Finally, in the plural, one understands piles, a disease of the lower rectum, or hemorrhoids. Money and lower-body materials are hereby allied. The fascinating and disgusting Jewish body, activated by the deep connotations of a word, offers figures through which Eliot made a statement about the slimy, verminous control by Jews of “the lot” – everything. This is again familiar material in anti-Semitic discourse. Beyond the sexual materials, Jews bore a heavy discursive burden: they were seen as criminal, swindlers, crass, aggressive, dishonest, parasitic. In the poem, both the Shylock allusion to the Rialto and the hemistich “Money in furs” stand for this; Eliot draws upon the sexual/somatic and the economic topoi surrounding Jews. (One might hear an encrypted, mocking “monkey in furs.”) The Jews’ economic deceit and their tribalism coupled with their inexplicable (animal or intuitive) energy, led to the endlessly deployed working postulate of their transnational economic conspiracy. For instance, read via a social philology, the list in apposition around Bleistein (“Chicago Semite Viennese”) uses the lack of commas to blur the words listed, thus representing the stereotyped rootlessness and shifting allegiances of the Jew. The lack of grammatical consistency (two proper nouns and one adjective, but one city and two cultures) also makes the line, like the character, hard to pin down, yet crossing semantically on the word “Semite.” Eliot’s Jew “underneath the lot” is also a double political statement. The Jew is the lowest of the low, scurrying around in that low space with rodents, beneath contempt. Yet “underneath the lot” intimates the most controlling, basic and primary, a prime mover. This belief that Jews were a secret power behind events was a recurrent ideological fantasy (Lindemann , ). “Underneath the lot” had a particular suggestiveness in and just before. For it was in that year that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion – a notable forgery – achieved English translation and wide circulation. This set of materials, variously translated into the European languages between and through the s suggest that there is a secret Jewish government with a well-articulated plan to achieve world domination, taking over Gentile states by fomenting political unrest, subverting morality, and inciting to class warfare.22 Norman Cohn points out that “In Britain there had been talk of a Jewish worldconspiracy for a couple of years before the Protocols appeared [translated in ]”; it was fueled by a very literate and presumably informed response to the Bolshevik revolution (Cohn , ). Thus it is more than plausible, as J. A. Morris argues, that the impact of this conspiracy
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
theory on Eliot is registered in the poems he wrote in and . Indeed, the Protocols were known in America by (Higham , ). Henry Ford began a campaign in May against Jews, publishing the Protocols in The Dearborn Independent, and circulating the propaganda through Ford dealerships. Although he was compelled to retract and apologize in , Ford had propelled a major anti-Semitic campaign (Dawidowicz , –). This survey of cultural discourses and their textual emergence in the “detail of composition” reveals that Eliot’s poem condenses longstanding and chronic stereotypes of Jews with a recent triggered activation of the materials in the post-World War I period (Williams , ). It was Eliot’s “seriousness” to offer – in metaphor, unpunctuated metonymy, prosodic choices, deep connotations, and line break – a condensed social debate drawing on discourses about Jews, prevalent in the United States in Eliot’s youth in every site from dime novels for boys to sociological analysis and scholarship, and present in the England of his chosen residence. He may, indeed, have been drawing upon two distinct discourses – from the period of his youth, in which anti-Jewish sentiment is expressed as a wariness of and disgust with teeming hordes of immigrants, and from the inter-war period: a revulsion against the European other, the scapegoat for the economic disorder of that period, and the focus of political anxiety about failing hegemony and social change. But these “Semites” do not stand alone in Eliot; they work within and near another figure: amalgamating Black, Irish, and the lower classes. This is a mongrelized figure whose depiction is the climax of Poems . There are links between the Sweeney and Bleistein poems, between mongrel and Jew. Deep topographic associations are activated, given the kinetic stance of the two characters. In the one poem, “Ape-neck Sweeney spreads his knees / Letting his arms hang down to laugh” (). There is a matching posture in “Burbank with Baedeker: Bleistein with Cigar”: Bleistein’s “saggy bending of the knees / And elbows” (). The posture evoking, as we shall see, the apeish Irish and the minstrel, can relate this character to the “krumm” or crooked and bent posture, a stereotype of the Jew. There is yet another link. Looking up “sheeney” in the OED gives, of course, Jew, apparently from a pronunciation of a Slavic word for Jew. The Hebrew letter shin ù appears on the windows of kosher butchers, and may be a source. When one looks up “sweeney,” one gets a primary meaning “atrophy of the shoulder muscles of the horse” and the figurative “stiffness of pride and self-conceit” – thus associating this name with the “stiff-necked people,” a characterization of
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
the ancient Israelites (by Yahweh and by Moses) in Exodus : , : , and elsewhere. Through these deep denotations, the name “Sweeney” can drift across to sheeney. These chains are also fused through gender fears – whether erect or “krumm,” this sexualized lout triumphs over women. Like Sweeney and his crew in “Sweeney Among the Nightingales,” in “Burbank/Bleistein,” “Jew” is proposed as the antonym of real culture (classical, sacred, invested with magnificence), by virtue of beast-like, cosmopolitan, and rootless qualities.23 Eliot’s erasure of long traditions of Jewish learning as culture is notable. So Bleistein may suggest the fullest development of Sweeney, in a continuum of urban horrors. Or the Bleistein figure may embody far worse cultural suggestions of decay and destabilization. The materials are mobile, somewhat unstable. T. S. Eliot can be tempted by and even admire elements of Sweeney, the mongrel figure, but he draws the line at Bleistein and Klein, the New Jews. Beyond the “sheeney” association, Sweeney is an Irish name, and the character magnetizes an Irish stereotype. In both England and America, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the Irish had moved, in popular consideration, from depictions that made them into simple peasants, and feckless, sometimes witty drunks, to apes. In “historical physiognomy,” they were depicted visually as simianized figures with flat nose, long projecting lip, sloping forehead, and forward jutting jaw, visually coded as inferior. These codes were loosely based on a spectrum depicting species evolution. So as “species” went, the Irish were subhuman, “white chimpanzees” (Curtis , ). This mid-Victorian stereotype of the savage or simian Irishman, “the gorilla metaphor[,] cropped up often after the outbreak of rebellion in , followed by the AngloIrish guerrilla war of –.” In this, Sweeney seems like a postrebellion emergence of longstanding cultural materials involving threats to British hegemony. But ape-necked, spotted or freckled, and therefore perhaps “Irish” as Sweeney is, he is also spotted or polluted, animal-like: “The zebra stripes along his jaw / Swelling to maculate giraffe” (Eliot , ). With his apeish posture – or is it a strained vision of a vaudeville singer, a Charleston dancer, a minstrel? – and with the geographical origin of these animals in mind, it seems equally likely to see him as “African.” Sweeney may then allude to the “African” and “African-American” presence in early modernism, ambivalently viewed: the Harlem Renaissance in America; the use of African art as an inspiration for cubism and artis-
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
tic innovation, jazz clubs, and the sensual license that any new popular music encodes. That a link between Irish and black obtained in Eliot’s mind is visible in textual waverings in “Ballade pour la grosse Lulu” from July , an unfinished comic work. “The Outlook gives an interview / An interview from Booker T. / Entitled ‘Up from Possum Stew!’ / Or ‘How I set the nigger free!’” (Eliot , ). The work parodies other public figures, too, all swept away in Lulu’s invitation to come to “the Whore House Ball.” The poem originally had, in the place of Booker T. Washington, Edward Bok, editor of The Ladies Home Journal, and in the place of the comments about Washington, the lines “Called kinds of Irish Stew / And ‘How to fill a Christmas Sock.’” Eliot’s parody of cultural enterprise can substitute “Irish” for “Possum” stew, and unify women’s magazine banality, Irishness and blacks. These are metonymically linked by him in one saucy farrago. There are many reasons for considering Eliot a writer who wanted at once to be and to resist such a figure as Sweeney; his own “Possum” nickname is a reminder of his tempted revulsion, his struggle with the conglomerate title to writing provided in these outrageous vital figures. Their entitlement induces his fascination and his despair. Thus in some ways, for some purposes, in some lights, Sweeney is the Black and Irish Bleistein; Bleistein is the Jewish Sweeney. This suggestive convergence of despisable/sometimes a little attractive groups – Irish and black and even Jewish – in the figure of Sweeney, I take to be a very significant moment, both ideologically for Eliot, and critically for us. By the use of these discursive evocations, Eliot builds a shimmering undertext inside his poem, constructing an interplay of veiled and tacit social suggestions which also have a way of being self-denying – the figure is not “really” Irish, not “really” African, and barely Jewish; being a little of both and all, and yet neither or none of one particular type. Eliot has created a poetic mongrel (“mélange adultère de tout”), activating, and activated by the discourse of the mongrel in contemporary thought (Eliot , ). The question what discourses are encoded in “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” demands a plural answer. Sweeney is a white “Negro,” and a “maculate” (stained/blackened) white, offering some intertwining of two commonplace simian stereotypes for the primitive louts that are somehow, barbarously, at – or inside – the gates. His sexual triumph (like that of “Sweeney Erect”) is apparent, and is posed in the most degrading terms: sex is coterminous with a low drunkenness, prostitution, and strange positions.24 The social triumph may be in destabilizing imperial
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
claims (the Irish Sweeney), in displacing Eurocentric culture (the Christian Church and Agamemnon figure displaced by Black Sweeney), or in displacing an enervated patriciate with animalistic, crude, and cruel sexual acts. Thus Sweeney is a multi-ethnic figure with sexual/ social implications. He is a figure who encodes attitudes toward threatening politically active races, classes, and groups who are (in terms the poem proposes) beneath Culture in one sense while exhibiting a lurid, complete, and tempting culture of pleasure, avariciousness, and sadism. Eliot’s mongrelized figure is invested with allusive mixes of lower classes and aggressive ethnicities.25 It is also clear that the “Sweeney” figure embodies Eliot’s terrific and mobile ressentiment – and admiring jealousy. The mongrel is admired and deplored; it destroys and revitalizes. It is sexually potent and culturally active. It has entitlement; it is entitled new. This personage is surrounded by a set of low life: sexualized female characters, whorish and slattern (nightingale is, after all, slang for prostitute). A woman falls off Sweeney’s lap, into a revealing tarty pose. Another, “Rachel née Rabinovich,” is spotlighted as greedy and aggressive; her “murderous paws” – exaggerated in their object, a bunch of grapes – continue the animal motif and the sense of threat. New Woman/Jew woman/lewd woman are peculiarly intertwined. As elsewhere in Eliot, insurgent females, rank sexuality, and the cunningly animalistic are fused. The “silent vertebrate in brown” – an onlooker – is attracted and yet withdraws; his back and forth movement forms the center of the poem: tempted by the two whorish women, yet declining the “gambit,” exiting, yet found “leaning in” at the window as “Branches of wistaria / Circumscribe a golden grin.” He seems to be deciding whether to be an animal, or to be a distanced, but implicated voyeur. This character is a peculiar fusion: of “brown” man (with the “grin” of stereotyped representations of blacks) and of a Jew (“heavy eyes”). The “golden grin” may suggest the golden-toothed (another stereotype of the Jew), as Anthony Julius suggests (, ); the nearby word “circumscribe” can emphatically produce an encrypted “circumcise.” This figure is, like Sweeney himself, another of the mongrels (poetically depicted fusions of two social groups) who inhabit this poem. But I also take this tempted, withdrawing, negotiating character to be an encoded self-portrait. Eliot produces some self-image of himself as a potential mongrel too – a minstrel, if not in blackface (as his characters were to be in “Sweeney Agonistes”) at least in a brown suit, a sexually tempted witness of this drama. At this
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
point, the analysis echoes the findings of Bryan Cheyette: that many of the British writers he discusses (bridging Victorian to modern times) for their constructions of “the Jew” had a secret identification with the Jew, as well as a fear of being Judaicized. In Eliot’s case, he desires the entitlement these New figures claim, and he wants to claim the passions and energies of their presence for his work in poetry and culture. This zoo is apparently, by its very obliviousness, dishonoring triumphant moments of high culture: the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Agamemnon’s sexualized, vulnerable death, the traditional heroic and martyred. “Dishonoured” is the word that Eliot proposes at the end of the poem for the fate of the European tradition, as the “nightingales” (literal and figurative, actual birds and slutty women) emit excrementory “liquid siftings” on the murdered body of a Greek hero, back from the war – here a sense of betrayal of the male martyrs of World War I enters.26 Eliot used a Protestant hymn stanza and a logopoeic diction of intellectual superiority and playful sourness to suggest that society is now in the hands of figures greedy, murderous, and female; vacuous, diseased, and subhuman; phallic, simian, and triumphant: the Sweeney–sheeney, the Irish ape, the maculate African, the grasping Rachel, the Hebrew slime – all these representations bound and connected to each other. In the matching poem, the erosion of a “pure” America or a “pure” Europe by Jews and other mongrel peoples had radically displaced Burbank. Burbank is wandering, expatriated, disenfranchised; he has become nomad, or no man. He is virtually a shadow Jew, parallel to that figure haunting Henry Adams (or Ezra Pound). In his early work, Eliot was trying to find and to negotiate a line between poetry of ideas (which he rejected) and poetry of ideology (which he embraced): overt espousal versus subtle deployment (Eliot, , –). Eliot’s cultural work involved the sub rosa threading of ideologically charged materials and chronic socio-cultural stereotypes into the poetic texture (by allusion, metonymy, prosodic placement, deep denotation, transegmental aural drift, and other tactics), tactics that can be read by a social philology. He could reject “ideas” in poetry, since he absorbed social issues into his poetry inside the poetic texture itself. The fusing of racialized, ethnic/nationalistic, and Semitic tropes in one figure (Sweeney–Bleistein) or in an unstable compound – mongrel and Semite as better and worse – made an ideological conglomerate which could only with difficulty be taxed with the imposition of one capital letter Idea, such as “The Jew.” Indeed, for many years such interpretations seemed
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
like all too interested overreadings, vulnerable to the charge of cultureless oversimplification or failed aesthetic sense. Hence the visibility of Eliot’s anti-Semitism was mystified and intermittent in commentary for almost seventy years, although contemporary culturalist criticism now does not neglect this matter. A social philology shows how these unstable ideas are visible in “the detail of composition” wherein “a certain social structure, a certain history discloses itself ” (Williams , ). The Waste Land is a poem making a spiritual quest through the debris of contemporary urban civilization which seems to make no accusation against one specific group for the dissolutions visible – there are certainly no accusations of the strength and animus of the “Burbank/Bleistein” poem, although the same kinds of characters move through the site. In The Waste Land, female power, sexual longing and frustration, abortion and female control of fertility are clear targets, but by cutting out a particularly swell passage (on Fresca), Eliot/Pound also somewhat represses the thought that blames the New Woman and her literary–cultural pretensions for some of the ills of society. Now that the manuscript is available, the reference is both there and not there; a critic can foreground it, or not. In the published poem, the Sweeney figure is quite reduced, with one line or two. His ilk is much more present in the original beginning, a scene of pub-crawling with character-types which later emerge in “Sweeney Agonistes.” Some responsibility for the pervasive atmosphere of despair and loss falls on the figure of the irresponsible lower middle class – the dim clerks and their debased, rapacious sexual encounters with turned-off “nymphs.” All in all, The Waste Land, like “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” makes sexuality much more of a cause and symptom of cultural decay than ethnicity. Women are deregulated, hysteria is rampant, the grail legend bespeaks a wound to generation and phallic potency. So too the Jew in the published The Waste Land occurs intermittently, and is not named as such, yet the figuration is present. But the Jewish danger is spoken in a muted fashion: in the notes, in German in a passage from Hesse’s Blick ins Chaos, as if a code that some might be able to read – a conspiratorial use of poetic texture (Eliot , ). These are the “hooded hordes” who are coming across from Eastern Europe – an image that condenses the fear of Bolshevik Revolution and the “Asiatic” (arguably Jewish) overspill into the white domain that were the subject of Lothrop Stoddard’s recent fulminations (). These hordes emphatically suggest the Jew, and the unleashing of unregulated populations, including a suggestively “demotic” list of cities without commas, as in “Chicago Semite Viennese” – “Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
London” – but Jews as such (by name) are not adduced as a mainspring of this social and historical moment of potential chaos, as they are in the “Burbank/Bleistein” poem, written at about the same time (, ). Jews are present and absent. However, this sense of being overrun is a strong motive for the work: the shards constructed (“shored”) are a jerry-built wall propping up “my ruins” against further incursions (). One could see The Waste Land, therefore, as a poem whose shardlike texture walls out the alien, degenerate face of “Asiatic invaders” of whom the shardlike texture is also an interior symptom. The Waste Land proposes (as is well known) a conservative analysis of cultural decline in an exciting heteroglossic form and texture, thus offering a synoptic struggle with analysis and symptom poised in scintillating interplay. The stakes are very high: The Waste Land stages a struggle for the sign between the mongrel and the pure. Soon after, in “Sweeney Agonistes” Eliot tries to recuperate the energies of the mongrel for popular theater. That work is, in certain ways, a second Waste Land. There was to be no other. The mongrel was a source of danger that overwhelmed the pleasures of using it. Eliot identified with the forces of passionate primitives that he associated with the Jew and the immigrant mongrel. He needed to capture that force and sever it from its apparent owners. So he grasped the mongrel as intimating a better culture with more positive ends when the primitive was properly channeled and focused, and he rejected the Jew. From through , Eliot underwent a period of increasing Christianization, in which more and more of his social, ethical, and cultural analysis solidified into one “complex”; indeed, in he would argue with a mournful rage that we lack something that primitive societies have: “the operation of a social–religious–artistic complex” (Eliot , ). It is clear that he is directing his efforts and best energy to affirming such an anti-secular complex for modernism and modernity. At first, post-conversion, Eliot said “What I want is a literature which should be unconsciously, rather than deliberately and defiantly, Christian” ( [“Religion and Literature” ], ). But just a few years later (), he shifted from unconscious to conscious Christianity, as the threats of fascist Germany on one side and mass (“mob”) democracy and liberalism on the other became equated in his analysis. It is clear that his efforts as a Christian apologist were increasingly devoted to articulating and inspiring adhesion to a renewed “complex” under the aegis of Anglicanism, rejecting the plausibility of any other of the world religions, liberalism, free-thinking secularisms, paganism, not to speak of
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
the mob mind of any stripe, and fascism – though not rejecting patrician authority over others. In his arguments, the superiority of a “conscious” (and non-dissident – non-mongrelized) Christianity and its humbly powerful “clerisy” is assumed; other religions and their potential for ethics are given no discussion when the “Kingdom of Christ” is assumed (Eliot , ). His argument seems intra-Christian, for a certain amount of tight-lipped hostility is expressed about the range of non-Anglican Protestants; indeed, his call “to affirm the Universal Church on earth” is directed at them (–; ). In this phase of Eliot’s polemical arguments for a Christian culture, the hostility to both Jews and immigrants (as related mongrels) is more muted, but persistent, as one can see in After Strange Gods: a Primer of Modern Heresy. The book was never republished after its initial appearance in , and yet as Anthony Julius documents thoroughly, the sentiments it contains were never repudiated (Eliot , ).27 These lectures, delivered to a Southern audience in , let us know that Eliot’s patience is running out with a world “trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality” (Eliot [“Thoughts after Lambeth,” ], ). Here Eliot is concerned about immigration (for the “influx of foreign populations” is destabilizing), and he congratulates the South as being “farther away from New York . . . less industrialised and less invaded by foreign races” (, , ). Homogeneous populations and “blood kinship” are, he argues, crucial for effective tradition, which he construes as far overriding modernist writing and its superficial originality (). His overt attack on “freethinking Jews” matches a covert attack on blacks; both may “adulterate” the desired cultural and ideological homogeneity (, ). He recommends resistance to “excessive tolerance” because of the social damage from such liberal benevolence; heterodoxy is a form of mongrelization that needs to be nullified (). The Jew was forcefully put into question during this period by a number of debates both specific to religious culture and by ideas about “race” and national character. Jews, new and old, Enlightenment and “Orientalized,” are discursive figures on whom many writers comment, and through whom writers made and modified their subject positions. In some writers, one can easily see politics of conspiracy and ressentiment building ominously throughout the s – Pound is, of course, among these. But when Jews were in debate by modernists in the early s, anti-Semitism was not the only plausible position. Marianne Moore seems to have been consciously responding to the foregrounding
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
of stereotype by poetic and popular discourse in two of her poems from the s, one subsequently uncollected. Both try pointedly to avoid “racial” prejudice and socioeconomic stereotype. The index to Observations – a rare touch for a book of poetry – adduces, from these two works, the following information (with page numbers): “Jew, brilliant, ; not greedy, ” (Moore , ). There are also positive and powerful statements about Hebrew (Biblical) poetry, an important source for Moore. “To A Strategist” (a one-word note identifies this character with Disraeli) obliquely concerns canards of anti-Semitism; it shows, however, how difficult it is to manage them (Moore , ). For the poem half-participates in the prejudice it also deplores, which may explain its absence from collections after Observations (). You brilliant Jew, You bright particular chameleon, you Regild a shabby fence. (Moore , )
Confronting the charge that Jews were changeable, specialists in mimicry, altering their opinions strategically, trying at all costs to fit in, Moore does not deny the generalization, but she revalues it as the triumphs of a political strategist. The “gold”-seeking stereotype has been split and revalued into “brilliant”/“bright” and “regild” – adding luster to something in decline, rather than causing that decline. A second stanza says that “they” “begrudge you prominence / And call you cold!” Although “they understood / your stripes and particolored mind,” they were resistant to the chameleon. “Stripes and particolored” presents, in a condensed way, a depiction of the little lizard, a Biblical allusion to tactician Joseph’s manycolored coat, and puns pointing to the strategist’s “winning stripes” and service for a political party. But the root image of the chameleon becomes problematic as the poem goes on. “But when has prejudice been glad to hold / A lizard in its hand – // A subtle thing?” Although the intent of the poem is to speak against prejudice, the reptilian image can be read as patronizing even in the context of Moore’s many lovingly detailed poems about small animals, and even despite her clear identification with their elegance and allegorical message. She closes by saying “Sound sense is contraband,” which I take to mean that constructing a position against anti-Semitism has to be smuggled into people’s consciousness, it so cuts against the grain – “contra band,” a word punning on those Jewish stripes. So Moore’s stripes (indeed, the very lines of her poem) and the chameleon’s stripes are compared.
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
The other poem, “The Labors of Hercules,” retained in her Complete Poems, is explicit to the point of a credo; indeed, its ringing last words are taken from a minister’s sermon (Moore , ). She appropriates to herself the labors of Hercules, the serious and hard tasks of persuasion it takes to extirpate prejudice. One remembers the labors of Hercules best for the cleaning of the Augean Stables of mounds of animal excrement. Hence this is Moore’s critical use of the “merds” metaphor worked by Eliot and Pound, for it makes anti-Semitic prejudice into what must be cleaned up. The ultimate labor is to convince snake-charming controversialists that it is one thing to change one’s mind, another to eradicate it – that one keeps on knowing “that the negro is not brutal that the Jew is not greedy, that the Oriental is not immoral, that the German is not a Hun.” (Moore , )28
The sentiments against anti-Semitism and other prejudice, closing the poem, might well be responding indirectly to Eliot’s work in Poems . It is certainly a forthright poem in the light of its context: the lynchings that were endemic, the race riots in the United States, the Henry Ford anti-Semitic campaign going on as Moore wrote, and the aftermath of the First World War during which “the Hun” was stigmatized. Indeed, the “snake-charming” alludes to a hypnotized irrationality; for Moore, those believing in these stereotypes have “eradicated” their intelligence. Mina Loy’s contribution to this debate was to valorize the mongrel, to claim that subject place as fruitful and creative. Loy’s aesthetic sites, the places in which interesting art could be made, mingle garbage, cast-offs, flotsam, and the beautiful, sleek, and fashionable – a mongrelized aesthetic. This mongrelized vision is the modern for Loy. Her satiric play The Pamperers (quite indebted to cinema, with its fade outs and scannings of “tag ends of overheard conversation”) concerns the discovery of a “genius” in the form of a bum “picking up cigar ends” (Loy , , ). (“Picasso,” it is noted suggestively, “uses all sorts of odds and ends” [].) This “houseless loony” – a nomad figure, vaguely semiticized, with “fanatical eyes, set in the lewdest eyelids” () – is transported to an aristocratic, pretentious salon headed by the seductive Lady Diana, who finds that the Loony is a genius, worth cleaning up (as is done with another down and out genius in Loy’s Insel) and packaging.29 The Loony has a few moments of suggestive lucidity before he is colonized by the
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
rich and pretentious. In these moments, he has a slightly Christological and Hebrew air, as those eyes and eyelids suggest, but as some of his diction also proposes. “You know not what you ask,” he says to Diana’s proposition of visionary and erotic partnership. “I am the apostle of Fraternity,” he responds, yet he implies that she would be out of place in the mud, which he describes graphically, genially rejecting the life of the rich “among the geometric static of your bric-à-brac” (Loy , ). But as quickly, in this stylized work, the Loony has a few cocktails, gets cleaned up, and, creative impulse still relatively intact, progresses to a second stage of show: as Diana offers, “No use picking up cigar ends – Here . . . are the whole cigars . . . (handing him the box . . . the genius picks out a cigar entirely at his ease.)” (). But for our purposes, the hybridity of mud and upper crust creates a mongrelized moment which is revealing of Loy, as the Loony recites a Loyesque poem, proposing, from the “transcendental showers of ideofags,” to glean a few “ashy iotas” (). The butt-ends of cigars, the Prufrockian “butt-ends of our days and ways” have been replayed with brio. Loy’s attitudes to debris and to the hybrid emphasize their importance to the modern. It is the same impulse to mix that led Loy late in her life to create collage and sculptural assemblages of garbage and debris. Loy’s longest poem, Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose: –, is a sixtyfour page Bildungsroman or Kuenstlerroman treating the family background, the growth and development into consciousness and exile of the female artist, Ova, with greatest attention to the defining moments in her childhood (Loy : –). This poem undertakes to present and defend a mongrel aesthetic, even if the mixed elements – the paternal and maternal heritages – are rife with betrayal, hypocrisy, and rejection. The poem can be positioned as a response to T. S. Eliot’s anti-Semitic discourses of the early s. But since he was, of course, not alone, the poem can also go on record as a response to the amount of loose, general anti-Semitism in the British world in the s and earlier, occurring everywhere from Wyndham Lewis to Virginia Woolf. Bryan Cheyette’s study of selected (and not even extreme) authors argues that the “Semitic racial representations” in Shaw, Wells, Belloc, Chesterton, Joyce, and Eliot are not aberrations or embarrassing gaffes but central to the construction of liberalism. Ova’s father, Exodus, is Jewish, an immigrant to London from Budapest; her mother, Alice-Ada, is an English Rose. The poem dramatizes issues of entering, as a Jew, into hegemonic Gentile and genteel society: “Zion’s sons / with the subconscious / irritant of superiority”
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
(the “Chosen People” trope, reiterated in Exodus and Deuteronomy, as in Deuteronomy :–), and while “David’s daughter’s dowries” beckon, he spends his evenings “circumcised circumspect,” until he “knows / no longer father / or brother, or the God of the Jews” . . . but rather the “romance of the rose” (Loy , , , , –). The ten-page section devoted to the exodus of Exodus with his “itinerant / Judaic eyes” conveys a good deal of information about the tensions between alienation and assimilation. For reasons that are inexplicable, the prim, bloodless, tepid, and virginal English Rose succumbs to the fascinating Jewish male body “loaded with Mosaic / passions that amass / like money” (). Albion in female form salutes the alien Exodus[.]
(Loy , )
Rejecting the Jewish traditional arranged marriage through “intermediaries” which involve courtship rituals designed to protect the virginity of the woman, Exodus is intrigued by a woman having her virginity in her own care. “Delightfully / on its own defensive!” puns charmingly on defense/defensive (). The analysis of her parents’ premarital flurries (he gets one petal, but somehow the whole passion of the rose disappears) shows that Loy was well aware of the dynamics between them, but also fairly well informed about Jewish customs and stereotypes, which she deploys with nuance and bite. Among other features of their marital engagements, Alice-Ada and Exodus embody the shocks of intimate impact of the instinctive murderer and pamperer of Jesus [.]
()
so that their sexual bond represents the whole social history of Christian anti-Semitism (murder of Jesus) and worshipful sentimentality surrounding Him. These contradictory forces form the child Ova. Ova is a “Mongrel Rose,” mixing Israel and Albion. She is “this composite / Anglo-Israelite,” with a “mongrel heart,” and, the ambiguous gift of a fairy godmother, a “Jewish brain” (). The word “mongrel” repeats aggressively in this work; given the bad press it has had in this period, Loy’s use makes a bold statement of adhesion to a subject place of hybridity. What is this “mongrel-girl” going to do? (). Like the Loony in Loy’s closet drama, she will “coerce the shy / Spirit of Beauty / from excrements and physic” (). Her first artistic epiphany comes
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
when she hears the word “[d]iarrhea” and hears its color described as “quite green,” an incident several critics have compared to Joyce’s portrait of Stephen Daedalus’ early childhood (). The “iridescent hush” is a mixture of the visual and the aural that characterized Loy’s work in writing (ibid.). It seems appropriate as well to situate this muck as a critique of the representations of Jews that work through such tropes as “merds”; “[d]iarrhea” may connect to Eliot’s “Gerontion.” Dirt to beauty, “moon-flowers out of muck” is not an unusual aesthetic, but it becomes more suggestive when linked to the derogatory terms in which the Jewish body was cast, and to the forthright use of the word “mongrel” in Loy’s title (Loy , ). It is worth wondering, as well, whether Marcel Duchamp’s provocative auteur, R. Mutt – another mongrel – with his upsidedown urinal at the Armory Show, was not also diddling these discourses about the purity and high-mindedness of art while playing with lower-body allusions. Loy’s poem is an essential document for a study of religious culture in the literature of the modern period, because Loy depicts Ova negotiating a particular kind of relationship with her dual heritage. Jesus appears as a figure available to compensate for the angers and rejections visited on her by her mother. Introduced to “gentle Jesus” by a “housemaid,” Ova is gratified at his potential to absolve “every infantile / indiscretion,” but baffled at his general absence in the world; she thereby engages in “Christian / introspection” (, , ). She also walks through the haunts of the Jewish “ragamuffins” of Kilburn who are apparently doomed to hell for killing Jesus, in the simplistic doctrine of Christianity. These children may be dressed in rags, but they eat muffins (Ova’s folk etymology), and therefore have what she desires (). The materialism and literalism of stereotypical Judaism is thereby manifest. In a variety of incidents, the poem tracks a religious and cultural debate out of the mixed marriage between two arrogant and rejecting parents, each embodying a different religion, each rejecting the other, and each tricking her and putting her in the wrong. The poem describes certain “spots of time” around religious apprehension and ethical realizations of which the father’s trick gift of a farthing and claim of having given her a sovereign is a masterful nexus. The subtracting move of father/sovereign to father/farthing (not to speak of further lower-body allusions) embodies Loy’s thematics of loss inside poetic language itself. Ova is cheated by the sharp practices of her own Jewish father. Ova begins to do a pained synthesis of these two unpromising religious traditions: “Jehovah – / exemplar par excellence / of megaloma-
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
nia –” and Christ with his feet “neat-/ly crossed / in anguish / and wounded with red / varnish” (). The synthesis proposes a new subjectivity of exilic “wondering Jew” (), a dynamic pun on wandering Jew, for the “child of Exodus” follows him and many others of the Diaspora, into a “heritage of emigration” (). As well, “wondering” suggests the speculative intelligence whose birth this poem chronicles. The poem itself has two endings. One, the section called “Religious Instruction,” traces a sense of conflict between the ethical – and Enlightenment Judaism – impulse to “commit” her consciousness “to justice,” the secular form that certain strands of Jewish Messianism took in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries (). This contrasts with the sense of being tampered with and impeded by those parties nastily and antiseptically called “her breeders” and “her procreators” (). This section seems to chronicle Ova’s first foray into exodus, by a child’s very compromised episode of running away from home. A commandment is delivered, a warning twisting and criticizing the Biblical injunction in Deuteronomy :: “Thou shalt not live by dreams alone / but by every discomfort / that proceedeth out of / legislation” (Loy , ). (“One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.” This is repeated in the temptation scene in Matthew : and Luke :.) At that moment, both the Jewish and the Christian strands of her makeup conspire to lay down unpalatable law. The second ending is much less clear, but it is very important. Called “The Social Status of Exodus,” it seems (and this is confusing) no longer to concern Exodus the father, but to use a number of the materials associated with the father (he is a Tailor, for example) to divulge a new path, and a new hero, “another / greater than Jehovah” (Loy , , ). The section is a notable critique of religion’s religiosity (“Spiritual drapers / Popes and fakirs and shakers”) (). In it Loy proposes a mysterious concept – “dissubstantiation” – that “Theological tinkers / and serious thinkers” have spent a good deal of time discussing (ibid.). The “‘unprintable word’” that they contemplate is, probably, God (ibid.). He is literally, by Hebrew custom and reverence, unnameable, and thus is written as “G-d” in pious renditions of English. Further, God functions metaphorically as an “unprintable word,” in the numerous curses (like “God damn”) that utilize Him as a bit of vocabulary; hence “the unprintable word” that Loy does not mention is in fact “impossible to erase from a vocabulary” (ibid.). Loy’s condensed wit is fierce; I think that the suggestive phrase “this jew-jaw of general invective” clues us to the unprintable Concept (ibid.).
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
The “dis” of dissubstantiation means reversal, negation, lack, removal, rejection. The term substantiation means the verification of, the proof of the firmness of material form. Of course Loy’s neologism calls up both transubstantiation (the eucharist transformed into the true body and blood of Christ), and consubstantiation (the materials of the eucharist coexisting with the body and blood of Christ, but not changing into it). These two alternative interpretations about the body of Christ had long been the subject of theological debate even unto religious war among Christians. Loy’s entrant “dissubstantiation” is a nonce word blithely inserted into raging religious debates. Responding to Christian issues, she makes an existential query from the childish insight noted earlier in the poem – the absence of God, or Christ, whenever He is most needed. Responding to Jewish tradition, “dissubstantiation” could be a wild pun on the fundamental terms of post-Christian Jewishness (or Jewishness as Christians, astonished, construct it), precisely not to believe in Christ as the Messiah. This is dissubstantiation – the rejection of the bodily presence of God, incarnated in his son. In any event, at the end of the poem a modern thinker about the issues of God’s existence has arisen. This humanist proposes “the manmade God” as an anthropological insight about human need (). He is described as a Jew because (like Exodus) he is a tailor, a cutter, who makes new clothes for humankind. But he is as well someone from whom gentle people turn away, and whom they ostracize (ibid.). “Gently born” plays with Gentile, and genteel, and gentlefolk, of course, in a class and religious amalgam violated by this tailor. Thus he is also like a Christfigure “who staked the plot / of manhood in his nobler form” (ibid.). Who he is precisely is not identified in the poem, but he is both a hero, and a mongrel Jew–Christian.30 Keith Tuma has made the important suggestion that Loy is writing about Sigmund Freud, whom she met in . If so, she is tracing his contributions, or the contributions of a critical humanist religious analysis, to the dilemmas of religious belief and religious culture.31 In this untrackable Jewish/Christian feminized and prophetic figure, Loy has constructed and approved of a mongrel subjectivity offering solutions to longstanding religious dilemmas. The ending is vaguely Christological, but it is also vaguely Hebraicized: a mongrel sensibility triumphs. The claim that poetry itself would be reinvigorated by mongrelization, new vocabularies, the heteroglossias of immigration, and the pressure of the city was a radical position. In a (ca. April ) essay called “Modern poetry,” Mina Loy argues eagerly that the multicultural,
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
enriched American language of immigrants is the site of choice for “the renaissance of poetry.” Modern poetry is a response to “the modern world of varieties”; more specifically, modern poetry has received its impetus from the U.S. (Loy , ). Why? Loy proposes that modern poetry arose in a double contact zone, between British and American languages, and between new immigrants and older Americans. The negative counter to this position had already been articulated by Edmund Wilson. His article “The Anarchists of Taste” in Vanity Fair () describes the “sour befoulment” of Chicago and its class and status limits in a criticism of Carl Sandburg’s poetry. Sandburg’s aesthetic skill is inhibited by the city with its “blank buildings and slaughter-houses and factories, of Claxon-blowing motor-cars and typewriters cracking like machine-guns, taxicabs, jazz-bands, trick electric signs, enormous hotels plastered heavily with garish magnificence . . .,” and so on (). Not only is the physical environment degrading or overwrought, the “language which he hears spoken is the harsh patois of the city”; hence, Sandburg doesn’t stand a chance against French poets whose pastoral landscapes and poetic language are singled out for Wilson’s admiration. In contrast, mongrel language and the mongrel city are categorically praised as vital generators in Loy’s essay on “Modern Poetry.” Apparently written soon after her poem “Anglo-Mongrels,” Loy’s essay argues that the reinvigoration of poetic language has occurred in the United States precisely because of immigration. “It was inevitable that the renaissance of poetry should proceed out of America, where latterly a thousand languages have been born, and each one . . . English enriched and variegated with the grammatical structure and voiceinflection of many races . . .” (Loy , ). Out of the welter of this unclassifiable speech, while professors of Harvard and Oxford labored to preserve, “God’s English,” the muse of modern literature arose, and her tongue had been loosened in the melting-pot. (Loy , )
Poets incorporate these swinging tonalities by listening to, and participating in, the melting-pot of sound, a speedy, living, “composite language.” The terms melting-pot and then composite/variegated, with its mongrel overtones, signal the cultural power of immigrant idioms.32 Loy’s examples leave no doubt that she is talking about the languages and inflections of the “baser avenues of Manhattan” (the Lower East Side) where “every voice swings to the triple rhythm of its race, its citizenship and its personality” – a nice Tainean touch (ibid.). Indeed, Loy mentions explicitly the language of the “adolescent Slav who has spec-
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
ulated in a wholesale job-lot of mandarines and is trying to sell them in a retail market on First Avenue” (ibid.). One can’t help but see an allegorical encoding in the portrait of a “Slav” (Russian Jew speaking Yiddish?) selling job-lot mandarins (oranges, of course, but also the intricate, elite dialect of imperial control ) as a source for the new language of American poetry. The “mongrel-girl” of “Anglo-Mongrels” has made a mongrel aesthetic of language. The question of purity or purification of language as a modern marker is raised, of course, in both Eliot and Pound. Although a variegated and heteroglossic diction is characteristic of their poetry in the twenties, still both insist in their criticism on purifying the language of the tribe – and tribe is in the singular.33 In this debate over the language of modernity, Loy’s defense of the mongrel, that unmistakable term for cultural contact, mixing, hybridity, and the low fertilizing the high, is a significant, jaunty defense of the positive cultural impact of immigration. Her theories of language are much closer to Williams’ brash acknowledging that his American diction came “from the mouths of Polish mothers” – whether imagined as Slavic or Jewish, the mongrel cast is the same (Williams , ). Another participant in this debate over mongrelization and Jewishness constructs his position with reference to Eliot and Henry James. Louis Zukofsky is making a new modernism in a crucial spiritual struggle – in which he is the marked winner – with/against the two generations of [Gentile] modernists just preceding his. When he wrote his earlier poetry, Louis Zukofsky seems to be deep in an interior debate between emancipated Judaism with its “elimination of provincial particulars” and affirmation of particularist markers, particularly Yiddish, a familiar, loved and despised tongue (Blau , ). His modernization as a New Jew accepting “Western aesthetic norms in literature as in daily behavior” meant the rejection of the physical markers of male Orthodox Jews in dress and hair style (Harshav , ). Zukofsky, with his Columbia education, had a stake in Enlightenment values – learning, aestheticization, and self-realization, but he also began life as a speaker of Yiddish (Harshav , ; Quartermain , –). His conflictual ties to both aspects of Jewish culture (the modernist and the particularist) are represented in his first major poem, “Poem Beginning ‘The’” (), a work that also addresses anti-Semitism, both external and internalized. Written (when the poet was twenty-two) with elegant headnotes and numbered lines, the work was not only an allusion to The Waste Land, but, as Zukofsky wrote to Pound in , “a direct reply” to Eliot’s poem
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
(Pound , ). The poem comments on Eliot in its very presentation. In both The Waste Land and this poem, the materiality of the signifier is offered by means of the foreign languages and the general heteroglossia; the fact that Zukofsky numbers his lines, as if his poem were already anthologized, shows a further aggressiveness in the marking of the materiality of the text and of the signifier. Both poems renounce transparency, renounce the purification of diction. Where Eliot began with a dedication and homage to Pound, Zukofsky, with an arrant literary friskiness, is both more eclectic, democratic, and insistent on a master. He dedicates his poem both to “Anyone and Anything I have unjustifiably forgotten,” [that is, forgotten to mention in the poem] – and to Bach. The list of sources is heavy on soon-to-be-known modernists, but also on such popular forms as “Modern Advertising,” “Popular Non-Sacred Song,” and “Broadway.” The poem also puts these glossing notes first – the end beforehand – in scandalous formal pun on Jewish “backwardness” (whether the non-acceptance of Jesus as messiah or the insistence upon Moses seeing only the backside of God, Exodus :) and on the images of excrement and the lower body that bedevil Jews, as we have seen. “Poem beginning ‘The’” has five movements, like a tone poem, a Heldenleben. It is also a concertedly “oedipal” poem of mother-love and mother-elegy. The first movement surveys modernist literature (“Mauberley”, Lawrence, Daedalus, Ulysses, Woolf, Eliot are just a few of the allusions). One issue the poem addresses is how to be a Jewish modernist when one at least half agrees “ Not by graven images forbidden to us” (Zukofsky , ). The answer is to repeat and scrutinize images “graven” by others. This is also a terrifically confrontative slap at, and repetition of the canard of unoriginality: “A book is something which one Jew copies from the other,” an anti-Semitic statement that shocked Heywood Broun and George Britt into their philo-Semitic essay (Broun and Britt, , ). The first movement concerns Zukofsky’s own vows, as a belated modernist, to live like Spinoza, grinding “lenses” with which to bring the work of others into focus. Within a few years, the “lens” of objectification and sincerity had crystalized in a seminal essay by Zukofsky. That enabling document was itself very plausibly influenced by the In Zikh (Introspectivist) manifesto of signed by three Yiddish-language United States poets, Jacob Glatshteyn, Aaron Leyeles, and N. Minkov, a work itself influenced by “the American Imagists” as “a self-conscious trend of Modernist verse in Yiddish that was founded in New York in ” (Harshav and Harshav , , ). Zukofsky
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
hybridized Anglo-American modernist purifications of the language (Imagism) with Yiddish affirmation of a certain strand of New Jew entitlement. The second movement of Zukofsky’s poem is a concerted address to the circumcised penis which is on an outing with Zukofsky; nothing could be more abrasive and confrontative. “Peter Out” and Zukofsky are walking through the city (an enactment of the “Prufrock” situation by a randy young Jew).34 They discuss a variety of topics, some serious (Il Duce), and some less – the shows or revues they will see. In the context of semiticized discourses about circumcision to which this chapter has alluded, this walk with Peter (who is called “polite” with his “light”) is particularly mocking of the norms of gentility and civility. This section contains nineteen lines of the Yiddish poet Yehoash, a lyric love poem about the Bedouin, his camel, and his love.35 That part of the movement, considerably more poignant, is a mourning statement for the suicide of his close friend, Ricky Chambers. Yehoash was, not incidentally, the only Yiddish poet of an earlier generation who received the accolade of the In Zikh group in their founding document as “not merely a precursor but a fellow poet” (Harshav and Harshav , ). The brief third movement (“In Cat Minor”) is a tap-dance routine; the vaudeville moment following from the invented titles of revues ending the second movement (like “Tear the Codpiece Off, A Musical Comedy”) (Zukofsky , ). It recalls the flowering of musical comedy in the s and how among the most creative, debonair, and prevalent composers and librettists were Jews – George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Oscar Hammerstein, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern. These tonal slides and eclectic allusions are an aggressive comment on Eliot’s master poem. One could describe “‘The’” as a poem that will claim, in the semantic text (the enounced), a theme of assimilation, but is, in the textual rhetorics (the enunciation), mongrelized in the extreme by inexplicably startling tonal shifts (from coarse joke to elegy, for example). So too The Waste Land is a work whose rhetorics are mongrelized, while the overt meaning mourns the very forces that run rampant in the rhetoric. The fourth movement, “More ‘Renaissance,’” is a nasty parody of university education (“Askforaclassic, Inc.”) addressed to a boring “Engprof ” who well knows that one of his listeners is a “Jewish boy,” and whose repeated “don’chewknow” is, by the repeated phoneme (chew/Jew) an excluding drawing of an inner circle (Tomas , ).36 The debate during the early twenties about “numerus clausus,” or the
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
quota-based exclusion of Jewish students from major private universities, lies behind this passage.37 Harvard’s attempt to limit the numbers of Jews was especially dramatic. Columbia, from which Zukofsky received his M.A. in (with a thesis on Henry Adams), also invoked “numerus clausus,” so that Jewish presence would not constitute an “invasion” (Feingold , –; citation ). There had been a spurt in the number of Jewish students before; this quota system was a replica of the restriction on immigration, experienced as a crack-down by upwardly mobile second-generation Jews. The tension of insider/outsider in this section and the self-mocking use of “backseats” (of the classroom) and “weary bott’m” (of the student) with their backside imagery, the evocation of the doubly unkosher “roast flitches of red boar” (flitch is bacon) as the substance the professor serves all contribute to Zukofsky’s self-lacerating parody. The slide from boar to bore (the professor) to boor (the transitional Jew) can be remarked; to evoke Cuddihy’s terms of the kulturkampf between modernizing Jews and their coarse ghetto relatives, the burden of learning “civility” (the genteel norms of a modern elite) falls on the partially assimilated, but still obtrusive Jew (Cuddihy , –). Indeed, Zukofsky’s confrontative tone and pockets of vulgarity violate a norm of a Jewish (male) intellectual tradition: “edelkayt, a term signifying both nobility and delicacy” (Howe and Greenberg , ). The speaker shows that he is not a full member of either family by two dastardly puns: “For the Pater that was Greece / The siesta that was Rome.” This is a parody of Poe’s “Helen” and it refigures the line of culture that Poe had made without any Hebraic element. Zukofsky then sediments “Pater” or aestheticism onto that story without Jews, but he also produces a family narrative (pater/siesta or father/sister). One might also remember “Peter” in Pater. The vulnerable mother/son combination of the next sections is like a response. The fifth movement, “Autobiography” is addressed to his mother, about her Russian childhood and girlhood intermingled with post-revolutionary desires. This section also has a high proportion of Yiddish allusions: from the poems of Yehoash, cited in translation, to folk songs (one cited in Yiddish; “ Un in hoyze is kalt”). Zukofsky’s contribution is to try to bring Yiddishkeit into play in the context of a poem absolutely situated in European culture, in the same ways that Eliot’s poem is. The cultural claims of Yiddishkeit are forthright and serious as a literary and popular language, presented as such by the poet. But in the eyes of some detractors Yiddish is also a degraded lower-class marker. As mama-loshen
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
(maternal language), not the hieratic Hebrew of the Torah and Scripture, it is a language around which much cultural ambivalance gathers. It is as if Yiddish culture is at play within the enounced (the narrated events within the poem), but has to be ironized within the enunciation (whole speech event as American-language poem). The section ends with several citations from Heine, including “ Keine Kadish wird man sagen” – presumably no Kaddish over the “dead” – assimilated – Jew. Alternatively, the assimilated Jew, when dead, will have no one to recite Kaddish for him. Is assimilation a kind of death? As Tamar Garb summarizes, Jews participating in the “universalizing projects of modernity” – Haskalah – rejected ghettos, irrationalisms about Chosenness, particularist taboos (such as kosher laws, resistance to intermarriage, and dress codes), Yiddishkeit, and holidays and celebrations of Judaism; they embraced civil rights for Jews under the rubric of democratic access, secularist premises (Nochlin and Garb , ). However, there was a great cost: this dream of equality and fraternity was “premised on an eradication of difference that was by no means reciprocal”; Jews were asked to give up their “cultural specificity” for a universal defined both by and as Christian hegemony (). This sense of hegemony and entitlement is clearly visible in Eliot’s Christianizing essays of the s; Zukofsky attempts, in this poem, to construct the entitlement of the New Jew. But that entitlement is split between assimilation as erasure of particularity and the aggressive retention of any, even self-lacerating, markers of Jewishness. With these stakes, Zukofsky cites the excoriations of Jeremiah to the backsliding Israelites about leopards changing their spots – an early antiassimilationist screed, one might say. (Jeremiah :).
Assimilation is not hard, And once the Faith’s askew I might as well look Shagetz just as much as Jew. I’ll read their Donne as mine, And leopard in their spots I’ll do what says their Coleridge, Twist red hot pokers into knots. The villainy they teach me I will execute And it shall go hard with them, For I’ll better the instruction, Having learned, so to speak, in their colleges.
The cost of Haskalah is visible in Zukofsky’s fierce ambivalence to his own tactic of assimilation. To announce his ambivalent mastery, and
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
masterful ambivalence to main culture, he cites Shylock’s speech from The Merchant of Venice: “the villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction” (, i). Zukofsky proposes, for his assimilated subjectivity, a tactic of disdainful overcompensation – bettering main culture at its own tasks. The allusion to Donne and the metaphysicals, the allusion to Coleridge’s epigram on the metaphysical poets are all involved with the authority of the criticism of Eliot, since the interest in this anti-romantic poetic mode was the sign, at this point, of an advanced poetic sensibility. Zukofsky’s “villainy” was to out-Herod Herod in his cosmopolitan panache, that is, to perfect literary tradition by taking it as his own – but with a difference, of mimicry, deformation. This tactic of “bettering the instruction” recalls the theories of Irigaray on female tactics of mimicry, and of Houston Baker on “deformation of mastery” in African-American work (Irigaray a, ; Baker , xvi). This angry affirmation of his power and cunning at assimilation to mainstream, Christian (metaphysical) modernist literary culture is combined with self-derision at himself as assimilated. When Zukofsky says “I might as well look Shagetz just as much as Jew,” he speaks selfmocking jibes. “Shagetz” [saygets] is Yiddish (of Hebrew origin, in this case) for a clever, roguish, handsome, arrogant male non-Jew. The female equivalent is a word much better known but equally a term of contempt and temptation: “shiksa.”38 In this line he articulates his rage at the games of assimilation and at his own Enlightenment position (the “Faith’s askew” – crooked, oblique, and disdained) which positions him – compels him – to play such games. If this poem is a notable act of cultural overcompensation in homage to modernism, it is also a poem of angry contempt for modernism’s exclusions, which Zukofsky redoubles, bettering the instruction. And to better the instruction is to retain the mongrel and Jewish core as inflecting and motivating modernism. The final section speaks, also to the mother, a guilty moment containing a translation of a Yiddish lullaby. There is also a confession of his attraction to non-Jewish women, and a song to the Sun, or the sun/son. This last intermingles Christological and Jewish allusions, and wraps the whole intense oedipal package in a pro-Revolutionary hope. As Bob Perelman points out, this answer to The Waste Land is optimistic at the end, with a swelling Internationale flavor (Perelman , ). But the material right before, it should be said, is wracked with untranscended guilt about Jewishness, assimilation, and sexuality. Steve Shoemaker sees this poem as articulating “tensions and conflicts in the ideology of modernism” precisely over the issue of “ethnic identity” and “the permissible
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
range of ‘difference,’” and offers the narrative that Zukofsky’s sense of the Jewish tradition of exile “supplants” modernism’s more narrow and self-congratulatory “self-exiled men” (, , ). The energy and verve, the racial crossovers and mixings, the nasty bounce all appear in an infamous poem by Pound, published in in An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology, edited by Louis Zukofsky. Like Eliot in The Waste Land, Pound uses the textures and rhetorics of mongrelization to reject the ideology of the mix: the enunciation is filled with appreciative verve, and the enounced is garish and mocking. “Yiddisher Charleston Band” is a dialect poem, blaspheming the sacred (Mary, Jesus, and other Christian icons) by an association with Jews, blacks, promiscuous females, and jazz. The poem is written in an orthographic strain of Yiddish dialect laced with some blackface turns, and a lineation supposedly showing the syncopated emphases of jazz. It fuses Africanist metaphors, semiticized tropes, parodies of religion, and gibes at New, that is sexually liberated, Women. It is therefore the poem of choice on which to end this book since we have dealt with all three forms of entitlements – New Black, New Jew, New Woman – and have touched on the fourth – Newer Man. The third stanza: Red hot Mary of Magdala Had nine jews an a Roman fellow Nah she’z gotta chob much swellah Mit der yiddisher Charleston Band. mit der Charleston . (Zukofsky , )
One might call this Pound’s klezmer. The “sweller job” is an allusive dig at Mary’s pregnancy, the swelling she had before her performance with the band. Pound’s second stanza appropriates, from T. S. Eliot, part of an exchange of lewdness, and probably anxiety, in the form of light verse among Eliot, Aiken, and himself. “Ole king Bolo’s big black queen / Whose bum was big as a soup tureen” has “lef ’ the congo” for an appearance with said band – an escapee from the Congo-laden constructions of Vachel Lindsay, perhaps. The work and its paratextual surround have a kind of manic Poundean glee that points to a desire to appropriate the mongrel in texture, while rejecting it in ideology.39 The crossing between black and Jew, and the “red hot” quality of the women of both “races” is marked, creating a nasty jumble that appropriated mongrel energies while disparaging the social groups in a bombastic fashion. For example, he wants
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
to take the sound and force of jazz establishing his rights as connoisseur in a field where his expertise is not patent. It may not be too strong to say that the word “active” brings jazz itself under the Poundean rubric (his Active Anthology was published in ), especially given his insistence in November , to Zukofsky, that this poem “ has to be sung” when they were considering it for the Objectivists’ issue of Poetry, where it did not appear. Pound claims this tarty little poem is active both as cultural work that matters and as physical performance (Pound , ).40 A second paratext in the printed version is the note, presumably to Zukofsky: “.. I shan’t persecute you if you print the Yittisher without the music” (Zukofsky , ). Pound thereby shows he was well aware of one of the aspects of anti-Semitism, but claims that the word “persecute” could pass between himself and Zukofsky in a playful manner. A few years later, the playful aspect is considerably diminished: “I spose Mr Pelley will be annoyed wiff me fer askin if all bankers iz jooz? . . . Seriously, yew hebes better wake up to econ. . . . If you don’t want to be confused with yr / ancestral race and pogromd . . . it wd / be well to modernize / cease the interuterine mode of life / come forth by day etc.” (Pound , –; May []). What it meant and means to “modernize” was very much at issue. Whose entitlement was modernism? What was the relationship between the modernity of the liberal compact – equal access for a meritocracy, and the modernisms, semantic, situational, and rhetorical of these poets? How can New Woman, New Black and New Jew be analyzed as part of modernism – as well as of modernity? This book has considered some of these questions. Note here Pound’s ability to pick up and claim he initiated what had already happened – Jews had long been engaged in “modernizing”; they certainly had been “pogromd.” There is a subject position, Pound insists, even beyond New, or Englightenment, Jew; as with the issue of the Newer Man following upon New Woman, this is a position that Pound defines. Jews, new and old, in his view, were “intravaginal,” part of a feminized site, kept warm in the family, as he was to argue in Canto . Zukofsky struggles with his attraction to Pound’s admiration and his serious filial mimicry and his desire to argue with Pound’s discreditable anti-Semitism. Given that “Yiddisher Charleston Band” is pretty flimsy doggerel, although thoroughly memorable, it is worth addressing the weight that Pound gave it as a kind of signature piece. Sixteen years and one war later, Charles Olson reports that in , as a privileged prisoner at St. Elizabeths, Pound performed “Yiddisher Charleston Band” for one of
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
the staff psychiatrists. It was a song and “a dance which Pound does, with gesture, movement, words” (Olson , ). A real vaudeville routine, showing, as with Eliot’s “Sweeney Agonistes,” that Pound identified with the verve of the groups he also berated and sometimes despised. He wants that compound energy, the energy of mixing black, Jew, female, sexuality, and anti-Christian blasphemy. He performs that mix, trying to assimilate it and come out as superior to it all in one economic gesture. Here we can also take this piece, confrontative in tone and untransparent in texture, as a mini-gesammtwerk of all the entitlements we have examined as active and vibrant in the period of early modernist poetry. It is a signature piece because it sums up the ambiguities and passions involved in the questions of entitlement to modernism, the relations between modernism and social modernity, and, within modernism, the construction of and confrontation with subjectivities entitled new. This book has been committed to exploring, by the invention of a social philology, how ideas, discourses, and debates about New Woman, New Black, and New Jew are exposed not only in poetry but as poetry, in any poem’s most intimate details of texture.
Notes
: Responding to Susan Stanford Friedman’s “new modernist studies” and to such invitations as Jerome McGann’s “to redraw the map of modernism” (Friedman , in her rubric for a set of MLA panels; McGann , ). Responding also to Marjorie Perloff’s “Modernist studies” overview (in Greenblatt and Gunn, ). The conjunction of “news” has been the subject of an anthology by Adele Heller and Lois Rudnick (), focusing on , and of a paper by Carla Kaplan, given at the Modern Language Association in December , reading the “New Negro” woman and the “New Woman” in their conflicts and intersections. The word “Negro” was used contemporaneously, as in the anthology The New Negro, but unless I am citing from work published when the term “Negro” was in use, I prefer to use Black or AfricanAmerican, as more respectful today. The term formation, as Raymond Williams uses it, refers to subjectivity in its own historical, ideological, and textual dialogue with social materials, subjectivities formed by and forming social stances. In another study of modern U.S. poets, Frank Lentricchia proposes a “philosophic modernism” from a generation of Harvard professors (Santayana, Royce, and William James), all flourishing around , and having serious effects on Stevens, Frost, Eliot, and Pound, not to speak, as he doesn’t, on Stein (Lentricchia , –). As Ray Strachey remarks about Britain: “There were still, in , a score of flagrant injustices and inequalities to be cleared away: there were unequal divorce, unequal inheritance and nationality laws, unequal franchise, unequal guardianship of children, unequal standards of morality, unequal chances of employment, and unequal rates of pay” (, ). Ann Ardis () and Carolyn Burke ( a and b) have made the important claim that the New Woman is an as yet under-studied component of the formal and intellectual shifts of modernism; DeKoven () and Burke () – have contributed notable studies of fiction and of poetry foregrounding this claim.
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This formulation is, of course, deeply indebted to Julia Kristeva’s postulates about the subject-in-process (Kristeva , –). The point about undoing exclusion has been made with vivacity by a number of critics who initiated a feminist reading of modernist texts, including a major recovery of materials by women. There are noteworthy studies of (mainly Anglo-American) modernism and gender by Shari Benstock (, ), Svetlana Boym (), Carolyn Burke (a, b, , , ), Marianne DeKoven (), Jonathan Dollimore (), Rachel Blau DuPlessis (, , ), Bridget Elliot and Jo-Ann Wallace (), Betsy Erkkila (), Rita Felski (), Susan Stanford Friedman (, , ), Christine Froula (, ), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (, , ), Barbara Green (), Linda Kinnahan (), Wayne Koestenbaum (), Cassandra Laity (), Jane Marcus (, , , ), Peter Middleton (), Jane Miller (), Susan Schweik (), Bonnie Kime Scott (, ), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (, ), Elaine Showalter (, ), Susan Rubin Suleiman (), and Trudi Tate (). Bonnie Kime Scott makes the ringing claim that “modernism at mid-century was perhaps halfway to truth. It was unconsciously gendered masculine” (Scott , ). With due respect to her halves (male modernism) and other halves (female modernism newly arrayed) to make a whole truth, I want to resist the binary picture of male and female modernism, however apparently irresistible at times. In a more useful metaphor, she sees “a new scope for modernism” by writing the workings of race, class, gender, and (I would add) religious culture into modernism (, ). My critical interests are congruent, then, with the general emphasis on getting beyond an articulation of a segregated “female modernism,” antisegregating perspectives that have been articulated in Tate () and particularly in Friedman (). I do not divide my consideration of texts into male and female modernism; difference is a multiple vector, not a unitary one. But I do not consider this a post-feminist position. As Myra Jehlen has argued, because of the existence of feminist criticism, “gender has emerged as a problem that is always implicit in any [literary] work” (Jehlen , ). Bornstein (), Bush (), Michael Davidson (), Drucker (), Friedman (), Froula (), Kappel (), McGann (, ), Brenda Silver ( and ). Influenced by critics like Jerome McGann, contemporary readers have become more alert to the specific occasions for a poetic text: have scrutinized paratextual material (dedications, epigraphs), looked at the material text as an indicator of bonds to historical occasions, and found revealing the identification of the occasions for which poems were made, instead of disdaining as “technical” any discussion of the physical and prosodic nature of the texts or their editorial constructions (as if poems and their Norton Anthology surround are to be found under cabbage leaves). To these “multifoliate” textual “performances,” Charles Bernstein would add the aural performances, thus giving any poem a “fundamentally plural existence” (Bernstein , ).
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An exception is Cary Nelson’s study of populist and formally innovative poetries (). DeKoven () has a chapter on poetry, Clarke () on Marsden treats the poetic milieu. Here should be noted those particularly treating modern poetries – Baker (), Friedman (), Kalaidjian (), Laity (), Monroe (), Perelman (), and Perloff (, , ); see also Altieri (), Conte (), Damon (), Davidson (, ), Golding (), Kalaidjian (), Keller (, ), Lazer (), Mackey (), Nielsen (, ), Perelman (), Perloff (), Quartermain (), mainly on poetry after modernism. Golding (), Hogue (), Kalaidjian (), Lyon (), Nelson () Nielsen (), Marek (), Perelman (), Perloff (, ), Quartermain (), Rasula (). Watten and Bernstein; also Silliman, Perelman, Davidson. Kalaidjian’s statement indicates some of the intermingled issues at stake: “Throughout the postwar decades, many critics followed [John Crowe] Ransom in repressing verse writing’s social text – that is, not merely poetry’s inscription of historical events, but equally important, its social transactions with various interpretive communities, conglomerate and small press markets, the academy, and other spheres of cultural production” (Kalaidjian , xii). In a later book, Kalaidjian points to the postwar construction of a dissemination mechanism called “high modernism” that has “largely silenced the century’s complex and contentious social context”; he rectifies this with a bravura “reading of the expanded cultural field of American modernism” – social and aesthetic avant-gardes – by including all kinds of texts – literary, polemical, diagnostic, visual (Kalaidjian , ). I am indebted to Lawrence Venuti for the understanding of what Lecercle contributes to this study. In his studies of translation, Venuti extends this consideration of the signifier to archeologies of tone, diction, archaism, colloquialism (Venuti , –). None of the most notable contemporary materialist critics ignores poetry, but the bulk of their readings vastly prefer fiction, narrative, and theorizing. However, Gayatri Spivak has written on Wordsworth, Dante, Yeats, the former in a symptomatic reading of the containment of politics and personal guilt by poetry as an institution, the latter two in a passionate essay demanding a “genealogical investigation” of the figures of females in culturally authoritative texts (Spivak , ); in addition, she tersely refuses the special status of poetry as transhistorical (). Said offers remarks on Yeats in his book on imperialism. Eagleton discussed The Waste Land in relation to its ideological productiveness (Eagleton ). Despite these materialists’ restrained critical engagement with poetries, concepts such as Jameson’s “the political unconscious” or Said’s “contrapuntal reading” as well as Eagleton’s “slowing down the frames of . . . reading almost to a standstill so as to catch the complex effects [of poetry] as they happen” have much potential for interpreting poetry (Jameson , Said , Eagleton , ). Bernstein’s use of the term “artifice” here might be glossed by his definition
Notes to pages ‒ – very like Lecercle’s sense of the “remainder” – in “Artifice of Absorption”: “‘Artifice’ is a measure of a poem’s / intractability to being read as the sum of its / devices & subject matters.” (Bernstein , ). Some other strong readers of poetry are also moving in this direction. Maria Damon is trying “to bring the estranged twins, cultural studies and poetry, into closer concert . . .” () in a paper given at Rutgers University Conference: Poetry and the Public Sphere (April ), itself a conference that began to articulate elements of a cultural poetics. Kathleen Crown, one of the convenors of that conference, has spoken about poetry in the public sphere (Crown ). Adorno’s essay was first made available in a translation by Bruce Mayo in Telos (); in my text the page numbers from that translation will follow the page numbers of the translation by Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Adorno ) that I use. As Watten indicates about the New Historicist readings: “the rise of this school has not been kind to poetry” (Watten , ); in the anthology Aesthetics and Ideology (Levine ), the articles on poetry by Susan Wolfson and William Keach suggest that critical tools do exist to offer culturalist readings of poetry. Arac’s essay challenges the lines of inquiry in this anthology, essentially claiming that it is still circumscribed by the ahistorical assumptions of New Criticism. Machin and Norris say the anthology was made “partly to refute the widespread idea that post-structuralism is a species of ‘textualist’ mystification which ignores – indeed denies – any access through writing to a knowledge of history or the world outside the text.” They speak of the ways that poststructuralist theory has “problematized” such access (by its deep readings of narrative tropes of history or rhetorics of politics) but not foreclosed it (Machin and Norrris , ). Wolfson’s recent proposal for a renovated close reading of poetry differs from my concern only in its motivation, and its field of study. For me two of the keenest provocations of such a materialist critical practice are the motivation from the interests of social and ethnic groups (based in gender, race, sexualities, and so on), and the motivation from politicized understandings of the literary text from contemporary poet-critics mainly affiliated with language poetries. In contrast, for her critical origins, Wolfson offers a brilliant history of literary formalisms, from Russian Formalism, to New Criticism (with a surprisingly historicist undercarriage) and deManian deconstructive formalism, all in their philosophic ramifications. I take first license for the almost obsolete word “philology” from Leo Spitzer in a discussion of “the etymology of a particular word-family” leading to “evidences of a change of historical climate” (Spitzer , ). Stephen Nichols has also recently called for a new philology, based within the Viconian work of Erich Auerbach, for Mimesis showed “that language could be the key to a sociology of textual study” to understand how a social group conceptualizes itself (Nichols , ).
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I am aware that Medvedev/Bakhtin (whose virgule indicates that they may be “one” author, though two people) meant something more general by the term “poetics” – something like the theory of art practices in writing. However, they propose that all genres are susceptible to such analysis, and bringing poetry into this critical arena has special status in their essay. The editorial(izing) gender “correction” of pronouns should never occur without comment, as it is possible that such a corrected phraseology will not be equally applicable to male and female poets. In this case, I think it is. “The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination” (Jakobson , ). “Method of this [Arcades] project: literary montage. I need say nothing. Only exhibit (zeigen). I won’t filch anything of value or appropriate any ingenious turns of phrase. Only the trivia, the trash – which I don’t want to inventory, but simply allow it to come into its own in the only way possible: by putting it to use” ([N a,] Benjamin “Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress.” in Smith , ). In terms of the poetics of the detail, Marianne DeKoven suggests a fruitful analogy between the New Critical emphasis on the detail and the New Historicist desire to read whole movements and eras allegorically in or out of one document (DeKoven , ). I have in mind such warnings as Robert von Hallberg’s to Walter Benn Michaels, “Literature and history: neat fits,” protesting against the exclusion of understanding of form as a way of presenting and representing social ideas, and insisting that historical scholarship not sanitize contradictory representations by poets (von Hallberg , –). It must be said that Adorno’s notion of the historical moment is construed as the larger economic tendencies, as anticipations of social progress, and the poem as “a philosophical sundial telling the time of history” ( / ) – ideas that cannot produce specific readings of the bulk of poetry. In addition, I am interested in diverse social determinants, not one. Any romantic (or technical) aura around creators or around what we help to construct as “masterpieces” can impede our understanding of discursive mechanisms; this aura is what Easthope resists by insistence on author-function. At every turn, one must struggle critically against too complicit a view of poetry as a special discourse made by special people, with heightened – because superfluous and/or spiritual – value. Here one might allude to Nancy Miller’s penetrating feminist argument against the denial of authorial agency (Miller ). I need to invite the reader of this book to find published versions to consult – perhaps the Gerald Early, ed., My Soul’s High Song (Cullen ) or anthologized reprintings of Cullen’s important poetry. I have chosen, reluctantly, to discuss Cullen by paraphrase and miniscule fair use citations of individual words. “Incident” (Cullen , ). Cyrena Pondrom (Stein (b) dates the work –; Ulla Dydo (Stein (a) gives it as .
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Ulla Dydo is clearly not of my opinion: “The word gay nowadays means homosexual, but in it did not” (Stein a, ). In contrast, Marjorie Perloff queries this limitation on reading the term “gay,” suggesting that Stein was one of the first to use the term in its now-current homosexual denotation, a point I follow (Perloff , , ). Richard Bridgman takes this meaning as extremely plausible, noting that “‘Gay’ has long been slang for homosexual” (Bridgman , ). Partridge dates gay/homosexual from ; the OED from ; Chapman’s New Dictionary of American Slang from s or earlier; Richard Spears dictionary of Slang and Euphemism says that from the s to the present gay meant homosexual man, and then woman. See also Bruce Rodgers, The Queens’ Vernacular: a Gay Lexicon. See also George Chauncy in Duberman, Vicinus, and Chauncy (). One may reconstruct some of the resonance of the sex debates from passages in Winifred Holtby (a British book, published in ). What Holtby means by “the fight for an equal moral standard” (, ) is the possession by the woman of her own body and pleasure; it involves control and spacing of births, no double standard for male and female adultery, no rape nor marital rape. These issues were not the work of, as Holtby says, “Puritan cranks” but were vital for females to control their own destiny (). The result, in the next generation, was a sex-radical emphasis on equality and pleasure that is visible in Stein. As a summary of these trends for the United States, John Fout states” “by the years immediately preceding the outbreak of World War I, Victorian assumptions about sexuality were largely a thing of the past” (Fout and Tantillo , ). Thanks to Carolyn Sorisio of West Chester University for this point. Lisa Ruddick’s brave and convincing interpretation of the tropes and rhythms of anality in Stein should remind us that, if literary criticism is to talk of “drives,” it cannot limit itself to oral and genital. Lentricchia uses feminine as an ahistorical spot in a generally historicizing position, although it is not quite an absolute. One might instead propose that the feminine was and is something actively in contestation. In the years in which Stevens assumed some feminine poses, his mode is consistent with a genteel, pre-feminist fe/male – a “Bo-Pete” to Elsie Stevens’ “Bo-Peep,” two pastoral figures in a pre-modern play. In this feminized (or androgynized) subjectivity, Stevens often avoids any possible allusions to contemporaneous gender debates. Although my ideas were invented independently, I have been influenced by Shoptaw’s ever since I first was introduced to the notions, in , at a conference at Cornell University. Given Samuel Hynes’ interpretation of this moment of British culture as an interior war against modernism occurring alongside of World War I, one may here see Pound trying to cast Britannia in a “Germanic” light, to insist that the barbarism and degeneracy are the property of the rulers, not the modernists. In Pound’s countermove, a female allegorical figure is scapegoated (Hynes , et passim).
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That poets are fascinated by the compacting of materials from multiple terrains can be illustrated by a suggestion by Alfred Kreymborg with which Williams agrees: that the title Al que quiere encodes Kreymborg’s name (Williams , ). For instance, in her consideration of the Hosek and Parker anthology Lyric Poetry: Beyond the New Criticism, Perloff reserves an instructive impatience for readings that claim to do new (theoretical) things, but can only read the most traditional romantic lyric, can only make romantic assumptions about poetic practices, can only attend to the canon of the same, neglecting virtually all post-symbolist modern and contemporary poetries (Perloff ). The term “American” is not a synonym for United States, but it is still so used in card catalogs and indices. British writing sometimes claims T. S. Eliot, but not H.D., although they lived in England for roughly comparable times, and in assumption of British citizenship H.D. actually predates Eliot. H.D. was resident in England from to , when she spent increasing time in Switzerland; she died in . H.D. became a British citizen automatically in October when she married Richard Aldington. T. S. Eliot was resident in England from until his death in ; he became a British citizen in November , making official an allegiance he felt well before that. “ ”: Homans proposes an extended Irigarayan reading of specularity as it devalues female bodies and sexuality, and also proposes that female poets, faced with this culturally powerful material, were compelled to construct counter tropes replacing the primacy of the visual with tactile imagery, and replacing metaphor with metonymy. She also suggests that “the best way out of the binding conventions of lyric romance [may be] through renouncing lyric altogether,” a position to which I am poetically sympathetic (Homans , ). Employing Jameson’s term about the novel: political, because gender relations are relations of power, and unconscious in the sense than any cultural myth is part of a deep ideological structure. For evidence of the impact of these materials on some poets: H.D.’s sketch ca. “The Suffragette” shows her curiosity and sympathy (Friedman , ). Moore participated in feminist campaigns for the vote (Molesworth ). Mina Loy epitomized the New Woman and symbolized the link of new poetry and new women, free verse and free love (Burke , ). See The Gender of Modernism (Scott ) for more links between modernism and feminism, either directly or in reaction, and Lyon (), J. Miller (), and Clarke () for historical and cultural studies of the changes provoked by and around independent women in early modernism. My studies of H.D. have emphasized her resistance to the role of “poetess” (DuPlessis and ). The eloquent work of Svetlana Boym on “The
Notes to pages ‒ Death of the Poetess” in identifying “the grotesque conglomeration of lack and excess” and other cultural flaws of cultural inferiority well illustrates the apparatus “poetess” and its problematic (Boym , ). There is debate on this point, with Eileen Gregory suggesting that H.D. attempts to draw the poetess as a figure of power. Here too I agree with Friedman’s emphasis on this poem as a semi-biographical encoding of H.D.’s desire to escape from “conventional femininity” (Friedman , –). By citing some of Mulvey’s findings, though not treating her analysis of male anxiety about woman’s “lack” or castration as the unconsciousness of patriarchy, I am signaling the importance of feminist film theory to discussions of the lyric. “It seems quite natural to me that an artist should have just as much pleasure in an arrangement of planes or in a pattern of figures [abstraction], as in painting portraits of fine ladies [i.e. realist representation], or in portraying the Mother of God as the symbolists bid us” (Pound [] , ). I am giving the poem in the version in Gaudier-Brzeska with a colon after “crowd” and a comma after the word “petals,” not in the version in Personae () with a semicolon after “crowd” and no comma after “petals.” A gender reading of this poem is also given in Marianne DeKoven’s Rich and Strange (): the poem is the “compression and containment of an erotic response” that needs the interplay between the crowd and the technology of the Metro and the “wetness and blackness of the female.” DeKoven reads the work as emblematic of the simultaneous enabling by the woman and erasure of the necessary woman by “masculine ahistorical poetic transcendence” (, , ). His “songs” are repeatedly addressed, saluted, and given “commissions” to attack all sexual repressors and censors; in a letter to his father, “Tony [Anthony] Comstock” (of the notorious “Comstock Laws” against the circulation of sexual materials, including birth control information) is put forth (familiarly) as one of the “male prudes” whom Pound found derisory, as he proposes to let loose this bunch of sexual imps to tweak the bourgeoisie (Pound , ). Suzanne Churchill’s work on Others contains a parallel finding: “little magazines became associated with radical feminists and effeminate men” (Churchill , ). Alfred Kreymborg “struggled both to redeem poetry as a masculine occupation and to occupy the space of poetry without being emasculated,” and thus “established an alternative poetic space that transcended gender lines and tried to construct “an ‘other’ kind of masculinity” (). In , the “Woman’s Number” of Others (, , Sept. ), welcomed women’s voices, with a hortatory self-consciousness (although the actual issue is underwhelming). “At present most of what we know, or think we know of women has been found out by men. We have yet to hear what woman will tell of herself, and where can she tell more intimately, more immediately, than in poetry?” remarks editor Helen Hoyt. “In other words,”
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adds Alfred Kreymborg, “it is time woman played troubadour!” (Others , ). See the version of this chapter in the Keller and Miller anthology () for a discussion of Pound’s March review of Loy and Moore, essential reading for an analysis of logopoeia and gender. Logopoeia – named by Pound – then became a key critical term of his modernism, appearing, for instance, in “How to Read” () and in ABC of Reading (). It is one of three ways of creating meaning – by visual imagery (phanopoeia), by sound (melopoeia), or in logopoeia, by “using the word in some special relation to ‘usage,’” playing ironically with the contexts in which one expects it, in a phrase retooled from , “‘the dance of the intellect among words’” (Pound , ; , ). I can’t, unfortunately, pursue all of the Pound end of things here. However (irreverently) it does seem as if Pound’s attitude to women writers, while genuine in its interest, and supportive, if didactic, was also like that of miners to their canaries; if the canary didn’t keel over, then the site was safe to enter and to work. Pound used H.D. as the canary for imagism, and Moore and Loy for heteroglossic logopoeia. Amy Lowell keeled over and was discarded. I have cited the complete poem (Loy , ). Conover dates it to after ; it was first published in The Dial in October . Marianne Moore read it appreciatively, and mentions it (July , ), in her letters (Moore , ). Elisabeth Bronfen has devoted Over Her Dead Body to the aesthetization of the dead female figure, with subtle accounts of the psychological persistence and cultural rootedness of the topos in which “the feminine corpse is treated like an artwork, or the beautiful woman is killed to produce an artwork” (Bronfen , ). It is possible that this poem was challenged by Marinetti’s remark, “We deny our Symbolist masters, the last Moon-lovers” and produces a modern moon to love. Cited in Bradbury and McFarlane, (), . “Infusoria” are a class of one celled protozoas which live on decaying animal and vegetable matter. Loy uses precise, obscure terms from biology to get at forces animating us as organisms. Moore did know Loy’s work; in a review, she sees it as cubist and sculptural: “a sliced and cylindrical . . . use of words” (Moore , ). Emerson’s “The Rhodora” and Herrick’s “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time.” Loy has a satiric poem called “English Rose” that simultaneously attacks British imperial claims and prim, feminine women, in the Lunar Baedecker. This poem was then extended to treat Jews and her family, becoming one section of the sixty-five page poem “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” (Loy [], –). Given that syllabics are more common in the French prosodic tradition, her poems are foreign to her own tradition; hence her choice makes Moore be her own standard. She takes away what you are used to as poetry (meter,
Notes to pages ‒ regular rhyme, conventional stanzas such as quatrains, regularity in line lengths) but, instead of modernist free-verse prosodies, she gives back something almost the same: syllable count, slant, or irregularly recurring rhyme, or rhyme mingled with non-rhyme; unique but exact stanza shapes based on syllable count; intricately irregular lines. The very artful elegance of her syllabic system is a form of that “disruptive excess” which, Irigaray posits (b, ), is the final answer to theories of female incapacity and lack. Molesworth tracks how Moore was both a serious suffragist, and also had, at times, the teasing subject position of a boy or uncle in intra-family nicknames (Molesworth , , ). He tends to see the latter as regressive; it could also be viewed as interesting gender hybridity, and resistance to “Woman.” I have relegated to the article (in Keller and Miller, eds. []), not this chapter, an analysis of how, in “People’s Surroundings,” conventional beauty (“roses outlined in pale black on an ivory ground – ”) is probingly examined for its hidden cost and secret story (Moore , ). Materials critical of the notional cluster of the lyric that we have been tracking emerge in this poem: gorgeous and exotic beauty, complaisant and (might one say) ductile “lady,” herself “lost” in nature like a jewel, and the clear hint of predatory sexuality. Note also Moore’s blason “Those Various Scalpels,” another poem about gender challenging a genre featuring “the gaze.” Just as Moore attacks the carpe diem poem, she also alters the blason in this poem about Loy. Nancy Shevlin of the University of Maryland directed me to Addison and Steele; see especially The Spectator , – and , .
“ ”: , A number of points made in the version of this chapter published in Mezei, ed. () and Shreiber and Tuma () have had to be cut: among them a full analysis of sexualities in Dracula, a discussion of the times Loy alludes to Sappho’s fragments, and a discussion of Virginia Woolf ’s responses to Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I have also excluded a discussion of Stein’s “Lifting Belly.” I also want to note, explicitly, that this chapter focuses mainly on heterosexual intercourse. “Songs to Joannes” can be found in Loy (). In the wake of “Songs to Joannes,” and possibly influenced by its frankness, both Pound and Eliot’s serial poems ( and ) incorporate questions of sexuality. Eliot knew Others in which “Portrait of a Lady” had been published in September ; his Letters show he was reading Others in and (or ) (Eliot , , ). He wrote to Moore in praising her poems there, which suggests that he could have followed the journal through the appearance of Loy’s whole poem in ; he knew enough Loy to review her in . Eliot was working on materials which came into The Waste Land as early as , but a spur from Loy’s work is not out of the question.
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The crucial and most useful works on Loy are Roger L. Conover’s introductions and editorial discussions in his two editions of the poems (Loy and ), the study by Virginia Kouidis (), and Carolyn Burke’s striking biographical, contextual, and analytic studies on Loy (Burke a, , ) which have been capped by a critical biography Becoming Modern: the Life of Mina Loy (Burke ). Burke discusses elements of “Songs to Joannes” at several junctures in her published articles to date (e.g. Burke a and ). Vital also is Mina Loy: Woman and Poet (Shreiber and Tuma, eds., ). The manifesto is conjecturally dated , that is, virtually simultaneous with the poem, and just preceding it; possibly its critical force then is transferred to the poem “Love Songs,” for, although Conover notes Loy had written on the typescript. “This is a rough draught beginning of an absolute resubstantiation of the feminist question,” the manifesto is apparently not continued in these terms (Loy , – and ). A background to this feminist manifesto is her “Futurist Manifesto” cast in the generic “he.” As did Loy. “As conditions are at present constituted – you have the choice between Parasitism, & Prostitution, or Negation” (Loy , ; her emphasis). A review in The New Freewoman stated there was no difference between men’s and women’s “sex-feelings” (Loy , in Loy ). See Clarke () for finely elaborated discussions of the sex debates in Marsden’s journal. For the analysis of the sexual debates, I am indebted to Mort (), Weeks (), Dubois and Gordon (), Cott (), and Trimberger ( and ). The phrase pleasure/danger is also indebted to Carole Vance. My double use of British and American materials for British Loy occurs because the poem “Songs to Joannes” was first published in the United States and made quite a splash in its avant garde circles. First partially published in Others (July ), the whole poem was later issued as a chapbook: Others , (April ). Burke’s article – an important study of the link of free verse and free love – traces the considerable impact of Loy on the Others group and the New York avant garde, and the impact on Loy of Margaret Sanger’s birth control activism (Burke a). “Skow” could be someone’s misprint for show or it could be the verb scow: a nautical maneuver to trip an anchor on a foul bottom. Evidence of Pound (, ) suggests that “show” is correct. This latter editorial announces the now much-discussed end of the “new freewoman” title, so that the review would no longer emphasize female specificity but be for “individualists of both sexes.” The name change was precipitated by a letter from such male contributors as Ezra Pound, Allen Upward, and Richard Aldington. Given the putative date of Loy’s Manifesto (November ), it is plausible that was written as a response to Marsden’s withdrawal from the word “feminist.” Lawrence Lipking traces the seduced/abandoned motif of the poetess, as does Svetlana Boym (Lipking ; Boym ).
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A Bengal light is a firework with a brilliant blue light sometimes used for signaling. The combination of orgasmic connotations with images of scrutiny and signage exemplifies Loy’s work in this poem. Lyon quotes a passage about a honeymoon in Loy’s unpublished prose: “The rocket of the senses has been lit. The rocket sputters out in nervous irritation. No inward bodystar illuminates the bride in tremulous revelation” (Lyon , , citing from Yale University’s Beinecke Library). This passage confirms Loy’s interest in fictional and poetic representations of the experiences of orgasm. Section (Loy , ) reads in toto: “Shedding our petty pruderies / From slit eyes // We sidle up / To Nature / —– —– —– that irate pornographist[.]” I take this as the development of a new species within a genus, or the development of specialized organs, a word used of embryos or fetuses. “Every woman [i.e. no matter whether married or unmarried] has a right to maternity”; indeed “Woman must become more responsible for the child than man –.” The latter is either the most banal of her propositions, since it recapitulates what is, or the most radical in proposing dyadic families and sexual mothers (Loy , ). Shreiber (typescript) suggests that within this poem Loy narrates an abortion. I follow Susanne de Lotbinère-Harwood’s suggestion (made in translating Nicole Brossard), that anglophones should use a modified version of the French word “cyprin” for a word apparently missing in English (LotbinèreHarwood , –). One sees the relationship especially in a paragraph from the “Postscript to The Natural Philosophy of Love . . .” which is, in prose form, the explanation and gloss for the section in “Mauberley” () that begins “‘Conservatrix of Milésien’”: “Woman, the conservator, the inheritor of past gestures, clever, practical, as Gourmont says, not inventive.” (Pound , ; , ). Positive because Carpenter rejects any of the well-known interpretations of homosexuals and lesbians as morbid, diseased, degenerate, or sexual libertines. Behind each of these rejected descriptors there were scads of medicolegal arguments. Carpenter does not even accept the “trapped soul” theory of Ulrichs (homosexuals as mental/emotional women trapped in male bodies; lesbians the other way round), although he alludes to it agnostically (, –). See also Weeks (, ; and Dollimore (). “Certain Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality.” Elaine Showalter cites an comment by Edith Lees, about the excitement among women who attended the first London production of The Doll’s House: “We were restive and impetuous and almost savage in our arguments. This was either the end of the world or the beginning of a new world for women. What did it mean? Was there hope or despair in the banging of that door? Was it life or death for women? Was it joy or sorrow for men? Was it revelation or disaster?” (Showalter , vii, citing an article that appeared in ). Marianne Moore saw Ibsen’s The Doll’s House in and was quite
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affected by its stance for “individual liberty” and by its offering of “harrowing experiences in their real setting” (Moore , ). In his comments on “Suffragettes,” Pound dismisses Wright, yet in this context, six years and a war later, the sexual opinions have more of a hearing. In December , T. S. Eliot is reiterating this problem: “It is a commonplace that the increase of the electorate, in Britain, is the destruction of Democracy; that with every vote added, the value of every vote diminishes” (, ). Here the expansion of franchise is, counterintuitively, the death of democracy. In another post-suffrage analysis, in poems () by D. H. Lawrence, the sexual and political energies of women are seen as the fault of effete, masturbatory, or semi-potent men: “Willy wet-legs”; in what may be a slap at even the Marsden-style of female emancipation, any “egobound women” are dismissed as overt or covert lesbians – the most damaging sexual category Lawrence had (Lawrence , –, also ). This argument, ten to fifteen years later than our center of gravity, proposes that womanish men and manly women have caused general social decay. It is a development, in a specific way, of the “struggle of driving the shaft of intelligence into the dull mass of mankind” about which he spoke in (Pound , ). In seven years (pre-War to post-War and post-suffrage), the gender narrative has become more specific. Note the word “chaos” coded female; this is a usage in Pound that Moore criticized repeatedly. His remarks also bear an uncanny resemblance to some of Marinetti’s phallic politics (Poggi , ). See this letter to John Quinn (March , ), expressing an anxiety and pride in equal measure (Pound , ). He is praising Wyndham Lewis for his vitality. “Vortex. that is the right word, if I did find it myself. Every kind of geyser from jism bursting up white as ivory, to hate or a storm at sea. Spermatozoon, enough to repopulate the island with active and vigorous animals.” The Paige edition of the letters leaves off before the “jism” reference (Pound , ). Pound’s further remarks can also be found in Pound’s Artists , . Although I do not cite them, my knowledge of Lawrence’s sex-radical odyssey has been informed by Simpson () and Siegel (). Clarke summarizes Lawrence’s phases: first “an early suffragist and feminist liberalism” then, second, “heterosexual libertarianism and anarchistic individualism” then, third, “a physiological mysticism, a strident masculinist hierarchical separatism, and a desperate survivalism” (Clarke , –). This is related to an important scene of the female gaze at the very beginning of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in which Connie sees Mellors half naked: many of the adjectives are feminine descriptors; indeed, it is a new woman blason and Mellors is approved for his pure, delicate, white beauty (Lawrence , ). Stephen Heath has spoken about this dominant discursive convention of lovemaking in twentieth century fiction (he calls it “the sexual fix”), which
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frames the penis–vagina connection, with its male–female binary, and makes a large “primordial and cosmic investment in ‘sexuality’” as “culminations of a life and a novel”: “Writing love-making is again a problem of complicity with and support for the sexual fix, going over and over the standard pattern. Here if anywhere, one might think, differences would be fundamental, a plurality of positions and inscriptions would be possible. Yet here [he speaks in fact of a passage from Lady Chatterley’s Lover] precisely the same is made and remade, the very fact of these scenes determined by the myth and its repetition; with the difficulty of writing otherwise, outside that repetition, immense” (Heath , , , ). “, , ”: In Carl Sandburg’s “Jazz Fantasia” (), hoo is the sound of a steamboat, but made in the racial context of an apostrophe to “jazzmen” (Sandburg, CP ). Similarly, in a study of the virtually phatic in the Dada sound poetry of Hugo Ball, Raymond Williams remarks about “zimzim urallala zimzim urallala zimzim zanzibar” that the appearance of this last word is a “reminder of how deeply constituted, socially, language always is, even when the decision has been made to abandon its identifiable semantic freight” (Williams , ). See Frye (, ), Nielsen (, ), Morrison (), bell hooks (), Sundquist (), Lott (), North (), and Mullen (), and also related to the work of such social historians as David Roediger (). The article by Shelley Fisher Fishkin in Wonham offers more complete bibliographic documentation (Wonham ). The feminist social philosopher Marilyn Frye offers a penetrating analysis of whiteness as a “political classification,” from which one can disaffiliate (Frye , ). She subsequently elaborates the concept of “whiteliness” or “being whitely,” which she defines as a set of learned but deeply imbedded and rewarded behaviors and ideologies parallel to masculinity for males (Frye : –). The eclectic book by Susan Gubar shows that “racechanges” – appropriations, racial cross-dressings, minstrelsy, influence, impersonations, passings, and counterpassings – occur through the whole of twentieth-century literature, visual art, film, and performance. Gubar offers a synoptic cultural history of motifs, illustrating “the powerful attraction of black people and their culture within the white imagination as well as the imaginative centrality of the color line for African-American artists” (Gubar , xviii). This process has begun, with work by Eric Sigg, Robert Crawford, and Michael North, as well as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Colleen Lamos, and others. When Aiken remembers their Harvard years, he reveals their urgent examination of the American culture, including African-American, in which both felt called to act, and which they hoped to influence, including
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vaudeville, comic strips, dirty jokes, and slang, including the “latest slang word for Negro, ‘dinge’ –,” a word revealing the intense curiosity of the white gaze on blacks as formative in Eliot (Aiken , ). “Sweeney Agonistes,” however, has pride of place in Robert Crawford . Nor is it invisible to Tony Pinkney in his study of women in Eliot. It is important evidence for Michael North () as well. For Stevens, Peter Brazeau’s biographical anecdotes, Alan Filreis’s exhaustive contextual studies, and Joan Richardson’s biography are of prime usefulness. African-American writers also evoked tom-toms for a variety of purposes; I do not consider that question here. Cheryl Wall also points towards ways of distinguishing the words, based on Albert Raboteau’s work in slave religions, arguing that voodou was an integral cult and religious system, but that it “disintegrated” in the U.S., and became a “less cohesive system” but still one that evoked magic, herb working, divination, and conjuring as “a whole area of folklore” (Wall , , citing Raboteau , –). Observe also that if a person says only “hoo” as a way of alluding to “hoodoo,” something odd occurs. “Hoo” in isolation, without its “doo,” suggests that agency (doing), power, powers, and control are still at issue, but have been obfuscated. The denial or occlusion of black agency is an element of whiteness as an ideology. In a later appearance of this poem, in a collection for children, the last word has been altered from the demeaning slang term for black person, and the line is given as “Gee, that poor guy!” (Bontemps , ). In Marianne Moore records “I read an amusing article in Boy’s Life at the library last night on ‘Putting on a Minstrel Show’” (Moore , ). Boy’s Life is the official journal of the Boy Scouts. In his speech, Yeats praised Lindsay’s “General William Booth” as having “an earnest simplicity, a strange beauty.” Harriet Monroe records what then happened. “And when the new poet [Lindsay] responded by reciting for the first [actually the second] time ‘The Congo,’ then still in manuscript, the ‘strange beauty’ of the poem came to the audience with an accolade, as it were, of authoritative praise. Only a few of us had ever heard Lindsay recite his poems; the audience was quite carried away by his gusto, and if any dissenters from his method or manner were present they dared not express their feelings. That night, which for the Irish poet was merely one of many such occasions, was a triumph for the young poet of Illinois” (Monroe , ; Yeats’ speech, as transcribed after the event, –). Lindsay stated: “I have heard the race question argued to shreds every week of my life from [boyhood] til now.” But compare: “We have so many negroes [in Springfield, Illinois] that we had race riots for a week in .” I see here a basic structure of blame, which I will continue to identify in this chapter (Lindsay , ). “Then I heard the boom of the blood-lust song / And a thigh-bone beating on a tin-pan gong” (Lindsay , ). The allusion to Tin-Pan Alley is
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placed in a cannibal context. Yet “tin-pan” marks the joint black–Jewish origins of popular music and adds an urban ethnic note to Lindsay’s rampaging Africa, expressed by the blackface vaudeville acts of Jewish and black performers (Rogin , –). For the Mandingo peoples on whose language this word depends, a mamagyo-mbo (or Mama Dyumbo) is a protective spirit who makes the troubled ancestral spirits go away. With etymological irony, one might point out that our usage, and the usage which Lindsay enshrines in his poem, is apparently the opposite of the meaning the term has in the African context. Manbo or mambo is also a term, in voudou rites, for the priestess (Murphy , passim). In these comments, I am interpreting Lindsay’s use of Williams and Walker. However, it has been argued that these black performers engineered a major transition from minstrel stereotype to Broadway success with their “Backto-Africa musicals” written and staged by black performers from about to (Woll , –). Jessie Fauset eulogized Bert Williams, pointing out that he studied pantomime, he practiced African-American dialect (he himself was from the Bahamas), and that his stage persona was a carefully studied and honed cultural fabrication, not a natural emanation. Furthermore, the white world that demanded and consumed these despised stereotypes of “coons, end-men, clap-trap” thereupon denigrated this artist, whose rare dramatic talent was, because of race prejudice, allowed to emerge only in such limited venues (Fauset , ). Indeed, Moore singles out Lindsay’s lines “laughed till their sides were sore / At the baboon butler in the agate door” and “hats that were covered with diamond dust” explicitly contrasting them with the succinctness of Bert Williams’ lyrics which Lindsay is remastering: “Baboon butler at the door, / Diamond carpet on the floor.” Moore uses this to illustrate her proposition that Lindsay, despite his claims, has no ear for real African-American rhetorical nuance. Moore does not mention Bert Williams by name. Lindsay does; in “A Poem on the Negro,” he cites the stanza which is his source (, ). The brief comments, probably written by Du Bois, and appearing in his regular column “The Looking Glass,” state that Lindsay’s work and opinions are “well meant” but sometimes involve “nonsense.” “Mr. Lindsay knows little of the Negro, and that little is dangerous” ([Du Bois] , ). This exchange of letters was made public in The Crisis (See also Massa , –). Ezra Pound made a response to Lindsay, but one in a variant key from the ones discussed here. In a letter of November , he comments about “Lindsay’s manner”: “it really is tew bloomin easy.” He proceeds to parody a few choice elements, proposing the term “hoo,” but shifting the racial group. “Bone arrow, / bow of beaver wood, / my squaw is a corker / my cork is a squa[w]ker, / minne-hoo-loo / Laughing water.” Even with Longfellow lurking, this “hoo” is evidence that the parody is part of the “Congo” complex around whiteness (Pound , ).
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Like Hughes’ Mississippi as intimating black presence and power, there are Sherwood Anderson’s poetic novel Dark Laughter () and T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (): “the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops, / The bitter apple and the bite in the apple” (Eliot , ). The joining of African-Americans with domesticated animals who are property is reductive, combined with the eradicating lower-case “n.” The sullen, implacable “sudden fury” that one might read as white understanding of black resistance or black anger is all displaced to the Mississippi. The sequence of events is as follows: in February , Stevens submitted one poem to the Dial’s Gilbert Seldes, promising more. On May , he submitted more, including “Bantams in Pine-Woods”; they were published in July . A month earlier, on April , Stevens wrote to Harriet Monroe that Vachel Lindsay was to come to Hartford “next week with other early songsters. Autograph copies of his poems are to be sold in the lobby of the High School. My word!” (Stevens , ; sequence of events ibid., –). The temporal and situational put-down in “early songsters” is clear in its repositioning of Stevens’ belatedness as timeliness and its use of the feminized “songsters.” An appearance by Lindsay could not have avoided “The Congo” – his major performance piece. In suggestive literary historical probing, A. Walton Litz notes the possibility that “Bantams” may be a “disguised protest against Lindsay’s colorful bombast” (not explicitly stating “The Congo”); he does not further link the work to issues of race (Litz , ). The allusions are to an invented racial–class amalgam: Azcan (Ashcan)/ Aztec/Aztlan (the American Southwest as Mexican)/Arab (the “caftan”). But given the function of “Arab” for Williams (the end of Spring and All) and Stein (Picasso), as a euphemistic way to avoid acknowledging blacks and their cultural power, this poem’s “Arab” may be a knowing displacement of other dark-skinned players, as it is plausibly a response to Lindsay’s white performance of blackness. The (second) edition would have been available to Eliot, with six works by Lindsay totaling seventeen pages (counting Untermeyer’s introductory remarks). “The Congo” was among these works – ”an infectious blend of rhyme, ragtime, and religion” (Untermeyer , ). The works by Eliot that the anthology included were three short poems or excerpts (e.g. only the cat passage from “Prufrock”). Two pages were devoted to him, counting the introduction, in which Untermeyer commented upon Eliot’s “mordant light verse” and “complex and disillusioned vers de société” (). In June , for example, Eliot was experimenting with a (Lindsayesque?) performance style for The Waste Land. Virigina Woolf heard him read it thus: “He sang it & chanted it, rhythmed it” (Woolf , ). In a review from , Eliot noted: “The artist, I believe, is more primitive, as well as more civilized, than his contemporaries, his experience is deeper than civilization, and he only uses the phenomena of civilization in expressing it. . . . In the work of Mr. [Wyndham] Lewis we recognize the thought
Notes to pages ‒ of the modern and the energy of the cave-man” (, ). One sees a program for the character Sweeney, and for Eliot here. Though he drew mightily on an “Africanist” lexicon, Eliot resisted specific focus on the “negro problem.” In one contemporaneous comment on this (in “Review of Eugene O’Neill”) he saw race as a subgenre of a larger kind of problem, “the universal problem of differences which create a mixture of admiration, love, and contempt, with the consequent tension” (, ). The interest in Conrad links this work to The Waste Land. Eliot was ambivalent about naming Heart of Darkness as a source; “The horror. The horror” is Conrad’s climactic phrase that would prove central to Eliot’s imagination. In a letter to Pound about his editing of The Waste Land, Eliot asks: “Do you mean not use Conrad quot. or simply not put Conrad’s name to it? It is much the most appropriate I can find, and somewhat elucidative” (Eliot ). A letter from March then retracts the Conrad quotation. In the “London Letter,” in which he reviews Untermeyer’s anthology and mentions Lindsay, Eliot reiterates the qualities of music hall, “precisely those forms of art” in which “directness, frankness, and ferocious humour” are in evidence. He implicitly compares music hall with the “commonplace and conventionality” of both American and British poetries. He also mentions Ulysses; evidently Joyce, as well as Lindsay, was a goad. These productive associations show he wanted some new kind of work going well beyond conventional poetry (, ). Most of Eliot’s critics seem to agree: “[The killer] is dead, more truly dead than his victim, since he is damned for all eternity” (Gordon , ). Unless a Christian teleology of redemption is assumed as a commonplace frame for literary critical interpretation, this seems a specious argument, since it is the female character who is really, truly dead; the killer’s mythic or metaphoric “death” is not depicted. Jan Nederveen Pieterse discusses contemporary comic images of the cannibal (chefs and gourmands), as the “icon of the colonized savage and of a pacified Africa”: that Africans are perpetual savages, and thus need Europeans, and that Europeans have civilized them at least with chef ’s hats and wire whisks, and yet the process is incomplete (for they are cooking the colonisers) (Pieterse , ). Indeed, one of Sterling Brown’s poems explicitly answers the cannibal trope as applied to blacks, by a “surreal” description of the dismemberment and scattering of the body parts of a black man named for two AfricanAmerican notables (the first man to fall in the American Revolution, and the inventor of an industrial lubrication process, and source of the phrase “the real McCoy.”) “Crispus Attucks McKoy” (Brown , –). As he suffers every racial degradation possible in the Boston setting of “cradle of freedom,” he could “have committed murder, / Mayhem and cannibalism,” a comment which is Brown’s “boo” to his readers. What the poem in fact recounts is the opposite: the hero’s murder and dismemberment at the
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hands of “Nordics and Alpines / Hebrews and Gentiles,” a murder triggered by the hero’s response to the scream of “Kill the Nigger!” The real black McKoy is cannibalized – that is, picked apart by a lynch mob. In a minstrel show, both characters would play percussion (tambourine and castanets), and both would be part of the medley of entertainment – songs, solos, and comic dialogue which featured exchanges between an emcee and these minstrel clowns – whites in blackface. Michael North argues that Eliot “imprisons the song once again in a minstrel tradition” (North , ). In my contrary view the use acknowledges the power of African-American popular culture in relation to other powerful theatrical traditions. Marianne Moore’s review of “Sweeney Agonistes” shows she well knew the source of the song, for she cites a version of lines that Eliot does not quote: “where you love-a me, I love-a you, ‘One live as two,’ ‘Two live as three’ – and there is no privacy under the bamboo tree” (Moore , ). Modifying “If you lak-a me lak I lak-a you and we-lak-a both the same” (Woll , ). Note the same pattern as in her review of Lindsay: she cites African-American popular music back to the white men who incorporated it in their poems, tracking their sources to demonstrate her critical prowess. “ ” : Charles Johnson’s summary, “The Negro Renaissance and Its Significance” (), ends with the universalist claim that the intense race consciousness of this period did not benefit only “a special culture group” but contributed to “the national society and world civilization” (Lewis , ). I will not trace specific uses of African-American dialect (or imagined versions of it) to create a “pattern of [modernist linguistic] rebellion through racial ventriloquism,” already elegantly discussed by Michael North (North , ). The passage argues that the idea of portraying “things as they are, no matter what the consequences, no matter who is hurt, is a blind bit of philosophy. . . . To broadcast [all elements of Negro life] to the world will but strengthen the bitterness of our enemies, and in some instances turn away the interest of our friends. Every phase of Negro life should not be the white man’s concern” (Cullen : ). Gwendolyn Bennett’s poem “Advice” discusses the situation of having work controlled and guided by others – light or white. “You were a sophist, / Pale and quite remote, / As you bade me / Write poems – / Brown poems / Of dark words / And prehistoric rhythms . . . / Your pallor stifled my poesy” () (Cullen , ). Cullen is not named in the review, but the identification is clear, despite a slightly masked picture of “the colored middle class” home which generates these sentiments. The actual occasion for the review was also a
Notes to pages ‒ Menckenesque article by African-American journalist and novelist George Schuyler called “Negro Art Hokum” which the editor of The Nation had sent to Hughes, then a student at Lincoln University, in the hopes that he would respond. His important statement clearly fuses attention both to Cullen’s review and to Schuyler’s propositions (Schuyler [] and Hughes [a] in Mitchell, ed., ; Rampersad , –). In Caroling Dusk (subtitled “an anthology of verse by Negro poets rather than an anthology of Negro verse” xi), Cullen’s brief biography, written by himself, makes the point forcefully: “He has said, perhaps with a reiteration sickening to some of his friends, that he wishes any merit that may be in his work to flow from it solely as the expression of a poet – with no racial consideration to bolster it up. He is still of the same thought” (Cullen , ). The impulse to idealize the Negro against which Cullen made his principled remarks can be seen in Floyd Dell’s review of “Negro Poetry”: “It may perhaps be said that a Negro poet would feel the same emotions about a sunset or a woman, a butterfly or a battle, that a white poet would. . . . I think that is not true. I hope it is not true. I believe there is a Negro way of seeing a sunset. And I believe it is a more splendid way. – There, I have given myself away” (Dell, , ). Even more: the role of the aesthetic experience in transcending the trials of discrimination and segregation and liberating the spirit is clear in his column “The Dark Tower” for the April issue of Opportunity, cited in Cullen (), –. Readers are reminded to seek the full text of Cullen’s work discussed in this chapter in Cullen’s books, in easily available anthologies, or in Gerald Early, ed., My Soul’s High Song (Cullen ). A number of Cullen’s poems were dedicated to men with whom Cullen had a strong bond, and a number were his lovers, including Donald Duff, the dedicatee here. (Reimonenq, passim) See also Walter Kalaidjian’s reading of the illustrations in the book Color, proposing that “image and text” offer a “queer performative act whose utopian mix” of sexual and racial images is confrontative (Kalaidjian , ). Charles Cullen, the illustrator, was no relation to the poet. For example, whenever faced with some mannered, exaggerated praise of Negro artistic achievement, his response was always to list important white artists – ”Frost and Robinson and Millay; Anderson and Cather and O’Neill” (Cullen , ; essay from ). His column “The Dark Tower” in Opportunity during and was characterized by a rich commentary on that precise point where black and white meet (and where “white” does not mean “universal”). He has a strong interest in and tolerance for whites writing about blacks (Du Bose Heywood’s Porgy); he conversely encourages blacks to write about whites. A gloss on such types might be found in Cullen’s critical essay “On Miscegenation” (Crisis , Nov. ; reprinted in Cullen : –). The essay concerns Cullen’s reasoned and ironic resistance to a melodramatic
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novel on black–white intermarriage by Claire Goll, and his further resistance, in a meeting with her, to “the enormity of her enthusiasm [for] the Negro” (Cullen , ). Enormity, indeed; Cullen always chose his words pointedly. The Letters of Wallace Stevens make clear that cultural or political movements like the post-Reconstruction crisis, New Negro, or the Harlem Renaissance were not subjects for his comment although he did sometimes comment upon the social and historical presence of real AfricanAmericans, as those departing for World War I. Ann Douglas does not find any evidence of Stevens’ participation in the crossracial cultures of New York (Douglas ). In Stevens’ Letters, there are no references to such contemporaneous black writers and thinkers as Hughes, Cullen, Brown, James Weldon (much less Fenton, Georgia Douglas, or Helene) Johnson, Du Bois, or Washington. No black writers noted, in Richardson’s biography of Stevens, until . The one is a compromising allusion (in ) to Gwendolyn Brooks calling her “a coon” (Richardson , ). Sambo was also one signature of choice for his letters to Elsie (Stevens , ). Joan Richardson’s discussion of this material (, –) does not analyze the racial (and class) narratives at work. Crediting Joan Richardson’s interpretation of this poem as not only one of the great French symbolist poems in English (i.e. poésie pure, without referent) but also as commemorating the conception of the Stevens’ only daughter (with an absolute referrent), the importance of the Sambo figure as joyous po(e)tency demands comment. To be exact, once one whispers (words unwritten) to a Chinese person; another time one “makes a sound to attract their attention.” At a third time, a black character picks up a discarded instrument and strums. But no worded voice is depicted (Stevens , , , and ). An account of a production in explains that the problem of the voiceless blacks was solved by treating “these visible stagehands as mo, prop men on the Chinese stage who dress in black to be ‘invisible’ but available.” This ingenious solution, well in keeping with the work’s Orientalist mode, still protects us from Stevens’ use of “Negroes” (Evans , ). In the letter to Monroe (May , , Stevens , ) Stevens says that Monroe and the prize donor both resisted the actual stage presence of the hanging body; but finally, as Holly Stevens notes, “the hanging body remained in the play as published” (Stevens , ). Of course, as Eric Sundquist remarks, the Italian as type figured in antiimmigrationist thought as a kind of “colored” and degraded figure; and in a sensational case, in , eleven Italians were lynched in New Orleans, possibly for crossing the social line between whites and blacks (Sundquist , –; Lindemann , ). This by virtue of U.S. military incursions into Mexico and countries in the Caribbean in the early part of this century. Stevens also traveled to Florida on business from on.
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Joan Richardson, Stevens’ biographer, says that Stevens identifies as black. She is working with the poems of the s in which Stevens, she says, enters “the black man’s skin” in a Whitmanesque inclusiveness, and from the sense that blacks had advantages of anonymity and closeness to the natural world. His racial prejudices (or, as she says, “ambivalences”) were due to “the circles in which he moved” (Richardson , ). The poem says a “black figure”; the rural site of the poem and its consistency with others of this type make me interpret this as a “black person,” rather than the weaker “[white] person dark because he walks at night.” This admiration can also turn into a topos of criticism – white writers criticizing each other for too much primitivist identification. When Eliot addressed Stein’s “Composition as Explanation” in “Charleston, Hey! Hey!” he disparaged it through jazz: “its rhythms have a peculiar hypnotic power . . . it has a kinship with the saxophone. If this is of the future, then the future is, as it very likely is, of the barbarians” (Eliot , ). When Wallace Stevens came to disparage T. S. Eliot (in a more allusive moment in “Comedian as the Letter C”), he spoke of “a blubber of tom-toms harrowing the sky” – the pun on Eliot’s first name evoked the automatic primitive-Africa complex of ideas. The question of culture and civilization is always set in play by EuroAmericans treating African materials. In Vision and Design, Roger Fry reprints his review of a show of “negro sculpture.” After a stunning introduction about cultural relativism, showing Graeco-Roman assumptions of superiority being “blown away,” and after appreciative formalist praise of certain works, Fry recuperates superiority by the remark “it is curious that a people who produced such great artists did not produce also a culture in our sense of the word” (Fry , ). The “negro” exhibits a “want of a conscious critical sense and the intellectual powers of comparison and classification.” “After all one must never forget that African sculpture is not naive, not at all, it is an art that is very very conventional, based upon tradition and its tradition is a tradition derived from Arab culture. The Arabs created both civilisation and culture for the negroes and therefore African art which was naive and exotic for Matisse was for Picasso, a Spaniard, a thing that was natural, direct and civilised.” Presumably because of the Arab influence in Spain, that is. This leap over Africa by assigning its culture to Arab influences totally decivilizes that continent (Stein , ). Robert Farris Thompson discusses the folk decorations of graves in Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. Peter Brazeau cites Judge Powell: “[Stevens] was interested when I explained the custom of negroes to decorate graves with broken pieces of glass, old pots, broken pieces of furniture, dolls heads, and what not” (Brazeau , –). Stevens “ignored” the comment of I. L. Salomon who told him directly that “I found the title offensive” (). See Charles Bernstein’s comment on the situation in his title: “Like DeCLAraTionS in a HymIE CEMetArY” (Bernstein , ). Hyman
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Kaplan – actually “H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N” – a Yiddish-speaking, font-happy new immigrant proud of acquiring English, created by Leo Rosten – meets Longfellow meets Stevens meets L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. For another famous use, see James Weldon Johnson’s “St. Peter Relates an Incident of the Resurrection Day” (), in Johnson (), , whose climactic lines concern the heroic unknown soldier revealed to some good old boy war participants as “his towering form loomed big and bigger – / ‘Great God Almighty! Look!’ they cried, ‘he is a nigger.’” This division is borne out in an extended comment by Claude McKay in his novel Home to Harlem (); as this comment is assimilated, one must remember that the fond, intra-racial use of the term “nigger” pervades this novel. “Jake thought how strange it was to hear the Englishman say “darky” without being offended. Back home [in the U.S.] he would have been spoiling for a fight. There he would rather hear “nigger” than “darky,” for he knew that when a Yankee said “nigger” he meant hatred for Negroes, whereas when he said “darky” he meant friendly contempt. He preferred white folks’ hatred to their friendly contempt. To feel their hatred made him strong and aggressive, while their friendly contempt made him ridiculously angry, even against his own will” (McKay , ). Carl Van Vechten’s title, Nigger Heaven, glossed within the novel (), alludes to the seats high up in a theater, and is a social allegory of both exclusion and overview. The title is also, however, lurid and sensationalist, given the many scenes of high life, jazz abandon, sexual liaisons, and jealous rage well beyond the staid main plot of striving, middle class African-Americans. The overt claim (the word is a descriptor) is swamped by the covert force of this word as prurient scandal. Indeed Van Vechten’s father (an aristocratic integrationist) criticized the title in a () letter to his son (from the Van Vechten papers at the New York Public Library) that I am quoting from Chidi Ikonné. “Your ‘Nigger Heaven’ is a title I don’t like. I remember that it was said of some Democratic candidate for the presidency, he couldn’t be elected because he spelled negro with two g’s, and I have myself never spoken of a colored man as a ‘nigger.’ If you are trying to help the race, as I am assured you are, I think every word you write should be a respectful one towards the black” (Ikonné , ). “ ”: - Title citation with its important pun from Loy, “Anglo-Mongrels.” The epigraph, cited in part to show how “mongrel” was a vital, even obsessive consideration, has further interest as coming from “The Modern Pharisee,” an essay bucking historical trends and all of the poetry in this chapter by exhorting the modern Jew to resist assimilation. It was published in by Rabbi Joel Blau (my grandfather). He continues, “We are grateful to the anti-Semites for having called our attention to it; in guarding against mongrelization at the hand of Jews, they will help us preserve our own type”
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(Blau, , –). I have also had occasion to cite from the historical overviews of Joseph L. Blau, my father. John Higham tracks the story of Emma Lazarus, whose poem was not set on the pedestal til , twenty years after it was written, in the context of the transformation of the meaning of the Statue by the immigrants. The poem was not popularized until the mid-s, as an ennobling ideology in light of the ethnic hatreds fueling fascism (Higham , –). Lazarus (–) was a wealthy, well-educated woman, quite assimilated, who became consciously politicized after the pogroms in Russia in the s. For Jews, according to Norman Finkelstein, drawing on John Cuddihy, assimilation – the question of becoming a New Jew – is “the Jewish crisis of modernity” (Finkelstein , ). However, a somewhat earlier formation in the U.S. saw a congruence between the self-made Jewish man and the self-made Yankee – crude, loud, and pushy: certainly a double edged descriptor, though not one that featured disease but rather preternatural energy (Lindemann , ). In his preface to Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness, Sander L. Gilman remarks that “stereotypes can be (and regularly have been) freely associated, even when their association demands a suspension of common sense” (Gilman , ). Linda Nochlin is also eloquent about the contradictory stereotypes: Jews are smart/incapable of genius; sexually wanton/frigid/impotent; control all finance/live in poverty; are over-intellectual/are over-emotional, concluding that one cannot talk about a “good image” or “bad image” but rather who has invented these materials, when, and how they are used (Garb and Nochlin ). M. Carey Thomas, patrician president of Bryn Mawr College, subscribed to these sentiments. Echoing Grant, she argued in that “we are jeopardizing the intellectual heritage of the American people by this headlong intermixture of races, . . . lowering the physical and mental inheritance of a whole nation by intermixture of unprogressive millions of backward peoples”; she was “pro-Nordic,” anti-Eastern and Southern Europeans, including Czechs, Slavs, Italians, Jews, while Asian exclusion (the Chinese Exclusion Act was extended in ) and the low status of AfricanAmericans were, for her, givens (Horowitz , –; ). These ideas were played out in the exclusionary admissions policies of the college she headed. As Peter Quartermain and I argued in our introduction to The Objectivist Nexus (), to understand cultural products, one must develop a critical literacy in Jewish material – Jewish history and Jewish practices – comparable to the critical literacy in various Christianities necessary for the study of literature. That is, one must know a good deal about Christian rites, beliefs, practices, and paradigms to read Donne, Milton, Herbert, Hopkins, Eliot, Auden and others, from early English and American literatures through the modern period. A comparable literacy needs to be insisted upon to understand modernities whether or not they directly represent or construct Jewish
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experience. This literacy might begin with such terms as Diaspora, exile (galut), Jewish messianism, Hellenizing, Hebraism, Wandering Jew, midrash, assimilation, secularization, quarrels with God, covenant, chosenness, Yiddishkeit; it might continue by understanding such practices as circumcision, kosher, the (non-hegemonic) Sabbath, and the institutions and claims of anti-Semitism such as shtetl, plague, degeneracy, feminization/castration, infection, conspiracy, pogrom. When Adams wants to characterize late nineteenth-century greed and capitalist expansion, he says that in their worship of money they were worse off than the ancient Hebrews (Adams , ). “Weird” is a term that recurs for Yiddish. Alfred Kreymborg is uneasy about the oddness of Yiddish, which he cites in a semi-appreciative, semi-hostile rush in his urban poem “Chess Players.” call him ‘potzer,’ ‘nebich,’ ‘kibitz’; if that trio don’t confound him, sneer him ‘goy’; the weird vernacular has always this to addle Jews. . . . (Kreymborg , )
An earlier passage suggests that Kreymborg knows that “goy” is a term particularly appertaining to “Gentiles.” A Jew might well be “addled” to have precisely the wrong term of opprobrium applied to him. In there was a high degree of anti-Semitism in the British press; in an anti-Semitic group called “Britons” was founded, “which suggests expulsion or extermination as solution to Jewish problem” (Loewenstein , ). In an earlier version of this chapter, I tracked my own reading strategies as a daughter (indeed, literally so) of Enlightenment Judaism, and discussed the repression of the question of anti-Semitism in Eliot, because of the critical strategies of New Criticism. The Eliot elements of this chapter were first written for anthology appearance in People of the Book before the important and revelatory book by Anthony Julius (). My remarks were originally formulated independently of his, but now may be read as parallel and interdependent findings. Eliot only began using capitals for this Jew in (Ricks , ). Casillio makes an important remark about the non-capitalization of “jew” with reference to Pound; it is applicable to Eliot. The lower-case “jew” is a cutting down to size, a castration motif, responding to the multiple threat to the phallus that Jews embody (circumcision as castration; syphilis, immorality) (Casillio , ). Behind this bracketed voice of the epigraph which I have identified as “gay” may lie the culture of decadence, homosexuality, and the association of poetry with effeminacy; see Dellamora () and Laity ( and ). Julius says of this poem “it rehearses some major themes of anti-Semitism”: “the unity and wickedness of the Jewish people and the trans-historical struggle between Jews and Gentiles” (Julius , ). Among its “antiSemitic clichés” are a number that I had (independently) also detailed: the
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man with cigar, the rats, the piles (Julius , –), the blind or protrusive eye (). “Entertain” means to divert, to amuse (sexually or in society); to give parties; also to continue with, maintain, support (thus politically, economically). Note also that Jews traditionally enter the furniture, jewelry, shoe, retailtailoring and fur trades (Holmes , ). Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno are not alone in remarking that Jews serve as the scapegoat for capitalist relations: “The economic injustice of the whole [owning] class is attributed to them” (Horkheimer and Adorno , ). Casillio notes Eliot’s anti-Semitism, but does not see it structuring his work as it did Pound’s (Casillio , ). Casillio’s reading of anti-Semitic materials in The Cantos and in Pound’s oeuvre as a whole also links castration, disease, especially syphilis, prostitution, parasitism, the swamp, loss of single, solid maleness, identification with nomadic exiles. Many of these motifs parallel the claims of this Eliot poem, as we shall see. Casillio notes that the Hell Cantos of Ezra Pound, contemporaneous with this work of Eliot, never refer to the Jews, although the image package is thoroughly consistent with his later uses: “fragmentation, darkness, bogs, swamps, impotence, monstrosity, falsification, loss of origins, infection, plague, castration, organic disease, vermin, prostitution, filth, stench, sadism, and violence” are all characteristic of the Hell that is post-War England. This material is waiting to be galvanized by the centralizing conspiracy theory figure of the Jew (Casillio , ). The cultural presence of Jews is remarked on virulently by John Quinn in a letter to Pound from : “the damned Jew spewing-up of the Untermeyers, the Oppenheims, the Waldo Franks, the H. L. Menckens, the George Jean Nathans and the other parasites and pimps in poetry, literature generally, painting, the theater . . .” (Pound , ). A Bleistein poem cut from The Waste Land manuscript also represents this figure as diseased; the loss of this figure to the poem as completed may signal a diffusion of the suggestions around cultural decay, no longer as pointed to any one group. T. S. Eliot’s father had a decided attitude toward syphilis; as it was God’s punishment, he felt it should not be tampered with. A cure should not be found (Showalter , , cited from Lyndall Gordon). The Protocols were serialized in The Morning Post in the summer of (Morris , ). Anthony Julius speaks about this in several places. This point is also made by J. A. Morris, who especially notes the comparisons of Jews to animals, and their position in Eliot’s writing as “parasites, marauders, destroyers” (Morris , ). Morris characterizes Eliot’s opinions as consistent with the depiction of Jews in proto-Fascist and Fascist discourse. In yet another poem, the simian has achieved a Darwinian, and sexual
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“ascent,” related to evolutionist discourses analyzed here in “Seismic Orgasm.” Stephen H. Clark, “Testing the Razor: T. S. Eliot’s Poems ,” contains a startling line by line analysis of “Sweeney Erect,” discussing “the violently repudiatory sexuality prevalent in these texts” and the “virulence of its misogyny . . . its capacity not only to shock and repel, but also to implicate” (Clark : –). In “Sweeney Agonistes,” the Sweeney figure is one of the apparently American businessmen, Babbitts all, who visit the British demi-mondaines; they break into a minstrel show as “Tambo and Bones” and sing a primitivizing song, as whites in blackface. Sweeney discusses a lurid urge to kill and dismember women in a ritual manner, a primitivizing image which slides over to cartoon African (see chapter ). The taint is affiliated with images about blood; this trails or traces a slight motif of sexual taint in a shimmering, hard-to-pin down fashion. It suggests the blood taint of syphilis which will be activated in the “Bleistein/Burbank” poem and the blood libel of Jews. Eliot’s sentiments on race, Jews, blacks, the urban, and culture were consistent with the popular postures of pseudo-historical narratives about the South in the post-Civil War period. “Yes, I confess it,” [says the hero of The Leopard’s Spots: a Romance of the White Man’s Burden, –, by Thomas Dixon], “I am in a sense narrow and provincial. I love mine own people. Their past is mine, their present mine, their future is a divine trust. I hate the dish water of modern world-citizenship. A shallow cosmopolitanism is the mask of death for the individual. It is the froth of civilization, as crime is its dregs” (Dixon , ). The white race, and the white man’s burden and this argument reemerges in After Strange Gods, with the same slide between racial and semiticized discourses. This poem originally appeared in The Dial, . I have cited it from Observations. The version is longer than the version in Complete Poems, and despite the small “n” on “negro,” it is a more stirring statement. Since I am concerned with the context of the s, I have cited the version from that era. On those “Jewish eyes,” see Williams’ poem The Wanderer, with a woman character with “lewd Jew’s eyes” (Williams , ). It may well be Exodus, her father, in a different permutation than we saw him earlier, now as a free-thinking Humanist. Tuma, in Sagetrieb; his argument is subtle, suggesting that this “figure for a secularized Christianity or just simply . . . modernity – has remade humanity, but he also denies us, or at least that part of us which is spiritual, our ‘cruciform’ nature” (Tuma , ). Tuma reads the center of the poem as Ova’s spiritual epiphany a “saint’s prize / his indissoluble bliss” (Loy , ). I read it as her construction of a mongrel subjectivity. Carolyn Burke does not emphasize this poem in her biography, but does see it as betokening “a transcendence of the hybrid,” a position with which I clearly
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disagree (Burke , ). Another brief reading is Friedman, who sees the poem as a “(re)constitution of history” redefining the epic as a mixage of public and private (Friedman , ). Two important readings were published in Mina Loy: Woman and Poet, one by Elisabeth Frost, arguing that “Loy uses this apparently eugenical history to cast herself not just as an ethnic mongrel but as a hybrid of male and female traits” (Shreiber and Tuma , ). The other, by Marjorie Perloff, calls the poem “Loy’s most compelling representation of her ‘mongrelization’ – the ‘crossbreeding’ of the English and Hungarian-Jewish strains that produced, so [Loy] herself seems to feel, a form of mental and emotional gridlock that could be overcome, in life as in art, only by large doses of the transnational avant-gardism of the interwar period” (Shreiber and Tuma , ). This essay also appears in Perloff . The poets Loy mentions are Pound, cummings, H.D., Moore, Lawrence Vail, Bodenheim, and Williams. H.D. is marked as an exception to her general thesis, more engaged with an “older culture.” “No matter how Pound might try to purify, isolate, and sacralize his words by using Chinese ideograms and foreign languages, by drawing pictures and employing musical notation, by drastically truncating syntax, language itself was, as a social medium, impure, rotten, Jewish (that is, social and historical)” (Perelman , ). In her “Songs to Joannes,” a poem attentive to the vagaries of sexuality, Loy also puns on “petered out” (Loy , ). Harold Schimmel has outlined Zukofsky’s indebtedness to Yehoash (Samuel Bloomgarden) in Terrell (). To recall: Jews were excluded from the professoriat, a prejudice slowly changing during this period, but a barrier still very much in force. An account of Jewish progress in the U.S. is painstakingly catalogued in Isaac Max Rubinow, “The Jewish Question in New York City,” mentioning by name all Jewish professors who have found posts in private universities. In when Pound was thinking of returning to the U.S., he and Quinn discussed his needs. He was “perfectly willing to professize in Columbia or the College of the City of .. (where the hebraic element wd. pardon my lack of Xtn. faith)” (Pound , ). This is notable for its mildness and identification of common cause with a Jewish professoriat. My definitions and spellings come from Leo Rosten (). Slightly alternative definitions in Harshav and Harshav (). “Shegets”: “young Gentile man (with overtones of uneducated, unmannered ruffians)” and “Shikse: Gentile maiden (sometimes used with negative overtones or as a symbol of sexual attraction)” (). After my analysis was written I found a parallel analysis (Scroggins , –, ), which remarks that shagetz sometimes meant ruffian and Jew. In “European Paideuma” of , Pound the moralist finds a problem of evil in history often coterminous with “Semitism,” despite self-masking claims about some of his best friends being Jews (Pound ). The wrath
Notes to page
about the Semitic is visibly intertwined with Pound’s mysticism; “European Paideuma” argues that Hebraic monotheism “destroyed” the nonetheless persistent fecundating nature religions of Mediterranean paganism. Zukofsky also made a strategic separation of himself from some Jews, an ability to criticize Jews in specific and in general, a disgust with certain Jews, but the function of his discourse of “the Jew” often differed from Pound’s.
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Index
Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok , Adams, Henry –, , , The Education of Henry Adams –, n. Addison, Joseph and Richard Steele Adorno, Theodor –, , n. , n. , n. , ; see also Horkheimer, Max African-American modernity , , – experience , , , African art –, , , n. , n. Africanist representations xi, , –, , , , –, , , , –, , , –, , , , , –, n. , n. , n. , n. agency authorial , , –, , , , n. poetic vocation , , , n. social , , , –; see also New Black, New Jew, New Negro, New Woman, Newer Man Aiken, Conrad , – n. , Aldington, Richard , , n. , n. , Altieri, Charles , American language – American literature as definitional term –, n. “creolized ‘Unitedstateness’ ” anality , , n. Anderson, Sherwood , n. , n. , androgyny , , , anti-Semitism , , , , , –, –, , –, , , , , , n. , – n. , n , – n. ; see also Jews, stereotypes of Arabs , , n. , n. Arac, Jonathan , , , , , Ardis, Ann L. , , Asian representations , , n. , n. Auerbach, Erich n.
Bach, Johann Sebastian Baker, Houston , , Baker, Peter , Bakhtin, M. M., and P. N. Medvedev –, n. , “social evaluation” , , Barthes, Roland , beauty, see poetry and gender Bederman, Gail , , , , Behling, Laura , Belsey, Catherine Benjamin, Walter , , n. , Benn Michaels, Walter, see Michaels, Walter Benn Bennett, Gwendolyn xiii, –, “Advice” n. Benstock, Shari , Benveniste, Emil , Bergman, David Berlin, Irving , Bernstein, Charles , , , –, –, n. , BLAST , Blau, Joel , , , –, n. , Blau, Joseph L. –, , –, n. , Bodenheim, Maxwell n. Bontemps, Arna , n. , , “Golgotha is a Mountain” Bornstein, George , Boskin, Joseph , , Boym, Svetlana , –, n. , n. , Bradbury, Malcolm, and J. McFarlane n. , Braithwaite, William Brazeau, Peter , n. , Bridgman, Richard n. , Bristow, Joseph , Brodwin, Stanley, see Singh, Amritjit Bronfen, Elisabeth n. ,
Index Brooks, Gwendolyn n. Broun, Heywood , Brown, Marshall Brown, Richard , Brown, Sterling , , , n. , “Crispus Attucks McKoy” –, n. “Negro Characters by White Authors” “Sam Smiley” “The New Congo” – Burke, Carolyn xi, , , , n. , n. , –, n. , Bush, Ronald , , Bunyan, Paul Byrnes, Lillian “Nordic” cannibalism , , , , , , , n. , –, n. , Carpenter, Edward , –, , , n. , Casillio, Robert , n. , n. , Chatman, Seymour Chauncy, George , Cheyette, Bryan , , , , Christianity , , , n. Calvary , , , Christian culture , , , , , , , –, , , –, n. customary practices , , n. religious ideas , Churchill, Suzanne W. n. , Churchill, Winston civilized (racial ideology) , –, n. , n. , Clark, Stephen H. – n. , Clark, Suzanne , Clarke, Bruce , , , , , , n. , n. , n. , class (social) , , , Coghill, Neville Cohen, Ralph xii, Cohn, Norman R. , Cole, Bob , Coleridge, S. T. Columbia University , n. Comstock, Anthony n. Conover, Roger L. xi, n. , Conrad, Joseph , , , , n. Conte, Joseph , Cook, Eleanor , Cooley, John , Cooper, Helen Cornford, Francis Cott, Nancy , n. , Crawford, Robert , , ,
Crisis, The , , , n. , n. Criterion, The , criticism, literary, see specific practices: feminist literary criticism, ethnic literary criticism, cultural studies, materialist literary criticism, New Criticism, New Historicist, poststructuralism Crown, Kathleen , crypt word –; see also Abraham and Torok; Shoptaw; and poetry as mode Cuba Cuddihy, John Murray , n. , Cullen, Countee xiii, , , , –, n. , n. , n. , n. , n. , debate with Hughes – as Negro poet –, , , n. , n. , n. , – n. Caroling Dusk , , –, n. “Colors” “Heritage” “Incident” –, “To Certain Critics” – “Tableau” “Uncle Jim” – “Yet Do I Marvel” cultural poetics –, n. cultural studies , , , (Kalaidjian on) canon contextualizing theories – ideologies of form –, material text production reception and dissemination , and poetry ; see also social philology problem of textual specificity –, (Bernstein on) cummings, e.e. , , n. , Cuney, Waring “Dust” Curtis, L. Perry , , Damon, Maria , , Davidson, Cathy xii Davidson, Michael , ,, Dawidowicz, Lucy ,, , decadence , De Gourmont, Rémy, see Gourmont, Rémy de DeKoven, Marianne , , , n. , n. , Dell, Floyd n. , Dellamora, Richard n. , derogatory words “coon” , , , n. , n.
Index
derogatory words (cont.) “hebes” “nigger” , , , , –, , –, n. , n. , n. , n. “sheeney” – De Zayas, M., see Zayas, M. de Dial, The , , n. , n. DiBattista, Maria diegesis, see poetry as discourse Dijkstra, Bram , discrimination (racial) , – Dixon, Thomas n. , Dobkowski, Michael N. Dollimore, Jonathan , n. , Donne, John , –, n. Doolittle, Hilda, see H.D. Douglas, Ann n. , Douglass, Frederick Drucker, Johanna , Du Bois, W. E. B. , , , , , n. , n. , Duberman, Martin Dubois, Ellen, and Linda Gordon , n. , DuPlessis, Rachel Blau –, , , , n. , n. , n. , – Dydo, Ulla E. n. , n. Eagleton, Terry , , , Early, Gerald , n. ; see also Cullen, Countee Easthope, Antony –, n. , effeminacy , , , , n. , n. , n. Egoist Eliot, T.S. xiii, , , , –, , , –, , , , , , , n. , n. , –, n. , n. , n. , –, Africanist representations –, , n. , n. , n. After Strange Gods , , n. “Ballade pour la grosse Lulu” “Burbank with Baedeker: Bleistein with Cigar” , , –, , –, n. , n. , n. , n. , n. “Charleston, Hey! Hey!” n. Christianity, ideas on , – doggerel works , , drama, ideas on –, , n. Four Quartets n. gender, ideas on , –, , , , –, ,
“Gerontion” , , “Hysteria” Jews, ideas on , , , , –, , n. , n , n. , n. “Portrait of a Lady” , n. “Sweeney Agonistes” , , –, , , , n. , n. “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” , , – “Sweeney Erect” , – n. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” , n. The Waste Land , , , , , , –, –, , , n. , n. , n. , n. Elliott, Bridget, and Jo-Ann Wallace , Ellmann, Maud , Empson, William , , Engle, Gary D. enounced, see poetry as discourse enunciation, see poetry as discourse Erkkila, Betsy , ethnic literary criticism , , Euro-American, attitudes , , , –, , , , , –, , n. , n. Evans, Robley n. , Evans, Sara M. , evolution , , , , n. excremental images , , –, , , –, Fabian, Johannes , Fairchild, Henry Pratt –, Farr, Florence , fascism , –, n. , n. Fauset, Jessie n. , Feingold, Henry , Felski, Rita , femininity, as ideology , , , feminism , ; see also gender, femininity feminist literary criticism , , gender binarism , , gynesis gynocriticism feminist cultural studies , (DuPlessis) feminist reception “locational feminism” (Friedman) Filreis, Alan Finkelstein, Norman , n. , Fishberg, Maurice , Fishkin, Shelley Fisher xii, xiii, , Fitzsimmons, Linda, and Viv Gardner , Ford, Henry , ,
Index Foucault, Michel foundational cluster , ; see also poetry and gender Fout, John n. , Frascina, Francis, see Harrison, Charles Fredrickson, George M. , free love , , ; see also New Woman, sexuality, sex-radicalism Freewoman (and New Freewoman) Freud, Sigmund – Friedman, Susan Stanford xi, , , , , , n. , n. , Frost, Elisabeth –, n. , Frost, Robert , n. , Froula, Christine , Fry, Roger n. , Frye, Marilyn n. , Garb, Tamar , , ; see also Nochlin, Linda Gardner, Viv, see Fitzsimmons, Linda Gates, Henry Louis gay –, ns. and , n. ; see also heterosexuality, homosexuality gaze, the , Geller, Jay , gender , –, , , gender ambiguity, see intermediate sex genre George, Lloyd Gershwin, George and Ira Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar , –, , , Gilbert and Sullivan Gilman, Charlotte Perkins , Gilman, Sander L. n. , Glatshteyn, Jacob Golding, Alan , Gordon, Linda, see Dubois, Ellen Gordon, Lyndall , n. , n. , Gourmont, Rémy de , –, Grand, Sarah Grant, Madison –, n. , Granville-Barker, Harley Green, Barbara , Greenberg, Eliezer, see Howe, Irving Greenblatt, Stephen , , Gregory, Alyse , Gregory, Eileen n. Gregory, Horace , Grossman, Allen , Gubar, Susan , , , , ; see also Gilbert, Sandra Guillory, John , , Gunn, Giles, see Greenblatt, Stephen
Hallberg, Robert von n. , Hamilton, Cicely , Hammerstein, Oscar Harlem Renaissance Harris, Joel Chandler Harris, Trudier , Harrison, Charles Harshav, Barbara, see Harshav, Benjamin Harshav, Benjamin , , , n. , Harvard University , Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) xiii, , , , , , , , , n. , n. , gender ideas n. “Hymen” review of Moore – “Sea Rose” , “Sheltered Garden” – suffrage interest n. Heath, Stephen , – n. , Heller, Adele , Henderson, Mae heterosexuality –, , , , –, –, , Heywood, Du Bose n. Higham, John , , , , n. Hill, Lynda xii history, see struggles, social Hogue, Cynthia Holley, Margaret Holmes, Colin , , n. , Holtby, Winifred n. , Homans, Margaret n. , homosexuality , , , , –, , , , , , n. , n. , n. ; see also lesbian, intermediate sex, effeminacy, gay homosociality , , , Honey, Maureen , , hoo-doo (also hoo) –, chapter passim, n. ; see also Lindsay “The Congo” hooks, bell , Horkheimer, Max Horne, Frank , “Nigger: a Chant for Children” Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz n. , Hosek, Chaviva, and Pat Parker n. , Howe, Irving, and Eliezer Greenberg , Hueffer, F. M. [Ford Maddox Ford] Huggins, Nathan Irvin , Hughes, Langston xiii, , , , , n. , debate with Cullen –, – n. “Dream Variation”
Index
Hughes, Langston (cont.) “I Thought It Was Tangiers I Wanted” “I, Too, Sing America” – “Lament for Dark Peoples” “Our Land” “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” , –, n. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” Hulme, T. E. , Hurston, Zora Neale , , Hynes, Samuel n. , Ibsen, Henrik , , –, n. Ikonné, Chidi n. , immigration , –, , – intermediate sex , , (inversion), , , –, Irigaray, Luce , , n. , Irish (stereotype) , , , , , Italians , , , n. , n. Jakobson, Roman , , n. James, Henry –, , , , James, William, Jameson, Fredric , , “the political unconscious” , , n. Januzzi, Marissa xi jazz –, , –, n. , n. Jehlen, Myra , Jews social issues , –, , –, , , n. , n. stereotypes of , , , , , , , –, –, , –, –, , , –, n. , n. , n. , n. see also Judaism Johnson, Charles S. , , n. Johnson, Fenton , n. , “Tired” Johnson, Georgia Douglas , n. , “The Suppliant” Johnson, Helene xiv, n. , “Bottled” – “Magalu” Johnson, James Weldon , , –, n. , “St. Peter Relates an Incident of the Resurrection Day” n. Jordan, Viola Baxter Joyce, James , , n. Judaism circumcision , , , , n. customary practices , , , , –, n.
kosher (food taboos) religious ideas , , , , –, n. Julius, Anthony , , n. , –, n. , Kalaidjian, Walter , n. , Kaplan, Amy Kaplan, Carla n. , Kaplan, Cora Kappel, Andrew J. , Karp, Abraham J. Katz, Jonathan Ned , Keach, William Keats, John Keenaghan, Eric , Keller, Lynn , and Cristanne Miller xii, n. , Kent, Susan Kingsley Kenton, Edna , Kern, Jerome Kinnahan, Linda A. , Koestenbaum, Wayne , Kouidis, Virginia M. , n. , Kramer, Victor A. Kreymborg, Alfred , , , n. , n. , “Chess Players” n. “Icicles” poem to Fenton Johnson – Kristeva, Julia , , Ku Klux Klan , , Laity, Cassandra , , , , n. , and Nancy K. Gish Lamos, Colleen language poetry , n. , n. , – n. , Lawrence, D. H. , , , , n. , “After Dark” “Ego-Bound Women” n. ideas on gender and sexuality – men , – ideas on gender and sexuality – women –, , n. Lady Chatterley’s Lover , n. , –, n. “Manifesto” – “Now It’s Happened” n. review of Nigger Heaven The Rainbow Lawrence, Karen Lazarus, Emma –, n. , Lazer, Hank ,
Index Lecercle, Jean-Jacques , , Lentricchia, Frank , , , Lerer, Seth lesbian –, , , , n. , n. Lessinger, Hanna, see Swerdlow Amy Levine, George , , Lewis, David Levering n. , Lewis, Sinclair Lewis, Wyndham , , n. , n. Lindemann, Albert S. , , n. , n. , Lindsay, Vachel , , , , , , “Booker T. Washington Trilogy” “General William Booth” n. racial ideas of –, n. , “The Congo” , –, –, n. , – n. , n. , , n. , n. , n. Lipking, Lawrence n. , Litz, A. Walton n. , Locke, Alain , , Loewenstein, Andrea Freud , n. , logopoeia , , , , , n. as feminist critique – as anti-female Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth n. , – n. Lotbinère-Harwood, Susanne n. , Lott, Eric , , , , , , Low, Barbara Lowell, Amy , , n. , Loy, Mina xii, xiv, , , , , , , , , , , , n. , n. , “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” –, n. , n. , n. , –, n. eugenicist ideas , – “Feminist Manifesto” , , , , , n. , n. “Futurist Manifesto” n. gender ideas, including feminism , –, , n. Insel “Lunar Baedeker” “Modern poetry” –, n. mongrel, ideas on –, –, –, n. motherhood, ideas of , , –, n. “Poe” , n. , religious culture – sexuality, ideas of –, , , –, , n. , “Songs to Joannes” –, , –, , , n. , n. The Pamperers –
lynching , –, –, , , –, n. , n. , n. anti-lynching campaigns , , Lyon, Janet , , , n. , n. , Macherey, Pierre Machin, Richard, and Christopher Norris , n. , Mackey, Nathaniel , Major, Clarence , Malamud, Randy , maleness effeminacy, critique of , , (also, see effeminacy) ideologies of manhood , , , , , –, , , , , masculinity , , , , , n. spermhood –, n. , Man, Paul de n. , “return to philology” – Man Ray March, Richard Marcus, Jane , , , Marek, Jayne E. Marinetti, Filippo n. , n. Markel, Howard , Marsden, Dora , , , , –, , , n. , Massa, Ann materialist literary criticism , , , , n. , n. Matisse, Henri , , n. , McFarlane, James, see Bradbury, Malcolm McGann, Jerome , , , McKay, Claude “America” Home to Harlem n. “If We Must Die” Medvedev, P. N. ; see also Bakhtin, M. M. melting pot , –, ; see also Zangwill, Israel Mezei, Kathy xii, n. , Michaels, Walter Benn , Michie, Elsie , Michie, Helena Middlebrook, Diane Wood, and Marilyn Yalom Middleton, Peter , Millay, Edna St. Vincent , , , , n. Miller, Cristanne ; see also Keller, Lynn Miller, Jane Eldridge , n. , Miller, Nancy K. , n. , , Milne, Drew, see Eagleton, Terry minstrelsy , , –, –, , n. , n. , n. , n.
Index
Mitchell, Angelyn n. , modernism as field , , , –, n. Christianity and modernism , – “female modernism” , ns. and “gendering modernism” , –, , n. primitivism in modernism – race in modernism –, “sentimental modernism” modernist studies , , modernity its modernizing projects , – gender issues racial issues , –, , – semiticizing issues , , – “the modernization of sex” Molesworth, Charles n. , n. , mongrel ideology of race , –, –, , , , –, , , n. mongrel as Jew , , , , , –, n. Monroe, Harriet , , , , , n. , n. , Monroe, Jonathan , , Moon, Michael xii Moore, Marianne xii, xiv, , , , , , , , n. , – n. , n. , –, n. , n. , n. , n. , n. , gender ideas , , –, , , n. , n. “My Apish Cousins” [“The Monkeys”] “New York” “Novices” – on race “People’s Surroundings” n. “Picking and Choosing” “Radical” – review of H.D. – “Roses Only” – semiticized representations – suffrage support n. “The Fish” – “The Labors of Hercules” , n. “The Steeple-Jack” “Those Various Scalpels” n. “To a Strategist” Morris, J. A. –, n. , n. , Morrison, Toni , , , , , Morrisson, Mark Mort, Frank , n. , Mudimbe, V. Y. , Mullen, Harryette ,
Mulvey, Laura , n. , Murphy, Joseph M. , Nation and Atheneum national literature, see American literature National Origins Act nativist thinking , Negro Renaissance , , , n , n. Nelson, Cary , New Criticism , , , n. (Kalaidjian on), n. (Arac on), , n. Newman, Robert New Black , , , , , , , –, , –, , , –, , n. aesthetic issues – Africa as topos – civic equality –, , , , n. critique of racism , , , , n. cultural debates , –, , , decolonization struggle with terrorism , subjectivity –, , use of the primitive – new entitlements , , , , –, , – New Freewoman , , n. , n. ; see also Freewoman New Historicist , n. (DeKoven on) New Jew , , , , , –, , , , –; see also Jew, Judaism assimilation , –, , , n. , n. , –, n. Enlightenment , , , , diaspora , , , –, n. melting pot metaphor – mongrel metaphor , – particularist traditions , –, , , secularization , , , New Negro , , ; see also New Black New Woman , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, n. , n. androgyne birth control , , , n. critique of the feminine , , critique of “poesy” divorce higher education , ideas on marriage , independence professional claims , , , sexuality, sex-radicalism , , , , , , , , , , , , n. “Social Purity” , , , , suffrage , , –,
Index Newer Man , , , , , , n. Nichols, Stephen , Nielsen, Aldon Lynn xi, xiii, , , , , , “nigger”, see derogatory words Nochlin, Linda, and Tamar Garb , n. , Nordic , –, , n. , n. , Norris, Christopher, see Machin, Richard Norris, Margot , North, Michael , , , , , , n. , n. , numerus clausus – O’Hara, Daniel xii O’Neill, Eugene n. , n. Ouida Olson, Charles –, Oppen, George Oppenheim, James –, n. , Opportunity , n. , n. orgasm, chapter three passim; see also sexuality Orvell, Miles xii Osborne, Peter , Others , , , – n. , n. , Pankhursts Parini, Jay parisitism and prostitution, see New Woman, ideas on marriage Parker, Pat, see Hosek, Chaviva Pearce, Richard , Pease, Donald E., see Kaplan, Amy Perelman, Bob , , n. , Perloff, Marjorie , , , , , n. , n. , –, n. , Perry, Gil ; see also Harrison, Charles Peterkin, Julia , Picasso, Pablo , see also Stein, Picasso Pieterse, Jan Nederveen n. , philology , n. philology, social, see social philology Pinkney, Tony , Plessy v. Ferguson () Poe, Edgar Allen , poesy , , see also poetry and gender poetess, traits of –, , –, n. , n. poetic drama , , , – poetry and gender , , , – foundational cluster –, , –, –, , poetry and society , , –, , see also social philology poetry as discourse
author, loss of , n. condensation , , , , diegesis , editorial constructions n. enounced , , , , , enunciation , , –, , genre , ideology et passim material text n performance , persona pronouns semantic meaning subjectivity of the enounced subjectivity of the enunciation , , n. poetry as mode; see also poetry as discourse caesura connotation , , , crypt word , , , –, , , , , , , denotation –, , , , , , –, , detail of composition , , , , , , , , n. , n. diction , , etymology , , , imagery , line break and segmentivity , , , , , , , , , , , metonomic or lateral associations , , , phoneme , , –, , prosody pun , , , , , , punctuation , , rhyme , , , , semantic image , , sound , , , , stanza , , , syntax , , , – “the remainder” , , , ; see also Lecercle “transegmental drift” , , , ; see also Stewart visual text , , , Poggi, Christine n. , pogrom , –, Pollock, Griselda , Pondrom, Cyrena n. Porter, Cole post-structuralism , –, , n. Pound, Ezra xiv, , , , , , , , –, , , , , , , , n. , n. , n. , n. , n. , n. , ; see also logopoeia
Index
anti-Semitism , , , , –, n. , n. , n. , n. , – n. Canto XIV , Canto XXXV “Commission” , doggerel poetry – Gaudier-Brzeska , n. , n. gender ideas – womanhood , –, , , , gender ideas – manhood , , –, , , – “Hell Cantos” (Cantos XIV and XV) , n. “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” , –, , , –, –, , ideas on sexuality –, –, , n. , n. “In a Station of the Metro” – Lustra , “Postscript to The Natural Philosophy of Love . . .” –, n. racial attitudes – “Salutation the Second” “Tenzone” “The Condolence” “The Encounter” “Yiddisher Charleston Band” , – Price, Sally , Prins, Yopie, and Maeera Shreiber primitivism , , , –, , , , , , , –, , n. , n. , n. , n. Protocols of the Elders of Zion –, n. Quartermain, Peter , , n. , Quartermain, Peter, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis Quinn John , n. , n. , n. Raboteau, Albert , race , –, , –, –; see also ethnicity, New Black, New Negro, whiteness, Africanist representations race suicide, see racial theories racial theories , , , , , , –; see also Grant, Schultz, Stoddard Rado, Lisa Rampersad, Arnold xiii, , n. , Rasula, Jed , Red Summer , ; see also lynching religious culture ; see also Jews, New Jews, Christianity Richardson, Dorothy , ,
Richardson, Joan , , n. , n. , n. , Ricks, Christopher , n. , Rigsby, Nigel , Robins, Elizabeth Robinson, Paul , Roby, Kinley E. Rodgers, Bruce , Rogin, Michael rose , – Rosten, Leo –, n. , n. , Rothenberg, Jerome , Royce, Josiah Rubin-Dorsky, Jeffrey xiii, n. Rubinow, Max n. Ruddnick, Lisa n. , Rudnick, Lois, see Heller, Adele Ruggles, Eleanor Russian Revolution –, , Said, Edward , , , “contrapuntal reading” , , n. Sanday, Peggy Reeves , Sandburg, Carl , , , , Sanders, Mark A. Santayana, George Scarry, Elaine Schimmel, Harold n. , Schreiner, Olive , Schultz, Alfred P. , , Schuyler, George S. n. , Schweik, Susan , Scott, Bonnie Kime , n. , Scroggins, Mark , n. , Scully, James Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky , , segregation (racial) semiticized representations, see Jews, stereotypes of serial poem – sex-radical , , n. , n. ; see also New Woman sexuality , , – esp. representations of sexual intercourse, , , n. Shaw, George Bernard , , sheeney, see derogatory words Shiver, William S., see Singh, Amritjit Shoemaker, Steve Shoptaw, John , n. , Showalter, Elaine , , n. , Shreiber, Maeera n. , and Yopie Prins and Keith Tuma n. , n. , Shufeldt, R. W. , Shylock (Merchant of Venice) ,
Index Sieburth, Richard Siegel, Carol n. , Sigg, Eric , Silliman, Ron Silver, Brenda , Simpson, Hilary n. , Sinclair, May , Singh, Amritjit Sitwell, Edith , , slavery in U.S. , Slavs , , , n. Smith, Carol H. Smith, Gary , Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll , social philology , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , “close reading” (Shoptaw on), n. (Wolfson on) “historical semiotics” , “social formalism” “social evaluation” , , , ; see also derogatory words see also poetry as mode, for specific examples Sorisio, Carolyn Spectator, The , Spingarn, Joel E. –, Spitzer, Leo n. , Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty , n. , Stein, Gertrude xiv, , , , , , n. , “Composition as Explanation” –, n. “Lifting Belly” , n. , “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene” – Picasso , n. , n. “Poetry and Grammar” – racial ideas , n. , “Sacred Emily” The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Stevens, Wallace xiv, , , –, , , , , , –, , n. , n. , n. , n. , “Architecture” , “Bantams in Pine Woods” , , –, , n. “Contents of a Cab” – “Floral Decorations for Bananas” gender ideas in , , – Harmonium , – “Hymn From a Watermelon Pavilion” – “Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery” –, n. , –, n. , “O Florida, Venereal Soil”
“Ploughing on Sunday” racial materials in , –, –, –, , , –, n. , n. , n. , n. , “Sea Surface Full of Clouds” – “Some Friends from Pascagoula” “Stars at Tallapoosa” “The Comedian as the Letter C” , n. “The Jack-Rabbit” “The News and the Weather” “The Silver Plough-Boy” , n. “The Virgin Carrying a Lantern” “The Worms at Heaven’s Gate” – “Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise” –, n. , n. , n. “Two Figures in Dense Violet Light” – Stewart, Garrett –, , “trans-segmental drift” Stock, Noel Stoddard, Lothrop , , , Stoker, Bram n. , Stopes, Marie Carmichael –, Strachey, Ray –, , struggles, social , –, , n. (von Hallberg on) ideological linguistic new entitlements , –, post-Reconstruction subjectivity and social location , –, citizenship –, n. “conglomerate titles” –, , in humanist ideology in poetry , , , n. in society , , , , in theory , (R. Williams n. ), (Kristeva n. ) modern subjectivity , , tension between group and individual , , –, –, suffrage woman suffrage , , , , –, including hunger strikes, n. , n. extension of male franchise , n. Sundquist, Eric J. , n. , Suleiman, Susan Rubin , Svarny, Erik M. Sweeney, see Eliot, T. S. Swerdlow Amy syntax, see poetry as mode syphilis –, n. , n. , n. , n.
Index
Tambimuttu, see March, Richard Tantillo, Maura Shaw, see Fout, John Tate, Trudi , Teasdale, Sara Terrell, Carroll Thomas, Lorenzo xi Thomas, M. Carey n. Thompson, Robert Farris n. , Tickner, Lisa , , , , Toll, Robert C. Tomas, John , Tomlinson, Charles tom-toms –, n. , n. Torgovnick, Marianna , Torok, Maria, see Abraham, Nicolas Transitional Man, see Newer Man Trimberger, Ellen Kay n. , Tuma, Keith , – n. , ; see also Shreiber, Maeera Uitti, Karl –, Untermeyer, Louis , , n. , , n. , n. , Vail, Lawrence n. Van Vechten, Carl , Nigger Heaven n. Vanity Fair , Vendler, Helen , , Venuti, Lawrence xii, , , , Vicinus, Martha, see Duberman, Martin Vickers, Nancy , Volosinov, V. V. , voudou –; see also hoo-doo Wall, Cheryl , Warren, Austin, see Wellek, René Watten, Barrett , , , Washington, Booker T. , , n. , Weeks, Jeffrey , n. , n. , Weininger, Otto , , Wellek, René, and Austin Warren , Wells, Ida B. , whiteness , –, , , , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, –, , , n. , n. , n. , n. ; see also Euro-American Whitman, Walt , , , n.
Widdowson, Peter Wilde, Oscar , Williams, Bert , , n. , n. Williams, Raymond , , , , , n. , n. , Williams, William Carlos xiv, , , , , , , n. , n. , n. , Al que quiere , n. gender ideas –, “La Flor” – Spring and All , n. “The Uses of Poetry” “To a Young Housewife” , – “Transitional” – Wilson, Edmund , Wintz, Cary D. , Wolff, Janet , Wolfson, Susan J. , , Woll, Allen , n. , Wonham, Harry , women historical conditions Woolf, Virginia , , –, , , n. , n. , World Columbian Exposition , World War I , , , –, –, , , , , n. , n. , n. , n. , n. Wright, Almroth E. , , n. , Wylie, Elinor Wynter, Sylvia , Yalom, Marilyn, see Middlebrook, Diane Wood Yeats, W. B. , , , , n. Yehoash , , n. Yiddish , , , , –, –, , , –, n. , –, n. , n. Zangwill, Israel –, Zayas, M. de –, , Zukofsky, Louis xiv, , , –, , n. , n. , An “Objectivists” Anthology “Poem Beginning ‘The’ ” , –, n. “Sincerity and Objectification”
