Howl, New Jersey, Holla

Have either of you looked at a little book called The Poem that Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later? Silly title, I know, but it's actually pretty useful. The collection is edited by Jason Shinder, Ginsberg's personal assistant from the late 70s on, and his introduction is kind of embarrassingly idolatrous and not very well-written. But the volume does bring together a number of interesting reactions to "Howl" (by, among others, Amiri Baraka, Marjorie Perloff (who argues that Ginsberg is a direct inheritor of Modernism [OK, fine, whatever] and that "Howl" is really about WWII [more interesting]), Billy Collins (!), John Cage, and Rick Moody) as well as including a facsimile of the original mimeographed edition, which "costed [sic] $10.00 typed by poet Robert Creely [sic] dittoed by Martha Rexroth transported by me to the hands of Robert Lavigne [sic] in exchange for several drawings," according to Ginsberg's inscription. (Doesn't $10 seem like kind of a lot of money for 1956? Seems like one could do a Lawrence Rainey-esque analysis of the economics of this first presentation.)

A couple of remarks about the poem itself: has anyone written on the possible influence of W.H. Auden on Ginsberg? Auden is mentioned in Shinder's preface as one of Ginsberg's "'enemies'," but also an "eternal presence": I don't know much about their personal relationship. But on this reading I notice quite a few touches which seem Audenesque; for one, the unexpected dropping and adding of definite articles (examples include "the drear light of Zoo" and "the last fantastic book thrown out of the tenement window"). This is something Auden does a lot, and I think the effect in his poems is usually to either particularize or universalize the rhetorical situation of any given poem: kind of a Zoom-In/Zoom-Out effect. In "Howl," Ginsberg utilizes this to keep the reader involved on a macrosociological level ("this is an important poem: it's about a generation, it's about a nation, it's about history") and on a more micro-, affective/emotional level ("this is about the author, his friends, his mother, or me"). It's a technique Whitman uses too, of course, but Ginsberg's interest in including shabby, sordid or ironic details which temporarily undercut the grandeur of the macro-phrases (e.g. "in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets"; compare "Spain 1937") is closer to (early) Auden, I think.

Second idea: Ginsberg's insistent return to New Jersey place names ("Paterson," "Newark," "the filthy Passaic," etc.), among, admittedly, a lot of other place names, has to be understood, in its historical context, as a very complicated rhetorical move. Because New Jersey was not just where Ginsberg was from, and thus a signifier of the "real" or the "autobiographical," but also, by the mid-1950s, a landscape that was newly literary, thanks to the ecstatic critical reception of William Carlos Williams' still-in-progress Paterson. As Perloff points out her chapter on him in The Poetics of Indeterminacy, the publication of Paterson had finally secured a major reputation for Williams, long considered a marginal figure of the Modernist movement. Thus Paterson, which ten years earlier would have been fairly meaningless as a literary signifier, now evokes a whole complex of ideas about Modernism and American poetry that Ginsberg slyly insists upon. (And WCW also wrote the introduction to Howl's first commercial edition, as Adrienne pointed out months ago.)

Anyway, it's interesting to think of the symbolic capital that New Jersey acquires in this period, as the breeding ground of the only ideologically correct,* homegrown version of High Modernism (Williams') as well as the most incendiary updating/challenging of the academic version of Modernism: significantly a humble state, in proximity to a great metropolis but not containing it, a place synonymous with the simple, homely and plain, which also just happens to be the site of some of the worst industrial exploitation and ecological spoilage in the entire country. This is quite a different pole to orient us than London or New York, and the attitude of its writers to it is also significantly different: sure, it's a waste land, they tell us, but it's our waste land, and we like it that way. And this in turn might have something to do with the remarks by Leslie Fiedler that Adrienne just posted, about the American mediation (some would say adulteration) of Modernism through regionalism. But I'm getting hungry, so I'd better stop here and drag myself through some Brooklyn streets to go looking for a sandwich fix.

* If you ignore the Communism.

Theory vs. Theory

Remember when Jeremy was talking in our seminar about the need at Princeton for a course that traces the history of literary theory from Russian Formalism through French structuralism/poststructuralism and American deconstruction and into its current phase of disciplinary/international diaspora? Well, I just came across such a history, in miniature, and admittedly from a partisan position, by Raymond Williams. It's taken from the appendix of The Politics of Modernism, which is the transcript of a public conversation between Williams and Edward Said in 1986. Whether you agree or not with the polemical points of Williams' narrative (and probably none of us really know enough about the subject to be sure about that yet; certainly I don't) I thought it might be interesting to read an account of the rise of theory from a decidedly non-reactionary viewpoint (i.e., not Harold Bloom's). In particular, Williams' idea of formalist theory's historical delay in reception that led to its being in effect used as a weapon against a more fully developed version of itself is really provocative, ironically calling to mind some of Derrida's writing about autoimmunity and parasites. And with its 80s-eye view of the situation and typical Williams clarity and toughness, it makes a good companion piece to Rabaté's equally useful Gallic perspective in The Future of Theory. Anyway, here goes (I've highlighted some key terms and sentences to make it easier to read schematically):


"[Russian] Formalism was a reaction against what was called in the early stages a crude sociologism, which never really looked at the work at all but looked at elements which could be extracted from it and handled in other transferred ideological terms, or else simply related a text to the conditions of its production. Now the first phase of the response to that is to say that however important those questions may be, we also have to look at what the work specifically is. And this insistence has to be understood within the context of the debate. We need then to look at the second stage of the formalist argument, in the mid and late twenties, in works which have received much less publicity. Works with that tangled authorship of Bahktin, Voloshinov, Medvedev are much less well known in the West … than Shlovsky and Eikhenbaum and so on. It was agreed: let us look at what is specific in the text. But looking at what is textually specific does not rule out, rather it encourages, new ways of exploring the relations between the creation of something very specific and these more general conditions. Then, as against the previous practice which has not looked analytically at the work but which had gone straight to what was extractable as ideology or as general social conditions of authorship, let us indeed go specifically to the text as a way of finding new methods of analysing the relations between its precise composition and these conditions.

"Now this kind of work is what has been called, in Britain especially, Cultural Studies. I mean the break of Cultural Studies in the fifties from an earlier kind of sociological and indeed so-called Marxist study was precisely that it started from the close analysis of works. The contrast couldn't be more marked with earlier positions which had postulated a bourgeois economy and then a bourgeois ideology. Whereas, [Cultural Studies] starts from the texts themselves … But what it does not do, what it refuses to do, is to stop at that point. Now precisely the version of formalism that was imported and intensively propagated was to say 'and when you have done that, there is no more to do.' [Here's where I'd place the early Marjorie Perloff, circa The Poetics of Indeterminacy, whose Russian Formalist-influenced re-reading of Modernism is still so influential.] Although in fact the second stage of the formalist argument that was lost from the late twenties, and that is still not properly perceived and understood, was that when you have done that, you then have the problem of finding ways in which to analyse those specificities of the work or text, which uncover new kinds of evidence that weren't available by other methods. Then you can ask in new ways, how is the specific kind of literariness produced? How are certain forms produced? How do certain negations and absences which can be well identified by formalist methods constitute themselves in the social and historical structure? And suddenly you're into a new kind of inquiry."

OK, here's the really crucial part:

"But just at the moment that this work was making progress, back came — in a fifty-year historical delay, going via the United States and France and reappearing intensively propagated there — the old first stage of the argument, as if there had been no more move beyond it either by that Leningrad School of the late twenties, or in many of the developments in Cultural Studies in the West. The new formalism started as if it were fighting an enemy which no longer existed: the enemy which did not start analysis from specificities, but postulated the big abstractions of a society and economy and ideology, on a base-and-superstructure model, and then deduced the work, leaving many of the facts of the composition of the work unaddressed. And then we were asked to choose in this absurd way between work which was very specific within the texts and which said it didn't interest itself in other questions, and work which was still projected as talking only about reading publics, audiences, social conditions of writers or the most general facts of history. Yet in fact the other real work had been done.

"One is then very sad when the kind of propagation of theory that went on — including incidentally the reference to Saussure which was almost entirely misleading, even at times fraudulent, because it was never the representation of the whole of what Saussure had said — takes over from the development of actual new work. It's a very long and difficult job, how to carry through this powerful task, which is 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 the composition. It is precisely finding ways in which forms and functions, in very complex ways, interact and interrelate. That was what we were doing. I think the interruption is now over [wishful thinking, clearly], but I do want to say that I think it has been extraordinarily damaging, especially since theory — so-called — is much easier than this actual analytical work. You only have to read the five points of formalist technique or the three distinguishing marks of a dominant ideology; I mean you can write it in a notebook and you can go away and give a lecture on it the next day. Or write endless books about it. It's an extraordinarily easy intellectual practice. Whereas this other analytic task is difficult, because the questions are new each time. And until the last few years [?] there was this very complicated business of finding your way around what was called Theory [a still critical business, which now seems to be considered the preserve of "legitimate autodidacticism," at least at Princeton]. It failed to understand what kind of theory cultural theory is. Because cultural theory is about the way in which specific works relate to structures which are not the works. That is cultural theory and it is in better health than it is represented." (The Politics of Modernism, 183-185)