Elizabeth Bishop and the Immutability of the World

I’ve been thinking more about Charles Altieri’s contention that postmodern poetry is primarily about the need to express one’s experience of the world. He presents a compelling case that postmodern poetry, despite its incredible variety, is essentially unified by its immanentism. This poetry presents the fact of experience rather than the attempt to shape it into some kind of ordered, symbolic world. He writes that this “aesthetic mode reflects qualities of the mind engaging the world rather than structuring it into created orders (Enlarging the Temple 24-25). This is an argument about what poetry is capable of, and more importantly, it’s an argument about what the mind can do.

I tend to see the modernist tendency to create order as a sort of an anxious, almost hyperventilating, need for order. That is, it is more of a desperate wish than a comfortable and committed belief. In fact, this haunted quality is one of the things that most draws me to the modernists. It feels so very human (despite the “extinction of personality” that Eliot and others often claimed for their work).

This leads Altieri to the fascinating insight concerning the ego: “For the postmoderns, on the other hand, the ego is not a thing or a place for storing and ordering experiences; the ego is not a force transcending the flux of experience but an intense force deepening one’s participation in experience” (43). But what about those for whom this sort of participation is deeply disturbing? If one recognizes that the world cannot be structured as a result of one’s own will, then the self is at the mercy of the world.

It seems to me that Elizabeth Bishop writes at this juncture, wherein one recognizes the compelling power of the world and the futility of desire. Bishop’s “Little Exercise” is a good example of the forces at play. The poem describes a Florida thunderstorm: “It is raining there. The boulevard / and its broken sidewalks with weeds in every crack / are relieved to be wet, the sea to be freshened.” The actions of the world are undeniable; they are written upon it. The storm cannot be avoided.

The poem closes with the introduction of the human being into this destructive world: “Think of someone sleeping in the bottom of a row-boat / tied to a mangrove root or the pile of a bridge; / think of him as uninjured, barely disturbed.” The man is equally subject to the world. But there’s a bit of backtracking, in two senses. First, Bishop suggests that he is “barely disturbed.” Though he must submit to the actions of the world, he nevertheless exists as a counterpoint to it. Though it buffets him, he can tune it out.

Second, Bishop does not tell the story as an experience. It is not (to use Altieri’s useful term) a “disclosure.” Instead, each image is a hypothesis. The poem instructs one to “think of someone”; the someone is putative, not real. The entire action of the poem takes place in the mind, in one’s imagination. The power of the imagination is a stay against the world’s power to compel.

Finally, the structure of the poem is a product of the poet’s power over her material. Bishop’s ideas about form run completely counter to Charles Olson. She exerts her will, not over her material, but over her presentation of the material. Bishop rejects the postmodern effort to rely on the transmission of experience. Instead, she recognizes the immutability of the world at the same time she refuses direct participation in it.

Linda Hutcheon and Postmodernism

Linda Hutcheon's A Poetics of Postmodernism argues that postmodernism is a contradictory, historical, and political set of aesthetic practices. She attempts to carve out a middle path through the wildly disparate versions of postmodernism and its implications. Postmodernism is neither the revolutionary dissolution of metanarrative truths, nor is it a complicitous conservativism that serves consumer capitalism. It's primary feature, according to Hutcheon, is its ability to both establish and problematize truth. Postmodern works challenge the prevailing order while recognizing their own historical development from that order. So, for example, postmodernism's tendency to complicate the subject, or in fact dissolve the subject, never fully succeeds because the attempt dissolution requires an understanding of its cultural foundations. But these very foundations give rise to the problematized subject. Postmodern cultural texts, such as the historiographic metafiction upon which Hutcheon focuses, are always involved in what they contest. The primary tone of this involvement is ironic or parodic. If Hutcheon's "poetics" could be distilled into a single feature, it would be postmodernism's parodic treatment of a past from which it cannot escape but which it is determined to challenge.

Gertrude Stein and the value of meaning

There is no better writer than Stein for stating at the outset the tentativeness of one's critical assertions. In Tender Buttons, she is obscure. She leaves playfully up-ended any definite notions of meaning one may have had before coming to her work. The question is not whether it's nonsense, but what type of nonsense it is and whether it can tell us anything. There's not going to be any sense at the narrative level; one can only look for which meanings might be subverted by the unexpected, and which meanings are created through those subversions. I can only hope to read small pieces of brokenness to look for what might be offered in return.

Nothing Elegant
"A charm a single charm is doubtful. If the red is rose and there is a gate surrounding it, if inside is let in and there places change then certainly something is upright. It is earnest."

The first sentence employs a form found repeatedly in Tender Buttons: a word followed, without punctuation, by a modification of that word. Instead of being placed in front, like an adjective or adverb, the modification calls attention to itself by trailing the word it modifies in an uncomfortable join. Often the modification swallows the word itself.

In this first sentence, the charm is emphasized as a single charm: a real, identifiable, graspable, countable charm...but it is "doubtful." It is negated, though uncertainly. The attempt to isolate and instantiate a single charm is found doubtful. The reader's desire for meaning is ultimately unsatisfied. This is even clearer "if inside is let in and there places change." "Inside" is not, of its essence, inside. Stein suggests it must be "let in." If objects do not contain their inside essences, then they are given meaning. And if it can be given, it can be taken away, which seems to be Stein's project here.

But she has an interesting notion of taking away, as exemplified in another instance of this familiar locution: "this means a loss a great loss a restitution." In subverting the desire for meaning, Stein offers at least some recompense: we gain a greater understanding of language when we understand the necessary dissolution of meaning.

But for me, this is the insight offered over and over again by so much postmodern literary criticism: yes, meaning is unachievable, thank you very much. What I value about (some) postmodern literary texts is missing in Stein's modernist one: a closer examination of the human wreckage of lost meaning. Meaningful or not meaningful, language is a medium of human communication and emotion. Tender Buttons is entirely devoid of people, probably because the blessed rage for order (if I may borrow the phrase), the human yearning for meaning, is too complicated to fit into the task of pointing out language's failure.