Surrealism: Subversion and Fascism

It is apt that David Gascoyne writes that “Surrealism is not a style, it is not a school of literature, it is not a system of aesthetics” (Gascoyne, “Introduction,” ix). By failing to pin surrealism within a category, he departs from a logocentric notion of language grounded in “presence” and “absolute meaning” and reflects the spirit of Surrealism.

I sense inherent paradoxes within Surrealism. The positing of an alternate system of reality that is governed by the Unconscious presents another notion of a system of meaning that is grounded in the absolute. The “Unconscious” is marked with a capital U, showing a certain extent of logocentrism implicit in a movement that seeks to relocate itself from a logocentric notion of language and meaning.

On one hand the absoluteness of an alternate reality allows Surrealism to securely enact a resistance to ideology. The notion that it is the “Unconscious” that dictates our actions makes Surrealism subversive in that it questions the basis of assumptions and suggests a certainty of an alternate plane of reality. Rimbaud uses his art to “revolt [...] against old stupidities, conventions, morality—the whole life of the epoch of capitalist prosperity in which he lived” (Gascoyne 7). At the same time, the ability of one to exploit the notion of the Unconscious to impose a certain, arbitrary and indisputable (how can one argue against a theory of the Unconscious?) truth makes Surrealism a possible mode for facilitating fascism and totalizing worldviews. As Gascoyne notes, Surrealism’s associations with Orientalism confirms this rather unhappy truth.

Ars Poetica

After all those readings, I decided to write my own Ars Poetica. The winged thing metaphor is a bit old, but I think the old metaphors have a certain allegorical nature that new metaphors don't have. I think the last line might be a bit overbearing. I like that everyone else is asleep in this poem.


Ars Poetica

I didn’t sleep the night before flying
into New York.

I spent the night
spinning a roomful of silk.
So when I emptied the room of myself,
The room would not be empty.

I stayed awake
to see my sister awake.
Delivering her into the dawn,
her face disappeared
like a star.

I picked through the debris
of the years, deciding what to take
and leave behind. Finally,
I decided to take
nothing more than
a pair of wings.

I am leaving now, I nudged my grandfather, still asleep.
What? he said, turning
his better ear towards my lips.
Nothing, I said, Get back to sleep.
I left. He continued sleeping,
as though woken by nothing more
than the faintest impression
of some night thing in passage.

Language: the Site of a Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost maps the fall of Man. Although the text employs the language of Christian dualism and invokes a long-established epic tradition to place itself within a tradition of religious texts, the signifiers in the text become emptied of their religious weight. Thus the text too, enacts the fall of Man through the fall of language.

A radical instability is produced when pagan influences seep into the text, suggesting the infiltration of the pagan upon the religious in the text, and pointing to a culturally conflicted world. The speaker calls upon Urania, the patroness of astronomy and one of the nine Muses of Greek tradition, reflecting upon a departure from orthodoxy.

The theological notion of poetry is the site of God’s presence upended by the voice of individual subjectivity. When the speaker writes, “invoke thy aid to my adventurous song” (13), the word “adventure” suggests restlessness, curiosity, the desire for knowledge—that which was the cause for the Fall. One of the ambivalent moves of the poem is how the poet calls upon the spirit of God to “pursue [...] Things unattempted yet in prose and rhyme” (15-6). The appeal to the divine to steer one away from tradition seems an appeal to God for the permission to transgress established boundaries. The emphasis on original artistry on the poem is the privileging of the self or art above God. Poetic authority lands in the hands of the poet over the God, by the end of the poem, completing the coup d’etat that the poem enacts, “I may assert Eternal Providence, / And justify the ways of God to men” (25-6). The ars poetica in the preamble cleverly rationalizes why the lack of rhyme signifies a return to tradition, rather than the departure from tradition that is denotes: showing the ability of reason to rationalize any deviation from tradition. The absence of rhyme is a move towards the reclamation of “ancient liberty [...] to the heroic poem.” It is important to note how the meaning of “liberty” becomes altered in the poem from the original religious meaning of “liberty through sacrifice of individual freedom to God” to “liberty in individual freedom,” showing the privileging of the self over God.

Milton’s Paradise Lost shows how the religious word itself is fallible and characterized by its fundamental instability. His poem reveals the operations by which the signification of the word can become emptied. Like the barren religious landscape he seeks to depict, Milton’s poetic language is itself a kind of “paradise lost.” The question that the text begs is this: is a poem that is composed of fallen language able to portray the theological without enacting its fall? Language becomes implicated in the destruction of ideology. The next question to ask is then this: what comes first, the fall of language or the fall of religion? The text thus shows how, a worldview is structured by language and both challenged by language.

The impossibility of meeting

Pound’s “The River-Merchant’s Wife: a Letter” is about love and separation. It is a lamentation of lost love.

It is possible to link the theme of the inevitability of separation with the impossibility of the marriage of different language systems, the impossibility of the encounter with the elusive other. The work was adapted from Li Po’s poems and based on interpretations by Japanese scholars and notes from an American scholar. If we read the line “I desired my dust to be mingled with yours” as the speaker’s attempt to bridge the divide between cultures, the inevitable separation shows its impossibility. The chain of transmission of form raises the question, can a poet assume the identity of another? Is the assumption of another voice inevitably tied to the alienation that we see in the poem?

We are aware that the poem is an experiment in other forms. This tempers the authenticity of the voice in the poem. I remember when I was rewriting Rafiq Kashwari’s ghazal into another form for the last assignment. I felt powerful while writing it to be able to exercise the creative license to assume another identity, I also felt guilty for unconsciously imposing preconceived notions of race, gender and identity into the poem, and thoroughly distorting the original voice.

The Politicization of Poetry

(nb: in case you read an earlier verson, this blog entry has been changed, I felt the first entry didn't really adequately capture what I wanted to say.)

Just a year ago, I was very taken by the poetry of Adrienne Rich. She became my model as a writer and a thinker. There are many similarities and mutual influences in Rich’s and Rukeyser’s work. Both their voices are beautiful, passionate and urgent. Both set out with the project of rewriting an official history. We see moments of prosaic reality interspersed with lyrical bursts of song, the exploitation of the italic, the placement of the language of officialdom and capitalism into verses. The documentation of history through poetry doesn’t only illuminate history, it’s a subversive move that undermines officialdom and causes the language of officialdom to fall apart. The placement of official language into verse has the effect of fragmenting and satirizing it. It becomes integrated into the speaker’s consciousness and takes on a new voice. The title, “The book of the dead” aptly portrays the attempt to capture the voices of those who have been silenced. Writing, like embalming, serves an an act of preservation and a tribute to the dead.

I have ambivalent thoughts about the politicization of poetry, just as I have ambivalent thoughts about Adrienne Rich, and Alfian Sa’at, and any other political writer that I’ve read. Sa’at is a Singapore poet who has been labelled as a political activist. Sa’at writes about the contaminating influence of the shipwrecks that are washed onto shore on a sleepy island. Mario Petrucci sets out in his book Heavy Water to show the effect the Chernobyl disaster had on the people. Poison, radiation, debris—all become metaphors for the moral corruption that plagues our age. On one hand, it is necessary for poetry to be relevant to life and history, to be a point of resistance against the hypocrisies of our day and age. Undeniably, we’re all political entities, and definitely, it doesn’t make sense for art to assume ignorance of this. But I am uncomfortable about politics colonizing the literary sphere. While I am not advocating a separation of politics and art, I think it’s important that art, poetry doesn’t become the tool of propagandists. When you move a political struggle into art, to what extent are you undermining the struggle when you reduce the cause to an artistic aesthetic subject? Can the liberal arts educated poet really take on the voice of the working class miner? Is the exploitation of another voice an imposition of another kind of insidious power relationship? I'm not providing a critique of Rukeyser here, just thinking out loud about poetry, and the dangers of a naive reading of poetry.

It's too easy to be emotionally exploited by the lyrical voice. But poetry is not innocent, neither is it noble. Even if it sets out with the noble task of rewriting history. When you use a specific incident to illustrate a broader political theme, you invite people to say “oh, this reminds me of another incident, and etc, and etc.” Historicity becomes collapsed within the concerns of today, or poetic metaphor. Dehistoricization and deconstextualization is another imposition of silence. It is violence, a different form of violence from the violence it protests against. But violence, nonetheless. And a blind art is one that is unable see its own limitations, that mistakes violence for the honorable political struggle.

A Midsummer's Night Dream--Self-conscious Theatricality

I attended the Durham Shakespeare Company’s Production of A Midsummer’s Night Dream at the Cornell plantations last Friday. There was a half-moon, and you could hear animals shuffling in the trees and the sound of crickets. I felt curiously distant from the mechanisms of life for a moment. But the play took me away from reality, and back.

Watching Puck’s final prologue adds a curious postmodernist dimension to a Renaissance play. Rather than asking us to suspend our disbelief, Shakespeare entreats us to be aware of the highly wrought theatricality of the play, a reflection of a highly self-conscious art: “If we shadows have offended,/ Think but this, and all is mended, / That you have but slumber'd here.” The Durham Shakespeare Company reinforced the theatricality of the play by putting its characters in ludicrously over-the-top costumes—Puck and the workmen were dressed like characters out of X-Men, complete with that punk, androgynous, grungy look.

The self-satirizing reflects an awareness of the propensity of art to employ smooth sugar coated endings and its all-too-easy reconciliation of the tensions of real life, “Give me your hands and if we be friends, / And Robin shall restore amends,” “If we shadows have offended, / Think but this, and all is mended.” The prologue also demystifies the nature of stage as existing outside the real world: “I am an honest Puck” hints at Puck’s assessment of his social status as a workman, the addressed title “Gentles” makes a reference to the aristocratic gentry, enacting a return back to the hierarchical structure of the Renaissance.

Puck denies his theatrical art, “you have but slumbered here”, reducing it to a series of “visions,” “[a] weak and idle theme,” isolated from the sphere of the real world. The iambic tetrameter and paired couplet add a sense of poetic flourish and provide the illusion of artistic completion to the poem, while its contents deny its significance as art. The staged persona remains standing, while his dramatic signification flees from him. In the production, the same actors who played Oberon and Titania—symbolizing art, anti-reason, youth—played Theseus and Hippolyta—symbolizing reality, reason, hierarchy, and political leadership. Theatricality and reality are not necessarily mutually exclusive poles; both deconstruct each other. And it is in deconstructing one another that they reach a mutual formulation of each other, and themselves.

Thoughts on Shaped Poetry: Interfering Forms

I was thinking that there is a distinction between saying that “physical form coincides with a poem’s meaning” and “physical form shapes a poem’s meaning.” Does the form of the poem merely support a poem’s meaning, or does it shape the meaning of the poem?

In Herb’s “Mother and Child,” it’s not clear which mechanism is at work. On one hand, the strategic placement of “child” inside the “O” in “mother” seems to be shaping our perception of the categories “mother” and “child”. The mother is on the outside, giving life to the child, who is on the inside. We are aware of the biological category that “mother and child” is, because the “child” nestled within “O” resembles the fetus in a womb. We get the sense that the “child” is becoming subsumed within the mother—suggesting that the meaning of “child” is intertwined with that of mother. They are a collective entity and one cannot understand the meaning of “mother” without establishing her relationship to a child. The absence of “father” suggests that “mother” can be defined without association to “father.” Yet on writing all this, I come to the realization that all these formulations are socially conditioned, and one can just as easily understand this by thinking a little bit about what “mother” and “child” mean.

Perhaps one must come to the conclusion that form guides the meaning of a poem, while the meaning of a poem guides our perception of the form. “Form” and “content” are a bit like the categories “mother” and “child”—we need the category “mother” for us to come to the definition of “child”, as we need the category “child” for us to come to the definition of “mother”. As with the relation between "form" and "content."

I think that when you read a poem in print without shapes, metrical or rhyming patterns, there is an isolation of the senses—tactile, visual, olfactory sensations are glimpsed purely through the filter of the printed word. “Seeing” becomes a process that takes place, purely mediated through the written word. A poem that is read out loud is also a “mediated” poem. There is something about how the human voice is able to accommodate the metrical patterns, yet there is something about how the human voice is also able to defy it. The form of a poem shouldn’t be seen as just “guiding”, “reinforcing” the content—it can interrupt, alter. I’m not sure if you agree about this reading of Herbert’s “Easter Wings.” There seems that tension between how the poem seems to be a prayer to glorify God’s redeeming powers, while we are aware that the sense of redemption seems to be something the narrator himself is executing. The form of the poem shows the speaker enacting a certain reality, mapping despair (with short lines that denote spiritual impoverishment) quickly followed by hope (with longer lines denoting spiritual enrichment, a broadening of one’s spiritual vision). The form shows the control of the speaker, rather than the power of God. Here we get how form interrupts the content.