A New Mimesis: Unbinding Textual Possibilities in William Carlos Williams’s “Composition”

Composition,” lyric XII from Spring and All (1923), is one of the more aggressively fragmentary of William Carlos Williams’s improvisational lyrics:

The red paper box hinged with cloth

is lined inside and out with imitation leather

It is the sun the table with dinner on it for these are the same—

Its twoinch trays have engineers that convey glue to airplanes

or for old ladies that darn socks

paper clips and red elastics—

What is the end to insects that suck gummed labels?

for this is eternity through its dial we discover transparent tissue on a spool

But the stars are round cardboard with a tin edge

and a ring to fasten them to a trunk for the vacation—

(CP1 210–11)

The best readers of “Composition,” Peter Schmidt and Marjorie Perloff, argue that the poem is thoroughly antimimetic. The red paper box for them has no definable referent in the outside world; the box exists only within the boundaries of the poem. For Schmidt, “Composition” is antimimetic because it is so self-contradictory. “[I]nfinitely expandable,” the box constantly takes on new shapes, undercutting and transforming itself (Schmidt 164). These contradictions and transformations destroy the poem’s referential power.

Perloff’s reading is similar, but she grounds her reading in a larger literary-historical argument than does Schmidt. She identifies a countertradition of indeterminacy in modern poetry that begins with Rimbaud and includes the Williams of the improvisations. The poems of this countertradition “are composed of particulars that cannot be specified, of images that refuse to cohere in a consistent referential scheme. Indeed, external reference seems peculiarly irrelevant in the case of these poems” (Perloff 45). Perloff places “Composition” squarely within this antimimetic tradition; it is the lynchpin of her reading of Williams. The poem for her is entirely nonrepre sentational: “The ‘box’ is purely the poet’s construction. We cannot visualize it” (128). Her insistence on nonrepresentationality and discursive incoherence leads her to pose this analysis of “Composition,” framed as a series of questions:

The poem’s particulars [ . . . ] refuse to cohere. The red paper box turns out to be “hinged with cloth.” If it is lined “inside and out” (an odd description for lining usually refers to what is inside) not outside, with “imitation / leather,” how can it be made of paper? If its “two-inch trays” have “engineers / that convey glue / to airplanes,” it may have large hinges; if, on the other hand, it holds “paper clips / and red elastics” for “old ladies / that darn socks,” it must be one of those delicate little boxes with tiny compartments and drawers. “What is the end,” the poet asks, “to insects / that suck gummed labels”? But how do insects get at these drawers? And what is the “dial” by means of which “we discover / transparent tissue / on a spool”? Perhaps the combination lock of a jewelry box. But then, would a box that contains airplane glue have a lock? Finally, and most confusing, are the “stars” made of “round / cardboard / with a tin edge” inside the box or do they decorate its surface? How and why would one fasten “them” as opposed to “it” (the box) “to a trunk / for the vacation”?

(128)

While Schmidt and Perloff place “Composition” in different literary avant-gardes—Schmidt sees it as Dadaist, Perloff as Cubist—both believe that the box has no referent outside the poem.

Perloff takes her analysis a step further. Not only does Williams shatter mimesis in “Composition,” but he replaces it with a “new verbal construct” (Perloff 129). Indeed, Perloff shatters mimesis in order to create a new verbal construct. The abolition of the one enables the creation or revelation of the other. In this context, Perloff approvingly cites E. H. Gombrich’s aesthetic: The artist attacks illusion “to prevent a coherent image of reality from destroying the pattern in the plane” (Gombrich 282; qtd. in Perloff 128). In the following pages, I argue against the idea that “Composition” destroys all reference to reality and replaces it with a purely verbal construct. The poem, I believe, is...