Notebooks: Césaire, Williams

This essay interrogates the role of identity formation in the poetry of William Carlos Williams and Aimé Césaire, using the theoretical concept of the “immanent sublime” as formulated by Jean-François Lyotard. It works through issues related to Williams’s Caribbean heritage as it surfaces in his poems, primarily Paterson, and it locates similar energies in the poetry of Césaire. It includes insights related to their joint, but separate, contact with Yvan Goll and other French intellectuals of the 1940s. Both Césaire and Williams were translated by Goll (who was multilingual) and Williams translated sections of Goll’s Jean Sans Terre into English. Williams and Césaire both appeared in the same issues of Goll’s literary review Hemispheres. In the context of discussing Williams’s Caribbean identity certain aspects of his interest in other “outsider” people like the Ramapo Mountain people emerge as an aspect of his interest in the exotic and grotesque. This interest is in my view an over-determined response to his mixed heritage.

A conjunctive synthesis: The “transcendental other” for William Carlos Williams lives in New Barbados in Bergen County, New Jersey, a rural district near Paterson. She is Latin, English, Dutch. She is “Arab / Indian / dark woman” (CP2 236). Her mother is Jacataqua. “There was an earlier day, of prismatic colors” (P 110). She wears a mask; nonetheless the “transcendental other” is not the “immanent sublime.” She does not haunt the abyss prior to those memories that assuage and compel the attention of a traumatized subject. Unlike the immanent sublime, she is not prior to history. My topic is the immanent sublime. These reflections are gatherings from my “notebooks.”

Trauma and authenticity: Does “meaning” mean “feeling” when the subject is an unspeakable experience. “I am all right! Leave me alone!” The victim, in a state of shock, veracity and memory intertwine, mock one another. Once there was a feeling and now there is a getting on after the horror of rape, murder, beheading, or holocaust. The issue is not transformation or betrayal of some painfully authentic moment but the reality of a moment that is beyond words, beyond how words function. Nameless trauma is prior to terror’s imprint on the reeling brain. Words like neutrinos penetrate a traumatized mass, pass through and give a sense of its leaden gauzy presence. This essay is about different intensities, common human sources of identity; it is about the way in which poetry scales or measures affect.

I

An initial shock has been “deposited outside representation” writes Jean-François Lyotard, reflecting on Proustian and Freudian forms of forgetting. He describes an initial trauma that always escapes (or exceeds) representation (16). For both quantum mechanics and modernist poetics, representation is elusive. The cloud chamber illuminates “the radiant gist” of birthing and death. For Williams, Madame Curie, pregnant in her laboratory, her fetus exposed to radiation poisoning, represents the relation of trauma to beauty (P 109). The words below are Aimé Césaire’s:

and you star please from your luminous foundation draw lemurian being—ofman’s unfathomablesperm the yet undared form

carried like an ore in woman’s trembling belly!

(Césaire, Collected 67)

Williams again: “Her belly . her belly is like a white cloud . a / white cloud at evening” (P 86). Both poets superpose, image and phrase, side by side, the paratactic method of modernist verse collage, whether the compositional principle is constructivist, as it often appears to be for Williams, or explicitly surrealist as for Césaire. For both, the sublime in the figure of a woman’s belly is a powerful attractor, a physical and planetary force. Both draw on advanced physics to sacralize the woman’s body. She becomes the “chora”¹ or attractor that consumes, not the privileging of the phallus. Williams locates her namesake in hell.

Concerning the Notebook of Return to a Native Land / Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, Clayton Eshleman in the Introduction to the translation that he made with Annette Smith writes: “The incredible burden of the poem is that of parthenogenesis in which Césaire must...