The Game Changed: Essays and Other Prose

A Few Reflections on Poetry and Language

A Few Reflections on Poetry and Language I In “When Was Modernism?”—which appeared in New Left Review in 1989—Raymond Williams defined what modernism is by asking when it was. As a classification for a whole cultural movement and moment, “modernism”—Williams pointed out—did not appear until the 1950s; until then, the meaning of “modern” in literature was roughly the same as “contemporary.” Modernism is, therefore, a critical construct; modernist writers “are applauded for their denaturalizing of language, their break with the allegedly prior view that language is either a clear, transparent glass or a mirror, and for their making abruptly apparent in the texture of narrative the problematic status of the author and his authority.” As the author appears in the text, the “self-reflexive text assumes the centre of the public and aesthetic stage, and in doing so declaratively repudiates the fixed forms.” Or, as Peter Burger writes in an essay, “Aporias of Modern Aesthetics”—published in New Left Review a year after “When Was Modernism”—after modernism “art is itself dragged into the process of alienation that separates subject and object.” In the context of a crisis first imagined by Nietzsche, the romantic writer’s belief in the self’s power to shape reality through language , and the realist’s sense of language as an accurate expression of factitious reality, are shattered. Modernist writing— as Charles Taylor observes in Sources of the Self—turns more inward, tending to explore, even to celebrate, subjectivity, exploring “new recesses of feeling,” entering the “stream of con78 sciousness,” spawning “schools of art rightly ‘expressionist,’ while, at the same time, decentering the subject,” displacing “the center of interest onto language, or onto poetic transmutation itself, or even dissolving the self as usually conceived in favor of some new constellation.” The paradox, aesthetically, is this: Although the subject is dissolved into the text’s language—into the formal process itself, onto a new and separate aesthetic plane—modernism does not eliminate subjectivity. In “Subjective Authenticity”—a 1976 interview with Hans Kaufmann—Christa Wolf says that the “reservoir writers draw on in their writing is experience, which mediates between objective reality and the authorial subject.” Quoting Anna Seghers, who said that the writer “is the curious crossing point where object becomes subject and turns back into object,” Wolf continues in a passage worth quoting at length: To my mind it is much more useful to look at writing, not as an end product, but as a process which continuously runs alongside life, helping to shape and interpret it: writing can be seen as a way of being more intensely involved in the world, as the concentration and focusing of thought, word and deed. This mode of writing is not “subjectivist,” but “interventionist .” It does require subjectivity, and a subject who is prepared to undergo unrelenting exposure—that is easy to say, of course, but I really do mean as unrelenting as possible —to the material at hand, to accept the burden of the tensions that inexorably arise, and to be curious about the changes that both material and the author undergo. The new reality you see is different from the one you saw before. Suddenly , everything is interconnected and fluid. Things formerly taken as “given” start to dissolve, revealing the reified social relations they contain and no longer that hierarchically arranged social cosmos in which the human particle travels along the paths pre-ordained by sociology or ideology, or deviates from them. It becomes more and more difficult to say “I,” and yet at the same time often imperative to do so. I can only hope I have made it clear that this method not only does not dispute the existence of objective reality, but is precisely an attempt to engage with “objective reality” in a productive manner. 79 II Theories of language appear throughout modernist poetics. As Sigurd Burckhardt noted in his still worth reading 1956 essay “The Poet as Fool and Priest,” the “first purpose of poetic language is the very opposite of making language more transparent .” If a language pure enough to transmit human experience without distortion existed, there would be no need for poetry. Not only does such a language not exist, it cannot; language, by its very nature, is as a social instrument, and must be a convention , arbitrarily ordering the chaos of experiences, denying expression to some, allowing it to others. Language must provide...