The Darkness of the Present: Poetics, Anachronism, and the Anomaly

2. Corrosive Poetics: The Relief Composition of Ronald Johnson’s Radi os

2 Corrosive Poetics The relief Composition of ronald Johnson’s radi os This chapter is divided into two separate but related parts. The first revisits the over-theorized matter of periodization to take issue with the accuracy of the label “postmodern” in its specific application to much recent North American poetic practice; the second examines Ronald Johnson’s 1977 Radi os as a complex intertextual enterprise whose mode and implications extend beyond the literary into both philosophical issues and the practice of everyday life, as well as beyond imputed “postmodern proclivities” into an unwitting resuscitation of a thirteenth-century poetic. The term postmodern has acquired a fashionably unproblematic currency as a buzzword of our time; it is the powerful and ready term that encapsulates our contemporary condition. Yet there remains essential research to be done on the broad theme of the prefix. As the precise registration of an addition before to mark a having passed beyond, “post” carries a semantic import and ineluctable janiformity that implicates it in that broad historicizing agenda that Derrida has noted: “It is as if one again wished to put a linear succession in order, to periodize, to distinguish before and after, to limit the risks of reversibility or repetition, transformation or permutation: an ideology of progress ” (“Point de Folie” 324).1 Postmodern hardly generates consensus as a descriptive term for a cultural condition. Defined variously as the advent of the simulacrum and the hyperreal (Baudrillard), as a consequence of the logic of late capitalism (Jameson), the general collapse of efficacious master narratives in the broad condition of Western knowledge (Lyotard), and as a paradigm shift from epistemology to ontology (McHale), postmodernism remains stubbornly elusive, heterogeneous, and paradoxical. Notwithstanding the differentials, this term for our current period has been intransigently ensconced within contemporary conceptual presuppositions since the 1970s.2 An added complication springs from the emigration of postmodern from its 26 Chapter 2 broad cultural designation to one that offers descriptions of a multiplicity of art discourses and frequently takes the form of a catalogue of stylistic devices. Thus Charles Jencks co-opts the term to designate a strain of architectural practice emerging in the 1970s that takes the form of a quasi-historicism formulated upon a schizophrenic crossing of discrete codes, resulting in a double coding of modern and traditional. The appreciator, or depreciator, of postmodern architecture encounters numerous instantly recognizable features and predilections: a rejection of austerity with a resultant use of ornament, a preference for nonprimary pastel colors, a mixture of heterological quotations from styles of other periods, and a general proclivity to pluralism, complexity, and hierarchical collapse . This latter feature of postmodernism does not elude a longstanding theological resonance. Indeed, Jenks’ architectural postmodernism, with its defining collapse of hierarchy, unwittingly inflects the central paradox of Christianity: the mystery of the Incarnation. As Meyer Abrams summarizes: [The New Testament] is grounded on the radical paradox that “the last shall be first,” and dramatizes that fact in the central mystery of Christ incarnate as a lowly carpenter’s son who takes fishermen for his disciples, consorts with beggars, publicans, and fallen women, and dies ignominiously , crucified with thieves. This interfusion of highest and lowest, the divine and the base, as Erich Auerbach has shown, had from the beginning been a stumbling block to readers habituated to the classical separation of levels of subject matter and style. (Abrams 115) Similarly, Michael Camille points to the habitual heterogeneity and hierarchical collapse of medieval reading: “The concoction of hybrids, mingling different registers and genres, seems to have been both a verbal and visual fashion for élite audiences” (13). Unlike literary postmodernism, yet similar to Language poetry, architectural postmodernism developed out of an intense semiotic awareness and a belief in the contingent nature of meaning. Distinguishing between modern from postmodern architect is the conscious approach of postmodernism to architectural practice, which it takes as a language developed upon the perceptual codes of its makers and users. For her part, Linda Hutcheon has defined postmodern writing as primarily a practice of irony, formal and thematic reflexivity, and a deliberately paradoxical use and subversion of conventions, with its quintessential genre being prose historiographic metafiction.3 But where exactly (if ex- Corrosive Poetics 27 actly) does postmodern emerge in the twentieth century? Kenneth Rexroth locates a “postmodern sensibility” in Eugene Jolas’ Transition enterprise but claims Robert Desnos to be “the first ‘postmodern’ intellectual in 1925,” a claim that...