Reading the Difficulties: Dialogues with Contemporary American Innovative Poetry

Problems of Context and the Will to Parsimony: Reading “Difficult” Recent U.S. Poetry

Problems of context and the Will to Parsimony reading “difficult” recent U.s. poetry Thomas Fink in his 1982 essay “Migratory Meaning,” ron silliman—with the help of linguists Charles Fillmore and paul Kay’s conceptual apparatus—identifies and questions fundamental ways in which readers make sense of texts. “envisionment ,” a reader’s sense of a unified understanding of a text, depends upon the development of a “frame or schema”(112). The “frame” is a context in which structures order worldly and textual experience through associations and the application of “the parsimony principle”; it involves the emergence of particular kinds of “confidence” as well as “levels of importation of detail and nuance” (113). These “levels” include interpretation “explicitly justified by the material of the text,” “inferences which the text is seen as clearly inviting ,” readings resulting “from schematizations brought to the text to situate its events in common experience,” and manifestations of “idiosyncratic experience and imaginings of individual readers” (113). Crucial to the components of envisionment, as presented by Fillmore and Kay, is the “parsimony principle,” which allows “the latency of the text and the ideological dimensions of presupposition into an actual envisionment combining frames always to a maximum of unification with a minimum of effort” (silliman, The New Sentence 115). smaller contexts involving local details of a text during the process of reading are eventually placed within a larger one. Fillmore holds that “whenever it is possible to integrate two separate schema into a single larger frame structure by imagining them as sharing a single common participant the reader will do so” (qtd. in silliman 115, 120). silliman not only argues that the experience of reading texts like Joe Ceravolo’s poem “Migratory Moon” disrupts and eventually derails the quest for a single total envisionment, but he seeks to show that “the experience of contact and unity is not” a natural attainment of interpretive truth “beyond the experience of words at all but is itself just an effect” (112). Further, while 158 Fink “each [poetic] device is determined by its relationship to the whole” text, no actual “whole” exists, as reading is temporal: “The reader is always at some point with regard to the reading” (122).1 in “signature event Context” (1971), Jacques derrida elucidates what disrupts envisionment and the parsimony principle. stating that “a written sign carries with it a force of breaking with its context, that is, the set of presences which organize the moment of its inscription,” he foregrounds the possibility of lifting “a written syntagma from the interlocking chain in which it is caught or given without making it lose every possibility of functioning” and “eventually . . . inscribing or grafting it onto other chains” (317). “no context ,” derrida asserts, “can enclose it.” any interpretation of a literary text involves such “grafting.” “The unity of the signifying form,” states derrida, can be “repeated in the absence . . . of a determined signified or current intention of signification, as of every present intention of communication” (318). “Citationality,”—the fact that “every sign . . . as a small or large unity, can be cited, put between quotation marks”—ensures that the sign “can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion” (320). even though a context needs to be assigned for any “mark” to be legible, “there are only contexts without any center of absolute anchoring.” The force of citationality is evident when one wishes to determine whether a sentence should be read literally or ironically. Writing that both “irony” and “literalness” are “ways of reading,” with “neither . . . prior to the other,” stanley Fish holds that these “interpretive ways” are “set in motion by cues and considerations that are themselves in place as a consequence of an interpretive act” (195).2 according to annette Kolodny, “Insofar as we are taught how to read, what we engage are not texts but paradigms,” and so “we appropriate meaning from a text according to what we need (or desire), or . . . according to the critical assumptions or predispositions (conscious or not) that we bring to it” (505). Like silliman’s fourth kind of confidence in envisionment , involving individual “experiences and imaginings,” Kolodny’s point accurately debunks the idea of interpretive “objectivity.” even conscious need and desire do not necessarily preside over individual interpretation; reading can be influenced by forces beyond a reader’s control . in section 27 of “The Chinese notebook,” a long Wittgensteinian metapoem (originally published in 1986 and probably written ten years earlier), silliman ponders how a reader...