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The Sacred and the Real in The Tablets of Armand Schwerner
- American Literary History
- Oxford University Press
- Volume 17, Number 2, Summer 2005
- pp. 259-279
- Article
- Additional Information
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American Literary History 17.2 (2005) 259-279
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The Sacred and the Real in The Tablets of Armand Schwerner
Norman Finkelstein
God is in every thing as the place in which every thing is, or rather as the determination and the "topia" of every entity. The transcendent, therefore, is not a supreme entity above all things; rather, the pure transcendent is the taking-place of every thing.God or the good or the place does not take place, but is the taking-place of the entities, their innermost exteriority. The being-worm of the worm, the being-stone of the stone, is divine. That the world is, that something can appear and have a face, that there is exteriority and non-latency as the determination and the limit of every thing: this is the good.
1.
To a greater extent than any of the other figures in the ethnopoetics movement, Armand Schwerner (1927–99) understood that the modern attempt to reconnect with the spirituality of the archaic and the "primitive" had to be accompanied by a deep—and deeply ironic—self-consciousness. Along with his colleagues, such as Jerome Rothenberg and Nathaniel Tarn, Schwerner (re)discovered both the poetic and the religious potential in anthropology's study of native cultures and languages. Likewise, the fields of archaeology and paleography inspired in the poet an enduring awareness of the synchronicity of the archaic and the modern, especially in regard to matters of textuality. Schwerner embraced the universalizing spirit of ethnopoetics—the dream of total translation, total performance, total ritual—while at the same time implicitly acknowledging its impossibility. The uncanny pathos that informs Schwerner's work, especially in The Tablets (1999), has its origin in a romantic primitivism that is continually undercut by Modernist skepticism—and vice versa. [End Page 259]
The child of Jewish immigrants from Belgium, Schwerner first spoke French, and it could be argued that an understanding of cultural displacement and the consequent need for continuous translation lie at the heart of his work. This sensibility and background may well account for his attraction to what became known as ethnopoetics, while his training in music, comparative literature, and anthropology fully prepared him for participation in both the literary and performative dimensions of that movement. Steeped in European and American Modernism, Schwerner's stance toward his art was rigorously avant-garde; he published mainly in little magazines and small presses and performed his work in alternative venues and with experimental theater companies (including the famous Living Theater), especially in New York City, which was his home nearly all his life. Yet like Rothenberg (probably the figure most closely associated with ethnopoetics) and related poets such as Charles Olson and Robert Duncan, Schwerner's avant-gardism results from an awareness of and participation in a broad and generous continuum of cultural and artistic practices that, in effect, deconstruct the boundaries between primitive and Modernist. "PRIMITIVE MEANS COMPLEX" (xviii) declares Rothenberg in Technicians of the Sacred (1969). In "primitive" poetry, he goes on to observe, "An object is whatever it becomes under the impulse of the situation. Forms are often open. Causality is often set aside. The poet (who may also be dancer, singer, magician, whatever the event demands of him) masters a series of techniques that can fuse the most seemingly contradictory propositions" (xxi–xxii). The resemblance to Modernist avant-garde practices is unmistakable.
In Schwerner's case, however, the connection between the primitive or archaic poet/shaman and the experimental Modernist is thoroughly ironized by the problematic introduction of what Brian McHale ingeniously calls "the 'primal scene' of Modernist archaeologism: the moment when a consciousness enters into some relation with the past through an encounter of its artifacts, extracted from underground" (242–43). Not the Modernist poet but the modern scholar is the parallel to the archaic figure who, in The Tablets, is just as often a scribe as a prophet, shaman, or seer. Furthermore, as McHale points out, this primal scene is never fully witnessed: "Nowhere in The...