"The Truth about Us": Pastoral, Pragmatism, and Paterson

Set in the depressed New Jersey city where William Carlos Williams lived and practiced medicine, Paterson opens with a pastoral mountain scene depicting the area's natural beauty. The poem's protagonist, Dr. Paterson, configured in mythic proportions, lies in the valley below the local falls, stretched alongside the female "mountain," who has "[p]earls at her ankles, her monstrous hair / spangled with apple-blossoms." ¹ The pastoral mode, so crucial to narratives of American identity, immediately gives way to a prose narrative chronicling the nineteenth-century discovery of pearls, by a shoemaker, in a body of water near the city. Eating mussels he has collected, the shoemaker discovers that they contain what appear to be pebbles. Although he first discards them, he later brings them to a jeweler, who pronounces them extremely valuable (P, 9). This seemingly odd piece of trivia, the preceding mountain scene, and the collage of voices that follow depict Williams's local environment and its inhabitants, mythical and actual, in a radical reincarnation of the pastoral mode, which historically has been linked to narratives of the New World as well as to the kinds of social and political shifts Williams addresses throughout the poem.

Wearing pearls, the female mountain is Dr. Paterson's first apparent object of love and desire—and the first of the poem's many incarnations of the Kore, or "beautiful thing." By Book Three, this central source of value has taken the form of a working-class African American woman whom Dr. Paterson treats after she has been repeatedly raped in a disputed middle territory claimed by rival gangs from Paterson and Newark (P, 104–5). ² Her status in the poem is surprising, potentially offensive, and yet reflective of Williams's insistence upon disturbing settled aesthetic and social concepts of purity, value, and truth. Like the pearl, the Kore is granted value through the poet's fascination with her. This value, derived not from any intrinsic function of her own, is the product of Dr. Paterson's desire. Similarly, the pearl, prized for its structural integrity, sphericity, and pure white color, is no more than the product of the mussel's bodily secretions. Easily deemed excremental if classified by its physical origin, the pearl is discovered accidentally just before the shoemaker swallows and ingests it, presenting Williams with the opportunity to underscore its transformation from pollutant to treasure. The Kore in Book Three, seemingly devalued because of her race, gender, and violation, is esteemed by the doctor precisely because of these associations with marginalized aspects of American culture. It is she whom Dr. Paterson calls upon in a manner both disdainful and worshipful, not only to "[t]ake off your clothes and purify / yourself" but also to "let me purify myself /—to look at you, / to look at you" (P, 105). It is the dark, female, violated body that occupies the position of privilege, however problematically, within this pastoral poem.

Although some readers consider Dr. Paterson's gesture racist and sexist essentialism, it also exemplifies Williams's redefinition of the valued self and his desire to confront readers with the culturally relative nature of social and aesthetic value. Williams's Kore is emblematic of a radical new use of the pastoral form that, in its depiction of local environments, conveys a purposefully conflicted, often indeterminate, politics. In Book Four of Paterson, this new aesthetic is evident in a series of idylls depicting amorous, often disturbing, and sometimes comic encounters between a middle-aged, gay, wealthy woman; her younger employee, a nurse; and Dr. Paterson himself. Because these encounters are foregrounded, Book Four came under critical attack from readers such as Randall Jarrell, who had praised books one through three. According to Williams, Jarrell "couldn't take the identification of the filthy river with the perversion of the characters"; later critics echoed Jarrell, seeing its pastoral vision as a "suicidal nightmare of modern history." Williams defended his...