A View of Particulars: McGann’s Pictures of Great Detail

“There are some ‘features’ of the real world that are better lost in translation. Perhaps the idea of a document having a single location is one of them.”¹

—quoted in McGann, Radiant Textuality

“the barest flutter of the smallest leaf creates and destroys infinitely many things, and ordinary reality suffers a sort of ‘explosion.’”²

—Ernest Sosa, “Existential Relativity”

I’ll start with a particular: the first line of robert hass’s poem, “Meditation at Lagunitas,” from his 1979 volume, Praise.³ “All the new thinking is about loss.”⁴ Before specifying “the new thinking,” the narrator notes its resemblance to “all the old thinking” (line 2). That abstraction does get specified, and then, exemplified, with a show of playful pedantry about the status of examples as particulars. (By playful pedantry, I mean the throwaway interjection, “for example,” in a statement about examples on line 3.) The first example of the “old thinking” (that is, “The idea . . . that each particular erases / the clarity of a general idea,” on lines 3–4) takes a form that mirrors the statement’s content. You can see that in matching the sentence subject—“idea”—with a noun clause (“that each particular”), the sentence doesn’t anchor the abstraction, it multiplies it. And while it is true that the noun clause narrows and nominalizes the antecedent, it doesn’t come close to delivering a bona fide particular. That’s the job of the second such clause: the idea of “the clown- / faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk of that black birch” (lines 4–6). Here, the narrator makes good to solve the problem of particulars by the performative presencing—that is, exemplification—that has been, by tradition, not just the mandate of poetry but its peculiar privilege. At the same time, the comically particularized particular that is used to signify particularity (“clown-faced woodpecker”) so archly upstages its referent as to declare the infinite regress— mise en abîme—of verbal particularizing. (I say verbal to contrast with the mute particularizing that happens when we point at something: when we specify the “that” rather than “the the,” as Wallace Stevens puts it in “Man on the Dump.”) The line about the woodpecker—cast as signature of the real—is a forgery. And so, one might add, for all acts of exemplifying. The minute we set some particular as an example, the categorical of—example of what?—takes over. The particular takes a backseat to the universal, the category, the type, that it is said to exemplify. Does Hass’s poem know this? Maybe: that could be the force of the last line, the sheer “saying” (line 31) of a word too plumped with meaning (like a blackberry with juice) to leave room for reference. Then again, once we have read “clown-faced,” “wood-pecker,” and “pumpkinseed” (line 23)—the run of compound nominatives, their particularizing adjective jammed onto the common noun—some of blackberry’s sensuous juice drains out of it, the leak coming between “black” and “berry,” the property and the noun. We are back with another word that is elegy to what it signifies.

But I have made a tangle of Hass’s straightforward observation about the irony of “the new thinking” resembling the old. It is easy to see that Plato is Hass’s paradigm for the old thinking: namely, the idea of the Idea as metaphysical origin, and, descending from that, Western philosophy’s metaphysics of presence—a doctrine that casts the physique of our world and our cognition of it as a tragicomedy of lost causes. In other words, a metaphysics of uppercase Being entails an ontology of lowercase (and lower-class) beings and their pathetic—as in, full of pathos—becomings.

Line 11, with its specimen of the new thinking, clinches the irony of its resemblance to the old thinking. “Word is elegy to what it signifies” picks out Derrida, especially in 1979, just three years after Of Grammatology’s English translation.⁵ The phrasing captures not just the substance but the verbal style and also the tone of that era...