The Zukofsky Era: Modernity, Margins, and the Avant-Garde

2. G. Oppen, Materialiste: Cinematic Capitalism

“Frankly, I paste without cutting.” Oppen, 1969 “. . . FROM DISCRETE SERIES TO THE MARXISM WAS NOT A ‘BREAK’————BY ANY MEANS . . .” Oppen, 1973 George Oppen’s first published work, Discrete Series (1934), at once marked the poet’s entrance and then-indefinite departure from the world of literary modernism. Composed of thirty-one poems with relations that often vex, Discrete Series was Oppen’s last major poetic work to appear until twentyfive years later, when he began writing the poems of The Materials (1962), This in Which (1965), and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Of Being Numerous (1968). Immediately after the publication of Discrete Series, Oppen set literary life aside to organize with the Communist Party, serve in World War II, and at greatest length, practice carpentry in Mexico, far from the FBI agents increasingly interested in his prior and current political commitments and activities. Many literary historians place Discrete Series within the Imagist tradition.1 This chapter will both concur and demur, noting that Oppen’s early work emerges in complex fashion from a historically short-lived intersection of divergent modernist traditions. The text itself is the impress of Oppen’s simultaneous engagements with both left and right modernist tendencies. Oppen composed parts of Discrete Series during his trip to Europe in 1929, where he met Pound by way of Zukofsky’s introduction. During this time, Oppen was also actively involved with To Publishers, the Objectivists’ press, which published W. C. Williams’s early poetry, Pound’s How to Read, and 2 G. Oppen, Materialiste Cinematic Capitalism 70 The Uneven Poetics of Radical Parataxis Zukofsky’s An “Objectivists” Anthology. Indeed, Discrete Series finds formal solidarities with Williams’s 1930s short lyrics as much as it does with the aesthetic energies of Imagism. The work is charged at the contact points between first- and second-generation Anglo-American literary modernism. Published eighteen years after H.D.’s Sea Garden and under historical circumstances radically altered from Imagism’s first flush, Discrete Series debuted in the same year as the Christian homiletics of Eliot’s The Rock, and Pound was immersed in the reconceived American pragmatism of his postXXX Cantos. While the Series offers an index of Objectivism’s ideological divergence from the first generation, it also testifies to the chimerical and resilient portability of the forms of that earlier avant-garde. At the same time that Pound was returning in his post-Imagist work to the allusive hypotaxis that Imagism had sought to supersede, we find Oppen ’s Discrete Series embracing spare negations. In doing so, Discrete Series allows us to see the ways in which Objectivist works offer us a genealogy of a modernism characterized as much by the forward march of innovation as by recursive returns to generative, provocative forms. Indeed, I will argue in this chapter that Oppen revisits Imagism in order to pursue a utopian aesthetic project promised, and abandoned, by an earlier generation. Like the American landscape in which it was written, Discrete Series engages synchronously with an uneven coexistence of expressive forms; Oppen’s work finds redemption for the potentials of once-emergent forms like Imagism in a return to the older forms of Realism. Discrete Series’ exploration of the reifying effects of the perceiving “I” is both a commentary on the aesthetic limits of late Realism and a poetic alternative to the reemergence of the egoic subject in post-Imagist poetics. In Oppen’s Series, history does not disclose a moral guide or offer a recuperative example; rather, as in Zukofsky’s “A,” historical junctures constellate perceptual data, which the poet in turn borrows and arranges. Discrete Series’ constructed montages of country and city, and of sea and land, reflect the Objectivist’s tendency to articulate historical arrangements in the vocabulary of geographic particulars, with special attention to the asymmetrical topographies that upset narratives of unified, unchecked progress. Through its formal merging of Imagism’s potentials with an Objectivist’s attention to highly differentiated social surfaces, Discrete Series achieves legibility only through the aggregation and combination of its separate scenes. As the reader stitches each stanza into a social fabric, the Series as a whole is tex- G. Oppen, Materialiste: Cinematic Capitalism 71 tured with themes, correspondences, and recurrent afterimages. Successive poems in the series undergo constant revision of their discrete, individual meanings as they interact with their antecedents and heirs. In the end, the aggregate meaning of the Series depends as much...