The Poethical Wager
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The Poethical Wager The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by the General Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Associates. The Poethical Wager Joan Retallack UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley . Los Angeles . London University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2003 by The Regents of the University of California For acknowledgments of permissions, please see page 269. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Retallack, Joan. The poethical wager / Joan Retallack. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-520-21839-6 (alk. paper) ISBN 0-520-21841-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Feminism and literature. 2. Women in literature.3. Literature, Modern—History and criticism.4. Literature and morals.I. Title. PN56.F46 R48 2003 809Ј.93352042—dc21 2002151319 cip Manufactured in Canada 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 10987654 321 The paper used in this publication is both acid-free and totally chlorine-free (TCF). It meets the minimum re- quirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).A This book is dedicated to Holly Arnao Swain, Caitlin, Walker, and Erin The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything. It is understood by this time that everything is the same except composition and time, composition and the time of the composition and the time in the composition....The composition is the thing seen by every one living in the living they are doing, they are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living. Gertrude Stein, “Composition As Explanation” Contents Acknowledgments xi Introduction: Essay as Wager 1 The Poethical Wager 21 Wager as Essay 47 Blue Notes on the Know Ledge 63 Poethics of the Improbable: Rosmarie Waldrop and the Uses of Form 81 The Experimental Feminine 90 The Scarlet Aitch: Twenty-Six Notes on the Experimental Feminine 102 :re:thinking:literary:feminism: (three essays onto shaky grounds) 110 The Difficulties of Gertrude Stein, I & II 145 Four on Cage Geometries of Attention 175 Fig. 1, Ground Zero, Fig. 2: John Cage— May 18, 2005 181 Poethics of a Complex Realism 196 uncaged words John Cage in Dialogue with Chance 222 Notes 243 Bibliography 259 Acknowledgments of Permissions 269 Index 271 Acknowledgments I feel lucky to have known so many whose improbable minds and work have enlarged my sense of poetic possibility and who have, in countless ways, affected this book. Tina Darragh and Peter Inman have been friends in conversation and experimental spirit since the late 1970s. A sustained correspondence with Jackson Mac Low helped me clarify my working concept of poethics. Lyn Hejinian, Anne Tardos, and Rosmarie Waldrop have contributed directly and indirectly to my projects of the last decade through generosities of many kinds, by humor and example, by questions and challenges, and by the energies and lucidities of their own work. Ulla Dydo has been a source of inspiration and assistance in all the work I’ve done on Gertrude Stein since the early 1990s. I am in- debted to Marjorie Perloff’s work that, at least since the 1981 publica- tion of The Poetics of Indeterminacy, has changed the topography of ac- ademic discourse on twenty-first-century experimental poetics in important ways. Her research on international, interdisciplinary histori- cal contexts linking avant-garde movements from the late nineteenth century on has led many of us to a new understanding of indeterminacy in Euro-American literatures prior to the influence of John Cage. Others from whose friendship and conversation—on and off the page—I have benefited enormously are John Ashbery, Peter Baker, Caroline Bergvall, Charles Bernstein, Robert Creeley, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Lynne Dreyer, Carolyn Forché, Dominique Fourcade, Alan Golding, Burton Hatlen, Susan Howe, Lynn Keller, Susan Kirschner, xi xii Acknowledgments Laura Kuhn, Doug Lang, Ann Lauterbach, Tom Mandel, Jerome McGann, Bill Mullen, Jena Osman, Bob Perelman, Meredith Quarter- main, Peter Quartermain, Phyllis Rosenzweig, Jacques Roubaud, Ron Silliman, Myra Sklarew, Mary Margaret Sloan, Rod Smith, Juliana Spahr, Keith Waldrop, Mark Wallace, Terence Winch. Alan Devenish, whose friendship in life and literature (with no gap implied) has been a two-decade pleasure, read large portions of the final manuscript, caught many inadvertent unintelligibilities and offered in- valuable suggestions for elucidating language at difficult conceptual in- tersections. Jane Flax has been a cherished friend whose lucid mind has often helped me clarify ideas that enter into my work. The surprising, hu- morous scope of our conversations has been a constant delight. The two H.A.S.s in my life—my daughter Holly Arnao Swain and my late husband, and beloved friend, Henry Albert Segal—are in this book in more ways than probably even I can know. Holly gave me cru- cial help during the final editing of many of the essays. Had I not met John Cage and Buckminster Fuller in my early twen- ties, my methodical optimism might not exist. It was Cage’s lifework that led me to the term poethics. I wish to thank the editors with whom I’ve worked at the University of California Press. Linda Norton invited me to submit the manuscript of this book and encouraged me to put it together in the way I believed it needed to be done. I appreciate her early support of the project, along with that of her assistant Randy Heyman. I am grateful to Laura Cerruti and Rachel Berchten for guiding the book through production and to Joe Abbott for his knowledgeable and precise copyediting. Bard students Ella von Holtum and Kate Schapira worked with dedication on the bib- liography and permissions requests. Eirik Steinhoff’s active reading- through of the page proofs gave me much needed assistance and courage to finally face what I have done. A small disclaimer. The essays in this book are the product of more than a decade of writing about and applying a conceptual framework I’ve been calling poethics. I have wanted them to remain independent as essays but also to work together in the formulation of the argument of the book. The sequence in which they are placed is significant, but, be- cause they are essays, I know they will not necessarily be read sequen- tially. I have therefore repeated some (I hope not too many) key quota- tions and explanations of terms where I felt they were necessary to the internal logic of a piece. INTRODUCTION Essay as Wager In the dream a small plane falls out of the sky. The writer is lucky. She crawls out and walks away with bad memories and a crooked smile. Dita Fröller, “Autobio: A Littered Aria,” from New Old World Marvels Former Guerrillas Are Dressed in Dark Suits and Children Play in Foxholes New York Times, 9.28.01 Life is subject to swerves—sometimes gentle, often violent out-of-the- blue motions that cut obliquely across material and conceptual logics. If everything were hunky-dory, it might not be so important to attend to them. As it is, they afford opportunities to usefully rethink habits of thought. Relativity theory, the quantum mechanical principles of com- plementarity and uncertainty, constituted major conceptual swerves with consequences in the culture at large, as did Freud’s theory of the unconscious and, more recently, chaos theory. Dada and surrealism, the work of James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gertrude Stein, Benoit Mandelbrot, John Cage have all created productive cul- tural dislocations. The sudden interconnectedness of the planet via satellites and the internet has brought on a cascade of unforeseen con- sequences. September 11, 2001, was a paradigmatic swerve, wrenching a parochial “us” into a new world of risks without borders. How can one frame a poetics of the swerve, a constructive preoccu- pation with what are unpredictable forms of change? One might begin by stating this: what they all have in common is an unsettling transfigu- ration of once-familiar terrain. They tend to produce disorientation, even estrangement, by radically altering geometries of attention. In today’s world politics a geometry of straight lines in the sand (“we dare you to cross”) is obsolete. Whether global leaders recognize it or not, “world us” is now in a situation where the fractal geometry of coast- lines, with their ecologically dynamic, infinite detail, may be a more 1 2 Introduction productive model for the interrelationships of cultures. You may notice that my sense of geometries of attention crosses disciplinary and generic boundaries. I believe we learn the most about what it can mean to be human from border-transgressive conversations. In the third century b.c.e. the Greek philosopher Epicurus posited the swerve (a.k.a. clinamen)1 to explain how change could occur in what early atomists had argued was a deterministic universe that he himself saw as composed of elemental bodies moving in unalterable paths. Epicurus attributed the redistribution of matter that creates no- ticeable differences to the sudden zig or zag of rogue atoms. Swerves made everything happen yet could not be predicted or explained. Lu- cretius put it this way in his Epicurean poem De Rerum Natura: While the first bodies are being carried downwards by their own weight in a straight line through the void, at times quite uncertain and [in] uncertain places, they swerve a little from their course, just so much as you might call a change of motion. For if they were not apt to incline, all would fall down- wards like raindrops through the profound void, no collision would take place and no blow would be caused amongst the first-beginnings: thus nature would never have produced anything.2 Assigning such a crucial role to chance roused many critics, Cicero chief among them.