A Ghost Light of Modernism: Reorienting the Community in Hart Crane’s The Bridge Teppei KURUMA 1 Contents Introduction: Reenergizing a Ghost Light………………………………………………..7 Chapter 1: Overviewing the Reception History of The Bridge………………………….40 I. From the 1920s to the 1980s…………………………………………………40 II. From the 1990s: A Failed Nostos and Queer Readings of The Bridge………53 Chapter 2: “When Love Foresees the End”: “Quaker Hill” and an Intimation of the Common Strangeness………………………………………………………65 I. “I See Only the Ideal”: The “Perspective” Unworked……………....……..68 II. “Cancelled Reservations”: Pathetic Fallacy Dismantled………………….74 III. “The Curse of Sundered Parentage”: The Alternative Genealogy Dispersed…………………………………………………………………...79 IV. Exposing Heart………………………………………………...…………83 Coda………………………………………………………………………….90 Chapter 3: “And This, Thine Other Hand, upon My Heart”: “Cape Hatteras” and Imagining a Trace of Letting Go……………………………………….……94 I. Revisiting “Mr. Crane’s Wreckage in View”……………………………….97 II. Interweaving Queer Strands “under the Looming Stacks”……………….101 III. Returning Home to “Junctions Elegiac”……………….………………..110 2 IV. So “Suddenly” and So “Soon”………………………..………………….116 Coda………………………………………………………………..……….123 Chapter 4: “Oh, Hold Me in those Eyes’ Engaging Blue”: “Indiana” and the Land of Intimate Strangers…………………………………………………………..125 I. “The Morning Glory”: What Is Furled in Her Song?.....................................128 II. Toward the (Homosexual) Sublime……………………………………….132 III. “Won Nothing Out of Fifty-Nine”: A Self-Criticizing Lyric……..……….135 IV. “Perhaps a Halfbreed”…………………………………...……………….143 V. “Traveler―Stranger, Son,―My Friend―”………….……………………151 Coda…………………………………………………………………...……..156 Interlude: “An Act of Faith besides Being a Communication”: Reconsidering Crane’s Poetics of Bridging………………………………………………...…………158 I. “New Hierarchy of Faith”: An Evidence without Any Authorial Witness…162 II. “The Word Made Flesh”: A Mystic Communion and / or Queer Self- Shattering………………………………………………………………….....168 III. Reformulating the “Logic of Metaphor”: Crane’s Poetics of Spacing…...177 IV. “Simply a Communication between Man and Man”: A Relation of the Heterogeneous Purity…………………………………………………..…….191 3 V. Becoming an Un-Faithful Witness of the New Wor(l)d……………….…..198 Chapter 5: “I, Too, Was Liege to Rainbows”: “The Dance” and Shattering the Mirror’s Pledge………………………………………………………………..………211 I. “Loth, Disturbed, and Destined”: Crane’s Imperialist Nostalgia……….…..214 II. “I Learned to Catch the Trout’s Moon Whisper”: Mirroring the Native Land………………………………………………………………………….219 III. “Lie to Us”: Impersonating “the Indian”…………..……………………..223 IV. “The Tribal Morn” as “Our” Burial Ground…………………………..….231 V. On a “NY Taxi Driver”: Crane’s Poetics of Cruising………………………238 Coda: Post Festum………………………………………………………...…246 Chapter 6: “Close, Cool, High”: “Southern Cross” and Mobilizing a Distant Closeness…………………………………………………………………...251 I. “No Wraith, but Utterly”: Revising a Distance……………..…………….254 II. “Homeless Eve, Unwedded”: Two Solitudes Consolidated…………..….259 III. “I Bring You Back Cathay”: Misnaming, Repetition, and Transmission……………………………………………………………..…263 IV. “The Cross Climbed by Aslant”: An Oblique Strategy of Bearing a Cross………………………………………………………………………..271 4 V. “Yes, Eve―Wraith of My Unloved Seed”: Crane’s Wasteful Productivity……………………………………………………………….276 Chapter 7: “Where Can You Be Nimbus?”: A Hauntological Revisit to “Cutty Sark”....284 I. “Another Poor Soul, Like Myself”: Harry Candee………………………..286 II. “His Bony Hands Got to Beating Time”: An Obscured Potential……..…293 III. “ATLANTIS ROSE”: The New (and Mournful) World………….……..300 IV. “Pennies for Porpoises”: And for Purposes……………………...………307 V. “For These Lovely Ghosts”: An Engagement with a Poly-Rooted Kinship……………………………………………………………………...313 Coda………………………………………………………………………...317 Chapter 8: “Kiss of Our Agony Thou Gatherest”: “The Tunnel” and Allegorizing the Radical Fragmentariness……………………………………………..……320 I. “Performances, Assortments, Résumés”: A Surface Experience Repeated...322 II. “Like Hair beyond Extinction”: Formless Materials………………………325 III. “And Somehow Anyhow Swing”: Reconsidering the Weakened Links….330 IV. “To His Own Native Shore”: An Inchoate Community………………..….336 V. “Toward Worlds That Glow and Sink”…………………………………….339 Coda………………………………………………………………….………349 5 Postlude…………………………………………………...…………………………..352 I. Three Aspects of the Community…………………………………..……..352 II. Postmodern Aspects of The Bridge………………………………………361 III. From Hart Crane’s “Community” to Frank O’Hara’s “Coterie”…..…….371 Conclusion: The Ghost Light in The Bridge…………...………………………..……..391 Notes…………………………………………………………………………………..400 Works Cited……………………………………...……………………………………419 6 Introduction: Reenergizing a Ghost Light Hart Crane’s The Bridge (1930) has been labeled as “failure.” This seems hardly a thought-provoking observation. As John Emil Vincent cogently puts,“‘[f]ailure’ is used to describe Crane’s life, his alcoholism, suicide, sexuality, and career, as well as single poems, groups of poems, his poetics, his execution of those poetics, and his cosmology” (127). A possible danger when drawing on such a term as “failure” to reconsider the queer potential of Crane’s poetry is not only redundancy but also mere sentimentalism. According to Heather Love, moreover, “[m]any contemporary critics dismiss negative or dark representations entirely, arguing that the depiction of same-sex love as impossible, tragic, and doomed to failure is purely ideological” (1). At the risk of repeating the cliché of gay, lesbian, and queer studies, I will participate in the discourse of “failure” in Crane scholarship. In 1923, when Crane started gestating the concept of The Bridge, Crane wrote to his friend about “the fusion process” in his poetry, declaring that “this mystical fusion of beauty is my religion” (CPSL 320).¹It is the fusional orientation of the poet’s aesthetic aspiration that urges Crane to conceive The Bridge as “a mystical synthesis of ‘America’” (CPSL 321). The aim of this dissertation on Crane and The Bridge is to see in detail how the poem fails to accomplish the desired communal identity, both structural and thematic. In so doing, I try to revitalize the textual incompletion thus found as a 7 generative instant that interrupts all attempts at communal fusion with any mode of collectivity. This dissertation will have two interrelated consequences. First, it leads us to reframe one modernist’s “failure” as an alternative aesthetics of “community,” the issue of which has not been discussed enough in the critical history of Crane’s writings. At the same time, it makes a contribution towards another reintroduction of The Bridge,²which has been regarded as “the always secondary” modernist epic (Bernstein, “Introduction”), as a long poem much more available to what Albert Gelpi calls “a distinctly Poststructurist, Postmodernist sensibility” (“Genealogy” 524). In The H. D. Book, Robert Duncan, whose “derivative” poetics disturbs the boundaries between romanticism, modernism, and postmodernism in poetry, invokes the name of Crane as follows: “There is one lonely ghost light of poetry where Hart Crane is seized by his vision of the Bridge” (214). The “ghost light” refers to a single light bulb illuminated on the vacant stage in an unoccupied theater. Duncan’s association of Crane with that particular stage light is helpful for us to shed light on “dark” and “spectral” aspects of Crane’s poetry that have not been paid enough attention. While Crane might be mistaken as a mere optimistic propagandist of the modern industrial age, new technologies and exuberant city life in the early twentieth century, Crane never fails to develop in The Bridge the ghostly imagery of a movie theater and other playhouses. Not 8 to mention “cinemas, panoramic sleights” (CPSL 33) or “[o]utspoken buttocks in pink beads” in a burlesque theater (CPSL 62), those apparitional flickers and gaudy glimmers are bound up with (dis-)illusion, emptiness and primitivism of the underworld, relating to the poet’s same-sex desire and experiences. In the similar vein, the image of a “ghost light” as the metaphor for Crane’s poetry helps us foreground the haunting figures in Crane’s text, whose uncanny traces point toward the melancholic space between presence and absence, making us re-experience the impossibility of fixing the past as a solid concept. Furthermore, Duncan’s evocation of Crane in the guise of the “one lonely ghost light of poetry” draws attention to the peculiar status of Crane and his writings in the modernist canon. As Brian Reed notes in his 2012 book, Crane “has conventionally been considered something of a second-tier modernist, eminent, perhaps, but ranking in prestige and accomplishment below the likes of T. S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams” (Phenomenal 134). Attuned to Adam Kirsch’s 2006 view that Crane’s “work resists the complacency of canonization,” ³Reed’s observation about Crane’s place among the modernist poets can also segue to Duncan’s recollection of the “reactionary” atmosphere in the 1940s poetry world. In the 1940s, so Duncan writes, the poetry of Hart Crane, who killed himself in 1932, seemed to be left energized by Crane’s solitary vision in the almost empty theater of modernism 9 in which the other modernist poets such as Eliot, Marianne Moore, and Stevens “remain within the rational imagination.” Duncan’s recollection was made to imply the apparently regressive