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The Aesthetics of Classical Reception in 20 Century American

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The Aesthetics of Classical Reception in 20 Century American Strange New Canons: The Aesthetics of Classical Reception in 20th Century American Experimental Poetics by Matthew S. Pfaff A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Comparative Literature) in the University of Michigan 2013 Doctoral Committee: Professor Yopie Prins, Chair Professor Sara Ahbel-Rappe Associate Professor Basil Dufallo Associate Professor Joshua L. Miller Assistant Professor Gillian White 2 © Matthew S. Pfaff ii for Carla— ἀντι τᾶσ ἔγω οὐδὲ Λυδίαν παῖσαν οὐδ᾽ ἔρανναν. iii Contents Dedication ii. List of Figures iv. Introduction: Literary Canonicity And Poetic Innovation 1 Rethinking Reception Aesthetics: Methods and New Models 16 Overview Of Chapters 28 1. Translating Opacity: Homophony and the Material Text 33 “Askforaclassic, Inc.”: The Classics And The Culture Industry 38 “pulchertime” or “Poe tit”: David Melnick’s Poetics Of Epic Farce 63 2. Residual Mainstream Margins: New American Classicisms 82 The Invention of “HUMANITY”: Allen Ginsberg’s Mainstream Margins 92 “A title not chosen for dancing”: Jack Spicer’s Residual Margins 113 3. C=L=A=S=S=I=C=I=S=M=S and Beyond 129 A Critique of Pure Skepticism: Susan Howe’s Luminous Shards 137 A Critique of Pure Citation: Charles Bernstein and the Sublime Object of Bibliography 155 Conclusion: Strange New Classical Reception Studies 174 Works Cited 192 iv List of Figures 1.1: Front cover of David Melnick’s Eclogs 72 3.1: Untitled poem (“Eudoxus”) from Charles Bernstein’s The Sophist 159 3.2: Electronic text, “Littoral,” Charles Bernstein 162 4.1: Front cover and side-view of Anne Carson’s Nox 176 4.2: Clipping of Catullus 101 in Nox 178 4.3: “Snub-Poemed,” Johannes Sigil 181 1 Introduction: Literary Canonicity and Poetic Innovation The writer who shuns the deceptive aspects of tradition and assumes it no longer has anything to do with him still is constrained by it, above all through language. Literary language… derives its meaning from its history and this history embraces the historical process as such… To insist on the absolute absence of tradition is as naïve as the obstinate insistence on it. Both are ignorant of the past that persists in their allegedly pure relation to objects; both are unaware of the dust and debris which cloud their allegedly clear vision. Adorno, “On Tradition”1 Experimental poets after modernism in America turned to Greek and Latin texts as pretexts for exploding the ideal of the classical tradition, and explored, instead, the radical discontinuity and linguistic alterity of the classics. My dissertation brings together research into American avant-garde poetics and a set of concerns with ideas of tradition and “the classical” which proliferate in studies of modernism, but remain largely unexplored in studies of 20th century post- or counter-modernist experimental writing. By focusing on divergent but related modes of classical reception, I explore why “the classical” becomes a key site for experimental American poets such as Louis Zukofsky, David Melnick, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Spicer, Charles Bernstein, and Susan Howe, and how these poets turn to classical Greek and Latin texts to play out questions of alterity, alienation, marginality, and the limits of representation. I argue that each of these modes, by alternate routes, destabilizes what is “classical” about the classical in 1Adorno, Theodor W. “On Tradition.” Telos 1992.94 (1992): 75-82, p. 78. 2 order to arrive at a minor Greek and a minor Latin: minor, both in the sense of marginal and in the dissonant sense of a minor key. My dissertation therefore brings into dialogue a series of discourses that seem anathema to each other: novelty and tradition; the canon and the margins; the ancient and the modern. Simon Goldhill, in Who Needs Greek: Contests in the Cultural History of Hellenism, captures the multivalent indeterminacy of classicism as a site of both cultural hegemony and cultural contest: “The image of Greece becomes bolstered by idealism and fissured by lack and absence—a site of contention and difference as well as value and authority” (11).2 Certainly, the overdetermination of Greek and Latin in high modernism was a commonplace.3 William Carlos Williams described his fragmentary epic, Paterson, as “a reply to Greek and Latin with bare hands.” 4 The wording and implications of such a description are enigmatic, rich with possible meanings. They encapsulate both an antagonism and an intimacy towards “the classical” in a single breath: a reply in the sense of a retort, with hands bare and ready to strike? A reply as a response of mutual longing, hands bare and ready to caress? A reply in the sense of homage or in 2 Goldhill, Simon. Who Needs Greek: Contests in the Cultural History of Hellenism. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 3 A number of studies have been invaluable in thinking through modernist classical intertextuality. Charles Martin’s Affecting the Ancients: Pound, Zukofsky, and the Catullan Vortex (Buffalo, New York: State University of New York at Buffalo, 1987) and Diana Colecott’s H. D. and Sapphic Modernism, 1910-1950 (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999) both provide useful studies of the reception of a single classical author in critical modernist writers. Martin in particular helps to build a bridge between modernist and later modes of classical reception around the figure of Catullus, the reception of which is central to the dissertation’s first chapter (see below). Goldman-Rosenthal’s Aristotle and Modernism: Aesthetic Affinities of T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Virginia Woolf (Brighton, England; Portland, Oregon: Sussex Academic Press, 1999) provides useful tools for understanding the impact of classical configurations of genre and aesthetics on modernism, and the reception of ancient philosophy in modernism. For studies which treat ideologies of the ancient in modernism more generally, see Jeffrey Perl’s The Tradition of Return: The Implicit History of Modern Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984) as an interesting treatment of the impact of various ideologies of “tradition” on modernism; and David Adam’s Colonial Odysseys: Empire and Epic in the Modernist Novel (Ithaca, New York; London: Cornell University Press, 2003) as a study of the intersections of ancient constructions of genre, the reception of epic, and colonialism. 4 Williams, William Carlos. Paterson. Edited by Christopher J. MacGowan. New York: New Directions, 1995, p.2. 3 response to linguistic beauty, ready to embrace? In keeping with Williams’ presentism and commitment to the rhythms of natural speech, perhaps the crucial element is the hands’ “bareness”: Greek and Latin come to him gloved in their centuries of accrued history and veils of time, and he offers in response—as a mirror image? a reproach? a request?—hands stripped of history and mediation. With Greek and Latin stripped of their European and English sedimentation, dislocated from the rigid layers of mediation and reception, and configured as present, Paterson made these “dead” languages living according to a poetics of linguistic immediacy that composes the textual fabric of Williams’ poem. For Williams, the “classical” was a vital site of cultural contestation; a battlefield on which high stakes encounters determined both the fate of contemporary poetics and the meaning of the past.5 The competing legacies of modernist classicism attest to the persistence of “hegemonic classicism” alongside the “demotic classicism” of a poet like Williams, as when Eliot decried the displacement of the King James translation: “in our headlong rush to educate everybody, we are lowering our standards, and… destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanized caravans.”6 What was at stake, for Eliot, is not at all the text itself of the ancient tradition, whether Biblical or Greco- Roman. The ancient texts themselves, after the vulgar drive of the demotic present has swept 5 Quartermain reads both the sense of retort and of longing as characteristic of Williams’ “reply to Greek and Latin”: “In deprivileging or perhaps reprivileging cultural icons, such a disturbance of settled hierarchies and authority is but an extension of William’ refusal to let red and yellow mean anything but themselves… Hence Kora in Hell or the birth-of-Venus passages at the opening of White Mule are written… in opposition to a cultural baggage that impedes observation by inferiorising immediacy, making it stand for something else and turning it into a transparent window that seeks to deny it own existence through self-effacement” (16). Quartermain’s description strikes me as absolutely correct, and yet it glosses over what is to me the most fascinating aspect of Williams’ demotic “immediacy”: its grounding in “cultural icons” such as “the-birth-of-Venus passage at the opening of White Mule.” See Quartermain, Peter. Disjunctive Poetics : From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe. Vol. [59]. Cambridge England ; New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 1992. 6 Eliot, Thomas Stearns. Notes towards the Definition of Culture. Harcourt, 1949. 4 away the sediment of its prior reception, are the “ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanized caravans.” Eliot’s moral qualm was precisely that the present would colonize the past, stripping it of its remoteness and “pastness,” granting it an immediacy that would have made it available to all. For Eliot—and this may be characteristic of the methodologically conservative tendency in classicism in general—Ezra Pound’s “make it new” came to mean “make it [the pastness of the past] new.”7 The job of Eliot’s classicist is the continual renewal of the distance, strangeness, and cultural exclusivity of a classical past.8 The contemporaneity of a certain past was established or lost in the space of interplay between “Greek and Latin” and modernist poetics.
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