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The Pennsylvania State University

The Graduate School

College of Liberal Arts

ON SECOND REFLECTION: ASSEMBLING CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

A Dissertation in

English

Abram Foley

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

August 2016

The dissertation of Abram Foley was reviewed and approved* by the following:

Jonathan P. Eburne Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and English Dissertation Adviser Chair of Committee

Robert L. Caserio Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Nergis Ertürk Associate Professor of Comparative Literature

Brian Lennon Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature

Daniel Purdy Professor of German Studies

Benjamin Schreier Associate Professor of English and Jewish Studies

Debra Hawhee Professor of English and of Communication Arts and Sciences Director of Graduate Studies, English Department

*Signatures are on file in the Graduate School.

Abstract

On Second Reflection: Assembling Contemporary Literature examines a range of authors and academics who became editors and publishers of prominent literary magazines and publishing houses since 1945. The dissertation argues that practices of editing and publishing compel these writers and academics to undertake a “second reflection” on the forms and contexts of postwar writing in the United States. “Second reflection” provides an alternative for thinking about the reflective aspects of literary works by opening reflection to conditions of experience and production. As such, my project studies writers who became editors and publishers, and who made editorial work into a lens for theorizing how contemporary literature can be constituted. Charles Olson and Nathaniel Mackey take stock of their editorial practices to position their work against the limitations of New Criticism (1950s) and the identity politics of the canon wars (1980s). But they also foster in their writing what I call a “procedural metaphysics” and a “poetics of hospitality,” respectively, that derive from editorial experience. The Dalkey Archive Press republishes out-of-print works to lay bare the effects for-profit publishing has on literary criticism; but it also demonstrates how literary remainders—in the form of out-of-print books— operate within the discourse of contemporary literature. Chris Kraus’s Native Agents Series within the Semiotext(e) publishing house not only corrects problematic gender oversights in the press’s list before her editorship, but it also serves as a functioning model with which Kraus theorizes the relationship between gender and genre in postwar writing. And the Black Took Collective establishes an experimental “black” collectivity, but proposes that this collectivity gives rise to a critical dissonance the members associate with experimental arts. On Second Reflection concludes that these critical positionings sustain the task of assembling contemporary American literature in ways that demand the emergence of new literary histories as a prerequisite for understanding our literary present.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments...... vi

INTRODUCTION ...... 1 On Second Reflection ...... 1 The Critical Field: A Brief Overview ...... 16 Two Backdrops: Postmodernism and Corporatized Publishing ...... 21 Conclusion ...... 31

CHAPTER 1. Charles Olson and the Process of Metaphysics ...... 37 Introduction ...... 37 The Printed Word, in Theory...... 45 The Word on the Page ...... 52 Interlude: Poetics between Explanation and Expression ...... 59 Islands Hidden in the Blood ...... 61

CHAPTER 2. A Literary History of the Dalkey Archive Press ...... 78 Introduction ...... 78 “‘Contemporary literature’ is only certain people…” ...... 84 Founded upon a Void: On the Question of Literary History ...... 91 Material Economy and Literary History: Sorrentino and the Dalkey Archive Press, Redux ...... 98 Interviews with Black Writers and the Lacunae of Literary History ...... 101

CHAPTER 3. Hambone’s Call: Intellectual Labor and the Invitation to Literary Hospitality ...... 115 Introduction ...... 115 Hambone’s History...... 126 Hambone’s Expeditions into Wholeness ...... 130 On Hospitality and Hambone’s Call ...... 140 “Destination Out”: On Centrifugal Inconclusion ...... 151

CHAPTER 4. Another Frame: Chris Kraus, Semiotext(e), and the Economy of Letters ...... 158 Introduction ...... 158 Desire, Excess, and Literary Economy ...... 167 The Law of Genre ...... 172 Another Turn: I Love Dick as Vulgar Telling ...... 183 A Narrative of Ghosts: From James to Kraus ...... 192

Conclusion: James, Kraus, and the Future of the Novel ...... 197

CHAPTER 5. Coda: The Black Took Collective and Movement-in-Progress...... 204 Works Cited ...... 213

Acknowledgments

Given that this dissertation addresses the many processes that surround literary publication, it is fitting that “On Second Reflection” is itself the result of countless conversations that can be only informally documented in the project itself. Better, then, to make them somewhat more explicit here at the outset. It has been with great pleasure and gratitude that I have written this dissertation under the advisement of Jonathan Eburne, whose intellectual generosity has helped to improve the project immeasurably, while also serving as a model for how an engaged academic can approach this profession. Throughout the dissertation’s development, Jonathan has seen it through its advancements and missteps, always maintaining his uncanny ability to intuit— or simply to know—what I needed and when, when to guide and when to simply think along with me. My many thanks to him for showing how process becomes a part of the project.

My other committee members played major roles in helping me to develop “On Second Reflection.” Professor Robert Caserio pointed me to Charles Olson after reading the direction of my thoughts in my comprehensive exam answers. Just as importantly, he was a close reader of everything I sent to him and always responded with wonderful insights, which he also always followed by asking: “How can I be helpful to you?” And he always was. Nergis Ertürk gave me my first extended introduction to the work of Edward Said, whose philological approach to abstract thought continues to influence my thinking about the development of “second reflection,” even if I don’t cite him extensively in what follows. She also encouraged me to think more closely about the public reception of the works I consider, which I hope to take up if this dissertation becomes a book manuscript. Brian Lennon introduced me to some of the foundational works of contemporary media theory, which had a profound effect on how I think about literature and its media. More than this, his own book, In Babel’s Shadow: Multilingual Literatures, Monolingual States, serves as a singular example of what serious critical reflection on the subject of contemporary literature and its media can undertake. It has been a pleasure discussing ideas with him on numerous occasions. Ben Schreier has been a terrific committee member and also a good friend over my years at Penn State. Many of my ideas were worked out at the “Schreier/Koenig Residency” over the summers in State College when I house-sat for him and his family, and he was kind enough to invite me to his home for several excellent Thanksgiving celebrations. My many thanks, Ben, for your generosity and kindness, and also for asking difficult questions about the project, which have and will continue to improve the basic ideas of “On Second Reflection.” Daniel Purdy was kind enough to join the committee as my outside reader. He immediately improved it with his knowledge of German media theory and I will no doubt turn to him in the future when questions about Bernhard Siegert or Theodor Adorno arise. Finally, although he was not on my committee, Aldon Nielsen has been an excellent interlocutor for this project. In particular, he turned me toward Nathaniel Mackey’s editorship of Hambone when I was just beginning to write my chapter on Charles Olson. He also

helped me to bring Mackey to Penn State in spring of 2015. My heartfelt thanks to all of the above mentioned.

I would also like to say thank you to my friends at Penn State for making my seven years in State College a good balance between intellectual pleasures and the pleasures of a good dinner or a hike. To my family for arranging travel plans and vacations around my schedule for years to make sure that I still had a place to go home to. I also thank them for their endless support in choosing a profession that must often look very strange to those who didn’t choose to work in academia. Lastly, to Alice Mitchell for choosing to share this life with me even though we often share it from different parts of the world. I can now make my way back to you very soon.

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INTRODUCTION

On Second Reflection

Until very recently, the history of U.S. literature since World War II has been written largely in the absence of books. This is not to say that books disappeared. Nor is it to invoke claims about the death of the book in the digital age. I mean something much simpler: books, and the practices associated with publishing books, have been almost entirely overlooked as subjects for serious critical reflection on postwar American writing.1 In a period when the author died, the work became a text, the American novel faced charges of both “greatness” and impending obsolescence, and poetry engaged new media, books became nearly immaterial.2 They have been hiding in plain sight, and one can extend this claim, as I do in this dissertation, to include a range of printed formats, such as literary journals and reviews. “On Second Reflection” provides a print-media basis for new literary histories of writing in the U.S. since 1945 by turning its focus to print culture and the material practices surrounding postwar writing, editing, and publication.

While many factors have contributed to the relative invisibility of print culture in critical studies of contemporary American literature, several stand out for the active role they played in structuring dominant trends in the literary field.3 First we must consider the shared interests of

1 The most well-developed scholarship on print culture and book history in American literary scholarship since 1945 has emerged from the study of Cold War cultural programs that the U.S. government promoted. For a wide-ranging overview of print culture and the Cold War, see Barnhisel and Turner; for more focused considerations of print culture and cultural diplomacy, see Barnhisel. 2 For “The Death of the Author” and the movement “From Work to Text,” see Barthes; for an overview of claims regarding the Great American Novel and the novel’s impending obsolescence, see Buell; Fitzpatrick. 3 I follow John B. Thompson’s definition of the “literary field” from Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century. Thompson offers a distillation of Pierre Bourdieu’s conception of the literary field, writing that “a field is a structured space of social positions which can be occupied by agents and organizations, and in which the position of any agent or organization depends on the type and quantity of resources or ‘capital’ they have at their disposal…. They are made up of agents and organizations, of different kinds and quantities of power and resources, of a variety of practices and of specific forms of competition, collaboration and reward” (3-4).

two prominent groups: the rapidly corporatizing publishers who sought ever increasing returns on their investments in “literary” authors; second, a handful of authors who were eager or at least willing to take on roles as literary celebrities and popular intellectuals. Consider that the decades following WWII gave rise not only to “middle-brow” literary icons such as Norman Mailer and

James Michener (Perrin 3; 120). These decades also produced the last profusion of what some critics have insisted on calling “the Great American Novel.”4 Directly related to the idea of the great American novel, quite logically, is the great American novelist: Bellow, DeLillo, Ellison,

Mailer, Morrison, Pynchon, and Roth, all of whom have been included as exemplary in critical books about either literary celebrity or the great American novel; and all of whom were published primarily by corporate publishing houses.5 The simultaneous emergence of these canonical figures and an increasingly profit-driven publishing industry is not entirely coincidental. Among Foucault’s insights in “What is an Author?” is that the author function results from diverse operations in the literary field (110); but these operations are ultimately concealed by the established author function (118). The author, in some sense, is made to appear as autonomous and so becomes a powerful symbolic function for the creation of both cultural

Thompson’s book is a notable exception to my claim about the lack of scholarship on book history and print culture, but Thompson approaches the field as a sociologist rather than as a literary critic. His book is the most comprehensive overview of how British and American publishing operates today. For another sociological account, but one which focuses more on bookselling, see Miller, who is also a sociologist. And for another exception to my opening claim, see Lennon on the fraught relationship between multilingualism and the mostly monolingual publishing industry in the United States. 4 For the most extensive recent criticism on the great American novel, see Buell. It is worth noting that his book discusses several mid-century authors including Bellow, Ellison, and Wright, and that it ultimately claims Toni Morrison as the final figure in the genre. For an author who argues against the category and its postwar American triumphalism, see Tillman. 5 For a reading of post-1945 literary celebrity in the United States, see chapter six of Loren Glass’s Authors Inc. on the celebrity posturing of Norman Mailer. To be clear, my point is not to judge the value of these writers’ works, but rather to show that most of the canon of postwar American writers derives from corporate publishing, which should compel us to question the economics of canonicity. It should also compel critics to look for other kinds of work that was being done, especially today when independent and non-profit publishing in America is on a significant upswing.

and actual capital. The author limits the field and conceals many of the processes that constitute it, including the practices of editing and publishing. Corporate publishers, in short, have had a vested interest in promoting their authors in such a way that the guiding hands of the publishing house and the market would remain invisible. The author’s name, more than the publishing house’s colophon, is the most valuable sign in a profit-driven literary economy.

However, the particular formation of the publishing industry during this period is not the only reason that textual production remains outside the purview of most studies in contemporary

American literature. Critical trends outside the period offer other points of insight. The “new modernist studies” has reinvigorated its field over the past two decades by turning to the material contexts of modernist aesthetics and artistic production. Much of this transition toward historical and sociological studies, however, has been achieved by making “modernism” the subject of the analyses as much as print or material culture: Institutions of Modernism (1998); The Public Face of Modernism (2001); Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity (2005); Collecting as Modernist

Practice (2012) (Rainey; Morrisson; Jaffe; Braddock). In light of the titular repetition seen in these well-known books, we can say quite simply that the contemporary lacks its “ism.” Scholars have been abandoning postmodernism for over two decades now, a point I will come to later, and no stable category has taken its place. While an established “modernism” anchors the new modernist studies’ turn toward material and cultural history, postwar American literature remains adrift, categorically speaking, and so there appears to be little demand in historicizing its

(non)emergence. Moreover, while the new modernist studies has introduced the history of print culture into its assessment of early twentieth-century writing, the contents of The Book History

Reader suggests that even this incursion into the twentieth-century was a small triumph for

textual scholars (Finkelstein and McCleery). Book history and textual scholarship run up to, but seldom include, the twentieth century. But why?

Looking to a medievalist for answers might help. In a 1990 special issue of Speculum on the subject of The New Philology, Stephen G. Nichols proposes that as books became the product of a more highly mechanized and refined mode of production, a critic could see a book’s production as merely incidental and not worthy of critical consideration. Nichols, who is interested specifically in the “manuscript culture” of medieval texts, takes Erich Auerbach as his target, remarking that “in Auerbach’s view, philology represented a technological scholarship made possible by a print culture. It joined forces with the mechanical press in a movement away from the multiplicity and variance of a manuscript culture…. Auerbach’s generation installed a preoccupation with scholarly exactitude based on edited and printed texts. The high calling of philology sought a transfixed text as transparent as possible, one that would provide the vehicle for scholarly endeavor but, once the work of editing accomplished [sic], not the focus of inquiry.

It required, in short, a printed text” (2-3). While Nichols is in a philological turf war with the most well-known philologist of the twentieth century, his point is worth reflecting on, especially if we consider the New Critics among “Auerbach’s generation.” Auerbach published Mimesis in

1946; Cleanth Brooks published The Well Wrought Urn in 1947. To summarize Nichols’s charge, and to extend it to Brooks: the literary text, in the absence of its media, stands transparently alone as a well-wrought urn; literary textuality is set free from historical production and contingency precisely because the production of texts has become so highly mechanical.6

6 For another reading of the movement from philology as a form of textual scholarship to philology as a variety of formalism, see Veggian. Veggian shows that the transition to formalism takes place much earlier than Nichols suggests, for Veggian around 1920 when John Matthews Manly was editor of Modern Philology at the University of Chicago. For a reading of New Criticism that argues that the claims against it are often baseless caricatures, see Wellek. Finally, I do not want to suggest that Auerbach and Cleanth Brooks share the same critical methods. I am dealing here instead with Nichols’s characterization of Auerbach, which in some ways is a better characterization of Brooks. As a counterpoint, consider that Edward W. Said looked to Auerbach throughout his career because

Even while literary scholars have been reacting against New Criticism for decades, with René

Wellek noting that it was “considered not only superseded, obsolete, and dead, but somehow mistaken and wrong” already by 1978, the backlash against the New Critics in the United

States—which has turned American literary scholarship toward a mode of historicist cultural studies—did not necessarily redirect itself toward textual studies (Wellek 611). A New Critical approach to literary texts lives on in the scholarly reception and study of postwar American literature today, even while historicism is now the basis for critical inquiry in many respects.

While scholars of American literature continue to overlook the practices such as editing and publishing that constitute the field of contemporary literature, many writers during this period have emphasized the centrality of literary practices to postwar literary expression.

Consider Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse.” Olson published this influential essay on poetics in

1950. In it he sets projective, open verse in opposition to “the NON-Projective (or what a French critic calls ‘closed’ verse, that verse which print bred” (“Projective Verse” 239). Just three years after the publication of The Well Wrought Urn, Olson anticipates what Nichols outlines forty years later: print has resulted in a conception of literary textuality that omits a range of historical experience associated with textual expression. Print allows verse to “close” itself to context and process. And process is revered for some postwar writers. In his 1966 essay collection Home,

LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka) places the art “artifact” in opposition to the active process of making art, what he calls “art-ing” (173, 175). He writes: “The academic Western mind is the best example of the substitution of artifact worship for the lightning awareness of the art process…. The process itself is the most important quality because it can transform and

Auerbach understood literary forms to be the result of human work in language, a more historically attentive characterization of Auerbach’s work. For a reading of Said’s concept of Orientalism that puts editorship at its center, see Mufti.

create, and its only form is possibility. The artifact, because it assumes one form, is only that particular quality or idea. It is, in this sense, after the fact, and it is only important because it remarks on its true source” (174). Here we find Jones the poet reflecting on his poetic process, to be sure, but this process is no doubt informed by the significant editorial positions he held in the

New York poetry scene in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In 1958 he co-founded and co-edited

Totem Press and the little magazine Yūgen with his wife Hettie Jones. He played a variety of editorial roles for the influential little magazine Kulchur from 1960 to 1965. And he also co- edited the early issues of the mimeographed The Floating Bear with Diane di Prima during the same period.7 Among these various projects, Jones edited and published major figures from the

Beats, the New York School poets, the San Francisco Renaissance poets, and the Black

Mountain poets, among many others. Given that his essay on “art-ing” as an active process is titled “Hunting is not Those Heads on the Wall,” the essay also speaks to Jones’s editorship. It is not simply that he published William Burroughs, Diane di Prima, Denise Levertov, Frank

O’Hara, and Charles Olson; it is that he brought them together in the first place through the active process of assembling these various little magazines, and so helped give form to the emerging field of postwar poetry. Editing underwrites “art-ing,” a sentiment Nathaniel Mackey shares in his reflections on Hambone, which I discuss in chapter three.

7 I want to note here that two of Jones’s co-editors were women. While Jones receives recognition for his early editorship, in part because it prepared him for the organizational work he went on to do with the Black Arts Movement after Jones shifted his poetic and political aims as a result of the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, the attention given to the fundamental roles Hettie (Cohen) Jones and Diane di Prima played has been best addressed primarily in their own memoirs. For the roles Hettie (Cohen) Jones and Diane di Prima played in the day-to-day editorship of the noted projects, see Hettie Jones; Di Prima. Jones’s account was published in 1990 and Di Prima’s in 2001, and each looks back to an earlier arts scene in New York. Chris Kraus, the subject of the final chapter, began her recovery work of women’s experimentalism with Native Agents in 1990 and can be seen to do similar work to Jones’s and Di Prima’s memoirs, i.e. the work of recollection and recovery. For a contemporary reflection on the gendered economy of editorial labor, see also Blackwood.

Nearly ten years after Jones’s essay appeared, the novelist Ronald Sukenick used his space as “The Guest Word” contributor to the New York Times Book Review to take a position on the “Author as Editor and Publisher.” He begins: “The publishing industry can no longer support quality fiction. For novelists this situation may be an opportunity in the guise of a disaster”

(“Author” 55). To seize the opportunity, Sukenick writes, he and some other practicing writers have founded the cooperative Fiction Collective “to select, edit, produce and distribute the books of its peers on the basis of literary merit, free of the implicit commercial standards of the book business” (“Author” 55). To Sukenick’s mind—as his title suggests—authors can add parity to the publishing field by taking on roles as editors and publishers themselves. The notion of what an author is and does, according to Sukenick, has to be reimagined in the face of a publishing industry that is actively abandoning its commitment to “quality” fiction, which I take to mean experimental or innovative fiction, though these terms also lack clarity. Sukenick’s call to arms in 1974 is particularly interesting if we count Sukenick “among the founders and standard- bearers of American postmodernist fiction” (McHale). Sukenick’s The Death of the Novel

(1969), for instance, offers a collection of short stories that responds to Roland Barthes’ “The

Death of the Author” and that also includes a fictional author who engages in a variety of editorial work as a ploy for moving between narrative frames. In Sukenick’s fiction, editorial work figures as that which deconstructs both the novel and the author as stable forms. “Author as

Editor and Publisher” suggests that such metafictional maneuvers have some grounding in

Sukenick’s ideas about actual editorial work and literary publishing in the postwar literary economy.

Let’s take as a final example a writer and publisher opposing both the commercial publishing industry and the kind of scholarship it gave rise to: Curtis White’s response to Fredric

Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Jameson’s book came out in 1991, and White, an author of a couple of novels who had recently become co-editor of the revived Fiction Collective 2, responded to Jameson in an essay published in 1992.8 In the essay titled “Jameson Out of Touch?”, a question that calls to mind the tactility of literature’s media,

White takes issue with Jameson’s selection of postmodern texts: they are all published by corporate publishing houses. E.L. Doctorow, for instance, who serves as Jameson’s primary literary example of a frenetic ahistoricism (Jameson, Postmodernsim 21-25), was paid two million dollars for just the paperback rights to Ragtime (Barnhisel and Turner, 8-9). White writes:

Certainly, Jameson is right to analyze what the capitalist presses produce. But

what kind of Marxist is it that looks only at the dominant culture? What kind of

Marxist is it that not only doesn’t discuss work on the margin but refuses to

acknowledge that it exists? Why isn’t Jameson interested in that scene? Why

doesn’t he know about Sun & Moon, City Lights’ new fiction series, Dalkey

Archive, Burning Deck, the Fiction Collective, Fiction International, Black Ice,

Factsheet Five, Semiotext(e), and The Exquisite Corpse? If he does know about

them, why aren’t they significant enough to discuss? Why isn’t he interested in

the way these presses contest the hegemony of capitalist presses? (44)

I offer an extended answer to White’s many questions later in this introduction. Here it suffices to say that White is right to ask these questions of Jameson’s work, because Jameson overlooks the structure of the publishing field entirely in Postmodernism, preferring to read the logic of late capitalism through the political unconscious of literary texts when he discusses literary texts at

8 For more on the history of Fiction Collective and especially Fiction Collective 2, see Bérubé, “Straight Outta Normal.”

all. Jameson’s injunction to “always historicize” in the Political Unconscious (1981) limits itself to a historical materialism that takes the text as its point of entry into dialectics rather than the textual object or the field that produces it (ix). In pointing out other dynamics of the literary field to Jameson, White is representative of a corps of writers and author-editors who recognize that a range of publishing and editing practices constitute the field of contemporary literature. As we have seen, Jameson has good reason to assess works by major presses, for most of the postwar

American writers that could be called canonical have been published by major, often corporate- owned publishing houses. Saul Bellow, Junot Diaz, E.L. Doctorow, William Gaddis, Toni

Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Marilynne Robinson, and many others are represented by such publishers. Morrison was herself an editor at Random House (Wall). Yet as Olson, Jones,

Sukenick, and White show here briefly, and as this dissertation demonstrates at greater length, the field of contemporary literature shifts around a variety of literary practices that often position themselves against dominant currents in the field.9 “On Second Reflection” narrates the histories of a handful of such practical and discursive literary positionings.

The literary practices I address in this dissertation operate explicitly in and around publishing ventures, primarily literary journals and small publishing houses. I show that writer- editors and an academic who became a publisher maintain an emphatic interest in practices such as editing and publishing, for these provide working methods for reflecting on the composition of the literary field while actively taking part in its ongoing creation. While most of the figures I address have garnered some attention for their own writing, their editorial work provides a novel

9 For a reading of the position-takings, critical oversights, and diverse cultural forces that help to establish distinctions between dominant and marginal literary culture, see Bérubé, Marginal Forces / Cultural Centers: Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon. This work, I should note, is a provocative exception to my remark about the lack of interest in books and print culture. For a related work that emerged from cultural studies’ approaches to the canon wars, but covers texts from the modernist period, see Nelson.

point of entry for assessing the active constitution of contemporary literature and its history.

Charles Olson’s conceptualization of the literary journal as a site for opening “closed verse” to its historical contexts should transform Olson’s reception history as a poet interested primarily in orality. It also shows, more than Olson’s oral emphasis can, that Olson’s attempt to create a

“poetic polis” in The Maximus Poems (1948-1970) refers in part to the establishment of a republic of letters in print. Dalkey Archive Press, which was established by a trained literary scholar, was set up to function as criticism in the field of contemporary American literature. It offers an alternative history of what contemporary literature has been and might yet be in the

United States, in part by re-introducing forgotten works into the literary field, and in part by introducing significant works of literature in translation to U.S. audiences for the first time.

Nathaniel Mackey’s editorial work on the literary journal Hambone has offered U.S. readers one of the most persistent cross-cultural engagements with experimental poetry and prose from the

U.S. and abroad, especially the Caribbean. As I show in the third chapter, Hambone also operates as a testing ground for various typologies through which different kinds of intellectual labor are classified, often according to the illogic of race and identity. And Chris Kraus uses her editorship of the Native Agents imprint of Semiotext(e) publishing house to launch an extended criticism against the elision of women’s experimental writing in Sylvère Lotringer’s earlier conception of

Semiotext(e) as an outpost for French critical theory. Kraus’s editorship, that is, deconstructs the corpus Lotringer had assembled and in doing so adds another turn of the screw to debates about gender, genre, and critical theory in the 1970s and 1980s. Together these author-editors show how editorial work actively transforms the literary field as it exists. They reveal the conceptual and reflective dynamics of literary practice, whereby deliberate practical work makes new figural

propositions possible and can in fact double as a figural proposition in its own right, as I show with Nathaniel Mackey’s editorship of Hambone.

The author-editors whose work I explore approach material texts—whether a single- authored book, a collection, or a journal—partly in terms of their physical status. But more importantly for this study, they also recognize the material text’s modes of production and distribution as living components of the literary imagination. At the most basic level, editorial work compels Olson, O’Brien, Mackey, and Kraus to consider the rhetorical force that such work entails. Put simply, deciding to publish this or that work over other work requires judgment. This need for judgment accounts for the many strategic outlines and publishing

“prospectuses” that herald the press or journal to come. Such forecasts often characterize the press or journal as a response to various shortcomings in the field as it currently exists. Ronald

Sukenick’s “Author as Editor and Publisher,” for instance, attacks for-profit publishing houses in order to outline the dismal conditions that led to the founding of the cooperative Fiction

Collective. The author-editors this dissertation examines position their own editorial projects in relation to—which is not necessarily in opposition to—some element of the literary field as they perceive it to exist or function. Olson responds to the New Criticism and what he calls Eliotic modernism. John O’Brien, like Sukenick before him, responds to for-profit publishing and the increasing commercialization of the publishing industry. Nathaniel Mackey responds to racial ideologies of the early canon wars that tethered black writing to identity politics. And Chris

Kraus responds to the white-male dominated Foreign Agents imprint of Semiotext(e) by focusing her Native Agents imprint on overlooked women’s experimentalism. This last example also removes us from the risked dichotomy between simply major and minor formations, because

Kraus’s imprint functions almost as a Marxist brand of self-criticism that operates within

Semiotext(e). That is, Semiotext(e) had established itself as alternative to dominant trends in the

American literary academy in the 1970s but fell into the same traps—i.e. unacknowledged sexism—that have plagued other experimental publishers and collectives (including Fiction

Collective and Dalkey Archive to a degree), and fell even harder into the trap than many corporate presses. According to Kraus, Semiotext(e)’s original 25 Foreign Agents books were authored entirely by men (Schwarz and Balsamo 212). At this fundamental level, then, editorial work allows the figures I cover to be active and responsive agents in an ever-shifting literary field.

Addressing this last point, this dissertation sets out to show that practices of editing and publishing compel writers to undertake a “second reflection” on the forms and contexts of postwar writing. “Second reflection,” a term I adapt from Theodor Adorno’s work in Aesthetic

Theory, provides an alternative for thinking about the reflective aspects of literary works by opening postwar literature to the procedures of production and mediation that inform it. In the

“Situation” section of Aesthetic Theory, Adorno writes that “Second reflection lays hold of the technical procedures, the language of the artwork in the broadest sense, but it aims at blindness”

(26).10 While second reflection remains theoretical in Adorno’s work, my project tests his idea and expands upon it by studying writers who lay hold of technical procedures by becoming editors and publishers. These figures take up editorial work and find in it methods for theorizing how contemporary literature can be constituted, in part through the blindness such methods

10 “Zweite Reflexion ergreift die Verfahrungsweise, die Sprache des Kunstwerks im weitesten Verstand, aber sie zielt auf Blindheit” (Äesthetische Theorie 47). Adorno’s choice of “Verfahrungsweise,” translated as “technical procedures,” is itself a look back to Friedrich Hölderlin, who wrote “Über die Verfahrungsweise des poetischen Geistes” (1800), which has been translated as “On the Operations of the Poetic Spirit.” I make the connection here because “Verfahrungsweise” is an uncommon German word, and is not to be found in many German dictionaries. The link is more apparent in the subjection matter itself, as both Hölderlin and Adorno seek to conceptualize the processes or operative modes of poetic and artistic expression.

introduce into the supposedly unobstructed clarity of authorial insight and intention.11 The processes associated with literary practice enact medial operations that test authorial conceptions about literature and literary form. Such mediated reflexivity does not limit itself to the methods of literary production, I argue, but extends into the literary forms these author-editors develop in their own writing as well. Literary practices introduce into the literary work, by way of mediated partiality (I prefer the partial to Adorno’s all-or-nothing blindness), a mode of thought that arises in part from practice itself.

The German media historian Bernhard Siegert has written that German media history seeks to change the “humanities’ frame of reference” from “the hegemony of understanding, which inevitably tied meaning to a variant of subjectivity or self-presence, with the ‘materialities of communication’—the nonhermeneutic non-sense—as the base and abyss of meanings”

(Siegert 2). Second reflection, by contrast, works between the “materialities of communication” and the figural and symbolic forms that such materialities co-constitute. As Adorno theorizes, the technical procedures and materialities of art impose a blindness on authorial self-presence, but from this blindness emerges new art and new ways of theorizing what art is, how it works, and how it generates meaning. The blindness that Adorno sees as fundamental to second reflection, I argue, figures the coincidence of the technical procedures of art and art’s symbolic manifestations.12

11 In my interpretation of Adorno’s “laying hold of technical procedures” to “aim at blindness,” I see an anticipation of Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, which, to put if very simply, develops a concept of “actants,” or non-human actors, as playing a critical role in complex social processes once associated with human agency, or which once simply overlooked the medial nature of sociality. I do not engage with Latour in this dissertation, but want to suggest, as I think we will see over the course of the chapters, that the figures I write about employ literary practices in such a way that they experience the field and its attendant media as non-human actors that push against their own notions of authorship, agency, and authority. For a much more extensive engagement with Latour’s theory in relation to aesthetic works, see Felski. 12 The best account I have found on the place of second reflection in Adorno’s thought is Alan Singer’s 2003 book Aesthetic Reason: Artworks and the Deliberative Ethos. Singer summarizes: “It is important to note that when Adorno valorizes aesthetic reflection he does so by contrasting it… with rational intention. Rational intent, he says,

The written and editorial work of four writer-editors anchors this dissertation. Yet the discrepancies in practice, aim, outlook, and outcome among these four suggest that the scope of second reflection extends to cover the field of postwar writing more broadly. I have already noted, for instance, that the commonalities between Ronald Sukenick’s fictional author-editors and his own editorial work for Fiction Collective hint at a print-media history of postmodernism that remains to be written. I do not spend much time writing that history here, for my interest is not in postmodernism as a critical-aesthetic construct. The topics I address, however, touch upon the possible alternative histories of postmodern form that are based not in textual play but in historically situated literary practices. For an author whose editorial procedures upend the predominant whiteness, maleness, and straightness of Sukenick’s circle, one can look to Gloria

Anzaldúa. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), which

Anzaldúa co-edited with Cherríe Moraga, predated Anzaldúa’s publication of Borderlands/La

Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) by several years and also anticipates its assemblage form. As

Anzaldúa’s critics have shown, her textual corpus operates as a material-historical machine for mythmaking and is highly attentive to the conceptual stakes of literary practices such as editing and assembling (Anzaldúa; Bost). The Jamaican-American poet Claudia Rankine recently hosted an online open letter forum on “the racial imaginary” in contemporary writing. While the forum was initially open, online, and highly active, it has since been edited into a book and published by Fence Books. Seeing how Rankine and her two co-editors shaped the online forum into a

should be equated with idealist truth. He argues that philosophical truth and reflection are, in that traditional equation, rendered antithetical. As such they constitute an insuperable inhibition to artistic production. They reprise the theory-praxis split upon which Plato’s fateful disenfranchisement of art was so self-servingly founded. Second reflection is thus proffered as a way of making truth once again immanent to reflection. It is a means of reconditioning spirit to experience” (33). I am adding to Singer’s account here by arguing that art’s “Verfahrungsweise,” i.e. its operational modes and technical procedures, are the means by which Adorno imagines that “truth” could be immanent to art. These modes add a historical dimension to art while resisting the notion that rational intentionality is the sole agent of this history.

book—a kind of filtering of the unfiltered expression of “the racial imaginary” online—reveals how the project elaborates on the collagist and editorial poetics that Rankine has developed in her several books of poetry. Both Rankine’s authored and editorial work draw on an editorial aesthetic to address questions of poetics, (un)timeliness, and race in contemporary American culture.

Even authors who have little editorial experience in publishing anthologies or collections have produced texts that could be read profitably in light of the editorial aesthetic of second reflection. Karen Tei Yamashita’s I Hotel (2010) presents a fictional compendium whose purpose, in part, is to make apparent its highly edited form as a means for reflecting on the documented and undocumented history of a specific time and place in postwar America: San

Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1970s. The poet Juan Felipe Herrera, who has not edited any major anthologies or journals despite his prolific output, published his very interesting 187 Reasons

Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border: Undocuments 1971-2007 (2007), which presents an amalgam of “undocuments” and occasional pieces.13 Because of their very occasional nature, these pieces take shape only retroactively as a publishable book and consequently comment—by way of the collected form—on the often retroactive and retrograde methods for engaging with undocumented immigrants in the United States today, whether in politics or in literary writing.

These last two authors could also be approached through the critical discourse on documentary forms. I prefer the editorial aesthetics of second reflection, however, because it proposes that fictions and un-documentary sources can also be approached in light of material literary

13 Herrera’s most recent work is titled Notes on the Assemblage and presents readers with bi-lingual (Spanish/English) editions of numerous poems. The question of translingual writing is not covered in the chapters below, but Herrera clearly ties his own bilingualism into his reflections on the “assembled” nature of his poetic works.

practices. Literary practices are also historical and can also document the emergence of historical discourses, sometimes in conceptual form, but always as an element of literary history.

Charles Olson and Nathaniel Mackey, for instance, take stock of their editorial practices to position themselves and their work against the limitations of New Criticism and the identity politics of the canon wars. But they also foster in their writing what I call a “process-derived metaphysics” and a “poetics of hospitality,” respectively, that emerge from editorial experience.

The Dalkey Archive Press republishes out-of-print works to lay bare the effects of for-profit publishing on critical discourse; but it also demonstrates how literary remainders—of modernism, non-Anglophone writing, and out-of-print books—refigure the discourse of contemporary American literature. And Chris Kraus shows that a publishing strategy committed to female experimentalism offers another turn of the screw to debates about literary economy and literary genre from Henry James to Shoshana Felman and up to the present. Taken together, these critical positionings sustain the task of assembling contemporary literature in ways that demand the emergence of new literary histories as a prerequisite for understanding our literary present, and even writing itself. “On Second Reflection” seeks to narrate a few of these histories by looking to the “Verfahrungsweise”—the operational modes and technical procedures—that disclose the complicated and complementary relationship between literary work and literary texts, between literary practices and forms. Such relationships constitute the literary history of writing in the United States since 1945.

The Critical Field: A Brief Overview

“On Second Reflection” draws on the work of literary scholars who have attempted in recent years to historicize contemporary literature by looking to its institutions and economies.

My interest in the operation of the literary field, for instance, is shared by several criticsc who trace the theorization of the field back to Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu outlines the literary field as a

“space of relations” comprised by various agents (authors, editors, publishers, booksellers, prize committees) who operate within and actively create it, often in an inverse relation to what he calls the field of power, which is structured as the competitive field of the open market (214-

215). Mark McGurl’s The Program Era (2009) draws on Bourdieu, for instance, to account for the field of postwar American literature and its dominant aesthetic forms by making the creative writing program the primary locus for their emergence (McGurl). James English and Rebecca

Walkowitz examine the transnational networks of publishers, translators, and prize committees that lead to a thriving global (and often capitalist-driven) literary field (English, Economy of

Prestige, 2005; Walkowitz, Born Translated, 2015). Loren Glass focuses on one publisher,

Grove Press, as the basis for a wide-ranging theory about the democratization of countercultural literature in postwar America (Counterculture Colophon, 2013).14 Together these studies indicate the re-emergence of a Bourdieu-derived approach—especially in the James English study—that seeks to rationalize the field of contemporary American literature by assessing its institutions, apparatuses, and practices. “On Second Reflection” adds to these approaches by looking at the way author-editors have responded to elements of the literary field by establishing their own presses and journals. If one of McGurl’s points in The Program Era is that the U.S. now has an abundance of good writers, some of these writers have taken their relative security in teaching

14 For an alternative and theoretically nuanced approach to considering the operations and limitations set in place by the specific formation of the publishing industry, see Brian Lennon. Lennon looks at the limiting functions that operate within the literary field by looking to the multilingualism of “immigrants, migrants, and exiles” whose language practices “can be neither represented nor expressed by the material apparatus of U.S. trade book publication and distribution—which marks, instead, the verge of what, in contemporary literature, it is possible to write and have read” (xiv).

for writing programs as an opportunity to establish new journals and presses.15 “On Second

Reflection” also departs from the above works by proposing that authors and editors consciously draw on the material economies of literary practice as a tactic for un-thinking the field: they try to let literature’s apparatuses think against themselves, whereas a project such as Glass’s, for instance, sets “incorporation” as its end point.

Institutions and the material economies of literature form one dominant lens for approaching contemporary literature today; media-experimental and media-historical approaches form another. Here I refer to critical works that view contemporary literature through its engagements with digital media, and those that seek to historicize such engagements by looking at the media history of digital experimentation in literature. My work departs from these in one obvious way: its persistence on looking only to print publications. There is a purposeful luddism to this approach, for it shows that the material economies of print have also given rise to highly conceptual experiments, and it does so without situating the digital as the telos of print technology or as the impetus for undertaking research into literary practices of editorship. N.

Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman have authored and edited numerous monographs on the transition from print to digital media and the subsequent effects on contemporary literature.

Although the two have worked closely together, co-editing Comparative Textual Media:

Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era (2013), Hayles tends to glorify the novelty of digital publication (Electronic Literature, 2008), while Pressman more often emphasizes the continuities between print media and digital formats (Digital Modernism, 2014). Like Pressman,

Lori Emerson approaches contemporary digital literature by way of the intersection between

15 A great recent example is Danielle Dutton, a young author who publishes her Dorothy, A Publishing Project in addition to teaching creative writing for Washington University in St. Louis. One could find numerous other examples, including Nathaniel Mackey. In short, the rise of creative writing programs McGurl describes has also allowed for the emergence of the literary economy I address.

print and digital media, arguing that a media-archaeological method shows that our literary present is not an “inevitable consequence of the past but instead…one possibility generated out of a heterogeneous past” (xiii). This work, like Pressman’s, looks to print in order to better reflect on the digital present.

Kenneth Goldsmith’s Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (2011) takes explicit interest in the digital, especially the way in which digital technology makes copying text from other sources a remarkably easy and efficient method for assembling new texts. Goldsmith also offers an oblique response to McGurl’s work on creative writing programs by exalting the virtues of “uncreative writing” in an age of information overload. The overlapping yet divergent strategies of the two works are most clear on the point of writerly

“voice.” McGurl writes a convincing account of “Our Phonocentrism” in which he links creative writing’s dogma of “finding one’s voice” to the solidification of an institutionally approved aesthetic for multiethnic American fiction, citing examples by authors such as Frank Chin and N.

Scott Momaday (262, 267). Goldsmith by contrast retreats from the authorial voice by culling material for his works from other sources, such as newscasts, traffic reports, and digital texts.16

He champions a method of radical mediation whereby the poet works as a textual assembler of extant materials rather than as the creator of “new” work. The uncreative writer—who works more like an editor—assembles existent materials to point to the overproduction and ready availability of text and information today.

16 In retreating from voice, Goldsmith amplifies McGurl’s criticism of “Our Phonocentrism” by seeking to remove the writerly voice from his collage-like, conceptual works. It must be noted, however, that his strong conceptualism has run aground because of his reading in March 2015 of the slightly modified autopsy report of Michael Brown, who was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014. Goldsmith’s reputation has fallen quickly as the reading became the focus of intense criticism by cultural critics and fellow poets, and it may be worth reevaluating the charges against Goldsmith specifically, and conceptual writing more generally, in light of McGurl’s charge of “our phonocentrism,” though that task falls outside of the scope of this introduction.

Goldsmith’s project is not new. In many ways, he intensifies practices long associated with twentieth-century avant-gardists who thought in tandem with extant media. Marjorie

Perloff, one of Goldsmith’s early and vocal champions, establishes the literary genealogy of

Goldsmith’s conceptualism in her book Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by other Means in the New

Century (2010). Perloff begins with T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Even more than the experimental avant-gardes that preceded The Waste Land (Dada, for instance, receives only one mention in Perloff’s book), Eliot’s poem exemplifies for Perloff a densely citational style that speaks through various textual masks in order to destabilize the unitary form of the poem (1-3).

Perloff then moves through the work of other twentieth-century “appropriationists” such as

Walter Benjamin of the Arcades Project, Karl Kraus (great uncle of Chris Kraus), Ezra Pound,

John Cage, Susan Howe, and up to Goldsmith and his contemporaries Craig Dworkin and

Caroline Bergvall. All of these figures have adopted practices of working explicitly by way of other texts in order to write “unoriginally.” While Goldsmith has achieved renown for his

“uncreative writing,” teaching for many years now at the University of Pennsylvania and even being invited to read poetry at the White House in 2011, his unoriginal project, in many ways, is just that. Whatever one might think about Goldsmith and his work, however, his method reminds us that literary works often emerge from practices that seek to refigure the field of literature by engaging conceptually with its most basic apparatuses and methods.

Goldsmith’s and Perloff’s works elaborate on a point Adorno makes quite simply in

Aesthetic Theory. In reflecting on experimental modes in postwar art and writing, Adorno argues that experimentalism after World War II has intensified the experimental modes of the modernist period: “If even as late as 1930 experimentation referred to efforts filtered through critical consciousness in opposition to the continuation of unreflected aesthetic practices, in the

meantime the concept has acquired the stipulation that a work should have contents that are not foreseeable in the process of production, that, subjectively, the artist should be surprised by the work that results. In this transformation of the concept of experimentation, art becomes conscious of something that was always present in it and was pointed out by Mallarme. The artist’s imagination scarcely ever completely encompassed what it brought forth” (37-38). In other words, media carry out some of the work of art. Art’s media are operative and add to the way that art thinks. While the emergence of media historical approaches to modernist experimentalism requires us to take Adorno’s characterization of modernist experimentalism with a grain of salt—i.e. it is no longer a truth universally acknowledged that a self-possessed critical consciousness was the basis for modernist experimentation—his latter point is worth bearing in mind. Contemporary experimentalism places self-possessed agency in question.

Goldsmith’s work has gained notoriety by making this point explicit over and over again. “On

Second Reflection,” by contrast, shows that the materials and practices that test authorial agency can be much more subtle and nuanced. The figures I examine engage with practices of literary assembly as a means of giving their thought over to an agency that is not entirely their own.

Practice, process, procedure, and medium have long been testing and informing literary expression. “On Second Reflection” wants to show how this testing works specifically in relation to practices of editing and publishing in postwar American literature.

Two Backdrops: Postmodernism and Corporatized Publishing

The pressure critics are putting on the concept of “the contemporary” today—what is it? what was it? how has it developed? where is it going?—emerges from the critical abandonment of postmodernism as the key term for talking about postwar writing, especially in the United

States.17 “On Second Reflection” participates in the abandonment of postmodernism—I give it serious critical attention only in the few pages that follow—and proposes that one way to displace its powerful legacy is to retell postwar literary history through the particular positions taken up by those working actively in the field. Such a focus might lead us to a new conception of “contemporary literature” today. In her essay on “The Period Formerly Known as

Contemporary,” Amy Hungerford notes that “the contemporary” is at once problematic and necessary: problematic because it now encompasses over 70 years of literary history when marked from 1945 and so lacks specificity; necessary as a shifting category that bypasses the once dominant and now discarded narrative of postmodernism. It is on this second point that

Hungerford approves of McGurl’s 2005 Critical Inquiry essay that introduces the central ideas of

The Program Era. She writes that McGurl “neatly…sidesteps the cultural materialist accounts of postmodernism that have been so powerful in defining the field—specifically, Fredric Jameson’s argument about the relationship between culture and late capitalism in Postmodernism (1991)”

(413). McGurl avoids a full-scale engagement with postmodernism, according to Hungerford, by discarding a dialectical method in favor of a sociological one that establishes the writing program as the primary lens for viewing postwar fiction today. With McGurl and many of the critics who contributed to special issues on the contemporary irrelevance of postmodernism (see note 16),

17 On the popularity of “the contemporary,” see the schedule for an upcoming conference on “the contemporary” to be held at Princeton in March 2016. The list of participants reads—somewhat unnervingly—like a “who’s who” of young scholars of contemporary literature and culture (“Schedule”). An abundance of criticism about the end of postmodernism has emerged in recent years, with the prominent postmodernist critic, Brian McHale asking “What Was Postmodernism?” in a 2007 essay (McHale, “What”). His answer, while still tethered to the work of Thomas Pynchon, points to September 11, 2001, as a decisive factor in the tense change from present to past. More recently, a range of primarily Americanist scholars have addressed the subject of an outmoded postmodernism. Andrew Hoberek, for instance, edited a special issue of Twentieth-Century Literature titled After Postmodernism: Form and History in Contemporary American Fiction (2007). Four years later, Twentieth-Century Literature published another special issue edited by Daniel Worden and Jason Gladstone on Postmodernism, Then (2011). While I cannot cover the array of positions taken up by the numerous scholars who contributed to these issues, the consensus is that critics have either exhausted the term, that the term was never adequate in the first place, or that we are in a new period altogether. Regardless of the position one takes, the “contemporary” often emerges as a usefully indistinct category that, for the time being, can supersede postmodernism while also incorporating literary history since 1945.

the critical consensus is that one can best avoid the mire that postmodernist discourse has become by claiming, at great length, that we have already trod across that ground or that our current “period” surpasses what Jameson outlined in Postmodernism. Another option: make little or no reference to postmodernism at all, particularly by avoiding engagement with Jameson.

Jameson, however, still has much to teach us about postwar cultural production, particularly about the relationship between dominant and emergent cultural discourses. In the reception of Jameson’s essay (1984) and then book (1991) on postmodernism, few note that

Jameson claims to outline postmodernism as a dominant mode of cultural production so that alternative and emergent cultural practices might emerge against the flattened backdrop of postmodernist forms.18 This purpose is often lost to the book’s more assertive claims. The book has remained memorable, after all, for its distinction between high modernism and postmodernism, charging that the key difference is “the emergence of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense, perhaps the supreme formal feature of all the postmodernisms to which we will have occasion to return in a number of other contexts” (9). Jameson goes on to claim that the depthlessness of postmodernist forms is mirrored in a “waning of affect” that also marks a postmodernist aesthetic. This claim too has been hotly contested and has incited many critics associated with affect theory to respond.19

Rather than evaluating Jameson’s famous claims for their usefulness in defining what postmodernism is, critics would profit from asking why Jameson took on this labor in the first place. What is the purpose of transforming an already influential essay into a formidable tome? If

18 The passage my argument hinges on here appears only in the Postmodernism book and not in the article. My argument might therefore address a change in Jameson’s thought between 1984 and 1991 that signals a movement toward his later work such as A Singular Modernity (2002) in which he makes room for the uneven and utopian operations of modernity within the period he had previously associated with postmodernism. 19 For an overview of the role Jameson’s claim plays in the establishment of affect theory, see Duncan.

we ask that question, Jameson gives a straightforward answer. The purpose of his work on postmodernism, he writes, is “to project some conception of a new systematic cultural norm and its reproduction in order to reflect more adequately on the most effective forms of radical cultural politics today” (6, emphasis added). One possible reading of this statement: Jameson wrote a monumental book not merely to posit what postmodernism is and how it works, but also to seek out what emerges in contrast to its flattened backdrop. It could be that Jameson wrote a lengthy volume in order to goad critics into thinking about what cannot be subsumed under the postmodernist rubric his work lays out. If we think about Postmodernism in this way, Jameson’s book does not cancel the dialectic still available to modernism; it incites the dialectic by projecting a totalizing theory of cultural production under the logic of late capitalism to which critics are meant to respond and with which they are prompted to dis-identify.20 Jameson works to solicit a response to his postmodernist projection, but asks for a response—“to reflect more adequately on the most effective forms of radical cultural politics today”—that would not necessarily negate postmodernism but rather offer alternatives to it. Each of the figures I address in this dissertation works by way of particularity, distinction, and discursive positioning, hardly the expressions of the depthless pastiche associated with postmodern form.

Given that Jameson designs his book as an exigence for critical response, it makes sense that his work on postmodernism has met with agonism bordering on antagonism. Some of the opposition stems from the subjects Jameson chooses to address in his characterization of postmodernist cultural production. Let’s return here to Curtis White. White asks of Jameson why small presses and journals are not “significant enough to discuss? Why isn’t he interested in the

20 For a reading of Jameson that supports my argument here, see Jeffrey Nealon, Double Reading: Postmodernism after Deconstruction, 144-152. On the positive aspect of Jameson’s dialectics, see Nealon’s Post-Postmodernism, or, the Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism, 6-8.

way these presses contest the hegemony of capitalist presses?” (44). My response to White’s questions: Jameson outlines a dominant mode of cultural production he calls postmodernism. He leaves it to others to find the points of resistance and alternative modes. In asking his questions and suggesting that marginal publishing operates differently than corporate publishing, White in fact answers Jameson’s call by attempting to conceptualize what stands out from the backdrop of postmodernism. “On Second Reflection” offers a more developed response than White could have with his series of questions. The points of resistance I find mark the ends of postmodernism in two ways. First, they throw into relief the kinds of practices postmodernism was meant to distinguish, negatively (or at least counter-intuitively), in the first place. This was the end—as purpose—of Jamesonian postmodernism. Second, the points of resistance I identify mark the various ends—as limits—of postmodernism as a dominant cultural mode. Cultural politics indeed remain possible beyond this limit. None of this is to say that I intend to bury my project in the rhetoric of postmodernism. Rather, I argue that critical reflection—a second reflection—on the relation between imaginative texts and publishing practices throws into relief a variety of methods that refuse to be flattened by the logic of postmodernism and so offer an alternative account of writing and publishing in postwar America.

White’s series of questions, which he links to small presses and journals, makes apparent another aspect of Jameson’s work that remains obscure in Postmodernism: late capitalism’s rapid intensification since the 1950s included the corporatization of the publishing industry in the

United States and the United Kingdom. While Jameson and White offer oblique introductions to the subject of corporate consolidation at work in the background of postwar literature, the sociologist John B. Thompson offers a direct account of this corporatization in his 2010 study,

Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century. Let me note here at

the outset of this brief discussion on corporate consolidation that it remains in the background of

“On Second Reflection” as well. Still, I want to point to this background here in the introduction as a kind of anticipatory reminder as we work through the following chapters. As Thompson’s subtitle indicates, his primary focus is the publishing industry since 2000. However, Thompson also offers a history of the publishing industry since the 1950s that outlines the shifting dynamics that led to the corporate bearing of much book publishing today. Thompson narrates this history of corporate consolidation in his book’s third chapter, but begins with a couple of caveats that come in the form of brief summaries of the book’s first two chapters, “The Growth of Retail

Chains” and “The Rise of Literary Agents.” The placement of publishing’s history of consolidation in the third chapter, Thompson tells us, stresses that “publishing does not consist only of publishers” (100). He adds, “Large publishing houses may seem to be the major players and to have a great deal of power (and, indeed, they do); but in the book supply chain, the publisher is in many ways just another intermediary, a player in the middle, and the power of the publishing house, however large it is, is always hemmed in by and traded off against the power of two other key players in the field: the power of the retailers, on the one hand, who largely control access to the customers, that is, the readers; and the power of the agents, on the other, who largely control access to the content and to the creators of content, that is, the authors”

(100). Thompson’s point here is that while corporate publishing is often vilified for its vulgar interest in profits, its hand is often compelled by other “players” in the field of contemporary book publication and sales, other elements of the culture industry that Adorno and Horkheimer identified in The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947).

Let’s take one prominent example of the pressure exerted on publishers by other intermediaries, for it will help us to see the culture industry still at work and even intensified.

The culture industry, after all, still pervades American literary culture, but it seldom makes its operations apparent to the public. This was not the case, however, in 2014 when Hachette Book

Group had a very public and contentious feud with Amazon about the pricing of digital books.

Because Amazon developed the Kindle device specifically for digital book distribution, and because the great majority of digital books sold are sold through Amazon for the Kindle,

Amazon has a particularly strong position regarding digital book pricing.21 When the company tried to force Hachette to price its digital books at $9.99, Hachette refused, saying that Amazon was not taking into account other costs of book development, including editorial and marketing costs. Amazon responded by making it more difficult to buy books published by Hachette through Amazon, including the elimination of pre-order options for Hachette books and intentional delays in shipping Hachette’s printed books. Amazon’s aggressive moves, which threatened the livelihood of the “content providers,” i.e. authors, prompted over 900 concerned writers to sign an open letter written by author Douglas Preston. The letter demanded fair practices in the online retailer’s dealings with its publishers and the authors they publish (“Letter to Amazon.com”). Authors who signed the open letter range from bestselling authors of thrillers such as John Grisham and Brad Meltzer to critically acclaimed writers of “literary fiction” such as Claire Messud and Mark Z. Danielewski to a range of writers with limited audiences who depend on Amazon’s accessibility and wide distribution network to make what money they can from writing. In this story at least, Amazon plays the role of the rapacious corporation better than the beleaguered Hachette Book Group possibly could.

21 A 2014 article in Forbes states that 19.5% of all books sold in the US are digital books. Of all digital book sales, those sold to the Kindle device from Amazon account for 65%. The other 35% is split mostly between Barnes and Noble and Apple (Bercovici).

Amid the anti-trust claims lodged against Amazon by Hachette and its authors, however, it was not lost on many that Hachette Book Group is itself but a small branch of a Lagardère, a multinational, publicly traded media conglomerate headquartered in Paris. At a time when corporate retail is the number one way a book will get sold, whether through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Wal-Mart, corporate publishers are sometimes forced to make significant concessions to retailers. These concessions, as above, can place publishing subsidiaries of massive corporations in the role of embattled freedom fighter. Still, Hachette’s interest was wholly economic and mostly corporate, regardless of the ideological arguments that might have made it seem otherwise. When Hachette finally reached a deal with Amazon, the Wall Street

Journal reported that the entire feud arose in part because Hachette had missed year-over-year quarterly revenue by 18.5% from the second quarter of 2013 to 2014, some of which the publisher sought to make up by raising e-book prices (Trachtenberg and Bensinger).

I use this example to show that the corporatization of the book publishing industry is but one aspect of the growth of the culture industry. As Thompson puts it, “the growing role of large corporations is not unique to the publishing world: large corporations have become increasingly important players throughout the media, information and communication industries, and indeed throughout the economy as a whole, and many of the corporations that have acquired major stakes in publishing are diversified media conglomerates with interest in other sectors of media and entertainment” (101). This is certainly the case with the Hachette Book Group under the umbrella of Lagardère, which also owns many media retailers that operate predominately in international airports. Vast networks of capital and ownership form the nebulous culture industry, and we should keep them in mind when we think about postwar American writing. As I

will show in my chapter on Charles Olson, for instance, Olson’s turn toward small press publishing was directed more at corporate newspaper publishing than it was at book publishing.

Still, the publishing industry has undergone radical changes since the 1950s, and these changes have influenced the subject of this study: independent publishing practices in postwar

American literature. Beginning in the 1950s and intensifying in the decades since, corporate consolidation has defined contemporary literary production in the United States, with once independent publishing houses becoming subsidiaries of multinational media conglomerates.

Dozens of mid-sized independent publishers comprised America’s literary field in the 1950s.22

Today in New York there are “five or six large corporations, each operating as an umbrella organization for numerous imprints…with varying degrees of autonomy” (Thompson 102). The consolidation of the publishing industry, in which one now reads regularly about the Big Five—

Penguin Random House, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Hachette, and Simon and Schuster—has fundamentally changed the structure and culture of publishing. Publishing has long been a for- profit enterprise, to be sure. Yet the structure of publishing enterprises was very different in the early half of the twentieth century, during which many of the United States’ premier publishing houses were established. As Thompson tells it, many of the independent houses “were run by individuals who either owned the company outright or had a substantial stake in it, and other members of the family were commonly involved in the business. These publisher-owners were often men of strong character and opinion—and they were nearly always men. They knew what they wanted to publish and they built their lists on the basis of their own judgment and taste— and, as they grew larger and delegated more responsibility to editors, on the basis of the

22 Thompson offers a list of the better known American houses in this category: “Random House, Simon & Schuster, Scribner, Doubleday, Harcourt, Harper, Boni and Liveright, Henry Holt, Dutton, Putnam, Viking, Alfred A. Knopf, Farrar Straus & Giroux, William Morrow, W.W. Norton, Houghton Mifflin and Little, Brown, to name just a few” (101).

judgment and taste of their editors” (101). During the period of acquisitions and mergers running from the 1950s to the present, the idiosyncratic tastes of individual publishers have tended to be played down in favor of editorial and executive boards. Although Thompson notes that this is not always the case—even some corporate publishers keep older models intact in “federalist” systems in which imprints are run by editors with unique visions—it is most often the case that editorial boards under the pressure of marketing data and demands for profit lead to a culture of publishing by consensus, with corporate-driven consensus often edging toward the most marketable middle ground.

My goal here is to note simply that the history of corporate consolidation, like the intensification of postmodern forms under late capitalism, forms a backdrop against which the work my dissertation addresses takes place. I let this history remain in the background, however, and I do this for the following reason. I am not interested in arguing that the new publishing ventures I look at are only reactionary, only responses to the workings of the corporate consolidation that was taking place within literary publishing. Certainly, corporate consolidation played a role in the formation of Charles Olson’s conception of publishing and public life in the postwar era; and it without a doubt informed John O’Brien’s decision to begin a literary review and subsequently a publishing house aimed at bringing abandoned works back into print with the

Dalkey Archive Press. But to make corporate consolidation the primary cause of alternative publishing practices is too simplified, and in fact follows the kind of thinking that the literary practitioners I examine work against: cause and effect logic proves insufficient for conceptualizing the often nebulous and shifting range of interests—aesthetic, material, personal, and interpersonal—from which the field of contemporary literature emerges. As Thompson notes in his study, it tends to be the case that as corporate publishers publish more books, mid-size

independent publishers and small presses publish more as well. In a publishing economy at least, a rising tide lifts all boats.

Conclusion

And yet, each publishing venture I address is borne out of and borne on particularity. As such, the chapters that follow seek to balance close readings of texts with commentary on the specific literary practices and formations that inform them. The meticulous attention I give to the figures and formations in what follows helps to explain the relative absence of the broader claims

I have laid out in this introduction. As a collection of studies into the particularities of presses, journals, and literary texts, the cumulative effect of this work bears out these early claims.

Moreover, I am confident that this dissertation shows that an abundance of work remains to be done on the relationships among literary practices and the texts and textual objects they create. If literary scholars follow up on the work already undertaken by postwar author-editors, we might yet develop new methods for reflecting on the works and workings of contemporary literature today.

The chapters that follow proceed in chronological order, but other logics operate in this order as well. I begin with Charles Olson’s writing from the 1950s, as it sets the foundation for postwar experiments in publishing, at least in the context of this dissertation. Olson became a serious poet immediately after World War II and had a tremendous effect on a certain line of postwar writing and publishing, influencing in some way each of the later figures or formations at which I look. Gilbert Sorrentino, for instance, without whose guidance John O’Brien would not have founded the Dalkey Archive Press, knew Olson and followed his work closely when

Sorrentino was himself an editor of various literary journals in New York City, and eventually

editor at Grove Press in the 1960s. Sorrentino thus serves as a bridge figure between the first chapter on Olson in the 1950s and the second chapter on the Dalkey Archive Press in the 1980s.

Nathaniel Mackey, the subject of my third chapter, also looks back to figures associated with

Olson and the Black Mountain poets, particularly Robert Duncan. Mackey, however, draws equally on the legacy of Afro-Caribbean writers from the postwar period such as Kamau

Brathwaite, Édouard Glissant, Wilson Harris, and so makes visible with his editorship of

Hambone the correspondence between postwar U.S. and Afro-Caribbean writing. Chris Kraus’s literary works and editorship of the Native Agents imprint of Semiotext(e) are the subjects for my final chapter. While Kraus is familiar with Olson and alludes to him in her work, I am more interested in what her work points out about the first three chapters: the predominance of men in the discourse of postwar experimental writing. While Kraus’s work comes last chronologically anyway (she began publishing Native Agents books in 1990), I address her work in the final chapter as way of reworking, retroactively, some of the lines of argumentation developed in the first three chapters. That is, if Kraus’s novels and publishing strategies seek to recover experimental writing and art by women, Kraus also shows that the discourse of experimental writing continues to work along highly gendered lines. The feminine-gendered (e) of

Semtiotext(e) is thus meant to work its way back through the earlier chapters as a figure of disruption. And together Mackey and Kraus show that while literary practices constitute the field of contemporary literature, operations of effacement and erasure also work within them. The final two chapters thus develop an oblique and critical relation to the subjects of the first two chapters, thereby showing how the literary field generates its own critical modes—as deformations of its existing formation—through the ongoing practices of editing and publishing.

Chapter one, “Charles Olson and the Process of Metaphysics,” examines the relationship between Olson’s poetic epic, The Maximus Poems (1950-1970), and his letters and letter-poems to editors of little magazines regarding the conceptual aspects of editorial work. Olson’s meticulous interest in publishing has two primary sources: the corporatization of print culture in postwar America that he addresses in The Maximus Poems; and his idea that a radically “open” publishing strategy will undermine the New Critics’ interest in what Olson identified already in

1950 as “‘closed verse,’ that verse which print bred.” The well-wrought poem, that is, might be cracked open by introducing the historically situated work of literary practice into conceptions of what poetry is and how it works. The chapter offers an account of Olson’s success in opening

“closed” verse to historical contingency by way of a highly theoretical understanding of literary procedure. I conclude that Olson’s theory of literary practice generates a “process-derived metaphysics,” whereby the techniques of literary assembly give rise to poetic figuration.

Chapter two, “A Literary History of the Dalkey Archive Press,” switches focus from an author’s work to a literary publisher. The Dalkey Archive Press is a non-profit American publisher founded in the suburbs of Chicago in 1984. It began by publishing out-of-print works of contemporary fiction while also looking back to, and eventually reissuing important works of, literary modernism. I read the press’s institutional history beside the modernist texts after which it models itself to argue that the press adjusts modernism’s aesthetic strategies to a literary economy dominated by corporate publishing. Like the reanimation of modernism that takes place in postwar writing, the out-of-print books Dalkey brings back into print remind us that contemporary literature is shot through with untimely remainders. These remainders urge us to undertake a second reflection on the literary histories of contemporary American fiction.

Chapter three, “Hambone’s Call: Intellectual Labor and the Invitation to Literary

Hospitality,” addresses Nathaniel Mackey’s written work as well as his editorial work on the literary journal Hambone. Since its inception in 1982, Hambone has offered an “open call” to writers looking to experiment with literary form and has also aimed to bring together African

American, Afro-Caribbean, and other avant-garde writers as a means of addressing the still problematic segregation of experimental writers within American poetic and academic discourse.

This chapter argues that Hambone models a literary-political project that perplexes the boundaries drawn by racial ideology and national literary culture by adopting an editorial poetics of hospitality. Hambone’s purposefully eclectic assemblage of American and non-American authors, working in a wide range of experimental modes, challenges our methods for creating aesthetic categories with which to evaluate a given work or place it within a specific literary tradition. This is not to say that Hambone removes itself from literary history. On the contrary, its open call agitates on behalf of a new literary history that would remain receptive to the many literatures and forms that make up American literary culture.

Chapter four, “Another Frame: Chris Kraus, Semiotext(e), and the Economy of Letters,” takes a doubled approach to Chris Kraus’s first novel I Love Dick (1997). First, it argues that the novel forms an elaborate response to the gendered economy of letters that Henry James sets up in

The Turn of the Screw (1898), and which Shoshana Felman critiques in her now famous essay on

“Turning the Screw of Interpretation” (1977). Second, it argues that Kraus adds another turn of the screw to these narratives of gendered textual economy by using her own publishing imprint,

Native Agents, to publish her autobiographical fiction against the wishes of “Dick,” who is in fact Dick Hebdige. If The Turn of the Screw is in some sense a tale of love and desire that “won’t tell…in any literal vulgar way” (James 3), I Love Dick tells all, vulgarly, and so literalizes—

through publication—Chris’s desire. And yet, as the chapter shows, Chris’s love letters to Dick have multiple addressees, many of whom enter the narrative as ghosts of Chris’s dead friends who lived as artists and writers in postwar America. I Love Dick is thus both a love story and a ghost story, and Chris uses her narrative and her publishing imprint to reflect on the impressions that love, gender, and genre have left on the history of experimentalism in the U.S.

“On Second Reflection” studies how some of the most fundamental processes of literary expression—editing and publishing—take part in the active experiment of postwar writing. In focusing on these elements of the literary field in relation to literary works, I develop a method that keeps its eye trained at once to texts and textual objects, and to the changing field in which each operates. This method has enabled me to draw a conclusion that could be applied broadly to postwar literature: the aesthetics of pastiche and intertextuality once claimed to be expressive of literary postmodernism derive in part from literary practice, from the quotidian but nevertheless conceptual work that goes into assembling contemporary literature. This conclusion requires literary scholars to rethink texts from the period in light of other kinds of work and other expressions of intellectual labor. Such work has been consistently devalued due to the ontological independence so often afforded to literary texts. Such independence is not immaterial, for it has a tendency to eclipse the working methods from which it emerges. These methods are worth recovering—and worth thinking with—so that postwar American writing may recollect its other histories. I began by claiming that the history of American literature has been written largely in the absence of books. I conclude by proposing that this persistent absence marks a problem of value and evaluation operating at the center of literary economy: work disappears and gives rise to texts. “On Second Reflection” brings that work forward and makes it

operative in the practical and conceptual processes of assembling contemporary American literature.

CHAPTER 1. Charles Olson and the Process of Metaphysics

Introduction

Of the many letter-poems that comprise Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems, a poetic epic written from the late 1940s until Olson’s death in 1970, few set the tone and the stakes for the epic as well as a three-poem sequence addressed to a beleaguered literary editor. “Letters” five, six, and seven of The Maximus Poems find Olson responding to a recent issue of Vincent

Ferrini’s literary journal 4 Winds in which Olson had just published “Letter 3” of his fledgling

Maximus epic (Butterick 65). 4 Winds was a fitting venue for a Maximus poem, since it was published in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where the epic poem is set. In “Letter 3” the epic hero addresses the citizens of his “root city” in an attempt to outline his vision for a “polis” in the postwar era. His vision has a limited purview, however, as he concedes that “Polis now is a few”

(Maximus Poems I.11, hereafter MP). Yet the limited audience forms “a coherence not even yet new (the island of this city…” (MP I.11). By Maximus’s logic, a poetic letter addressed to

Gloucester will find its “few” recipients and so help to establish an island city—a poetic polis— by way of poetic address.

If Maximus dreams of making Gloucester his model polis through a sequence of letters,

Olson’s expectations for 4 Winds were no less grand. Ferrini and his little magazine were to be among the “few” that would establish Gloucester as a new literary center. The magazine was to help the letters of Maximus to find their recipients, thereby forming his envisioned community.

These high expectations for 4 Winds explain Olson’s eventual disappointment at “Issue # 2-3” to which letters four, five, and six—which I call the Ferrini Letters—respond. Far from being pleased with seeing his writing in print and published in Gloucester, Olson scolds and patronizes

Ferrini for “this sheet you’ve had the nerve … / to put upon the public street” (MP I.18). In a particularly proud moment in which Olson openly conflates his own voice with that of Maximus,

Olson wonders if Ferrini feels “(as vulnerable as I am / brought home to Main St / in such negligible company” (MP I.20). Displeased by the quality of the poems alongside which “Letter

3” appeared, Olson draws on his experience with publishing in 4 Winds to refine his vision of the polis, this time in relation to the printed venues in which Maximus appears. While Maximus’s triumphant arrival home eludes him, his printed appearance in Gloucester compels Olson to conceptualize the role of print and printed distribution in relation to an otherwise abstract poetic polis. In doing so, Olson weds the processes and means related to poetic expression to more conceptual questions concerning poetic form and address.

Olson’s bluntness with Ferrini displays more than the poet’s injured pride. The sequence discloses some of Olson’s most significant reflections on the place of printed media and literary process in his poetics. Moreover, the letters reveal that literary editors are among Olson’s most productive interlocutors as he develops this poetics. I begin with these letters because they make known the important role that printed media and literary journals play in Olson’s thought and in turn lay the foundation for the analysis of postwar literary practices that this dissertation undertakes. The procedures and limitations Olson associates with publication, that is, work as an operational set of constraints for which Olson’s work itself is the test subject. Olson’s reflections on printed media thereby demonstrate how the material limitations set by literary production figure in his writing, making process-derived limitation a source of poetic expression and form.

The early Ferrini Letters also help to explain why some of Olson’s most foundational statements on poetics take shape in the form of letters to literary editors, such as Ferrini, who embody textual limitation—the editor as gatekeeper. Such letters anchor much of Olson’s poetic theory.

The Ferrini Letters themselves, written in 1953, stem from arguments Olson made in earlier letter sequences, most significantly in the Mayan Letters (1950-1951), written to fellow poet and eventual editor of the Black Mountain Review, Robert Creeley, and in his letters to Cid Corman, editor of the little magazine Origin (particularly Olson’s early letters from 1950-1951). The

Ferrini Letters thus set the tone and stakes for the Maximus sequence because in them Olson anchors his poetry and poetics—by which I mean his critical reflections on poetry’s forms and related practices—in the quotidian aspects of literary work: letter writing, publishing, and conceptualizing the mediations—and media—required by publication, by making a poem public.

While this chapter shows how Olson anchors his poetics in the process-based economy of literary publication, it also argues that his poetry nevertheless withdraws from the purely practical and procedural as it moves toward the metaphysical and symbolic. Olson places his emphasis on the material aspects of poetic expression, but the results of this emphasis approach the metaphysical, by which I mean highly abstract and symbolic figuration. In this, Olson’s engagement with the practices of literary production and distribution illustrate in the immediate postwar years a process-derived poetics akin to Adorno’s conception of second reflection, whereby “technical procedures” participate in the generation of art’s symbolic forms (Aesthetic

Theory 26). Olson makes the link between process and metaphysics clear in an early essay on

“The Materials and Weights of Herman Melville” (1952). Melville understood the “given physicality” of things, Olson says, and moves literature from a concern with “essence” to a concern with “kinetics,” a statement that appears to oppose the ideal or essential forms associated with metaphysics. Olson shores up this position by declaring that modern writing must express kinetics and the “dimension” of things, not their essences (“Materials” 117). But while Olson seeks to abandon essences, he retains metaphysics and makes metaphysics

immanent to methodology. “For the metaphysic now to be known,” Olson announces, “does lie inside function, methodology is form” (“Materials” 117). Thinking by way of Melville, Olson proposes that metaphysics inhabits function, which must be understood as a process of transposition, like a mathematical function. By this logic, metaphysics also inhabits the methodologies of poetic expression, up to and including writing and publication.

Olson thus makes process-derived metaphysics a means of opening poetry to its worldly contexts while refusing to let go of the possibility that poetic process might transfigure those contexts. This unsettled poetic disposition makes poetic expression into a process of historical, political, and artistic contention. As he argues in the Mayan Letters, “the substances of history now useful lie outside, under, right here, anywhere but in the direct continuum of society as we have had it (of the State, same, of the Economy, same, of the Politicks” (Mayan 84). Olson seeks a space “outside” of the “direct continuum” of society as we have had it, calling metaphysical detachment to mind. Yet he suggests that this “outside” exists “right here.” Only by working through that which is “right here” does the poet obtain unfamiliar cultural models for histories and emergent political formations. Assembling the materials at hand acts as a process of metaphysical discovery. This movement between that which is right here and that which is elsewhere—anywhere but in the continuum of society as we have had it—is compelled by what I call Olson’s process-derived metaphysics. As I argue in this chapter, Olson views the processes associated with editorship and publication as constitutive of this process-derived metaphysics, making editorial and publishing work central to Olson’s thoughts on history, politics, and poetics in the years immediately following the Second World War.

The Ferrini Letters work as a meeting place for several of Olson’s theories about printed media and the process of publication as they relate to literary address. They are written as letter

poems to a literary editor;23 they reflect on printed media and the limits of literacy; and they propose that a little magazine functions as both a material and conceptual print-poetic space that forms something akin to a Heideggerian dwelling in language, but in the form of print rather than language as such (Heidegger). To take the second point first, Olson addresses the structure of printed media early in “Letter 5,” where Maximus asserts that “The habit of newsprint / (plus possibly the National Geographic) / are the limits of / literacy” (MP I.17). Here, the medium of print—not writing, I should note—limits and restricts “literacy.” Publishers who decide what is fit to print form the horizon of legible public knowledge. Print then bears tremendous weight in the production and limitation of such knowledge. Yet while print limits the conditions of thought’s possibilities, it also discloses thought by publishing it. Olson consequently asks whether that which print discloses might proceed beyond print’s limiting habits: can thought’s disclosure in print exceed the enclosures formed by print? Olson begins responding to this question by having Maximus accept the limiting function of printed media:

I am not at all aware

that anything more than that

is called for. Limits

23 It is worth noting here that while Olson wrote letters five through seven as a response to Ferrini and 4 Winds, he did not ultimately send the letters to Ferrini, due to either technical difficulties (Butterick 30) or because Olson, uncharacteristically, felt bad about the drubbing Ferrini receives in those letter poems. In a letter to Cid Corman from April 9, 1953, Olson remarks that he has been at work on “a run of 4 new Max’s (provoked by Ferrini’s 4 whatever they ares…. (These new Maxies rough up Vinc considerably—I was shocked by both the choice of things and their putting together (to put chowder before a Maximus—or at least such a one, as that one, #3!! But this is only part of the bigger wrong. Hold his hand (tho I don’t think he deserves forgiveness) I just hate that the necessities (at least I take them are bigger than we are / only hate it, that he had to go & get caught in the wringer” (Letters for Origin 124, hereafter LO). Ferrini, in fact, never read or heard the letter poems until Olson published The Maximus Poems / 1 – 10 late in 1953, at which point Corman, who lived near Gloucester, “held Ferrini’s hand” by reading the poems aloud to him at a party. Olson wrote to Corman again in September and expressed his regret at Ferrini having made himself the target of the sequence. Olson again asks Corman to “hold Vinc’s hand” and notes “if he hadn’t moved to Gloucester, he needn’t have been [the target]! But that he did (even if now he has to suffer!) is why, in the 1st place, this poem got born! So the complex is larger than any hurt (I hope!!)” (Butterick 65-66). While Ferrini never received the letters as letters, the letter poems which make up the Ferrini Letters are most certainly formed as a response to Ferrini’s “negligible” editorship of 4 Winds.

are what any of us

are inside of (MP I.17)

Maximus acquiesces to the limits prescribed by printed media without much complaint here, for he understands that poetry and thought operate within limitation and structure. And Maximus, a poetic figure who dwells in printed words, quite literally exists within print’s limits. Olson makes the “limits any of us are inside of” into a literary abode, allowing him to conceptualize how thought and poetry engage with and emerge within set limits, and within historical experience.

For Olson, these confines cannot form a determinative or totalizing system, for the system is a work-in-process, giving rise as much to limits as to metaphysical excursions that reset them. The limits of literacy—a pithy metaphor for addressing the limits any of us are inside of—move with print. Literary processes of editing and publishing that constitute those limits, also work against them by way of the process-derived metaphysics Olson conceptualizes in his work on Melville.

Olson’s attention to print seeks to make explicit not only the connection between print and medial limitation, but also between process and poetic figuration. Olson establishes the link between process and figuration most clearly in “Letter 5” in which he employs a poetic conceit to conceptualize the little magazine. Still upset by the negligible company he is forced to keep within the pages of 4 Winds, Maximus suggests to Ferrini that they meet “anywhere you say”

(I.22). Maximus then proposes several meeting places in Gloucester, each of which he embellishes with local lore, thereby populating his polis and his poem with houses, inns, sailors, and early settlers of Gloucester. The poem’s populace, however, is a strange lot, drawn as it is from both historical documentation and local legend. Gloucester’s population in the Maximus

Poems blurs the line between historical fact and imaginative expression. After several attempts to locate a meeting place, Maximus abandons his efforts:

I begin to be damned to figure out where we can meet. I liked your own house,

that first day I sought you out (you will recall that I came to your door

just because I had read a poem by you in just such a little magazine

as you now purport to edit (MP I.23)

Irritated, Maximus convinces himself that the meeting place he seeks cannot be found. Poised to give up, he finds solace in recollection: he remembers Ferrini’s home, and then a poem he read in the pages of a little magazine. The proximity of the home, the poem, and the magazine hints at the close associations the three have in Olson’s thought. The poem, in fact, hovers between two distinct dwellings: the home and the little magazine. Maximus concludes the three-element sequence by highlighting a little magazine. In doing so, he implies that the meeting place he sought was not any four-walled building in Gloucester. Instead, 4 Winds was to be their meeting place. If we take Letter 5 at its meta-critical word, the little magazine was to materialize as the meeting place for poetic discourse and poetic figuration.

Olson commits himself to the union of process and figuration, for in his thought new political models for the postwar era might emerge from joining the two. Figuration proceeds from quotidian process, underwriting Olson’s political no less than poetic ideas. In Olson’s thought, political models that lie outside the “direct continuum of society as we have had it” emerge from methodology’s facility for exceeding and thereby refiguring its own methods: process becomes figural, and the figural, in turn, might refine the particulars the process. In

Olson’s thought, this dialectic, which joins process and figuration, forms the working basis for generating new models of polis and politics. Olson unites process and figuration in his vision of the little magazine. Still addressing Ferrini, Olson writes:

A magazine does have this ‘life’ to it (proper to it), does have streets,

can show lights, movie houses, bars, and, occasionally,

for those of us who do live our life quite properly in print

as properly, say, as Gloucester people live in Gloucester

you do meet someone

as I met you

on a printed page (MP I.24)24

Here, Maximus makes explicit his earlier implication that the meeting place he sought was not a particular house or inn, but the city of Gloucester as it exists and has a life proper to it in a little magazine. The magazine has streets and bars; it shows movies. It is not simply a place to meet. It establishes the conditions for the possibility of meeting, just as it prefigures affective and political attachments and commitments, however provisional they must be. Olson figures the little magazine as a place for poetic life by transforming it into Maximus’s figural polis. The island city, which is the locus of Maximus’s poetic topography, manifests itself through the typography “on a printed page.” Maximus’s address to Ferrini thus operates as an attempt to construct a poetic polis in print through the process-derived metaphysics of literary work.25

24 I try my best to be true to Olson’s typographic layout, since typography is an important aspect of Olson’s poetry. Still, within the limits of the academic page, there may be slight variations. 25 Given my emphasis on process, I should note the lasting influence that Alfred North Whitehead’s work had on Olson’s poetry, particularly Whitehead’s Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929). The connection between Olson and Whitehead has been addressed in numerous critical commentaries. Robert von Hallberg devotes a chapter to Olson, Whitehead, and the Objectivists in his early study, Charles Olson: The Scholar’s Art, 82-125. Paul Christensen and Sherman Paul, two other early Olson commentators, both address Whitehead in relation to Olson’s theories of history: Charles Olson: Call Him Ishmael, 117-160; Olson’s Push: Origin, Black Mountain, and Recent American Poetry, 100-114. Paul usefully points out that Olson, in his preface to The Special View of History, writes that Whitehead “has written the metaphysic of the reality we have acquired” (qtd. in Paul, 108; SVH 16). Whitehead’s Process and Reality, in short, might be seen as one of the compelling forces behind Olson’s own process-derived metaphysics. My task here is to address how Olson expresses this metaphysic by conceptualizing— which is to say thinking figurally about—the literary field and how it works.

The Printed Word, in Theory

Olson’s commitment to print in the Ferrini Letters gives reason for pause, not least because Olson opens his most famous essay on poetics, “Projective Verse” (1950), by denouncing what he calls “‘closed’ verse, that verse which print bred” (“Projective Verse” 239, hereafter “Projective”). Later in that essay he emphasizes that “What we have suffered from, is manuscript, press, the removal of verse from its producer and its reproducer, the voice”

(“Projective” 245). Olson immediately balances his stress on the voice by singling out the typewriter as the machine with which the poet can “indicate exactly the breath… which he intends” (“Projective” 245), thereby transferring the poetic breath to the typed page. The introduction of the typewriter in Olson’s thought about oral expression and poetry invites us to consider that his oral emphasis finds a medial balance in print. That is, his assertive denunciations of print work less to rid us of print altogether than they do to reconfigure our conception of print and type as media of poetic expression.

Olson has taken various stances against print, most often linking it to closure, the strictures of literacy, and commercialism. His often hostile view of print as such, however, clarifies Olson’s turn toward the processes associated with print, including editing and publishing. Literary practices, for Olson, might open print to the active processes of experience and creation Olson otherwise associates with poetry. His suspicion of print stems from his conviction that the written word has enforced logocentrism since the times of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Rather than logos meaning simply “word” as it once did, it has become a unit of ratio and measurement and leads to thought’s abstraction. Consider the strong position Olson takes against logos in “Human Universe”:

We have lived long in a generalizing time, at least since 450 B.C. And it has had

its effects on the best of men, and the best of things. Logos, or discourse, for

example, in that time, so worked its abstractions into our concept and use of

language that language’s other function, speech, seems so in need of restoration

that several of us go back to hieroglyphs or to ideograms to right the balance.

(The distinction here is between language as the act of the instant and language as

the act of thought about the instant.)

(“Human Universe” 155-56)

Olson pits the “abstractions” of logos against the seemingly immediate expression of speech, where speech figures as “language as the act of the instant.” His lament that “language’s other function, speech,” has been abandoned implies that language’s primary mode has become written, measured expression, which Olson associates with unwanted abstraction (“language as the act of thought about the instant”). In this passage, logos associated with alphabetic expression falls short of the expressive possibilities Olson attributes to speech.

Olson solidifies the link he sees between logos and alphabetic writing by offering non- alphabetic graphic systems—the ideogram and the hieroglyph—as alternatives for graphic communication. Hieroglyphs and ideograms, like speech, access language’s other function: its non-rational, processual potential. Joseph Riddel has argued that for Olson a glyph “is a metonym for a poem, a means of communication and not a closed work reflecting (upon) itself”

(145). The glyph forms the antithesis to “closed work” in order to counter the “closed verse” championed by the New Critics and to open postwar poetry and textuality more broadly conceived to “the formula and formulation of the transactional” (Riddel 145). In a similar argument, William Spanos explains that by invoking ideograms and hieroglyphs Olson aligns

himself with Ernest Fenellosa’s The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (1920).

Like Fenellosa, Spanos writes, Olson destroys “the hardened logocentric metaphysical tradition beginning with Plato and Aristotle” by stressing “the verbal or active element evoked by the occasion, the speech ‘motion’ the ideogram enacts” (40-41). It is not so much that Olson abandons graphic expression outright. Rather, Olson discovers a balance between speech and its graphic manifestation in the forms of ideograms and hieroglyphs. He retains his suspicion of the alphabetically written and printed word in his attempt to counter the power of logos in Western thought. But he also insists that some forms of graphic expression—and as this chapter argues, the practices associated with graphic expression—work as means for language’s active use.

Olson’s evident suspicion of print and logocentrism in “Projective Verse” and “Human

Universe” extends to literacy as well. In a 1959 “Letter to Elaine Feinstein,” Olson restates his claim from “Projective Verse” that “form is never any more than an extension of content,” but adds the clarification “—a non-literary sense, certainly” (“Projective Verse” 240; “Letter” 250).

The non-literary holds Olson’s interest in this letter because it helps him to reflect again on the relationship between speech, alphabetic literacy, and poetic language. “The only advantage of speech rhythms,” he explains to Feinstein, “is illiteracy: the non-literary, exactly in Dante’s sense of the value of the vernacular over grammar—that speech as a communicator is prior to the individual and is picked up as soon as and with ma’s milk” (“Letter” 250). In going back to

Dante, Olson accesses two monumental figures of the vernacular at once: Dante himself, who composed The Divine Comedy in Italian rather than Latin; and the figure of the mother, once conceived of as the source of “a primary orality” (Kittler 25).26 For Olson, speech is illiterate and

26 For more on primary orality in relation to the mother, see Friedrich Kittler’s Discourse Networks, 1800/1900. Kittler claims that the discourse network of 1800 sees a change in the mother’s role in regard to language. During this period the mother becomes an educator. “Pedagogical discourses disappeared into the Mother’s Mouth only to reappear multiplied in the form of bureaucratic administration,” and so “What Faust called a life source became

non-literary because it finds its source in the figure of the mother before the onset of literacy.

While Olson idealizes primary orality with the figure of the mother, he grounds his idealization in Dante, who brought the vernacular voice to the printed page. Dante’s vernacular triumph, after all, was not that he spoke Italian, but that he wrote in it. For all of Olson’s championing of illiteracy and the non-literary, illiteracy often refines Olson’s thinking about what literacy entails rather than working as a starry-eyed dismissal of literacy altogether.27

Olson’s rethinking of literacy and logocentrism aims to confound language and thought’s abstraction, an aim he sees as fundamental to opposing the rampant commercialism of postwar cultural production. While the association between words and commerce has long been a topic of literary modernism and modernist theory—I think particularly of Adorno, Benjamin, Joyce, and

Pound—Olson’s variations on the topic set logocentrism and commercialism side by side in order to address what Horkheimer and Adorno identified in 1947 as the “culture industry,” a concept that links capitalism’s intensifications with cultural and artistic mass production. In his letter to Elaine Feinstein, Olson clarifies his position on speech rhythms: “I couldn’t stress enough on this speech rhythm question,” he says, for the results exhibit “a non-literate, non- commercial and non-historical constant daily experience” (“Letter” 250). For Olson, thought’s abstraction through graphic and corporate media underwrites economic abstraction. “The Songs of Maximus,” for example, openly criticize the graphic bias toward commercialism:

institutionalized. The mother ‘must be an educator’ because ‘the child sucks in its first ideas with the mother’s milk’” (55). Unlike Kittler, Olson does not believe the voice to be entirely dominated by literacy and bureaucratic administration. 27 Here, Olson fits into a configuration of mid-century media theorists such as Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan takes a particularly strong stance against dominant literary (i.e. written and printed) forms. For the relation between print and linear thought after Gutenberg, see McLuhan. For a history of various graphic technologies, from ancient to digital, especially in relation to the development and administration of empire, see Innis. Innis published The Bias of Communication in 1951, just a year after Olson published “Projective Verse” and at the same time that he was researching Mayan glyphs on the Yucatan Peninsula. Olson without a doubt read Innis’s The Cod Fisheries (1954) because it touches on the history of Gloucester (Maud 144). There is no evidence, however, that Olson read Innis’s communications work that is so related to his own thought.

colored pictures

of all things to eat: dirty

postcards

And words, words, words

all over everything

No eyes or ears left

to do their own doings (all

invaded, appropriated, outraged, all senses

including the mind, that worker on what is (MP I.13)

Here, Olson makes graphic media objects for consumption. Olson’s postwar audience gorges on colored pictures, dirty postcards, and words, words, words, but in doing so are themselves

“appropriated” by the machinations of the capitalist culture industry. Postwar cultural consumers lose their senses: eyes and ears become the property of graphic commercialism.

Moreover, if logos abstracts language’s capacity to express active, unabstracted thought, as Olson claims in “Human Universe,” it also abstracts mental labor. The appropriation of our senses means the appropriation of the mind, “that worker on what is.” According to Olson’s argument here, literate expression binds mental labor to its own abstraction. It forces intellectual labor to reproduce the split between experience and expression characteristic of Western logocentrism. In doing so it tightens the bind between language and economics. To summarize in

Olson’s own words, “Let those who use words cheap… / cease putting out words in the public print” and “leave Gloucester / in the present shame of, / the wondership stolen by, / ownership”

(MP I.9). The cheapening of public print, graphic expression, and language more broadly, marks the strengthening of ownership at the expense of “wondership.” Here, the wonder of the literary

imagination and the wonder of intellectual labor that cannot be abstracted for the ends of a rampant commercialism suffer in part because of the print that binds them to economics and commercialism.

Olson’s entrenched wariness of printed words and of logocentrism displays itself most forcefully in “Projective Verse.” As we have seen, Olson condemns “‘closed’ verse, that verse which print bred” (“Projective” 239) and laments that “What we have suffered from, is manuscript, press, the removal of verse from its producer and its reproducer, the voice”

(“Projective” 245). The poetic voice—which stands in for the poetic use of language—has been evacuated by and to the page, making Olson’s purpose in “Projective Verse” recuperative. The breath and ear become poetry’s recuperative apparatuses. William Spanos sees Olson’s turn to the ear and voice as an attempt to “dis-cover the primordial meaning of the logos covered over and finally forgotten by the hardening of the recollective emphasis of the ontotheological tradition, that is, to retrieve (or repeat: wiederholen) the relationship between the speech act, which is the ‘act of the instant,’ and the fundamentally existential phenomenological character of the being of Dasein (being-there as being-in-the-world), that is, its radical temporality, and, therefore, that of being itself” (46). Olson’s turn away from print and toward the breath, in other words, discloses a relationality inherent in being which scrapes away the hardened crust of the

“ontotheological tradition.” Olson “dis-covers” the primordial meaning of logos by turning to the

“temporal sense par excellence, the ear, that is to say, speech as oral / aural activity as agency of knowledge” (46). In Spanos’s argument, only the oral / aural enacts poetic activity as the agency of knowledge.

A problem arises here which has distorted the reception of Olson’s work: the too ready embrace of the oral / aural at the expense of graphic expression. The apparent pressure to choose

either the oral / aural or the graphic, Thomas Ford has argued, underwrites many of the tensions of twentieth-century poetry. “Of course the main currents of Anglophone modernism,” he writes,

“were neither phonocentric nor graphocentric. But no poetry could afford to ignore the agonistic struggle between these rival poles. The purities of script and the absolutism of voice acted as historical limit cases for twentieth-century poetry. Between them they defined the media space available to poets. In fact, much of the history of twentieth-century poetics can be understood as a story of strategic positioning within this technical space” (454). Following this argument,

Olson’s body of work presents itself a series of strategic positionings between the poles of phonocentric and graphocentric poetics. Yet the “laws and possibilities of the breath”

(“Projective” 239) that propel Olson’s argument in “Projective Verse” have often compelled critics to neglect the role of print in Olson’s thought in favor of the phonic. Spanos, for example, makes the ear the temporal sense “par excellence” for registering the agency of knowledge in time. And while he notes that critics should be wary of falling for the ruse of oral / aural presence which, according to Derrida, underwrites logocentrism, Spanos makes little mention of writing’s place in the dis-covery of the “primordial meaning of logos.” Despite the strong emphasis on the oral / aural in Olson’s poetry and poetics, graphic expression functions as a necessary counterpart to Olson’s poetic breath and remains critical for comprehending Olson’s medial positioning. Writing and print serve as other material bases for what I am calling Olson’s process-derived metaphysics. They require Olson to think through the means and media of expression as much as the poet’s breath does.

While “Projective Verse” is best known for its breathing poet, the essay makes an equally strong case for writing and print as media for projective engagement. Any careful reading of

“Projective Verse” has to account for the fact that breath, which produces the syllable, forms

only half of Olson’s poetic equation. The other half is the poetic line. “Together, these two,” he writes, “the syllable and the line, they make a poem, they make that thing” (“Projective” 242).

The two complement one another in the creation of the poem. Olson goes on: “And the line comes (I swear it) from the breath, from the breathing of the man who writes, at the moment that he writes, and thus is, it is here that, the daily work, the WORK, gets in…” (“Projective” 242).

The poet who writes registers the law of the breath because the breath “gets in” to verse by way of its graphic manifestation. This is to say the poet’s inspiration—his breathing and imaginative work—inhabits the process of writing the poem, whereby the day-to-day work of the living poet gets into the poetic work. While Olson and the Black Mountain poets “are usually remembered for endorsing a speech-based poetics” (279), as Brian Reed has remarked, writing and print balance the aural / oral claims for which the essay is known.28 The central role transcription plays in “Projective Verse” explains Olson’s wonderment at the typewriter: the poet can “record the listening he has done to his own speech and by that one act indicate how he would want any reader, silently or otherwise, to voice his work” (“Projective” 245). The typewriter records the poet’s work and creates “a script to its vocalization” (“Projective” 245). The ear and the eye thus work in concert, which makes the split between orality and literacy in Olson’s work a red herring at best, or an exacerbation of the very logocentric, metaphysical split a critic such as Spanos sets out to deny.

The Word on the Page

28 Consider, too, that the Black Mountain poets derive their moniker as much from the Black Mountain Review as from any more direct association with the Black Mountain College in North Carolina in the 1950s. Although Olson and Creeley worked for the college and Creeley edited BMR from Black Mountain College for the first two years, some of the Black Mountain writers, such as Denise Levertov, maintained mostly literary ties to Black Mountain, i.e. through printed work in the literary journal.

Olson’s extension of the poetic breath to the poetic line extends itself still further to literary journals and little magazines. Olson’s letters to Cid Corman, editor of the journal Origin, offer some of his most provocative elaborations of “Projective Verse,” prompted by Olson’s theorization of what a little magazine is and how it works. In his initial letter to Corman, Olson replies to Corman’s invitation to be a contributing editor for Origin. He begins the letter cautiously before explaining “I am an older animal. And smell thrice, as I go around a new baby, just, to make sure… to be mighty sure, there’s breath BREATH in it” (Letters for Origin 1, hereafter LO). Olson’s emphasis on breath here certainly plays into his metaphor which presents

Origin as a newborn baby. The emphatic repetition of “breath BREATH,” however, also links this letter to the “laws of breath” that govern “Projective Verse.” The date of the letter helps to corroborate this reading, as the letter was written on October 18, 1950, shortly after the publication of “Projective Verse” in Poetry New York, no. 3 during that same year. “Projective

Verse,” moreover, took form as “written and rewritten correspondence with Fances Bolderoff

[sic] and Robert Creeley,” placing literary and editorial correspondence at the center of Olson’s most extensive refinement of the poetic theory set forth in his most famous essay (“Projective

Verse” on Poetry Foundation).29

29 This wayward mention of Frances Boldereff is significant. Olson’s circle of friends and followers was dominated by men, and many of the editors he associated with were also men, with the great exception of Diane di Prima, who edited The Floating Bear with LeRoi Jones and eventually on her own. However, Olson’s relationship with Frances Boldereff, who sought him out after finding a copy of Call Me Ishmael, Olson’s 1947 study of Moby-Dick, on the shelves of the Pennsylvania State College’s library, was overlooked for decades until recently (Thesen ix-xi). In 1999, Ralph Maud and Sharon Thesen published the correspondence between Olson and Boldereff, which shows the extent to which Boldereff informed Olson’s ideas about poetry and poetics prior to his rise to renown with the publication of “Projective Verse” in 1950. As Sharon Thesen puts it in her introduction to the correspondence, “Many correspondents encouraged Olson on his path, but the one who seems to have set his compass was Frances Boldereff…. For any number of reasons, Olson chose never to acknowledge publicly his relationship with and dependence on Boldereff; but as readers of these letters will see, her significance to his development as a poet is undeniable” (ix). I want to point out here as well that Boldereff was also a writer, and published Reading Finnegans Wake (1959) and A Blakean Translation of Joyce’s Circe (1965), among other works. Immediately prior to initiating her correspondence with Olson she had published A Primer of Morals for Medea, which Thesen describes as a “feminist manifesto” (xii). In Charles Altieri’s blurb for the book of correspondence between Boldereff and Olson he notes the “haunting repetition of gender roles that [Boldereff] is trying to escape.” I address the subject of women

A later letter testifies to the connection between “Projective Verse,” Origin, and the place of graphic expression and literary process in Olson’s poetic theory. In a 1951 letter written from

Campeche, Mexico, Olson responds to Origin’s first issue. He declares his pleasure that the issue works like a book—a single unit of expression—with the major caveat that a book articulates the thought of a single author while the little magazine expresses the thought of the editor and the many authors in any given issue. For an editor of a little magazine, “the pieces, he is composing, are, someone else’s (chiefly), in other words… he is the agent of a, collective” (LO 48). Because an editor selects “the pieces, he is composing,” according to Olson, the editor’s “taste” shapes the ambiguous collective he presents. Unlike with a single-author book, the editor’s work revises the “taste” of authors by placing them side by side. A little magazine for Olson thus has the potential to turn into “a fearful compounding” of “taste” that could hinder poetic expression, for taste is an “inherited mold” (48) that lies within the continuum of “society as we have had it.”

The question becomes: how does one edit without compounding inherited tastes that further shape poetry into a closed aesthetic form (48-49)?

Olson answers by changing the governing principle of literary publication from “taste” to

“force,” a term that anchors his poetics in “Projective Verse.” In his letter to Corman, Olson writes:

What I am urging on you is, a wholly different principle of, governance:

simply, that, any given issue of ORIGIN, is, not a champ clos (!) of taste alone

(which rests—inevitably—on an assumption that the culture system is clear, its

validities certain, and its values to be depended on: a closed system)

experimentalists and the gendered economy of letters at greater length in my final chapter on Chris Kraus. For more on the homosocial nature of Olson’s poetic network, see DuPlessis, 89-198; see also Mossin.

that any given issue of ORIGIN will have maximum force as it is

conceived by its editor as a FIELD OF FORCE. (LO 49)

In this passage, “taste alone” intensifies cultural parochialism and narrow aestheticism. It rests on a closed system which assumes the system’s values to be valid. But instead of turning to the laws of the breath to open the system as he does in “Projective Verse,” Olson looks to the processes associated with the production of a little magazine. “Projective Verse” tries “to show what projective or OPEN verse is, what it involves, in its act of composition” (“Projective” 239) by way of the ear, the breath, and the typewriter. This letter to a literary editor establishes editing and assembling as sources of projective force, making literary practices associated with publication and distribution central to Olson’s projective poetics.

Still, Olson freely admits that simply claiming Origin as an opening in a field of forces does not necessarily make it so. After he explains to Corman that each issue of Origin should be conceived of as a field of force, he remarks: “which brings us to the mat: in what way can a magazine for the ‘creative’ be at once the inevitable act of the taste of the editor and at the same time be, wholly, inside itself, a, field of force[?]” (LO 49). Given the vitality of Olson’s writing throughout this letter, one expects a potent answer to the question he poses to himself and

Corman. Instead, Olson concedes that the answer is undecidable, just as the supposed opposition between art and culture is (49-50), or between print and voice. He writes that

this opposition of art & culture) seems to me to offer us the clue,

that is THAT ORIGIN PRESENTS THE SAME PROBLEM AS—

I take it—A POEM OR A STORY DOES, now:

that, because it is

OPEN, & it already implies that ENERGY

is the source of, taste…

that THE DEMAND

ON YOU, CID CORMAN, is, to accomplish each issue—to see it,

always clearly, exhaustively, as—A

FIELD OF FORCE

that is, that, as agent of this collective (which ORIGIN is going to

be) the question is larger than, yr taste, alone: it has the same sort

of confrontation as—in any given poem—a man faces: how much

energy has he got in, to make the thing stand on its own feet as, a

force, in, the fields of force which surround everyone of us, of

which we, too, are forces: to stand FORTH

This is getting to sound altogether too much like a P[rojective]

V[erse] thing! (LO 50).

Here, the magazine acts as a force in the field of forces in which Olson situates his poetic theory and in which humans live their lives. Olson conceptualizes the active process of what Spanos would associate with Heideggerian Being and oral / aural action by reflecting on the assembling of a literary journal. Fittingly, Olson concludes this passage with a moment of critical reflection:

“This is getting to sound altogether too much like a PV thing!” Put differently, the tenets set forth in “Projective Verse” find a correspondent expression in the quotidian operations of editing a little magazine.

Still, Olson has not yet answered the question: how can a magazine be both an expression of taste and an expression of force? The answer, finally, emerges in graphic expression, particularly as graphic expression is the manifestation of quotidian literary practices. Toward the end of his letter to Corman, Olson offers a numbered summary of the points he has set out in the letter:

(I), Keep clear of the insides of, any assumptions which are

part of, or colored by “Western”, or “Christian”, history

(2) which means most of our assumptions abt taste and “the

aesthetics of” any art (as proceeding fr, the Greeks, & first

formulated significantly by Aristotle, and Longinus, etc.

(3) offset to 1 & 2, kinetics of contemporary physics, say,

as more healthful than, either of above, and of the graphic as a

better runner for the sleigh or cart than, humanism (LO 51)

Olson distances himself from western aesthetics yet again. Rather than develop a counter- aesthetic position by turning to the voice as he does in “Projective Verse,” however, Olson invokes the kinetics of “the graphic” as an alternative to closed aestheticism. For Olson, kinetics traces the transfer of force from one place to another, from the breath to the line, for example, or from the line to the little magazine. Instead of situating the graphic as the final expressive means in a series of kinetic transfers, Olson characterizes the graphic as the horse before the cart. This is a substantially different position than that taken in “Projective Verse.” His targets remain the same: Western and Christian history; aesthetic assumptions that perpetuate the opposition between art and culture. His media, however, have changed: the kinetics of the graphic and the practices associated with editorial work and printed publication.

The change in Olson’s stance toward the graphic thus emerges from his reflections on the practices associated with editing and publishing little magazines. Olson concludes his letter to

Corman by describing the form of the magazine as the manifestation of literary work:

I rather think the job is to push what you have already started (as to the devices of

presentation) even further—that is, the one man, the book, the juxtaposition of

varying materials, or varying devices, thicken, thicken, PACK, in order to set

aside any lingering results of “literary” or “aesthetics” or “professional” orderings

(what I have here dubbed “Taste” dangers, and, in so doing, seen as inherited

culture patterns which, a magazine devoted, as yrs is, to fresh energies, has to cut

away. (LO 52)

To summarize and extend, methods of composition, compilation, and eventually publication exceed the inherited cultural patterns Origin has inherited and must cut away. This is not done entirely consciously, for the results surpass the intentions of editor. The processes of assembling give rise to a critical density—thicken, thicken, PACK—at which point an unforeseen transposition occurs. Literary process as Olson conceptualizes it works to go beyond the materials at hand. If Olson’s logic here is hazy, it is because it emerges within the non-logic of a process-derived metaphysics. Assembled “devices of presentation,” including literary journals, present more than what is intentionally there. Process proceeds beyond its materials and the composition of a little magazine engenders abstract conceptions and unexpected cultural patterns. It is here that a metaphysic is reintroduced into Olson’s supposedly post-metaphysical poetics. Editorial work bears out what Olson theorized in “Melville’s Weights and Measures”: metaphysics inhabits material functioning; methodology becomes concept and form.

Interlude: Poetics between Explanation and Expression

In one of the first book-length critical works on Olson, Paul Christensen offers some balanced skepticism about the powerful place “Projective Verse” holds in criticism on Olson’s work. For Christensen, too much emphasis on “Projective Verse” forecloses discussions about artfulness in Olson’s poetic oeuvre. “The essay seems to take away from poetry more than it gives,” he writes, “for its most explicit points condemn the conventions of artifice; offered in return are rhythm, sound, and perception—the irreducible properties, he argued, that constitute the poetic act” (70). Christensen laments that Olson’s focus on process and mediation neglects

“conventions of artifice” that must also be addressed in Olson’s work. The point merits a response for a couple of reasons. First, the early critical reception of Olson’s work, particularly

Robert von Hallberg’s influential monograph, Charles Olson: The Scholar’s Art, replicates the split Christensen perceives. And second, “conventions of artifice” abound in Olson’s work.

Process and artifice need not be mutually exclusive. Rather, the irreducible processes which constitute the “poetic act” give rise to and inform artfulness and artifice in Olson’s poetry.

Christensen’s worry that poetry’s artifice falls into the background of Olson’s work is borne out in Charles Olson: The Scholar’s Art by Robert von Hallberg. Though Hallberg’s subtitle suggests an engagement with Olson’s “art,” his book focuses primarily on Olson as a scholar and pedagogue. Olson’s art is subsumed under the pedagogue’s rubric. Hallberg subordinates art to pedagogy to argue that Olson’s cultural politics derive from his experience as a “New Dealer,” having worked in and then resigned from Roosevelt’s Office of War

Information during World War II, resigning because of disagreements Olson had with

Roosevelt’s administration regarding the treatment of foreign residents in the U.S. as suspicious.

Hallberg’s argument is persuasive and valuable, but it is also one-sided. In the second sentence

of his book, for instance, Hallberg writes that he is “concerned primarily with Olson’s understanding of poetry and only secondarily with individual poems” (1). He then justifies his focus by assuring the reader that Olson is “influential more as a writer of manifestoes than as a poet” (2-3). And in his brief summary of the book’s argument Hallberg dismisses Olson’s poetry again: “[the] argument, briefly, is this: Olson began his literary career in reaction against political events immediately following WWII. He designed a poetic theory as ambitious in its way as the political administration from which he resigned. The central tenet of this theory is that the poet is more of a teacher than a maker or a priest, and it is to this tenet that my evaluative judgments refer. Olson’s best poetry is offered as explanation and understanding, not as expression” (3).

This last sentence is quite a curious statement. First, it would be useful to know what distinguishes explanation and understanding from expression. Hallberg implies that expression equates with something like poetic imagination, while explanation and understanding remain the teacher’s mode of knowing. Furthermore, “expression” must be left to “makers and priests,” implying a lack of poetic vision in Olson’s actual poetry. I do not want to belabor the point, because Hallberg’s book is an important contribution to criticism on Olson’s work. Yet critics should take note of such attempts to separate Olson’s pedagogic impulse from his poetic artifice, his materialist interests from his poetic “expression.” Such practices of separation, after all, replicate the very split in Western thought that Olson’s poetry seeks to bridge.

Christensen and Hallberg outline two visions of Olson’s poetry and poetics. The former looks to the “conventions of artifice” in Olson’s work (though even Christensen suggests a dearth of the very artifice he seeks). The latter, complementing Christensen’s lament, asserts that

Olson’s poetry lacks expression and turns to his explanatory poetic theory as the source of primary interest. Olson’s poetry is merely “the scholar’s art.” Indeed, Hallberg calls on a quote

from Pound to solidify his earlier claims, contending that “[Olson’s] main distinction is the ability ‘to assimilate and coordinate a large number of preceding inventions’” (3). While methods of assimilation and coordination inform Olson’s poetics, and may even be his “main distinction,” they need not disallow poetic expression. Olson’s methods of coordination, on the contrary, function as both process and poetic expression. The metaphysic, we should remember, is in the methodology.

Islands Hidden in the Blood

“just south of Atlantis Gloucester…” - The Maximus Poems

Islands hold a unique place in Olson’s literary topography. In “Cole’s Island” (1964), written after the death of Olson’s wife and one of the most haunting poems of The Maximus

Poems: Volume Three, Olson uses insular topography to present an ethereal experience

(Butterick 574). The poem opens, “I met Death—he was a sportsman—on Cole’s Island,” suggesting that the island is a place for other-worldly experience, here the experience of death.

As Maximus describes the setting for his meeting with death, he remarks that

Cole’s Island

is a queer isolated and gated place, and I was only there by will

to know more of the topography of it lying as it does out over

the Essex River. And it is now, with no tenants that one can speak of,

it’s more private than almost any place one might imagine. (MP III.69)

Maximus concludes this passage proposing that Cole’s island is a remote place, resting over the perhaps stygian river Essex. Published in the exploratory volume of Maximus IV, V, VI, “Cole’s

Island” works here as a removed point of entry to the insular topography of The Maximus Poems.

The queer isolation that characterizes “Cole’s Island” also defines the poetic polis of

Gloucester that Olson’s epic calls forth. Like Cole’s Island, Gloucester is a queerly isolated place. It emerges as an otherworldly insular space of poetic retreat where diverse forces gather.

Olson conceives of Gloucester as an island city akin to Atlantis, their relationship so close he does not bother separating the two with a comma: “just south of Atlantis Gloucester.” Olson’s conceptualization of Gloucester as an island city shows how Olson draws on insular topography as a figuration for poetic imagination and expression. In the opening address of The Maximus

Poems, for instance, Maximus speaks among islands:

Off-shore, by islands hidden in the blood

jewels & miracles, I, Maximus

a metal hot from boiling water, tell you

what is a lance, who obeys the figures of

the present dance (I.1)

Maximus’s forceful opening addresses both the citizens of Gloucester and the reader of the poem. For all the force of his address, however, Maximus speaks from a distance. He speaks from “Off-shore, by islands hidden in the blood.” In the opening lines—the epic space once committed to invoking the muses—Maximus favors an address withdrawn in poetic retreat.

From this space, he mines jewels and miracles and emerges as the decorated epic hero he remains throughout the Maximus sequence. The figuration of insular detachment in the opening

lines immediately establishes a semi-detached poetics for Olson’s epic that calls into question

Robert von Hallberg’s depiction of Olson as a pedagogue and bureaucrat.

Maximus’s opening retreat invites us to reconsider Olson’s poetics and reception that have often been understood to circumvent poetic detachment. William Spanos focuses on the active agency of speech in order to short circuit poetry’s abstractions into “logocentric metaphysics.” Paul Bové has turned to Olson’s work precisely because he understands it to resist the poetics of detachment associated with New Criticism and its solipsistic vision of modernist poetry. In his book, Destructive Poetics: Heidegger and Modern American Poetry (1980), Bové sets out to expose the “metaphysical critical tradition” that the New Criticism has underwritten

(ix). For Bové modernist habits of reading “are based on critical theories of aesthetic distance” that insist on “a continuous, unchanging tradition maintained by the exclusive definition of poetry as ironic, closed form” (x, xii; note that Bové’s language of closure mirrors Olson’s).

Olson in particular “subverts the traditional language of abstract concepts and ironic symbols to displace not only the continuous linearity of the Western onto-theological tradition, but to discover that the very notion both of ‘tradition’ as a centered canon and of ‘history’ are Western myths used to defend the aesthetic, distanced, disinterested privilege of antihistorical metaphysics” (xiv-xv). Here again, Olson’s writing is thought to work against abstraction, where poetic abstraction manifests “the Western onto-theological tradition” and “antihistorical metaphysics” simultaneously. This is a strong position to take in response to the New Criticism and its ironic, disinterested aesthetic. And Olson certainly plays into Bové’s hand here, having repeatedly lamented T.S. Eliot’s influence on Anglophone poetry, particularly Eliot’s use of poetic symbol as a means of aesthetic abstraction. In this sense, Spanos and Bové are often right

about Olson’s poetic positioning against Eliotic modernism and the New Critics, developed in large part in Olson’s deeply historical and historically engaged Maximus Poems.

Queer, then, that Maximus opens his epic by retreating offshore to islands hidden in the blood. The maneuver performs the very poetic distancing that Bové and Spanos so eagerly jettison. And it is not only the opening address that figures Gloucester as an insular poetic space.

Maximus concludes the first book of the Maximus Poems—comprising the first 165 pages— invoking the insular space he establishes at the outset. When Olson seeks a subdued conclusion to the first volume of The Maximus Poems, he finishes by connecting his island of Gloucester to the mainland United States. The final six lines read:

to this hour sitting as the mainland hinge

of the 128 bridge now brings in

what, to Main Street? (MP I.160)

Public infrastructure connects Gloucester to the continent, bringing the unknown to Main Street and an end to the first book of The Maximus Poems. The coincidence between the mainland hinge (the bridge on Route 128) and the sequence’s terminus suggest that Gloucester’s figurative insularity is generative for Olson.30 Olson brackets the entire sequence with insular address, lending the first book an undefined connection to other places, even the actual city of Gloucester

Maximus claims as his poetic polis. The insularity of the first book prompts two observations.

30 Let me pause here to clarify a point about Gloucester’s actual topography. Gloucester is not an island city. It is located on the Cape Ann peninsula, which is mostly separated from the mainland by the Annisquam River. On current maps, the separation looks complete, due to the construction of a canal which connects Gloucester’s harbor in the south to the Annisquam River in the north. Now, at least, Gloucester appears to be an island. Topographic specificity, however, is less important here than poetic functionality. For Maximus, Gloucester is an island city, for islands function as floating worlds of sorts from which the poetic voice emerges.

First, despite critical claims to the contrary, Olson maintains conventions of poetic artifice and detachment. Second, the insular space of Olson’s poetics hinges upon its connection to graphic expression.

On this latter point, consider Maximus’s opening address once again. Maximus speaks from islands hidden in the blood, but at the same time claims to command the “figures of / the present dance.” While the speaker’s voice is cloaked the language of insular retreat, its emergence inhabits and is enabled by other poetic figures: printed words. The opening address thus combines poetic figuration with its graphic configuration. The first two definitions for figuration in the OED prove useful here. The first defines “figuration” as “the action or process of forming into figure” (“figuration” 1a), a process at work throughout Olson’s poetry and poetics, and particularly in Maximus’s opening address. The second definition is a consequence of the process of figuration: “The resulting form or shape; contour, outline” (“figuration” 1b).

The process of figuration, in other words, creates figurations as forms and shapes. Particularly interesting about the second definition is the OED’s classification of such figurations as “quasi- concrete.” The process of figuration, in other words, inheres in its resultant forms. Figurations take form, but those forms never rid themselves of the process of their making. And Maximus’s insulated poetic expression hinges upon its scripted figuration on the page.

The processes of poetic figuration and graphic expression found in Maximus’s opening lines are developed further in “Projective Verse.” As I noted earlier, Olson conceives of two primary media of poetic expression for projective verse: the breath and the line. Although Olson emphasizes the poetic breath early in his essay, he changes his focus to the poetic line after several pages, writing that “it is the LINE that’s the baby that gets, as the poem is getting made, the attention, the control, that it is right here, in the line, that the shaping takes place, each

moment of the going” (“Projective” 242). The “shaping” of poetry—its figuration—takes place here in the composition of the line. The line registers “each moment of the going.” This “going” is not only a poetic stance toward being within an open field of forces, but also an ongoing conceptual process of poetic figuration. “The dance of the intellect is there,” Olson remarks, where “the PLAY of the mind” is (“Projective” 242). Importantly, Olson grounds the intellect’s playful dance in his turn to the poetic line: “And the threshing floor for the dance? Is it anything but the LINE?” (“Projective” 243). The dance of the intellect takes place upon the floor of the line; material grounding enables the play of figuration. When Olson opens the Maximus Poems, combining “islands hidden in the blood” with the “figures of the present dance,” the sequence moves between poetic figuration and the dance of the line as those figured words upon a printed page.

Here we return to the Ferrini Letters, for they demonstrate how the play of imagination comes to inhabit the materialization of literary production. As we saw earlier, Maximus tells

Ferrini that a little magazine has a life proper to it, and proposes that occasionally you meet someone, “as I met you / on a printed page” (MP I.24). Olson follows up on the notion that a magazine has a life proper to it:

You get my drift: 4 Winds

(or let me call it “Island”,

or something more exact –

“Gloucester”, just that flat

making my polis yours (MP I.24)

Olson discards Ferrini’s chosen title, 4 Winds, to suggest two alternatives: Island and Gloucester.

He cycles through the two substitutes quickly and asserts that “Gloucester” is the “more exact”

moniker. The two, however, are inseparable, for the little magazine forms an Olsonian island, the space of both poetic retreat and emergence. This island is equally an Olsonian polis. A magazine, after all, “does have streets, / can show lights, movie houses, bars.” In this sense, Olson imagines a polis of letters, whereby Gloucester emerges as poetic polis through typographic expression in a little magazine. Finally, Olson’s “Gloucester” refers to the city of Gloucester as it exists on

Cape Ann, Massachusetts. Gloucester, in other words, is a historical and material referent as well. As Olson attempts to rename Ferrini’s magazine, he cycles through instances of abstraction and concreteness at work in his own poetry. The sequence shifts around referents: from the figural space of the “Island” to its poetic manifestation in “Gloucester,” the poetic polis, to the real-life city of Gloucester and its history.

After Olson offers “Island” and “Gloucester” as alternative titles for 4 Winds, he makes a third suggestion which is intended to offend Ferrini but which in fact displays the various literary and historical registers of Olson’s work. He carries on with his suggestions:

or if you have to be romantic why not call it “The Three Turks Heads” and have something at least which belongs to the truth of the place as John Smith so strikingly did? (MP I.24)

Olson seeks to chasten Ferrini by calling him “romantic.” “The Three Turks Heads” seems to come straight from the kind of romantic writing Edward Said identifies in Orientalism. This is true in part. The Three Turks Heads was the name John Smith—the American romance figure himself—gave to three islands off the southeastern point of Cape Ann, apparently

“commemorating an incident from his earlier adventures in which he claims to have beheaded three Turkish warriors in successive single combats” (Butterick 142). While Olson implies his rejection of the romantic by using it to chastise Ferrini, he also recognizes that the romantic

“belongs to the truth of the place / as John Smith so strikingly did.” Both the name and John

Smith are historical figures. The three islands exist as John Smith did. But they are figurations, too, bound as much to romance as to factual history. As Butterick’s gloss implies, John Smith’s own triumphalist claims may be grounded more in legend and romance than in historical fact.

Olson’s reference to The Three Turks Heads thereby indicates the entanglements between romance and history in Olson’s epic poem.

Some of Olson’s most clarifying thoughts on romance, poetry, and graphic expression present themselves in the form of an annotated bibliography to the Mayan Letters. Published in

1953 as letters to his friend and collaborator Robert Creeley, the Mayan Letters record Olson’s brief time researching a Mayan language near Campeche on the Yucatan Peninsula. Here I want to focus less on the letters themselves than on the annotated bibliography that concludes the

Mayan Letters. Given that the letters were initially part of a personal correspondence between

Olson and Creeley from 1951, the audience for the bibliography is not immediately clear. At the end of the bibliography, however, Olson adds the date “October, 1953,” suggesting Olson wrote the bibliography as an addendum for the publication of the letters in book form in 1953.31

Olson’s inclusion of the bibliography, then, marks Olson’s impulse to both record and instruct.

More importantly, the bibliography, a word which refers to both the description of books and the writing of books (“bibliography”), shows how Olson employs the bibliographic form to consider the associations between poetic figuration and literary materialization.

The bibliography to the Mayan Letters is strangely literary in its formatting, by which I mean it combines description and annotation with odd spacing, line breaks, and other typographic markers associated with literary form. Olson introduces his bibliography with an epigraph, quoting an early twentieth-century agricultural theorist, Edward Hyams: “‘The

31 The last letter in the Mayan Letters was written on July 1, 1951.

scientific bias taken by our civilization has… given to History and Archaeology a role, valuable and respectable, of course, but not inspired’ – Edward Hyams, Soil & Civilization (Thames &

Hudson, 1952)” (Mayan 125). Olson chooses his epigraph wisely, because it connects several of his interests. First, Hyams’s assertion that scientific bias has deadened our historical and archaeological methodologies dovetails with Olson’s ambivalence about logocentrism and its rational biases. Second, Hyams speaks to historical method, one of Olson’s primary interests in the Mayan Letters. Early in the letters Olson clarifies to Creeley that his project entails “getting rid of nomination, so that historical material is free for forms now” (SW 81). Like modernist poets before him, Olson seeks a methodology to perplex the inherited names of things so that he might derive new forms of expression from them. Finally, Hyams moves from scientific form to

“inspired” form. The word choice is significant, for it links Olson’s methodology to

“inspiration.” In “Projective Verse,” Olson remarks that “the breath has a double meaning which the latin [sic] had not yet lost” (“Projective” 245). Spiritus, in Latin, means breath and spirit and joins physical method and poetic inspiration. Olson’s use of this particular epigraph for his annotated bibliography emblematizes a literary methodology linked to inspiration: inspiration inhabits graphic expression and biblio-graphy.

Olson concludes his bibliography for the Mayan Letters just as he begins The Maximus

Poems: by retreating to an insular, secreted place. Olson has worked through most of his bibliography, having recorded and recommended works by authors as diverse as Brooks

Adams’s The New Empire (1902), Leo Frobenius on the topics of African rock paintings and

Paideuma (1890s – 1930s), Jane Harrison on Greek writing and religion in Prolegomena to the

Study of Greek Religion (1903), Carl Sauer’s Environment and Culture in the Deglaciation

(1948), D.H. Lawrence’s Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), Herman Melville in general, and

Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur (written 1938). These authors share Olson’s interests in writing, ecology, ethnography, cultural analysis, and imperial history. Strange, then, that Olson concludes his bibliography with a retreat into the realm of eccentric and romantic literature. Fond of creating categories for organization in his bibliography, Olson labels the final section of his bibliography “(Addendum, Attic, Annex, Any hidden place” (Mayan 129). Each of Olson’s multiple designations indicates yet another hidden place in Olson’s writing and calls to mind

Maximus’s “islands hidden in the blood,” or the queer isolation of “Cole’s Island.” Two of

Olson’s designations here are also bibliographic terms. An addendum is an addition to a text meant to clarify some earlier portion of the text (“addendum”). And an annex can be “an addition to a document; an appendix” (“annex”). By combining bibliographic description with places that are hidden, subordinated, or supplemental, Olson suggests that bibliography and figural supplementation are mutually constitutive. The hidden place from which poetic expression emerges exists within graphic expression and bibliographic codes. To put this differently, the methods of bibliographic coding, collation, and expression serve as a hidden annex inhabited by and generative of the romantic figures of literary creation. Olson’s bibliography coalesces as a literary retreat, but where the retreat is crafted by textual supplements.

The authors mentioned in Olson’s final “addendum” support Olson’s proposition that the literary figuration binds itself to graphic expression. After the “addendum,” the bibliography carries on: “for those who have the wit to tell the Unconscious when they see one, or for the likes of me, who was raised on the American Weekly, there are at least two men I want to mention

(not to speak of Ignatius Donnelly on Atlantis, Churchward on Mu – or, for that matter, Rider

Haggard!):” (Mayan 129). Olson ultimately names the two men he mentions in passing here:

Victor Berard and L.A. Waddell. However, it is well worth pausing to consider the three writers

Olson refrains from elaborating on: Ignatius Donnelly, James Churchward, and Rider Haggard.

Each of these three figures garnered fame for writing about those hidden places Olson refers to in the section heading, and each offers a clue for piecing together how Olson’s conception of hidden places operates in tandem with his understanding of poetry, history, and graphic expression.

Ignatius Donnelly, a fascinating figure in nineteenth century American culture, is most famous for his books that offer unusual and occult accounts of human history. One of his most well-known books, Atlantis, the Antediluvian World (1882), argues for the historical existence of

Atlantis as the source of human civilization.32 He also wrote several other works that I pass over here, but which situate Donnelly as a significant occultist, fantasist, and political figure during the nineteenth century.33 Olson’s interest in Donnelly stems from Donnelly’s work on Atlantis.

In his invaluable book, Charles Olson’s Reading: A Biography, Ralph Maud notes that “Olson’s interest in Atlantis goes back a long way to an early reading of H. Rider Haggard’s She, though he did not keep the book; to Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis: The Antediluvian Word… though

32 Olson’s interest in a “core” of civilization echoes throughout his work. In “The Gate and the Center,” for example, Olson takes interest in ancient Sumeria. He writes that “until date 1200 BC or thereabouts, civilization had ONE CENTER, Sumer, in all directions, that this one people held such exact and superior force that all peoples around them were sustained by it, nourished, increased, advanced, that a city was a coherence which, for the first time since the ice, gave man the chance to join knowledge to culture and, with this weapon, shape dignities of economics and value sufficient to make daily life itself dignity and sufficiency” (“Gate” 170). Here, Olson’s avant-garde impulses align with the existence of ancient centers of civilization. The emphasis on cultural centers also explains much of Olson’s interest in Mayan culture. Curiously, his fascination with ancient centers manifests itself as well in poetic centers and “mysterious cores,” a phrase I use to allude to Elizabeth Bowen’s short story, “Mysterious Kôr,” a take- off on Haggard’s work. Olson’s avant-garde vision is not so much a practical project to renew political life in Gloucester, but a poetic project to create Gloucester as a poetic polis. Only here, to Olson’s mind, do culture, politics, and daily life coincide. 33 Donnelly’s other works include: Ragnarök: The Age of Fire and Gravel; The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon’s Cipher in the Socalled Shakespeare Plays; and Caesar’s Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century, which is most often compared to Edward Bellamy’s more famous work of a similar nature, Looking Backward. While criticism on Donnelly has quickened its pace in recent years, one would hope to see more scholarly work on him. Not only was Donnelly famous for the writings I have just mentioned, he was also a prominent political figure who served as Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota from 1859-1863 and as a representative to Congress from 1863-1869. In later years, Donnelly withdrew from national politics while fortifying his socialist vision in Minnesota, where he lived in the then envisioned utopian community, Nininger City, and established the journal the Anti-Monopolist in 1874 (O’Shea).

again he did not hang on to the book. He owned James Churchward, The Lost Continent of Mu… notes on it are found in a journal of 1939” (335).34 Maud, following Olson, links the three authors as well, probably having noted their linked inclusion in the bibliography to the Mayan

Letters.

While I cannot undertake an extensive explication of Donnelly’s, Churchward’s, or

Haggard’s works, it suffices here to say that each takes an acute interest in imagined, mythic, or lost civilizations. Atlantis, of course, is a mythical island or continent which is said to have existed in the Atlantic Ocean, its first mention believed to be in Plato’s dialogues (“Atlantis”).

Donnelly re-popularized Atlantis for U.S. readers in 1882 with the publication of his book, which eventually found an important supporter in Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, more famously known as Madame Blavatsky. Similar to Donnelly, James Churchward promoted the idea of a lost continent in his several books on Mu, also known as Lemuria, the Pacific Ocean equivalent of Atlantis (“Churchward”). He published seven books on Mu between 1926 and 1935. In She: A

History of Adventure (1887), H. Rider Haggard extends his interest in fictionalized lost worlds with his singular depiction of Kôr, a lost city ruled by the goddess-like Ayesha. Taken together, these authors and the lost lands they write into being offer insight into Olson’s poetics because they guided Olson to his belief that mythic, literary history is no less true than the factual variety of history we have inherited in the modern West. In following these figures, Olson considers how the relation between history and metaphysics inheres in written forms, from the poem to the bibliographic addendum. Olson maintains a literary metaphysics that inhabits the materialization of the literary artifact and thereby inspires history with literary history.

34 Olson’s other reference to Donnelly comes by way of Olson’s reading of C.L.R. James. In a 1953 letter to Robert Creeley, Olson writes that “a crazy book fr a crazy man came in here, surprise, yesterday… sounds like a sort of Waddell & Ignatius Donnelly…” (Maud 249). The book Olson refers to is James’s Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: the Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (Maud 249).

Olson concludes his bibliography with a brief reference to Victor Berard, a

“Mediterranean explorer, who wrote several books to show that the Odyssey was a rewrite from a Semitic original,” and L.A. Waddell, “who was sure that the Sumerians or the Hittites or the

Trojans founded the British Hempire, and that Menes the Egyptian was Minos the Cretan and ended up dead, from the bite of a wasp, in Ireland, at the Knock-Many, the ‘Hill of Many,’ in

County Tyrone” (Mayan 129-130). Yet again, literary histories provoke Olson’s curiosity and admiration. They also provoke his writing. Consider, for example, a poem early in the Maximus

Poems IV, V, VI, titled “All My Life I’ve Heard About Many.” The poem traces the travels of

Maximus:

He went to Spain, the handsome sailor, he went to Ireland and died of a bee: he’s buried, at the hill of KnockMany

He sailed to Cashes and wrecked on that ledge, his ship vaulted the shoal, he landed in Gloucester: he built a castle at Norman’s Woe (MP II.7) Maximus here becomes the poetic figuration of Olson’s fascination with alternate and imaginative histories that play out within the Maximus sequence as literary history. He incorporates the entangled and recursive continuities literary history allows by having Maximus die but then find his second—or third, or fourth—coming on the shores of Gloucester. The poem’s title, “All My Life I’ve Heard about Many,” plays on the epigraph for the entire

Maximus epic: “all my life I’ve heard / one makes many” (MP 3). Olson’s motto speaks to the ever-changing Maximus as he figures the process, repetition, and alternation associated with

writing literature and history. Menes becomes Minos becomes Knock-Many becomes Maximus, who vaults the shoal and lands in Gloucester, his island city. Waddell’s literary history, which posits that Menes died of a bee sting in County Tyrone, Ireland, transforms into Maximus dying of a bee sting at Knock Many, but being revived, sailing on, and landing in Gloucester. This process of engendering literary history and transformation is Olson’s dance of the intellect, threshed out, as it is, on the floor of the printed page.

The processes of landing, touching down, and taking off again—of the protean morphing of one that makes many—tether the alternations of literary figuration to the processes of literary documentation. Olson outlines the process in his conclusion to the Mayan Letters, where he most clearly links fantasy and writing. This passage comes at the end of the bibliography, just after his annotation on Waddell and Knock Many:

But no one but an herodotean may fool around with such fraudulence and fantasy

practiced on document (instead of on the galaxies), no matter how much such

stories are, to my taking, the body of narrative which has intervened between the

great time of fiction & drama (the City-time) and the present (which is no time for

fantasy, drama—or City).

The trouble is, it is very difficult, to be both a poet and, an historian.

(Mayan 130)

This passage functions as Olson’s attempt to answer the question embedded in the closing statement: how can one be both a poet and an historian? The answer appears to lie in the work of

“fraudulence and fantasy practiced on document,” the conjuncture of which links Olson’s process-based poetics—practice on document—to the metaphysical figurations such practices generate: fraudulence and fantasy.

The documents of literary history, which Olson refers to at length throughout the

Maximus Poems as well as in his bibliography for the Mayan Letters, offer a history of process- derived metaphysics. Consider the beginning of the above passage. Olson comments that “no one but an herodotean may fool around with such fraudulence and fantasy practiced on document.”

This is to say, only a historian working with a herodotean method should “fool with” the fraudulence and fantasy written by Donnelly, Churchward, Haggard, Berard, and Waddell.

Fortunately, Olson understands himself to be working in the herodotean tradition. In “A Later

Note on Letter #15,” Maximus asserts that

In English the poetics became meubles – furniture – thereafter (after 1630

& Descartes was the value

until Whitehead, who cleared out the gunk by getting the universe in (as against man alone

& that concept of history (not Herodotus’s, which was a verb, to find out for yourself: ‘istorin, which makes any one’s acts a finding out for him or her self, in other words restores the traum: that we act somewhere…

as against what we know went on, the dream: the dream being self-action (MP II.79)

According to Olson’s reading of Herodotus, history is an active verb, which means to seek and find out for oneself. Such a definition would align very well with Bové’s and Spanos’s readings of Olson’s purportedly anti-metaphysical poetics. But as we see here, the activity of finding out for oneself restores “the traum.” The “traum” might be the existence of self-action, but traum— or dream—and self-action for Olson go hand in hand. The dream inhabits herodotean seeking.

When Olson remarks in his conclusion to the Mayan Letters that no one but a herodotean may fool with such fraudulence and fantasy “practiced on document (instead of the galaxies),” he

makes an assertion on behalf of a process-derived metaphysics. Fraudulence and fantasy practiced on document get “the universe in.” In turn, the universe—and history—are to be found in the practices of documentation Olson seeks to develop in his poetics. Yet fantasy inhabits the practice of documentation as well: metaphysics cannot be severed from human work in language.

It is the task of the literary historian to continue seeking the derivations of such metaphysics; not to refute them, but to understand how they emerge in tandem with the materialization of literary artifacts.

By making the document the practical dwelling of fantasy and a material condition for fantasy’s emergence, Olson forms an answer to his question: how can one be both a poet and an historian? The answer is in the figuration of praxis, to use a provocative phrase from Adorno,35 whereby the practice of thought on document leads to its partial figuration. As Joseph Riddel remarks, Olson “would ultimately define poetry as ‘document,’ meaning that poetry is an assimilation and articulation of the fragments or records, the signs, by which any culture realizes its structural coherence, particularly its systems of communication and exchange, and thus becomes culture” (144). Riddel’s comment is astute, but he fails to point out that Olson’s poetry documents more than the fragments and signs of history morphing into culture; it also documents the practice of fantasy which gives rise to works of poetry such as The Maximus Poems. For

Olson, history regains its cultural coherence only if it reunites with fantasy. Anything less than this would keep history “in the direct continuum of society as we have had it (of the State, same, of the Economy, same, of the Politicks” (Mayan 84).

35 In his brief essay, “Resignation,” collected in The Culture Industry, Adorno writes that “open thinking points beyond itself. For its part, such thinking takes a position as a figuration of praxis which is more closely related to a praxis truly involved in change than in a position of mere obedience for the sake of praxis” (202). Adorno is responding in part to students who wanted him to be more overtly active it political protests. Adorno’s point is that thought and “resignation” are not removed from praxis and that one may think of various “figurations of praxis” as a means of reflecting on how thought remains open and mutable, rather than rigid and dogmatic.

Olson’s project to discover fantasy in literary practices ultimately refigures Olson’s search for new poetic and cultural models for postwar America. There’s a methodic utopianism to this. Following Pound’s modernist call to make it new, Olson attempts to wrench print out from its commercial associations by making graphic expression new through a process-derived metaphysics. This dynamic metaphysics unites the material and the figural as a way of opposing the split between practice and abstract thought Olson thinks of as characteristic of logocentrism.

Olson’s work keeps his eyes trained as much on literary practice as on literary fantasy.

Maintaining this complementary focus by theorizing the material manifestation of thought’s expression, Olson makes writing newly productive for poetic and political engagement. He writes with conviction on this topic in the pages of the Mayan Letters, saying “that the substances of history now useful lie outside, under, right here, anywhere but in the direct continuum of society as we have had it” (“Projective” 84). “Outside” and “under” the direct continuum of society should call to mind Olson’s hidden places, his addenda, and his islands in the blood. But such hidden places need not be elsewhere. They are “right here” in writing. As we will recall from “Projective Verse,” it is in the written line, “here… the daily work the WORK, gets in” (“Projective” 242). The hidden place from which new histories, cultural patterns, and politics might emerge is nowhere else than here, in the processes recorded on the printed page.

The printed page forms the material and metaphysical space to actively constitute a new polis, poetics, and politics in the years immediately following World War II.

CHAPTER 2. A Literary History of the Dalkey Archive Press

Introduction

The preceding chapter on Charles Olson argued that the aesthetic dimension of Olson’s poetry—its engagement with metaphysics and its figuration of poetry as an insular poetic retreat—emerges in tandem with literary practices associated with writing, editing, and publishing. “The metaphysic now to be known,” Olson wrote, “does lie inside function, methodology is form” (“Materials” 117). The cause-and-effect logic of this poetic emergence— where Olson refines his conception of poetic figuration by theorizing literary practices—is inverted in this chapter on the literary history of the Dalkey Archive Press. Instead of assessing how methodology informs literary figuration, this chapter shows how the Dalkey Archive Press founds itself on a discourse of fictional aesthetic detachment, that is, a discourse of artistic detachment developed specifically in works of fiction Dalkey sees as fundamental to its formation. The Dalkey Archive Press looks to fictional voids, vacuums, and archival spaces in the works of two Irish modernists, James Joyce and Flann O’Brien, in order to establish a conception of the press as a receptacle for and an active agent in the ongoing discourse of literary history. Olson’s process-derived metaphysics moved from the page to insular poetic polis.

Dalkey Archive Press, in turn, emerges from a figural void that its publisher John O’Brien draws upon to propose that aesthetic commitments and formations are operative in the establishment of material literary formations. Put specifically in relation to the Dalkey Archive Press: the aesthetics of Irish literary modernism find a correspondent manifestation in the booklist and literary operations of the Dalkey Archive Press.

When James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus famously proclaims that “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” he does so in the midst of a literary work (Ulysses) whose historic and geographic specificity is designed to bring Dublin to life (2.377). However, Stephen does not denounce history in Dublin proper. He speaks the line while sitting uneasily in an educational institution in Dalkey, a town just south of Dublin. That space is the eponymous one of Flann O'Brien's The Dalkey Archive (1964), a work that begins by describing Dalkey as “an unlikely town… pretending to be asleep” (7). More than mere coincidence, O'Brien responds to

Stephen’s nightmare-inducing Dalkey by making the same town a setting for fictional awakening—an awakening that encompasses not Stephen but Joyce himself. In Dalkey, Joyce has survived World War II and renounced nearly all of his literary works, and in his last appearance in the novel he is offered a job washing the underpants of Jesuits, a joke fitting what

O’Brien describes as his fictional “class of fooling” (35). If Ulysses finds Stephen wishing to awake from the nightmare of history, O’Brien wakes Joyce within the unlikely place of literary history. His description of Dalkey as an “unlikely town… pretending to be asleep” can thus be read as a reflection on the curious diegetic space developed in the novel, and on the inconspicuous modes of literary-historical succession taking place therein.

Extending the focus of the novel from which it takes its name, the Dalkey Archive Press took shape around a constellation of literary-historical claims ranging from the intertextual to the institutional. Let’s take the latter first. The press formed in the suburbs of Chicago in 1984 primarily as a response to what the scholar-turned-publisher John O’Brien saw as the troubled status of contemporary fiction. Even when publishers took risks on publishing formally complex fiction, they too readily let those works go out of print, creating an abandoned archive of books within American letters. And the out-of-print books, in O’Brien’s eyes, were symptomatic of an

academic failure to write about and teach works of fiction by lesser-known writers. Academic criticism perpetuated work on established authors, often published by major houses with large marketing budgets, while neglecting authors with little celebrity status and small print runs.36 In

1980 O’Brien addressed these problems by founding the Review of Contemporary Fiction, which published brief critical essays on understudied authors and sought to “define contemporary fiction in terms of its aesthetics, its traditions, and its internal relationships” (O’Brien, 14

October 1980). Following the success of the Review, O’Brien broadened his literary historical task by publishing out-of-print fiction with the newly established Dalkey Archive Press. The young literary historian turned away from a traditional academic path in order to found alternative institutions for considering contemporary fiction’s literary histories. Many of these histories were to be found among the remainders of a profligate publishing industry and beneath the oversights of scholars and critics overwhelmed by the wealth of contemporary fiction.

Dalkey Archive Press makes some of these histories available to us in the form of a second-hand critical account that doubles as an institution of literary history.

Structured as both an archive and a press that keeps works in print that initially fell beyond the purview of competing institutional models, Dalkey Archive Press poses a problem for the institutional histories so prevalent in recent literary scholarship. Mark McGurl’s study of the effect creative writing programs have had on the styles and forms of contemporary American fiction is a prominent example of scholarship that reads contemporary fiction through an

36 In an interview, John O’Brien states his reasons for establishing the Review of Contemporary Fiction, which he sees as the necessary antecedent to the press: “The writers I was interested in—Gilbert Sorrentino, Paul Metcalf, Wallace Markfield, Luisa Valenzuela—were not being written about… and it was difficult for me to write about them with any expectation that what I wrote would get published in journals at that time. If you wrote the 5,000th essay on Saul Bellow, you had a pretty good chance of getting it published because editors knew who he was and so publishing another essay on Bellow was safe…. So, the critical establishment (however you want to define this, from academic journals to the New York Times Book Review) had a lock on what writers would be covered, as well as how they would be covered.” (O’Brien, “An Interview”).

institutional optic (McGurl). In Margaret Doherty’s more recent account of the relationship between the National Endowment for the Arts and literary minimalism in the 1980s, the NEA operates as an “overdetermined” if not determining force on literary forms (Doherty 89).37 Such institutional optics bring into focus many aspects of the literary field that have remained obscure.

Yet approaches such as McGurl’s and Doherty’s must contend with an overdetermined methodology: institutional histories often begin with the assumption of success. The narrative forms and literary categories that have lodged themselves most firmly in the institution, that is, become the starting points for institutional accounting. I tread lightly here, for neither McGurl nor Doherty claims an entirely determining relationship between institutions and literature. And neither is blind to the fact that institutional history overdetermines the forms that are most readily at hand. McGurl addresses this point obliquely in the introduction to his book, for instance, where he writes that “This book will take up residence in the gap between freedom and necessity—or rather, in the higher educational institutions that have been built in that gap, with gates opening to either side” (3). While McGurl nods toward “freedom” here—which refers back to Vladimir Nabokov’s assertion of artistic freedom in writing Lolita while teaching at Cornell

(2)—his moderate position as an institution-bound critic may rely more on the necessities of history than McGurl admits.

37 While Doherty points out that the relationship between institutions and aesthetics is not determinative, opting for the more capacious “overdetermined,” both she and McGurl emphasize a directionality leading from institutional cause to literary effect, though both trouble that directionality in sophisticated ways. Loren Glass’s recent book on Grove Press and the Evergreen Review works in this line as well, with Glass successfully arguing for the “incorporation of the avant-garde,” but only insofar as he performs his reading through the lens of a successful publishing house. I do not disagree with the approaches these scholars take. They offer maps that tell us how we arrived where we are. My position is somewhat closer to Merve Emre’s concept of a “paraliterary institution,” which she defines as “an institution that uses literature to organize practices of self and sociality, but has little to do with the conventional sites and spaces of literary production” (113). Emre’s position resonates with my own because she recognizes that institutions emerge from different ways of reading and interacting with literature. While Emre looks to institutions that are not traditionally associated with literary production, however, I propose that we can see such institutional derivation at work within the literary field by reading through the lens of the Dalkey Archive Press and other literary publications.

It is difficult to fault McGurl for so readily adopting this position, which emphasizes the limitations set by thinking within institutions. He has, after all, taken up the task of testing a central insight of Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination: that liberalism carries with it an impulse toward organization. “Contemporary liberalism,” Trilling writes,

does not depreciate emotion in the abstract, and in the abstract it sets great store

by variousness and possibility. Yet, as is true of any other human entity, the

conscious and unconscious life of liberalism are not always in accord. So far as

liberalism is active and positive, so far, that is, as it moves toward organization, it

tends to select the emotions and qualities that are most susceptible to

organization. As it carries out its active and positive ends it unconsciously limits

its view of the world to what it can deal with, and it unconsciously tends to

develop theories and principles, particularly in relation to the nature of the human

mind, that justify its limitation. (xix)

Trilling’s purpose here is to explain how a liberal desire for “variousness and possibility,” two terms he associates with literature, engenders its own constraints. An organizational impulse becomes active and positive within liberalism, thereby marking out the categorical limitations of the liberal imagination. What Trilling identifies as the paradox of liberalism finds an updated expression in McGurl’s study of contemporary writing programs and postwar American literature. Substitute “contemporary literature” for Trilling’s “emotion,” and “creative writing programs” for “liberalism,” and we have a very succinct summary of McGurl’s book. But where

Trilling makes limitation a problem to be investigated through the medium of literature, which

“is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty” (xxi), McGurl makes the institution his primary and limiting lens. My

point: as McGurl’s work “moves toward organization” it tends to select the critical and aesthetic categories that are most susceptible to programmatic claims. McGurl’s book is important because it shows us an institution determining the field of contemporary literature. But it also shows us McGurl operating from a position overdetermined by the necessities of history.

Institutional history wins out over the specificities of literary history Trilling once thought capable of countering an impulse toward organization.

Like the institution McGurl inhabits, Dalkey Archive Press occupies a gap between freedom and necessity: between “artistic freedom” as Nabokov thought of it (McGurl 2) and the necessity of the market. It levies into this gap the enigma of literary history. Robert Caserio has written that “literary history might be all the more involved than history proper with the problematics… of unintelligible specificity. By suspending their immediate relation to contexts, the fictions that constitute literature simultaneously explain and do not explain themselves. They intrude a riddling specificity or singularity upon the historicizing enterprise” (150). The Dalkey

Archive Press operates at the crux of history and literary history that Caserio identifies. One can write a history of DAP as an institution. And to that end, the first section of this chapter offers an historical account of the foundation of the press. Yet the press remains open to—precisely because it is kept open by—the “riddling specificity or singularity” of the fictions it publishes.

The chapter then proceeds from the institutional history to close readings of several key works by Joyce, Flann O’Brien, and Gilbert Sorrentino that were foundational to the press’s early self- conception. I point out the press’s emphasis on literary-historical specificity because literary historians today appear eager to make literary history an overdetermined effect of its institutions.

The relation between the two is close and I understand the impulse. I cannot escape the institutional forces that have shaped my thought either, nor can the Dalkey Archive Press. Still,

the literary history of the Dalkey Archive Press reminds us that institutions also derive from commitments to literary particularity, even if, as I will show in the final section of this chapter on

John O’Brien’s early book Interviews with Black Writers (1973), they generate their own blind spots in the process. To return our critical focus to the riddling specificities of literature, as John

O’Brien has done with the Dalkey Archive Press, might offer us alternative starting points for arriving again, with our various institutions, in our literary present.

“‘Contemporary literature’ is only certain people…”

John O’Brien’s career has long been focused on the methodologies by which literary history emerges in critical and institutional discourse. Before he founded the Dalkey Archive

Press, for instance, the fledgling academic published a book titled simply Interviews with Black

Writers. Published in 1973, the book draws out a genealogy of literary experimentation by

African American writers in an attempt to emphasize the often overlooked place of such experiments within academic accounts of twentieth-century American literature. O’Brien’s experience interviewing writers ranging from Arna Bontemps and Ralph Ellison to Michael

Harper and Ishmael Reed, who was just on the verge of publishing Mumbo Jumbo (1972) when

O’Brien interviewed him, led him to conceive of a second book of interviews with overlooked writers regardless of race. Although the second book never took shape, O’Brien’s early inquiries for the collection put him into contact with author and editor Gilbert Sorrentino, without whose guidance O’Brien almost certainly would not have founded the Review of Contemporary Fiction or Dalkey Archive Press.38 From his initial contact with Sorrentino in July or August of 1971,

38 In an interview from 2012, Jeremy M. Davies, a senior editor at Dalkey Archive Press, states that “there would be no Dalkey Archive without Gilbert Sorrentino—our first book was a reprint of his Splendide Hotel, and his advice guided a good number of the Press’s early acquisitions and has great influence here to this day. (A good way to get

through the founding of the Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1980, to the founding of Dalkey

Archive Press in 1984, and then to the end of Sorrentino’s life in 2006, John O’Brien looked to

Sorrentino as a friend and mentor whose guidance shaped O’Brien’s project.

Sorrentino was 42 years old when John O’Brien wrote to him, and he had a more stable position in American letters than the young academic. Sorrentino edited the important little magazines Neon in the late 1950s and Kulchur in the early 1960s. In the latter half of the 1960s he became an assistant editor at Grove Press, which Loren Glass has recently shown was then at the height of its influence in American countercultural publishing (Glass). Additionally,

Sorrentino had published three books of poetry and two books of fiction by the time O’Brien contacted him in 1971. His first novel, The Sky Changes, was published by Hill and Wang in

1966 (later republished by DAP), and his second novel, Steelwork, was published by Pantheon in

1970 (also republished by DAP). In Sorrentino’s first letter to O’Brien dated August 20, 1971, he adds “P.S. My third novel, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, will be available from

Pantheon next month. You might want to read it before talking to me” (Sorrentino, 20 August

1971).

While Sorrentino was already on the path of a well-established literary career, having gathered many literary contacts and experiences in publishing that would become essential to

John O’Brien, his finances were less assured. He moved among jobs proofreading, editing, and teaching in order to fund his writing. His letters to O’Brien show that he was continually scrambling for financial security during the 1970s, some of which he sought with O’Brien’s academic backing. On July 26, 1972, he wrote to O’Brien: “I’m going to apply for a

Guggenheim this year and I wondered if I might use your name as a reference. Please let me

something noticed is to say, ‘Sorrentino loved this book . . .’) His death in 2006 was a serious blow to the Press and American letters both” (Davies).

know” (Sorrentino, 26 July 1972). As this brief request suggests, the friendship between O’Brien and Sorrentino was mutually beneficial. Sorrentino offered O’Brien access to the world of contemporary American letters and O’Brien in turn filled the role of academic advocate. When

O’Brien solicited an editor of the Chicago Review to review Imaginative Qualities of Actual

Things, Sorrentino responded gratefully: “Thank you for your conversation with the editor of the

Chicago Review. I have a feeling that it is too late for reviews of I[maginative] Q[ualities] to appear, but perhaps someone will be moved enough by the book to consider a critical essay”

(Sorrentino, 27 May 1972). Sorrentino’s comment demonstrates the multiple time frames in the life of a novel: if it is not reviewed immediately in the press and taken up by a wide public, the next best opportunity might be a belated academic essay. Or, though he could not have known it at the time, an even better second life might be found in a new publishing house that would situate Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things within a complex institutional narrative about the history of contemporary literature.

John O’Brien was early in his academic career and aside from Interviews with Black

Writers his work met with repeated setbacks due in part to his interest in relatively obscure authors. His early letters to Sorrentino have three general themes: excitement at discovering new authors through Sorrentino’s recommendations, including many O’Brien ultimately republished with his press, such as Brigid Brophy, Henry Green, and Nicholas Mosley; anger at the publishing industry for letting most work by such authors go out of print; and resentment about his stalled academic career. O’Brien shared his reservations about contemporary academia with

Sorrentino, who in response to a particularly bleak letter from O’Brien, outlined the reality of contemporary literary studies for his younger friend:

It is permissible to be “interested in” contemporary letters, so long as you are interested

in the right kind. The “line” runs from Henry Miller through Lawrence Durrell and

thence to [John] Barth, [Donald] Barthelme, [Robert] Coover, [Thomas] Pynchon, down

to our “peers” - - [Ronald] Sukenick, [Richard] Brautigan, [Jerzy] Kozinski [sic], et al.

You are still safe with O.K. black folks like Ish[mael] Reed and LeRoi [Jones], but

outside those two, you’re not too cool. What I’m saying, of course, is heresy, i.e.,

“contemporary literature” is only certain people. (Sorrentino, 27 September 1974)

Sorrentino’s heresy acknowledges the limited purview of the academy with regard to contemporary writing. O’Brien knew the limitation well. He likely even saw the purpose of anointing only a handful of contemporary writers out of the dozens or even hundreds whose work literary critics could usefully address. After all, how can an academic, or even a corps of contemporary literature scholars, be attentive to the vast field of contemporary literature in a critical and evaluative manner? Within purely academic channels: one cannot. O’Brien responded to the wealth of fiction and the limits of criticism by founding Dalkey Archive Press.

It offsets the “line” of “contemporary literature” Sorrentino refers to by constituting new literary histories and alternative models for the succession of contemporary fiction. Answering

Sorrentino’s quip that “‘contemporary literature’ is only certain people,” the press makes the category of contemporary literature uncertain, founded as it is on the indistinct lines of literary history for which the critical category of contemporary literature cannot entirely account.

In establishing the press to counter then-current academic versions of contemporary literature, O’Brien followed advice Sorrentino gave him in the aforementioned letter from late

September, 1974:

I think that you should forget such shabby journals as American Scholar and their

aberrant editors. Why don’t you start contributing to “little little” magazines? God knows,

they are spotty and half of the stuff they print is shit on toast, but they will print you,

you’ll get some kind of audience, and they are weak in the criticism department anyhow,

by and large. They could use you. You mentioned Oyez, that’s the kind of thing I mean.

Forget P[artisan] R[eview] and Chicago [Review], etc. I also wasn’t kidding about N[ew]

D[irections] and your Henry Green stuff - - if you want, I’ll write [James] Laughlin

[publisher of New Directions].

I don’t know. Maybe you should give the writing business a serious shot and try

for a job out of the academic mill. It seems to me that you are being punished for writing

anyway, or at least for what you are writing. The great problem nowadays is that there is

really not a first-rate magazine out of the muddy academic stream, viz., Kulchur, Black

Mt Review, Origin. What I’m really saying is that I think you should take a shot now at

seeing what you can do out of academe. I don’t want to sound fashionable, etc., but the

university is a truly stultifying and depressing place, meant to be moved through rapidly,

and then out of. (Sorrentino, 27 September 1974)

Sorrentino’s references to “little little” magazines and New Directions are rife with modernist precedents. Indeed, Sorrentino’s sympathetic letter to O’Brien recalls the creation story of New

Directions, perhaps the most important publisher of literary modernism in the United States since the 1930s. That story reports that Ezra Pound, sensing no great achievement in James Laughlin’s poetry, directed him to use his steel-wealth inheritance to become a publisher. While the tale is famous in the history of Anglo-American modernism, Laughlin’s biographer writes that “There is no evidence to corroborate J’s [Laughlin’s] story that Ezra had snuffed out his poetic

aspirations in favor of publishing others’ work. Years later J apparently concocted the story that

Ezra had disparaged his poetic ambition and sent him in the direction of publishing, and this became the gospel of the New Directions creation myth” (82-83). While there is also no direct evidence in the above letter that shows Sorrentino telling O’Brien to found a press, his anti- academic encouragement echoes Pound’s apocryphal advice to Laughlin, thereby forming a provisional link between the foundation of O’Brien’s press and the literary-historical mythmaking which operates within New Directions and its version of literary modernism.

Within several years of Sorrentino’s advisory letter, John O’Brien conceived of a little magazine that he planned to run with his colleague, John Byrne. The Review of Contemporary

Fiction published its first issue, dedicated to the works of Gilbert Sorrentino, early in 1981 and operated on the following guidelines, which O’Brien wrote up in a prospectus for possible subscribers and sent to Sorrentino for suggestions:

PROSPECTUS: AIMS / PLANS

*** Will promote an on-going discussion of contemporary fiction, primarily through a

consideration of one or two writers per issue.

*** Will consider the moderns in terms of their continuing presence in contemporary

fiction.

*** Will regularly consider various schools and movements within the contemporary:

the Beats, the Black Mountain school, the Kulchur group, etc.

*** Will treat the other arts in so far as their activities touch upon or parallel those in

fiction.

*** Will publish essays on the work of younger contemporaries beginning in issue three.

*** Will feature book reviews, forthcoming books, recommended books, and out-of-print

books that should be reissued.

*** Will define contemporary fiction in terms of its aesthetics, its traditions, and its

internal relationships.

*** Will treat expansively the work of Gilbert Sorrentino, Hubert Selby, Paul Metcalf,

Wallace Markfield, Nicholas Mosley, William Gaddis, Douglas Woolf, Aidan Higgins,

Paul Bowles, John Hawkes, Juan Goytisolo, Julio Cortazar, Robert Pinget, Paul

Goodman, Coleman Dowell, Ishmael Reed, LeRoi Jones, William Eastlake, Jack

Kerouac, Camilo José Cela, and José Lezama Lima.39 (O’Brien, 14 October 1980)

Several points in O’Brien’s prospectus anticipate the formation of the Dalkey Archive Press.

First, O’Brien writes that the Review “Will consider the moderns in terms of their continuing presence in contemporary fiction.” This presence has long anchored the self-conception of the press, and it continues to publish works of both literary modernism and contemporary fiction.

And second: RCF will feature out-of-print books “that should be reissued,” a task O’Brien undertook himself. These two goals lead up to the most important point of the prospectus: the

Review will “define contemporary fiction in terms of its aesthetics, its traditions, and its internal relationships,” anticipating the literary-historical project that became central to the formation of the press. Sorrentino’s advice to retreat from the deadening academy was not entirely taken by

39 The male-dominated list O’Brien generates reveals some of the shortcomings of his early conception of the Review. While DAP has gone on to become an important supporter of works by Djuna Barnes, Christine Brooke- Rose, Brigid Brophy, Anne Carson, Micheline Aharonian Marcom, Carole Maso, Gertrude Stein, and Diane Williams, among others, the early masculine leanings of the press are apparent and indicative of a larger problem in the reception of experimental writing. Christine Brooke-Rose, an author whose work O’Brien has supported with both the Review and the press, points out in the title essay of her collection Invisible Author that avant-garde writing and reception suffers under the strategies of male posturing, leaving many female experimentalists in the role of “invisible authors” to their more boisterous male counterparts (Brooke-Rose). As Urmila Seshagiri writes in an article on the London-based feminist press, Persephone Books, “Despite decades of dedicated scholarship, impassioned activism, and progressive publishing, literary culture at the turn of the twenty-first century continued to devalue the talents of women writers” (242).

O’Brien, who has kept institutional ties for either himself or the press throughout the press’s history.40 Yet O’Brien did turn away from producing formal academic writing in order to found alternative institutions for considering contemporary fiction’s literary histories. DAP promoted contemporary fiction by republishing the work of those who, as Sorrentino remarked, failed to be

“contemporary literature” in their time. In this sense, the texts Dalkey Archive Press published and continues to publish remind us that the critical category of “contemporary literature” is often a useful contemporary fiction for literary historians, and one which sometimes obscures the points of correspondence and contradiction that comprise literary history.

Founded upon a Void: On the Question of Literary History

The hundreds of letters sent between O’Brien and Sorrentino during the 1970s and 1980s abound with book recommendations from Sorrentino to O’Brien. Many of the authors catalogued in O’Brien’s prospectus had been the topic of exchanges between him and his author-mentor.

Take Nicholas Mosley. In a letter from February 8, 1974, Sorrentino writes to O’Brien: “If you can, get a book (Coward-McCann) called Impossible Object by Nicholas Mosley. It is extraordinary and brilliant. You see how everything conspires to keep these remarkable writers under wraps. He’s British and has been publishing novels for apparently 20 years or so. But read it yourself. What a pleasure to see a conscious artist at work” (Sorrentino, 8 February 1974).

Seven years later, Mosley contributed a brief piece on Sorrentino’s fiction for the first issue of

RCF. Eight years later, RCF dedicated half an issue to Mosley’s work. And at present, DAP has

40 O’Brien established the press while teaching at the Illinois Benedictine College. It subsequently moved to Illinois State University for a time and then to the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The press recently announced that it has moved to University of Houston-Victoria (“Dalkey Archive”).

at least seventeen of Mosley’s books in print, including the remarkable five-novel Catastrophe

Practice series. In the same letter that Sorrentino recommends Mosley, he commands: “Write about Douglas Woolf. The stomach turns when one sees year after year go by with no one mentioning his name even in relation to the American novel” (Sorrentino, 8 February 1974). Ten years later, Douglas Woolf’s Wall to Wall was one of the first three books published by Dalkey

Archive Press. The other two were Splendide-Hôtel by Gilbert Sorrentino, and Cadenza by the still little-known Irish writer Ralph Cusack. In an introduction Sorrentino wrote for this last volume he compared it favorably with the fiction of James Joyce and Flann O’Brien (Sorrentino,

“Introduction”).

The most significant point of correspondence between the writer and future publisher was their mutual adoration of Irish fiction. Allusions to Flann O’Brien dot their epistolary exchange, with Sorrentino recommending that John O’Brien name his press “Flann Books, or, even better,

The Dalkey Archive Press” (Sorrentino, 9 August 1983). In an earlier letter from 1980,

Sorrentino writes to John O’Brien about the literary-historical correspondence between Irish and

American fiction: “if I were a scholar, I would write a book about Irish and American fiction, that is, how it is not only removed from, but at odds with, English fiction, that it is, operating at its best, ‘blood brothers’” (Sorrentino, 6 September 1980). Sorrentino’s claim is worth bearing in mind here, for John O’Brien’s early publishing strategies often follow the dynamics of literary- historical mythmaking in the fiction of three foundational figures for the press: James Joyce,

Flann O’Brien, and Gilbert Sorrentino. The problems of succession—of one thing following upon or replacing another—that motivate literary-historical reflection in these authors’ works find a corresponding formulation in John O’Brien’s publishing strategies.

Among the many hypotheses Stephen Dedalus advances over the course of Ulysses, one from the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode bears particular significance for this chapter: that succession takes place upon a void. The ninth episode finds Stephen in Ireland’s National

Library surrounded by friends and rivals who listen as he develops his theory of lineage in

Hamlet. Stephen speculates on Hamlet with a two-pronged form of genealogical criticism: he performs a reading of succession within Hamlet; and he undertakes his reading based on details of Shakespeare’s biography, namely the death of his son Hamnet Shakespeare. The literary thereby converges with the material and biographical in Stephen’s reading and gestures toward the often competing claims between literary history and history that structure literary economy.

For DAP, a similar tension arises: a corpus of out-of-print books can be conceived of as a problematic void in the literary field. The uncertain correspondences that constitute literary history are met by the hard facts of the literary market. Insofar as Dalkey seeks to preserve works of fiction from the obsolescence created in part by the literary field, it merges literary history with literature’s material economies and shows how literary historical succession takes place within what might otherwise have become a void of unpublished or out-of-print books.

The associations between literary history, succession, and institutional history figure prominently in the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode of Ulysses. Well into the episode, Stephen spars with his intellectual rival, Buck Mulligan, who pokes fun at Stephen’s scholastic lecture on spirit, matter, and genealogy in Hamlet. Provoked by Mulligan’s skepticism, Stephen turns from literary genealogy in Hamlet to other forms of succession, asserting that “Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten. On that mystery… the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro and microcosm, upon the void. Upon

incertitude, upon unlikelihood” (9.837-842). In conflating fatherhood and apostolic succession here, Stephen proposes that the unconsciousness of begetting undermines the stable foundations that institutions often claim to have. He likens fatherhood to church fathers, who derive their power from an unbroken successive line which finds its source in the apostles. Yet despite

Stephen’s doubt concerning the foundational forces at work in the process of succession, he recognizes that the powerful Catholic Church founded and maintains itself upon this very process. Stephen draws two conclusions from this observation. First, he reasons that institutions can be founded on processes that remain obscure or even mystical. And second, he concludes that lineage as often derives from elective processes of succession—where one chooses the line one will follow—as it does from ontologically or biologically stable points of origin. Like literary history, the process is constitutive, drawing unlikely lines of descent and founding uncertain institutions.

To the extent that “Scylla and Charybdis” takes literary genealogy as its theme, we must consider how literary history takes place, like churchly succession, upon a void. Indeed, Joyce merges the clerical and the literary in “Scylla and Charybdis” through the Catholic conception of limbus patrum. Early in his lecture on Hamlet, Stephen asks his small audience, “Who is the ghost from limbo patrum, returning to the world that has forgotten him? Who is King Hamlet?”

(9.147-151). In Catholic theology limbus patrum denotes the limbo in which the saints from the

Old Testament awaited the resurrection of Christ and consequently their own ascension to

Heaven. Here, Stephen figures limbus patrum as the hazy locus from which the ghost of

Hamlet’s father returns to the world. Joyce’s invocation of “limbo patrum” thus takes on meaning for literary history as well: both Stephen and Joyce engage with Shakespeare to situate themselves in a literary genealogy, Stephen as the precocious student and analogue to Hamlet;

Joyce as Shakespeare’s descendent and peer. Hamlet remains open to claims of lineage that institute literary history. And as Joyce suggests, such claims take place within the strange limbo known as literature.

Flann O’Brien follows Stephen Dedalus’s arguments in “Scylla and Charybdis” by making the novel a limbo-like space of succession. In a passage from O’Brien’s first novel, At

Swim-Two-Birds (1939), the unnamed student narrator of the primary narrative frame, of which there are several, proclaims that literary “Characters should be interchangeable as between one book and another. The entire corpus of existing literature should be regarded as a limbo from which discerning authors could draw their characters as required, creating only when they failed to find a suitable puppet” (20). In a meta-critical manner characteristic of O’Brien’s fiction, this passage applies the process it describes. The student narrator is himself drawn from the figure of

Stephen Dedalus, as Anne Clissman has shown in her early study of Flann O’Brien. He is not identical to Dedalus, but rather a parodic figure whose literary assertions “are intended to be a mockery of the overstatements, conscious posturings and squalid habits of James Joyce’s

Stephen Dedalus” (106). Yet even a mocking rejection of Dedalus’s perceived pretensions ultimately draws upon, refigures, and continues the Joycean legacy O’Brien seeks to divert. If the corpus of existing literature is a limbo, adding to that corpus constitutes new lines of literary history but not necessarily a line of flight.

O’Brien develops this point in his in his last-written novel, The Dalkey Archive, where the “unlikely town” of Dalkey corresponds to the “unlikelihood” and “uncertainty” Joyce attributes to institutions based on succession. As we saw in the introduction, Flann O’Brien reflects on his novel as an unlikely place where historical figures return to fictional life. The novel’s archival conception has a specific figural counterpart in the narrative. Indeed, the archive

takes shape as a vacuum in which figures from the past return to the present. After the novel’s opening description of the town, the protagonist Mick and his friend Hackett encounter the

“theologist and physicist” De Selby, who tells them he has developed a substance, DMP, that removes oxygen from the environment (12). Forming an analogue to O’Brien’s conception of fiction, De Selby claims that in an enclosed environment DMP creates a vacuum where time ceases to exist and historical figures present themselves. With Mick and Hackett doubting his claims, De Selby invites them to a cave along Dalkey’s shore. The cave mouth has been sealed off by high tide, creating a sealed environment within, and De Selby outfits the two young men with oxygen masks to swim into the concealed space. In the cave De Selby detonates a small charge of DMP, suspending time’s apparent course. The novel’s opening passage hints at the

“unlikely” spaces fiction creates; here we find the rarified version of fiction’s unlikely figurations: “Then Mick saw a figure, a spectre, far away from him. It looked seated and slightly luminescent. Gradually it got rather clearer in definition but remained unutterably distant, and what he had taken for a very long chin in profile was almost certainly a beard. A gown of some dark material clothed the apparition” (33). As with Hamlet’s reaction to his father’s ghost, Mick is startled by the vision. But before he can conceptualize his experience, De Selby addresses the apparition, who responds with a voice, “from far away but perfectly clear” (34). Oddly, the specter has a Dublin accent, but speaks about perhaps being African. Only when the ghost brings up his second book of confessions do we realize that the specter is Saint Augustine brought back to fictional life in the vacuous Dalkey archive, which is a figuration of the limbo-like space of the novel as well as the “corpus of existing literature.”

Following the specter’s appearance in the cave, a lively discussion ensues, with De Selby asking questions about Saint Augustine’s still murky life. O’Brien uses the scene as an

opportunity for a range of jokes, mostly at Augustine’s expense. The treatment Augustine receives in the novel even led O’Brien to include an epigraph to Saint Augustine: “I dedicate these pages to my Guardian Angel, impressing upon him that I’m only fooling and warning him to see to it that there is no misunderstanding when I go home” (5). O’Brien’s use of the word

“fooling” here is important, because a brief interaction concerning “fooling” early in De Selby and Augustine’s conversation returns us to Gilbert Sorrentino and the Dalkey Archive Press.

Referring to Saint Augustine’s renowned days of debauchery before turning to God, De Selby asks, “Were all your rutting ceremonials heterosexual?” Augustine responds passionately:

“Heterononsense! There is no evidence against me beyond what I wrote myself. Too vague. Be on your guard against that class of fooling. Nothing in black and white” (34-35). The saint’s pithy response to De Selby—there’s nothing in black and white—hints at the passage’s complexity. In particular, the “black and white” can be glossed in several ways. Most simply, the expression suggests that nothing exists in an either / or opposition; nothing is that simple. Yet

Augustine, in his early years, was greatly influenced by Manichaeism, which sets spiritual light against the darkness of the material world. Manichean duality therefore lodges itself in

Augustine’s response as well.

Most importantly, Augustine’s assertion that there’s “nothing” in black and white refers to print, the medium in which O’Brien theorizes fiction and literary history. Augustine emerges in a vacuum in The Dalkey Archive and proceeds to empty print of its content. Augustine’s assertion thus proposes that there is nothing in the printed word. Yet his assertion takes place in a novel whose response to literary tradition and whose own internal consistencies make it into a singular fiction. In this light, Augustine’s assertion must fail to transform print into a pure negation or total void. We are still left with this strange novel called The Dalkey Archive, after

all. What O’Brien attempts here is to empty print of its content—of its historically factual content especially—in order to make the “nothing” in print available as a “class of fooling,” an especially fitting definition of fiction as Flann O’Brien understands it. In The Dalkey Archive, the

Manichean dualism between the ideal and secular—which would describe separate worlds of absolute aesthetic autonomy (total void) and positive factual history (all is present)—collapses into the limbo expressed in black and white: literature. Literature is neither factual history, nor total void. It is an uncertain form. Calling to mind Auden’s epigram that poetry makes nothing happen, The Dalkey Archive makes “nothing” happen in the printed language of the novel. It continues to make nothing happen in the formation of the Dalkey Archive Press, which looks to

O’Brien’s theory of the novel as it sets into print a range of modern and contemporary fictions.

Material Economy and Literary History: Sorrentino and the Dalkey Archive Press, Redux

It is a coincidence of history that Flann O’Brien published The Dalkey Archive in 1964, the same year Gilbert Sorrentino published a book of poetry titled Black and White. The close publication dates make it doubtful that Sorrentino had read The Dalkey Archive and had time to make his book’s title a reference to a brief passage in the novel.41 It is doubtless, however, that

Sorrentino’s later novel, Mulligan Stew, works as an elaborate extension of Flann O’Brien’s oeuvre. Like O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, Mulligan Stew plays with the relationship between fictional authors and the fictional characters they adopt and create. Antony Lamont, the fictional author in Mulligan Stew, is a character created by the fictional author, Dermot Trellis, in Flann

41 In a letter to Sorrentino from May 10, 1980, John O’Brien wrote that he planned to name his little magazine, “Black and White.” His reasons are “1) too obvious to mention; 2) that’s the way I see the world and that’s the way this journal will see literature” (O’Brien). Whether O’Brien makes reference to Sorrentino’s book of poetry or to Saint Augustine’s speech in his first point remains unclear.

O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds. And as in At Swim, Sorrentino makes Dermot Trellis into

Lamont’s literary rival. The fiction Lamont ultimately writes employs Ned Beaumont (a character out of Dashiell Hammett’s fiction), a “created” character named Martin Halpin, and

Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby as its protagonists. Beaumont and Halpin are publishers in

New York and the bane of Lamont’s increasingly frustrated writing career. Since the novel does not have a plot as such, it suffices to say that as Antony Lamont becomes ever more frustrated with his stalled literary career, the chapters of his novel become increasingly unruly. Making his central figure into a comically stymied author, Sorrentino fools with literary history just as Flann

O’Brien did before him. But he also turns his novel into a meta-critical reflection on the extraneous pressures—primarily the publishing industry—exerted on the intra- and intertextual working of literary history.

Given the relationship between formal experimentation and authorial frustration in

Mulligan Stew, it is not without some bitter irony that Sorrentino failed to find a publisher for the novel for several years. When Grove accepted the book and published it in 1979, Sorrentino prefaced the novel—before the title page and copyright even—with eleven unnumbered pages of comically fictionalized rejection letters from publishers that dramatize the novel’s trials. Some letters lampoon the commercialism of for-profit publishing: “To be frank with you, I must show a profit to the parent company before I can even consider getting behind a project like yours”

(Sorrentino, first unnumbered page).42 This particular editor offers hope for future experimental works, however, which will be funded by the popular books he has recently published: “One already on the shelves, is, it seems to me, a necessary addition to ‘Beatle lore’ – The Compleat

Beatle Wardrobe Book” (first unnumbered). The next letter mocks the contradictory logic at

42 Due to the strange space these pages occupy in Sorrentino’s novel, I number them from the first to the eleventh unnumbered page.

work within publishing houses: “the conclusion, I’m afraid, is that the narrative doesn’t rise above its own irony—although one of our readers, a Sorrentino ‘fan,’ felt that the irony hasn’t the precision to cope with the strong narrative” (first unnumbered). Another letter ridicules publishing’s association with corporations: “I am about to leave to join my senior colleague

Dack Verlain in starting our own publishing house, a subsidiary, wholly owned, of Cynosure

Oil” (second unnumbered). Eventually, “Gil” sends a letter to Barney [Rosset of Grove Press], joking about the many suspicious characters who have rejected his work: “Can ‘Dr. Mullion

Blasto’ exist? He sounds like one of my characters” (seventh unnumbered). At Grove Mulligan

Stew finally receives an excellent review and recommendation to publish. The saga continues, however, because the larger publishing house that distributes Grove’s books refuses to distribute

Mulligan Stew. When Grove demands an explanation from “Hasard House,” its legal counsel replies that “Hasard House did not elect to distribute Mr. Sorrentino’s novel because it was not considered by our legal staff to be of sufficient merit to warrant the additional investment of inventory. ‘Merit’ in this context is to be spelled ‘bottom line,’ if you follow me” (eleventh unnumbered). Even with a good publisher behind it, Mulligan Stew, or some fictional version of it, is left in a legal limbo as tortuous as the lines of literary history developed within the novel’s narrative.

Hasard House’s final letter to Sorrentino and Grove Press, fictionalized as it may be, outlines the limbo between publication and distribution that Dalkey Archive Press sought to address. Arthur Gride, Hasard House’s General Counsel and an old miser in Charles Dickens’s

Nicholas Nickleby, explains: “Our decision [not to distribute Mulligan Stew] is not a rejection of

Mr. Sorrentino’s manuscript, which presumably has been accepted by Grove Press, heaven knows why! Be that, however, as it may, we here at Hasard House simply have exercised our

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option under our contract with Grove not to distribute that work for Grove, nor to have anything to do with that work. Grove is now free to arrange for its distribution by others and, if I may say so, lots of luck!” (eleventh unnumbered). Whether they are drawn from actual letters Sorrentino received, or whether they are pure invention, these last sentences detail the material and historical distributive limbo into which many lines of literary history lead. Hasard House is not rejecting Sorrentino’s book; they simply refuse to make it available to readers.

We come here to the crux that Sorrentino and John O’Brien identify as a problem for literary history: a book can be accepted and even published but nevertheless fall into a very real material-historical void. In Mulligan Stew, fiction internalizes this distributive limbo, which is a problem of material literary economy made into a problem for literary history and into a catalyst for literary-historical mythmaking. Fooling with the oeuvre of Flann O’Brien, whose second novel, The Third Policeman, went unpublished for over two decades until after his death,

Mulligan Stew acknowledges literary history’s reliance on publishers. Yet Sorrentino also suggests that the specific correspondences and contradictions generated in literature are not to be found through an institutional optic alone. Institutional histories can indeed tell us much about literary history. But too few institutional histories tell us how institutions can also make nothing happen, thereby suspending rather than guiding the uncertain operations of literary history.

Interviews with Black Writers and the Lacunae of Literary History

My argument up to this point has focused on the relationship between literary history and the material economies of literature, prizing Dalkey Archive Press for the way it holds up a broken mirror to the field of contemporary literature. Yet the Dalkey Archive Press generates voids of its own. If one follows the history of Dalkey’s development, it is clear that as the press

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changed its focus from Anglo-American to translated fiction in the 1990s, it had to give up other commitments O’Brien once had. The move from Anglo-American to translated fiction was highly savvy, as it addressed a gap in literary publishing for which funding was often readily available. The narrative of cultural diversification has led to the founding and funding of other literary translation presses, including Archipelago Books (founded in 2003 by Jill Schoolman) and Open Letter Press (founded in 2008 and supported by the University of Rochester). Aside from garnering state and federal funding within the U.S. for its publishing ventures, many of

Dalkey’s books in translation are underwritten by the cultural arms of various foreign governments, as is the case with Dalkey’s “Library of Korean Literature” or its “Estonian

Literature Series,” to name just two recent cooperative publishing efforts. Cooperative projects such as these have expanded the scope of contemporary writing in the U.S. and has introduced many never-before-translated works to reader in English. Still, Dalkey’s savvy publishing strategies and cooperative projects have led to the nearly complete abandonment of what had once been John O’Brien’s research emphasis: experimental writing by African American authors.

These authors, whom I discuss in this final section, form the backdrop of what I see as the foundational moment of the press: John O’Brien’s first letter to Gilbert Sorrentino requesting an interview. O’Brien initiated this contact for two reasons. First, his own criticism was facing continual rejection from academic journals. Second, the most success he had had was in undertaking a series of interviews in the early 1970s that was published as Interviews with Black

Writers with Liveright in 1973. The success of O’Brien’s interviews with African American writers prompted him to write to Sorrentino, as O’Brien saw author interviews as a way forward for his academic career and was considering publishing a second book of interviews on

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American experimental fiction that omitted the organizing rubric of race. O’Brien never produced this second volume, however, because his interests were redirected by Sorrentino’s guidance. Sorrentino’s guiding hand led O’Brien to establish the Review of Contemporary

Fiction and Dalkey Archive Press, both of which have been important for refiguring contemporary writing published in the United States, both in English and in translation. Yet what turned into O’Brien’s lifelong projects left Interviews with Black Writers as a confounding lacuna in the history of the emergence of Dalkey Archive Press.

Interviews with Black Writers moves provocatively through African American literary history of the twentieth century. Arna Bontemps, who died just a year after O’Brien interviewed him in the spring of 1972, had firsthand experience of the Harlem Renaissance and lived on to chronicle and eventually archive the movement’s literary and intellectual history as a writer and a librarian. Ralph Ellison stands in in the Interviews as the most well-known African American writer of the mid-twentieth-century. Julian Mayfield represents politically radical authorship of the civil rights era, having published his most political novel, The Grand Parade in 1961, just before fleeing from the FBI to Ghana, where he worked for Kwame Nkrumah for several years.

In 1962 Mayfield edited THE WORLD WITHOUT THE BOMB: The Papers of the Accra

Assembly, which chronicles a major event in what Jean Allman calls “the struggle against

‘nuclear imperialism’ that emerged out of the Pan-African struggle for freedom in the late 1950s and early 1960s” (83).43 Ishmael Reed, just then on the verge of publishing Mumbo Jumbo, dazzles with his iconoclasm and his vociferous charges against Western aesthetics and idealism in terms that call Charles Olson’s anti-essentialist metaphysics to mind. A remarkable aspect of this collection of interviews is O’Brien’s foresight in undertaking it. Trained as a scholar of

43 For the best account of the life and literary works of Julian Mayfield, see Kevin K. Gaines.

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twentieth-century American literature, he understood early in his career—long before the height of the canon wars of the 1980s and 1990s—that the dearth of criticism on African American literature was a critical failure on the part of literary historians. Moreover, he recognized that such a failure skews critical understanding of American literary history. His book of interviews thus marks an important moment in O’Brien’s intellectual development in which he and the authors he interviews pursue questions of tradition, experimentation, and the task of publishing work in a literary and academic environment often indifferent to writing by black writers.

Each of the writers I mention above—Bontemps, Ellison, Mayfield, and Reed— comments critically on problems of publishing as they relate to African American letters.44 I focus here on those comments from Bontemps and Reed. O’Brien asks Arna Bontemps why Jean

Toomer and Claude McKay were not more popular in their time. Bontemps responds that “The time wasn’t right. Even if they had written different things, the American culture was such that it would not have accepted them. They couldn’t have written anything that would have been wholly acceptable as long as they were identified as blacks. Our first attacks had to be directed against the closed doors; just as the generation of the sixties had to be preoccupied with getting into restaurants, theaters, and trains, so the writers of the Renaissance had to be concerned with trying to get published by standard publishers” (6-7). Here, Bontemps addresses the cultural

44 Although Amiri Baraka declined to be interviewed for O’Brien’s volume, he addresses the hazards of publishing for African Americans in essays such as “The Myth of a ‘Negro Literature’” (1962) and “Black Writing” (1963). In the former, he renounces most writing by African Americans as “middle class” writing and urges authors to write, if possible, from outside the mainstream. In the latter, Jones addresses the publishing industry and the black writer simultaneously, warning the black writer that “Negro Material is hot right now, to quote a knowledgeable white man. But even hot, there are many books by Negroes that will not be published because they, the publishers will tell you, ‘duplicate our other Negro material.’ Though, of course, they will publish as many duplicated junks about ofays as they can” (“Black Writing” 162). Jones again urges resistance to the mainstream of the “commercial novel in America” and the “merchant’s reality” before concluding that “The Negro, as he exists in America now, and has always existed in this place (certainly after formal slavery), is a natural nonconformist” (“Black Writing” 164). Black writing’s nonconformity thus resists the commercial logic of publishing “industrialists,” who realize that “A book – no matter what you have to say in it – is just a commercial object, and Negro Material is not the commercial object that gets the best sales” (“Black Writing” 162).

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obstacles black writers faced in attempting to publish their work in the early part of the twentieth century. Even if a black writer wrote commercial fiction, the odds of getting it published by a mainstream publisher were slim and the chances of it finding a wide readership were equally bad. Bontemps’ comments require that we consider again how the literary field can be founded upon voids more radically vacuous—to the point of non-existence—than anything Flann O’Brien could dream up in his novel. While Flann O’Brien’s The Dalkey Archive places a productive void as its diegetic center, imagining a kind of radical contemporaneity within it—where all of history can be simultaneously contemporary—at a very practical level literary fields create temporality through the erasure of other literatures and traditions.45 Bontemps’ charge that the

“time wasn’t right” for black writers saddles literary historians with a new variation of

Sorrentino’s claim that “contemporary literature is only certain people.” For Bontemps and his contemporaries, “certain people” were almost certain to be white.

For Ishmael Reed, one of O’Brien’s liveliest interlocutors, the void upon which literature rests is mostly ignorance on the part of America’s reading public, but this ignorance is more likely to leave writing by African American authors in the dark.46 O’Brien interviewed Reed immediately prior to the publication of Mumbo Jumbo, a novel that challenges the traditions and assumptions of Western literature and culture by charting the spread of the viral African

American cultural expression—Jes’ Grew—across the United States. Reed employs the viral

45 Pedro Erber addresses the racial dimension of “contemporaneity” and literary history in his essay on “Contemporaneity and Its Discontents.” Erber follows the work of anthropologist Johannes Fabian to claim that we need a better conception of contemporaneity, quoting Fabian affirmatively in his assertion that “the radical contemporaneity of mankind is a project” (44). Erber counters the critical positions that argue for a careful attentiveness to the many temporalities that exist as the result of uneven development and instead argues that the West defines contemporaneity against the regressive temporality of its others. Erber might acknowledge many “temporalities” existing among different cultures, but argues that these temporalities must be understood in their contemporaneity, which cannot be measured by the West’s metric. 46I am alluding here to Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, which considers how the history of African Americans in the U.S. for over 400 years has affected the aesthetics, forms, and ideologies of American literature.

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outbreak of black culture as a metaphoric means for challenging Western religious, philosophical, and literary foundations. The alternative episteme Reed traces in Mumbo Jumbo expresses itself in Reed’s brief and provocative interview with O’Brien as well.47 In an outburst about the misidentified lineage of American literary tradition and his own frustrations with how his work is reviewed, Reed remarks,

Everyone thought that I had made some innovations but the more I get into Afro-

American culture, the more I find that I’ve really not done anything that former

writers haven’t. Two-thirds of American literature is the part of the iceberg you

don’t see. I think that there’s so much of American literature that we don’t know.

It’s been hidden and suppressed. I was reading a dandy book called Caleb

Catlum’s America (1936) by Vincent McHugh.48 It’s better than Melville but

since it’s written in vernacular and slang, and since it has something to do with

what’s going on here instead of the eternal verities of Europe, and since it doesn’t

have a style reminiscent of Shakespeare or Moby Dick, it’s been cast aside. It’s

like a great fantasy, a science fiction book based on American folklore. Its style is

absolutely fascinating and innovative. So how could I say that I was an innovator

when the sort of book exists? Most American aren’t educated to American

culture; that’s why they don’t know themselves and are confused. (173)

47 While Dalkey Archive Press has never published Mumbo Jumbo, likely due to the book’s considerable popularity and profitability since its initial publication, it currently publishes six of Reed’s other works, all of which except the collection The Plays (2009) and the novel Juice! (2011) were first published by other publishers. Works by Reed in Dalkey’s current list include Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1971), The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974), which has the same hero as Mumbo Jumbo, The Terrible Twos (1982), Reckless Eyeballing (1986), The Terrible Threes (1989), The Plays (2009), and Juice! (2011). 48 I should note here that it is very likely that Reed was familiar with other works by McHugh, particularly since McHugh’s novel I am Thinking of My Darling (1943) uses the plot device of a viral outbreak in New York City that makes everyone happy and reckless. Although the plat device of the viral outbreak is not invented by McHugh, Reed’s admiration for McHugh’s other work suggests a correspondence between I am Thinking of My Darling and Mumbo Jumbo.

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Reed’s outburst here expresses the desire that the public, including critics, read more widely and outside of the established canon, particularly in African American writing.49 To claim Vincent

McHugh to be “better than Melville” is a provocative claim, but it does the work of emphasizing the “hidden and suppressed” literary traditions that the Dalkey Archive Press sought to uncover beginning ten years later.

Dalkey Archive Press has done a remarkable job recovering the “hidden and suppressed” elements of American literature, including keeping many of Ishmael Reed’s books in print, such as the satirical western novel Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969). In response to a question

O’Brien poses about this novel and about creating an African American literary tradition, Reed says that “‘To create our own fictions’ has caused quite a reaction. The book is really artistic guerilla warfare against the Historical Establishment. I think the people we want to aim our questioning toward are those who supply the nation with its mind, tutor its mind, develop and cultivate its mind, and these are the people involved in culture” (179). This comment aims in two directions. First, Reed once again aims his criticism at the public and at the “Historical

Establishment” that tutors the public’s mind, strangely echoing a Kantian call for enlightenment.

And second, Reed addresses his answer to an academic attempting to uncover a “hidden and suppressed” tradition within American literature. If Reed’s answer includes O’Brien in its pluralized “we,” it suggests that Reed finds a critical companion in O’Brien. That O’Brien keeps most of Reed’s work in print still today confirms this companionship. A monolithically conceptualized “Historical Establishment” just might, according to Reed and eventually O’Brien, be undermined by other kinds of history, perhaps the “riddling specificity” that literary texts

49 Vincent McHugh, to my knowledge, is not African American. Reed apparently looks to him here because Caleb Catlum’s America participates in “urban ghetto traditions” in which Reed takes interest (Mvuyekure 206). Reed includes The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari by F.W. Murnau, as examples of this tradition (Mvuyekure 206).

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“intrude… upon the historicizing enterprise” (Caserio 150). In this passionate conversation between a writer and a critic who would become a publisher we can glimpse a vision of how literature ought to work—the kinds of thought it is capable of introducing into American culture—and what is at stake when we examine structures of literary publication and reception.

And yet, of the 17 authors the young John O’Brien interviewed for Interviews with Black

Writers, Ishmael Reed is the only one he has published with the Dalkey Archive Press. When

Sorrentino wrote to O’Brien in 1974 listing the “certain people” who make up “contemporary literature,” Ishmael Reed and Amiri Baraka were the only two black writers on the list. “Outside those two, you’re not too cool,” Sorrentino wrote. Granted, some of the writers O’Brien interviewed have had little trouble keeping their work in print. Invisible Man has never gone out of print. Ernest Gaines has been popular enough to keep many of his works in print, even if some have been recovered by reprint presses more recently with the rise of print-on-demand publishing. John Edgar Wideman, similarly, has had a long and fairly blessed career in terms of reception and keeping his books in print. Alice Walker, the same. John O’Brien also distances himself from some of the authors he interviewed even in the introduction to the collection.

O’Brien writes, for instance, that “Ann Petry, Julian Mayfield, and Cyrus Colter are really outside of [the African American] tradition and are better understood if seen in the mainstream of American realistic fiction” (vii). For O’Brien, the African American literary tradition “is a literary rather than a racial tradition, defined not by its complexion, but by literary styles, themes, myths, heroes, structures, and influences…. The sources of the black literary tradition are clear enough: folk stories, spirituals, and blues songs that came out of the slavery experience” (vii).

Petry, Mayfield, and Colter do not fit this description. But Arna Bontemps, William Demby,

Michael S. Harper, Clarence Major, John A. Williams, and Charles Wright certainly do, and

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often in the experimental ways O’Brien approves of in the many white Anglo-American writers he has published. The great majority of works by all of the authors in the last list, however, remain out-of-print.

It is a publisher’s prerogative to publish the books he or she sees fit. The publisher serves an evaluative function—as a gatekeeper—and readers come to trust a publisher’s judgment based on the list of books the publisher ultimately sees into print. The implicit claims: this is good and worthy of publication; you should buy and read this. Here I run up against a critical problem: a void that, while addressable, is unaccountable. I cannot say why O’Brien does not publish more work by African American writers. They are not completely absent from Dalkey’s list, but are disproportionately few.50 Aside from Sorrentino’s tongue-in-cheek, idiomatic “you’re not too cool,” the many letters sent between Sorrentino and O’Brien are free of talk about race and racism and Sorrentino clearly admires work by Baraka and Reed. Sorrentino even worked with

Baraka on the little magazine Kulchur in New York in the early 1960s. The subject of race, in short, hardly comes up at all. While I am not accusing O’Brien of any overtly racist gatekeeping as the publisher of Dalkey Archive Press, the absence is worth commenting on as I bring this chapter to a close.

What do we do with this palpable absence? Turning to Toni Morrison might be one way of circling the void. In Playing in the Dark Morrison writes:

For some time now I have been thinking about the validity or vulnerability of a

certain set of assumptions conventionally accepted among literary historians and

critics and circulated as ‘knowledge.’ This knowledge holds that traditional,

50 The tagged link for “African American” literature on Dalkey’s website will bring the reader to the works of exactly three authors: C.S. Giscombe, Ishmael Reed, and Jay Wright. Three is an exceptional few with a press that has published works by over 100 American authors in its over thirty-year history.

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canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the four-

hundred-year-old presence of, first, Africans and then African-Americans in the

United States. It assumes that this presence—which shaped the body politic, the

Constitution, and the entire history of the culture—has had no significant place or

consequence in the origin and development of that culture’s literature. Moreover,

such knowledge assumes that the characteristics of our national literature emanate

from a particular ‘Americanness’ that is separate from and unaccountable to this

presence. There seems to be a more or less tacit agreement among literary

scholars that, because American literature has been clearly the preserve of white

male views, genius, and power, those views, genius, and power are without

relationship to and removed from the overwhelming presence of black people in

the United States. This agreement is made about a population that preceded every

American writer of renown and was, I have come to believe, one of the most

furtively radical impinging forces on the country’s literature. The contemplation

of this black presence is central to any understanding of our national literature and

should not be permitted to hover at the margins of the literary imagination. (4-5)

Morrison’s extended observation leads her to wonder whether major characteristics and themes in canonical American literature—mostly written by white Americans—“are not in fact responses to a dark, abiding, signing, Africanist presence” (5). My line of questioning here is more focused: is the Dalkey Archive haunted by an Africanist presence? And is contemporary literature as it is configured within Dalkey Archive Press largely “unaccountable” to the presence of African and African American literature, even though we know O’Brien produced a compelling book of interviews?

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The simple answers: yes on both accounts. But it is more complicated than that. John

O’Brien’s abandonment of nearly all of the African American writers he interviewed, even those whose works he championed in the introductions, such as William Demby’s The Catacombs, repeats the racial haunting at the heart of Flann O’Brien’s The Dalkey Archive. You will recall that the figural “archive” at the center of The Dalkey Archive is a vacuous cave in which St.

Augustine gives himself bodily form and holds a discussion with the scientist De Selby. After several pages of De Selby’s inquiry into Augustine’s history, De Selby begins one final series of questions on a point he cannot let rest (the dialogue in all italics is St. Augustine’s and is printed so in the book):

- We must be going very soon.

- Yes. Your air is nearly gone.

-There is one more question on a matter that has always baffled me and on which

nothing written about you by yourself or others gives any illumination. Are you a

Nigger?

- I am a Roman.

I suspect your Roman name is an affectation or a disguise. You are of Berber

stock, born in Numidia. Those people were non-white. You are far more aligned

with Carthage than Rome, and there are Punic corruptions in your Latin.

- Civis Romanus sum.

- The people of your homeland today are called Arabs. Arabs are not white.

- Berbers were blond white people, with lovely blue eyes.

- All true Africans, notwithstanding the racial stew in that continent, are to some

extent niggers. They are descendants of Noah’s son Ham.

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- You must not overlook the African sun. I was a man that was very easily

sunburnt….

- If I ask it, will you appear to me here tomorrow?

- I have no tomorrow. I am. I have only nowness.

- Then we shall wait. Thanks and goodbye. (43)

De Selby and his companions then leave the cave and make “their way back to this world” (43).

Aside from the racial vulgarities, De Selby here addresses a well-known aspect of St.

Augustine’s life: he was born in and worked for most of his life in the Roman province of

Numidia, in present-day Algeria. For De Selby, this fact is almost irrelevant compared with his more pressing question: is St. Augustine black, i.e. “Are you a Nigger”? Augustine refuses to answer in the terms set by the question, and so replies simply, “I am a Roman.”

Earlier in this chapter, I characterized the archival cave in The Dalkey Archive as a vacuous space in which historical figures come back to life, making it a figuration of Flann

O’Brien’s conception of the novel as a playful literary form, a “class of fooling.” De Selby’s final questioning of St. Augustine, however, refigures the Dalkey archive as a response to the

“dark, abiding, signing, Africanist presence” that Morrison sees as central to American literature.

O’Brien’s invocation of St. Augustine, of course, does not address American literary history but rather “Western” literary history, especially as the Confessions of St. Augustine and City of God have been foundational texts in Western literature, philosophy, and Christianity. O’Brien’s placement of this later scene, which dramatizes the indeterminability of Augustine’s “race,” for lack of a better word, compels us to reconsider O’Brien’s use of “race” as a productive, void-like referent upon which the novel founds itself.

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In his book Ashes Taken for Fire, Kevin Bell argues that “literary modernism is obsessed with the ways in which language supplants the nothingness that precedes it. More relentlessly than any other, this literature thematizes both the profound absence prior to language and the strategic concealment of that void by language. This book is concerned with how such aesthetic investigations undo the essential logic of cultural identity” (1). There’s no doubt that Flann

O’Brien is interested in the way that language founds itself upon a void. “There’s nothing in black and white” claims Saint Augustine in reference to writing. Yet Augustine also figures the resistance to “the essential logic of cultural identity” to which Bell refers. Augustine continually confounds De Selby’s attempt to categorize him. When De Selby asks if all of Augustine’s sexual encounters were heterosexual, Augustine responds that De Selby should not believe everything in writing because there’s “nothing in black and white.” When De Selby asks

Augustine to identify himself as black, Augustine refuses. In this sense, De Selby’s meeting with

Augustine stages an encounter between categorical, instrumental reason and what Kevin Bell calls the “nonknowledge, failure, or ‘chaos’ that utilitarian or instrumental language necessarily suppresses” (2). As vulgar as De Selby’s line of questioning is, then, the point of the scene is in

Augustine’s refusal to answer in the terms De Selby sets. Augustine, that is, the North African figure of Western thought, refuses De Selby’s contemporary rubrics and systems of knowledge.

While Flann O’Brien makes Augustine’s “Africanist presence” into a statement about

Western knowledge and fiction in The Dalkey Archive, the Dalkey Archive Press has continually missed the opportunity to carry out a similar task. One could certainly see Ishmael Reed as an intellectual companion to Flann O’Brien, and Dalkey has done well to keep his works in print and make Reed and Flann O’Brien part of the same vertiginous booklist that is the Dalkey

Archive. But the very real void of writing by African American and Afro-Caribbean authors in

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the Dalkey Archive is not an aesthetic challenge to the “Historical Establishment” as Reed sees it, but rather an all-too-common reinforcement of it through oversight. Such oversights, more powerfully than the distribution limbo Sorrentino found himself in, suspend numerous narratives and counter-narratives of American literary history. These are voids we cannot read.

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CHAPTER 3. Hambone’s Call: Intellectual Labor and the Invitation to Literary Hospitality

“‘Hambone, Hambone, where you been?’ ‘Round the world and I’m goin’ again’”

Introduction

Whereas the Dalkey Archive Press laid its foundations by looking back to Irish literary modernism, Nathaniel Mackey’s literary journal Hambone establishes its genealogy in the deep history of black experimentalism in the United States and the Americas. Having begun around the same time as Dalkey Archive Press—DAP first began publishing in 1984 and Hambone in

1982, though both were conceived of in the 1970s and took several years to get underway—

Hambone provides an account of American literature that places the “abiding, signing, Africanist presence” (Morrison 5) front and center in its conception of experimental writing in the

Americas. This chapter thus complements and responds to the formation of the Dalkey Archive

Press even if Nathaniel Mackey and John O’Brien, to my knowledge, have never themselves been correspondents. Given that Hambone’s primary emphasis has been on poetry rather than fiction, the journal also recalls Charles Olson’s poetic theorization of the literary journal as a pragmatic and conceptual space for the constitution of new literary and cultural models for postwar America. Whereas Olson theorized the literary journal as a means for opening up poetry to its historical contexts at the height of the New Critics’ influence in the United States, however,

Mackey established Hambone in the milieu that also gave rise to the culture and canon wars of the 1980s. While Hambone shares commonalities with Olson’s theorization of literary journals, then, it operates in its own historical juncture and should be approached according to its

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specificities rather than as a mere iteration of Olson’s work three decades earlier. This is my approach in the proceeding chapter.

In an essay titled “Editing Hambone,” author, editor, and critic Nathaniel Mackey looks back on the history of the literary journal he has edited and published since early in his career.

Mackey reports that the journal was initially founded in the early 1970s as the publishing outlet for the Committee on Black Performing Arts at Stanford University, where he was a graduate student, and that it began with a different title under its first editor (Paracritical Hinge 244; hereafter cited as PH). The initial editor left Stanford for a job before the first issue was completed; Mackey took over the editorship and published the inaugural issue in the spring of

1974.51 Mackey published that first issue under a new and noteworthy title: Hambone. Following its publication, Mackey also left Stanford and no one on the Committee continued with the work.

Only after carrying around the idea of reviving the journal for several years did Mackey return to it in 1982, this time as sole editor and publisher (PH 244). Hambone had called him back.

Since the publication of Hambone 2 in the autumn of 1982, the journal has appeared regularly, with intervals of about one year in the 1980s and early 1990s that have since lengthened to two or three years. The tapering frequency of publication has had an inverse relation to the development of Mackey’s own writing career. While Mackey had published a chapbook entitled Four for Trane (1978) prior to resuming his editorship of Hambone, his first major works with national distribution did not appear until the mid-1980s. Eroding Witness, his first book-length collection of poems, was selected by Michael S. Harper for the National Poetry

Series and published in 1985 by the University of Illinois Press. And Bedouin Hornbook, volume

51 This first issue is remarkably difficult to acquire, though one can now see its table of contents on Hambone’s newly created webpage, www.hambone.org/back-issues. The first issue includes writers who have since established prominent literary careers: Michael S. Harper, Ishmael Reed, Gloria Watkins (better known in literary circles as bell hooks), Al Young, and of course “Nate” Mackey himself (“Back Issues”).

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one of Mackey’s ongoing epistolary fiction about an avant-garde jazz ensemble—now with four volumes published and letters in the sequence continuing to appear in a range of little magazines—was published in 1986 as part of the Callaloo Fiction Series. Since the publication of these early works, Mackey’s distinct contribution to American letters has been increasingly visible, signaled in recent years by his receipt of the National Book Award for Splay Anthem in

2006,52 a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2010, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize by the American Poetry

Foundation in 2014, and the Bollingen Prize in 2015. These last two were awarded for “lifetime achievement,” making some space within his still-growing body of work for Mackey’s particular accomplishments with Hambone.

Mackey’s ongoing work with Hambone may be understood within the broader context of his “lifetime accomplishments,” particularly as the intellectual labor of literary editing works in a literary economy still dominated by authorship and by “prevailing divisions of labor” in the critical field that often ascribe African American creative expression to a stable black identity

(PH 239). As James English has shown, honoring an author’s work is the most assured way to generate the symbolic capital literary prizes seek to bestow. According to English, offering a prize to a literary work tends to disrupt “exchangist” (English 6) approaches to the generation of value, primarily because the value of a prize—and the work for which it is given—tends to be indeterminate. Since a prize is offered for a work whose value is unassured or even unknowable, the granting of prizes, English points out, precipitates what Jacques Derrida describes as a

“residue… [or] remainder that no one knows what to do with” (qtd. in English 6). Prizes function as both a supplement and remainder within an exchange economy. I turn to this prized remainder

52 Aldon Lynn Nielsen has noted that this was the first time in the history of the National Book Award that the poetry award went to a black writer for a discrete volume of poems rather than for a collected or selected works: http://heatstrings.blogspot.com/2008/03/more-from-louisville.html (Nielsen, “More from Louisville”).

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to propose that Hambone itself acts as a “remainder that no one knows what to do with” within an economy of authorial prestige.

Take the Ruth Lilly Prize. While the first two of Mackey’s major prizes—the National

Book Award and the Guggenheim—are awarded for a single, authored work, the Ruth Lilly

Poetry Prize for “lifetime accomplishments” values a wider range of a writer’s undertakings: the myriad tasks of the literary laborer.53 Mackey’s reputation certainly rests upon his authored works. Yet he has also been a committed editor, professor, and disc jockey for many years, and he has sought to make these various tasks part of his broader engagement with critical, literary, musical, and intellectual history. By making other kinds of work integral to the authored work he is most acknowledged for—a point this chapter will address at length—Mackey asks us to reconsider the privileged status of authorship within the economy of artistic and intellectual history. Departing from the role as simply author, Mackey’s wide-ranging poetic engagements help to challenge what Michel Foucault once identified as the “author function.” In “What is an

Author?” Foucault writes that “The author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning” (118). Read in light of English’s recent work on prestige, Foucault’s invocation of

“thrift” can be understood to work in the service of value and evaluation: the “author function”

(108) limits the proliferation of meaning, thereby making the author and the authored work the most appropriate receptacle of literary value.54 I want to take the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize seriously, then, in its nod to “lifetime accomplishments” by looking to the critical function that

Nathaniel Mackey’s editorship of Hambone performs: namely, the testing of authorship against

53 Andrew Mossin, for instance, remarks that Mackey’s various literary undertakings “suggest a model of the poet as fully engaged (and institutionally situated) culture worker” (Mossin 560). 54 In Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity, Aaron Jaffe reports that with the rise of literary celebrity authors began to develop an “authorial imprimatur” (3) which they wielded for the purpose of self-promotion and cross- promotion within a diffuse literary field. Such an imprimatur makes the “author function” powerful beyond its initial limiting function of simply identifying an author as the creator of a specific work, thought, or piece of text.

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the often overlooked work of editorship. Could editorship be a means of calling on the

“proliferation of meaning” against the “principle of thrift” that authorship has become? And a final question that issues from Hambone: can a writer’s accomplishments be wholly his or her own?

I address such questions concerning the indeterminacy of literary value—an indeterminacy which provokes the incessant generation of claims about literary value—by proposing that Mackey’s “aesthetic,” the most symbolically valuable aspect of an author’s corpus, disperses itself across a broad literary field in part through the day-to-day work he takes up with Hambone. Within an economy of authorial prestige, Hambone is an outlier: a centrifugal force within a centripetal economy. “Centrifugal work” Mackey writes, “begins with good-bye, wants to bid all givens good-bye. It begins with what words will not do, paint will not do, whatever medium we find ourselves working in will not do” (Paracritical Hinge 239).55

Centrifugal work flies from the forces of an often centralizing literary economy, making

Hambone a testing ground for the centripetal and centrifugal currents at work in the processes of assembling contemporary American literature. I recognize that Hambone could not have become the magazine it did had Mackey not been an author. His work as a writer of poetry and fiction put him into contact with many of the writers he eventually published, and so his editorial work undoubtedly benefited from his authorial renown. Likewise, his authorial imprimatur certainly gained value as a literary taste maker, wherein his editorial work bolstered his authorial status.

Mackey’s editorship cannot be entirely dissociated from his authorship. Nor should it be. Given

55 One practical example I can think of: the difficulty imposed on literary historians by those oddball authors who write one masterwork that does not fit easily into the rubrics of literary history. Roberto Calasso defines these as “singular books” and offers a good list of them published by his Italian publishing house, Adelphi Edizioni. They include Alfred Kubin’s The Other Side, Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, and Solitary Confinement by Christopher Burney. For more on “singular books,” see Calasso, 18-79.

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that the most prestigious artifacts of intellectual labor (works of art) tend to elevate the value of the ancillary artifacts of artistic labor—letters, marginalia, and other miscellany of a literary corpus—what follows may simply garner further prestige for Mackey’s editorial work and the journal that issues from it. And yet, Mackey’s editorial work mounts a significant challenge to the centripetal aggregation of literary value that Loren Glass has associated with the incorporation of avant-garde writing (Glass).56 With Hambone, Mackey follows several of his professed literary forebears—Amiri Baraka, Robert Duncan, and Charles Olson among them— whose work looked to the process-driven “opening of the field” (Duncan) as the opening of a conceptual space for a dispersed aesthetic.57 Hambone carries on this work of process-derived dispersal: like Robert Creeley in Olson’s dedication of The Maximus Poems, Hambone functions as a “Figure of Outward” (Olson 3). But here the figure takes form in the shape of a literary journal that tests value production within an often “incorporating” literary economy.58

56 With the phrase, “the incorporation of avant-garde writing,” I allude to Loren Glass’s book, Counterculture Colophon: Grove Press, the Evergreen Review, and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde. Glass argues that Grove was such a strong node in the network of avant-garde literature in the United States—and that it so effectively democratized avant-garde writing by making it widely available to college students—that it also effectively centralized avant-garde literature, thereby marking the end of avant-garde. 57 Mackey has written on all three of these authors, including a book-length manuscript on Duncan, eventually published as an extended essay, “Gassire’s Lute: Robert Duncan’s Vietnam War Poems,” in Paracritical Hinge in 2005. Mackey has also cited Baraka’s tremendous influence in an interview with Christopher Funkhauser (PH 251- 52). It is useful to keep Baraka’s influential role as a literary editor in mind—as LeRoi Jones—in the 1960s, specifically with the journals Kulchur, Yūgen, and The Floating Bear. Finally, Mackey associates Olson with Baraka and Duncan for his early emphasis on the processes of poetic expression. In an essay on “Black Music in the Poetry of Amiri Baraka,” Mackey cites all three writers on the same page and writes that “The most obvious of the ‘persistent similarities’ among, say, Olson’s or Baraka’s poetry, the painting of Jackson Pollock, and the music of Coleman or Taylor is their exaltation of process” (PH 32). I will show in this chapter that Mackey employs a process poetics in his editorship of Hambone as a means of expanding our understanding of intellectual labor and its relation to the literary work. 58 Equally important to Mackey’s “dispersed aesthetic” is the history of the African diaspora and its legacy in black international literary practices. Brent Hayes Edwards accounts for the relationship between black internationalism and literary culture in The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. There, he remarks that “The ‘spindles and joints’ of a print culture that aims to construct the ‘fact’ of blackness, that attempts to intervene in conditions of great suffering and social upheaval, that strains to be ‘actively equal’ to the exigencies of crisis and advocacy, are located above all at the stratum of periodical culture” (8). Edwards’s book, which addresses primarily the first half of the twentieth century, serves as a touchstone throughout this chapter on Mackey’s journal, which shares the aim of its antecedents: to perplex the construction of the “‘fact’ of blackness.”

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Some theorists of the avant-garde, including Loren Glass and Paul Mann, have tended to overlook the centrifugal workings of intellectual labor in the production of avant-garde discourse, thereby making the labor of literary gathering into a method of either the incorporation of the avant-garde to liberal-economic discourse (Glass) or of the recuperation of avant-garde discourse to an economic model (Mann). I focus on Mann here, for Mackey’s work responds most forcefully to his position. In his self-assessment of his book The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde, Paul Mann remarks that

If this book is of any use at all, it will be as a reflection on the medium in which

all critical texts are suspended and circulated, as a fractionally more alert and

therefore disturbed glimpse of the centripetal currents of even the most marginal

and transgressive projects. (4)

Mann’s basic point is that criticism and the “discourse of the avant-garde” alike recuperate avant-garde projects to a capitalist economy. Note here a distinction in Mann’s position: between

“critical texts” and “transgressive projects.” Mann at first appears to embrace a distinction between the two. Yet the distinction washes away in the centripetal currents of the most operative term in the sentence: the unnamed “medium.” For Mann, the “medium in which all critical texts are suspended and circulated” is the discourse of the avant-garde itself. “Discourse precedes all art” (5), he writes, and then adds that “to privilege the discursive character of the avant-garde is above all to privilege its economic over either its aesthetic or its ideological aspect” (6). To summarize, the discourse of the avant-garde is fundamentally an economic discourse, at least in Mann’s view. With this view in mind, we can summarize Mann’s main position as follows: the discourse of the avant-garde entails that avant-garde work recuperates potentially radical thought to the field of economic exchange.

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Yet Mann’s emphasis on discourse creates a blind-spot in his argument: it privileges the economic function of avant-garde discourse without giving recourse to the labor that produces and affects further discourse. Since discourse precedes all art, it also recuperates all intellectual labor in advance so that labor is always incorporated by the discourse that binds it. By this account, criticism and avant-garde projects might as well be equivalent, for neither escapes the economy, literary or otherwise. Mann concludes that the “discourse of the death of the avant- garde is the discourse of its recuperation” (14-15). Mann, however, has a medium problem. Even if we take it as a given that discourse, as medium, works to recuperate avant-garde expression to the capitalist economy in which it exists—avant-garde art cannot be independent of economy—

Mann could do better to acknowledge the function of both intellectual labor and media in redirecting the centripetal currents of the discourse that precedes them. This is not to make a claim for the metaphysical escape of avant-garde practices from a discursive economy—my goal here is not autonomous art—but to ask for a better, more nuanced account of how varieties of intellectual labor and the material economies of art affect the discourse that anticipates their arrival. If discourse is a centripetal, centralizing force, we should attempt to account for the centrifugal, de-centralizing forces brought about by working via media. As Mackey’s work with

Hambone shows, operative constraints give rise to centrifugality within an otherwise consolidating discursive economy.

Mackey’s work on Hambone launches a centrifugal claim within what I am calling his aesthetics of dispersal: dissensus—a form of dissent within a centripetal economy—emerges from relatively trivial forms of intellectual labor. In his introduction to Rancière’s Dissensus: On

Politics and Aesthetics, editor and translator Steven Corcoran writes that Rancière’s dissensus works in opposition to consensus, which “is defined by ‘the idea of the proper’ and the

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distribution of places of the proper and the improper it implies” (Corcoran 2). By contrast, “the logic of dissensus consists in the demonstration of a certain impropriety which disrupts the identity and reveals the gap between poiesis and aisthesis. The logic underlying these practices is a materialist and anti-essentialist one.” (Corcoran 2-3). For Rancière, dissensus finds its corresponding aesthetic in what he calls the “aesthetic regime of the arts.” In The Politics of

Aesthetics Rancière writes that “The aesthetic regime of the arts is the regime that strictly identifies art in the singular and frees it from any specific rule, from any hierarchy of the arts, subject matter, and genres. Yet it does so by destroying the mimetic barrier that distinguished ways of doing and making affiliated with art from other ways of doing and making, a barrier that separated its rules from the order of social occupations” (23). If the logic underlying dissensus is a “materialist and anti-essentialist one,” and the aesthetic regime destroys the “mimetic barrier that distinguished ways of doing and making affiliated with art from other ways of doing and making,” then we can conclude that dissensus emerges as an anti-essentialist politics that entails the recategorization—even better, the de-categorization—of the kinds of practices that have distinguished between “art” and “not art.” Rancière attempts to blur such distinctions through a de-conceptualization of “ways of doing and making” that could imagine non-artistic doing and making to be fundamentally related to, perhaps even indistinguishable from, artistic making.

Like Rancière’s aesthetic regime, Mackey’s working methods perplex the boundaries between intellectual labor and aesthetics. Whereas Rancière’s dissensus functions by an impropriety that disrupts categorical identity—the proper thing in its proper place—Mackey develops a method he calls “discrepant engagement.” This is probably the most famous of

Mackey’s critical concept, and lends the title to Mackey’s first full-length volume of criticism

Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (1993). In

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the introduction to the volume Mackey describes discrepant engagement as a series of “practices that, in the interest of opening presumably closed orders of identity and signification, accent fissure, fracture, incongruity, the rickety, imperfect fit between word and world” (Discrepant

Engagement 19; hereafter DE). The “practices” Mackey refers to here take many forms, from editorial to critical work, and from writing serial fiction to writing serial poetry. One may even find a further outlier in Mackey’s work as a radio disc jockey in Santa Cruz where he hosted the program “Tanganyika Strut” for several years.59 Mackey’s body of work invites us to read it as an ongoing manifestation of discrepant engagement. The “closed orders of identity” Mackey associates with rigid categories of artistic and intellectual expression break down in practice.

Discrepant engagement, as a material, intellectual, and artistic practice, forms a practical politics similar to the operation of dissensus Rancière theorizes in his work.

Mackey’s politics are practice-based, founded on his notion that testing categorical distinctions—genres, forms, media, but also among racial distinctions—is itself a political gesture. Mackey rarely makes explicit political claims or demands in his writing. He relies instead of the centrifugal power of intellectual work and practices. One senses this reliance in his recollection of the formation of Hambone. Mackey writes that he designed Hambone to follow in the line of literary journals from the 1960s that “accentuated plurality and particularity, bestowing upon the literary landscape a growing number of small-scale but often far-reaching journals that made no claim to institutional authority. Indeed, implicitly on the whole and explicitly in many cases, they countered the notion of such authority, which tends toward centralization, consensus-making, and canon formation, with a valorization of individual energy, idiosyncratic vision, and centrifugal or polycentric judgment and address” (PH 246). The points

59 One can read through Mackey’s playlists from the years 2004 to 2008 at: http://www.kusp.org/playlists/strut/

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of admiration are clear. These journals “made no claim” to authority. More than that, when they stated an agenda, it emphasized “centrifugal or polycentric judgment and address.” These journals were politically engaged as partial retreats from claims of foundational and institutional authority. The claims such journals made emerged instead from discrepant approaches and methodology.

Given that Mackey wrote the above lines in 1998 as a recollection on his editorship, one could suspect a certain idealism about what he wanted his journal to do. An early letter to the poet Robert Kelly soliciting work for Mackey’s first issue of Hambone, however, shows that

Mackey’s resistance to categorical thinking motivated the journal’s operations from the very beginning. In the letter from 30 May 1980, Mackey asks if Kelly ever published some poems

Mackey had heard him read back in 1977 where Kelly remarks on his “sense of a rapport between Black and Irish investments in eloquence, which you carried back to Egypt as a common source” (Mackey). As he goes on Mackey tries to offer Kelly a better sense of what he would be contributing to: “Can’t offer much of an overture as far as the thrust I want to give the mag is concerned. ‘Crossings’ is a word which comes to mind, as does the much more widely worked expression ‘New World poetics’ - - but I wouldn’t want to push either one of them beyond what particular works give substance to” (Mackey, 30 May 1980). Here, we see Mackey briefly fall back on a currently popular critical category—New World poetics—but then distance himself from the classification by noting that the journal will manifest simply “what particular works give substance to.” Unlike the bullet-pointed prospectus we saw with the Dalkey Archive

Press, or the strong claims about direction and reach made by Olson to Cid Corman and Vincent

Ferrini, Mackey’s reticence here is characteristic of an editorial undertaking that seeks to classify itself only through the work it does, through what works give substance to. Mackey’s reticence

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takes part in a cultural politics that seeks to think against the categories of thought currently available for classifying thought and its manifestations in writing.

Hambone’s History

Hambone’s flight into the world, as the vernacular rhyme has it (“I’m going again”), has two obscured but important origins: the history of African and African American musical expression in North America and enslavement. I should make clear here that when I refer to the figural Hambone, I refer specifically to the figure in the vernacular rhyme: “‘Hambone,

Hambone, where you been?’ ‘Around the world and I’m goin’ again.” While the origin of the rhyme likely remains irretrievable, its structure and figure derive from the traditions of African and African American music. In their introduction to the first edition of African American Music,

Portia K. Maultsby, Mellonee V. Burnim, and Susan Oehler, remark that “by the third decade of the seventeenth century, accounts of New World music-making by African slaves, as observed by slaveholders, travelers, and missionaries began to surface. Sources such as diaries, journals, reports, and memoirs provided firsthand documentation of the activities of Blacks, noting the use of antiphony as a recurrent musical structure” (8). In a useful marginal gloss the authors define antiphony as “A performance practice in which a singer or instrumentalist makes a musical statement which is answered by another soloist, instrumentalist, or group. The statement and answer sometimes overlap. Also called call-response; call-and-response” (8). Antiphony is thus among the earliest recorded Black60 musical forms in America. The centuries-old antiphonal structure of Black music suggests that the figure of Hambone emerges from traditions extending

60 I follow the editors of African American Music: An Introduction in using Black as an umbrella term for people of different ethnicities—African, African American, Afro-Caribbean—in the Americas.

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back to African musical practice. Moreover, it suggests that Mackey names his journal Hambone to signal the journal’s engagement with traditions of Black expression in America. Hambone’s call to writers of the contemporary avant-garde—a call awaiting the response of those diverse writers—offers a literary variation to longstanding antiphonal practices in music.

Like so many African cultural traditions, antiphonal music adapted quickly to conditions of enslavement in the New World. Lawrence W. Levine writes on the topic of “African

American Music as Resistance” in the antebellum period, reporting that “the overriding call-and- response pattern that Blacks brought with them from Africa… placed individuals in continual dialogue with each other. The structure of their music presented slaves with an outlet for individual feelings even while it continually drew them back into the communal presence and permitted them the comfort of basking in the warmth of shared assumptions that permeated the slave songs” (589). Individual expression in the service of communal solidarity certainly paints a warm picture here. Yet Levine also reminds us that the establishment of strong individuality and community through antiphony forms a protest against the condition of enslavement. “In no other expressive medium,” he writes, “were the slaves permitted to speak so openly of the afflictions of bondage and their longings for freedom. In this sense, there was always an element of protest in the slaves’ religious songs” (590). Hambone’s flight into the world appears more secular than the specifically religious songs to which Levine refers, but its protest is equally persistent. What better figure to protest enslavement and forced travel than one who flees unfettered into the world? To be sure, Hambone is always summoned by an initial call, suggesting he is still subject to the one who calls. Yet his response to that call—I have returned from a trip around the world—anticipates another flight: and I’m going again. The antiphonal balance between caller and respondent is maintained in the rhyme. If antiphonal music forms a protest to enslavement—

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the most extreme division of labor—then Mackey’s journal modeled on Hambone forms a protest against contemporary divisions of labor still based on race. Hambone continues to adapt antiphonal structure to perplex the classifications of the system in which it functions, in this case, contemporary writing in the United States.

Hambone is also a musical practice. Burnim and Maultsby define hambone as “a form of rhythmic body percussion that involves slapping the hands against the thigh and hipbones” (25).

Also known as “patting juba,” hambone’s origins are as murky as are those of the vernacular rhyme. In a documentary called The Human Hambone, the historian Margaret Washington acknowledges that hambone almost certainly stems from African traditions, but she also gives a possible reason for its particular persistence in the United States. In the colony of Carolina in

September of 1739, the Stono Rebellion took place. The largest slave rebellion of the eighteenth century in North America, the rebellion and its eventual suppression by a local militia claimed the lives of “approximately 40 blacks and 20 whites” (“Stono Rebellion”). Most important for the discussion of hambone as a musical practice were the legal consequences of the rebellion.

Washington reports: “It created the Negro Act of 1740. They [the slaves in Carolina] lost the de facto right to learn to read and write and they lost the right to use their own African instruments”

(Human Hambone). Implicit in Washington’s remark is that hambone persists in North America as a creative response to dispossession. With the ban on drumming and literacy, slaves returned to what we should understand as both traditional and alternative forms of creative expression, hambone being one form among them.

The history of hambone, though obscure, is not lost to Mackey. In Bedouin Hornbook

(1986), the first book of his epistolary novel sequence, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume

Still Emanate, Mackey calls on the history of musical dispossession explained by Margaret

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Washington. Bedouin Hornbook—and the whole novel sequence—relates in epistolary form the narrator N.’s experiences as a member of an experimental jazz ensemble which takes multiple names over the course of the novel and sequence.61 Nearly three years after N. begins corresponding with the Angel of Dust, the instrumental band has begun to consider adding a drummer. Two of N’s bandmates, Lambert and Penguin, hold different opinions on whether the band needs a drummer, and if it does, on how to select one. Lambert takes a strong position on including a drummer, suggesting that the band’s current methods are rather makeshift. To this point Penguin makes an impassioned rebuttal:

…he went on to say that the more crucial point he wished to make was that the

approach Lambert had referred to as makeshift, disparaging it on historical

grounds, was not without historical precedent, not without a certain sanction from

the past. He reminded us that in this country, unlike places like Trinidad, Cuba

and Brazil, the drums had been taken away during slavery (a fact, he admitted, to

which Lambert had repeatedly alluded in the course of “Prometheus”). This theft,

however, he encouraged us to recall, had given rise to a tradition of oppositional,

compensatory or, if we would, makeshift practices, a making do with whatever

came to hand whose inaugural ‘moment’ was marked by more emphatic recourse

to such things as footstomping, handclapping and the-body-used-as-drum in

general…. He took this ‘moment’ to be the seed of such subsequent developments

as the tendency to reinstate, as it were, the outlawed or abducted drum by taking a

61 In the first 28 pages of Bedouin Hornbook, the band changes names three times, from Deconstructive Woodwind Chorus (4), which is deemed “deracinated” and changed to East Bay Dread Ensemble (to disguise the fact, while playing in Berkeley, that the band is based in Los Angeles) (5), to Mystic Horn Society, a name which the band uses for a considerable period given the swift change between the first three.

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percussive approach to ostensibly non-percussive instruments. (From a Broken

Bottle 124; hereafter FBB)

While Penguin does not refer to the Stono Rebellion in particular here, his plea demonstrates

Mackey’s familiarity with the history of musical dispossession for slaves in North America, the response to which took form in oppositional and makeshift practices such as hambone: “the- body-as-drum.” Mackey’s editorial work continues such practices and in doing so records the creative repercussions of historical dispossession that Mackey outlines in Bedouin Hornbook.62

Hambone’s Expeditions into Wholeness

Mackey’s decision to change the name of the journal to Hambone in 1974 was one of his first significant editorial interventions in a career now filled with a variety of important editorial work.63 The world-traveling Hambone prefigures the journal’s emphasis on dispersal—as

Hambone continues his flight into the world—while also manifesting what Mackey calls the cross-cultural dynamic of American literature, whereby the work of African American and Afro-

Caribbean writers appears alongside white Anglo-American experimentalists and other experimental poets as the emerge in Mackey’s milieu. Mackey has been resolute in publishing and promoting work by Wilson Harris and Kamau Brathwaite in the pages of Hambone and he has regularly included works by other Caribbean writers such as Fred D’Aguiar, Édouard

62 For another instance in which Mackey draws on hambone to consider how classification systems omit traditional African American forms of cultural expression, see N’s letter in which he narrates one of his early childhood memories. N. was about six and his brother and some friends decide to perform hambone in the school talent show. N.’s mother is so embarrassed that her son presents hambone as “talent” that she scolds him immediately after (FBB 88). Mackey has told me in conversation that this story is in fact autobiographical. 63 Hambone is now in its 21st book-length volume. Mackey has also co-edited Moment’s Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose with Art Lange and was co-editor with Marjorie Perloff and Carolyn Kizer of the Library of America’s American Poetry volume covering the twentieth century.

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Glissant, Mark McMorris, and Marlene Nourbese Philip (M. NourbeSe Philip). He does not simply publish these writers; he actively draws on them to inform his own poetic practices.

When Mackey describes his vision for Hambone as promoting “cross-cultural work with an emphasis on the centrifugal” in his brief essay from 1995 his language adopts the critical idiom of Édouard Glissant and Wilson Harris (PH 245).64 Deriving the concept for his poetics in part from the literary generation that preceded his own, Mackey establishes Hambone as engaged in an internationalist literary practice that looks to cross-cultural collaborations as the motivation for a centrifugal poetics. While the vernacular Hambone may prefigure concepts found in all three of these writers, Hambone’s emphasis on “cross-cultural” engagement, which Mackey eventually modified to “discrepant engagement,” stems more directly from the poetics of

Glissant and Harris.

Engaging with cross-cultural practices through editorship of Hambone, Mackey observes that a “centrifugal” force operates within such practices. To develop this point he turns to Wilson

Harris. In his introduction to Discrepant Engagement, Mackey admires Harris’s promotion of a

“centrifugal poetics” in Caribbean literature (DE 5). “Key to this,” Mackey writes, “is his notion of the partial image, the therapeutic work of a play of images around the acknowledgment of a partiality one strives to overcome” (DE 5). Harris speculates that one exists in “partiality,” but it is an acknowledged partiality that seeks to complete itself. Partiality, for Harris, has an idea of wholeness it tries to find, and this search operates centrifugally and so underwrites a “centrifugal

64 Mackey’s archives at Emory University show that his most substantial correspondence has been with Wilson Harris. The two have exchanged hundreds of letters since their first meeting in the late 1970s and Harris has had a tremendous influence on Mackey’s work. Among Mackey’s other closest correspondents are Kamau Brathwaite and Jay Wright, though Brathwaite appears much more erratic in his correspondence. My research suggests that Harris’s letters are still held privately. A future researcher will likely find in them many of Mackey’s most important letters, covering more or less the entirety of Mackey’s career, and judging by Harris’s response to them, some of Mackey’s most important statements about his literary concepts and methods.

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poetics.” Mackey emphasizes his interest in the centrifugal by quoting a 1986 interview with

Harris at length:

Well, as I tend to see it at this point in time, there is a kind of wholeness, but one

can’t structure that wholeness. One knows it’s there and one moves into it

ceaselessly, but all the time one moves with partial images. Now the partial image

has within it a degree of bias but it also represents a part of something else, so that

there is a kind of ceaseless expedition into wholeness which has to do with the

ways in which one consumes—metaphysically consumes—the bias in the partial

image and releases that image as part of something else which one may not be

immediately aware of in that context—one may not be immediately aware of how

the partial image links up with another partial image until the centre of being in an

imaginative work breaks or moves and the illusory centrality of the partial image

is enriched in creative paradox.65 (qtd. in DE 5)

Mackey’s selection of this particular passage from an interview with Harris sheds light on the important role Hambone plays in Mackey’s ongoing practice of discrepant engagement. Like the practice of editing Hambone, a process that gathers diverse often excerpted pieces of writing in order to present them as a provisional whole in the form of a published journal, the process

Harris describes here wavers between the centrifugal and the centripetal. We see this most clearly in the paradoxical directionality of his phrase, a “ceaseless expedition into wholeness.”

65 Some of the quotations I use follow the quotations that Mackey himself uses. Even among poets and poet-critics, Mackey is particularly shrewd in his critical reflections on his own work, particularly in the introductions to Discrepant Engagement and Paracritical Hinge. With this in mind, I try to think with Mackey while offering what I hope to be readings of his own critical assertions that offer more insight into Mackey’s poetics. Here, for instance, I elaborate a point made only briefly in “Editing Hambone” by looking to Mackey’s more detailed engagement with cross-cultural and centrifugal poetics in his introduction to Discrepant Engagement, which is among his most important pieces of critical writing. Additionally, reading with Mackey helps us not only to understand the development of Mackey’s thought, but also to identify the themes and concepts Mackey draws upon throughout his career.

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The prefix “ex” cannot be overlooked, for it marks a movement outward—from where, exactly, we will see in just a moment. Yet Harris says that the partial image prompts an expedition into wholeness, suggesting the irrevocable complementarity between a centrifugal expedition and centripetal constellation. The logic of Harris’s idea is not fully developed in the interview, but his point is that the partial image finds a supplement as its moves “outward” and thereby moves into a new provisional wholeness. As the final lines of the passage indicate, however, the provisional wholeness breaks down “in creative paradox.” The partial image is recognized as such in the constellation of the whole—here Harris says “of an imaginative work”—and so begins another flight outward from a compromised totality. The partial image’s “enrichment in creative paradox” evolves with “expedition into wholeness.”

The supple and paradoxical expedition into wholeness aptly characterizes the vernacular

Hambone’s flight into the world. Consider the etymology of “expedition.” It derives from the verb expedite, which the OED notes as coming from a Latin verb meaning “‘to free (a person's) feet from fetters’…hence, to free from difficulties, to help forward, to get (a work) out of hand, to dispatch, send off, etc.” (“expedite”). The etymology is rich when considering Hambone as a figure of perhaps African and certainly African American provenance. Hambone’s freedom to travel can be read as a response to having one’s feet fettered—impeded—as a result of enslavement. In response to forced travel, an African American oral tradition makes Hambone into a figure of expedition, traveling around the world at a whim. That Hambone travels around the “world” is important as well because it stands in metaphorically for the imagined but provisional wholeness of being to which Harris makes reference. Harris’s vision of a centrifugal poetics compelled by the “partial image” seeking wholeness thus finds a corresponding figure in

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Hambone, whose feet are freed for his journey into a wholeness he will never achieve, but which he will continue to seek.66

The partial expedition into wholeness outlined by Harris aptly characterizes Mackey’s cross-cultural poetics. In his description of the journal, “the centrifugal” complements the “cross- cultural work” Mackey sees Hambone performing. To conceive of a cross-cultural poetics, that is, one must acknowledge from the outset the partiality of one’s own position. And once one acknowledges the partiality of one’s own position and seeks to address it, according to Harris and Mackey, a centrifugal “expedition into wholeness” begins. Mackey’s version of cross- cultural poetics is certainly indebted to Harris, who writes in The Womb of Space: The Cross-

Cultural Imagination that “society is approaching in uncertain degree a horizon of sensibility upon which a capacity exists to begin to transform claustrophobic ritual by cross-cultural imaginations that bear upon the future through mutations of the monolithic character of conquistadorial legacies of civilisation” (xv). Here, the imagined totality set in place by

“conquistadorial legacies” will be broken open and open to the future by “cross-cultural imaginings.” Mackey no doubt draws on this conception of the cross-cultural in his work on

Hambone as he seeks to introduce his own cross-cultural imaginations to the literary scene in the

United States.

Mackey’s own citations inform us that Édouard Glissant’s writing on cross-culturality is equally foundational for Mackey. Mackey quotes Glissant at length in his introduction to

66 For an excellent introduction to Harris’s own testing of an “expedition into wholeness,” see his novel Palace of the Peacock (1960), which narrates a surreal and mystical journey into inland Guyana. The narrative depends heavily on various scenes and images rotating through the “partial” vision of the narrator, who has one “dead seeing material eye” and one “living closed spiritual eye” (20). Through this split vision, both historical and visionary, Harris seeks to narrate a partial history of the colonization of Guyana and its effects.

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Discrepant Engagement, drawing primarily on an essay by Glissant titled “Cross-Cultural

Poetics” (1973). Glissant writes that

The issue… is the appearance of a new man, whom I would define, with reference

to his ‘realization’ in literature, as a man who is able to live the relative after

having suffered the absolute. When I say relative, I mean the Diverse, the obscure

need to accept the other’s difference; and when I say absolute I refer to the

dramatic endeavor to impose a truth on the Other. I feel that the man from the

Other America ‘merges’ with this new man, who lives the relative; and that the

struggles of peoples who try to survive in the American continent bear witness to

this new creation. (qtd. in DE 5-6).

Two quick points about Glissant’s diction here: with Other America he refers to “the Caribbean and South America” to oppose the tendency to identify “American” as U.S. American (Glissant

147); and second, by “the Other” here he refers to those who have been considered the Others of

Western modernity (i.e. non-Western-European, enslaved, and colonized peoples).

The quotation Mackey selects offers up a striking similarity between Glissant’s “new man” who “is able to live the relative after having suffered the absolute” and the figure of

Hambone. Hambone, as I have proposed, takes shape as a figure who flees the fetters of enslavement. Read in light of Glissant’s language, such enslavement can be understood as the most violent “endeavor to impose a truth on the Other.” Hambone represents failure of this imposition: the Other cannot be subsumed under monolithic absolute of Western modernity.

Hambone instead works dialogically and centrifugally within the impulse to impose the truth of

Otherness upon him. Like the new man and the partial image, Hambone tracks an outward moving freedom by modifying the totality the Western modernity supposed itself to be, but

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which can no longer find its center. As Glissant notes further on in the selection Mackey quotes,

“The collective ‘We’ [an Other America ‘we’ that works against Western modernity] becomes the site of the generative system, and the true subject. Our critique of the act and the idea of literary creation is not derived from a ‘reaction’ to theories which are proposed to us, but from a burning need for modification” (Glissant 149). For Glissant, as for Mackey, the generative system that emerges from collective work of cross-cultural poetics puts the gears of modification in motion. In doing so, Other American literature proposes its modified alternatives to the imposition of Western modernity.

While Hambone becomes a figure of freedom in the above reading, Mackey’s journal asks how we might track his flight and thereby make his ongoing expedition into an outward force in American literature.67 Glissant, after all, proposes that a “new man” finds his

“realization in literature.” The vernacular Hambone likewise finds his realization in the pages of his namesake journal.68 The medium of the journal records Hambone’s excursions and asks:

67 Mackey outlines his definition of “American” literature in a letter written to Professor Mark Williams in 1992. Williams contributed an article to Callaloo’s special issue on the work of Wilson Harris that Mackey edited. On the topic of “Afro-American” writing, Mackey gave Williams the following editorial advice: “differing senses of the terms ‘American’ and ‘Afro-American’ appear to have resulted in something I’m a bit uncomfortable with at the beginning of your essay—the degree to which you dissociate Harris from Afro-America writing. I’m aware that to many people both inside and outside this country ‘American’ pertains exclusively or primarily to the United States and therefore ‘Afro-American’ has to do with people of African descent in the United States. This is not, however, the way everyone understands these terms and not, more specifically, the way Callaloo understands them. Callaloo calls itself ‘a journal devoted to creative works by and critical studies of black writers in the Americas and Africa.’ Its use of the term ‘Afro-American’—recently changed to ‘African-American’—in its subtitle is more inclusive than the term is often taken to be and in this it is consistent with the practice of, for example, anthropologists like John Szwed, Sidney Mintz, Richard Price and others who do not view ‘Afro-American’ as confined within the borders of the United States…” (Letter to Professor Mark Williams, 12 November 1992). While Mackey speaks specifically to the corresponding interests among varieties of African diasporic writing, these lines offer a précis of Mackey’s thinking on the contexts of American literature. In this, he follows in the footsteps of his friend and mentor of sorts, Wilson Harris, who maintained a career-long interest not only in Afro-Caribbean traditions but also in the traditions of indigenous tribes such as the Caribs. 68 The emphasis I place on the name Mackey gave his journal falls directly in line with Mackey’s other literary work. Apart from the primary theme of music and improvisation in From a Broken Bottle, for instance, one could reasonably argue that a second major theme in the entire sequence is the theme of naming. The West African spirit of Anancy, receives some playful treatment in the second book, Djbot Baghostus’s Run: “Djamilaa’s faltering reproduction of Nancy Wilson’s voice seemed to obey a namesake negative dialectic and a nominal near-identity with Aunt Nancy rolled into one. Flawed reproduction seemed to insist that Djamilaa was not, after all, Nancy

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what if we knew more about Hambone’s journeys and about the places he touches down on his continued flight into the world? For Mackey, the editor and writer, Hambone touches down in the medium of print. Hambone thus tracks figural flight and records the particularities of

Hambone’s movements via the cross-cultural, multi-authored, material engagement afforded by print. When Mackey characterizes Hambone as performing “Cross-cultural work with an emphasis on the centrifugal,” the cross-cultural is also cross-medial: a point of printed articulation for a vernacular figure.

Hambone forms and responds to a crux in the theorization and reception of African

American imaginative expression: between the oral and written. Can Hambone in fact find his

“‘realization’ in literature,” that is, in the printed pages of Hambone? If so, how provisional is this realization? And further: should Hambone’s formalization in the pages of a little magazine be seen as obstructing the vernacular figure’s flight into the world, or as participating in that flight? Such questions address debates about the relation between orality and literacy that have both underwritten and undermined literary critics’ ability to engage black experimental forms.

On the topic of naming his journal, Mackey writes that he had in mind not only the vernacular rhyme, but also “a composition of the same name by saxophonist Archie Shepp, itself based on this rhyme, a signal, suggestive meeting of the vernacular and the avant-garde” (PH 244-45).

The avant-garde Mackey refers to here is Archie Shepp’s jazz. But we should keep in mind that

Mackey is talking here about naming an avant-garde print journal, for print too has played a critical role in the development of an African American experimental tradition. This last point

Wilson. The new name with which in so doing it seemed to christen her confirmed an echoic, slightly ‘off’ rapport with Aunt Nancy. Djamilaa was no longer exactly Djamilaa either but was Ain’t Nancy. Though double name negation had its way of troubling every pose or impersonation, every ostensible position, Ain’t Nancy went on with the song and its subtle threat of secession” (FBB 205). This is only one particularly condensed example of the importance of naming within the sequence. For an excellent if brief reading of “puncepts” in relation to Mackey’s “operatic tilt,” see Morris.

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might seem obvious. Yet as Aldon Nielsen has shown, “One key component of the critical operations that have ‘deaccessioned’ (to use a term depressingly current in the language of the library and the gallery) broad swaths of the recent past of black experiment in poetics is a series of nearly hegemonic assumptions about the nature of the relationship between African-American oral traditions and writing, with a clear privilege given to the prevailing ideal of the oral” (18).

Nielsen’s point is not that we should turn away from African American oral traditions, but that

American literary critics must also account for formally experimental African American writing as writing. Refusal to give writing its due is to bolster a Western metaphysical split between logo- and phonocentrism identified by theorists from Martin Heidegger to Marshall McLuhan to

Jacques Derrida decades ago, the same split Charles Olson worked to undermine in his poetics.

Naming his literary journal after a vernacular figure, Mackey addresses and redresses this split.

His journal becomes the printed expression of avant-garde experimentation, where part of the experiment is to test the complementarity between the vernacular and the literary.

Mackey’s clearest statements on discovering a balance between orality and literacy in postwar American poetry take shape in his analysis of the critical reception of the American poet

Charles Olson. As we saw in the first chapter, Olson based his theory of “projective verse”

(1950) on the ear, the breath, and the voice as they could be expressed by the typewriter on a printed page. Even while “the breathing of the man who writes” finds its most intricate expression by way of the discrete keystrokes and mechanical spacing afforded by the typewriter, critical reception of Olson has tended to focus on Olson’s oral / aural emphasis rather than on graphic expression.69 Mackey’s article responds to a 1975 special issue of boundary 2 on the

69 Much more recently, the critic Brian M. Reed reiterates Mackey’s line of argument, observing that “Although the Black Mountain writers are usually remembered for endorsing a speech-based poetics… it is significant that their discussions of speech often also concern the minutiae of page layout” (279).

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topic of “the oral impulse in contemporary American poetry” (DE 121). The issue devotes articles to numerous poets, but Mackey singles out Olson’s reception as the cornerstone of his response in an essay whose title says so much: “That Words Can Be on the Page: The Graphic

Aspect of Charles Olson’s Poetry.”

By Mackey’s account, critics such as William Spanos, who edited the special issue, exacerbated a false dichotomy between the oral / aural and the visual / graphic. Critics, in turn, should resist glorifying the oral / aural as an overcorrection against a Western visual bias.

Mackey writes, “The opposition, a false one, is concocted of the tension between two differing

‘perspectives on reality,’ the will toward openness and the will toward closure, to which the terms oral and visual have been forcibly made to apply” (DE 121). When Spanos talks about the coercive nature of the visual and his desire to “recover the vitality of the ‘vulgar’ senses narcotized by the primacy of the ‘spiritual’ eye” (qtd. in DE 121-122), Mackey responds that such assertions serve as metaphors for a philosophical stance that “perpetuates the narcotization

[Spanos] claims to oppose” (DE 122). Mackey acknowledges that Olson’s poetics emphasizes oral expression. Yet he also points out that Olson continually weds his oral emphasis with graphic expression, either in the form of typography or by way of his interest in hieroglyphs and ideograms. In Olson’s “Human Universe,” as we saw in the first chapter, Olson asserts that

“several of us got back to hieroglyphics or to ideograms to right the balance” between speech and writing (qtd. in DE 122). “Why,” Mackey asks, “would Olson speak of going to hieroglyphs and ideograms, with their primarily visual impact, as a means of restoring speech?” (DE 122). In answer, he proposes that critics must look to Olson’s “use of the term balance” (DE 122). Olson seeks a balance between orality and literacy; the typographic layout of his poems, as Mackey goes on to argue, stresses graphic experimentation as being equally important to the practice of

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an open poetics, a point the first chapter responds to and extends by assessing Olson’s theorization of little magazines and editorial practices.

Mackey concludes his argument with an assertion about Olson’s poetics that is equally applicable to Hambone’s medial balance: “One of the most significant features of the quest for an open poetics is the effort to circumvent the closure of either/or propositions. In Olson’s case, one encounters an inclusiveness in which the oral and the graphic coexist, each in its own way furthering an attempt, to use Spanos’s words, ‘to recover the vitality of the ‘vulgar’ senses’—not only the ears, but the eyes as well” (DE 138). Olson’s open poetics balances orality and literacy to “circumvent the closures of either/or propositions.” Likewise, Hambone’s migration to the pages of Hambone balances the dominant critical emphasis on orality in African American imaginative expression that Aldon Nielsen points out. Hambone offers an alternative medium for

Hambone’s historically oral response: print. It is by way of the print medium that the vernacular and figural Hambone travels new routes and finds new interlocutors. In the pages of the journal,

Hambone offers more than a reply to an ongoing call which always precedes his arrival. He offers his own call to writers of Other American writing, broadly conceived, making the journal

“a signal, suggestive meeting of the vernacular and the avant-garde” that bears in it literary art’s ongoing excursions.

On Hospitality and Hambone’s Call

Hambone emits an ongoing call to Other American literature and this call wavers between Other as a noun and other as a verb. Consider the conclusion Mackey draws from his discussion of Harris and Glissant in his introduction to Discrepant Engagement. He quotes

Harris, writing that Discrepant Engagement’s “aim is ‘to highlight variables of dialogue that tend

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to be suppressed in so-called normal classifications of fiction and poetry….’ I think of the mix these essays advance as a contribution to a cross-cultural poetics, plots upon an alternative map, one on which the Other America has begun to emerge” (DE 6). By this account, the somewhat unconventional grouping of authors Mackey discusses in the book emphasizes how methods of assembling can create strange combinations: fiction by Wilson Harris beside fiction by Robert

Creeley beside poetry from Clarence Major. His introduction to the collection is his space to reflect on the methods and effects of collecting what might otherwise seem like discrete literary essays. The process of collecting and publishing the essays together prompts Mackey to comment on the collection itself. Likewise, Mackey concludes that the collection of essays introduces dialogic variables that become coordinates for “plots upon an alternative map, one on which the Other America has begun to emerge.” Here too Mackey brings into focus the unsettled and unsettling processes of literary work. The Other America emerges in a collection that does not entirely cohere.

Mackey concludes Discrepant Engagement with an essay on the process of othering in an essay titled, “Other, from Noun to Verb.” Mackey sets out by acknowledging the the essay’s antecedent: Amiri Baraka’s “Swing – From Verb to Noun” (DE 265). In that essay, Baraka discusses the co-optation and commodification of traditionally black musical forms by white musicians. Mackey reverses the directionality of Baraka’s verb to noun movement, however, making “the Other” into the verb: to other. Written in the early 1990s, Mackey’s essay responds to ongoing debates in the canon wars about “cultural diversity” and enters the discussion reporting that “the inequities the recent attention to cultural diversity is meant to redress are in part the outcome of confounding the social with the genetic, so we need to make it clear that when we speak of otherness we are not positing static, intrinsic characteristics. We need instead

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to highlight the dynamics of agency and attribution by way of which otherness is brought about and maintained, the fact that other is something people do, more importantly a verb than an adjective or a noun” (DE 265). Read in light of his introductory comments that his collection charts the emergence of an Other American literature, his comments here suggest that any such emergence others American literature and is itself the result of “othering” as a critical and creative task. The literary assembling his book undertakes seeks to other American literature by calling into question the often racially based categorical identifications within American literary discourse—from marketing to reviewing to criticism. To map the surfacing of Other American literature is to make the process of othering a condition of the emergence of American literature more broadly conceived.

Mackey employs a similar cartographic idiom in his description of the process and purpose of editing Hambone. He writes that when he resumed publishing the journal in 1982, he solicited all work for the first issue—Hambone 2—and explains his strategy: “My aim in composing the issue entirely of solicited work was to delineate the magazine’s intended range and reach, to sketch out some of what I intended to be its defining dispositions and concerns”

(DE 248). The authors with whom Mackey sketched the journal’s range included Kamau

Brathwaite, Beverly Dahlen, Robert Duncan, Wilson Harris, Susan Howe, Clarence Major, Paul

Metcalf, Ishmael Reed, Sun Ra, John Taggart, and Jay Wright. As the list of authors suggests,

Hambone 2 also sought to map a geographic range of American literature not exclusive to the

United States. Mackey remarks, “It has… been a particular aim of mine to make the work of the

Caribbean authors Brathwaite and Harris better known in the United States” (DE 248).

Acknowledging that the actual physical range of the journal will be limited to primarily US

American circulation—with exceptions of a few copies making it abroad to expatriate

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contributors such as Clarence Major and those contributors residing permanently outside the

United States such as Wilson Harris in England—the conceptual range Hambone charts is provocative for gauging the international engagements of contemporary American literature.

Let’s consider its provocative range by looking to the work of Paul Metcalf and Sun Ra in that first issue. Mackey received numerous comments on this particular pairing in congratulatory notes upon the issue’s publication. While one might suspect that the responses to the pairing were simply reactions to novelty—Metcalf and Sun Ra in the same place!—the responses might in fact have registered the uncanny similarity between Metcalf and Sun Ra. The contribution by Sun Ra in Hambone 2 is a transcription of a talk he gave in December 1979 at

“Soundscape, a musician’s and artist’s loft, in New York City” (Ra 98). The talk is largely a theological and cosmological treatise with significant wordplay, or “wered” play as Sun Ra calls it in the lecture. Metcalf’s contribution, by comparison, is part one of his book Golden Delicious

(1985), which collects a series of excerpts about the early Puritan settlement of North America, reminiscent of parts of William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain. Metcalf provides a list of works cited ranging from Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana, to The Wall and the

Garden: Selected Massachusetts Election Sermons, to Sacvan Bercovitch’s The Puritan Origins of the American Self (Metcalf 73). Reading Ra and Metcalf side by side makes apparent some remarkable similarities between the radical theology of early puritanism and its vision of the

New World, and Sun Ra’s Afro-Futurist vision of cosmology and history. When I talk about

Mackey actively “othering” American literature with his editorship of Hambone, I refer to instances such as this one in which Mackey’s editorship discovers commonalities within intellectual histories and traditions that one might have supposed are radically different. And they are different to be sure, but the shared interests add context not only to Sun Ra’s Afro-

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Futurism, but also Metcalf’s turn to the early Puritans at around the same period. This juxtaposition in Hambone, according to my research, remains the only “critical” work that places

Metcalf beside Sun Ra in order to show two strands of experimental American utopianism in the

1970s and 1980s.

Upon its publication Hambone 2 defined the interests and concerns of the journal, thereby issuing an open call to writers who wished to position themselves in or around the magazines conceptual coordinates. Mackey reflects on the development of his little magazine after the publication of the 1982 issue, noting that many of the contributors to Hambone 2 continue to publish in its pages.70 Yet Mackey also notes that the response to the publication of that first issue redirected the course and contents of the journal:

Still, that issue was a call, a summons, an invitation to those who located

themselves in the terrain it mapped to submit work…. I’ve been especially

gratified to receive a good deal of unsolicited work that fit, to be introduced to the

work of writers I wasn’t previously aware of but who, in some cases, have

become regular contributors, to be taken, especially by the work of such writers as

[the French poet and translator] Anne-Marie Albiach, [the Spanish-Mexican

novelist] Max Aub, Julio Cortázar, [the Palestinian poet] Mahmoud Darweesh

[sic], and [the Argentinian poet] Alejandra Pizarnik, submitted by translators, in

70 Several of the initial Hambone contributors have published in the three most recent issues – nos. 18 through 20 – which were published between 2006 and 2012. Hambone 18 includes work by John Taggart and Jay Wright; 19 by Kamau Brathwaite, Sun Ra, and John Taggart; and 20 by Kamau Brathwaite. The most regular contributors to Hambone have, of course, changed with time. Some have become less productive with age. Wilson Harris, for instance, is in his nineties. Some have died. After the title page of each issue, Mackey includes a page “In Memorium.” In the last three issue, the journal honors the following deceased writers who have influenced Mackey and Hambone (in the order they are listed, issues 18 – 20): Robert Creeley, Barbara Guest, Gustaf Sobin, Lorenzo Thomas; Robin Blaser, Aimé Césaire, Gene Frumkin; Billy Bang, Édouard Glissant, Leslie Scalapino. Still other writers have emerged as longstanding friends, collaborators, and contributors, including: Rachel Blau DuPlessis, George Kalamaras, Myung Mi Kim, Fred Moten, and Ed Roberson, to name a few of the most regularly published.

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directions I hadn’t planned or foreseen. As in the music the journal’s name refers

to, this is what one wants: that the call not go without response. (DE 248)

While Mackey has editorial control of his magazine, the point he drives at here is that blindness also guides editorship. For Adorno, “second reflection lays hold of the technical procedures, the language of the artwork in the broadest sense, but it aims at blindness” (Aesthetic Theory 27).

For Mackey, once the magazine issues its initial call, it must remain open to unforeseen responses and directions. Mackey says as much in his somewhat tortuous sentence: “I was especially gratified… to be taken… in directions I hadn’t planned or foreseen.” Hambone remains open to authors Mackey had not previously known. And it hints at some humility on

Mackey’s part to imply that much of what he does not know is due to the limitations of his

American and Anglophone biases. An editor cannot know all authors and languages and so a journal’s open call thinks more expansively than an editor can. Mackey’s straightforward reflection here complements Adornian second reflection wherein the literary practices give rise to unknown currents and directions in the literary field.

Mackey’s diction in the above passage also suggests that beneath the veneer of practical limitation is an intricate reflection on the function of hospitality in Hambone’s call. Words such as “call,” “summons,” “invitation,” “terrain,” and “gratified” all participate in an economy of hospitality.71 In his late and now well-known essay, “Hostipitality,” Jacques Derrida begins by

71 Mackey’s idiom for conceptualizing Hambone also relates directly to his conceptualization of From a Broken Bottle. In his “Author’s Note” to the three volume edition published by New Directions in 2010, Mackey explains the origins of the epistolary sequence, saying that he went to see a jazz performance in the late 1970s and “was the only person to show up, an audience of one” (FBB viii). Mackey describes it as “an almost mystical experience” which led him to feel “as though I’d been summoned” (ix). Mackey concludes that this experience “along with wondering what being in a band like that might be like, led eventually to From a Broken Bottle and the fictional band in which N. plays, known first as the Deconstructive Woodwind Chorus, next as the East Bay Dread Ensemble, next as the Mystic Horn Society, most recently as Molimo m’Atet. Now into five volumes, the first three of which comprise this book, the letters respond to the music’s ongoing call” (ix). The phrasing of the last sentence nearly duplicates the conclusion to “Editing Hambone”: “As in the music the journal’s name refers to, this is what one

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noting the paradox of hospitality as formulated in a famous work by Kant on perpetual peace (3).

Derrida remarks that the title of Kant’s “Third Definitive Article” claims that “Cosmopolitan

Right shall be limited to Conditions of Universal Hospitality.” The paradox, which Derrida terms an aporia, is that “universal hospitality” is in fact “limited” and conditional because Kant conceives of it as a “law.” This aporia—between universality and conditionality—makes hospitality a threshold within Derrida’s late thought, and it leads him to his primary claim on which he reflects for most of the essay: “We do not know what hospitality is [Nous ne savons pas ce que c’est que l’hosptitalité]. Not yet” (6). Our inability to know what hospitality is has to do with the shifting nature of its terms: Hospitality has its root in hôte, which means both host and guest, and is also related to hostis, which means enemy. The shifting positions within a scene of hospitality, that is, as guest becomes host becomes enemy, disallows knowledge of pure hospitality. The following proposes that Mackey’s editorial work on Hambone corresponds to

Derrida’s reflection on hospitality. Yet where Derrida leaves hospitality on the aporetic threshold of shifting signifiers and signifieds, Mackey sees the liminal space of hospitality as resulting from the engagements of intellectual labor.

Derrida works through his aporetic axiom—we do not know what hospitality is, not yet— by way of four “acceptations.” The acceptations belong to the discourse of hospitality and denote

“the action of receiving, the welcome given, the way one receives” (7). I focus here on his first

“acceptation” for its relevance to my consideration of Hambone. The first acceptation stresses our “not knowing” what hospitality is: “This not-knowing is not necessarily a deficiency, an infirmity, a lack. Its apparent negativity, this grammatical negativity (the not-knowing) would not signify ignorance, but rather indicate or recall only that hospitality is not a concept which

wants: that the call not go without response” (PH 248). But where the epistles answer an ongoing call, Hambone emits one.

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lends itself to objective knowledge” (7). Such not-knowing bears on Mackey’s conception of

Hambone’s call, for in eliciting the unforeseen it also elicits “not-knowing” as fundamental to literary receptivity. This is not to say that Hambone simply demonstrates that we cannot know hospitality, or that “objective knowledge” can be difficult to come by. Rather, Mackey characterizes the emergence of the “unforeseen” as the “gratifying” effect of Hambone’s call to emphasize “not-knowing” as the condition of emergence for an other American literature in the pages of Hambone. The form of receptivity or “acceptation” immanent to Hambone’s call remains open to the othering force of literature. The unplanned directions Hambone takes share a common directionality: they are centrifugal because they invite the hospitable host—in this case the literary editor—outward into a literary terrain he mapped rather blindly. Mackey must also be understood, then, to be invited into this other terrain. And he accepts this invitation gratefully; his use of “gratifying” connotes both pleasure and gratitude. In this sense, Hambone’s call creates the terrain wherein a host and his guest meet on common ground. The call functions as both an invitation and a summons “outward” by the other it calls.

The not-knowing immanent to Hambone’s call is related to Mackey’s agenda to test the parameters of intellectual labor. More specifically, I argue in the following pages that intellectual labor effects the “not-knowing” immanent to Hambone’s call and thereby unites Mackey’s intellectual labor with the partially autonomous functioning of literature itself. It is not enough to say that Hambone’s call functions as a mode of “not-knowing,” leaving Mackey’s journal in one of Derrida’s conceptually hospitable aporia. We need rather to consider how Mackey’s literary practices operate in such a way that they establish the grounds for a common hospitality. In his remarks on the journal, Mackey affirms that individual work creates unforeseen multiplicity from particularity: “The publication of Hambone has thus been something of a personal

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undertaking—or, better, a particularist undertaking—yet with a certain drive, which every magazine should have, toward ensemblist identity and definition” (PH 246). The movement from the personal and particular toward “ensemblist identity” abridges the point I make above:

Mackey’s partciularist practice extends beyond its own particularity. While Mackey claims

Hambone as a personal undertaking—which he undertakes in the actual minutia of putting the journal together—he recognizes that the result of this undertaking extends beyond his control.

“Yet with a certain drive, which every magazine should have,” refers not to Mackey’s own particularist vision and control, but to a drive which inheres in the formation of the magazine itself and overcomes Mackey’s guidance. The journal has a drive and takes Mackey in directions he had not foreseen. These directions become available by way of Mackey’s editorial work, to be sure, but also by way of the work of other writers and translators who co-create the terrain

Hambone plots. Keeping these various operations in mind, it becomes possible to see that literary economy generates its own modicum of autonomy. It is partial, flawed, and ever-changing. But it is also that which balances authorial insight with an operative and autonomous blindness.

The claim that intellectual labor is related to the “not-knowing” of literary autonomy finds clarification in Derrida’s conception of hospitality. I return to Derrida to make two propositions: forms of intellectual labor such as those I attribute to Mackey’s editorship of

Hambone can be understood as experiments in hospitality; and thinking of intellectual labor in terms of hospitality may allow us to acknowledge the labors of avant-garde literary practice without recuperating it to an economic discourse, as Paul Mann suggests we must in The Theory-

Death of the Avant-Garde. In his first acceptation discussed above, Derrida clarifies some points about the working of hospitality: “Hospitality,” he writes, “if there is such a thing, is not only an experience in the most enigmatic sense of the word, which appeals to an act and an intention

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beyond the thing, object, or present being, but is also an intentional experience which proceeds beyond knowledge toward the other as absolute stranger, as unknown, where I know that I know nothing of him” (8). Here, Derrida sets the movements of hospitality in two directions. On the one hand, hospitality is an enigmatic experience which “appeals to” an act beyond “the thing, object, or present being.” This is the call of hospitality, which invites the emergence of non- objective knowledge within its experiential parameters. On the other hand, hospitality is an

“intentional experience which proceeds beyond” the parameters of objective knowledge toward the “absolute stranger.” In this second formulation, hospitality as an “intentional experience” motivates outward movement, proceeding beyond things as they currently exist. Taken together, the two halves of Derrida’s claim configure hospitality as both centripetal and centrifugal. The appeal calls outward and invites the “beyond” to it. The “intentional experience,” by comparison, moves with the call and proceeds beyond knowledge. While intention compels the latter experience of hospitality, the experience proceeds beyond its instigating intention, thereby becoming an outward-moving force within hospitality’s appeal. Derrida never mentions labor as such in his article on hospitality—perhaps the idiom is too different from that one he seeks to develop—but I propose that we take the “intentional experience” of hospitality that proceeds beyond knowledge as a reflection on the labor which may give rise to hospitality. Understanding

Derrida’s intentional experience in such a way allows us to reflect on labor while doing so with a modicum of distance from labor as it is associated within a market economy. It might allow us to conceive of varieties of labor based on the workings of hospitality rather than on economic productivity.72

72 For an enigmatic and compelling reading on the relationship between hospitality and labor, see Serres.

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Labor is at most a shadow concept in Derrida’s late essay; yet it becomes apparent if we read the essay alongside Mackey’s conceptualization of Hambone. Derrida, as we have seen, conceives of an “intentional experience” which proceeds beyond knowledge to the other as absolute stranger. Rendered in Mackey’s idiom, a particularist undertaking proceeds beyond editorial intention to an ensemblist identity that others American literature. For Mackey, the ensemblist identity results from an editorial and conceptual openness to the unforeseen, an openness which is operational in Hambone’s call. Consider Mackey’s reflection on the work he receives after publishing Hambone 2. He writes that unsolicited manuscripts took him and the magazine in directions he had not foreseen. What I want to emphasize once again is that the unforeseen becomes visible within Hambone’s conceptual terrain by way of intellectual labor— of Mackey’s editing, of the translators’ translating, of writers’ writing, and so on. Yet the labor itself, as I argued early on, is often undervalued or simply unseen within our rubrics for evaluating literary work, especially within a literary economy in which authors and the authored work so often mark the limits of evaluation.

We can rephrase, then: the condition of possibility for the unforeseen to emerge is intellectual labor cognizant of the “not-knowing” it itself creates. This is what I would call the labor of hospitality which accepts not-knowing as the return on that labor. Labor, in this sense, becomes a practice of hospitable receptivity, or at least creates the conceptual terrain for it.

Hambone’s ongoing call, emitted in part by Mackey’s editorial labors and in part by an ongoing tradition of creative expression as a protest against divisions of labor, creates a literary terrain in which the concept of hospitality becomes imaginable if not entirely realizable. And it is not entirely realizable because the call proceeds beyond knowledge, keeping the concept of literary hospitality in flight. Put differently, the intellectual labor of assembling Hambone sets the figural

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Hambone aloft. Mackey describes Hambone as “cross-cultural work with an emphasis on the centrifugal” (PH 245). In this characterization, Mackey joins work—the labors of literary practice—with the flight of literary modernity: the literary work proceeds beyond the labor that begets it. Aesthetic autonomy derives from the literary practices of hospitality.

“Destination Out”: On Centrifugal Inconclusion

In Paracritical Hinge, Mackey groups his brief essay on editing Hambone with two other equally brief essays that reflect on centrifugal and marginal forces in contemporary experimental writing. Taken together, these three essays make up only ten pages of a volume of over 350 pages. Yet they offer some of Mackey’s most lucid positions concerning divisions of intellectual labor as they relate to experimental writing in general, and black experimental writing in particular. I focus on “Destination Out” in shaping my conclusion, for the essay delineates the centrifugal movement within Mackey’s dispersed aesthetic. In Mackey’s entire body of work, this brief piece of only three paragraphs reads more like a manifesto than any other. The poetic polemic establishes a literary pedigree going back to René Depestre’s “Hello and Goodbye to

Négritude” in which Depestre famously questions the Négritude movement in African and Afro-

Caribbean writing; it also echoes Alejo Carpentier’s surrealist novel of expeditious flight, The

Lost Steps. I leave aside Mackey’s engagement with those intertexts, however, to address how

Mackey conceives of “Black centrifugal writing” in the mid-1990s as a force of dissensus in avant-garde discourse. Mackey’s dispersed aesthetic stems from a tradition in black experimental thought that seeks to recuperate experimental forms of black intellectual labor—and intellectual labor more broadly—in such a way that the recuperation need not be bound so tightly to the function of economic recuperation Paul Mann sees as unavoidable in avant-garde discourse.

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Mackey begins “Destination Out” with a provocation joining intellectual labor and centrifugal force. “Centrifugal work,” he writes, “begins with good-bye, wants to bid all givens good-bye. It begins with what words will not do, paint will not do, whatever medium we find ourselves working in will not do. Amenities and consolation accrue to a horizon it wants to get beyond, abandoning amenities and consolation or seeking new ones. It will, of course, suffer marginalization, temporary in some cases, unremitting in most” (PH 239). Mackey begins assertively, declaring centrifugal work begins with good-bye. But he immediately qualifies his claim saying it “wants” to bid good-bye to all givens. This is an important transition, for

Mackey’s “want” here is not a sourceless desire so much as a desire that arises by working within the context of “all givens.” The want must be understood as the result of “centrifugal work” rather than its source. Mackey solidifies this point in the following sentence, noting that centrifugal work begins with “whatever medium we find ourselves working in will not do.”

Mackey’s point here echoes Charles Olson’s observation that “limits are what any of us are inside of” just as it calls to mind Derrida’s primary acceptation that we do not know what hospitality is. For Mackey, media are limiting structures that gesture beyond their own givenness to what they cannot do and what we, consequently, cannot know. Mackey proposes that the realization of medial limitation introduces centrifugal force into literary work. And the realization of those limits comes about through “work” as such, in the forms of physical and intellectual labor.

Stating that centrifugal work begins with good-bye, Mackey makes work into the condition of proceeding beyond what is given in “Destination Out.” He insists on this point for a specific reason: the work of black experimentalism is too often conflated with the work of constructing a legible black identity. Mackey understands this sleight of hand—from work to

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identity—to be the result of specific divisions of intellectual labor, particularly those resulting from academic discourse. In the second paragraph of his tract, Mackey argues that “black centrifugal writing has been and continues to be multiply marginalized. Why would it be otherwise? At a time when academic and critical discourse battens on identity obsession (even as it ‘problematizes’ identity), black centrifugal writing reorients identity in ways that defy prevailing divisions of labor. In the face of a widespread fetishization of collectivity, it dislocates collectivity, flies from collectivity, wants to make flight a condition of collectivity” (PH 239).

Mackey sets myriad concepts in motion here without always tracking their many trajectories in full. If we follow through on Mackey’s centrifugal metaphor, for instance, would it not make sense that centrifugal writing—in its movement outward—ends up on the margins? It is precisely such “center / margin” discourse, however, that Mackey attempts to displace by situating the centrifugal at the heart of collectivity. Centrifugal work “wants to make flight a condition of collectivity” so that what Mackey calls “prevailing divisions of labor” within academic discourse cannot so easily ascribe the work of black creative expression to a stable black identity.

Mackey’s characterization of Hambone as developing a drive toward “ensemblist identity and definition” must then be read then as an alternative expression of making flight the condition of collectivity. To the extent that such flight forms a response to the categories of identity promulgated by divisions of labor within literary discourse, Mackey’s work on Hambone forms a protest against racialized divisions of intellectual labor while simultaneously making such labor the point of commencement for centrifugal displacement. “Destination Out” conceptualizes a methodology for remaining attendant to myriad forms of intellectual labor while also resisting the centripetal force—the drive toward categorical identification, the imposition of truth on the

Other—that would seek to bind labor’s creative and disruptive potential.

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Mackey’s effort to displace divisions of intellectual labor based on color lines did not go unremarked by his contemporaries. In his brief essay on editing Hambone, for instance, Mackey identifies an essay by Eliot Weinberger as addressing another of his motivations for editing a literary journal. In the essay, Weinberger writes of his experience as co-editor of the journal

Montemora and speaks to the dearth of writing by minorities in predominantly white avant-garde publishing circles in the U.S.: “On the aesthetic Left, the magazines are publishing many more women than they used to, but are not attracting young writers from the minorities, despite the presence of major avant-garde minority figures” (qtd. in PH 247). Around the same time

Weinberger published this statement in Poetry East (1983), Mackey published his inaugural issue of Hambone. In response to that issue, Weinberger wrote a private letter to Mackey in which he praises Mackey’s editorial work and develops his argument concerning the racial divide within avant-garde writing. Weinberger amplifies his rhetoric, even, claiming that

Hambone issues a decisive response to literary “apartheid” in America. He begins his letter by sharing his own vision of editorial work with the still fledgling editor: “the function of a little magazine is to draw a (highly personal) map of the world and to introduce new writers onto that map. Ultimately the success / failure of a magazine is dependent on the new writers—the people who wouldn’t be read if it weren’t for you” (Weinberger). Here, Weinberger’s language of mapping anticipates Mackey’s characterization of Hambone as plotting points on an alternative map of other American literature. More importantly for Weinberger is the emphasis on “new” writers. But within a literary culture Weinberger sees as racially divided, the question can easily be asked: new to whom?

Weinberger answers this question as he continues in his letter to Mackey. He explains that since the 1960s, American literature has fallen into a state of “apartheid” from which the

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escape routes remain obscure. He then identifies Hambone as the outlet for a new discourse of avant-garde writing in America:

The most disastrous effect of the post-1970 apartheid policy is that it has

created separate channels of communication. The black small presses and

magazines are simply not seen outside of the network of black writers. They are

rarely in the literary (white) bookstores; no press or magazine ever sent

Montemora review or exchange copies; etc. Rather than fostering a pluralistic

society, we have a situation where the various groups are talking to themselves in

isolated rooms.

This is where I see Hambone making a tremendous difference. As a black

writer, you are clearly plugged into networks that I or Clayton [Eshleman] or

[Robert] Bertholf are not. And you are obviously interested in some of the best

writing done by white writers at the moment. Hambone – for the first time in 20

years – is a magazine where black and white writers can read each other. For me

at least, this is worth a 100 Conjunctions or Callaloos. (Weinberger)

Weinberger’s praise for Hambone leaves some questions in the air. Who or what, for instance, instituted the “apartheid policy” to which he refers? One wonders if Weinberger is placing some blame on LeRoi Jones’s strong transition to the Black Arts Movement. When he imagines a pre- apartheid 1960s in literary publishing, after all, he is very likely speaking about influential journals such as Yūgen, The Floating Bear, and Kulchur, all of which had significant ties to

Jones and all of which published both black and white writers in their pages, though never in equal numbers. Despite some ambiguity, Weinberger’s letter to Mackey identifies a problem to which Hambone responds: the “apartheid” of avant-garde literary networks based on race. For

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Weinberger Conjunctions represents the contemporary white avant-garde, and Callaloo the contemporary black avant-garde. Hambone—given its range—is worth 100 of either.

Weinberger’s valuation of Hambone is rhetorical to be sure, but it nevertheless addresses the central concern of this chapter: how to value Hambone and its relation to a contemporary literary avant-garde as well as to a history of modernity that takes the figural Hambone as its namesake and figurehead. The value, however, is difficult to determine because Hambone’s value is in its work of continually displacing modernity’s incorporations, of fleeing as much as it can from the recuperative logic of modernity. Paul Mann has argued that the discourse of the death of the avant-garde is in fact a recuperative function for capital’s expansion—where outsider discourse charts the terrain of dissent so that capital can occupy that terrain. We must consider how and whether Hambone’s centrifugal force can function otherwise. It is not enough to say that Hambone’s flight is the flight of and from modernity or the flight of avant-garde literary art from its historical contexts and the conditions of its production. There’s more at stake here: a protest against divisions of intellectual labor and literary value based on race; and a proposition that recuperation functions in multiple registers, not all of which respond to capitalism’s incorporating mandate. Hambone, that is, recuperates a concept of experimental expression that maintains the disruptive potential for dissensus because it insists that intellectual and creative labor cannot be wholly bound by the divisions of labor that seek to keep them in their proper place.

This chapter has followed Mackey’s conception of his journal to show that Hambone is a critical figure for considering the valuation of intellectual labor in American modernity, for the vernacular figure emerges as a figure of intellectual freedom from people who suffered the most extreme division of labor: slavery. Mackey’s return to the figure of Hambone thus functions as

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an attempt to recuperate the value of intellectual labor and creative expression within the African diaspora by making the function of such labor into a flight from the economic impediments that would seek to bind them. Those unnamed who created Hambone, or at least made him a prominent figure in a vernacular tradition, had their physical labor and freedom stripped from them. Their creative labor, however, remained in flight from and in engagement with the imposition of Western modernity, leading the way to the emergence of an other America. We glimpse this flight in Hambone’s call, which calls so that we may answer.

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CHAPTER 4. Another Frame: Chris Kraus, Semiotext(e), and the Economy of Letters

Introduction

In the preceding chapter we saw how Nathaniel Mackey formed Hambone as both a response to a solicitation that operated in the history of African American and Afro-Caribbean experimentalism, and as an open solicitation in its own right to experimental writers of the

Americas. I argued that Hambone’s call-and-response structure swims against what Paul Mann characterizes as the centripetal currents of avant-garde discourse by tracking, in print, the figural

Hambone’s creative labor in flight. For Mackey, assembling the diverse materials for Hambone participates in “centrifugal work” that “makes flight a condition of [the] collectivity” that

Hambone both configures and deconstructs (Paracritical Hinge 239). As we consider Hambone in hindsight, and also transition into this final chapter on Chris Kraus’s novel I Love Dick (1997) and her editorship of the Native Agents imprint of Semiotext(e) since 1990, we might also note how desire motivates the deconstruction of collectivity undertaken by Mackey’s centrifugal work. Mackey writes that “centrifugal work begins with goodbye, wants to bid all givens goodbye” (239, emphasis added). Additionally, he argues that “black centrifugal writing reorients identity in ways that defy prevailing divisions of labor. In the face of a widespread fetishization of collectivity, it dislocates collectivity, flies from collectivity, wants to make flight a condition of collectivity” (239, emphasis added). The “want” that motivates centrifugal work, according to Mackey, also flies from fetishization. Mackey sets up flight as the condition of desire without an appropriate object. Centrifugal work, in this sense, responds to the solicitation of a desire that seeks to abandon the objects and subject categories it would otherwise cathect.

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Hambone’s creative labor in flight is propelled by a desire whose destination remains emphatically unknown.

Whereas Mackey theorizes the desire that undersigns his literary project most clearly in an out-of-the-way occasional essay that remained unpublished for years, Sylvère Lotringer and

Chris Kraus, the editors and publishers Semiotext(e), state explicitly that Semiotext(e) was founded to respond to and reroute desire as it operates within the literary field and in relation to the literary academy. Similar to the Dalkey Archive Press, which had its foundations laid out for it by John O’Brien’s earlier success with the Review of Contemporary Fiction, Semiotext(e) began in 1973 as a quasi-academic journal, but one focused on critical theory emerging from

France. Sylvère Lotringer founded the journal just after being hired to teach semiotics in the

French Department at Columbia University. The journal was to translate and publish key works of French semiotics for a U.S. audience, which led Lotringer to conceptualize his Foreign Agents series within the press. The journal was also meant to comment on the fashionable position of

French semiotics in the American academy. The introduction to a 1996 interview with Lotringer and Kraus, who joined the press as an editor in 1990, notes that “the title Semiotext(e) was devised from the first as a Freudian pun that would play on the American academic desire for the sexiness and scientific nature of French structuralism while subverting that desire through the very institutions that aroused and channeled it” (Schwarz and Balsamo 206, hereafter Schwarz).

To subvert the desire for French semiotics operating in the American academy, Semiotext(e) began by refiguring a founding father of structuralism with “The Two Saussures.” This opening shot was “designed to paint a surrealistic mustache on the great founder of structural linguistics,

Ferdinand de Saussure, by examining his lesser-known work in the Anagrams, a project that Jean

Starobinski averred would launch the ‘second Saussurian revolution’” (Schwarz 207-208). By

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the second year of publication, Semiotext(e) was publishing works by Jacques Derrida and the first translation into English from Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Delueze and Felix Guattari. Publishing work by these figures quickly established the press as a significant journal for poststructuralist theory, but suggests in hindsight that the journal fed off of and stoked the American academic desire for French theory more than it subverted it.73 In this early configuration of Semiotext(e), when its primary focus was French poststructuralism, the journal and then publisher functioned very much like the discourse of the avant-garde as Paul Mann theorizes it: as an outpost for the incorporation of the unsettling and difficult texts emerging as poststructural theory.

Yet there remains in Semiotext(e)’s formation and history another unsettling figure that was less easily incorporated into academic discourse: the visible, unpronounced, and in some ways supplementary (e) in the publishing house’s name, Semiotext(e). Semiotext(e) set out in

1973 to subvert academic desire for French structuralism and succeeded insofar as it switched out the object of desire: poststructuralism displaced structuralism but became a new fetish discourse in turn. Over the next 15 years Semiotext(e) published increasingly fashionable theorists, primarily French. These include Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault,

Felix Guattari, Jean-François Lyotard, and Paul Virilio, all of whom remain major figures in various iterations of poststructuralist theory and media studies. When Lotringer met Chris Kraus in the 1980s, however, she criticized the male-dominated Foreign Agents list. In an interview she called it a “huge embarrassment… that all 25 Foreign Agents authors were white males!”

(Schwarz 212). As self-conscious and savvy as Lotringer had been about the possible subversions of academic desire made possible by Semiotext(e), he fell into a trap of his own making. He never adequately theorized or even addressed that riddling (e) in the name of his

73 For more on the press’s early years, see Henry Schwarz and Anne Balsamo, 205-211.

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own press. Yet it remained there, operating as an open solicitation to some future writer or editor. Chris Kraus finally responded.

Kraus began publishing books in her Native Agents imprint of Semiotext(e) in 1990, a couple of years after she married Sylvère Lotringer. As its title suggests, the imprint was designed to respond to Lotringer’s Foreign Agents series and to demonstrate, Kraus says, that

“French theory is reinvented in this fiction—in the United States, gay and women’s writing was the ‘place’ in which those theoretical issues were being worked on or over” (qtd. in Schwarz

212). In an interview, Kraus remarks that the eight books she had edited and published at the time of the interview in 1994 were written with “a polemical, not an introspective, I” and that taken together, they are “aggressive and funny and they don’t see the personal as a final closed destination. Everything is in flux” (qtd. in Schwarz 212). Just as Lotringer initially sought to redirect the academic desire for structuralist semiotics by doubling Saussure and offering an alternative version of the structuralist figurehead, so too does Kraus seek to redirect the desire to read gay and women’s writing as fundamentally personal by publishing works that refuse to see the personal as a “final closed destination.” She re-introduces into the booklist of Semiotext(e) the unsettling mark of gender that was always in the press’s name and makes the gendered (e) a node for reconfiguring the economy of letters in Semiotext(e). Kraus’s editorship of the Native

Agents imprint thereby carries out the redirection of desire that Lontringer designed Semiotext(e) to undertake, but by looking where Lotringer had failed to: at a host of writers who had been hiding in plain sight.

Whereas Dalkey Archive responded to the corporatizing publishing industry and the critical academy that often followed its lead in the early 1980s, and Mackey offered a rejoinder to a fetishization of identity-based writing by black Americans with his editorship of Hambone,

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Kraus and her Native Agents show that even in supposedly enlightened avant-garde circles such as the one Lotringer worked in, erasure operates freely. In this, Kraus’s editorial work and writing redirect and call into question Lotringer’s legacy with Semtiotext(e) while also engaging critics such as Shoshana Felman and Barbara Johnson who demonstrated in the late 1970s that

“turning the screw of interpretation” and changing critical discourse’s “frames of reference” are endless operations that often function along gendered lines (Felman; Johnson). Kraus’s editorship and writing amount to another turning of the screw of interpretation, but one that takes the material economies of literary production into account as much as the discursive textual economies addressed by Felman and Johnson. Kraus literalizes theoretical debates about gender, genre, and textual economy by using her own publishing imprint as a material apparatus for changing the frames of reference for postwar American experimentalism. Moreover, her work as an editor and publisher informs Kraus’s own writing on desire, gender, and textual economy in her first novel I Love Dick. Taken together, Kraus’s editorial and written works show that assembling contemporary literature—rerouting its discourses and desires—is never ending. Its critical and analytic functions remain operative and open onto new conjunctures and forms of address. As such, Kraus is a fitting figure for bringing this dissertation to a close because her body of work opens new frames of reference that bring into focus, once again, the literary field as the terrain upon which literary politics—of gender and genre in Kraus’s case—continues to play itself out.

Instead of looking only to the writers Kraus has published with her Native Agents imprint, this chapter approaches the subjects of gender, desire, and textual economy primarily through the lens of Kraus’s first novel, I Love Dick (1997). Published with her own imprint seven after she began publishing books with Semiotext(e), I Love Dick is an autobiographical

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epistolary novel comprised of love letters to a man named Dick—about whom I will say more shortly. Because many of these letters to Dick reflect on writers Kraus has published, on forgotten artists of the postwar period, and on artists who, like Kraus, engage with the history of women’s experimentalism in the postwar era by making art assemblages, I Love Dick also theorizes in novel form the work Kraus undertook as editor of Native Agents in the years prior to the novel’s composition. Kraus’s editorship and authorship share aesthetic strategies and practical methods. Kraus’s stated reasons for founding Native Agents, for instance, and her description of the aesthetics of the various books she has edited and published could be treated equally as descriptions of her first novel. Based largely on Kraus’s real-life infatuation with Dick

Hebdige, I Love Dick also refuses to “see the personal as a final closed destination” as it addresses her desire not only to Dick, but to the wider and unknown audience that makes up her book’s readership. And like the written work Kraus publishes with Native Agents, I Love Dick forms a “space” in which the legacy of French theory is “worked over.” Beyond Chris’s oblique engagement with Felman and Johnson, I Love Dick calls to mind Derrida’s The Post Card (1980) with its epistolary theory—“Envois”—comprising the first half of the book. Derrida’s response to Lacan, which I will discuss later, was also published in The Post Card. Kraus’s novel addresses her editorship of Semiotext(e) because it is designed as a work of fiction that explicitly theorizes its own status as writing operating within a literary economy and also as a response to the desire for a highly masculine poststructuralism that set the terms for what “theory” was in the

U.S. in the 1980s and 1990s.

This chapter shows that the narrative of desire, address, and literary economy dramatized in I Love Dick derives in part from Kraus’s editorial work. Schwarz and Balsamo have described

Kraus’s editorship of Native Agents as an “attempt to deal retroactively with the women’s

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movement, and feminism more broadly” (Schwarz 212).74 A glance at the texts Kraus published early in her editorial career attest to this claim. The works that Kraus edited and published prior to her publication of I Love Dick in 1997 cover a range of women artists’ experiences working and trying to make a living in the postwar United States. Ann Rower’s If You’re A Girl (1990) includes Rower’s “transfictions,” or transcript fictions, that provide fictional documentation of the New York arts scene in the 1970s and 1980s. Cookie Mueller’s excellent Walking through

Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black (1990) recounts in autobiographical fiction Mueller’s experiences as a working artist and mother from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s. This was

Kraus’s first book with Native Agents, so I will offer her recounting here. Kraus says:

When I started the Native Agents series, I had just heard Cookie Mueller read at

the Poetry project. Cookie was this great, legendary New York figure: she’d been

a star of the early John Waters movies, this great Baltimore new age biker girl

who ‘took notes’ on her life by writing these perfect stories. Everyone loved

Cookie, and the readings that she gave in New York for five or ten years before

that were real high points. So it seemed incredible that no one had done a book of

Cookie’s work. Obviously her book should have been done by Random House or

Harper Collins, but it seemed all the major publishers she’d seen wanted so many

changes that Cookie couldn’t be bothered. So we published her book, Walking

through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black (1990), verbatim, as the first in the

series and it’s sold out several editions. (Schwarz 213)

74 Aaron Lecklider has shown that Semiotext(e) has long promoted work by gay, lesbian, queer, and transgender writers as well, and that this focus has been intensified with the editorship of Hedi El Kholti, who joined Kraus and Lotringer as an editor in 2002 (this further “turn of the screw” has been addressed very well in Lecklider’s article). Kholti, a Moroccan-born American living in Los Angeles, has also extended the purview of Semiotext(e) to Franco- North-African writers such as Abdellah Taïa, whose book, An Arab Melancholia has put him among very few Moroccan writers who write openly about their homosexuality, according to Semiotext(e) (“Abdellah Taïa”).

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Here we get a sense of Kraus’s early conception of Native Agents, with Mueller’s work taking shape as “notes” on her life that become stories, a generation of fiction through the annotation of one’s life. The passage also shows that Kraus was interested not only in the writing, but in the fact that it documents a scene, for Kraus these artist readings in New York in the 1980s but also the various art scenes in which Mueller had participated for most of her adult life. Such overlapping interests also characterize the later works she published. Eileen Myles’s Not Me

(1991) became influential as a frank expression of lesbian life in New York in the 1970s and

1980s, and also took a range of leftist political positions. And David Rattray’s How I Became

One of the Invisible (1992), one of the few men Kraus published early on, was assembled and edited by Kraus just before Rattray’s death that same year. This book collects Rattray’s writings on secret histories, mysticism, and esoteric poets, stemming largely from Rattray’s engagement with and translation of twentieth-century French avant-gardists such as Antonin Artaud and

Roger Gilbert-Lecomte. Together these works exemplify a kind of writing that seeks to record, document, and yet fictionalize experiences of alternative and artistic lifestyles in the postwar

U.S., even if some of the work, like Rattray’s looks back to much earlier figures and formations to do so.

Kraus’s various editorial projects, which include publishing the work of recently deceased friends and acquaintances—such as Mueller and Rattray, who died of AIDS and cancer in 1989 and 1992, respectively—have had a profound impact on Kraus the writer. As she has noted in a 2014 essay she wrote for the Sydney Review of Books:

After publishing five or six of these books, I realised they had something in

common. Yes they were all written by women—yes they were all written in the

first person—and like practically all books and films of their time, they included

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writing about sex. (Since these first-person narratives were written by women,

this necessarily meant that the books included narrative first-person writing about

sex by a woman, a fact that tended to obscure practically everything else, but

more on this later.) What seemed most important to me was not the fact of the ‘I’

but the way it moved through the text and the world. It was an active, public ‘I’ –

the ‘I’ of American realist fiction, from Mark Twain to Melville to Burroughs and

Kerouac and Alexander Trocchi. I did not begin writing myself for another few

years, but I learned how to write largely by reading and editing the first Native

Agents books. (“The New Universal”)

While it is easy to characterize I Love Dick as the result and expression of erotic love—even if there is only one mildly graphic sex scene in the work—Kraus’s attentiveness to these other writers and friends indicates that I Love Dick emerges from different kinds of love: erotic, certainly, but also love for her friends and fellow writers; love for lost friends; love for artists that have been largely forgotten. In this, Kraus figures in to a history of postwar experimentalism by artists who have sought to record and recover elements of artistic life in the U.S. that have been obstructed or occluded by more dominant discourses of experimentalism. It is no coincidence, for instance, that one of the later works Kraus published before giving the editorial reins to Hedi El Kholti in 2002, was Fanny Howe’s Indvisible (2000). This book is the concluding volume of a larger five-volume sequence that Howe has now published as Radical

Love (Nightboat Books, 2006).75 Howe’s sequence operates as an excavation of forgotten artists and desires in postwar America, focalized primarily by women living as outsider artists of various sorts, or as would-be artists who could not practice their art in their time.

75 I should note here as well that Howe supported herself early in her writing career by writing erotic novels, including West Coast Nurse and Vietnam Nurse under the pseudonym Della Field.

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Like Radical Love, Kraus’s Native Agents series acts as a single corpus with discrete parts. As Kraus writes in I Love Dick, these various parts seek to narrate “the lives of the unfamous, the unrecorded desires and ambitions of artists who had been here too” (I Love Dick

123, hereafter Dick), but who could not necessarily find a broad or even an academic audience for their work. In its persistent focus on the forgotten and unfamous, I Love Dick coincides with and anticipates lauded works such as Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives (1998 Spanish;

2007 English) and Rachel Kushner’s The Flame Throwers (2013) as contemporary novels seeking to recover the history of post-WWII avant-garde artists in the Americas who will otherwise be forgotten. Still, I Love Dick is not focused on recovery alone, nor are Bolaño’s and

Kushner’s novels. All of these unite the different kinds of desire that operate within a literary economy. Erotic desire no doubt drives the history of experimentalism. But so too do friendship and sympathy, and the desire for art itself, which is much more difficult to identify and account for, except through the production of more art and criticism. I Love Dick addresses all of these forms of desire and emotion and is thus destined to many addresses and addressees. This chapter tracks the itinerary of Kraus’s editorial work and I Love Dick as they shuttle between these varied addressees, from Dick to Henry James, and from Shoshana Felman to David Rattray.

Desire, Excess, and Literary Economy

Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick responds to theorizations of gendered literary economy written in the 1970s by Shoshana Felman and Barbara Johnson. A notable peculiarity of Shoshana

Felman’s reading of The Turn of the Screw—a novella whose tightly bound literary economy, I show later, is opened up and redirected in Kraus’s I Love Dick—is that the essay’s length exceeds that of the work it assesses. In Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of

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Reading—Otherwise, “Turning the Screw of Interpretation” runs to 113 pages. In the Norton

Critical Edition of The Turn of the Screw, the tale takes up 85 pages. The length of Felman’s essay alone cannot tell us much. Yet her work does not function in a vacuum. It responds, in fact, to a novella whose subject is literary economy, about the way a story circulates, the way things are made “telling,” and the manner in which the narrative is continually “returning upon itself” in order to “catch those not easily caught” (James, “Preface” 125). In contrast to such a tightly bound economy, James sets “invention,” which he sees as “running on and on” and as “sadly compromised from the moment its stream breaks bounds and gets into flood” (“Preface” 125).

Invention, that is, can be excessive. With James’s prefatory statements in mind, which Felman knew very well, could it be that Felman’s essay purposefully “gets into flood” in order to commit the indiscretion of excessive invention? Could it be, that is, that Felman’s essay is artfully excessive?

Today Felman’s essay is among the most well-known pieces of criticism published on

The Turn of the Screw, and it is very likely among a handful of the more famous contemporary essays to be written on literature and psychoanalysis.76 But it was not the only essay among this handful to be published in the 1977 double-issue of Yale French Studies on the topic of

Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading—Otherwise. Nor was it the only essay in that issue that questioned interpretation’s gendered relationship to excess and desire. The other

76 Although one can acquire a decent sense of well-known works in the field, it is much more difficult to prove such a claim. Google Scholar is making this somewhat easier, even if its quantifying methods will overlook non-digitized publications, leading to a digital presentism that one should keep in mind. Still, it is worth noting that “Turning the Screw of Interpretation” has been cited 412 times by Google’s count. The next most cited work that Norton includes is an excerpt from T.J. Lustig’s 1994 book, Henry James and the Ghostly, which has been cited 40 times. While Tzvetan Todorov’s book The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to Literary Genre has been cited over 2,000 times, those are citations of some aspect of the entire book and not necessarily citations of the portion discussing James’s short novel. For a point of comparison for the claim about literature and psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan’s seminar on “The Purloined Letter” by Edgar Allen Poe has been cited 458 times.

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essay was Barbara Johnson’s “The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida.”77 This essay, like

Felman’s, deals with questions of mastery and otherness and it shows how critical interpretation and analysis can engender both lack and excess. By performing a reading of Derrida performing a reading of Lacan performing a reading of Poe, Johnson questions how and why gender and psychoanalytic concepts of castration (as lack) become touchstones for the face-off between

Derrida and Lacan, particularly in Derrida’s reading of Lacan’s “Seminar on ‘The Purloined

Letter’.”78 Presented together in 1977, “Turning the Screw of Interpretation” and “The Frame of

Reference” formed a strong response to gendered aspects of critical analysis by showing that the economy of letters and critical discourse often rests on unacknowledged associations between mastery and masculinity.79

Johnson’s and Felman’s essays from Yale French Studies have maintained their stature as culminating points in historically situated debates, with Johnson responding most immediately to

Derrida, and Felman responding to psychoanalytic critics who applied psychoanalysis to literary texts as a means of exerting psychoanalysis’s mastery over literature. The purpose of their critical interventions, however, was to show that even their own incisive analyses should not be thought of as culminating in any way. Historically situated interpretation, that is, is interminable.

This chapter takes Felman and Johnson up on this last point to show how Chris Kraus’s I Love

Dick adds an additional turn of the screw to these poststructural arguments by literalizing and

77 Johnson’s essay has been cited 367 times, according to Google Scholar. 78 I am thinking here of Johnson’s resistance to Derrida’s claims that Lacan structures the letter as “lack” because he is really talking about castration. Johnson writes: “While asserting that the letter’s meaning is lacking, Lacan, according to Derrida, makes this lack into the meaning of the letter. He goes on to assert that what Lacan means by that lack is the truth of lack-as-castration-as-truth: [quoting Derrida] ‘The truth of the purloined letter is the truth itself…. What is veiled/unveiled in this case is a hole, a non-being; the truth of being, as non-being. Truth is ‘woman’ as veiled/unveiled castration’…. Lacan himself, however, never uses the word castration in the text of the original Seminar. That it is suggested is indisputable, but Derrida, by filling in what Lacan left blank is repeating the same gesture of blank-filling for which he criticizes Lacan” (217-218). 79 For an overview of the discourse of mastery as it operated within and against poststructural theoy in the 1970s and 1980s, see LeClair.

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further theorizing literary economy. She literalizes textual economy by publishing her own novel in her Native Agents series, a point I will address at greater length shortly. At the same time the novel theorizes the relationship between desire, gender, and literary economy at a more metacritical level by looking to the work of other authors in the Native Agents booklist, as well as to Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. Finally, I argue that Kraus’s novelistic theorization of textual economy results in part from Kraus’s editorial work with other experimental authors.

The novel stems from the work of recovering and promoting women’s experimental writing overlooked by Sylvère Lotringer. Native Agents thus served as I Love Dick’s antecedent and public outlet, making I Love Dick a fulcrum for considering the complementarity between literary practice and literary form, the co-constitutive elements of second reflection.

I Love Dick tells the story of “Chris Kraus’s” infatuation with a man named Dick, “an

English cultural critic who’s recently relocated from Melbourne to Los Angeles” (19). It takes form as an extensive series of love letters, many of which remain unsent, and some of which are written by Kraus’s then husband and fellow Semiotext(e) publisher Sylvère Lotringer. The letters chronicle Chris’s transforming obsession with Dick over the course of a year and a half, but also range from love to confession to personal history to literary and art criticism.80 So while the text is composed as a series of love letters, the letters themselves show the variety of interests, affections, affectations, and critical investments that can coalesce around erotic desire.

By configuring her book as a multi-generic text that shuttles between love letter and critical thoery, Kraus, like Felman and Johnson before her, asks how interminable and indeterminable desire drives an economy of letters, actually and conceptually. She addresses the compulsions that put related apparatuses and investments into motion and asks: how and why do some of

80 I will distinguish from here on between the fictional “Chris” and the author Kraus. The distinction holds up pretty well, but breaks down on occasion due to the genre-bending nature of Kraus’s text, which is largely the point.

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these cohere around forms of artistic expression? What is this desire and how do literary practices form it into constellations such as those we have seen with Hambone, the Dalkey

Archive Press, and Olson’s conception of little magazines?

Almost immediately upon I Love Dick’s release, the multi-generic ambiguity of Kraus’s work was nearly cut short by a brief gossip piece published in New York Magazine. The article called “See Dick Sue” revealed that the “Dick” of the title was in fact Dick Hebdige, the popular cultural theorist who gained some fame with the publication of Subculture: The Meaning of Style in 1979 (Zembla). The article reports that Hebdige threatened to sue Kraus and that Kraus was able to publish the book only after she agreed to remove Dick’s last name from the text and place him at a different university. This news has led the book to be read as a roman à clef, and it is widely acknowledged that Chris Kraus and Sylvère Lotringer did in fact know Dick Hebdige.

Yet even as the New York Magazine purports to reveal some “truth” about I Love Dick, it too takes part in the ambiguous economy of letters that I Love Dick addresses. The article, after all, is signed “—Nic Zembla.” This author, who managed to publish in the pages of a well-known magazine, has apparently never published anything else. Moreover, as one Larry Zirlin pointed out to the Nabokov scholar Donald Barton Johnson, who then forwarded Zirlin’s email to the

Nabokov listserv back in 1997, although the article purports to have been written by Zembla,

“there is no Nic Zembla listed on New York’s masthead” (Zirlin). The letter made it to the

Nabokov listserv because Zembla is the “distant northern land” ruled by “King Charles II” in

Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), suggesting that Nic Zembla is yet another fictional signatory in the literary who-did-what that I Love Dick presents. The “truth” of the book, even with Dick Hebdige named explicitly, is no less difficult to lay hold of.

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It is unsurprising that I Love Dick generated this kind of playful response. With Nic

Zembla we are talking not just about a nom de plume meant to shield the author from legal action by Hebdige or Kraus—though the fictional signature likely serves that function also—it is a nom de plume that alludes to a distant fictional land in a fictional work about desire driving one toward literature and literary analysis (Pale Fire). What Kraus’s novel seems to provoke is the desire to find some factual truth or stable position from which to judge her book, just as Lacan wanted to find in Poe’s story (the letter always reaches its destination), or as Felman’s various psychoanalysts wanted to find in The Turn of the Screw (the ghosts must be the projections of the governess’s repressed desire!). Yet as Zembla’s signature indicates, her work often defers this desire and reroutes it to an indeterminable elsewhere. The argument that Kraus makes with

Felman and Johnson, and which I will track through this chapter: while there may be a “there there,” i.e. while the novel might direct the reader to some shred of factuality or present some points that could form the ground for a stable reading, there is equally an elsewhere there: an unknown address or addressee, working like the unsettling (e) in Semiotext(e). I Love Dick makes explicit its doubled and doubling correspondence that speaks at once to the “riddling specificity” of the literary work that Robert Caserio outlined in the second chapter, and to the riddling specificity of lived experience and literary work—of writing and editing—that Kraus’s novel also addresses (Caserio 150).

The Law of Genre

Chris Kraus is most known today as a writer of fiction and art criticism and only indirectly as an editor and filmmaker. Her reputation as a writer rests on the four related novels she has published since 1997: I Love Dick; Aliens and Anorexia (2000), which chronicles the

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failure of Kraus’s film, Gravity and Grace, based on the work of Simone Weil; Torpor (2006), which narrates Chris and Sylvère’s (Sylvie and Jerome) journey across former communist states in 1991 in an attempt to adopt a child in Romania; and finally Summer of Hate (2012), which narrates the story of Chris’s relationship with a working-class former inmate who helps her to manage her properties in the American Southwest. I Love Dick, her first and most popular work, was published in 1997 by Kraus’s Native Agents imprint of Semiotext(e), which she had edited since 1990. The novel tells the story—in first and third person and epistolary form—of Chris’s infatuation with “Dick,” an unrequited love she pursues by writing voluminous letters, most of which she does not send. Dick, in turn, does not respond to any of the letters he does receive until the final pages of the narrative, where he criticizes Sylvère and Chris for making him an unwilling participant in their “bizarre game” (260). For Dick, Chris’s desire to become a writer, which coincides with her desire for Dick himself, feeds on what he perceives to be his inalienable right to privacy. In his single letter to Chris and Sylvère, which he addresses only to

Sylvère in an act of epistolary aggression, he concludes: “I do not share your conviction that my right to privacy has to be sacrificed for the sake of [Chris’s] talent” (260). Here, Dick conceives of a relationship in which a parasitic-like writer feeds off of and ultimately kills its host. Yet

Dick refuses to acknowledge that the writing itself introduces an interruptive and transitional element into the host/parasite relation, and this third element is the economy of letters itself, which helps Chris to move out of positions of dependence in her narrative.

Kraus’s first novel initially received few reviews and those it did receive were generally unfavorable. David Rimanelli of Artforum quipped that I Love Dick was “not so much written as secreted” (qtd. in Jamison), and the New York Magazine article I mention above described it as

“a stream of fawning love letters so intrusive that what [Chris] refers to as ‘abstract romanticism’

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seems more like epistolary stalking” (Zembla).81 I Love Dick remained something of a cult book until Kraus’s later works—the three novels and two books of art and cultural criticism—gained her further recognition, leading to the republication of a critical edition of I Love Dick in 2006.

This volume includes a foreword by the American poet Eileen Myles, who published her own breakout book Not Me with Native Agents in 1991, as well as an afterword by the critic Joan

Hawkins. This reissue has now gone through several printings. Kraus released a U.K. edition of I

Love Dick in late 2015. Writing in The Guardian, the author Joanna Walsh—who publishes her work in the U.S. with Dorothy, a Publishing Project, a press devoted solely to women’s experimental writing—gives it a glowing review and notes that “a whole generation of writers owe her,” singling out fashionable young authors such as Sheila Heti and Ben Lerner, both of whom write first-person fictions that clearly draw upon their own lives for inspiration (Walsh).

In 2015 The New Yorker also published an effusive critical essay on Kraus and her work, a kind of belated retrospective, by the equally young and fashionable Leslie Jamison. Nearly 20 years after its initial publication, Kraus’s work has found a wide and passionate readership.

I Love Dick begins, however, at a very different moment in Kraus’s life and career. The initial third-person narrator notes that the date is December 3, 1994, and “Chris Kraus, a 39-year- old experimental filmmaker and Sylvère Lotringer, a 56-year-old college professor from New

York, have dinner with Dick ____, a friendly acquaintance of Sylvère’s, at a sushi bar in

Pasadena” (19). Over the course of the book, we learn that Chris has just completed a film version of Simone Weil’s Gravity & Grace and its prospects look bleak. The film’s editors in

New Zealand, where Kraus spent most of her adolescence and also attended university, are delaying the project and demanding more money. Meanwhile, the prestigious film festivals to

81 Both of these draw on fluid metaphors—“secreted” and “stream”—that echoes James’s “flood” of invention, which I will show in the final section of this chapter is itself a highly gendered metaphor for James.

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which Chris has submitted the film have all rejected it. Chris writes to “Dick, Sylvère, Anyone” on December 17, 1994, that “it’s clear that the film has no chance in movie terms. I may as well own it but ohhh, I thought there’d be more movies after G & G. If there are no movies I need to figure out what it’s gonna be” (83). A couple of days later, Chris writes to Dick that “once I accept the failure of Gravity & Grace it won’t matter anymore what I do—once you’ve accepted total obscurity you may as well do what you want” (88). These letters are prophetic, for they ultimately form the basis for I Love Dick, on which Kraus establishes her new artistic career.

I Love Dick thus presents a “case study” of a transitional moment in Kraus’s intellectual and personal life. It charts her movement from filmmaker to writer while also tracking her transition from what she sees as a dependent wife to an “American artist” (97). The two transitions go hand in hand, for Chris’s films have been financed, we learn, by Sylvère’s professorship in New York and the various additional talks he gives as an expert on French psychoanalysis and poststructuralism. When the curator for a regional arts center asks Chris how she “really” finances her films, she answers bluntly: “It’s simple…. I take money from Sylvère”

(86). In her reading of her interlocutor’s mental response, Chris imagines that “unlike his favorites, Leslie Thornton and Beth B, I was difficult and unadorable and a Bad Feminist to boot” (87). As Chris’s own self-analysis goes on, an analysis incited not only by the curator’s question but by her economic dependence on Sylvère, Chris clarifies that “‘Sylvère and I are

Marxists…. He takes money from the people who won’t give me money and gives it to me’”

(87). Yet this explanation only intensifies and redirects the focus of Chris’s reflections. Chris recognizes immediately the disingenuous nature of her explanation. She writes, “it occurred to me that I was suffering from the dizziness of contradictions: the only pleasure that remains once you’ve decided you know better than the world. Accepting contradictions means not believing

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anymore in the primacy of ‘true feelings.’ Everything is true and simultaneously” (87). The contradictory position Chris occupies induces a sense of vertigo. She plays the role of the experimental Marxist filmmaker while also agonizing over her financial dependence on

Lotringer; her unrequited love for Dick leads her to despair rather than elation; she wanted to be a filmmaker, but has inadvertently, at least according to the novel’s logic, become a writer. I

Love Dick thus presents itself as a strange variety of Künstlerroman where the Künstlerin (Chris /

Kraus) begins as a failed artist and dependent wife, even if Kraus had been successfully editing

Native Agents for several years at this point, a task she never mentions explicitly in her novel.

To work through her own failed film career, and her precarious position within what

Eileen Myles says that Kraus calls a “male host culture” (15), Kraus makes her book into an experimental testing of Chris’s claim that “everything is true and simultaneously.” Kraus’s claim explains the genre-bending elements of Kraus’s novel, where fiction meets personal history, and sex writing meets critical theory. As such, I Love Dick acts in part as an investigation into genre and the way that generic classification often seeks to put writing in its appropriate place, much like Mackey sought to challenge divisions of labor and literary classification with his editorship of Hambone. I Love Dick, in this respect, agitates for inappropriateness. It is fitting, then, that critics have been reluctant to call I Love Dick a novel. Joan Hawkins puts it in quotes in her afterword and eventually settles on “theoretical fiction” (263). In her foreword to the book,

Eileen Myles calls it simply a “study in female abjection” that defies distinctions between “false or true” (13, 15). Leslie Jamison makes it a “novel” in quotes in her essay for The New Yorker

(Jamison). Anna Watkins Fisher, by comparison, calls it an “art book” and “performance art” in a provocative and convincing essay about female “parasitical art” (224, 234). In her glowing review in The Guardian, Joanna Walsh begins, “I first read I Love Dick a few years ago. What

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was it? I didn’t know exactly: some kind of cult book I’d heard of via whispers from the US, where it was published in 1997. Reader, I read it, and I still wasn’t sure. An autobiography, a piece of fiction, a series of essays, a work of critical theory?” (Walsh). Walsh refuses to answer these generic questions, but Chris does not. I Love Dick is each of those things simultaneously. It is a multi-generic text whose claims to truth remain largely undecidable. Chris rejects a hierarchy of feelings and the primacy of “true feelings.” I Love Dick similarly rejects the discrete genre as it seeks not only to document but also to theorize and fictionalize this moment of transition in

Kraus’s artistic and personal life.

The lack of critical consensus about the genre of I Love Dick is mirrored in the book.

Sylvère Lotringer, who established himself as a narrative theorist in France before turning to poststructuralist theory in the U.S., remarks to Dick in one of the book’s letters that “Chris’ letters are some new kind of literary form” (258). And in one of the earliest letters that Sylvère writes to Dick, he reflects: “Thinking about it further, these letters seem to open up a new genre, something in between cultural criticism and fiction” (43). The closest Chris comes to explicitly theorizing her own letters is in a letter to Dick in which she recalls her time in New York City in her early 20s, just after she moved to New York from New Zealand. “I was right back there in the room on East 11th Street,” she writes, “all those pages of notes that I was writing then, tiny ballpoint letters on wrinkly onion paper about George Eliot, diagrams of molecular movement and attraction, Ulrike Meinhof and Merleau-Ponty. I believed I was inventing a new genre and it was secret because there was nobody to tell it to. Lonely Girl Phenomenology” (137). Years later, as Chris writes to Dick, she has finally found someone to tell about her “new genre.”

While the young Chris turns to Merleau-Ponty, the mature Kraus responds to that other offspring of phenomenology, Jacques Derrida. In 1980, Derrida published two works that

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theorize literary economy, desire, and genre in a manner elucidates what Kraus undertakes in I

Love Dick. The first is Derrida’s relatively obscure The Post Card (French 1980; English 1987).

This volume’s first section, “Envois,” is constructed as a series of love letters to an unnamed recipient and takes particular interest in the double-sided form of the postcard: its reversibility.

What is front? What is back? Is the image most important? The address? The message? This reversibility—and undecidability—is particularly important for Derrida because his love letters also reflect on the temporality of writing and of intellectual and literary history. The primary structuring metaphor in the sequence, after all, is a medieval image Derrida sees in the Bodleian

Library at Oxford in which Socrates sits at a writing table, pen in hand, and Plato stands behind him, possibly dictating what Socrates is to write. This strikes Derrida as emblematic of the present’s relationship to the past, where the figures in the present engage historical figures but also dictate to them from their own present position. In turn, writing and thought from the past reach their many unknown destinations by being taken up by figures in the present. Derrida reflects on these positions by way of the post card, because the post card acknowledges the

“post” not only as a mark of distance, spatially and temporally, but also as a mark of distance that keeps writing open to its others. Derrida writes to his correspondent, “you understand, within every sign already, every mark or every trait, there is distancing, the post, what there has to be so that it is legible for another, another than you or me, and everything is messed up in advance, cards on the table. The condition for it to arrive is that it ends up and even that it begins by not arriving. This is how it is to be read, and written, the carte of the adestination” (29). For

Derrida, acknowledging the post as a necessary mark of distancing also opens the post (card) and guides it to the addresses of others for whom it is not explicitly intended. In The Post Card, epistolary openness and adestination save writing and intellectual history from dogmatism,

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because the case, or the post card, is never closed. Derrida’s arguments in The Post Card illuminate Kraus’s work, because I Love Dick operates as a love letter to Dick that allows Kraus to open her writing to writers and artists from postwar America whose history Kraus draws on and refigures by doing so. In short, Kraus’s work too uses the conceit of the love letter as a mode for reflecting on the relationship between desire and the maintenance of and open stance toward intellectual and artistic history.

Derrida takes a similar position to the one he adopts in The Post Card in “The Law of

Genre,” which he wrote around the same time (presented at a conference in 1979, published

1980). It begins by stating the basic law of genre: “Genres are not to be mixed” (202). Derrida develops this point later in the essay by looking at structuralist approaches to genre in which taxonomy plays a critical role. Kraus’s multi-generic work clearly breaks this “law” by drawing on a range of forms and narrative perspectives, and by mixing autobiography, fiction, and criticism in the form of a novel. In breaking the first law of genre, however, I Love Dick enacts a secondary law of genre that Derrida calls “the law of the law of genre” (206). According to

Derrida, this law makes clear that genre “is precisely a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy” (206). In Anna Watkins Fisher’s essay on the “parasitical art of

Chris Kraus and Sophie Calle,” Fisher points out that for Kraus “the love letter represents a state of play by which gendered opponents feed on each other in a dynamically unstable game” (224).

This suggests that parasitism, like the laws of genre, works at multiple registers: between the supposedly gendered couple on the one hand, and within the textual economy of letters on the other. That is, the letter acts as a parasitic interruption to a first level parasitic relation that operates on a false logic of binary gender positons.

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The most fundamental parasitic relations that Kraus herself identifies are in her relations with Sylvère and Dick. We have already seen Chris agitate herself by considering her financial dependence on Sylvère. As Fisher points out in her essay, such economic “parasitism” has long been a point of anxiety in Western feminism, from Mary Wollstonecraft who metaphorizes the relation between men and woman as akin to the relation between an oak tree and the ivy that clings to it (Fisher 225). Fisher additionally points out that Rosa Luxemburg, Simone de

Beauvoir, Gloria Steinem, and Germaine Greer have all likened women to parasites at some point in their writings (Fisher 225). In I Love Dick, this initial figuration of parasitism works as what I would call a “first-level parasitism.” The French theorist Michel Serres notes in his book

The Parasite (English 1982) that this first model is common and almost always too basic, as it sets up a deceptively simple host / parasite relation:

host parasite (19)

Kraus outlines a similar model when she thinks purely in terms of gendered dichotomy: her dependence on Sylvère, for instance. When read closely, however, this diagram reveals some discrepancies. As it is set up here, host is on the left side of a page reading left to right, suggesting the host simply comes first. Yet the host is retroactively designated as such by the parasite, even if it is set up to make it look as if the host simply exists from the beginning. The directional arrow is the key here then, because it suggests that host/parasite economy is co- constitutive. In it, “firsts” and “posts” can hardly be structured unidirectionally from one pole of a dichotomy to the other. This disruption of first and subsequent positionality is markedly similar to what Derrida theorizes in The Post Card.

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While Chris initially sees her obsession with Dick as rather simply parasitic, she comes to understand this relation as initiating an active economy that she chooses to track with her letter writing. Chris’s writing thereby introduces a more apparent interruptive element into the initial host/parasite economy: a literary economy of mixed genres. Just over two weeks in to her obsessive letter writing, Chris begins a letter she never completes, at least not in the book. This letter is presented in one of the third-person narration sections of the book: “‘Dear Dick,’ she wrote, ‘I guess in a sense I’ve killed you. You’ve become Dear Diary…’. She’d begun to realize something, though she didn’t think much about it at the time” (90). Here, Chris senses some slippage in her writing. Whereas her letters to Dick were once the expression of pure desire based on a highly gendered economy (his name is Dick, after all), Chris begins to sense that writing forms not only an outlet for her desire, but a means of transfiguring this desire in order to address different audiences. When Michel Serres initially outlines the basic host / parasite configuration, he almost immediately dismisses it. He surpasses it by arguing that a third point in the parasitic relation must be introduced if we are to understand parasitic economies as dynamic.

He initially labels this third point “the interruption” due to a story about a city rat who invites a country rat to dinner only to suffer various interruptions during the meal. Serres then produces the following diagram:

Interrupter (3)

Host (1) Parasite (2) (Serres 19)

Let’s work through this diagram briefly, for it illustrates the point I want to make about the genre of I Love Dick and the questions of gender that arise in the book. Serres writes that the initial host / parasite relation is one of rough equilibrium, which we might also describe as stasis. But

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when some interruption—a noise, rain, a knock at the door, chance in general—disturbs this equilibrium, a new system emerges that can be “inverted or contradictory, [and] in general could be entirely different from the one that was interrupted” (18). So, if a relatively stable equilibrium structures the basic host / parasite system, this system can be turned on its head—and indeed made into a dynamic operative system—by the introduction of some third point, for Serres an interruption or some other kind of “noise” in the otherwise stable system.

In I Love Dick the interruption comes in the form of a highly elaborate textual economy.

To be clear, the original equilibrium is based on what Chris feels to be her economic parasitism vis à vis Sylvère and her emotional parasitism in relation to Dick. The logic of these relations, especially with regard to Dick, is refigured by the disruption the letters introduce into it. Writing disrupts the original equilibrium so completely that Chris can imagine that she has in fact killed

Dick and replaced him with another addressee: Dear Diary or perhaps even dear reader. Serres proposes that when a system is interrupted and a new one takes its place, there is “a new kind of logic and a strong one” (18). Isn’t Kraus’s recognition here a strong one too? Kraus writes that

Chris might have killed Dick and also that Chris had “begun to realize something, though she didn’t think much about it at the time” (90). What she has begun to realize, as the reader of the book realizes over the course of its narration, is that the first position of parasitism might be overcome by the second law of genre, which is “precisely a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy” (206). In I Love Dick this parasitical economy—the economy of indiscrete genres—introduces itself into a different parasitical economy based for Chris on gendered dichotomy. The introduction of this second-level parasitism ultimately offers an alternative to that gendered structure in which Chris finds herself. That is, Kraus places indeterminable genre against a too easily determinable gender. The textual economy that offers

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Chris an avenue for breaking out of her self-perceived parasitism gets interrupted further when, in 1997, Kraus chooses to publish the letters as a book in her Native Agents series in

Semiotext(e).

Another Turn: I Love Dick as Vulgar Telling

I Love Dick teems with critical and literary references. Some are drawn from the writings of Chris’s and Sylvère’s friends and contemporaries such as the poets Barbara Barg, David

Rattray, and John Wieners, the first two of whom Kraus published with Native Agents. Some refer to writers of the recent past with whom Chris feels some special affinity: Patricia

Highsmith, Jane Bowles, and Chris’s fellow New Zealander Katherine Mansfield.82 A handful of others are authors that appear again and again throughout the story, working as points of reference to structure Kraus’s narrative. Chris meets Dick on December 3. On December 9 she and Sylvère begin writing letter after letter addressed to Dick. And on December 12, with dozens of pages already written, Chris reflects in the third person on the amassing series of letters:

“Writing this has been like moving through a kaleidoscope of all our favorite books in history:

Swann’s Way and William Congreve, Henry James, Gustave Flaubert. Does analogy make emotion less sincere?” (70). Of these Gustave Flaubert receives the most extended references in the text, with Chris and Sylvère even signing one of their co-written letters as “Charles and

Emma Bovary.” Later in the narrative, after Chris has decided to leave Sylvère and live on her own, Flaubert anchors one of Chris’s reflections on the constraints women face making their writing even minimally public. She brings up Flaubert’s relationship to the writer Louise Colet

82 Near the end of the narrative, Chris even writes a four-page reminiscence of her adolescence in New Zealand in the style of Katherine Mansfield’s short story, “Bliss.” See I Love Dick: 246-250.

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and notes that their letters read “like a Punch & Judy show” (197), with Flaubert making comments in letters such as “‘You are a poet shackled to a woman! Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art. No! The heart’s dross does not find it’s [sic] way on paper’” (197). After having an extended if intermittent intimate relationship with Colet, Flaubert ends it. Chris writes: “When Flaubert finally broke her heart she wrote a poem about it and he replied: ‘You have made Art an outlet for the passions, a kind of chamberpot to catch the overflow of I don’t know what. It doesn’t smell good! It smells of hate!’

To be female in 19th century France was to be denied access to the apersonal. And still—” (197).

We might end Chris’s thought by suggesting: and still one could not draw on the personal either.

This is the double bind I Love Dick tries to work through as it deliberates on the gendered economy of letters—apparent even in Lotringer’s Foreign Agents series. Women’s experimental writing is often identified as too effusively personal, with Flaubert, like James and the critics who criticized I Love Dick upon publication, drawing again on women’s gushing passions, writing as a “chamberpot to catch the overflow of I don’t know what.” Kraus tries to overcome the problem of an effusive personal investment in writing by making the personal public in such a way that it veers toward the impersonality of fiction and theory.

While I Love Dick alludes to Madame Bovary most extensively, Henry James The Turn of the Screw is in fact the more important literary precursor to I Love Dick, because it sets up for

Kraus a literary precedent in which obsession and love motivate a literary tale acutely aware of its own mode of telling. The Turn of the Screw is famous for its multiple frames and narrators, the point of which is to make the tale into a “trap” (James, “Preface” 125) for the unsuspecting reader. The story’s narrative modes and its style of telling make it very difficult for readers and critics to resolve the riddle of the text: what happens to the Governess at the Master’s estate? I

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propose that Kraus, in contrast to James, makes I Love Dick into a story about explicit telling and about the manner in which explicit telling might yet develop new narrative modes and genres for postwar contemporary writers. I conclude by showing that Kraus also makes her love story into a ghost story. But where James’s ghosts are the most indeterminable aspect of his narrative,

Kraus’s ghosts visit her in I Love Dick as friends and artists who come back from the dead in their literary works.

Chris places James among the handful of writers she most admires and James makes several appearances by name throughout the book (26, 50, 71, 115). Kraus also made a film adaptation of James’s The Golden Bowl in 1984, which she titled The Golden Bowl or

Repression.83 Bringing James into the text, Chris makes explicit reference to The Golden Bowl in her very first letter. After Chris and Sylvère leave their first meeting with Dick, “Chris tells

Sylvère how she believes that she and Dick have just experienced a Conceptual Fuck” (21). They discuss Chris’s newfound obsession for several days before “Sylvère finally suggests that Chris write Dick a letter. Since she’s embarrassed she asks him if he want to write one too. Sylvère agrees. Do married couples usually collaborate on billets doux? If Sylvère and Chris were not so militantly opposed to psychoanalysis, they might’ve seen this as a turning point” (25). Sylvère then writes the first letter and self-consciously explains that “It must be the desert wind that went to our heads that night or maybe the desire to fictionalize life a little bit” (26).84 When Chris

83 Kraus’s films have never found wide distribution and if they are to be seen now it is most commonly in an art exhibition. I have been unable to see The Golden Bowl or Repression. From the reviews I have read of it I know that it is a short film (12 minutes) that is necessarily a fairly loose adaptation of the novel. The reviewer for an exhibition of all of Kraus’s films summarizes: “inspired partly by the Henry James novel, you can feel the hangover of ‘70s New York: bankruptcy, dereliction, Patty Smith punk-poetry; images of empty rooms and silent people not connecting, even when they’re having sex” (Schwendener). 84 Joan Hawkins points out in her critical afterword to I Love Dick that “Through the use of letters, taped phone conversation, and written exchanges between Chris and her husband, it deconstructs the classic heterosexual love triangle and lays bare the degree to which—even in the most enlightened circles—women continue to function as an object of exchange” (269). Hawkins goes on to clarify this claim, but the basic point is that Sylvère’s participation in the exchange is not only due to the heightened sexual desire it arouses in Chris, with whom Sylvère has not had sex

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begins her letter, she notes, “Since Sylvère wrote the first letter, I’m thrown into this weird position. Reactive—like Charlotte Stant to Sylvère’s Maggie Verver, if we were living in the

Henry James novel The Golden Bowl—the Dumb Cunt, a factory of emotions evoked by all the men. So the only thing that I can do is tell The Dumb Cunt’s Tale. But how?” (26-27).

Given that these are Chris’s first three sentences in an epistolary eruption that makes up a

260-page novel, these sentences signal the importance of James’s work to I Love Dick. The

Golden Bowl is structured around the relationships of four people: Prince Amerigo, a broke nobleman who is marrying Maggie Verver for her wealth; Maggie Verver; Maggie’s wealthy widower father, Adam Verver; and Charlotte Stant, an old friend of Maggie’s who once had an intimate relationship with Amerigo, about which Maggie does not know. After Maggie marries

Amerigo, she orchestrates the marriage of her friend, Charlotte, to her widower father. Amerigo and Charlotte are both relatively bored in their marriages and rekindle their intimate relationship.

Maggie discovers the romance and subtly persuades her father to take Charlotte back to America, which he does, and so resolves the problem of the affair. By likening herself to Charlotte Stant and Sylvère to Maggie Verver, Kraus suggests that she is understood to be ruled by her passions, which are ultimately directed and redirected by the careful choreography of Maggie / Sylvère. It is Sylvère, after all, who suggests that Chris begin writing letters to Dick. Chris thus depicts herself to be a “factory of emotions” up against the calculated orchestrations of Sylvère. The analogy, for Chris, works very well.

Yet when Chris remarks that her “reaction” can only be to “tell The Dumb Cunt’s Tale” her point of reference becomes The Turn of the Screw. Aside from the roughly mirrored title—

for a very long time, but also because of the homosocial desire Sylvère feels toward Dick, writing in that first letter, “I’ve felt a lot of sympathy towards you and a desire to be closer” (26). I do not focus at length on Sylvère’s role in the textual exchange, so Hawkins’s point is worth noting.

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The Turn of the Screw / The Dumb Cunt’s Tale—I Love Dick more clearly mirrors the narrative of The Turn of the Screw than it does The Golden Bowl. The Turn of the Screw, after all, is about how stories are told, about how and why something is telling or not, about whether a narrative can conceal the subject of its telling, and about love and possibly desire. Kraus’s concluding assertion and subsequent question—“the only thing that I can do is tell The Dumb Cunt’s Tale.

But how?”—sets up points of commonality between The Turn of the Screw and I Love Dick, each of which interrogates the question of who gets to tell what, to whom, and in what manner.

Both Kraus and James, that is, focus explicitly on the “how” of the telling. James’s narrative begins with a small group of people, including an unnamed first-person narrator, sitting around a fire listening to ghost stories on Christmas Eve (1). The tale begins as one story wraps up, a story that had held the group “round the fire, sufficiently breathless” (1). This initial story elicits a

“reply” from a man named Douglas who says he knows a story in which not one but “two children” are haunted by a ghost (1). The news arouses great curiosity among the group and so

Douglas sends away for a manuscript of the story that he has kept locked in a drawer elsewhere for years.

While the small group awaits the arrival of the manuscript Douglas narrates its history. It was written in “a most beautiful hand. A Woman’s” and the woman was his sister’s governess who has been dead for twenty years (2). Douglas shows his great admiration for this woman and when he attempts to clarify how the manuscript came into his possession he explains the scenario, focusing specifically on the unnamed first-person narrator of this initial frame:

“I liked her extremely and am glad to this day to think she like me too. If

she hadn’t she wouldn’t have told me. She had never told anyone. It wasn’t

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simply that she said so, but that I knew she hadn’t. I was sure; I could see. You’ll

easily judge why when you hear”

“Because the thing had been such a scare?”

He continued to fix me. “You’ll easily judge,” he repeated: “you will.”

I fixed him too. “I see. She was in love.”

He laughed for the first time. “You are acute. Yes, she was in love. That is

she had been. That came out—she couldn’t tell her story without its coming out. I

saw it, and she saw it; but neither of us spoke of it.” (2).

This exchange reveals an important commonality between The Turn of the Screw and I Love

Dick: the topsy-turvy economy not only of the tale but also of the manuscript itself. Its circulation and eventual publication—being told around the fire by Douglas and eventually being published by the first person narrator in this scene to whom Douglas leaves the original manuscript on his own deathbed—hinges upon a complementary economy of love and affection.

Douglas says that the governess was in love, and the audience is led to believe that this love leads to the frightful narrative we are about to read. Moreover, it is the governess’s later admiration for Douglas that convinces her to tell her story at all rather than taking it to her grave.

And Douglas’s singling out of the first-person narrator in this frame—“You’ll easily judge… you will”—implies yet another budding relationship upon which the tale’s circulation depends. Even in James novella, then, the tale operates in a kind of parasitic but also constitutive relationship with a variety of forms of love and friendship. Its “publication” depends on these relationships, but these relationships depend in turn on the telling and further circulation of the story.

Much has been made of the Governess’s love and possible desire in The Turn of the

Screw. Edmund Wilson’s Freudian reading of the novella in “The Ambiguity of Henry James”

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proposes that the love Douglas mentions is the love the Governess feels for the Master but cannot express. For Wilson, The Turn of the Screw is about the governess’s “inability to admit to herself her sexual impulses and the relentless English ‘authority’ which enables her to put over on inferiors even purposes which are totally mistaken and not at all to the other people’s best interest…. The Turn of the Screw, then, on this theory, would be a masterpiece—not as a ghost story—but as a study in morbid psychology” (171-172). As Felman summarizes his position,

Wilson’s reading “follows [the] interpretative pattern of accounting for the whole story in terms of the governess's sexual frustration: she is in love—says Wilson—with the Master, but is unable to admit it to herself, and thus obsessively, hysterically projects her own desires upon the outside world, perceives them as exterior to herself in the hallucinated form of fantasmatic ghosts” (103).

Felman then quotes Wilson, who writes “The theory is, then, that the governess who is made to tell the story is a neurotic case of sex repression, and that the ghosts are not real ghosts but hallucinations of the governess” (qtd. in Felman 103). Felman takes issue with Wilson’s reading, because it takes the fundamental ambiguity of James’s narrative and attempts to make it unambiguous by attributing the ghosts to sexual repression and its symptoms, i.e. projections of the ghosts. For Felman, Wilson replies to symbols within the text with “proper names, with the literal meaning of the phallic metaphors” (105). The purpose of Felman’s criticism is to reorient the relationship between psychoanalysis and literary texts. That is, she sees Wilson as setting the text up as a question that a psychoanalytic approach can then answer (105). Psychoanalysis thus retains its own mastery over literature by way of gendered symbolism. The maintenance of this mastery works to the detriment of literature and its myriad ambiguities and indeterminable turns.

A crucial point in Felman’s criticism of Wilson is that James’s text is a masterpiece precisely because it resists the critical desire to answer for it fully. It is only by acknowledging

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the indeterminable nature of the narrative that the critic, ultimately, forfeits the assumption of his own mastery and so leaves the text open to the task of “turning the screw of interpretation.” But what if we responded to these two positions by way of Kraus and proposed: both are true and simultaneously? Or, we could ask, what would a narrative look like in which both were true and simultaneously? Kraus responds to the positions taken up by both Wilson and Felman by making her narrative into an account not of sexual repression but rather of an irrepressible sexual desire that takes shape in the form of an indeterminable literary text. We will arrive at my substantiation of this argument after a final look at James. For now, let’s return to Douglas’s narrative about the governess’s manuscript to reflect on this claim. After Douglas confesses that the governess “was” or “had been” in love, a member of his audience asks:

“Who was it she was in love with?”

“The story will tell,” I took it upon myself to reply….

“The story won’t tell,” said Douglas; “not in any literal vulgar way.” (3)

This reticence—that the story emphatically won’t tell whom the governess loved, or whether the ghosts were “real”—forms the enticement of James’s tale and has induced many critics to answer for it, whether in a position of mastery (Wilson) or in a position that champions non-mastery

(Felman).

Whereas James’s story thrives on the mystery of the obscure and on the story that won’t tell, Kraus’s succeeds on its irrepressible declaration: I Love Dick. And whereas James’s novella abstains from any “vulgar telling,” Kraus loves Dick and tells him and the reader about it for 260 pages. The frank excessiveness of Chris’s desire is precisely the point of I Love Dick. Rather than diminishing the story’s interest, it heightens it. As Eileen Myles notes in her foreword, “I

Love Dick is a remarkable study in female abjection and in its fashion reminds me of Carl

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Dreyer’s exhortation to use ‘artifice to strip artifice of artifice,’ because it turns out that for

Chris, marching boldly into self-abasement, not being uncannily drawn there, sighing or kicking and screaming, but walking straight in, was exactly the ticket that solidified and dignified the pathos of her life’s romantic voyage” (13-14). And Chris’s narrative is indeed a voyage. She begins with self-conscious embarrassment when Sylvère suggests that she writes Dick a letter and emerges in a letter a year-and-a-half later stating very clearly the conclusion she has drawn from the process of writing love letters to Dick. She writes to Dick:

I’m moved to talk to you about art because I think you’ll understand and I think I

understand art more than you— Because I’m moved in writing to be irrepressible.

Writing to you seems like some holy cause, cause there’s not enough female

irrepressibility written down. I’ve fused my silence and repression with the entire

female gender’s silence and repression. I think the sheer fact of women talking,

being, paradoxical, inexplicable, flip, self-destructive but above all else public is

the most revolutionary thing in the world. I could be 20 years too late but

epiphanies don’t always synchronize with style. (210)

The Turn of the Screw refuses to tell. I Love Dick tells all. One of the primary plot points in the

Governess’s narrative forbids the Governess from writing to the Master. If she agrees to take the job offered by the Master, she must not write to him under any circumstance. This restriction becomes a subject of great agitation for the Governess when she receives a letter from her young ward’s school—sent by way of the Master, who refused to open it—stating that he has been permanently dismissed from the institution. For James, severed communication heightens the interest of the story. For Kraus, the interest is in the telling and in being vulgarly explicit in writing: “flip, self-destructive, but above all public.” Or, to return to Myles’s point, if James’s

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governess is “uncannily drawn” to the position in which she ultimately witnesses and perhaps even perpetrates the death of her young ward Miles, who dies in her arms, then Kraus might be wiser to tell her whole story as it happens: to literalize and make public the desire that is the subject of her narrative. To literalize it, that is, by publishing it.

A Narrative of Ghosts: From James to Kraus

The narrative of I Love Dick takes place in two parts, “Scenes from a Marriage” and

“Every Letter is a Love Letter.” At the end of “Scenes from a Marriage,” which is comprised of the letters Sylvère and Chris write to Dick, Chris decides to leave Sylvère and live on her own.

She makes this decision not because her relationship with Dick has become more intimate, but because her letter writing has brought her to some realization about her own desires and interests beyond Dick and Sylvère. “Every Letter is a Love Letter” is also made up of letters to Dick, but these are written primarily by Chris, are much longer, and read more like critical essays on a range of topics: artists, filmmakers, or writers Chris admires; the possibility of publishing the letters as a book; and reflections on Chris’s early adulthood in New Zealand. In the final section of part two called “Dick Writes Back” Kraus presents the reader with the only epistolary response Chris receives from Dick, at least within the narrative as Kraus frames it. “Every Letter is a Love Letter,” like the Governess’s narrative in The Turn of the Screw, is motivated by love but addressed to an audience of ghosts. For Kraus, the ghosts emerge in the narrative as dead friends, forgotten artists, and even some of the writers Kraus published as the editor of the Native

Agents imprint of Semiotext(e).

“Every Letter is a Love Letter” begins two months after Chris and Sylvère initially met

Dick for sushi. Chris tells Dick that she has just moved to Thurman, New York, a “community of

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exiles” where “no one asks me any questions cause there’s no frame of reference to put the answers in” (122). Chris’s framing of her seclusion is roughly similar to the isolation of James’s

Governess. The connection between Chris’s isolation and the Governess’s is not so oblique as to be entirely disconnected. Indeed, Chris establishes the connection by telling Dick about an art installation in New York that addresses the ghostly nature of art history. “For several days now

I’ve been wanting to tell you about an installation I saw last week in New York,” Chris writes.

“It was called Minetta Lane—A Ghost Story, by Eleanor Antin, an artist/filmmaker who I don’t know very much about. The installation was pure magic” (122). Given that this mention of A

Ghost Story follows from Chris’s comment about her newfound isolation, it is not too far-fetched to suggest that Kraus continues to use James’s novella as a point of reference for I Love Dick.

She even mentions James by name just several pages before this. The ghosts Chris summons, however, are not those of perceived fiends, as the Governess characterizes Peter Quint and Miss

Jessel, but rather those of lost friends. Kraus’s book is in fact addressed in part to these ghosts and her attempt to communicate with them helps her to “[break] out of this stuffy, referential delirium” induced by the letters addressed only to Dick (30). In doing so, she also breaks out of the stuffy referential delirium characteristic of some of the poststructural theory to which she is responding. In this sense, Kraus’s letters to ghosts dramatize the very real intellectual histories and experiences that impress themselves upon Kraus’s work.

Chris’s description of Eleanor Antin’s Minetta Lane—A Ghost Story in her letter to Dick leads her to an epiphany that reverberates throughout her narrative. She begins by describing the approach to the installation in the gallery she visited: “You entered it through a sharply cornered narrow corridor—the white sheet rock of the gallery abruptly changed to crumbling plaster, rotting slats and boards, rolls of chicken-wire and other prewar tenement debris” (122). For

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Chris, the entryway places her in a mock-up version of Greenwich Village decades earlier.

Eventually, Chris exits the corridor into something like a foyer with a semicircular wall with three windows: “Three films played simultaneously in each of the three windows, rear-projected against the window panes. The corridor’d led you to this point so you could attend a kind of séance, becoming a voyeur” (122). Chris then focuses the narrative on one of the projected films in which a woman paints in a room. I quote the following at length, because it narrates a central epiphany for Chris and offers insight into Kraus’s work as an editor of Semiotext(e) because it shows how Kraus’s engagement with writers and artists from the recent past impresses itself on her work:

Through the far-left window a middle-aged woman was painting on a large

canvas. We saw her from behind, rumpled shirt and rumpled body, curly rumpled

hair, looking, thinking, drawing on a cigarette, reaching down onto the floor to

take a few drinks from a bottle of Jim Beam here and there. It was an ordinary

scene (though it’s [sic] very ordinariness made it subversively utopian: how many

pictures from the 50s do we have of nameless women painting late into the night

and living lives?). And this ordinariness unleashed a flood of historical nostalgia,

a warmth and closeness to a past I’ve never known—the same nostalgia that I felt

from seeing a photo exhibition at St. Marks’ Church a few years ago. There were

maybe a hundred photos gathered by the Photographic/Oral History Project of the

Lower East Side of artists living, drinking, working, in their habitat between the

years 1948 and 1972. The photos were meticulously captioned with the artists’

names and disciplines, but 98% of them were names I didn’t know. The photos

tapped into that same unwritten moment as Antin’s show—it was the first time in

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American art history, thanks to allowances provided by the GI Bill, that lower-

middle class Americans had a chance to live as artists, given time to kill. Antin

recalls: “There was enough money around from the GI Bill to live and work in a

low-rent district… Studios were cheap, so were paints and canvases, booze and

cigarettes. All over the Village young people were writing, painting, getting

psychoanalyzed, fucking the bourgeoisie.” Where are they now? The

Photographic/Oral History Project show transformed the streets of the East

Village into tribal ground. I felt a rush of empathetic curiosity about the lives of

the unfamous, the unrecorded desires and ambitions of artists who had been here

too. What’s the ratio of working artists to the sum total of art stars? A hundred or

a thousand? The first window did the job of shamanistic art, drawing together

hundreds of disparate thoughts, associations (photos in the exhibition; lives; the

fact that some of them were female too) into a single image. A rumpled woman

paints and smokes a cigarette. And don’t you think a ‘sacred space’ is sacred only

because of the collectivity it distills? (122-124)

Chris’s “flood of historical nostalgia” and its subsequent “rush of empathetic curiosity” is aroused not by Dick—even if he remains one of the letter’s recipients—but rather by arts and collaborative projects that seek to document the often “unwritten moments” from which the creative arts emerge. Chris’s response is elicited by a middle-aged woman painting alone in her room. Her empathy’s source is equally a collection of photographs of mostly unknown artists, the great majority of whom will remain unknown to a wide public. Yes, Chris acknowledges that her experience is related to a nostalgia that mixes with voyeurism. Yet her empathy with the lost and unknown rings no less true for its proximity to nostalgia.

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In light of Chris’s nostalgic epiphany, a much earlier moment in Chris’s story comes back into focus, a moment that makes this love story also a ghost story. The day after Chris and

Sylvère meet with Dick for sushi, and ultimately sleep at his house because of bad weather, Chris finds herself moved to write her first short story in five years. She calls it “Abstract

Romanticism.” Although her desire to write this story is provoked by her “conceptual Fuck” with

Dick, Dick is not its addressee. It is addressed instead to David Rattray, a friend of Kraus’s whose work she collected and published with Native Agents just before Rattray’s early death in

1992:

She addresses this story, intermittently, to David Rattray because she’s

convinced that David’s ghost had been with her last night for the car ride, pushing

her pickup truck further all the way up Highway 5. Chris, David’s ghost and the

truck had merged into a single unit moving forward.

“Last night I felt,” she wrote to David’s ghost, “like I do at times when

things seem to open onto new vistas of excitement—that you were here: floating

dense beside me, set someplace between my left ear and my shoulder, compressed

like thought.”

She thought about David all the time. It was uncanny how Dick had said

somewhere in last night’s boozy conversation, as if he’d read her mind, how

much he admired David’s book. David Rattray had been a reckless adventurer and

a genius and a moralist, indulging in the most improbable infatuations nearly until

the moment of his death at age 57. And now Chris felt David’s ghost pushing her

to understand infatuation, how the loved person can become a holding pattern for

all the tattered ends of memory, experience and thought you’ve ever had. So she

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started to describe Dick’s face, ‘pale and mobile, good bones, reddish hair and

deepest eyes.’ Writing, Chris held his face in her mind, and then the telephone

rang and it was Dick. (23)

This passage comes just five pages in to I Love Dick. Reading it beside the passage about

Eleanor Antin suggests that I Love Dick is deeply engaged, like The Turn of the Screw, with a love story that is also a ghost story. Chris even remarks how it was “uncanny” that Dick mentioned David’s work, an uncanniness that blends nostalgic haunting with present infatuation, and perhaps even implies that the trigger of Kraus’s infatuation with Dick is this uncanny lure that brings her back to David Rattray. Chris’s urge toward infatuation mingles with her desire to reconnect with a dead friend. As we learn throughout the rest of the narrative, Chris in fact engages with a host of dead friends, drawing on them, their work, and her affection for them in order to craft new narratives about desire, affection, love, and empathetic recovery in the contemporary arts. Chris writes that Rattray’s ghost pushes her to understand how “the loved person can become a holding pattern for all the tattered ends of memory, experience and thought you’ve ever had.” The letters comprising I Love Dick also form a holding pattern, or better still, a loving embrace structured by a textual economy that lets desire and affection maintain multiple addressees.

Conclusion: James, Kraus, and the Future of the Novel

There is a risk in making my analysis of Kraus’s work into an operation of eternal recursion. And indeed, this is partly the point. As Barbara Johnson showed so forcefully in “The

Frame of Reference,” the process of framing and reframing is an iterative impulse fundamental to the process of analysis. Still, one must draw to a close, and I do so here by expanding the

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frame of reference once again to include the practices of editing and publishing. The final turn of the screw in Kraus’s narrative, after all, is that she publishes her work, even after the threat of legal action from Dick Hebdige. As much as the analyses surrounding “The Purloined Letter” and The Turn of the Screw in the 1970s emphasized textual economy within the narratives of those stories, none of those critics—from Lacan and Derrida to Felman and Johnson—paused to consider that the literary works under consideration circulated in an operational literary economy in which books and essays are published and distributed in specific ways. Kraus adds this element of literary economy to the positions from the 1970s by thinking about literature in relation to its publication. In this, Kraus once again corresponds with the work of Henry James: once as an oblique rewriting of the novella in her consideration of desire and textual economy; and again as a responsive fulfillment of James’s prophecy concerning the “Future of the Novel,” an essay James published at the turn of the century and which forms a suitable endpoint for this dissertation, as it looks forward and outward to other modes and practices that are constituting new narratives in the history of postwar American literature.

In the preface to the New York Edition of The Turn of the Screw, James describes his novella as “an excursion into chaos while remaining…but an anecdote—though an anecdote amplified and highly emphasised and returning upon itself” (James, “Preface,” 125). For James, the story’s constant recursion—its returning upon itself—is the mark of its economy, that is, the sign that it is a highly deliberate and crafted tale whose function is “to catch those not easily caught” (125). This recursive economy stands in opposition to the improvisational method that

James eschews earlier in the paragraph. “Nothing is so easy as improvisation,” he writes, “the running on and on of invention; it is sadly compromised, however, from the moment its stream breaks bounds and gets into flood” (125). The Turn of the Screw, by James’s logic, is a well-

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wrought tale precisely because it returns upon itself and remains within the bounded stream of deliberate, novelistic craft.

James expresses a similar sentiment in a short essay on the “Future of the Novel.” This essay was published in England in 1899, just one year after the publication of The Turn of the

Screw. In it James addresses the subject of the overproduction of books in contemporary culture, especially the overproduction novels. He remarks that while the novel was a relative latecomer to the field of letters, “the flood at present swells and swells, threatening the whole field of letters, as would often seem, with submersion” (“Future”). James’s claim concerning novelistic overproduction is not my point of interest here, though we have seen with Charles Olson to some extent and Dalkey Archive Press to a greater extent that claims about literary overproduction often motivate alternative literary projects. My interest in James’s claim here, however, is in the source of overproduction James identifies: “the larger part of the great multitude that sustains the teller and the publisher of tales is constituted by boys and girls; by girls in especial, if we apply the term to the later stages of the life of the innumerable women who, under modern arrangements, increasingly fail to marry---fail, apparently, even, largely, to desire to” (James,

“Future”). To begin with at least, James’s theorization about novelistic overproduction rests on the emergence of a more broadly educated public, and specifically on an upwelling of women readers.

James continues his debasement of women readers by remarking that “The high prosperity of fiction has marched, very directly, with another ‘sign of the times,’ the demoralization, the vulgarization of literature in general, the increasing familiarity of all such methods of communication, the making itself supremely felt, as it were, of the presence of the ladies and children—by whom I mean, in other words, the reader irreflective and uncritical”

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(“Future”). Given this essay’s contemporaneity with the publication of The Turn of the Screw— which is about the Governess being either a good or bad reader of signs—one could argue that the novella expresses some of James’s anxiety about the feminization of the novel’s readership, and consequently the feminization of the novel as a literary form. To this point, the only time

James depicts the Governess in her private time away from the children, she is reading a novel.

Moreover, while The Turn of the Screw will not tell “in any literal, vulgar way,” here James explicitly links the vulgarization of the novel—i.e. its loss of artful craft—to an “irreflective and uncritical” female readership. I think there is much to be said about the relationship between The

Turn of the Screw and “Future of the Novel,” but my primary point here is that in James’s thought “floods” are related to the rise of a female readership. When he remarks in his preface to the New York Edition that “nothing is so easy as improvisation,” and that “it is sadly compromised, however, from the moment its stream breaks bounds and gets into flood,” James is very likely making a gendered argument. Floods are feminized. The discipline to maintain banks and boundaries is masculine; the art of the novel, that is, remains the product of masculine mastery.85

Even with ardent sexism setting the foundation for James’s analysis of the state of the novel, when James actually looks to the future of the novel, his argument takes a surprising turn toward the very women he debases. He notes that for all of the lassitude of novelists working around 1900, the future of the novel remains bright, because the novel is a radically adaptable form that will change with its times and readership. James calls for a renewal of novelistic craft, and notes that renewal will most certainly come. He reflects:

85 Sarah Blackwood makes a similar point specifically in reference to James (“Editing as mastery”) in her essay, “Editing as Carework: The Gendered Labor of Public Intellectuals.”

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It would be curious—really a great comedy—if the renewal were to spring just

from the satiety of the very readers for whom the sacrifices have hitherto been

supposed to be made [i.e. the “sacrifices” being undisciplined mediocrity; the

readers being women]. It bears on this that as nothing is more salient in English

life to-day, to fresh eyes, than the revolution taking place in the position and

outlook of women—and taking place much more deeply in the quiet than even the

noise on the surface demonstrates—so we may very well yet see the female elbow

itself, kept in increasing activity by the play of the pen, smash with final

resonance the window all this time most superstitiously closed…. It is the opinion

of some observers that when women do obtain a free hand they will not repay

their long debt to the precautionary attitude of men by unlimited consideration for

the natural delicacy of the latter. (“Future”)

The “natural delicacy” James mentions here refers to what he sees as the refusal by English and

American male writers to address the subject of relations between the sexes, what James refers to specifically as “love-making,” writing that “I cannot so much as imagine Dickens and Scott without the ‘love-making’ left, as the phrase is, out” ( “Future”). In short, what begins as a fervently sexist essay—a sexism which should not be entirely overlooked—takes an unexpected turn as this essay subtitled “an analysis and a forecast” in the New York Times moves from

“analysis” to “forecast.” It is, indeed, the “flood” of texts written for a feminine readership that will reorient and redirect the future of the novel. In The Turn of the Screw discipline makes for a story that “won’t tell” and that refuses to “break bounds and get into flood.” James suggests in his “Future of the Novel” that a flood of “improvisation” and a “running on and on of invention” might in fact be the corrective for the state of the novel he finds to be static. Given the very close

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publication dates of the “Future of the Novel” and The Turn of the Screw, could it be that the latter’s not telling, like the long overlooked (e) in Semiotext(e), is a Jamesian solicitation to a new novel of the future that will be written by women?

While James’s “forecast” has been answered innumerable times by a range of writers,

Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick is a particularly apt realization of it. I Love Dick takes James’s flirtation with vulgarity and makes it explicit. Kraus breaks bounds with the recursive “running on and on” of invention by publishing I Love Dick. This act of publication is part of Kraus’s art, for she argues that women being “paradoxical, inexplicable, flip, self-destructive but above all else public is the most revolutionary thing in the world. I could be 20 years too late but epiphanies don’t always synchronize with style” (210). Chris Kraus is self-consciously public about her own infatuation, even against the will, or the “precautionary attitude and natural delicacy,” of Dick Hebdige. Yet her realization of what an open address can accomplish is also self-consciously belated, because she understands that it derives from the work of her friends and fellow writers, specifically the writers Kraus edited for Semiotext(e). These writers anticipated and guided Kraus’s early work. Ann Rower, for instance, whose If You’re a Girl Kraus published in 1990, plays the role of the editorial sounding board within the novel once Chris begins thinking of the letters as a book. And in an essay from 2014, Kraus confesses that she “learned how to write largely by reading and editing the first Native Agents books” (“New Universal”).

These books haunt I Love Dick like David Rattray’s uncanny ghost that solicits Chris’s first letters. I Love Dick thus takes form as a novelistic post card, to draw on Derrida’s conception of the form. It is fashioned after the writers Chris admires and whose work she edited and published; it is also addressed affectionately to them. Kraus draws on her own particular engagement with postwar experimentalism—almost parasitically—but does so in order to care

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for that history, like a host might care for a guest. This form of care touches on the radical love at work in I Love Dick and operates in the literary economy the novel at once theorizes and constitutes.

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CHAPTER 5. Coda: The Black Took Collective and Movement-in-Progress

The story has not one ending Smudged into a solitary future Nor one formal statement or admission In principle It is a seed - Duriel E. Harris, from “Decorus” in boundary 2 “On Race and Innovation Dossier”

Second reflection remains incomplete and ongoing. “On Second Reflection,” however, draws to a close and has argued that author-editors drew on the practices associated with literary publication and distribution in order to refine, redirect, and disrupt their own conceptions about literary aesthetics and form in postwar America. Each figure I have addressed adapted his or her thought in relation to literary practices in slightly different ways and for a variety of reasons, each of them particular to a specific conjuncture in the historical development of the literary field. For Olson, a process-derived metaphysics allowed him to think against closed forms of print and poetry—and so against Eliotic modernism and the New Critics—because it centered on literary practices as both highly contextualized but also conceptualized. Olson’s postwar poetics maintained his interest in the historical-material limits of thought while also being able to imagine new poetic and political models emerging from within these limits, a process-derived metaphysics taking shape as a new poetic polis. Dalkey Archive Press, by comparison, responded to a highly profligate publishing industry in the 1970s and 1980s. It conceptualized its formation and publishing strategies, however, by placing the discourse of a literary-historical void at the center of its operations. This void, we saw, derived on the one hand from material limitations: the piles of out-of-print books that could not be “contemporary literature” in their

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time. On the other hand, it emerged from fictional discourse, with the cavernous Dalkey archive as a vacuous and productive conceptual dis-location around which Dalkey Archive Press based its vision of literary history. Nathaniel Mackey developed Hambone as part of his wide-ranging aesthetics of dispersal in order to examine the deep-seated histories of improvisation and experimentation in the black Americas. And he did so to propose that such histories, which continue to operate in present formations such as Hambone, provide examples of creative and intellectual labor that fly from the centripetal currents of economy and discourse that seek to bind them. The flight of the figural Hambone, I argued, forms the basis for a poetics of hospitality that Mackey develops with his editorship of Hambone. Chris Kraus, finally, answered the solicitation of the disruptive (e) in Semiotext(e) in order to imagine a literary economy where the disruptive mixing of gender, genre, and literalized desire establish a mode of public address—in novel form—that corresponds with many addressees, past, present and future.

Kraus used her editorial experience and her own publishing imprint to publish a novel that theorizes its own historical conditions of production and distribution—its conditions of possibility—in order to imagine them otherwise.

Regardless of the particular conjuncture addressed, each of the above figures and formations joins the historical-material with the conceptual and figural aspects of literary work.

Each demonstrates how material and historical considerations can generate literary figurations, and can engender conceptions about what literary work is and how it constitutes “literature.”

Adorno argues that second reflection “lays hold of the technical procedures, the language of the artwork in the broadest sense, but it aims at blindness” (27). The intersection of the historical

“laying hold of” and the potential “aims at blindness” takes form in second reflection. It also takes form in the editorial work of assembling contemporary literature. The particular

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conjuncture between material history and figuration and conception remains vitally important for thinking about the operations of the literary field today, for it allows one to think historically and situationally—within the limits any of us are inside of, to use Olson’s phrase—while also imagining that other working models might emerge from thinking in and with historical context, from thinking with media and methodology. Methodology, to paraphrase Olson again, creates forms, and some of these forms will be other than those that we had to begin with. Like

Hambone’s call, method can proceed beyond the intention that sets method in motion and makes it operative.

I emphasize the conjuncture between material history and figuration and conception here for it introduces us to a point of contention currently being debated in the field of contemporary

American poetry, and with which I want to close in order to demonstrate that the task of second reflection is ongoing and necessary. The debate shifts around whether conceptual poetry, as a an intellectual formation as much as a practice of literary assembly, lacks regard for specific histories of violence and racialization fundamental not only to U.S. culture but also to literary history in the United States. The statements surrounding this subject are copious and complex, so

I focus them here by looking to one particular response: the November 2015 issue of boundary 2 that has a special “On Race and Innovation Dossier” edited by the poet and critic Dawn Lundy

Martin. In her introduction to the “Dossier” called “The Rules of the Game: an Editor’s Note,”

Martin writes that the idea for the issue was “called into being” by an occurrence surrounding a

2014 panel performance called “Coon Songs, Kitsch, and Conceptual Writing” in which she ws to participate (1). The performance was canceled because one of its white panelists posted an overtly racist image to her Facebook page and the space that had agreed to host the performance withdrew support. Martin remarks that she was “curious about this protectionist gesture,”

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because the panel with “coon” in its title was clearly meant as an “attempt to mine and uncloak

America’s ugly racial history as it continues to leak into the present” (1-2). The “Dossier” was conceived as a response to this occurrence about which Martin appears to have an ambiguous response: neither condemnation nor consolation of the withdrawn support, but the demand for further consideration.

After the cancellation of the performance panel, a furious debate about conceptualism and racism embroiled the field of contemporary American poetry. The impetus for the debate was not the performance panel Martin was to take part in, however, but the conceptual poet

Kenneth Goldsmith’s reading of Michael Brown’s autopsy report as a piece of conceptual poetry. The reading took place at Brown University on March 13, 2015, around seven months after Brown’s death by gunshot wounds inflicted by police officers in Ferguson, Missouri.

Brown died on August 9, 2014. Martin describes the conditions for and consequences of the debate as follows:

If the coon incident was a drop of water, what followed was a tidal wave. Poets

across the United States went to war about what is permissible, what is racist,

and what kind of critique should bear down on those who use highly sensitive

race “material,” including but not limited to the bodies of murdered black boys, in

manners that tread not so lightly. Kenneth Goldsmith was excoriated for reading

Michael Brown’s autopsy report in a conceptual poetry performance at Brown

University, and a petition successfully got Vanessa Place (included in this issue)

removed from an AWP subcommittee because of her Twitter appropriation of the

black voices from Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. Still, in all the

mayhem, in all the personal attacks on social media, there has not been much

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actual conversation about what poetry has to say, and can say, about race in the

contemporary moment.” (2)

Martin treads lightly here, for one effect that charges of racism toward white conceptual poets can have, Martin knows, is an oppositional demand for black writers to inhabit blackness in specific ways. Charges of white racism lodged against conceptualism, that is, can simultaneously place the poet of color into a subject position she might rather not occupy.

Martin chooses to respond to the debates not by offering her judgment of Goldsmith and

Place but rather by making her edited “Dossier” into a poetic space for anti-essentialist, poetic positioning:

This collection of poems and other utterances brought together for this boundary

2 dossier begins with premises of bias. I assume that poetry in this historical

moment that takes up race as a concern or poetry written by racialized subjects

must, almost by necessity, step outside of conventional knowledges, languages,

and approaches to the poem if it is going to say anything of any importance at all.

Convention, really, is a killer. Our attachment to well-worn, sanctioned, and

funded ways of thinking race—what it is, what it does—I submit, are not our

own; they are spoon-fed to us by power regimes that seek to keep us dancing the

same troubling jig, our mouths open and receiving, yet wanting. (2)

Here, Martin refuses to make her edited collection simply oppositional to Goldsmith or Place or any other white poets who “take up race as a concern,” for she has more to gain by thinking against the bifurcated terms of the debate (racist/not racist; black/white) as they are set by a larger “power regime,” the history of capital’s predations in the U.S. for instance. This is not to say Martin does not respond to Goldsmith and Place—she even includes Place in the edited

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section—but rather that she responds to them and the larger debate obliquely through a poetic assemblage meant to intervene in the debate by abandoning the key terms of race that have structured it. She offers instead a collection of 29 poets and poet-critics, who, assembled, think with and against one another, and in doing so also think with and against the construction of race as it operates within “poetry in this historical moment.”

Martin is particularly well suited to respond to debates about race without offering a reified conception of race or racialized art in return, for “On Race and Innovation” is merely the latest manifestation of Martin’s career-long engagement with editorial and collective work that actively opposes rigid conceptions of blackness and race. Martin is one of the three founding members of the Black Took Collective, co-founded with Duriel E. Harris and Ronaldo V. Wilson in 1997.86 The Collective formed at the Cave Canem Retreat for African American Poets and retreated even further still as it met for the first time in the basement of the “castle” in some free hours. In the “Black Took Collective’s Call for Dissonance,” co-authored by Harris, Martin, and

Wilson and published in the literary journal Fence in 2002, they describe the founding moment as follows, calling to mind De Selby in the depths of the Dalkey archive:

In the dungeon, effusing from the light fixtures [cavernous pit] an apparition, a

familiar—the reiterative and irascible black poem, cloaked in ‘authenticity,’

encircling black cultural experience with a stifling string of sites/cites/sights: the

86 Even the “Black” in the Collective’s name maintains an ambiguous relation to racialized blackness. “Black Took” in fact comes from the penultimate object in the “Objects” section of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. The prose poem runs as follows:

IT WAS BLACK, BLACK TOOK Black ink best wheel bale brown. Excellent not a hull house, not a pea soup, no bill no care, no precise no past pearl pearl goat. (476)

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South, rivers, ‘Mother Africa’: odes to legendary black men; faceless ancestor

shadows,” and the list runs on (124).

Here, their vision of poetics is haunted by a tradition of African American poetry that sticks too closely to common “sites/cites/sights.” Emerging and also departing from this tradition, the

Black Took Collective, like Hambone before them, seeks a method “disassociated from the conceit of the mythic knowing subject and resisting the binary thinking that would, consequently, objectify us. Ours is a rational distrust. As we seek to communicate, encode our challenge in direct language, our Collective agency shifts from discursive site to discursive site”

(141). Responding to traditional representations and figurations of blackness, the Black Took

Collective seeks to transfigure the “sites/cites/sights” of such poetry into shifting discursive sites that fly from any stable conception of blackness and the often binary logic of race that works within the U.S.

The collective formation of Black Took guards against such racial reification because the collective is itself emphatically multiple: a collective of three poets working to sound out the dissonance that operates within their collectivity. Wary of the “conventions and labels” that serve as the “means of our subjugation,” the Collective explains its function in the “Call for

Dissonance.” They write: “By choosing to collectivize our efforts against this subjugation, we do not pretend to speak singularly and unproblematically about experimental or oppositional poems by black people or anyone else. To the contrary, sometimes the discord we embrace comes to bear on contradictions that manifest within our group. In carving out a space for disagreement, and contradiction, we allow for the subtleties of our approaches to the experimental to be racialized in different ways, or not racialized at all, or sexualized, and perverted. This textured syncretism resists assertions of both unitary identity and unitary expression” (Harris 141). The

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group forms a provisional coherence and makes collectivity the common ground for testing the failure of self-identity. The purpose of the collectivity is to manifest how it both does and does not cohere, and by not entirely cohering opens to the subtleties of each writers experimental modes. The Collective forms a “movement-in-progress that takes advantage of the particularities this slice/milieu offers” (Harris 141). At the outset, then, in this very first public call—published in an experimental literary journal Fence—Black Took Collective identifies its engagements as ongoing, because the collective is itself multiple and can never entirely cohere. This is especially true as it responds to calls that emerge in the literary field around it, such as the cancellation of

“Coon Songs, Kitsch, and Conceptual Writing” twelve years later, and the “war” that broke out in American poetry circles thereafter.

Martin’s early commitment to assembled form makes her particularly adroit in responding to the debates in contemporary American poetry on race and conceptualism without reifying race, or relying on the trappings of a singular racialized identity she worked to proceed beyond with Harris, Wilson, and the Black Took Collective. She instead collects a range of discrepant writings and lets them collide, communicate, and drift by one another in the pages of the now well-established scholarly journal boundary 2. Martin’s editorial commitments, which she shares with Harris and Wilson, display themselves in her poetry as well. Her poems in A

Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering (2007)—her first full-length collection—participate in and redirect the Collective’s dissonant poetics. Ronaldo V. Wilson’s Farther Traveler (2015) also extends dissonant practices and forms by making his text into a cacophonous compilation of textual forms, from poetry to prose essays to visual art. Duriel E. Harris’s work, too, could be taken up as a repercussion of collective dissonance. Even if each of these writers works in his or her own way—developing the specificities of his or her poetry and poetics—together they

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continue to agitate on behalf of a “movement-in-progress” that thinks by way of collective, social, and historical specificities: “the particularities this slice/milieu offers.” These particularities, however, can only assemble an incoherent collectivity, which is an apt characterization of Martin’s “On Race and Innovation Dossier.” The purpose of the “Dossier” is not to organize thought, after all, but to “disrupt the rules, crack open the game, in a kind of collective disorganization, which is also a resistance, which is also creation, beginning” (Martin,

“Rules” 3). “On Race and Innovation” thus shares practical and conceptual interests with the work Martin and her friends in the Black Took Collective set out to undertake over a decade earlier. Martin responds to racism in conceptual poetry by making her editorial work a method for testing concepts of race today, in this particular milieu.

Martin’s editorship makes apparent, one final time for this dissertation, that editorship has long been a conceptualism, but one more attentive than contemporary poetic conceptualism to the subtle historical dimensions of cultural work and literary expression. It is more attentive, that is, in its invitation to let the assembled work proceed beyond the concept intended to govern it. Martin’s editorial work lets the process of assembling and its correspondent engagement with historical specificity and discursive positioning introduce the fissures and cracks of historical experience into the contemporary textual assemblage. The cracks mark at once the history of literary practice as it engages the particularities of its milieu, and the opening of literature, by way of practice and milieu, to other histories and other futures. Second reflection looks to both, delineating and constituting the past and future of postwar American literature by remaining actively present in the processes of its assembling.

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