WRITING THE DISASTERS: THE MESSIANIC TURN IN POSTWAR AMERICAN POETRY by Patrick John Pritchett B.A., University of Colorado, 2001 M.A., University of Colorado, 2004 A thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Colorado in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English 2011 This thesis entitled: Writing the Disasters: The Messianic Turn in Postwar American Poetry written by Patrick John Pritchett has been approved for the Department of English __________________________________ Jeremy Green __________________________________ Karen Jacobs Date _____________ The final copy of this thesis has been examined by the signatories, and we find that both content and the form meet acceptable presentation standards of scholarly work in the above mentioned discipline. iii Pritchett, Patrick John (Ph.D., English) The Writing of the Disasters: The Messianic Turn in Postwar American Poetry Thesis directed by Associate Professor Jeremy Green Writing the Disasters: The Messianic Turn in Postwar American Poetry looks at how postwar avant-garde poets adopt Jewish textual tropes in their search for forms capable of regenerating the ruins of language after the catastrophe of Auschwitz. This study will show how three major postwar poets, George Oppen, Michael Palmer, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, employ these tropes to critique the culture of disaster, from the Holocaust to the Cold War‘s perpetual state of emergency. Working within the Objectivist tradition of adherence to things through rigorous perception, each poet stakes his or her claim for radical form‘s ethical engagement with history as outlined by Theodor Adorno‘s call for a new categorical imperative after Auschwitz: nothing less than the interruption of the hypnotic spell wrought by the homogeneity of everyday speech and kept intact by the logic of the disaster. Though it encompasses many varieties of Jewish textuality, I name this moment the messianic turn in order to emphasize its interventional character. By interrupting the regulatory surface of poetry‘s reifying subjectivist modes, these poets attack cultural amnesia at the level of language. Walter Benjamin‘s advocacy of a messianic cessation of happening that can awaken awareness from the dream world of commodity culture is mapped onto the Objectivist principle of sincerity: the poem as a process for thinking within the act of perception, resulting in the liberation of repressed potential and the affirmation of difference. What Jewish textuality provides are models of interruption drawn from Talmudic practice: disruption, deferral, negation, and re-interrogation. These strategies are joined to Objectivist procedures of seriality, parataxis, and caesura to unsettle language‘s customary drive to closure. iv My reading of Oppen‘s late work, such as Myth of the Blaze, demonstrates how he writes historical disaster through a constellated serial structure that prioritizes the provisional aspects of meaning, guarding its fragile and contingent status as a site for alterity. Likewise, Palmer‘s poetry in Sun and At Passages places a dissipating pressure on language in order to let the historical trauma of the Cold War speak through the Talmudic figure of the burnt book. And in Drafts, DuPlessis probes the complicated legacy of Poundian modernism through a midrashic poetics that dynamically subverts postwar culture‘s masculine discourse of power. By fashioning such self-interrupting texts, all three poets recover language by pushing it into deeper estrangement. v Acknowledgements I dedicate this work to the memory of my parents, Frank and Betty, who taught me so much about perseverance and caring. Many people have guided and sustained me and I want to acknowledge them here, beginning with my peerless advisors, Jeremy Green, Karen Jacobs, Julie Carr, and Patrick Greaney, who shaped my thinking with such extraordinary care, then helped me to reshape it into my own. Rachel Blau DuPlessis offered bold exhortations and helpful nudges, while Michael Palmer graciously responded to my earnest queries. My friends and mentors at the University of Colorado schooled me brilliantly: Jeffrey Robinson, Beth Robertson, Daniel Kim, Tim Morton, Anna Brickhouse, Jane Garrity, and Sue Zemka. I am deeply indebted to their guidance, generosity, and hospitality. Naropa University was a de facto second grad school where I was warmly welcomed by Jack Collom, Andrew Schelling, Anselm Hollo, Laura Wright, Mark DuCharme, and Anne Waldman. Likewise, I owe a debt to Harvard‘s English Department and am grateful for the friendship and advice of Jorie Graham, Peter Sacks, Stephen Burt, Nicholas Watson, and Luke Menand, whose practical support and many helpful conversations were instrumental in sustaining momentum and keeping the faith. At crucial points, Hank Lazer, Aldon Nielsen, Timothy Bahti, Fanny Howe, Bill Corbett, Forrest Gander, Peter O‘Leary, Michael Forrest, James Belflower, Kirstyn Leuner, Odile Joly, and Julia Bloch provided excellent provocations and fresh enthusiasm. The community of History and Literature at Harvard has been deeply nourishing and it gives me real pleasure to acknowledge the warm camaraderie I enjoyed with my co-teachers Kim Reilly and George Blaustein, and my colleagues Sarah Cole, Anna Deeny, Sharon Howell, and Teresa Villa-Ignacio, who performed a heroic last minute intervention. The weekly debriefings of the Old Overholt club with James Murphy, John Ondrovick, and George Blaustein saved my vi sanity on more than one occasion. Without a special dispensation by Jeanne Follansbee, Director of Studies, who gave me the kind of time I needed to write, I doubt I would have managed to finish at all. Special thanks go to John Tranter, at Jacket Magazine, where portions of this study first appeared. Jen Jahner, who first ventured into the glittering labyrinth of the Arcades with me, was a boon companion, and Bruce Holsinger, whose friendship means more than I can say, offered key support at moments of crisis. Above all, my wife, Ingrid Nelson, has stood by me through doubt and hazard, encouraged me when I was even more melancholy than usual, and read my work with the kind of zeal and acuity every writer dreams of, all the while enduring my inanities and praising my modest triumphs. ―Rain, also, is part of the process.‖ vii CONTENTS CHAPTERS I. INTRODUCTION ………………………………………………………… 1 Writing the Disasters or, Poetry after Auschwitz .……………..……… 7 The Messianic Turn ………………………………………………….. 17 The Late Objectivist Nexus ……..…………………………………….. 26 II. ―INDESTRUCTIBLE SHARDS‖: CLARITY AND THE MEANING OF BEING JEWISH IN GEORGE OPPEN Discrete Seriality and The Disaster of Modernity …….……………… 42 After the War: The Difficult Route to Clarity .…..…………………. .. 51 Caesura and The Meaning of Being Jewish ………………………...... 72 III. ―THE LIBRARY IS BURNING‖: JEWISH TEXTUALITY AND THE BURNT BOOK OF MICHAEL PALMER Wittgenstein and ―The Book Against Understanding‖ ………………. 86 Eurydice‘s Book of Negation ……………………....………………… 99 The Burnt Book ……………………………………………………… 113 IV. ―THE BEYOND IS IN THE SURFACE‖: RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSIS‘ MIDRASHIC POETICS AND THE ANGEL OF HISTORY Midrashic Poetics ……………………………………………………. 136 Drafting Memory ……………………………………………………. 142 Adorno, Midrash, and The Angel of History ….…………………….. 164 V. CODA: THE PROMISE OF NEGATION ………………………………. 175 BIBLIOGRAPHY …………………………………………………………………… 194 1 Chapter 1—Introduction Alain Resnais‘ haunting 1959 film, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, opens with a dialogue between an unseen man and woman, voiced over a montage of increasingly disturbing images. Identified only as ―She‖ and ―He,‖ the pair gently spars, testing their memories against the actuality of the events of August 6, 1945, and its immediate aftermath. The script, by novelist Marguerite Duras, carries her trademark spareness, each exchange attesting to the unreliability of both memory and language to offer an adequate picture of experience. Yet, for all its ambiguity, the flat tone of contradiction between the Japanese architect whose family died in the blast, and the French actress on location in Japan who‘s plagued by memories of her role as a collaborator during the war, rises to an unsettling pitch as the scene progresses. HE: You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing. SHE: I saw everything. Everything. SHE: The hospital, for instance, I saw it. I‘m sure I did. There is a hospital in Hiroshima. How could I help seeing it? HE: You did not see the hospital in Hiroshima. You saw nothing in Hiroshima (15-17). As the dialogue continues the montage moves from scene to scene: a hospital, a museum, a bombed out ruins. We see the horribly maimed being tended to; we see the shattered survivors staggering and falling through the rubble. And gradually what becomes apparent is not a confirmation of the truism that no two people ever recall the same event in the same way, but that memory itself is damaged by the magnitude of the disaster. As Duras remarks of this scene: ―Impossible to talk about Hiroshima. All one can do is talk about the impossibility of talking about Hiroshima‖ (9). This dissertation argues that the crisis of representing the impossible becomes one of the key concerns for a certain group of poets after World War II. The disaster of the war exerts enormous pressure on poetry‘s traditional powers of consolation, compelling poets to ask how 2 their work can engage the shock of historical catastrophe without exploiting it on the one hand, or else succumbing to its numbing effect on the