4. literature transparent and opaque (iwallace)

7/28/2019 4. Literature Transparent and Opaque (IWallace)

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THEMNT-GAB,DETB'ADITION


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Published 7982by Prometheus Books700 East Amherst, Buffalo, New York 14215

Copyright a 1982 by Richard KostelanetzAll rights reservedLibrary of Congress Catalog Number B1-BJ34ISBN 0-87975-173-8

No poet, no artiil of any art, has his complete meanng alone. His sg-nificance, his appreciation b the appreciation of hs relation to the deadpoets and artbts. you cannot ualue him alone; you must set him, forcontrast and comparison. afiong the dead. I mean this as a principle ofaesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. . . . The existing monumentsform an ideal order among themseloes, zhich is modified by the intro-duction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The exist-ing order is complete before the new work arrues; for order to persistafter the supensention of nouelty, the whole existing order must be, ifez:er so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportons, ualues ofeach work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is confor-fiity between the old and the new. Whoeuer has approued thb idea oforder ot' the form of European or English literature will not find it pre-posterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as thepresent s drected by the past.Henri Peyre, The Failures of Criticbm (1967)No totalitarian regime has eoer tolerated the atsant-garde, uhateuer thelatter's overt politics be, or whether the regime uses the slogans of therght or the left.

Joseph Frank, "Spatial Form: A Answer to Critics" (1977)If we were talkng about modern panting, you wouldn't throw Burch-field or Grant Wood at me and erpect a serious discusson. And mypoint is that modemism in poetry has to be dbcussed at its extremes-just as it does in painting-othenoise you can't know if you'oe gottenpast it,

Ieome Rothenberg, in an interview (1975)

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Literatu re-Transparent and Opaq uelan Wallace


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342 The Auant-Garde Traditon in Lteratureour society, which are not spiritual or of the imagination, but rather are tech-nological and economic.So now we have nothing to say. That this is true is indicated by the factthat when literature does maintain an attemPt to say something of importance,it inevitably talks about its own emptiness. But literature, whose reputationhas been solidly entrenched for hundreds of years, continues as a creativeactivity by the sheer force of its own momentum. The life of literature thatdoes last is not found in the energy of content, of that "something to say" servedby transparent language, but instead by the changing outward shape of lan-guage itself. The power and meaning of creative speech is redirected from thesense of verbalization to the vehicle of verbalization.This redirection of expressive speech from the sense of content to the qual-ities of form is the main characteristic of modernism in all of the creative arts'Modernism implies a superfluity which has long been accepted by the visualarts, music and dance, but for good reason has been resisted by literature andtheater. Situated within a literary format and literature as a creative activity,concrete poetry plays a special role in the modernization of literature, a rolethat becomes more important as the power of rhetoric becomes exhausted.Modernism strikes a fateful blow at a good many of the basic assumptionsand conventions of literatue. First, the emphasis upon manipulation of exte-ritr form rather than central content involves a superficiality of passion and alack of commitment to "rhetoric of significance" and "greater understandings,"The enormous self-respect and sense of tradition that literature has maintainedfor itself is threatened by a movement which, though intellectually shallow,draws its virility from a sense of "newness," liberty and a certain revolutionaryflair. The solid, responsible respectability of literature is challenged; the plat-form of literary intelligence, that exclusiveness of profound thought which lit-erature has held out over the other arts for so long, now becomes all-too-easilyembarrassed by tentative but energetic modes of innovative exploration andexperiment.There is also the serious problem of the questionable ability of language aswe know it to be trasferred from a transparent to an opaque medium. The con-crete poet prefers or needs to reveal his intentions through a manipulation ofthe language as material rather than through thoughts or images. Language asmaterial is opaque. In this sense, words become sequences of letters ratherthan meanings, syntax becomes a condition of iconographical density, the"neamess of points" in the topological sense, rather than a chain of meaningswhich complete a thought. "Reading" opaque language involves a direct per-ceptual recognition of the body, the physicality, the format of the iconog-raphy. Conventional language is transparent, The reader does not see theiconography of transparent language, there is no delay between the recogni-tion of the word and the chain of meanings and associations it brings. Mean-ings which do not involve a delay are meanings which are taken for granted.Opacity, involving delay, brings both instability and openness to the meaning.

Ian Wallace 343The outlines of opaque literature, concrete poetry, are blurred, out-of-focus,or else the circumscription of the symbol is so sharp that there is no othermeaning than the shape and context of the symbol itself; its permutationsthrough space implying concepts or ideas about the act of eading in its ownright instead of as a function of understanding.In the concrete poem, the iconographical structure of the page or the fieldof visualization has its own material integrity. Modernism, implying perpetualnewness, affects only this outward, exteriorized material integrity, changingthe shape of the periphery, leaving the center dry. In contrast, conventionalliterature. releasing power from the central meaning, maintains appearancesand evolves at the core. Unfortunately, the central meanings and impulses ofconventional literature have lost their power to challenge the imagination inan era charged with powerful electronic media whose effects are most stronglyfelt in the appearance of things and our emotional identifications with theseapPearances.As content-with its descriptive and intellectual precision-is debilitated,the poet loosens himself from his traditional social role as moralizer and pur-veyor of the passions. Instead of applying his sensitivities and attitudes to hispoetry by talking about things, he makes things talk about themseives. Insteadof describing feeling, he creates an aura of feeling, or non-feeling. Instead ofpursuing grand themes beyond the measure of man, he contemplates theabsurd, the inane and the ironical. He mutters freely and disguises genius withinvention. There is nothing which indicates creative sterility more clearly thanthe pretense of sincerity; and when man's will to understand exceeds his capa-bilities of understanding, sincerity must be taken for granted. The creativeimpulse of poetry or literature in general need not be proved by sincerity or'greater understandings"; for its effect, impressive or not, is measured only bythe fact that the imagination is alive.The creative activity of literature now concentrates not upon explainingand expressing to men those "greater understandings," but rather it is used as ameans of locating the human consciousness in space and time; and culture, thecreative arts, now competes with science to provide the totems of our aware-ness deserted by religion. A metaphor: in the vast emptiness of the Australiandesert, aboriginal man locates his center with a single pole, thrust into theearth. Thus the poem, concrete.

4. literature transparent and opaque (iwallace)

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