The Age of Interpretation and the Moment of Immediacy: Contemporary Art vs. History Author(s): Herbert N.

Schneidau Source: ELH, Vol. 37, No. 2 (Jun., 1970), pp. 287-313 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2872402 . Accessed: 10/06/2011 13:27
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THE AGE OF INTERPRETATION AND THE MOMENT OF IMMEDIACY: CONTEMPORARY ART VS. HISTORY
BY HERBERT N. SCHNEIDAU

ART AND LIFE

There is nothing literature in but changeand changeis mockery. WilliamCarlos Williams

One way to approach the question of historyand American poetrywould be to considerit in the contextof the state of contemporary arts. The following observations not made withan are insider'sexpertise, but are frankly those of a, puzzled bourgeois: the natureof this viewpoint cannot be hidden,forany viewpoint as such is in these times bourgeoisfromthe start,literally" out of it ": it signifies to not an effort understandfromthe inside, " but a use insteadof the old perspectival distance." In any case the bourgeois view seemsto be part of the calculationsof today's aesthetics of boredom, shock, and humiliation: the works of and Burroughs counton the " square" all Warhol,Cage, Ginsberg response. My first bourgeoisobservationis that currentart seeks to be trulyapocalyptic,not just avant-garde. ClementGreenberg, the " millennial " art critic,thinksit mere journalism that each new " wave of Modernism shouldbe hailed as the startof a wholenew epoch of art makinga decisivebreak with all customsand conventions of the past." 1 Perhaps we have heard "Wolf!" too but that roughbeast may in fact come. Perhaps the true often, " theoryof the avant-garde is that, having yelled " Wolf!" so " often, theycan now bringhim on unnoticed. From early in our and sporadically a century, before, current art that is anti-art of runs,Futurismand Dada cresting the surface, and it looks as if thismay pervadethe wholestream. In our time,anti-art signifies
* This paper was read before the MLA meeting in 1968 and was accepted for publication in its present form in 1969. 1 " Modernist Painting," in The New Art: A Critical Anthology,ed. Gregory Battcock (New York, 1966), p. 110.

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preeminently breaking the downof distinctions between and art life,a totalsubmersion the one in the other.Seeking join of to artto lifeis notnew,but thenineteenth-century variants generally wantedto infuse withthe values of art, whereasnow life the prevailing desireis to drag art downout of its palace into thestreets.2 theRomantics revolutionists As and sweptaway the old hierarchies societyand nature,with Wordsworth of occaand inorsionally blurring even the distinction between organic ganicbeings, theartists todayhackawayat thislast vestige so of " of " aristocraticthinking.3 sneers the critics the old The of at " valuesarevery nearly audible. The work arthasstopped of being an illusory writes one; " Rauschenberg wantsthe work world," . ofartto be life. . . Another critic makesthe interesting sugoversizepicture gestion that the appearanceof the mammoth signals merging art withreality: the of
4

The pictureitselfis now a thing,and as such refers less to extraneous " subject matter" and illusions of the same. . . . It is no longer a windowto the world,but the world,immanentand autonomous. It has size, and thus dignity,a dignity no longer intruded upon by fictitious agents in human attire. The human figurewas forcedout of the pictureto rejoin its alter egos,the artistand the spectator.5 strategies Op, Pop, Action, and the newer ones all have different besides bigness to achieve this autonomy-though of course all abandon, or mock, such things as illusionist perspectivism. In making claims for autonomy the apologists for these arts attack the notion that art can be definedin terms of familiar non-lifelike canons such as order, permanence, and transcendence. Perhaps because these values inhere in the term " works," the new art seems " anti-work" as well as " anti-art." Having got over his shock at being told that a giant plaster hamburger is art, or that random sounds including trafficnoises are music, the bourgeois " spectator now findshimselfconfronting works " made by chance, plays or filmsthat are never the same twice in performance,even
2 One might make a special note on Wordsworth: to judge from the 180i Preface his purpose was to purify art with real-life values in order to counteract sensationalism, a " degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation." This ambition would not seem to have much force today. 8 Alfred North Whitehead wrote of Wordsworth: "Of course he recognizes, what no one doubts, that in some sense living things are differentfrom lifeless things. But that is not his main point. It is the brooding presence of the hills which haunts him." (Science and the Modern World [New York, 1925], p. 117. 4 Alan Solomon, in The New Art,pp. 75-76. 6 E. C. Goossen, in The Now Art,pp. 55-56.

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" maticformlessness: suspicion anything " transcends the of that immediate conditions artist of and spectator-these the conare ditions an art so intent immediacy novelty of on and thatit has embraced plannedobsolescence, is licensed consumption and for onlyon its ownpremises. It was Aristotle, suppose, I whomostfirmly a implied dichotomy betweenart and life whenhe distinguished poetryfrom In history. his view,art (as in a well-made tragicplot) reveals thecoherence events thatinlifeseemchancy unacunderlying and countable;history inextricably to the vagariesof life's is tied actualities, poetry but touches realmofpureessence, the thatof potentiality. This was indeed an aristocratic and distinction, denunciation Aristotle's of in touchstones notsurprising an age is of egalitarian sympathies. Sam Hunter, of writing the paintings of Still,Rothko, and Newman, statesthat " thisimpressive trio of artistsdeclarean essentially humanorderrather than some impeccable thatis flawed and imperfect, ideal,an order inseparable from of problems visionand perception. Sincethe imperfectis so hot in us, our delight in flawed is works and stubborn linesneedonlya slight disorder-Stevens' variation. a similar In in vein,Greenberg to proposes, relation paintings Pollock's, like thatthe" Crisis theEasel Picture"is due to its abandonment of of Aristotelian form: " all-over, the 'decentralized,' 'polyphonic' that dispenses, picture. . . is a kindof picture apparently, with end." It was just thosesimple beginning, formalities middle, that for off art works marked true from Aristotle thatwere episodic, too

"csculpture that destroys " A itself.6 cult of transience:program-

i. e., too much like " life." In Greenberg'sview, this new art responds to the feeling" that all hierarchicaldistinctions have exhaustedand invalidated;that no area or order been, literally, on is of experience intrinsically superior, any finalscale of values, to any other area or orderof experience." Which means art is 8

' Inspired by Burroughs' novels, we have the "cut-up" play in which the lines are shuffledand dealt at random to the actors before each performance. By this time there will have been furtherexperiments. Tinguely's self-destroying machines are not new, of course, but may become cultic. Recently there was a vogue for rock concerts to end with the musicians smashing their instruments. 7 In The New Art, p. 61. Critical Essays (Boston, 1961), p. 157. The remark about 8 In Art and Culture: beginning, middle, and end reminds us how far art has gone today past the openendedness or circularity of great works of the immediate past like the Cantos, " The Man with the Blue Guitar," and Finnegans Wake.

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on spontaneity, repetition, immediacy: and precisely values the of the new art. The influence jazz on improvisatory of and eventually aleatoric in techniques all the artsshouldbe obvious. Thereareundeniable benefits thissituation: only popular to not is music moreinteresting thana fewyearsago,but theyoungnow stersof today are beingconditioned swallowlarge doses of to and symbolic surrealist technique thathave increased their toler" poetry" in general. In middle-class ance for cultureuntil " " recently poetry was something 98-lb.pansies:evenmusic, for and kids who wantedto play instruments, were a littlesissy. Now every it seems, wantsto have his own " sound." teen-ager, It must saidthatthere notbeenso muchfrenzied be has visionary activity popularculture ages; to thisextent, merger in in the of art and lifehas been a success, though not so greata one as a wide-eyed pronouncement Alan Solomonwouldhave it. In by of speaking Pop Art,another interpenetrationart and life, of he foresees our culture" a fantastic in new wonderland, more or, properly, Disneyland, whichassertsthe conscioustriumph of man'sinner of resources feeling overthematerial rational world, to a degree not perhaps possible sincetheMiddleAges."9
9In The New Art,p. 72.

always been frankly transient, suspiciousof formalism, dependent

no better thanlifeand oughtto giveup its snobbish pretensions. sees of Greenberg the merging art and lifeas the end of a long processof levelling democratization; is easy to imaginehim it on going to say thatin ourcentury has finally art from emerged feudalism, spiteof his scornformillennialists. in Latentmillennialism also revealedby Greenberg's is desireto " buttress observations cross-disciplinary his with references.Literature provides parallelsin Joyceand Gertrude Stein,perhaps eveninthecadences Pound'sverse inthepackedstridencies of and ofDylanThomas," saysin thesamepassage. Actually he someof hisexamples questionable; shallarguethispointlater. Still, are I histhesis couldbe wellsupported examples by from manyfields. In modern is there the urgeofmenlike Cage and Stockmusic, hausento breakdownhierarchic musicand distinctions between noise;perhaps even moresignificant, development wildly the of experimental soundand lyric thenewcommercial in music implies an interpenetration ofserious popular thatis an extension and art of the axiomthat art and lifemustmingle.Popularmusichas

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of It must also be said that the merger art and life,like other has in society, been a great ventures ourmerger-loving commercial art, in every sense, than success financially.More people buy ever before; the starvingartist,like his counterpartthe artist who puts himself totallyinto a " work,"is an anachronism.Some may kill art by so enthusiastically are sayingnow that our culture remarksthat " for absorbingit: Harold Rosenbergportentously called vanguardhas been accepted the first time,the art formerly dissent have en masse and its ideals of innovation,experiment, and made official." More stridently, been institutionalized Thomas Hess warnsthat " the vanguard audience is an armyof white phagocytesmobilizedby the Body Politic to contain the the of infection art. Like the whiteblood cells,it surrounds alien engulfsthem,dissolvesthem. The vanguard audience elements, will buy an artistuntilit kills him."" Hess has an old-fashioned of fear for the preservation " art," but for those who are truly c" anti-art" it must be solacing to reflect that both art and life in the by are transformed interpenetrating: successfulmergers, lose theirformer characterin the new two originalentitiesmust Here the hiddenpremiseof nihilism latent in the " antiunity.12 art "currentcomesto the surface.For what thisnew transforma tion assumes is not only the depositionof aristocraticart, but also a violentchangein " life"-society, culture-as we knowit. Perhaps drama is the most obvious locus of this quest for a on sees writer theatre, revolution.Richard Schechner, respected the stage as the place of Go5tterdammerung: theatrehas been nature,Western communal Despite its inherently is process A during past fourcenturies. complicated the literaturized
In The Anxious Object: Art Today and Its Audience, 2nd ed. (New York, 1966), p. 13. Rosenberg agrees that the new public involvement is related to the art-life interpenetration: " The creations that have struck deepest into the public imagination as typical of the past twenty years show an unmistakable impulse to erupt into the life around them. Paintings swell into protuberances, are metamorphosed into freestanding cutouts. . . . Sculptures crawl along the floor, join the collector's family at the dinner table, are electrifiedto blink on and off,emit sounds " (p. 259). "In The New Art, pp. 167-168. 12 Some have objected to labelling this trend " anti-art," but the implications of these statements by Rosenberg in The Anxious Object seem clear enough: " As numerous 20th century artists have divined, the ultimate formal invention demanded by painting is the invention that does away with painting " (p. 271); " Op arouses, too, the enthusiasm of people utterly bored with painting and sculpture and convinced that it has no place in the rational and technological world of tomorrow. They see in Op an early phase in the liquidation of the old arts. . ." (p. 270).
10

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now unfolding that promisesto undo this literaturlzation.Artificial divisionsamong the arts and between art -andlife are being erased. Concernsfor linearityand perspectiveare becomingless important, while our need for simultaneity, multi-focus, and the total use of space is increasing.The tribalhas been latentlythereall along. We shall not be ready for new formsof thoughtuntil we have destroyedthe old forms.To hell with [the]" intellectualheritageof the West ". . . . Once it was gloriousbut it no longerworks-the intentions and explanationsour heritageoffers not controlsociety; nor do is thereany hope that they can be propped up and made functional again. The work that the cubists and abstract expressionists did on perspectival paintingneeds now to be done on a more generallevel.13 The essay concludes with a frank call to arms, but it is the latter part of the quotation above that most clearly indicates the belief that the democratization of art must find its end in revolution, that nihilismis the real meaning of Modernism. As riots become C" guerrilla happenings," unprogrammed TV spectaculars offering even juicier fare than airplane crashes (as the " police riot " of Chicago 1968 showed so well) we sense that Schechner's call for Guemlla Theatre is already answered. Perhaps. all our arts, and our millennialisttendencies in life as well, now aspire to the conditions of drama. Certainly the technique of confrontation,of making physical presences and actions manifest grievances and desires,is a " dramatization ": it is hard to discuss contemporary protest without using the word, and it describes non-violent techniques like the late Martin Luther King's "cmaking our witness " as well as violent ones. But it is in the violent protests that life becomes art in deadly earnest. Schechner scores well offthe proscenium theater, with its separation of actors and audience; he likens the curtain to book-covers, acts to chapters; this is the " literaturization" he complains of. As he puts it, the "cmost notable formal characteristic of literature is the absolute separation of reader and work." His call for the total immediacy and involvement of post-Artaud theater is an anti-art variant on et tout le reste est litt~rature, but more ominously implies that literature is part of the System, part of the elaborate suppressing mechanism by which a basically elitist its societymuffles rebellious upsurges: the aesthetic as anaesthetic. in Schechner's analysis literature must bear the Furthermore,
13 8"

Theatre & Revolution," Salmagundi II, 2 (Fall 1967-Winter1968), pp. 19-20, 27.

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guiltofpsychic wellas political he as suppression. Clearly feels " " thatthe closeting " readers with" works is a step toward of alienation, toward separation thought feeling defines a and that of schizophrenia it doesEliot's " dissociation sensibility." as of For thecoming generation self-alienation theworst such seems possible endofliving a society in and riven splits, by dualisms, divisiveness. Thus theyrespond whenwriters McLuhanpointthe like eagerly Gnger say,print thecauseofcultural at, as schizophrenia (another " literature . They take up with variant the charge of against ") all sorts prophets gurus of and whopromise life. re-integrated Sinceself-alienationout,thegoodold cause ofthe" artist is in isolation"is no more. Onlyrarely now do we hear about the terrible wisdom the artistgainedat the cost of worldly of life. Thereis no longer muchargument about the artist's commit" ment." Even in artylittleBritish wherewe might magazines, have expected idea of splendid the isolation holdout,we find to thissort thing: of Withvarious other manifestations old order, concepts of the the of isolation dearby many held Western artists must alsobe destroyed. If Western doesnotplunge thetideofchange, undergo art into and . . ., a transfiguration it willsuffer samefate Western the as religious institutions. One mustbecome totally immersed thiseverchanging in stateof in existence, order achieve to terms with unavoidable an reality.14 I relish slight the flavor illiteracy of thattheseextracts convey, sinceit indicates levelto which ideas have penetrated. the the The almost articulate promise thenewmillennial of arts,then, is wholeness life. The methodis to destroy of the Systemcapitalist, paternalist, rationalist, visualist, elitist-thathas prevented life perpetuating full by separations, distinctions, distances. Once the alienating mechanisms destroyed, can have, in are we D. H. Lawrence's terms, blood-knowledge is better a that than brain-knowledge. can have,forthe taking, newmysticism We a in which shuck " self we the "-that bugaboo-in Dionysiac tribal communion rather thanApollonian art-appreciation. is the This balmprescribed cureall thedoubleness Western includto of life, ingthe Cartesian abstraction mindfrom of matter and eventhe
" Dermot Joseph, " The Failure to Communicate," Apocalypse 2 (Liverpool, 1968), pp. 26 and 28.

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the " buried life.") Of course a tissue of quotations fromcritics is not the same as an exact description of what the new artists are doing. But is there not a sense in which these slogans, aimed at a bourgeois world,are likely to have more effect than those developments that only insidersdeeply understand? Slogans have a way of acquiring their own lives; popularization is inherent in the premises of the new movement. The ardently desired cultural transformation may come about as a result of bourgeois imitation of the new modes before revolution gets a chance. We see pastors using rock music to rejuvenate their congregations; educators falling all over themselves to "get with it," to put new "relevance" into the product demanded by their consumers; Hair packs them in on Broadway. As Wyndham Lewis observed, " in the Bourgeois Gentilhomme M. Jourdain . . . was astounded to find that what daily issued from his mouth was such an important thing as 'Prose.' In the same way he could have been told that many of his actions were 'Philosophy.'" '6
II THE AGE OF INTERPRETATION

ancientseparations soul from of body. We can even disregard theseparation selffrom of other: AndyWarholsays " I think it wouldbe terrific everybody alike."15 The newanti-subjecif was tivism offers return childlike a to undifferentiated in many life; it is fitting thesenewartsare produced or aimedat ways that by adolescent sensibilities, theboundary for between child's the world and the adult'sis the mostpervasiveof the underlying elitist dualisms Western of and sometimes most painful. society, the The adolescent often feelsthata greatduplicity hidden the is in between gulf innocence experience. and (The obsessiveness that of last theme-thedialecticof innocence and experience-in nineteenth-century American literature, wellas in isolatedBritish as prophets Blake or Lewis Carroll, like forecasts use of adothe lescent energies thetwentieth in the century dynamite dam of to

Not fornothingare we in the midst,at the moment,of an accelerating cult of enthusiasm, movementof the sensibility a which might
Quoted by Samuel Adams Green, in The New Art, p. 9231. Time and Western Man (New York, 1928), p. x. For a brilliant analysis of what, on the other hand, the attempt to become life is doing to art, see Robert Brustein, " The Third Theater Revisited," New York Review of Books, February 13, 1969, pp. 25-27.
'B

16

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b~ecalled " Warholism," whichnothing in has to be provedor justified, and which is designedto invalidate,as one writerput it, " the critic, with his lunatic distinctions, judgments,and . . . museummentality." Max Kozloff7 The last 9500 years, from one point of view, form an epoch in which the norm of literature was not directness but mediation; in which the literary particular was only an example of the universal it represented; when meaning was something separable fromwork, somethingto take away, pore over, analyze, explicate. This age postulated a dualistic view of art based on the division of art and life,event and meaning, with a form-content dichotomy thrown in for good measure. Between two distinct realms, with " two different languages," there must be interpretation. Hence critics,who will mediate to the uninitiated the messages that come fromthe high world of art. This state of things occurs when works of art become too permanent; that is, when the Greeks of the late periods faced the poems of Homer, of whose times they had only the remotest conceptions and whose literal meaning, for various reasons, did not satisfy them. Or when the Jews of the Diaspora faced the task of interpretingHoly Scriptures whose plain sense was no longer applicable: Susan Sontag uses Philo of Alexandria as an example. Allegorical interpretationcomes from one age tryingto transcend itself and assimilate the meanings of another, or from earth trying to transcend itself and assimilate heavenly meanings. In either case literature must have a more or less hidden meaning; it is a fable, a fiction,fromwhich a covert moral must be drawn forth. Biblical exegesis and, somewhat later, Christian or Neo-Platonic allegorizations of pagan mythbegat Western industriesthat lasted for more than a millenniumand a half (a time, it may be noted, when the most direct and participatoryform-drama-was largely proscribed by Church disapproval). We have now had a couple of centuries of secular criticism,but old habits linger on: there seems little essential differencebetween the theory of criticism that reads Genesis as an allegory of the soul's journey to God and that which reads, say, a novel by James as a parable of the growth of moral awareness. Of this period of time we can say with Angus Fletcher that " we must be ready to discern in almost any work at least a small degree of allegory"; allegory, i. e., a detachable
11In The New Art,p. 131.

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discovery they shall be more precious.19

meaning, in a sense the normof the era, in spite of many is attempts jettisonit."8 Allegory to tends to be schematic and visualist(notethatsomevarieties interpretation heavily lean of on chartsof imagery and diagrams structure), of well agreeing withthe mentalhabitsof the age; it makesits contribution to that spatialization thought whichso manysinceBergson of of have complained. whenit uses an appearanceMore important, reality dichotomy notehowoften (and somevariant theleadenof casketvs. golden-casket theme the subjectof allegory, is how it warswiththe inveiglements appearance, of how its visualism is thatoflooking through is things)allegory wholly consonant with thetradition dualisms our culture.Whenourmillennialists of in complain literaturization,is usuallyallegory of it theyare really objecting no wonder to; that,fora goodlongtimenow,theterm has beenusedmostly a pejorative in sense. Allegory consorts necessarily with a theoryof fictions.For thosemedieval and Renaissance theorists whoseultimate justification literature thatChrist for was spokein parables, assumpan tionofthefabulism poetry basic. As Sidney it: " Who of was put thinks thatEsope writit foractuallytrue,werewellworthy to have his namechronicled amongthe beasteshee writeth of." Of course themthefiction partoftheprotection precious for was of transcendent truth.To thecharge thatpoetsveiltruth with lies, Boccaccio retorted: it Surely is notoneofthepoet'svarious functions ripup and lay to barethemeaning which hidden hisinventions. lies in Rather where matters truly solemn memorable too much and are exposed, is his it office every effort protect wellas he can and remove to by as them from gazeoftheirreverent. . Surely one can believe the . . no that veil poetsinvidiously the truth withfiction, either deprive to the reader thehidden of or sense, to appearthemore but clever; rather tomake truths which would otherwise cheapen exposure object by the ofstrong effort intellectual andvarious that interpretation, inultimate

This reasoning follows the old principle of Augustinian exegesis that those truths are sweetest which are gained with the most labor, and that the words of the Parables reveal as they conceal: let those who have ears to hear, hear. Now Scripture obviously does not " mean " exactly what it " says "; nor, by this theory,
"Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, New York, 1964), p. 8.

" Boccaccio on Poetry,ed. CharlesG. Osgood (New York, 1956), pp. 59-60.

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does poetry any literature. or Therefore musthave training we in exegesis, a class ofprofessionals onlyto produce but and not it to handit on in an educational system; poetry for needsauthoritative interpretation lessthanScripture. no Therearemanywellattested reports the disasters of thatoccurin unguided interpretation.Surely funniest the are examples the Cambridge students reported I. A. Richards hisPractical Criticism, by in whohad the " dismaying habit of praising "Woodbine Willie and spewing sarcasm Donne orD. H. Lawrence Hopkins on or whenpresented withthepoemsunsigned undated.These students and werevictimsof the appearance-reality naturalin an age of dichotomy interpretation: forgot they to about the necessity distrust their uncorrected impressions. Psychoanalytic criticism makesa further contribution the to of theory fictions assuming by that fictions, otherforms like of fantasy, positively are For psychic necessities. critics like Simon 0. Lesser (Fiction theUnconscious) and fiction seems belong to to that class of activities-such dreams, as daydreams, ambitions, lifestyles, fetishisms-in which workout deeperconflicts we and desires.One critichas even assembled evidencefromsensorydeprivation experiments provethatwe needthe "irreal,"' to that and neurosis result anxiety can from inhibiting fantasy, when as normal peopleare keptfrom dreaming artists or prevented from " 20 their illusions." However, holeofindeterminate creating a size may have been knockedin this rationaleby the recenttrend " toward"confessional poetryamongAmerican writers.Poets like Lowell,Berryman, Snodgrass, and Sextonseem to perform self-therapy adequately " telling likeit is." Theyresort quite by it to a minimum fiction any: in thesepoems (as in mostother of if recent verse) it is hardto findplot,fable,character, setting, or the othertrappings fiction. of Even the persona,that bare disDore Ashton, " In Praise of Illusion," in The Now Art, pp. 111-122. In spite of such mystiques, the theory of fictions causes all kinds of trouble these days. For instance, the novelist Philip Roth seems to feel that American life has grown so bizarre that the boundary between fictionand a fantastic reality is too tenuous to be maintained. Certain other artists of our time revive the surrealist claim that truth is stranger than fiction,i. e., that our " real " lives contain a wild amount of the fantastic if we can only unleash it, " turn on." Certainly the bourgeois audience is tiring of fiction,if we can judge from the fact recently reported in newspapers that fictionsales are declining drastically in relation to sales of other kinds of books. If so, this may represent still another interpenetrationof values between artist and community, art and life.
20

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guise, is becomingattenuated. Olson's Maximus or Berryman's Henry are thinmasks comparedto Prufrock.In generalI think we can say that whereasartistsofthe age of interpretation tended to accept a tacit contractwiththe readerforthe " willingsuspension of disbelief," today's artistsseek out everyloophole in that contract. The collapsingof distinctions between art and life is part of the revolution that is bringing age of interpretation a close. the to If art and lifeever fullymerge,we will need no more intermediaries: we willhave the priesthood all believers. That littlegirl of who used to complain after her English class that she "loved poetrybut hated to analyze it" may become a figure mythic of dimension. Of course there have been many attemptsby individual artists over the last centuriesto escape the tyrannyof criticism, and there have even been movementsmotivated in whole or part by the desire to evade or abolish the norms of allegoricalinterpretation. Protestantism itselfwas one such. So was the "rise of the novel," insofaras it was a protestagainst thecloudiness highallegorical of romance:but the novel too easily became a kind of bourgeoisor democratized allegory. The Symbolists tried to write poetry with no detachable thought-i. e., separablemeaning-but too often resorted obscurantism, to which has self-defeating tendencies. A more significant breakaway was made by what Charles Olson calls " the revolutionof the ear, 1910." Olson dates fromthis time the recoveryof true orality in poetry,an oralitywhich graduallydissolves the old artificial distinctions and dualistic techniquesof the age of " closed" or " s print-bred verse (read " age of interpretation .21 With poets if) " like Pound and Williams,verse recoversthe " secrets of breath, the syllable,all that Pound called "living language." And we mightadd to Olson's analysisthe thesisofJ. Hillis Millerin Poets of Reality, that in the work of the Early Moderniststhere is a for a new relation between literatureand reality. For striving Pound, Joyce,Yeats, and Eliot the generalproblemwas to work referential theoriesof language freeof the old representational, more than writeworksin whichreality and art,to do something or is something outside,pointedto by elaboratefiction metaphor.
" Projective Verse," in Selected Writings Charles Olson, ed. Robert Creeley of (New York, 1966), pp. 15-26.
21

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" Myth is real," as Pound said, and the works of these men and their friendsaspire to the condition of myth. It ought to be emphasized that the sometimes fanatical efforts of these writersto get " the real " into their works have not much to do with the old artificial " realisms," which mostly aimed at producing more plausible fictions. Many of their early strategies were " realistic," but share with Impressionist art a tendency to transcend representationalismin the very act of fulfilling as it: Greenberg says, " the paradox in the evolution of French painting from Courbet to Cezanne is how it was brought to the verge of to abstraction in and by its very effort transcribevisual experience with ever greater fidelity."22 However, this is not the place to discuss the struggles of these artists to write the "poetry of reality." Miller's chapters underline the complexity of the task: he is especially adept at showing how Stevens came to anticipate today's arts of flux by elaborating old-fashioned perspectivism, and how Williams attempted the mergerof art and life by striving for an idiom totally demotic, totally nitty-gritty.But let us go back to the point that all these men find some solution by rejecting in whole or part the referentialidea of language, and in arrivingat new conceptions in whichone ofthe recurrent ambitions of Western thought is realized: Instead of measuringthe content,meaning,and truth of intellectual formsby somethingextraneouswhich is supposed to be reproduced in them, we must find in these formsthemselvesthe measure and for criterion theirtruthand intrinsic meaning. . . . From this point of view, myth,art, and language and science appear as symbols;not in the sense of merefigures whichrefer some givenrealityby means to of suggestionand allegorical renderings, but in the sense of forces each of which produces and posits a world of its own. . . . Thus the special symbolicformsare not imitations, but organs of reality.23 That is Ernst Cassirer; few of the Modernists were so transcendental, but all try in their various ways to heal the split between language and reality that the referential theory assumes. All exhibit some form of faith in the powers of language to coalesce with reality, seeking as they go a new definitionof "symbol" just as Cassirer does. Olson and others, including today's dictionary-makers, say that
22 Art
23

and Culture, p. 171. Language and Myth, trans. Susanne K. Langer, (New York: Dover, 1956), p. 8.

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the way to reunite language and reality is via orality. But sometimes this panacea is proposed not so much for its own sake as for a way to attack visualism, which is often blamed for all kinds of alienations. For instance the subject-object distinction is, according to Walter Ong, " derivative from an unreflective visualist notion of reality." 24 The new disciples of orality tax the visualist bias of Western culture with producing a schizophrenic sense of unreality in our lives. They point to the fact that a man reading (or simply existing in our cities) must learn to shut offmany stimuli fromthe " real " oral world. Then they trace visualism from the formalizing, reifying,allegorical-transcendental habit of mind, usually by saddling the Greeks with it and followingsuch a chain of reasoning as this: that ProfessorJaeger describes the Greek way of It is significant as understanding essentiallyvisual. The eye perceives the formof objects. If the approach to realityis visual, we are led to expect a search for the structures of reality, the forms governingchanging processes. This is just what the Greek quest was. .***.*.*
**.* *. ..................... . . . . . . . . . . *.*. * * . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Likewise,the longingforunderstanding, seeing the eternallytrue for is beyondthe changing, symbolizedforus in the Olympiandeities.25 Needless to say, the thrust of values today is all toward the antiformal,the unstructured (as in Summerhill-typeeducation), and toward the changing processes themselves rather than any transcendent understandingof them. Such " understanding," identical with ego-masteryin Freudian terms, is scorned as the breeder of those hated distinctions and dualisms, derivative from a slaveowning mentality. (This is a mild reproof: other apologists could go on to condemn order as anal-compulsiveness, permanence as fear of death, transcendence as escapism.) So we are urged to shake offthe Olympian for the chthonic consciousness, or at least the Apollonian for the Dionysiac, and return to the reality of oral-aural life,recover " I-Thou " relationships instead of subjectobject ones, and so on. This is all very persuasive, not the least so when we think of the pull some of these ideas exerted on the Modernist poets.
s" A Dialectic of Aural and Objective Correlatives," reprintedin Approaches to the Poem, ed. John Oliver Perry (San Francisco, 1965), p. 252. 26 Tom F. Driver, The Sense of History in Greek and Shakespearean Drama (New York, 1960), pp. 23 and 25. Driver is not making oralist arguments, but puts the case succinctly. 24

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Greenberg's of Pound and Joyceas examples his " aftituse of " hierarchic art. In their day theywereall accusedof formlessness,but it now appearsthattheyreallywantedfixity flux and in a boundtogether a paradoxical relationship,new form. FrankKermode's thesisis that theseartists wereaddictedto Romantic which describes a multihe whathe callsthe as Image, heldin suspension: tudeof paradoxes is 'aesthetic of The work artitself symbol, monad';utterly original and and notin theold sense 'imitated'; 'concrete,' fluid suggesyet unrelated and more to a exalted tive;a means truth, truth to, than, thatof positivist or science, any observation depending upon the out and therefore, discursive underone reason; of the fluxof life, alive of in dead;yetuniquely because itsparticipationa higher aspect, and it not but of order existence, because is analogous to a machine co-extensivematter form; in and resistant explicato to an organism; of and of tion[N.B.]; largely independent intention, of any form . fixed ethical utility;. . marble tree-like, yetconstantly yet moving.26 is maintained Pound'svortex theperfect symbol:it is pureform force. Much of the workof the Early Modernist by rushing strives thistension paradox, thisresolution generation toward of dilemof antinomies. Thus thesepoetsdealtwiththe traditional as mas of art: theybelievedin literature at once " real" and " symbolic," staticand kinetic, and particular, universal mythic Profesand communal Adamicand antinomian borrow yet (to . sorRoy HarveyPearce'sterms) Clearly thatonly theybelieved in couldholdthesecontraries suspension, were thus art,not life,
26 Romantic Image (London, 1961), p. 44. Although Miller disagrees about the essentially Romantic character of Modernism, he also is alert to the importance of paradox in modern poetics, especially in his essay on Stevens. Both writers might have made more of Coleridge's belief that the imagination in poetry " reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference;of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness,with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order . . ." (Biographia Literaria, Ch. xiv).

hence the objedctidnto order, permanence,and transcendence;

must Here,however, ertwial a differentiation be made. Notieof these artistsproposedpure oralism, any morethan theyproposed a totalbreakwiththe art and thought the past. They of reachtoward someofthevaluesoforality flux and but maintain a firm gripaonthe besthabitsof the age of interpretation the at same time. By no mnemons theyreadyto giveup all forms were of

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not interested in abolishing the distinction. In this love of suspended antinomies they join themselves with great traditions: the problem of the One and the Many; Nietzsche's Apollonian-andDionysian; and the ultimate source, the great Judaeo-Christian paradox of a God both immanent and transcendent. But contemporaryartists have no taste for paradox; it smacks too much of the Wilde-Chesterton-T. S. Eliot sort of thing. So they opt for one side of the equation-for kinetic Dionysian flux. Influenced (usually at several removes) by the attacks of Bergson and other dynamists on the crudity of concepts, fascinated by the problem of embodying flux, they create an art of immanence that parallels today's tastes in theology. Whereas for the Early Modernists language itself was one of the supreme symbols of resolved antinomies (since it was both constantly changing and yet in a sense permanent, personal but intersubjective), language fortoday's artists becomes not an ark of faith but a mere medium, no longerrevealing while concealing but, as Cassirer says, " bound to obscure what it seeks to reveal," thereforesomething to be reduced to an almost gestural level or even to be treated as an encumbrance. Many of them could echo the collagiste sentiment of Jack Spicer in his " Letter to Lorca ": " Dear Lorca, I would like to make poems out of real objects. The lemon to be a lemon that the reader could cut or squeeze or taste. . . . The imagination pictures the real. I would like to point to the real, to disclose it, to make a poem that has no sound in it but the pointing of a finger."27 In this great loss of faith in language they had predecessors in low-level nominalists like T. E. Hulme, who, assuming language to be basically referential,attacked it and called for a poetry that would " hand over sensations bodily." But the closest they can get to Hulme's " sensations " or Spicer's " objects " is a poetry of dynamistic,sensationalist oralism. Thus it may be that the oral gusto of contemporary poetry derives as much from this change in the conception of the values of language, fromthose of permanence to those of pure sensationalist behaviorism,as from the professeddesire to recover " I-Thou " communication and the immanence of oral reality. The oralism now cultic is so affective that it reminds one of Plato's theory of poetry, though of course with the values inverted. One suspects that for the coming generation the public reading will replace the little magazine as the
27New American Poetry 1945-1960, ed. Donald M. Allen (New York, 1960), p. 413.

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truelocusofpoeticcreation-andalreadysomeof thelatterare Art as beingdistributed tape cartridges. may have in this demodeofindividuation, the shucked Apollonian finally velopment in and plasticor visual concreteness, staticperfection favorof unity. of and the culticcommunion mystic Dionysianvitalism that Fryeargues is If so, thenthemillennium uponus. Northrop of the without interposition someconceptual no artcan be studied but scheme; thenewartsneednot be studied(i. e., interpreted), onlyexperienced. indeed the of cultivation paradox, Modernists their If we ignore millennialist ofchaos. The old aristocratic look likeinaugurators of of Yeats had his ear to theground.Thinking Pater'sisolation but of notthefruit experience, (" of themoment pureimmediacy life, itself as the end of aesthetic he musedon the ") experience " Did Paterforeshadowpoetry, a of works oneofhisclosefriends: the is wherethe individual nothing, fluxof the a philosophy, of critics his time CantosofEzra Pound...? 28 Yeats likeother in but formed therushofflux theCanto's, by the neglected fixity deal art in was basically right his visionthata stillnewer would no contour . . humanexperience longer . with" objectswithout of of have thought better course lives." He might shutintobrief of the Williams, naifguruto themoreflux-minded contemporary in poets. Millerdescribes Poets of Realityhow Williamstranand distinction apscendsold dualismslike the subject-object " the new depthlessspace" (anti-perspectivist, of proaches of with course)and " thenewimmediacy," its abolition " aesthedistinctions. Williams'theoryof " tic distance and hierarchic Paterson: " Not up may be summed in the linesfrom poetry / prophecy!NOT prophecy! but the thingitself!" Prophecy " canyouinterpretthething itself?29 but mustbe validated, how but all of these artistshad visions,or Not only Williams,
28 From the "Introduction" to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), quoted from Modern Poetry: Essays in Criticism, ed. John Hollander (New York, 1968), p. 97. Just as Pater's rejection of the " fruit of experience" signals the end of the age of interpretation,the laborious harvesting of wisdom, so his yearning for the " flame-like in our lives hints that an evanescent, all-consuming nihilism was a " hidden premise of his hedonism. I think we are seeing this emerge today, which is why I firstwanted to entitle this essay " Burn Baby Burn with a Hard Gemlike Flame." 29 Williams' Spring and Alt (Dijon, 1923) is the true manifesto of the new movement. It begins with an apocalypse of annihilation, attacks " crude symbolism," " perspective," and all " forms" that produce an art of " beautiful illusion " separate from " life " and " reality."

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chapterMiller nightmares, the new art of flux. In another of theoryof " immediate summarizes Eliot's early metaphysical life: for in experience," starting-pointpurefeeling all sentient that neither " In immediate experience theremay be distinguished nor nor nor perception, objects mind,nor selfhood, sensation, norspace, nor to to perceive, language namethemby,nor time, 30 norpositions space as 'points of view' on the whole." This in was a condition that made Eliot terribly anxious;he called it " " annihilation and " utter night." Yet something very like out hope of today'sart,as Eliot's fearturns to be the ultimate art seenin thatmostclearly symptomatic ofourtimecalled" enroom was an early ex(the totallymirrored vironmentalist" lightand psycheof but ample),consisting nothing stroboscopic (quotedin NewsAccording one projector to delicsoundeffects. as involvement to so week) thisartwill" become purein sensory of content." divest itself all formal so What the arts of today seem to be seekingis an effect or so by intense, unmediated, unconditioned formal contentual so "This is only considerations one could not stop to reflect, that not a fact." The zeal with art, not real life,only a fiction, which in renders themliable to the theyseek thiseffect reality to in upontranscendentalism,be charge returning a fullcircle of we content abstracted are leftwithsomeis sure, ifall formal for remote whatweusually think as theconcrete, of from thing pretty on tangible world. Yet the desireseemsto be predicated the that the thing, mostintense assumption in factthetruest reality, In in lifemustbe such " immediate experience." old aesthetic " " it have beencalled" spirit or " feeling or even language might " " (or, synecdochically,music or " poetry " " art "-as when said Coleridge that" no poemcan be all poetry"); the combinaand tionoftranscendentalism apocalypticism themovement gives salvationist. Thisflavor grow will a strong flavor being of stronger approaches, as the year1000 oncebrought just as theyear92000 to fantasies a frenzied millenarian pitch.31 the Whenthe modesof musicchange, wall of the cityshake. a writes poem" On Burroughs' WhenAllenGinsberg Work,"he symbolic interpretasees thatthe end of the age of allegorical,
30Poets of Reality (Cambridge, Mass., 1966), p. 132. "'Frank Kermode's The Sense of An Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York, 1966) is relevant here, as it is to much else in this essay.

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insane:

tionwill lead to something our old standards that wouldjudge

The methodmust be purestmeat and no symbolicdressing actual visions and actual prisons as seen then and now. A naked lunch is naturalto us, we eat realitysandwiches. But allegoriesare so much lettuce. Don't hide the madness.
III HISTORY AS THE SYSTEM

Hatred of art is unlikelyto develop as an isolated phenomenon;it goes hand in hand with hatred of science, hatred of State, hatred, in sum, of civilization as a whole. Is it conceivable that modern Western man bears a rankling grudge against his own historical essence? Jose Ortega y Gasset There is an inertia of movement, sometimes called " momentum," as well as an inertia of rest. One aspect of the new momentum is anti-historicist. This seems to be an ineluctable condition of all current art-so pervasive that no poet or artist can simply ignore it. As paintings strive to become events not pictures, as dramas strive to be happenings instead of well-made plots, as poems seek to embody not only process but even random flow,the war between flux and concept grows sharper, and more open become the attacks on the habits and norms of the past; history, a fortifiedredoubt of the intellectualist forces, undergoes a fearfulsiege. How can there be value or relevance in the past? It cannot be experienced directly,but must be continually reconstructed,and who can trust intellectual reconstructionswhen we do not trust the intellect? Or, to put it less rhetorically: 1) history is full of reificationsof events and concepts made on arbitrary and prejudiced principles, is thereforesimplistic and misleading, and obscures the basic flux of all life; 2) it representsthe dead hand of the past reaching at our vital centers, and is really nothing but a form of that will-to-powerbeyond the grave that afflictsmen too weak to let go of the world; 3) it is simply the last evasion of the fact that we are " condemned to freedom," and we use the past as guide and determinantonly because we are

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too cowardly facetheanxieties to in involved creating ourselves, and ourvalues,anewat each moment.32 Neurotics we repeat all, ourexperiences like endlessly the shell-shocked whofirst soldiers madeFreudsuspect thatthere something was beyond pleasure the " principle. History a nightmare is from whichI am trying to awake," Stephen as Dedalus so aptlyput it. All oftheseattacksbeginwithone ofthepermutations simof plified Bergsonianism ourtime. For truebelievers, in history distorts bothtrueflux true and memory. Georges Pouletasserts that Bergson's originality " in his affirmation duration someis that is thingotherthan history a system laws; that it is a free or of creation."And he goes on to quote an emotionally significant passagefrom Peguy,who writes that our habit of historicizing colorsevenour viewof the present thatwe have " a present so a present and stilled, present thatwas past, a congealed arrested, setdown;a determined An present. historic present.... [Whereas thetruepresenti not yet becomehistory: is freedom; has the it free thatwhich notyetbookedand jailed."3 All the anger is is of the disciples immediacy of against*the of interpretation age can be feltin thosewords. Poulet reminds further that us, on, thisparticular note has been soundedalso in the American traof dition: " The repulsion Thoreaufor is history thusofthesame natureas that of Bergsonor Peguy. Historyis a fixation, an of intellectualization life. Life,on the contrary, arbitrary exists It a onlyin fluctuation. is a suddenfire, ceaselessemergence. are So it might seemthatAmericans predisposed accept to of theBergsonian this critique history; possibly theyinherit from for their Puritanancestors, whomthe past was mainly record a lit of benighted of superstition, onlyby the occasionalstakefires and martyrs prophets. One couldobject,fairly easily,withsomeof the possibledisof qualifications the view that life is flux: " All thingsare a flowing, Sage Heracleitus / says," but theydo not flowat the so samerate,obviously. iflifeis really discontinuous, do Or, how we knowit? To be sure,these answerswould not suffice for
34

" McClure uses in his " Hymn to St. Geryon a quotation from the Still: " We are committed an unqualified to painter Clyfford act, not illustrating outalibis. One must accept total responsibility what wornmythsor contemporary for he executes." This neo-existentialism pervades the movement. " Studiesin Human Time (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1959), p. 35. 34 Poulet, p. 335.
32 Michael

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more sophisticated elaborations. Here is one such from the fashionable thinker Claude Levi-Strauss: of factsis no less so of their What is true of the constitution historical selection. From this point of view, the historianand the agent of history choose, sever, and carve them up, for a truly total history them with chaos. Every cornerof space conceals a would confront multitudeof individualseach of whom totalizes the trend of history in a mannerwhichcannot be comparedto the others;forany one of richin physithese individuals,each momentof time is inexhaustibly whichall play theirpart in his totalization. cal and psychicalincidents whichclaims to be universalis stillonly a juxtaposition Even history withinwhich (and betweenwhich) very much of a fewlocal histories A trulytotal historywould cancel more is leftout than is put in.... itselfout-its productwould be nought.85 In short, the very method of history is one of makeshift selectivity, and the best it can give us is some arbitrary " fruit" of experience. While our poets musing on the Union or Confederate dead have probably always known this, it takes on power in the context of the millennial thrust of the new immediacy. But we are really speaking of an emotional force here; whether Levi-Strauss can be refuted is irrelevant if we grasp the significance of that " grudge " Ortega speaks of. If the attacks are to be elaborated in emotional rather than intellectual terms,we must turn to the other critiques of history. First the hatred of mortmain: this motifis perhaps best voiced in an outburst fromone of Hawthorne's notebooks: whichDead Men have among livingaffairs the To represent influence for instance, a Dead Man controls the disposition of wealth; a Dead Man sits on the judgment seat, and the living judges do but respect his decisions;Dead Men's opinions in all things controlthe living truth; we believe in Dead Men's religion;we laugh at Dead and in all Men's jokes; we cry at Dead Men's pathos; everywhere inexorablyover us.36 matters,Dead Men tyrannize This passage, showing yet another side of the latent American anti-historicism, can easily be transposed into contemporary terms. For us this would be the lurking suspicion that history,
3 As it happens, this is not the whole thrust of Ldvi-Strauss' view, but his insistence on the arbitrariness in the method of history compels him to conclude that it is a very limited tool: " As we say of certain careers, history may lead to anything, provided you get out of it." The Savage Mind (Chicago, 1966), pp. 257 and 262. 36 The Portable Hawthorne, ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York, 1948), p. 568. Others responsive to the " tyranny" of history included, of course, Emerson and Whitman.

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and study is one of the formis' the its' toweptuahzation of forces.All our System,that ubiquitousalliance of repressive in persuaded today to resistthe System, youthare powerfully itself; history one,away withit. if is whatever form manifests it history one of the kindsof tranis According thisrationale, to " understanding," thingsto some lookingthrough scendental on principle behind theminsteadof " turning " to the flux. As is I remarked, in of understanding the form ego-mastery suspect Greekmenfrom slave-owning the todayas having beenderived of tality. We are seeinga new version the Freudianallegory: to insteadof a harassedadult ego struggling mediatebetween unreasonable and a rigidgrandid the demandsof a childish in reality, may now we motherly superego the faceofunyielding the usingego-mastery an picture ego as a SimonLegree, overseer id can to suppress youthful so thathe andthesuperego exploit the " from the proletariat.The assaults on " reason and flights " ideas" that periodically have shaken Westernculturemay futurist openly arts directed the at inspiring comehometo roost, that id tribal ineachofus-and arewefarfrom stagenow? There cerare severalsensesin whichthe new arts are behaviorist; the tainlyso in the realmof values,where demandto createall reinforce moment only,whenpopularized, can valuesanewevery and current cultsof faddishness producea new slogan: " what37 of is ever'shappening, right." Then too we have the efforts withthe soup cans and Brilloboxes,to persuade AndyWarhol, a of Equally us thatartis just " a wayofseeing," form behavior. carried todaywithas on is behaviorist the waron consciousness, evermustered. an anti-historiIn as B. fervor John Watson much or about the precepts cistmilieu, vagueLawrentian Emersonian that Fall of Man beinga fallinto consciousness, specifically of the If self,may proliferate. so they must reinforce suspicion directed our at voicedby Ortegathat a formof self-loathing the of ownpastsis underneath nihilism ourtimes.38
37Rosenberg, who implies that novelty is now the same kind of value-criterion in the serious arts that it always was in popular music, remarks: " With doing replacing making, values in painting can be as completely dependent on audiences as they are in night club entertainment'" (The Anxious Object, p. 272). " In the introductoryparts of his earlier hook, The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-CenturyWriters (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), Miller pointed out the relation of historicismto the now hated philosophies of subjectivism and relativism. In Poets of Reality he learns from Stevens that in an American milieu historicism itself may eventuate in a rejection of history.

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The franticfear of historylatent in our arts appears in a better light if we view these struggles to throw offthe tyranny of the past as a kick against determinism: whenever the idea of history becomes deterministic,it calls for rebuttal. Surely we must all be glad of such effortsas Heisenberg's, with the principle of indeterminacy,to lay to rest " Laplace's demon "-the little man who by knowing the size and motion of every molecule in the universe would be able to predict all future events. It may have been disgust with determinismthat led Pound, Eliot, and Joyce to take, as I believe, a more or less typological view of history. In Pound's work, for instance, one finds a Hebraic stress on the reality of history combined with a Hellenic sense of Eternal Recurrence; for him the past is not dead, and figuresin the present without rigidly controlling it. This is very like the pattern of typology in early Christian readings of the Old Testament: the Patriarchs really lived and acted, yet in their disparate actions God was showing forththe eternal truths finally unveiled in full in the New Testament. Today's anti-historicistsremind me of the Gnostics whose doctrines typology was designed to refute: they spurned history,or at least the Old Testament, as a record of the works of the devil, tainted with darkness and smelling of death. Poor historyis always being abused by somebody. Snubbed by Aristotle for being too demotic, it now seems not nearly demotic enough. True, there are great pacesetting poets still in their prime, such as Lowell and Olson, who have always been fascinated by history and continue to seek truer and truer forms of it. Nonetheless, a younger generation of poets bears history very hardly, and obviously prefersa bizarre combination of pre-history and " nowness." Here is an instructivetext from Gary Snyder: America five hundredyears ago was clouds of birds, miles of bison, and grassand clear water. Today it is the tiredground endlessforests of the world'sdominantculture.. . . thereis not much wilderness left to destroy,and the nature in the mind is being logged and burned off. Industrial-urbansociety is not 'evil' but there is no progress either. As poet I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the Neolithic: the fertility the soil, the magic of animals, of in the power-vision solitude,the terrifying initiationand rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the commonwork of the tribe. A gas turbineor an electricmotoris a finely-crafted knifein the hand. flint It is usefuland fullof wonder,but it is not our whole life. I try to hold both historyand the wildernessin mind, that my

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poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignoranceof our times. The soil and human sensieven withouta great war.39 bilitiesmay erode away forever, As Rousseau and Romanticism tell us, primitivism often goes hand in hand with a grudge against culture: in this state of mind, any milieu is preferable to that created by our own history, and we yearn forthe exotic: Snyder becomes a Zen initiate, living for years in Japan. Yet how American he is in seeing his turbine or motor as " full of wonder "! Many like-minded Americans today seem bent on establishing subcultures of noble savagery within the dominant one. And in this they are typically American: witness the frontier impulse. But today's cultists remind one less of Daniel Boone than of Pantisocracy on the Susquehanna. Curiously enough it is history which is often accused of being an evasion, an escapism, as in the third charge outlined. Adrienne Rich writes in her " Readings of History ": Is it in hopes to findor lose myself that I fillup my table now with Michelet and Motley? to ' know how it was' or to forget how it iswhat else? An anti-historicismwhich can thrive on such varied and even contradictoryfeelingsas are now detectable has its basis, without doubt, in an emotion too powerful to let logic stand in its way. Somewhere deep in the Western, and particularlyin the American, psyche (epitomized in the slogan " Don't look back ") there is a powerfulsuspicion that knowing how it was will prevent one from tellingit like it is. Donald Davie makes a judgment on Ezra Pound that once seemed to me quite fatuous. He asserts that the "(arrogant Bohemianism" with which Pound used history had discredited its appearance in poetry. This is what justifiesa post-Poundianpoet such as Charles Olson in wishingto " destroyhistoricaltime" and to rule out of poetry any of treatment " the direct continuumof society as we have had it." effect Whatevermore long-term Pound's disastrouscareer may have
39 "Statement," published by the Paterson Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1961).

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on American it that it willrule and British poetry, seemsinevitable out (has ruledout already, serious for writers) any idea that poetry to can or shouldoperatein the dimension history, of trying make senseoftherecorded by redressing historical past our . perspectives.. in History, from now on, may be transcended poetry, it may be or evadedthere; poetry nottheplacewhere maybe understood.40 but is it I still thinkthat Davie's analysis of the problemis fatuous,but at least he saw that therewas a problem,and that it was related to forcesthat make an appearance in Pound's work and in the work of the other Modernists who are the fountainheadsof contemporary poetry. " Only if the nihilismlatent in our culture would appear as nihilism wouldit be possibleto go beyondit by understanding it," writes Miller. Surely it is growingmore visible every minute, but whether will go beyondit is anotherquestion. Our more we gifted intellectuals, Lionel Trilling, like have oftendiscussedwhat theytook to be a standingquarrelof the artistwithhis culture.4 is Now a generation growing that is not prepared to let the up as quarrelstand: theytake it literally a war against paternalism. Since the Childrenof Israel struggledin love-hate ambivalence with their Father-God,or as Freud thinks since the sons and fathersof the primal horde struggledfor the women,we have had some form the war of generations of always withus, but this upcominggroup is singleminded: they have no use for detente, theywant to winthe war. The new nihilism seemsbent on asking current us, to use a recognizably it phrase,whether is not necesour culturein orderto save it. sary to destroy " Those who do not knowthe past are condemned repeatit," to as Santayana and othershave warned. The statementis borne out by the number of history'sgrotesqueriesthat are being wave of nihilism:not only the primitivist revivedin this current centuries even morearchaichappenings. but schemesofthe recent For one thingthe drive to do away with learned intermediaries inescapably remindsone of the Antinomiancontroversy the of Puritanismrecoilingupon itself. We 1640's, which represented have many Anne Hutchinsonstoday. Furthermore, some of our resemblanceto the chiliasticfanatics radicals bear an unearthly describedin Norman Cohn's Pursuit of the Millennium. Indeed
"0Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor (New York, 1964), p. 244. 41See especially the firstand last essays, and the essay on Freud, in Be'yond and Learning (New York, 1968). Culture: Essays on Literature

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thisancestry go muchfarther may back,to thereligious primitivism of the Old Testament: therewe meet a groupcalled the whoseprotest Rechabites, of againstthe culture theirtimesinvolvedrefusing do usefulworkin the agrarian to and economy stubbornly the tradition semiof maintaining old patriarchal nomadic pastoralism.(Today theyhave tradedin theirsheep formotorcycles.) Another Old Testament group,the Nazirites (e. g., Samson) made a fetish uncuthair. of in I bring these sectshave always becauseapocalyptic examples to beenanti-history, knotof the past's wanting cut the Gordian with thatwouldendhistory, also because complexities a stroke but fanaticism seemsthe properbackground the negareligious for character thenewmovement, of tivist in prominent spiteofall the to newness.Onlybeliefs and fearsas strong tributes creative as primitive tabooscan explain for whythe apologists the new arts spendso muchtimepromoting barrenanti-ideals.There is no that requirement poetrydeal withhistory, course,nor any of reason cannotbe anti-historicist, violently whygreatpoetry even so. Nonetheless Manichaeanavoidanceof the matterof the a past arguesa deeperpsychic problem.It is as if something had or to be buried covered theprevailing up; attitude toward history, as Ortegaimplies, one of repression-afrantic is effort to not know.No wonder arecondemned repeat past: notfrom we to the ignorance alonebutalso for thereasons all thatcauseneurotics to re-experience repressed material.42 " So,in a sense, this" newness is very all old. It is also notvery different themostblatanthabitsof American from Philistinism: " History bunk,"said HenryFord. There seemsto me little is thematic difference between newforce suchactions the this and as Buffalo fathers in 1950, city took bulldozing FrankLloydWright a building makeroom, believe, a parking to I for lot. In short our traditional for contempt traditions makesus a nihilist wellas as a futurist nation;all thenoisydemands newart makes,such the
part of history will we repeat next? Predictions are risky, but speaking politically we might notice that not long ago a wave of anti-rationalism, accompanied by scorn of parliamentary processes and open delight in the " annunciatory violence " that manifests apocalypse, became the official philosophy of Hitler and Naziism, those bad dreams of the Romantic Movement. Conditions seem ripe again today, especially since the term " fascism" is losing its meaning from foolish generalization and Newspeakish inversion. We even have the latent anti-Semitism growing up in the black militant and New Left camps, though it mostly goes by the name of " anti-Zionism."
42 What

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as merging intolifein thenameof democratization subart and jectingit to behaviorist-pragmatist forvalue, seem to me tests the logicalresultof 100% Americanism aesthetics. in Withour patronizing best) viewof thepast,withour Puritan-revolu(at thatour culture superior all that have is tionary assumption to gonebefore, withourgeneral and belief thatthepast mustmake we for way forprogress, are set-ups the apostlesof nowness.If theyhave their way,we are likely windup witha historyless to poetry-probably every in senseoftheterm.
State University New Yorkat Buffalo of

N. Herbert Schneidau

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