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The Argotist Online |
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Note
from the Editor I was initially unwilling to publish this essay as I felt that it was overly antagonistic to non-mainstream poetic theories and, therefore, unsuitable for The Argotist Online, which is sympathetic to such theories—albeit not slavishly. However, there were some aspects of Evans' essay that I thought should at least be given a voice, if only to invite further discussion. To initiate this, I have gathered from various poets and critics some responses to the essay. Of these responses, the one by Andrew Duncan is the most comprehensive with regard to dealing with all of Evans’ main contentions. The other responses are equally as valid but deal only with one or two of Evans' arguments. Therefore, I have put Duncan’s response on a separate page with a link from it to the other responses. Duncan's response can be found here.
Voices in Denial: Poetry and Post-Culture by
A.
C. Evans This essay aims to argue two points: first, that
British poetry during the 1960s missed an opportunity, suggested to it by other
art forms, to positively engage with mass popular culture and second, that the
denial of the “authorial voice” in poetry, due to the influence of various
Postmodernist literary theories, should be challenged and rejected. To take the second point, I would deny the very
possibility of a “voiceless poem”, regardless of the style or mode of the
work, regardless even of the stated intentions of the author, who may
vociferously deny his own voice. Notwithstanding the inherent difficulties of
defining the voice itself, you cannot surgically remove the individual
(“voice”) from the creative process without destroying the mechanism of the
creative process itself. Beyond all the textual analysis and critical theory
that can be directed towards a specific poem, the ultimate defining
characteristic of the work is the unique “signature” (strong or weak) of the
writer. The essential criterion of difference between a poem by Stevie Smith and
one by W. H. Auden is ultimately a difference of personality, irrespective of
literary theory. This is self-evident. It is also true of poems written by poets
who tell us they deny the voice – all you hear is their voice. I should point
out at this point that the existence of an authorial voice does not imply
interpretative exclusivity. The potential for plural meanings in a text and the
creative involvement of the reader remains unaffected by the presence of an
authorial voice. The ideal poem would always resist, or subvert, clear-cut
interpretations or didactic messages; it is unlikely to conform to expectations
derived from the received wisdom of either traditional dogma, or fashionable
orthodoxy. I make no apologies for this essay’s polemical tone, and welcome an
open debate on its argument. Such a debate, in my view, is long overdue. Roughly,
between 1952 and 1958, the British Pop Art movement promoted the idea that
artists should not denigrate mass popular culture, but rather celebrate it. The
British Pop Artists of the late fifties (the London Independent Group) developed
an aesthetic that celebrated the mass media and mass popular culture. By the mid
sixties, this became apparent in fashion (Mary Quant mini-skirts, Cecil Gee
suits) and pop music (The Rolling Stones, the “acid dandyism” of Jimi
Hendrix). Curiously, few of the participants in this process were poets, so this
was not actually a literary phenomenon. Generally, writers have often trailed
behind the visual arts, and British poets of the time failed to take a creative
interest in mass popular culture (the hippie mysticism of the sixties versions
of Beat Poetry was essentially anti-materialist). It is a given within British
Poetry (both mainstream and non-mainstream) that mass culture is to be minimised
and that poetry occupies an oppositional role in relation to its perceived
detrimental influence – an influence usually seen as a corrosive process of
vulgarisation. The long-term effect of this rupture between mass culture and
poetry has been to sideline or retard literary development in the poetic sphere
and to perpetuate conservative, even authoritarian trends. This is usually the
case, even among writers who consider themselves exponents of literary
“progress” and often profess a world-view quite the reverse of conservative.
It is also misleading to define this rupture in terms of a popular/elite
opposition, although it is certainly the case that non-mainstream poetry
projects an elitist image, even when playing with populism or flirting with
street credibility. In the sixties, British poetry was separated into two symbiotic “warring” camps: conservatives and radicals. The conservatives can be epitomised by publications such as Encounter magazine (1953-1967), and by poetic “schools” such as The Movement and the Confessional Poets. The radicals comprise what is now known as the British Poetry Revival, but was recognized in the sixties as the Underground, or the Children of Albion. In this essay, I will refer to the latter as the Albion Underground. The
abuse of the word “radical” to mean “progressive” is endemic when
looking back at this era. There is an assumption that experimentalism must be
radical by definition but that is not necessarily the case. Poetic movements of
the Left tend to monopolise this terminology, conflating the meaning of
“progressive” and “radical”. Radicals like to think of themselves as
working to a progressive political agenda, often involving ideas such as social
justice and revolution. Most “radical” poets fall into this category along
with, for example, “protest poets” who often are neither innovative nor
experimental in the avant-garde sense (“avant-garde” here being a synonym
for “radical”). In my view, the term “progressive” must be related to
freedom and – in a literary context – to freedom of expression. Freedom of
expression depends upon the concept of “the authorial voice”; consequently,
if you deny the voice, you deny the agent of expression. To deny the voice is,
thus, a reactionary and not a progressive position. The
cultural climate of the later half of the twentieth century was very different
from that of the Second World War or the period of Late Modernism. The Beat
Generation of 1945-1960, haunted by the ghost of Rimbaud was among the last of
the “Romantic” groupings defined by the image of the artist-poet as mystical
prophet, seer, wandering visionary and popular shaman. Ann Charters has asserted
that the Beat Poets ‘relied on autobiography’ because their marginal
identity lead them to insist ‘on the validity of their own experience instead
of accepting conventional opinions and the country’s common myths’. 1
From the 1970s onwards, in the UK, in Continental Europe and in North America,
we see the ever-expanding influence of academia. “Literature” became an
almost exclusive domain of the universities, resulting in most innovative poets
becoming functionaries in the Academy. Consequently, the traditional metaphor of
the poet as wandering troubadour, alienated “genius”, or tortured outsider
was replaced by the “academic expert in loco parentis” drawn from the
post-Structuralist intelligentsia. A new fashionable orthodoxy was born –
Postmodernism. Postmodern Theory (a diffuse and ambiguous phenomenon full of internal self-contradictions) was a consequence of the French universities general strike of May 1968 (“the May Events”) in which academics became disillusioned with the Left after the Unions and the Communists sided with the Gaullist Establishment. Displeased by the turn of events they decided that all the Grand Narratives of the Modern or Proto-Modern past (the Enlightenment, Marxism etc.) were worn out or invalid – the “condition” was Post-Modern, the situation was new. At the same time, Roland Barthes proclaimed The Death of the Author, one of the first assaults on the idea of the integral authorial voice. By
the 1970s there were, roughly, two strands or varieties of “difficult”
poetry trying to maintain the status of the avant-garde in a post-avant-garde
cultural landscape. There was the Euro-centric strand, inspired by Neo-Dada
movements such as Fluxus, and there was the American academic variety inspired
by Charles Olson’s Projective Verse and the Objectivism of Louis Zukofsky.
Fluxus was an early sixties Action Art movement initiated in 1961 by George
Maciunas. It was concerned with the integration of art with life and the
negation of social hierarchies. Allen Fisher, a poet once associated with
Cobbing’s Writers Forum, is the most noted exponent of Fluxus-inspired
poetics, as can be seen in his publications Place
(1974-1981) and Scram (1971-1982).
Objectivism was an offshoot of Imagism promoted by Ezra Pound. British
Objectivism imported by Basil Bunting, came to be identified with the
Northumbrian School centred on Barry MacSweeney, and the Cambridge School whose
most famous exponent is J. H. Prynne. Prynne is also an enthusiast for the
philosophy of Martin Heidegger (as you might expect Heidegger’s philosophy is
notoriously “difficult”). One aspect of Black Mountain doctrine was the
eradication of the ego. Ironically, and despite this, the Post-Albion
Underground experimentalists were addicted to huge, grandiose, self-important
projects emulating the Cantos, Patterson, Zukofsky’s
A and Olson’s Maximus. Academic
poetry differs from the writing of the pre-Albion Underground era in that it
substituted theory for personality in the creative process: this was, above all,
a Poetics of Process. As a Poetics of Process it paved the way for the next
style of American poetry to arrive, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. Like Olson, the Language
Poets were explicit in their denial of the individual “voice” and were
distinguished by their concern to exclude all “autobiography” and “ego
psychology” from writing. This stance, which coincided with contemporary
debates in the academic sphere about the role of science, identity politics and
knowledge epistemology, assumed the illusory nature of the “Lyric I”, and
the non-existence of facts beyond language as unchallenged givens. In many
respects, these ideas have now become entrenched as key doctrines of
“radical” experimentalist poetry in both the United States and the UK. In
reality it was another generational revolt: they used the denial of the voice
and the principle of linguistic determinism as tactics to challenge the
established status quo and assert their own “radicalism” – just as all
“new” movements seek to do. Ron Silliman, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian,
Steve Benson, Bob Perelman and Barrett Watten say in their 1988 group manifesto,
‘Our work denies the centrality of the individual artist’. This statement
suggests an authoritarian tendency in operation. Nothing is more authoritarian
than the denial of individual “expression”.
As an aesthetic or poetic this is entirely retrograde and reveals a
mistaken view of the creative process. These various innovations had a major influence
on non-mainstream British poetry, which, prior to this, had shared, to some
extent, a Beat aesthetic, founded on an authorial voice. In Britain the Academic
Left consolidated a position based on Post-Structuralism and similar tendencies
(e.g. Social Construction Epistemology, Reader Response Theory etc.) influenced
by the later writings of Wittgenstein and Thomas Kuhn's The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). This book in particular had a
tremendous impact, and precipitated what is known as the “science wars”. A
key idea was the denial of objectivity and the view that the individual is a
“cultural construction” not an innate entity. There can be no established
facts, only incommensurable “paradigms”. However, as Terry Eagleton has
pointed out in one of his critiques of Postmodernism, significant transformative
action in the real world requires the participation of an integrated unified,
human individual/subject. By extension, the same is true of artistic creativity
in all its forms. Postmodern Theory usually denies this possibility. The
rise of the mass media since 1945 has consolidated an already incipient
post-cultural state. This is a state in which former cultural values have
evaporated and “high culture” has disappeared. It does not follow that the
evaporation of high culture vindicates the historical claims of Postmodernism
– that would require an agreement on the nature of Modernism and a clear
distinction (perhaps) between Modernism and “modernity” in order to define
“post-modernity” as a viable chronological category. I consider
Postmodernism to be a doctrinal outlook: a limited (but diverse)
quasi-philosophical tendency intrinsic to the late Cold War period. The era
1968-1989 saw the rise and fall of “Postmodernism” in this narrow, doctrinal
sense. The emergence of post-culture on the other hand can be dated back to the
mid-to-late nineteenth century, a period that saw the rise of mass circulation
newspapers and popular entertainment such as Cabaret and Music Hall, the period
of photography and the first moving pictures. In
the twenty-first century, the state of post-culture continues to evolve at an
ever-increasing rate of acceleration, rendering superfluous the old, nineteenth
century “vanguard” model of literary and artistic self-definition. A crisis
of self-definition on this level has created an alienated intelligentsia still
clinging to notions of high cultural value. These values have no viable place in
a “new world order” of globalised mass “infotainment”. We now inhabit a
world where hitherto “profound” masterpieces stand revealed as propaganda, a
world where a tabloid headline or a refrain from a pop song may possess more
aesthetic value than a poem by J. H. Prynne or Basil Bunting. It
is ironic that the position we are describing has lead an alienated literary
class to deny the value of the authorial voice, not only the voices of others
– but their own as well. copyright © A. C. Evans A.
C. Evans was born in Hampton Court in 1949, and lived in South London until 1963
when he moved to Essex and co-founded the semi-legendary Neo-Surrealist
Convulsionist Group in 1966. Moving back to London in 1973, he currently lives
in Mortlake, near Richmond. Working in the tradition of the bizarre and the
grotesque, he also considers himself a Realist. Influenced by everything on the
dark-side, he is also inspired by the iconoclasm of Dada, revolutionary
Surrealism and the immediacy of Pop. He regards all these as points of
departure, none as a destination – we live in a post avant-garde world. 1 The Penguin Book of the Beats
(1993), p. 435.
2 ‘Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry: A Manifesto’, Social
Text, (1988), pp. 19-20. |