Download Exploding the Sentence

John Parras EXPLODING THE SENTENCE: THE POETIC-POLITICAL PROSE
OF BRUCE ANDREWS
In his important 1987 essay “The New Sentence,” language poet Ron Silliman observes that the sentence is the “horizon, the border between...two fundamentally distinct types of [linguistic] integration” or coherence: the first, of words, phrases and syntax integrating up to the level of the grammatically complete sentence; the second, of complete sentences integrating up to the level of the paragraph or toward larger textual units such as the overall narrative. In much of Silliman’s writing, by contrast, sentences work against such integration by refusing to combine readily with other sentences to form a coherent paragraph or narrative. The words, phrases and sentences in such works as Paradise and Tjanting do not follow one another in an orderly progression but rather operate through sheer juxtaposition within an arbitrarily defined textual unit. This seemingly arbitrary juxtaposition of material and the concomitant rejection of “organic” and logical form are marks of the new sentence. As Silliman explains, the new sentence’s effects occur as much between, as within, sentences: “Thus it reveals that the blank space is much more than the twenty-­‐seventh letter of the alphabet. It is beginning to explore and articulate just what those hidden capacities might be.” In his essay “Semblance,” Bernstein points out a complementary kind of poetic disruption: the possibility of thwarting integration and provoking reflectiveness at or below the level of the sentence; careful attention to and control of syllogistic integration "can also take place within sentences and phrases and not only intersententially. Syntactic patterns are composed which allow for combination of projection and reflection in the movement from word to word" (677). William Carlos Williams' work-­‐-­‐the novel syntax of which demonstrates remarkable attention to "the fundamental ways words combine, concern for the way words grapple with one another to form meanings" (Miller 297)-­‐-­‐is an important precursor (as is the work of Gertrude Stein, particularly the prose poems of Tender Buttons). Noting "the ambiguity and propellant quality of the syntax" in Williams' Kora, Stephen Fredman focuses his analysis around the "generative" quality of the sentence in Williams. Fredman demonstrates how the generative sentence "abandons the normative aspect of completeness" and instead "proceeds by the method of discovery" (30 and 35). The broken, ambiguous, and disorderly grammar and syntax frequently found in Kora (improvisation V, No. 2, is an excellent example) is the inner-­‐sentential corollary to the inter-­‐sentential disfigurements found in Silliman’s Paradise. One contemporary writer notable for his severe torqueing of syntax is Bruce Andrews, a poet and theorist who is one of the originators of Language poetry. The texts collected in his I Don't Have Any Paper So Shut Up (or, Social Romanticism) (1992) are electric, eclectic hybrids of verse and prose that accentuate the operations of language as it unfolds word by word in shocking juxtapositions, filling the page in a kind of high-­‐powered energy field. The fragmentation of grammar and syntax in Andrews' work is so extreme that sentences-­‐-­‐what we normally think of as discursive sentences-­‐-­‐practically disappear: Political economy means red-­‐-­‐subordinate sky omnipresent jeep pimp imperial cholesterol: these stylistic predicaments. The proud and the reproud-­‐-­‐my status pretentions are better than your status pretentions-­‐-­‐don't trash 'em, cash 'em; pencil skittish now-­‐-­‐System-­‐-­‐Discipline-­‐-­‐something wrong in slacks. If I had fewer interests, I'd drink more water-­‐-­‐only boobs are allowed to bike no natural heterosexual cleansing agents rearranging the sentence furniture: a religion of upward mobility, that's to keep the non-­‐white consumerism in line, eating their little status advantages-­‐-­‐not bent, wad endangered infantile class relations hump is on TV we need not to think. (223) In contrast to Silliman's focus on the inter-­‐sentential operations of language, Andrews' work highlights the inner-­‐sentential operations of individual words and phrases as they accumulate in a prolix linguistic field that challenges standard notions of syntax, genre, and discursive custom. While Andrews' work demonstrates some attention to traditional poetic devices such as assonance and consonance ("omnipresent jeep pimp imperial cholesterol"), its discursive method is startlingly heterogeneous, comprising a pastiche that both mimics and interrogates the languages of poetry, advertising, television and mass culture, political theory, academic jargon, and everyday speech and slang. The resultant mixture is characterized by precipitous juxtapositions ("subordinate sky," "wad endangered"), outlandish reflections ("no natural / heterosexual cleansing agents rearranging the sentence furniture"), and anarchic design that nevertheless shows signs of a critical intelligence intent on deconstructing certain (racist, capitalistic) ideologies: "a religion of upward mobility, that's to keep the non-­‐white consumerism in line, eating their little status advantages." Andrews' "skittish pencil" reflects the pandemonium of a postmodern capitalistic culture able to ingest and accommodate even the most unsettling speculations, a world in which "kids [are] born with guns / for limbs" (223), "Hitler was reduced to the bottom of a memo" (225), and a speaker can claim that the "C.I.A. stole my brain" (225). The relentless pursuit of radical political themes in Social Romanticism, however, successfully avoids pedantic moralizing. Instead, by conspicuously exhibiting or symbolically reenacting the incredibly cacophonous domain of postmodern culture, Andrews succeeds in exposing its ideological seams, the ways in which it appropriates and subsumes various discourses-­‐-­‐of art and mass culture, history, theory, politics, etc.-­‐-­‐into a kind of ungrounded, decentered, unmappable hyperspace. This postmodern space of "culture" resists what Fredric Jameson calls "cognitive mapping," the act of locating or positioning oneself-­‐-­‐perceptually, intellectually, historically-­‐-­‐in one's sociocultural environment.1 Andrews confronts such resistance by presenting his texts as "already written"-­‐-­‐that is, by emphasizing the fact that their language is "always-­‐already" influenced by ideological biases, that each word or phrase he employs necessarily carries its Bakhtinian "social tone." It is precisely this social tone of language and culture that Andrews seeks to interrogate. In his "poetic" essay2 "Poetry as Explanation, Poetry as Praxis," Andrews, a political economist at Fordham University, argues for a radical interrogation of the ideology of all writing: "Our medium is not a warehouse of styles; it's the way signs are already ordered into social codes, into meaning making & mediating. (or surplus), the social codes that bind and mediate. To argue: the way meaning is regulated is the way the social body is written-­‐-­‐locally, nationally, globally (& even intergalactically?)" (25-­‐26). Andrews' work seeks to "foreground the process by which language 'works', implicating the history & context that are needed to allow the writing to be more comprehensively understood" (24). For Andrews it is not the sentence but the social that is the horizon of language: "To face-­‐-­‐or recognize the face of-­‐-­‐a social horizon, a border condition or 'scope of operations' & scope of sovereignty...making the form that's truly in question the form of society itself" (26). His writing, his "poeticization of prose," is ultimately to be understood 1
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic
of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991), 54.
2
See Ralph Cohen, "Do Postmodern Genres Exist?" for
insights into experiments with the form of the postmodern
essay.
as a radical politicization of all language, poetic and prosaic. The work of Silliman and Andrews rests on assumptions toward language originating in French avant-­‐garde writing of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and in the modernist experiments of American writers such as Gertrude Stein and Williams. The stress on the anti-­‐referential, non-­‐mimetic, and autonomous aspects of language found in early modernist writing is in the postmodern writing scene almost unanimously taken as given. Contemporary writing shares further assumptions and interests with nineteenth-­‐ and early twentieth-­‐century poetic prose. Like the work of Max Jacob, it is highly skeptical of all generic dictates yet refrains-­‐-­‐or cannot help but refrain-­‐-­‐from disavowing the value of genre systems altogether. Current work also shows an exceptional interest in readerly engagement, a concern that has been a major preoccupation of the poetic prose of Thomas De Quincey, Jacob, and Virginia Woolf. Above all, today's poetic prose shares with its progenitors a keen interest in critiquing certain "prosaic epistemologies"-­‐-­‐of the sciences, journalism and philosophy, commercialism and capitalism, imperialism, and Naturalist fiction. Because lyric poetry has predominantly been conceived, throughout the history of modern literature, as existing in a realm that is somehow "apart from" or opposed to the social, there has been the attempt by writers of poetic prose to 1) reinsert poetry back into the social realm by combining it with prose, or 2) utilize its very "otherness" in the project of critiquing certain ideological premises perceived as inherent to prose discourse. This dual employment of poetic prose is one reason that the attempt to poeticize prose has frequently been linked with a concomitant politicization of poetry, an attempt to render poetry capable of confronting critical social issues it at times neglected in contemplating the beauty of moonlight. The muted critique of society implied by Wordsworthian lyricism and Mallarméan textual purity gradually gave way, in the work of Charles Baudelaire, Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf for example, to a more forthright and emphatic condemnation of unjust social practices. More recently we have seen an effort to make even more explicit the ideological assumptions inherent to any kind of discourse. There has been an endeavor to pursue the ramifications of the Althusserian observation that "one thinks in it rather than of it"-­‐-­‐it referring to language, to modes of discourse, and to ideology-­‐in-­‐language and ideologies-­‐in-­‐
discourses. The aesthetic, generic, and discursive multifariousness of poetic prose renders it an exceptionally resilient, valuable, and effective means of investigating these ideologies of discourse. Poetic prose, by toggling back and forth between various modes of discourse and by overtly juxtaposing various genres one beside another, renders apparent the theoretical disjunctions among various discourses and genres. In doing so, it not only calls attention to the "conceptual problematics"3 that underlie all discursive practices; it also to some extent transcends the limitations of thinking within a single problematic, thereby enabling a truly "scientific" reading of ideologies-­‐in-­‐discourse-­‐-­‐ideologies which represent, and which regulate and manipulate, the imaginary relationship we live to the real conditions of our 3
"Problematic" (as a noun) "names the matrix of theoretical pre-suppositions that cohere a given field of
thought, determining the visibility, or invisibility, of
objects within the field--the 'forms in which all problems
must be posed,' and, therefore, the possible solutions
that can be generated"; a problematic "provides 'a definite
theoretical structure' for a discourse, its 'absolute and
definite condition of possibility'" (Kavanagh 26).
existence. Above and beyond its aesthetic significance, poetic prose underscores the exigency of a cognizant and manifold sociocultural vision. Note: this brief paper is excerpted from Modern Poetic Prose: Lyricism, Narrative, and the Social Implications of Generic Form (NY: Columbia University Dissertation, 1996). Works Cited Andrews, Bruce. I Don’t Have Any Paper So Shut Up (or, Social Romanticism). Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1992. Andrews, Bruce. “Poetry as Explanation, Poetry as Praxis.” The Politics of Poetic Form. Ed. Charles Bernstein. NY: Roof Books, 1993. 23-­‐44. Bernstein, Charles. “Semblance.” Content’s Dream: Essays 1975-­‐1984. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1986. Rpt. In Postmodern American Poetry. Ed. Paul Hoover. NY: Norton, 1994. 676-­‐79. Cohen, Ralph. “Do Postmodern Genres Exist?” Postmodern Genres. Ed. Marjorie Perloff. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1988. 11-­‐27. Fredman, Stephen. Poet’s Prose: The Crisis in American Verse. 2nd ed. NY: Cambridge UP, 1990. Kavanagh, James H. “Marxism’s Althusser: Toward a Politics of Literary Theory.” Diacritics 12 (Spring 1982): 25-­‐45. Miller, J. Hillis. Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-­‐Century Writers. Cambridge, MA: Belknap-­‐
Harvard UP, 1966. Silliman, Ron. The New Sentence. NY: Roof Books, 1987. Dr. John Parras
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