Ben Lerner’s Mean Free Path is a book
of accidents. Slippage dislocates the
poetic line, as “the little delays,” turn disruption into a kind of horizon for
textual engagement. The non sequitur,
the interrupted idea, the inversion, all occur in the thematic register of the
text. We find in the poem Doppler Elegies,
“Somewhere in this book I broke/ There is a passage/ with a friend. I regret it now/ lifted verbatim from.” (31) Two statements interrupt the other; one a
complete idea and another a fragment. The
lines tempt a reading that creates “Somewhere in this book I broke with a
friend/ There is a passage lifted verbatim from.” Temptations of this kind persist
throughout the poem. One feels impelled to substitute the metaphorical status
of “reading between lines,” with a literal interpretation. Could such gymnastics of vision improve an
understanding of Doppler Elegies? Of course, noticing relations between lines in
the poem helps one to get a handle on what is happening, but, to my mind, an attempt
to build a smooth reading misses the point. Because
it is poetry, a medium where conveying information is not as important as
experiencing the way it is conveyed, interruptions in Lerner’s book are not
anomalies—they are constitutive properties of the text. Cancelling them amounts to dismantling poesis.
Mean
Free Path, then, challenges us to think of interruption as a kind of linguistic
rupture. A rupture that refuses a
solution to, as well aestheticizes the problem of, how to know a thing after
its field of representation has been dislocated. By maintaining a tension between repetition and disruption, Mean Free Path explores the impossibility
of abstracting subjective continuity from the rupturing field in which a subject
is embedded.
When confronted with Lerner’s text,
the question of what epistemic consequences occur when one tries to abstract a
thing from its background can be asked in a more specific way. We need to consider the consequences of cancelling
interuptions in Doppler Elegies. As an approach to exploring this idea,
let us first consider some of the philosophical foundations upon which a
concept of rupture may rest. As a
semiotic field (a set of interrelated signs), Lerner’s poem undergoes severe
and radical changes at the level of signification. Gayatri Spivak states, “A functional change
in a sign system is a violent event.
Even when it is perceived as ‘gradual’, or ‘failed’, or yet ‘reversing
itself’, the change itself can only be operated by the force of crisis.” (4,
Spivak) Spivak’s critique of subaltern
studies provides a clear point of entry into the problem of how to retrospectively
isolate relations of thought after ruptures in a semiotic field have taken
place.
Insofar as the Subaltern Studies
group attempts to theoretically extract insurgent consciousness out of a
colonized cultural milieu, Spivak locates the group’s mistake in believing that
it can overcome its participation within the semiotic field of the colonizer. The group believes that is possible to isolate
“the presence the rebel consciousness.” (12, Spivak) But, as Spivak observes, attempting isolate
such a “presence” causes subaltern studies to adopt the (seemingly paradoxical)
“strategic use of positivist essentialism.” (13, Spivak) I suggest that this kind
of essentialism, a specified and motivated belief that enduring properties constitute
a core identity of a thing, becomes the very standpoint one adopts by
attempting to read Doppler Elegies without
its interruptions. In such an attempt, one
seems to say that meaning of the text exists above the reality of its
ruptures. Perhaps, the impetus to make
amendments to lines in Doppler Elegies
stems from thinking that ruptures in the poem occlude a meaning that is real
but hidden: a meaning that remains despite violent changes in its signifying
structure. However, as Spivak reminds
us, “subaltern consciousness [or, consciousness of the other] is subject to the
cathexis of the elite…it is never fully recoverable, [and] is always askew from
its received signifiers.” (11, Spivak) Therefore, it is crucial when reading Mean Free Path to never forget the “break
of colored stars/ a voice described as torn in places.” (30, Lerner)
Just before reading your post I finished the Edwards article for this week (“The Uses of Diaspora”) and was struck with how your reading of Lerner’s “interruptions” as crucial members of the poems’ semiotic field relates to Edwards’ concluding argument on “décalage” as a crucial concept for his examination of diaspora. The connection you draw to Spivak’s strategy of positivist essentialism allows, I believe, the comparison to be more legitimate in that Edwards’ and Spivak’s subject matter is more closely related than that of the Lerner collection (or so I gather). In Edwards’ final explanation of the décalage as the gap between the articulated diaspora, using his metaphor of a joint, and its importance to understanding the function of difference in defining diaspora, he argues a similar point to your idea that the Lerner poem cannot exist “above the reality of its ruptures.” I’m interested to hear more about the content of the Lerner collection if this connection is valid, since it would seem to indicate a subject “ruptured” similarly to the various collective black identities in Edwards’ diaspora.
ReplyDeleteI think your emphasis on the disconnect between the disjointed syntax of Lerner's poems and the impulse to overlook the syntactical ruptures is really useful in considering where the meaning lies in reading any text, experimental or not. I wonder if the "meaning" (I hesitate to use the word) of the poem lies precisely in that disconnect--that despite the impulse to look for the "meaning that remains despite violent changes in its signifying structure," we cannot overlook the convention that Lerner is disrupting in the first place. Perhaps Lerner is critiquing the concept of the coherent sentence (which seems to carry with it all sorts of assumptions about temporality and a coherent self) precisely by playing off our impulse to reconstruct the disrupted sentences. I guess I just wonder if it works against Spivak's own insistence on privileging subaltern voices, and undermining "the cathexis of the elite," to say that we must resist our impulse to reconstruct the poem into "coherent" sentences, and to necessarily situate the "meaning" of the poem in these ruptures alone.
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting move to read the various elements of the poem -- those that seem to "fit" and those that veer off and interrupt, refusing to stay on message-- as you'd read the various voices within a group or a people. In calling on the reader to attend to the interruptions as much as to what they interrupt, it reminds one to adopt a careful reading practice --within poetry as well as within the political -- in order to do justice (rather than read only the main line). In requiring us to question the privileging of coherence, we are reminded that any voice (as, for Patterson, any self) can act or communicate even if it is not (as it cannot be) entirely cohesive and free of contradictions.
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