READING PRYNNE
AND OTHERS
Veronica Forrest-Thomson: Poetic Artifice, Manchester University Press.
JH Prynne:
Down where changed, Ferry Press.
Peter Ackroyd:
Notes for a New Culture, Vision Press.
Poetic
Artifice
explores the various techniques and devices that make poetry a special form of
discourse and, above all for Veronica Forrest-Thomson, an autonomous form of
language, separate from ‘everyday language’ and prose. Her study’s seriousness and complexity is the
antithesis of the engagé naivety exemplified by books like Raban’s The Society of the Poem, which reduces
art to a function of sociology: the sort of thing that is fashionable within
contemporary poetry courses in our universities. Forrest-Thomson’s “Preface” is vital reading
for anybody truly concerned with the health of poetry now, and I hope to show
that, although she tangles the umbilicus of Art and Life, she by no means
severs it; she is overstating her case to achieve a clarity of polemic, to make
her readers stop before they presume to state what a poem means, to realise (with Wittgenstein) that ‘a poem, even though it
is composed in the language of information is not used in the language-game of
giving information’. The enemy is what
she terms Naturalisation, ‘an attempt to reduce the strangeness of poetic
language and poetic organisation by making it intelligible, by translating it
into a statement about the non-verbal external world, by making the Artifice
appear natural’. We need to dwell on the
internal dynamic of the poem, to avoid both ‘external expansion’, pushing our
derived ‘meanings’ into the world, and the ‘external limitation’ of only
examining poetic artifice (formal patterning etc.) in the light of our thematic
interpretations or our too hasty paraphrasing.
‘Expansion must take place within the limits imposed by the poem’s
style.’ Thus expressed, it appears
obvious enough, but a brief meditation will reveal how often in critical
interpretations these limits are brutally transgressed, to the detriment of a
full reading of a poem.
The book, through a study of
the various forms of poetic logic and artifice in the works of Shakespeare,
Pound, Empson, amongst others, is seeking to demonstrate ‘how to read a
poem’. She endeavours to show that ‘Good
naturalisation dwells on the non-meaningful levels of poetic language, such as
phonetic and prosodic patterns and spatial organisation, and tries to state
their relation to other levels of organisation rather than set them aside in an
attempt to produce a statement about the world’. (Her full list contains the Conventional,
Phonological/Visual, Syntactic, and Semantic levels.) These coalesce to produce what she calls the
Image-Complex where the relevant devices from the hierarchical levels of poetic
organisation on her list are brought together to point towards a thematic
synthesis that hasn’t dodged the question of the role of Artifice, that doesn’t
rely upon extended meaning or imposed ‘interpretations’.
(Radicals will be seething
by now. But, briefly Forrest-Thomson
points out, ‘It is only through artifice that poetry can challenge our ordinary
linguistic orderings of the world, make us question the way in which we make
sense of things, and induce us to consider its alternative linguistic orders as
a new way of viewing the world’, but this is untied to dogma, and the poem
comes first. In Marcusean terms perhaps,
this is not too far from saying that the Aesthetic Principle undermines the
Reality Principle).
As a phenomenology of
correct reading along it is useful, but Veronica Forrest-Thomson is suggesting
something more. The book is half a
theoretic for a poetry just beginning to be written, and exemplified for her in
the work of JH Prynne.
There is no escaping the
‘tendentious obsecurity’ of Prynne’s poetry.
Down where changed, his latest book of short, untitled lyrics, is
prefaced by the epigraph, ‘Anyone who takes up this book will … have a half
formed belief that there is something in it.’
The question that any reader has to ask himself is, what is there, then,
in it?
Take one ‘lyric’:
You have to work it out
the passion-scribble
of origin swallowed up
the inserted batch of fission
lacks its label, grips its fever
you strike your fill of that.
A continuous sentence, one comma. To naturalise: ‘You …’ is perhaps an address
to the reader on the difficulties of interpretation. The ‘passion-scribble’, the original lyrical
impulse and/or act, is absorbed (lines 2 and 3 set in invisible parenthesis) by
something. The passion-scribble = the
inserted batch = the poems. They are inserted in a batch (‘Down where
changed’ itself) and fission is their outcome: they split, fall away into
meaninglessness or an infinitude of interpretations and guesses. The batch ‘lacks its label’ (the ‘lyrics’ are
untitled and their origins in experience, the ‘lyrical occasion’, are
‘swallowed up’ by its style. They also
lack the identity of lyrics at the Conventional level.) The alliteration suggests harmony. The caesura of the solitary comma couples the
phrases either side of it at a syntactic (and rhythmic), though not semantic,
level. It is a loose strand in the
poem’s tapestry of meaning (as so far I have inepted traced my naturalisation);
if we pull too hard the whole will disintegrate. (What does, or could, ‘Grips its fever’
mean? What is the relationship of
‘fission-fever-fill’; of ‘scribble-strike’, as actions of the pen? Other poems disturb our syntactic assumptions
constantly. ‘Thus’ introduces non-sequiturs; we sense patterning as part of the
image-complex, without (beyond?) meaning.)
The assonance of ‘lack’ and ‘that’, the repeated address to the
invisible ‘you’, slam the poem shut. The
reader (if indeed it is addressed to
him) has had his fill.
This is the only poem I wish
to examine. I could repeat the exercise
on others, but only to demonstrate my inability before Prynne’s poetry. Others I find resound with a tranquil, if
somewhat sterile, beauty.
The sick man polishes his shoes
wide-awake in the half light
what else should he do
as scent from the almond tree
‘abjures the spirit’ with its air
of mortification. What is known
is the almanack set out
on a trellis, a pious gloss
over waste so clean and natural
that clothes out on a line
dwindle and then
new colours are there again.
Perhaps Forrest-Thomson would agree with Eliot that
enchantment (I think it was) is the beginning of understanding. ‘The minute attention to technical detail,’
she says of Prynne, ‘together with tendentious thematic obscurity, gives the
poet a way of recapturing the levels of Artifice, of restoring language to its
primary beauty as a craft by refusing to allow its social comprehension.’
The cultural ideas that have
made both Forrest-Thomson’s criticism and Prynne’s poetry possible are examined
in Peter Ackroyd’s Notes for a New
Culture. Although it is a polemical,
theoretical book, it is also a critical history which traces, amongst other
things, the development of the notion of the autonomy of language from
Nietzsche and Mallarm¾, through Heidegger, where it is seen coupled with
the death of the image of Man as represented by humanism, to Prynne
himself. For Ackroyd, he is the first
poet ‘to exercise the full potential of the written language’, to subjugate the
lyrical voice (and thus the subjective humanistic Self) to the anonymity of an
‘objective’ Language. (Literature too is
represented as an entity to have emerged from the relatively modern concept of
Language.) (For a full review of the
book see Peter Riley’s fair assessment of its value and drawbacks in Poetry Information 17, and chiefly the criticism that Ackroyd’s
cultural history pays too little attention to the productive tension between the lyrical voice and
Language, and the value of a writing that resides in that tension, between
‘human significance’ and tradition/convention, although Ackroyd acknowledges
this to be one of the qualities of John Ashbery.)
‘The contemporary
abstractions here, and the syntactical force which holds them within the same
discursive context, exert an unfamiliar pressure upon the language,’ Ackroyd
writes of Prynne’s Kitchen Poems
(1968). Down where changed contains the same mixture of tones and
languages. ‘Just a twitch of doubt we
sail with’, he writes, with a public lyric voice that more properly belongs to
his first collection, Force of
Circumstance (1962). ‘The
consumption of any product is the destruction of its value’, begins another,
resembling the Kitchen Poems
themselves. There are images of
clairvoyance (the epigraph is from Practical
Crystal-Gazing; see also the lyric quoted above), as well as demotic
expressions (‘Shut yer face’).
Ackroyd goes to the limit -
and beyond. Prynne’s poetry is for him
‘completely written surface’; voice has been erased and so, he assumes, has
meaning, a concept that Forrest-Thomson complicates in her schema, but does not
exclude. It has an autonomy denoted by
its obscurity, it ‘contains varieties of contemporary language … within a
written paradigm which changes its function’, but can Prynne’s lines:
We give the
name of
ourselves to
our needs.
We are what we
want
which Ackroyd
quotes, have ‘no reference to anything except the presence of their written
form’? Surely we are better guided by
Ackroyd’s later comment that Prynne’s poetry ‘exists somewhere between use and
contemplation’.
Ackroyd tends to joy in
Prynne’s meaninglessness rather than in the skill Prynne demonstrates in his
handling of non-meaningful devices, although he acknowledges that ‘it is the
ability of literature to explore the problems and ambiguities of a formal
absoluteness which we will never experience.
For these forms seem to proclaim the death of Man’. We’ve to ask ourselves I think as Gerald
Graff does in ‘The Myth of the Postmodernist Breakthrough’ whether we’ve thrown
out the baby with the bath-water in our formalist anti-humanism. We know from Barthes that the Death of the
Author (the lyric voice replaced by text) is the Birth of the Reader. Despite these two ambitious beginnings there
may be other ways of reading Prynne.
August 1979 Reality Studios 2:2, 1979
