Roy Fisher wrote a poetry that foregrounds its own
artificiality, and this itself is foregrounded in the poems of the 1970s,
published in The Thing About Joe Sullivan in 1978. Indeed, foregrounding,
in the technical sense, involves ‘all salient linguistic phenomena which in
some way cause the reader’s attention to shift from the paraphrasable content
of a message ... to a focus on the message itself.’ 44 It resists
naturalization, in a way of holding a text in suspension, so that its qualities
of saying are extended, its fixity in the meaning of the said, delayed.
‘The Only Image’ consists of a
series of simple propositions concerning its opening observation, and is as
fundamental to Fisher’s poetics as Williams’ similar framing of the
wheelbarrow, or even Stevens’ of his snowman, are to theirs:
Salts work
their way
to the outside
of a plant pot
and dry
white. (DLD, p. 106)
This becomes ‘the only image’ of
the title, the only counter in its metaphoric change. ‘The rest,’ the poem
states, ‘comes as a variable that shifts/in any part, or vanishes.’ (DLD,
p. 106) Linguistic relations, particularly those of metaphor and simile, are as
arbitrary and free as they had been in The Cut Pages, although here
Fisher is remarking upon the process. The only image can be related, through
comparison, to any other. (The ‘salts’ are also, paradoxically, a metaphor for
the possibilities of metaphor.)
I
can
compare what I
like to the salts,
to the pot, if
there’s a pot....
The salts I
can compare
to anything
there is.
Anything. (DLD, p. 106 )
Metaphor, so distrusted by the Movement Orthodoxy (and used
only for domestic and limited defamiliarizations by the Martian poets of the
1980s and after), has a clearly subversive, rather than decorative, rhetorical role. In
Riceour’s formulation, it
brings together things that do
not go together and by means of the apparent misunderstanding it causes a new,
hitherto unnoticed, relation of meaning to spring up between the terms that
previous systems of classification had ignored or not allowed.
Fisher has called the poem a ‘formal “work-out”’, adding,
‘For me it’s a work of delight in making the picture of the salts on the
plant-pot and using them for that great void’ of linguistic relation which lies
open to the poet, the general economy of language’s surplus; since it can be
compared to anything, no metaphor or simile need be proffered.46 It
is this facility of language that allows for the saying to remain elusive to
the power of the said that must inevitably embody it, a game of hide and seek
between the metaphor’s fixed vehicle and its indeterminate tenors.
‘It is
Writing’ defiantly asserts its textuality; it argues for a poetry that
frustrates moral interpretation, that implicitly supports the argument of ‘The
Only Image’. Poetry becomes foregrounded as the subject of its own discourse,
even while the temptations of artifice (in being able to transform suffering)
are being ostensibly disavowed.
I mistrust the
poem in its hour of success,
a thing
capable of being
tempted by
ethics into the wonderful. (DLD,
p. 108)
Similar scepticism about the function of poetry is evident
in the conditional opening lines of ‘ If I Didn’t’, which denies the
possibility of foregrounding its artifice, in one sense, in the very act of
undertaking it in another.
If I didn’t
dislike
mentioning
works of art
I could say
the poem has
always
already
started, the parapet
snaking away,
its grey line guarding
the football
field and the sea ...
-
the parapet
has always
already started
snaking away,
its grey line
guarding the
football field and the sea. (DLD,
p. 112)
It is almost as though it were not possible to deal with the
epiphany of involuntary memory (‘the looking down/ between the moving frames’)
without ‘mentioning works of art’ (DLD, p. 112) The relineation of the
repeated report of the perception of the parapet foregrounds the fact of its
necessary mediation by a ‘work of art’. The ‘poem’ here contrasts with its
anterior memory which, as memory, is also an event. The enjambement of the
first occurrence of this phrase attempts to disguise the continuous presence of
a particular moment of recollection.
Part of
Fisher’s impulse to de-Anglicize England, is realized through foregrounding the
aestheticism of the gaze; years after City he is still on the number 15
bus, thinking with Birmingham and the Midlands. ‘In the Black Country’ uses the
simple declarative style Fisher developed during the 1970s, and even opens with
a simile, metaphor’s weak cousin.
Dudley from
the Castle keep
looks like a
town by Kokoschka,
one town
excited
by plural
perspectives
into four of
five
landscapes of
opportunity
each on offer
under a
selection of skies. (P55-87, p. 106)
Fisher distances the empirical Dudley by prolonging the
reader’s apprehension of the town, a classic act of defamiliarization. The last
line, ‘Art’s marvellous’, is sardonic about the use of art to achieve this,
even while the reader is made aware of the possibilities of the actual Midlands
town through the incongruous art of Kokoschka; the temptation of the wonderful
is suspended. Dudley achieves ‘clarity’ through the very ‘confusion’ of its
confrontation with the expressionist style of Kokoschka’s landscapes; the
reader’s perception of both has been revitalized and altered; an alternative
ethic to that of the wonderful and the marvellous is asserted.
There is a certain instability in
the textual voice that ‘mistrusts’ the poem. It is most often a disembodied
voice, a position, that the reader reads. As Barthes writes, ‘Linguistically,
the author is never more than the instance saying I; language knows a
“subject”, not a “person”.’ 47 Fisher dramatizes this lightly, in a
poem which, complete with title and dedication opens:
Of
the Empirical Self and for Me
for M.E.
In my poems
there’s seldom
any I or
you –
you know me, Mary. (DLD, p. 109)
Thus the poetic discourse
opens self-consciously with a series of puns on its title and the name of the
dedicatee, a playfulness at the level of the signifier unusual in Fisher’s work
that represents the unstable nature of the self that is barely represented in
the text. The empirical self is cut off from its own ‘me’. ‘Me’ is also the
‘M.E.’, the addressed Mary of the text, who is also, ‘linguistically’ as
Barthes would say, the position ‘you’. Pronominal usage of ‘I’ and ‘you’ is
rejected, but only by their very assertion; ‘the “I” is always located
unlocatably,’ as Bell and Lland assert. 48 Each becomes a possible
position for the other and the first person plural is fastidiously avoided to
preclude intersubjective agreement. However, despite this playful beginning,
rhetorical austerity returns; attention shifts from the instability of the self
to the nature of that self’s self-confirming apparatus of sense data and
perceptual instabilities. Merleau-Ponty claimed that the blending of
intersubjective perceptions confirmed the world; Fisher seems to argue the
opposite. The poem is concerned, moreover, with that area of tension between
the fictive and the real already examined, though now from the point of view of
the discrepancies between the self and its perceptual construction in making
the world. The night, innocently presented at first, nevertheless limits
perception until the empirical selves are once more unstable: ‘two invisible
ghosts’. (DLD, p. 109) The senses have defeated their own claims to
clarity and replaced it with comic confusion.
A tall man
passes
with what
looks like a black dog.
He stares at
the milk, and says
It’s nice to be able
to drink a cup of
coffee outside at night ... (DLD,
p. 109)
Once the man has vanished, this confusion prompts the
question, ‘ So-/ What kind of a world?’ (DLD, p. 109) The world is
constructed by agents of perception with all their phenomenological
indeterminacies; reality is a spectral trace, a mark (those frequent Fisher
lexes), something almost artificial, photographically printed:
‘lightning-strokes repeatedly/bang out their reality-prints’. (DLD, p.
109)
‘The Poet’s Message’ continues
this enquiry by opening with two parallel questions about the function of
subjectivity and text, what kind of ‘message’ and what kind of ‘man/comes in a
message?’ (DLD, p. 108) The second of the questions seems more engaging
and elicits not so much a clear response as a teasing confession. Its tone is
assertive, while its own ‘message’ – the first unanswered question - is
curiously oblique and conditional.
I would
get into a
message if I could
and come
complete
to where I can
see
what’s across
the park:
and leave my
own position
empty for you
in its frame. (DLD, p.108)
The self
is only the validating principle of the poem insofar as it is an absence, or a
‘position’ in Barthes’ sense. It stands behind the point where the scene
focuses on the artificial retina of a camera, and its ‘message’ would ideally
be the unmediated view of a characteristic park, which it knows to be an
impossibility. The view is blocked by the absent self’s paradoxical
self-consciousness. Not much of a man comes in a message, but enough, in this
case, to frustrate realistic description.
City had, of course, used
memories of a vanishing Birmingham, but the role of memory and its loss, its
correlative shadow, become problematic in Fisher’s work of the 1970s. Most of
these poems are quite slender with little evidence of metrical contour, and
consist of brief, almost gnomic, propositions upon their subjects. In the case
of ‘On the Open Side’, Fisher attempts ‘getting Proust down to matchbox proportions’,
as he jokingly put it. Not only is the memory fleeting and
involuntary, it seems eternal, pre-linguistic, and – more importantly –
autonomous:
-
the other life,
the endless
other life,
endless beyond
the beginning
... holds and
suddenly presents
a particular, but totally insignificant scene to the mind. (P55-87,
p. 111) ‘That was all,’ the poem concludes, ‘Something the other life wanted -
/ I hadn’t kept it.’ (P55-87, p. 111) The self is disrupted by this
autonomous image, strangely significant with its haunting insignificance, its
doubtful value. Elsewhere, in surprise, the narrator says,
So I start
at the single
recurrence of a counter
I expect never
to need. (P55-87, p.
135)
Unlike Proust, the recurrence does not involve the recovery
of the past. Fisher is ‘fascinated with memory,’ because of its non utilitarian
nature; ‘I’m impressed by its disregard for time and narrative sense. Or even
for the simplest categories of thought’. The ‘counter’ can’t be
used or exchanged in anything like the market this economic metaphor suggests.
Its patterns of association offer not the old, but the new; they do not so much
recover the past, as flood the present with the blank screen of nostalgia.
In many ways the
obsessive concern with Birmingham (the narrator’s need to think with it as yet
another counter) has dictated that later poems, such as the more discursive
‘Wonders of Obligation’, ‘Introit: 12 November 1958’ from A Furnace, his
most ambitious long work of 1986, and ‘Six Texts for a Film’ (1994), are
re-memberings of the body of the city, and constitute what Peter Barry calls
Fisher’s ‘“composite-epic” of urban material’.
‘Handsworth Liberties’ is yet another such attempt, in The
Thing About Joe Sullivan, and is one of Fisher’s most impressive sequences.
Like all such sequences, the 16 parts do not develop narratively, as they
negotiate adolescent memories of particular locations in Birmingham that Fisher
associated with particular pieces of music. Indeed it is the street that dominates
the sequence, not the people, who appear only as traces upon it: ‘The
place is full of people./It is thin. They are moving’. (P55-87, p.
118) Even when
A mild blight,
sterility,
the comfort of
others'
homecoming
is invoked, it is still the incomplete yet immobile
environment that claims the poem’s attention:
apart from the
pavement
asphalt and
grit are spread
for floors;
there are railings,
tarred. It is
all
unfinished and
still. (P55-87, p. 121)
Other poems from the sequence consciously de-Anglicize
memories of the 1940s, as had parts of City. The procedure to refuse to
name objects which then appear indeterminate, a form of semantic indeterminacy
developed from The Cut Pages, is introduced to deal with the
characteristic material. Thus the presentation of the city horizon, which
certainly resembles the northern prospect of one of the clues of ‘Starting to
Make a Tree’, ‘pale new towers in the north/right on the line’, operates here
through non-descriptiveness, as it were. One of Fisher’s favourite descriptive
adjectives is ‘non-descript’.
It all
radiates
outwards
in a
lightheaded air
without image.
(P55-87, p. 117)
Realism is forced, not just into the strategies of
foregrounded artifice, but into a register of ‘waves’, since there is no presentable
‘image’, a version of the ‘traces’ and ‘marks’ already noted. Occasionally a
‘flicker’ might reveal a partial, but insignificant, image.
There is a
world.
It has been
made
out of the
tracks of waves
broken against
the rim
and coming
back awry; at the final
flicker they
are old grass and fences. (P55-87, p. 117)
Sometimes, ‘At the end of the familiar’, there is stark
realist enumeration but with the barest of elaboration:
brick,
laurels, a cokeheap
across from
the cemetery gate –
a printing
works and a small
cycle factory;
hard tennis courts. (P55-87, p.
121)
But this exists in a state of tension with formalist
abstraction: ‘With not even a whiff of peace/tranquilities ride the dusk’. (P55-87,
p.119)
Shklovsky’s formalism is easily
mistaken for pure aestheticism, especially when he declares that the ‘object’
that undergoes defamiliarization is not important.52 As has been
seen the object – usually Birmingham - for Fisher is very important;
there are social and political reasons for his de-Anglicizing. The Russian
formalists themselves were rigorously criticized, both by Trotsky and the
Bakhtin Circle before the Stalinist years enveloped them all. Shklovsky’s 1940
volume Mayakovsky and His Circle, was a rejoinder to that criticism, in
which he reformulates defamiliarization. He repeats part of his 1917 essay,
particularly Tolstoy’s claims that ‘if the entire life of many people is lived
unconsciously, then that life, in effect, did not exist’. 53 This
has an obvious existential and moral dimension often missed in readings of the
original essay (as is its insistence upon form). Shklovsky developed this
(opportunely) with an examination of some statements of Lenin. His conclusion
is that Lenin took an interest in ‘eccentricism in art, a skeptical attitude
toward the conventional, and the illogic of the unusual’. 54 Although
Shklovsky is trying to prove that ‘eccentric’ art can be ‘realistic’, he is
also showing its political potential, that ‘the absurdity of the capitalist
world could be shown through methods of eccentric art’.55 One avenue
for this radical art would lead to the dramatic alienation techniques of
Brecht’s poetics of the theatre; the other would concentrate upon destroying
habitual associations within thought and language. In ‘Handsworth Liberties’ –
the pun on the second word is intentional – moments of eccentric illumination
occur during
a trip between
two locations
ill-conceived,
raw, surreal
outgrowths of
common sense, almost
merging one
into the other. (P55-87, p. 118)
Such a meeting of the extraordinary within the quotidian
produces
on an ordinary
day a brief
lightness,
charm between realities;
on a good day,
a break
life can flood
in and fill. (P55-87, p. 119)
As Shklovsky argued, the most radical art works are not
those that thematize revolution or class war. Indeed thematizing itself imposes
a limit upon the possibilities of expression.
Memories
and things in Fisher’s poetry of this time are often invested with an
additional autonomy from reference; things achieve a necessary freedom as the
recognisable world is phenomenologically reduced:
Travesties of
the world
come out of
the fog
and rest at
the boundary. (P55-87, p. 122)
These ‘travesties’ are not quite visual or tactile, but
synaesthetic, evanescent; they are only
strange
vehicles,
forms of
outlandish factories
carried by
sound through the air,
they stop at
the border,
which is no
sort of place;
then
they go back. (P55-87, p. 122)
Although ‘they come/out of a lesser world’, they offer an
approach to perceptual freedom: ‘I shall go with them sometimes/till the
journey dissolves under me’. (P55-87, p. 122)
Fisher has stated that the
‘political content’ of his work consists of ‘descriptions of consciousness,
reminders of the complexity of the perceptual mechanisms which show us the
world.’ 56 ‘For me,’ he adds, ‘it is the private memories and
private fantasies of individuals which actually create the public, social
world.’ 57 An art that consciously defamiliarizes breaks the false
perceptual automatism which habitualizes readers to a particular version of
social reality. In the fourth poem of the sequence there is yet another trip
unnamed between locations, one in which all that is solid melts into a world of
exchange that is not primarily economic:
Something has
to happen here.
There must be
change.
It’s the place
from which the
old world fell away
leaning in its
dark hollow.
We can go
there
into the
seepage,
the cottage
garden with hostas
in a
chimneypot
or somewhere
here
in the crowd
of exchanges
we can change. (P55-87, p. 118)
