Tuesday, February 24, 2009
slumdog-
the assurance that there is an other's poverty, more real, visual, graphic, shitty, brownier- & shining smiling faces of kids vs the phlorescence of the hospital passageways, old ages homes, wheelchairs, tubes running out of one like so many extra veins- this is the povrty of alzheimer's america
Monday, February 16, 2009
ponty pointing at genet
Nikhil Govind
In this paper I wish to discuss how Merleau-Ponty’s work may serve as a powerful critique of existing liberal humanist politics predicated as it is on notions of citizenship and rights. The possibility of such a discussion can only be ensured by an overview of the philosophical issues that have shaped Merleau-Ponty’s work- so my paper will begin with such an overview. In view of the enormous density of the philosophical corpus that informs the mind of Meleau-Ponty, my overview can only be modest and schematic. Nevertheless, I believe such an approach to be indispensable- a precipitate interpretation of politics can never be more than superficial, and leads one up into almost as many blind alleys as when one began. After such an overview, and introduction to the salience that Merleau-Ponty’s thought may still have for us, I will use Jean Genet’s 1950 silent, black and white film Un Chant d’amour to open up a still more concrete pathway into Merleau-Ponty’s political thought. In this, I hope one may get a sense of Genet and Merleau-Ponty indirectly engaging each other in common concerns like the need to radically enlarge our universe by multiplying correspondences -we will see how Genet speaks of the autopsy as a sort of depth-photography that reveals a startlingly different world- and by soliciting the slippage of mastery rather than the Cartesian sovereignty of the subject as assuring a more durable route to an inclusive citizenship and democracy. For even if these two thinkers did not seem to engage each other directly, surely at least they were committed to the moment of the common historical trauma of the years immediately following the horror of the Second World War.
A chief concern of Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre has consistently been to seek to articulate a jointure of the “subject” and the “world”(these terms in this paper should be read continually as being bracketed) where there is no priority or hierarchy of one or the other. For him, the most discussed modality of this jointure is vision- he takes issue with the Cartesian sovereign subject who “looks” at the world as if the world were a pure exteriority. For Merleau-Ponty, the world is joined to the eye- his concern, unlike Berkeley, is not to replace an objective with a subjective/idealist view, but rather to speak from precisely this jointure itself. It seems as if it is a sovereign visuality itself that radiates equally to the eye and the world. The case Merleau-Ponty wishes to make with this notion of visuality is that the visual bespeaks a network of secret correspondences between the subject (or consciousness, interiority etc- all these are terms of classical philosophy which Merleau-Ponty is engaged in radically investigation of) and the world. For Merleau-Ponty, it is this passing and sliding of visuality betwixt the objects in the world and interiority that constitutes the aesthetic- and this aesthetic is the most valued form of knowledge rather than either scientific objectivism or pure idealist subjectivity. It is the jagged hovering of the lines on the edges of the apple in a Cezanne still life that undermines a Cartesian fixity of gaze and objecthood -with its’ (i.e Cartesian) inexplicit claims to mastery- for this will to absolute mastery is the other side of the famed Cartesian doubt. But Merleau-Ponty refuses to hover infinitely in this unproductive anxiety of the binary subject and object. For him the achievement of the painter is precisely in making this visuality exhibit itself -the visuality whereby one cannot fix the outline, where the refractions of consciousness- like the shimmering of the pool (in the essay Eye and Mind)- is equally internal to the object as it is to consciousness. Or, still better, where questions of origin are admitted to be unknowable (and perhaps constraining and uninteresting), and what is to be valued is the exorbitance of a showing, an opening, a vision, which instructs us how copious and diverse the world is, incapable of either static fixity or static doubt. It is rather this diversity itself, one that can only be grasped when the “visual” in itself appears- or as Hannah Arendt would say, appearance is in itself being. Merleau-Ponty writes in the Visible and the Invisible-
“… an anonymous visibility inhabits both of us, a vision in general, in virtue of that primordial property that belongs to the flesh, being here and now, of radiating everywhere and forever, being an individual, of being also a dimension and also a universal” (1968:142).
And we can only grasp this appearance/presence/being for an instant before it passes away- and also, before it reappears. We cannot control this lighting and loss of being- if a painter seems privileged, it is only to a degree. For the vision of the painter is not a matter of his genius, control, training, technical excellence, self discipline etc. One cannot venture to ask if agency is entirely dissolved in Merleau-Ponty altogether, if there is a streak of “passivity” here. This is because, properly speaking, the question of agency is still too caught up in the vicissitudes of the question of the subject, and hence of a humanism that Merleau-Ponty urgently asks us to discard or shed. Instead, Merleau-Ponty asks us to dwell in the thrilling question of the world’s pressing curvature on the pupil, its demand/lure for total absorption, its rapture, its imperious demands, its implacability and its irrevocable rhythmic temporalities. There is a point at which the libido/eye/the scopic touches the world and is inflamed by it. Here the power of the Cartesian subject abnegates itself and is replaced by a wealthy vulnerability- and this is when an opening/a disclosure/an affirmation eventalises as the flesh of the world. For this vulnerability – which is also a self vulnerability, even, paradoxically, occasionally a vulnerability of a victim, one who turns his gaze away from an aggressor and turns instead to the more productive jointure of the self and world’s inflorescent possibilities. It is important to keep all this in mind before the political implications of Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre become clearer. For this is the site of a new politics and a different sense of both justice and even desire, which, though erstwhile seen as contradictory, can now be grounded by this dual agency, this intersubjectiveity of visibility and the body whereby a mutation, a verticillation of everyday embodied experience and politics can finally take place.
Thus instead of the traditional view that cognition is dependent on a certain relation of the subject’s apprehension of the “object”- the Cartesian heritage of modern thought- Merleau-Ponty instead wishes to intertwine the eye and the hand, with cognition lining the interiors of each of these senses, and thus continuously opening new configurations of and for the world’s flesh. The visual is understood as a covering or fold that pre exists and even makes redundant categories of not just cause and effect but also subject/object- or the return to the subject via reflection on the object- this latter being the privileged pathway of German idealism. In Merleau-Ponty there is no return, there is only the limitless ontological is-ness of the visual. Furthermore, we cannot really ask if this visual itself is a simple given, for Merleau Ponty would reply: Given to whom? For the visual pre-exists the subject.
It remains for us to see what might be gained and staked by this first insistence on the pre eminence of the visible, before cognition may be said to divide itself into a subject and object for reflection. What is gained is, perhaps, to put it simply, a new and unimpeachable empire for the senses (including the body), an empire- and thus a sovereignty that cannot be taken away by some of the recognized limitations of a purely self reflective cognition. Since Plato, the senses have largely been seen as the seat of illusion, of a distracting, dissembling knowledge. By privileging the senses as originary, Merleau Ponty is not simply inverting the claim by saying that the senses speak the truth. What he is instead saying is that the sensible provides a constant nourishment for cognition, and that ultimately it exceeds the reflective powers of cognition. But he is clear to insist that this excess of the sensible cannot be relocated in a Subject. Thus the visual exists as a universe which “we” can access through our eyes. Yet this universe cannot be contained by our eyes- nor could we claim to have originated them, or even claim to potentially see the entirety of this universe. Indeed Merleau-Ponty is saying that we cannot lay claim or contain what we “know” either. The misunderstanding comes when we somehow think we own the sensory in a way we do not generally think we own cognition- I say “I see the Cezanne painting” but I can “see” as little of all its possible interpretations and truths as I can “know” it- as Merleau-Ponty writes, the first paintings still have much of their life ahead of them (1993:149), and that there is a long future to them after our death and the waning of the influence of our interpretations. It is misleading to say, as it is conventionally said, that I can “see” the painting in its entirety (as if “seeing” involved just our ability to miniaturize in our retinal screen a given arrangement of colors and tonalities and perspective within a rectangular frame) - but perhaps not “understand” it. Instead, Merleau-Ponty insists that we must understand ourselves to be as modest in our ability to see as in our ability to understand, and that seeing belongs as much outside of us as inside- just as cognition is ultimately non localizable “inside” a Subject.
What Merleau-Ponty is ultimately speaking of when he speaks of a successful seeing is the seeing of the tear in the ontic tissue- but this seeing of the tear in the tissue cannot be learnt by discipline or talent. The opening of the tear is ontological, these are the citations received through the trespasses in the folded realms of the visible and the invisible. These are what produce what we may, with much qualification, possibly call the painter, the world etc. Merleau-Ponty is not simply asking or answering the old question of whether the painter produces the artwork or the artwork the painter? What interests him instead is the identifications of the signs of this ontological fissure- which to him is the sudden multiplication of equivalences. Indeed, it is in this bold valuation of proliferation and of irreducible multiplicity that we can foreshadow some his political significance.
If the visual then exists as a privileged “site” (or at any rate not an object) for an “intuition” then it is to some extent a given. Merleau-Ponty has been accused of a sort of ontological optimism. This may partly be because his work has often discussed canonical, “high” art- as for example his famous essays on Cezanne, rather than the visuality of say, horrific images of the atom bomb. But here the canonical serves chiefly as an occasion for intuition-this is surely misunderstood if it is taken to be an unreflective, or exclusive “optimism”. For of course canonical painting can be horrific- the affective mode of the purely horrific seems to be of relatively less priority to Merleau Ponty, partly because his concern would be more strictly ontological, only occasionally dipping into the psyche. But what is more overtly asserted is the insistence on the visual in its pre emptive, peremptory, originary quality of vision, the way it multiplies and opens equivalences. Merleau-Ponty is going further than simply speaking of the horror of man – and who needs to be told this after the Holocaust- what he is attempting to do instead is to be able to strike the first roots in a new way of conceiving the world in its entirety- the political would then serve as the necessary correlate of this.
The value is thus greater than simply the question of art or the aesthetic understood in the narrow sense. For what does this multiplication of equivalences bespeak if not the many ties of kinship between all humans, as well as the human and the natural and the cosmic, but also, the human and the artefactual- Merleau-Ponty is not conservative about means, and does not share Heidegger’s fears of technology, which many of Merleau-Ponty’s generation shared, especially after the technological horror of the War. Instead, he seems very open to some of the possibly visionary openings that the technological may yield to, and seems to suggest that a mechanical censoring of the technological or the artefactual will achieve nothing, and may even foreclose much for the human. If in Genet we then see the pastoral and the man made prison not so much as mutual exteriorities (for how then could one ever hope to reunite them?), but as an equivalence-in-difference, then we can see how they can open out to each other, how they open possibilities for both the warder (himself imprisoned in his role, in fact clearly more imprisoned than the prisoners- and hence the prisoners can rouse him carnally and politically), and the prisoners themselves. The meeting here of the gaze of the warder and the prisoner is not voyeurism, but an accordance of a haunting -for which prisoner is not haunted by the jailer, and which jailer is not haunted by his prisoners? This is not to say that there is no power relationship- the facticity of power is inescapable. But as Ferenczi is supposed to have remarked to Freud, in a line quoted in the Interpretation of Dreams, “every tongue has its own dream language”. And so the lovemaking in the film between the prisoners and the warder is not just rape and violence (which it doubtless and inexpugnably also is), but is also irreducibly a dream language- not just in the filmic content or “scene”, but in the very iteration of the haunting. Still more, it is also the special and singular dream language of a prison situation, with all its specific pleasures and perversities. The prison itself is a singular space in the modern world. This is not just due to the instrumental reason that prisoners have to be located somewhere- to believe in such utilitarian or common sense notions is, as Marx said, to let ideology play the ventriloquist. Rather, the prison is a specifically modern ideological constructure in the fact that it is the necessary constructed invisibility, the necessary counterpoint to the open, putatively fully visible public sphere of democracy. The prison’s secret and irreducible interiorities are thus necessary, and it haunts the modern project of citizenship and democracy in a way that, for example, and to be a little controversial, I think that traditional rights based immigration or minority discourse perhaps cannot really do- and again, perhaps precisely because the question of the visual is more acute and intractable and multivalent here. It is these more severe hauntings and invisibilities that cannot be easily disambiguated. The prison is singular in that it has a certain relationship and stake in the mutual undecidabilty of the visible and the invisible, a constant precipitation of each other into crises- and this singularity is perhaps what Merleau-Ponty has in mind when he speaks of philosophy as the constant conversion and reconversion of speech and silence to each other in The Visible and the Invisible (1968:129). The prison, like philosophy itself, is this special case of continual reconversion. Genet’s work opens a fold of this invisibility for us, and we glimpse through his art, for a distended moment, the dream language of prisoners -and perhaps more importantly, the warder, for in a sense he is one of the true interiorities of the apparatus- one who can conceptualize or bring to visuality the guilt of the entire political apparatus. Hannah Arendt had written that in premodern times the guilt of the death penalty was so heavy that the Athenians would rather plead with Socrates to drink poison himself rather than take on the guilt of murder. But today the minor Eichmanns follow orders in a bureacratised and instrumentalized world- instrumentalized especially (and hence especially ironically) in the name of justice and democracy. What greater compliment can we pay Genet than that he could even open for us the singular carnal dream language of Eichmann, that is of democracy and citizenship and science gone mad? Similarly, though in a different idiom, Merleau-Ponty offers us a deeper vision of human and worldly ethical togetherness than that claimed by the somewhat jaded claims- even more jaded today than in the aftermath of the Second World War - of an inclusive liberal humanism or multiculturalism. For Merleau-Ponty, this profound fraternity can only be excavated in an ontology that refuses to consider the subject of both science and citizenship as master. Merleau-Ponty does not seek to replace this mastery with a more sustainable one, or with a new set of tricks- rather, he resolutely speaks of “slipping away”, of a non localizability of subject and world (if these terms may be used at all), of instead an interanimation and braiding of objects and self, of the presences of equivalences and correspondences and correlates rather than hierarchy and priority, of reverberation and reciprocity, of the toleration, so inimical to Descartes, of incertitude, contingency and “accident”. Indeed, it is often this brush with mortality that quickens one’s awareness of these vistas of secret equivalences that so infuse and soak the world. It is up to political theorists now to be able to relate these new realms of possibility to the current discourse of citizenship. In Un chant d ‘amour, the warder is seduced by this new possibility- it is through the prisoner that he can re-imagine the pastoral and hence freedom and carnality itself- for even though as warder he has the discretion to leave whenever he wishes, he seems to understand that this freedom can only be re semanticized and materialized/visualized through the prisoner’s fantasy. It is this desperate wish to be able to feel this rapture again that causes him to whip the prisoner- so that he (the warder) can, through the cry of the prisoner feel the full force of the affect of the cry for freedom, a freedom that the warder, in taking for granted, has reduced to a conventionality that urgently needs to be released through an ontological fracturing. All this certainly seems to speak to the fate of routinized citizenship today, where we are all, more certainly than ever, enmeshed in a regime that has totally disarticulated the relationship between the citizen and the prisoner, in a polity that has reduced the prisoner to an inviolate invisibility. This invisibility of the prisoner partly accounts, for example, for some of the power of the scandal of Abu Ghraib- those photographs being indeed, to use Ferenczi’s powerful phrase, a dream language, emanating it would seem from the very navel of imperialistic power and desire, a whole prison corps of Cartesian subjects held fast to the thrall of mastery and utter domination. In all this it seems Merleau-Ponty and Genet were especially prescient, and the years following the horror of the War seem today to speak to us with a special intimacy and recognition.
Merleau-Ponty’s dominant temper is, however, not morose, and he does not write directly of, for example, the Holocaust. Yet he sees better than most how any attempted domination can only seemingly, or only fleetingly succeed. For everywhere an alternate and ultimately more powerful pleasure loiters. This other pleasure- stronger than the pleasure of domination- is the pleasure of the slipping away of mastery, and of receiving through this slippage, a newer and more universal kingdom of what had hitherto remained invisible. It is the pleasure of sight as it sees, only briefly, but with an almost eternalized impact, a new visibility for the first time in the history of the world- this is indeed the secret history, and pathway of humanity, the traces not of conquest (or subordination), but of disclosure and shift, a thrilling realignment and re coordination of the sensorium- I will quote at some length:
But however we finally have to understand it [i.e. that ideality is not alien to the flesh], the “pure” ideality already streams forth along the articulations of the aesthesiological body, along the contours of the sensible things, and, however new it is, it slips through ways it has not traced, transfigured horizons it did not open, it derives from the fundamental mystery of those notions “without equivalences”, as Proust calls them, that lead their shadowy life in the night of the mind only because they have been divined at the junctures of the visible world. (1968: 152-153)
It may be useful to briefly distinguish Merleau-Ponty from thinkers like Georges Bataille and Michel Foucault. To speak schematically, Merleau-Ponty is not speaking in the name of a sadism or masochism, or transgression or negativity. Again, Genet can come to our aid- when the warder whips the prisoner, and the long pastoral dream sequence is precipitated, Merleau-Ponty would not say that this precipitation is occasioned as resistance or as, to indicate in a telegraphic manner what I will here call “perversions”- i.e. sado-masochistic fantasies on the part of the viewer or the characters in the film. Merleau-Ponty would not particularly prioritise the putative causal trigger. Rather, he would understand the intercalation on its own terms- as world disclosing, as “streaming forth along the articulations of the aesthesiological body, along the contours of sensible things… divined at the junctures of the visible world”.
Nothing in all this belies the political, but it invites us to consider not rushing with precipitate haste into transgression and simple reversal, but instead to first unmoor our conventional entanglement with the figure of mastery - and the thorny question of whether there can ever be resistance that can be completely disentangled from an alternate discourse of mastery. It seems that few people ask this difficult and precarious question as unflinchingly as Merleau-Ponty. The prisoner does indeed in his fantasy imagine a world outside the prison- but that new world is still chiefly a place that is open to love, and to a lover who is next door. Much links the new world of the pastoral to the old world of the prisoner- passions do not necessarily change in the same timeline as the contingencies of crime and punishment- as they together stream along the curvature of the same aesthesiological body. How, in an account of politics and ethics, even one which seemingly prioritizes the other over self (as for example in Levinas), is one to argue for a sensation of yielding mastery, of slipping away along the line of one’s own body, and thus opening new pores in a shared visual and bodied imagination? This is the radical politics that Merleau-Ponty would find congenial and hospitable to his thought- and it thus calls on all of us to fundamentally revise many of our shibboleths regarding notions of justice and resistance, ethics and the listening to solicitation. In the end of the shot sequence of the whipping of the prisoner in Un Chant d’ amour, it is the warder who is seduced into the fantasy of the prisoner- this is not a simple act of transgression, or reversal of power, or a simple accounting of oneself through the other- it is rather the strange (and strangely beautiful) violent sharing of the fantasy that makes for the liquid pleasure of the “slipping away” of mastery, and hence the difference in power and politics between the warder and the prisoner. Merleau-Ponty’s politics will insist with the need to factor in this dream language of power and desire and all the discomfiting or warm and plenitudinous horizons that are released. This is in contrast to a mechanical tallying of crime and punishment from a judge’s manual in bourgeois democracy. But equally it is also in contrast to messianic calls to, perhaps, a socialist utopia- one that too, in the name of justice being understood now as complete equality, would foreclose horizons by not allowing the free trade of the secret currency and constant mutual conversion of the visible and the invisible, of the equivalences that are not universal, of the fitful, uncertain and partial non coincidences that do make up much of the traffic between humans and the world.
In Un Chant d’ amour the lovers never see each other but are held in tension by the wide opened voyeuristic eye of the warder. Even the gaze of Lucien (the younger prisoner who is the object of the elder prisoner’s desire and fantasy) is directed elsewhere- this echoes Merleau-Ponty’s sense of the non localizability of water and color as he writes with regard to the shimmering pool in the Eye and the Mind. It is thus only the pure structure of a visuality- not localizable in a subject, or even an inter subjectivity- that provides the links as well as the narrative dynamism of the plot. The warder seems thus to take his eye, as it were in the palm of his hand, from shot to shot linking them. Finally, he cannot bear the swell of this visual-carnality any longer and must consummate it – even though no consummation can be total, nevertheless it must rise on the surface of the plot as a fold. So the warder takes out his gun and, in the simulation of fellatio, offers it to the mouth of the elder prisoner. It is clearly a sexual act as the warder throws back his head and closes his eyes in ecstasy. He then leaves, his locution in the world of the carnalised visual-embodiment over- the flowers that are intermittently being swung in various shots of the film (and was one of the opening shots of the film) are now caught. This particular event is over, and the warder moves on.
It is important not to reduce this triangulated sexual encounter. The encounter itself is polyvalent- it has as much to do with eyes as touch (and the lack of touch and sight- the prisoners do not see each other), with the man made body (the phallic gun) as with hands, with actuality as with long stretches of fantasy that interpose themselves in the actual, with the male member as with “feminised” orifices- the mouth of the elder prisoner, but also more significantly with the long ridged cylindrical surface at the end of which the warder’s voyeuristic eye emplaces itself as he stares “inside”. This muti folded encounter cannot be bound by a logic of a “thermodynamic” account of sex-one which believes that sex is a matter of a charged excitation which requires precisely an exact quantity of discharge that will then restore a normative equilibrium. In Merleau-Ponty, as well as in Genet (and in contrast to at least some of Freud’s writing), there is no mute point of equilibrium, or harmony- rather, all grapples with, partakes of, participates in, excess, exorbitance, a sort of exhibitionism of the bodied visible. The very train of the movement of “consciousness” is this sliding and slipping (and resultant friction) in and out of the lush ultramarine element of the visible. It is the texture of this velvet friction that causes the varied affects of thrill and the sense of an almost unexpected and subterranean planet of multivalent pleasures hidden beneath our skin. Of course one of the privileged sites of this equivalence of texture from seemingly widely divergent sources is the materiality of Merleau-Ponty’s prose itself. Here again, it is useful to turn to Genet’s film, which too, like Merleau-Ponty’s prose, is in itself a superbly apposite representation of this sentiment. Genet had written of the equivalence of disparate things (equivalence sometimes in opposition, as a sort of negative echo and mnemonic recall) in a manner that would deeply reverberate in Merleau-Ponty- and of the Valery Merleau-Ponty quotes in The Visible and the Invisible who had written that there is a type of blue so blue that only the red of blood could be more red. Likewise, in The Thief’s Journal, Genet had written, in partial explanation of the wide use of the motif of white flowers in so many of his writings throughout his career:
There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts. The fragility and delicacy of the former are of the same nature as the brutal insensitivity of the latter. My sexual excitement is of the oscillation from one to the other. Should I have to portray a convict- or a criminal- I shall so bedeck him with flowers that, as he disappears beneath them, he will himself become a flower, a gigantic and a new one. (1985:61)
It is worth staying with some other passages from Genet’s extended oeuvre to simply inhabit, for a little while longer the subtle concurrent beauties of the world he- and Merleau-Ponty- evoke. In The Miracle of the Rose Genet had written of how, in photographing a band of half stripped youthful pirate sailors, the photographic plate would itself simply register a rose. Furthermore, the autopsy of a condemned murderer would reveal a gigantic rose in place of a heart even as his shackles are transformed into a bouquet. In Notre Dame des fleurs, he had written:
The big, inflexible, strict pimps, their members in full bloom- I no longer know whether they are lilies or whether lilies and members are not totally they”. (1991: 62)
Though unfortunately this is not a theme I can develop in this particular paper for lack of space, we can see how deeply insightful Genet was in understanding twentieth century technologies of visual representation. Though the visual technology itself may be from sources as diverse as medicine, nevertheless they may be said to have a special type of power, providing links unthinkable in the conventional everyday surface world of the subject. To see the world in terms of the links autopsies and x rays and the continually developing fields of imaging technology (predominantly medical today) provide is to open ourselves up to the possibilities of more profluent visual architectures- in other words, to repeat Genet, not only to see members as lilies but also lilies and members as this continually limitless, open landscape of the “they”.
This concern with serendipitous, even surreptitious linkages is critical for Genet, as for Merleau-Ponty. These are what provide the inner links, operating at a more subliminal sense -if one can is careful to use that word in the ontological or visual sense- as they always are for Merleau-Ponty. Even though Genet published much more literature and made only one completed film, it is clear how his writings are more filmic and visual than print-centric. To read any of Genet’s novels is to realize how closely he was working with the visual staple of the auteur, especially of his time- the collage, the flashback, the close up. Genet was known to be obsessed with cinema throughout his life and has more unpublished pages of film scenarios than any other, purely print-centric, genre. This is evident in his elaborate notes on filming La Bagne- I quote it here to further illustrate my previous point of his persistent search for ingenious ways of initiating us into how the world exhibits and confers itself as sameness in difference through the linking eye of the camera:
I have a few stipulations for the way in which it is to be filmed. The close ups should be very dark. No close ups of faces, but those of gestures, which without the immodesty of the camera would stay unseen…In a certain situation, a clenched fist can move us enormously, if the eye registers the texture of the skin, a black nail here, a wart, and the furtive caress of a finger on the palm that we wouldn’t have seen at the theater, for example- and perhaps which the characters ignore. In effect the cinema is basically immodest. Let us use this facility to enlarge gestures. The camera can open a fly and search out its secrets…The enlarged appearance of a ball of saliva in the corner of a mouth can, as the scene unfolds, arouse an emotion in the viewer which would give a weight, a new depth to this drama (quoted in Giles 1991:80).
By way of conclusion, I wish to briefly return to the question of mastery in Merleau-Ponty and Genet. Max Weber has famously defined the bureaucratic, instrumentalised modern state as that which monopolises power and violence- he was referring particularly to the standing army and the police. For Merleau-Ponty, this totalitarianism at the origin is what needs to be fatally undermined. He understands well the bureaucrat- that disembodied mind of science and technocracy who thinks that there are no limits to human sovereignty and the exploitation of the world- here the world is reduced, to use Heidegger’s language, to pure standing reserve awaiting the exploitation of man. In an indirect sense, then, one may read Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of Valery’s Leonardo- this “pure man of mind”. Merleau-Ponty does think that this is a misguided interpretation of Leonardo, even of Leonardo the scientist. Nevertheless, such a pure man of mind provokes much discussion in Merleau-Ponty and may be said to be his indirect way of commenting on bureaucratic state machinery. In Genet the link is clear- the warder is the instrument of the state. The alternatives Merleau-Ponty and Genet pose is the dissolution of such power – this dissolution may be is indexed as a vulnerability to difference, fascination and adventure. The warder is seduced by the prisoners and Merleau-Ponty’s Leonardo accepts his limitations and goes on to produce great art. Merleau-Ponty writes in Cezanne’s Doubt, before introducing the section on Leonardo to illustrate this very point regarding the necessity to understand the relation of freedom and limitation–
Two things are certain about freedom- that we are never determined and yet that we never change …It is up to us to understand both these things simultaneously, as well as the way freedom dawns in us without breaking our bonds with the world. (1993:72) The world then is emphatically not to be reduced to standing reserve for it has a higher destiny than to be reduced to anthropomorphisms.
Let us follow the argument in some more detail. Merleau-Ponty cites Valery’s remark on how purely intellectual Leonardo was, a “man of mind”, a “monster of freedom” (1993:72). He then questions this interpretation of Valery by suggesting that even in a painting like Saint Anne, the Virgin and Child, there is yet a secret and violent history. He then uses Freud’s reading of the fellatio fantasy, though wishing to go even further, suggesting the eternalized childhood of Leonardo, who had been abandoned by his father and brought up only by his mother, a peasant girl, for four years. I bring this partly to show how largely congenial Merleau-Ponty’s reading would be to psychoanalysis- indeed he spends the last pages of the essay defending psychoanalysis, telling the reader how close it is to his project of proliferating the channels of communication between ourselves and our kin. But to me the equally interesting effect would be to try and use it in further interpreting Un Chant d’amour. The lines of eroticism in the film would have a wholly different quality if it were just a love story between two prisoners who never see each other- the particular quality of the film is attained only by the linking eye (like the auteur and the reader’s) of the warder. The warder may perhaps be read as the Censor of psychoanalysis, both a punitive super ego but also the frozen ego. In a sense then, in this inverted bildungsroman, it is the warder who is educated out of his place as the citizen-censor of the criminalized prisoners, and who is allowed an opening into a wholly different and multi faceted domain. As censor, like Valery’s Leonardo, he seems to be all mind, a disembodied, punitive figure of the law. The narrative momentum is sustained only as he cedes control- and this is finally visually accomplished, as in Freud’s interpretation of Leonardo’s dream, through fellatio (in the warder’s case by the gun, in Leonardo’s by the screen of the dream-reality itself). The warder, from being the bourgeois provider of order, becomes, like Leonardo, infantilized, and following Freud and Merleau-Ponty, in need of nursing, of the mother- but this realization is enabling, educative and productive. Merleau-Ponty writes-
At the height of his freedom he was, in that very freedom, the child he had been; he was free on one side only because bound on the other. (1993:74, italics Merleau-Ponty’s)
It is partly through such heuristic moves that one may bring the feminine (and perhaps thus the heterosexual too)- as the viscous inception and and not so much as a repression- into a “gay” film. The warder thus re founds and re launches himself, from the illusion of being the monster of pure freedom -the bourgeois self righteous citizen, but also the ego or “internal” super ego frozen in the posture of moral righteousness- to someone questioning his work, and someone in dialogue and not in authority and judgment over his fellow citizen-prisoner. And this may be the opportune and optimistic note to conclude this paper with- by returning to hope- not naïve, but not skeptical either- and one always prospecting for fissures in the wall of the calcified political-ontic. Genet’s citizen-warder seems some way along the line to becoming closer to the ideal of Merleau-Ponty as Merleau-Ponty eloquently summarizes with regard to the perennial refusal of mastery in Cezanne-
That is why he questioned the picture emerging beneath his hand, why he hung on the glances other people directed toward his canvas. That is why he never finished working. We never get away from our life. We never see ideas or freedom face to face. (1993: 75)
Indeed, it is this impossibility, this viscosity that is resistant to too hasty a representation (mastery) - of a self-righteous political sort or otherwise- that can open the door to a differently furnished human democracy and solidarity that is not simply a return to a rights- based liberal humanism or a now routinized multi culturalist notion of citizenship or community.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971.
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. London: Barnes and Noble, 1994.
Genet, Jean. Miracle of the Rose. New York: Grove Press Inc, 1951.
Our Lady of the Flowers. New York: Bantam Books, 1943.
Un Chant d’amour [Video Recording]. No date.
The Thief’s Journal. London: Penguin. 1985.
Querelle. New York: Grove Press.1989.
Giles, Jane. The Cinema of Jean Genet: Un Chant d’amour. London: British Film Institute Publishing, 1991.
Heidegger, Martin. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2001.
Johnson, Galena A. (ed.) The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting. Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1993.
Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis. New York: W.W.Norton and Company, 1981.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. New York: Washington Square Press, 1984.
Saint Genet. London: Pantheon Books, 1983.
Silverman, Kaja. World Spectators. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
The Threshold of the Visible World. London: Routledge, 1995.
In this paper I wish to discuss how Merleau-Ponty’s work may serve as a powerful critique of existing liberal humanist politics predicated as it is on notions of citizenship and rights. The possibility of such a discussion can only be ensured by an overview of the philosophical issues that have shaped Merleau-Ponty’s work- so my paper will begin with such an overview. In view of the enormous density of the philosophical corpus that informs the mind of Meleau-Ponty, my overview can only be modest and schematic. Nevertheless, I believe such an approach to be indispensable- a precipitate interpretation of politics can never be more than superficial, and leads one up into almost as many blind alleys as when one began. After such an overview, and introduction to the salience that Merleau-Ponty’s thought may still have for us, I will use Jean Genet’s 1950 silent, black and white film Un Chant d’amour to open up a still more concrete pathway into Merleau-Ponty’s political thought. In this, I hope one may get a sense of Genet and Merleau-Ponty indirectly engaging each other in common concerns like the need to radically enlarge our universe by multiplying correspondences -we will see how Genet speaks of the autopsy as a sort of depth-photography that reveals a startlingly different world- and by soliciting the slippage of mastery rather than the Cartesian sovereignty of the subject as assuring a more durable route to an inclusive citizenship and democracy. For even if these two thinkers did not seem to engage each other directly, surely at least they were committed to the moment of the common historical trauma of the years immediately following the horror of the Second World War.
A chief concern of Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre has consistently been to seek to articulate a jointure of the “subject” and the “world”(these terms in this paper should be read continually as being bracketed) where there is no priority or hierarchy of one or the other. For him, the most discussed modality of this jointure is vision- he takes issue with the Cartesian sovereign subject who “looks” at the world as if the world were a pure exteriority. For Merleau-Ponty, the world is joined to the eye- his concern, unlike Berkeley, is not to replace an objective with a subjective/idealist view, but rather to speak from precisely this jointure itself. It seems as if it is a sovereign visuality itself that radiates equally to the eye and the world. The case Merleau-Ponty wishes to make with this notion of visuality is that the visual bespeaks a network of secret correspondences between the subject (or consciousness, interiority etc- all these are terms of classical philosophy which Merleau-Ponty is engaged in radically investigation of) and the world. For Merleau-Ponty, it is this passing and sliding of visuality betwixt the objects in the world and interiority that constitutes the aesthetic- and this aesthetic is the most valued form of knowledge rather than either scientific objectivism or pure idealist subjectivity. It is the jagged hovering of the lines on the edges of the apple in a Cezanne still life that undermines a Cartesian fixity of gaze and objecthood -with its’ (i.e Cartesian) inexplicit claims to mastery- for this will to absolute mastery is the other side of the famed Cartesian doubt. But Merleau-Ponty refuses to hover infinitely in this unproductive anxiety of the binary subject and object. For him the achievement of the painter is precisely in making this visuality exhibit itself -the visuality whereby one cannot fix the outline, where the refractions of consciousness- like the shimmering of the pool (in the essay Eye and Mind)- is equally internal to the object as it is to consciousness. Or, still better, where questions of origin are admitted to be unknowable (and perhaps constraining and uninteresting), and what is to be valued is the exorbitance of a showing, an opening, a vision, which instructs us how copious and diverse the world is, incapable of either static fixity or static doubt. It is rather this diversity itself, one that can only be grasped when the “visual” in itself appears- or as Hannah Arendt would say, appearance is in itself being. Merleau-Ponty writes in the Visible and the Invisible-
“… an anonymous visibility inhabits both of us, a vision in general, in virtue of that primordial property that belongs to the flesh, being here and now, of radiating everywhere and forever, being an individual, of being also a dimension and also a universal” (1968:142).
And we can only grasp this appearance/presence/being for an instant before it passes away- and also, before it reappears. We cannot control this lighting and loss of being- if a painter seems privileged, it is only to a degree. For the vision of the painter is not a matter of his genius, control, training, technical excellence, self discipline etc. One cannot venture to ask if agency is entirely dissolved in Merleau-Ponty altogether, if there is a streak of “passivity” here. This is because, properly speaking, the question of agency is still too caught up in the vicissitudes of the question of the subject, and hence of a humanism that Merleau-Ponty urgently asks us to discard or shed. Instead, Merleau-Ponty asks us to dwell in the thrilling question of the world’s pressing curvature on the pupil, its demand/lure for total absorption, its rapture, its imperious demands, its implacability and its irrevocable rhythmic temporalities. There is a point at which the libido/eye/the scopic touches the world and is inflamed by it. Here the power of the Cartesian subject abnegates itself and is replaced by a wealthy vulnerability- and this is when an opening/a disclosure/an affirmation eventalises as the flesh of the world. For this vulnerability – which is also a self vulnerability, even, paradoxically, occasionally a vulnerability of a victim, one who turns his gaze away from an aggressor and turns instead to the more productive jointure of the self and world’s inflorescent possibilities. It is important to keep all this in mind before the political implications of Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre become clearer. For this is the site of a new politics and a different sense of both justice and even desire, which, though erstwhile seen as contradictory, can now be grounded by this dual agency, this intersubjectiveity of visibility and the body whereby a mutation, a verticillation of everyday embodied experience and politics can finally take place.
Thus instead of the traditional view that cognition is dependent on a certain relation of the subject’s apprehension of the “object”- the Cartesian heritage of modern thought- Merleau-Ponty instead wishes to intertwine the eye and the hand, with cognition lining the interiors of each of these senses, and thus continuously opening new configurations of and for the world’s flesh. The visual is understood as a covering or fold that pre exists and even makes redundant categories of not just cause and effect but also subject/object- or the return to the subject via reflection on the object- this latter being the privileged pathway of German idealism. In Merleau-Ponty there is no return, there is only the limitless ontological is-ness of the visual. Furthermore, we cannot really ask if this visual itself is a simple given, for Merleau Ponty would reply: Given to whom? For the visual pre-exists the subject.
It remains for us to see what might be gained and staked by this first insistence on the pre eminence of the visible, before cognition may be said to divide itself into a subject and object for reflection. What is gained is, perhaps, to put it simply, a new and unimpeachable empire for the senses (including the body), an empire- and thus a sovereignty that cannot be taken away by some of the recognized limitations of a purely self reflective cognition. Since Plato, the senses have largely been seen as the seat of illusion, of a distracting, dissembling knowledge. By privileging the senses as originary, Merleau Ponty is not simply inverting the claim by saying that the senses speak the truth. What he is instead saying is that the sensible provides a constant nourishment for cognition, and that ultimately it exceeds the reflective powers of cognition. But he is clear to insist that this excess of the sensible cannot be relocated in a Subject. Thus the visual exists as a universe which “we” can access through our eyes. Yet this universe cannot be contained by our eyes- nor could we claim to have originated them, or even claim to potentially see the entirety of this universe. Indeed Merleau-Ponty is saying that we cannot lay claim or contain what we “know” either. The misunderstanding comes when we somehow think we own the sensory in a way we do not generally think we own cognition- I say “I see the Cezanne painting” but I can “see” as little of all its possible interpretations and truths as I can “know” it- as Merleau-Ponty writes, the first paintings still have much of their life ahead of them (1993:149), and that there is a long future to them after our death and the waning of the influence of our interpretations. It is misleading to say, as it is conventionally said, that I can “see” the painting in its entirety (as if “seeing” involved just our ability to miniaturize in our retinal screen a given arrangement of colors and tonalities and perspective within a rectangular frame) - but perhaps not “understand” it. Instead, Merleau-Ponty insists that we must understand ourselves to be as modest in our ability to see as in our ability to understand, and that seeing belongs as much outside of us as inside- just as cognition is ultimately non localizable “inside” a Subject.
What Merleau-Ponty is ultimately speaking of when he speaks of a successful seeing is the seeing of the tear in the ontic tissue- but this seeing of the tear in the tissue cannot be learnt by discipline or talent. The opening of the tear is ontological, these are the citations received through the trespasses in the folded realms of the visible and the invisible. These are what produce what we may, with much qualification, possibly call the painter, the world etc. Merleau-Ponty is not simply asking or answering the old question of whether the painter produces the artwork or the artwork the painter? What interests him instead is the identifications of the signs of this ontological fissure- which to him is the sudden multiplication of equivalences. Indeed, it is in this bold valuation of proliferation and of irreducible multiplicity that we can foreshadow some his political significance.
If the visual then exists as a privileged “site” (or at any rate not an object) for an “intuition” then it is to some extent a given. Merleau-Ponty has been accused of a sort of ontological optimism. This may partly be because his work has often discussed canonical, “high” art- as for example his famous essays on Cezanne, rather than the visuality of say, horrific images of the atom bomb. But here the canonical serves chiefly as an occasion for intuition-this is surely misunderstood if it is taken to be an unreflective, or exclusive “optimism”. For of course canonical painting can be horrific- the affective mode of the purely horrific seems to be of relatively less priority to Merleau Ponty, partly because his concern would be more strictly ontological, only occasionally dipping into the psyche. But what is more overtly asserted is the insistence on the visual in its pre emptive, peremptory, originary quality of vision, the way it multiplies and opens equivalences. Merleau-Ponty is going further than simply speaking of the horror of man – and who needs to be told this after the Holocaust- what he is attempting to do instead is to be able to strike the first roots in a new way of conceiving the world in its entirety- the political would then serve as the necessary correlate of this.
The value is thus greater than simply the question of art or the aesthetic understood in the narrow sense. For what does this multiplication of equivalences bespeak if not the many ties of kinship between all humans, as well as the human and the natural and the cosmic, but also, the human and the artefactual- Merleau-Ponty is not conservative about means, and does not share Heidegger’s fears of technology, which many of Merleau-Ponty’s generation shared, especially after the technological horror of the War. Instead, he seems very open to some of the possibly visionary openings that the technological may yield to, and seems to suggest that a mechanical censoring of the technological or the artefactual will achieve nothing, and may even foreclose much for the human. If in Genet we then see the pastoral and the man made prison not so much as mutual exteriorities (for how then could one ever hope to reunite them?), but as an equivalence-in-difference, then we can see how they can open out to each other, how they open possibilities for both the warder (himself imprisoned in his role, in fact clearly more imprisoned than the prisoners- and hence the prisoners can rouse him carnally and politically), and the prisoners themselves. The meeting here of the gaze of the warder and the prisoner is not voyeurism, but an accordance of a haunting -for which prisoner is not haunted by the jailer, and which jailer is not haunted by his prisoners? This is not to say that there is no power relationship- the facticity of power is inescapable. But as Ferenczi is supposed to have remarked to Freud, in a line quoted in the Interpretation of Dreams, “every tongue has its own dream language”. And so the lovemaking in the film between the prisoners and the warder is not just rape and violence (which it doubtless and inexpugnably also is), but is also irreducibly a dream language- not just in the filmic content or “scene”, but in the very iteration of the haunting. Still more, it is also the special and singular dream language of a prison situation, with all its specific pleasures and perversities. The prison itself is a singular space in the modern world. This is not just due to the instrumental reason that prisoners have to be located somewhere- to believe in such utilitarian or common sense notions is, as Marx said, to let ideology play the ventriloquist. Rather, the prison is a specifically modern ideological constructure in the fact that it is the necessary constructed invisibility, the necessary counterpoint to the open, putatively fully visible public sphere of democracy. The prison’s secret and irreducible interiorities are thus necessary, and it haunts the modern project of citizenship and democracy in a way that, for example, and to be a little controversial, I think that traditional rights based immigration or minority discourse perhaps cannot really do- and again, perhaps precisely because the question of the visual is more acute and intractable and multivalent here. It is these more severe hauntings and invisibilities that cannot be easily disambiguated. The prison is singular in that it has a certain relationship and stake in the mutual undecidabilty of the visible and the invisible, a constant precipitation of each other into crises- and this singularity is perhaps what Merleau-Ponty has in mind when he speaks of philosophy as the constant conversion and reconversion of speech and silence to each other in The Visible and the Invisible (1968:129). The prison, like philosophy itself, is this special case of continual reconversion. Genet’s work opens a fold of this invisibility for us, and we glimpse through his art, for a distended moment, the dream language of prisoners -and perhaps more importantly, the warder, for in a sense he is one of the true interiorities of the apparatus- one who can conceptualize or bring to visuality the guilt of the entire political apparatus. Hannah Arendt had written that in premodern times the guilt of the death penalty was so heavy that the Athenians would rather plead with Socrates to drink poison himself rather than take on the guilt of murder. But today the minor Eichmanns follow orders in a bureacratised and instrumentalized world- instrumentalized especially (and hence especially ironically) in the name of justice and democracy. What greater compliment can we pay Genet than that he could even open for us the singular carnal dream language of Eichmann, that is of democracy and citizenship and science gone mad? Similarly, though in a different idiom, Merleau-Ponty offers us a deeper vision of human and worldly ethical togetherness than that claimed by the somewhat jaded claims- even more jaded today than in the aftermath of the Second World War - of an inclusive liberal humanism or multiculturalism. For Merleau-Ponty, this profound fraternity can only be excavated in an ontology that refuses to consider the subject of both science and citizenship as master. Merleau-Ponty does not seek to replace this mastery with a more sustainable one, or with a new set of tricks- rather, he resolutely speaks of “slipping away”, of a non localizability of subject and world (if these terms may be used at all), of instead an interanimation and braiding of objects and self, of the presences of equivalences and correspondences and correlates rather than hierarchy and priority, of reverberation and reciprocity, of the toleration, so inimical to Descartes, of incertitude, contingency and “accident”. Indeed, it is often this brush with mortality that quickens one’s awareness of these vistas of secret equivalences that so infuse and soak the world. It is up to political theorists now to be able to relate these new realms of possibility to the current discourse of citizenship. In Un chant d ‘amour, the warder is seduced by this new possibility- it is through the prisoner that he can re-imagine the pastoral and hence freedom and carnality itself- for even though as warder he has the discretion to leave whenever he wishes, he seems to understand that this freedom can only be re semanticized and materialized/visualized through the prisoner’s fantasy. It is this desperate wish to be able to feel this rapture again that causes him to whip the prisoner- so that he (the warder) can, through the cry of the prisoner feel the full force of the affect of the cry for freedom, a freedom that the warder, in taking for granted, has reduced to a conventionality that urgently needs to be released through an ontological fracturing. All this certainly seems to speak to the fate of routinized citizenship today, where we are all, more certainly than ever, enmeshed in a regime that has totally disarticulated the relationship between the citizen and the prisoner, in a polity that has reduced the prisoner to an inviolate invisibility. This invisibility of the prisoner partly accounts, for example, for some of the power of the scandal of Abu Ghraib- those photographs being indeed, to use Ferenczi’s powerful phrase, a dream language, emanating it would seem from the very navel of imperialistic power and desire, a whole prison corps of Cartesian subjects held fast to the thrall of mastery and utter domination. In all this it seems Merleau-Ponty and Genet were especially prescient, and the years following the horror of the War seem today to speak to us with a special intimacy and recognition.
Merleau-Ponty’s dominant temper is, however, not morose, and he does not write directly of, for example, the Holocaust. Yet he sees better than most how any attempted domination can only seemingly, or only fleetingly succeed. For everywhere an alternate and ultimately more powerful pleasure loiters. This other pleasure- stronger than the pleasure of domination- is the pleasure of the slipping away of mastery, and of receiving through this slippage, a newer and more universal kingdom of what had hitherto remained invisible. It is the pleasure of sight as it sees, only briefly, but with an almost eternalized impact, a new visibility for the first time in the history of the world- this is indeed the secret history, and pathway of humanity, the traces not of conquest (or subordination), but of disclosure and shift, a thrilling realignment and re coordination of the sensorium- I will quote at some length:
But however we finally have to understand it [i.e. that ideality is not alien to the flesh], the “pure” ideality already streams forth along the articulations of the aesthesiological body, along the contours of the sensible things, and, however new it is, it slips through ways it has not traced, transfigured horizons it did not open, it derives from the fundamental mystery of those notions “without equivalences”, as Proust calls them, that lead their shadowy life in the night of the mind only because they have been divined at the junctures of the visible world. (1968: 152-153)
It may be useful to briefly distinguish Merleau-Ponty from thinkers like Georges Bataille and Michel Foucault. To speak schematically, Merleau-Ponty is not speaking in the name of a sadism or masochism, or transgression or negativity. Again, Genet can come to our aid- when the warder whips the prisoner, and the long pastoral dream sequence is precipitated, Merleau-Ponty would not say that this precipitation is occasioned as resistance or as, to indicate in a telegraphic manner what I will here call “perversions”- i.e. sado-masochistic fantasies on the part of the viewer or the characters in the film. Merleau-Ponty would not particularly prioritise the putative causal trigger. Rather, he would understand the intercalation on its own terms- as world disclosing, as “streaming forth along the articulations of the aesthesiological body, along the contours of sensible things… divined at the junctures of the visible world”.
Nothing in all this belies the political, but it invites us to consider not rushing with precipitate haste into transgression and simple reversal, but instead to first unmoor our conventional entanglement with the figure of mastery - and the thorny question of whether there can ever be resistance that can be completely disentangled from an alternate discourse of mastery. It seems that few people ask this difficult and precarious question as unflinchingly as Merleau-Ponty. The prisoner does indeed in his fantasy imagine a world outside the prison- but that new world is still chiefly a place that is open to love, and to a lover who is next door. Much links the new world of the pastoral to the old world of the prisoner- passions do not necessarily change in the same timeline as the contingencies of crime and punishment- as they together stream along the curvature of the same aesthesiological body. How, in an account of politics and ethics, even one which seemingly prioritizes the other over self (as for example in Levinas), is one to argue for a sensation of yielding mastery, of slipping away along the line of one’s own body, and thus opening new pores in a shared visual and bodied imagination? This is the radical politics that Merleau-Ponty would find congenial and hospitable to his thought- and it thus calls on all of us to fundamentally revise many of our shibboleths regarding notions of justice and resistance, ethics and the listening to solicitation. In the end of the shot sequence of the whipping of the prisoner in Un Chant d’ amour, it is the warder who is seduced into the fantasy of the prisoner- this is not a simple act of transgression, or reversal of power, or a simple accounting of oneself through the other- it is rather the strange (and strangely beautiful) violent sharing of the fantasy that makes for the liquid pleasure of the “slipping away” of mastery, and hence the difference in power and politics between the warder and the prisoner. Merleau-Ponty’s politics will insist with the need to factor in this dream language of power and desire and all the discomfiting or warm and plenitudinous horizons that are released. This is in contrast to a mechanical tallying of crime and punishment from a judge’s manual in bourgeois democracy. But equally it is also in contrast to messianic calls to, perhaps, a socialist utopia- one that too, in the name of justice being understood now as complete equality, would foreclose horizons by not allowing the free trade of the secret currency and constant mutual conversion of the visible and the invisible, of the equivalences that are not universal, of the fitful, uncertain and partial non coincidences that do make up much of the traffic between humans and the world.
In Un Chant d’ amour the lovers never see each other but are held in tension by the wide opened voyeuristic eye of the warder. Even the gaze of Lucien (the younger prisoner who is the object of the elder prisoner’s desire and fantasy) is directed elsewhere- this echoes Merleau-Ponty’s sense of the non localizability of water and color as he writes with regard to the shimmering pool in the Eye and the Mind. It is thus only the pure structure of a visuality- not localizable in a subject, or even an inter subjectivity- that provides the links as well as the narrative dynamism of the plot. The warder seems thus to take his eye, as it were in the palm of his hand, from shot to shot linking them. Finally, he cannot bear the swell of this visual-carnality any longer and must consummate it – even though no consummation can be total, nevertheless it must rise on the surface of the plot as a fold. So the warder takes out his gun and, in the simulation of fellatio, offers it to the mouth of the elder prisoner. It is clearly a sexual act as the warder throws back his head and closes his eyes in ecstasy. He then leaves, his locution in the world of the carnalised visual-embodiment over- the flowers that are intermittently being swung in various shots of the film (and was one of the opening shots of the film) are now caught. This particular event is over, and the warder moves on.
It is important not to reduce this triangulated sexual encounter. The encounter itself is polyvalent- it has as much to do with eyes as touch (and the lack of touch and sight- the prisoners do not see each other), with the man made body (the phallic gun) as with hands, with actuality as with long stretches of fantasy that interpose themselves in the actual, with the male member as with “feminised” orifices- the mouth of the elder prisoner, but also more significantly with the long ridged cylindrical surface at the end of which the warder’s voyeuristic eye emplaces itself as he stares “inside”. This muti folded encounter cannot be bound by a logic of a “thermodynamic” account of sex-one which believes that sex is a matter of a charged excitation which requires precisely an exact quantity of discharge that will then restore a normative equilibrium. In Merleau-Ponty, as well as in Genet (and in contrast to at least some of Freud’s writing), there is no mute point of equilibrium, or harmony- rather, all grapples with, partakes of, participates in, excess, exorbitance, a sort of exhibitionism of the bodied visible. The very train of the movement of “consciousness” is this sliding and slipping (and resultant friction) in and out of the lush ultramarine element of the visible. It is the texture of this velvet friction that causes the varied affects of thrill and the sense of an almost unexpected and subterranean planet of multivalent pleasures hidden beneath our skin. Of course one of the privileged sites of this equivalence of texture from seemingly widely divergent sources is the materiality of Merleau-Ponty’s prose itself. Here again, it is useful to turn to Genet’s film, which too, like Merleau-Ponty’s prose, is in itself a superbly apposite representation of this sentiment. Genet had written of the equivalence of disparate things (equivalence sometimes in opposition, as a sort of negative echo and mnemonic recall) in a manner that would deeply reverberate in Merleau-Ponty- and of the Valery Merleau-Ponty quotes in The Visible and the Invisible who had written that there is a type of blue so blue that only the red of blood could be more red. Likewise, in The Thief’s Journal, Genet had written, in partial explanation of the wide use of the motif of white flowers in so many of his writings throughout his career:
There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts. The fragility and delicacy of the former are of the same nature as the brutal insensitivity of the latter. My sexual excitement is of the oscillation from one to the other. Should I have to portray a convict- or a criminal- I shall so bedeck him with flowers that, as he disappears beneath them, he will himself become a flower, a gigantic and a new one. (1985:61)
It is worth staying with some other passages from Genet’s extended oeuvre to simply inhabit, for a little while longer the subtle concurrent beauties of the world he- and Merleau-Ponty- evoke. In The Miracle of the Rose Genet had written of how, in photographing a band of half stripped youthful pirate sailors, the photographic plate would itself simply register a rose. Furthermore, the autopsy of a condemned murderer would reveal a gigantic rose in place of a heart even as his shackles are transformed into a bouquet. In Notre Dame des fleurs, he had written:
The big, inflexible, strict pimps, their members in full bloom- I no longer know whether they are lilies or whether lilies and members are not totally they”. (1991: 62)
Though unfortunately this is not a theme I can develop in this particular paper for lack of space, we can see how deeply insightful Genet was in understanding twentieth century technologies of visual representation. Though the visual technology itself may be from sources as diverse as medicine, nevertheless they may be said to have a special type of power, providing links unthinkable in the conventional everyday surface world of the subject. To see the world in terms of the links autopsies and x rays and the continually developing fields of imaging technology (predominantly medical today) provide is to open ourselves up to the possibilities of more profluent visual architectures- in other words, to repeat Genet, not only to see members as lilies but also lilies and members as this continually limitless, open landscape of the “they”.
This concern with serendipitous, even surreptitious linkages is critical for Genet, as for Merleau-Ponty. These are what provide the inner links, operating at a more subliminal sense -if one can is careful to use that word in the ontological or visual sense- as they always are for Merleau-Ponty. Even though Genet published much more literature and made only one completed film, it is clear how his writings are more filmic and visual than print-centric. To read any of Genet’s novels is to realize how closely he was working with the visual staple of the auteur, especially of his time- the collage, the flashback, the close up. Genet was known to be obsessed with cinema throughout his life and has more unpublished pages of film scenarios than any other, purely print-centric, genre. This is evident in his elaborate notes on filming La Bagne- I quote it here to further illustrate my previous point of his persistent search for ingenious ways of initiating us into how the world exhibits and confers itself as sameness in difference through the linking eye of the camera:
I have a few stipulations for the way in which it is to be filmed. The close ups should be very dark. No close ups of faces, but those of gestures, which without the immodesty of the camera would stay unseen…In a certain situation, a clenched fist can move us enormously, if the eye registers the texture of the skin, a black nail here, a wart, and the furtive caress of a finger on the palm that we wouldn’t have seen at the theater, for example- and perhaps which the characters ignore. In effect the cinema is basically immodest. Let us use this facility to enlarge gestures. The camera can open a fly and search out its secrets…The enlarged appearance of a ball of saliva in the corner of a mouth can, as the scene unfolds, arouse an emotion in the viewer which would give a weight, a new depth to this drama (quoted in Giles 1991:80).
By way of conclusion, I wish to briefly return to the question of mastery in Merleau-Ponty and Genet. Max Weber has famously defined the bureaucratic, instrumentalised modern state as that which monopolises power and violence- he was referring particularly to the standing army and the police. For Merleau-Ponty, this totalitarianism at the origin is what needs to be fatally undermined. He understands well the bureaucrat- that disembodied mind of science and technocracy who thinks that there are no limits to human sovereignty and the exploitation of the world- here the world is reduced, to use Heidegger’s language, to pure standing reserve awaiting the exploitation of man. In an indirect sense, then, one may read Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of Valery’s Leonardo- this “pure man of mind”. Merleau-Ponty does think that this is a misguided interpretation of Leonardo, even of Leonardo the scientist. Nevertheless, such a pure man of mind provokes much discussion in Merleau-Ponty and may be said to be his indirect way of commenting on bureaucratic state machinery. In Genet the link is clear- the warder is the instrument of the state. The alternatives Merleau-Ponty and Genet pose is the dissolution of such power – this dissolution may be is indexed as a vulnerability to difference, fascination and adventure. The warder is seduced by the prisoners and Merleau-Ponty’s Leonardo accepts his limitations and goes on to produce great art. Merleau-Ponty writes in Cezanne’s Doubt, before introducing the section on Leonardo to illustrate this very point regarding the necessity to understand the relation of freedom and limitation–
Two things are certain about freedom- that we are never determined and yet that we never change …It is up to us to understand both these things simultaneously, as well as the way freedom dawns in us without breaking our bonds with the world. (1993:72) The world then is emphatically not to be reduced to standing reserve for it has a higher destiny than to be reduced to anthropomorphisms.
Let us follow the argument in some more detail. Merleau-Ponty cites Valery’s remark on how purely intellectual Leonardo was, a “man of mind”, a “monster of freedom” (1993:72). He then questions this interpretation of Valery by suggesting that even in a painting like Saint Anne, the Virgin and Child, there is yet a secret and violent history. He then uses Freud’s reading of the fellatio fantasy, though wishing to go even further, suggesting the eternalized childhood of Leonardo, who had been abandoned by his father and brought up only by his mother, a peasant girl, for four years. I bring this partly to show how largely congenial Merleau-Ponty’s reading would be to psychoanalysis- indeed he spends the last pages of the essay defending psychoanalysis, telling the reader how close it is to his project of proliferating the channels of communication between ourselves and our kin. But to me the equally interesting effect would be to try and use it in further interpreting Un Chant d’amour. The lines of eroticism in the film would have a wholly different quality if it were just a love story between two prisoners who never see each other- the particular quality of the film is attained only by the linking eye (like the auteur and the reader’s) of the warder. The warder may perhaps be read as the Censor of psychoanalysis, both a punitive super ego but also the frozen ego. In a sense then, in this inverted bildungsroman, it is the warder who is educated out of his place as the citizen-censor of the criminalized prisoners, and who is allowed an opening into a wholly different and multi faceted domain. As censor, like Valery’s Leonardo, he seems to be all mind, a disembodied, punitive figure of the law. The narrative momentum is sustained only as he cedes control- and this is finally visually accomplished, as in Freud’s interpretation of Leonardo’s dream, through fellatio (in the warder’s case by the gun, in Leonardo’s by the screen of the dream-reality itself). The warder, from being the bourgeois provider of order, becomes, like Leonardo, infantilized, and following Freud and Merleau-Ponty, in need of nursing, of the mother- but this realization is enabling, educative and productive. Merleau-Ponty writes-
At the height of his freedom he was, in that very freedom, the child he had been; he was free on one side only because bound on the other. (1993:74, italics Merleau-Ponty’s)
It is partly through such heuristic moves that one may bring the feminine (and perhaps thus the heterosexual too)- as the viscous inception and and not so much as a repression- into a “gay” film. The warder thus re founds and re launches himself, from the illusion of being the monster of pure freedom -the bourgeois self righteous citizen, but also the ego or “internal” super ego frozen in the posture of moral righteousness- to someone questioning his work, and someone in dialogue and not in authority and judgment over his fellow citizen-prisoner. And this may be the opportune and optimistic note to conclude this paper with- by returning to hope- not naïve, but not skeptical either- and one always prospecting for fissures in the wall of the calcified political-ontic. Genet’s citizen-warder seems some way along the line to becoming closer to the ideal of Merleau-Ponty as Merleau-Ponty eloquently summarizes with regard to the perennial refusal of mastery in Cezanne-
That is why he questioned the picture emerging beneath his hand, why he hung on the glances other people directed toward his canvas. That is why he never finished working. We never get away from our life. We never see ideas or freedom face to face. (1993: 75)
Indeed, it is this impossibility, this viscosity that is resistant to too hasty a representation (mastery) - of a self-righteous political sort or otherwise- that can open the door to a differently furnished human democracy and solidarity that is not simply a return to a rights- based liberal humanism or a now routinized multi culturalist notion of citizenship or community.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971.
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. London: Barnes and Noble, 1994.
Genet, Jean. Miracle of the Rose. New York: Grove Press Inc, 1951.
Our Lady of the Flowers. New York: Bantam Books, 1943.
Un Chant d’amour [Video Recording]. No date.
The Thief’s Journal. London: Penguin. 1985.
Querelle. New York: Grove Press.1989.
Giles, Jane. The Cinema of Jean Genet: Un Chant d’amour. London: British Film Institute Publishing, 1991.
Heidegger, Martin. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2001.
Johnson, Galena A. (ed.) The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting. Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1993.
Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis. New York: W.W.Norton and Company, 1981.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. New York: Washington Square Press, 1984.
Saint Genet. London: Pantheon Books, 1983.
Silverman, Kaja. World Spectators. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
The Threshold of the Visible World. London: Routledge, 1995.
modernist-rural-
Nikhil Govind
In this paper I will concern myself chiefly with Basil Bunting’s (1900-1985), Briggflatts (1964), while also briefly glancing at the lineation of an occasionally similar theme in William Carlos William’s (1883-1963) Paterson, finally published in full in 1992, and Allen Tate’s (1899-1979) The Swimmers (1953). This common theme that I am concerned with tracing out is that of the conceptualizations and investments in the idea(l) of the “rural”. I hope to investigate in a preliminary manner how this notion of the rural may be positively conceptualized (if at all- or is it only the obverse of the urban?), and what the criteria of such a “rurality” may be- especially with relations to other literary questions such as language, history, the polity, and the tasks and pleasures of personal memoration. As said I will focus chiefly on Bunting, while occasionally invoking Paterson and The Swimmers.
I do not have a simple answer as to why I bring these works together- by the end of the paper I hope it will be made clearer, but for now, perhaps the biographical facts of literary history might start one off. It is well known that Basil Bunting and William Carlos Williams poets were old friends and mutual admirers from the nineteen twenties onward. Bunting, for example, was to write to his colleague the poet Louis Zukofsky (1904-1978), in 1951-“ My excellence, if I have one, isn’t new or striking…I’d say I remember the musical origin of poetry, the singing side of it, better than anybody else except Ezra and Carlos Williams” (Forde 1973: 125). I will discuss Allen Tate, who wasn’t directly part of this circle, but who was, though perhaps in a different way, equally invested in the question of the “agrarian”, in a separate section.
The theme of the space- (if not perhaps the rural qua rural) is central to Paterson too. In that same year of 1951, Carlos Williams was to write in his A Statement by William Carlos Williams about the poem Paterson:
Thus the city I wanted as my object had to be one that I knew in its most intimate details. New York was too big, too much a congeries of the entire world’s facets. I wanted something nearer home, something knowable. I deliberately selected Paterson as my reality. My own suburb was not distinguished or varied enough for my purpose. There were other possibilities but Paterson topped them (William Carlos Williams 1951: xiii).
Speaking then in telegraphic fashion, one conventionally understands modernism to be interwoven with the names of the great urban centers- Paris (especially in the twenties), New York, London. Sometimes, these legendary urban spaces can be looked at even further down a microscope- not just London, but the northern part of Soho, Charlotte’s street, perhaps Klenfeldt’s Fitzroy Tavern (Alldritt 1998: 155). But what is overlooked is that many of these same major players- Ezra Pound (1885-1972), D H Lawrence (1885-1930) and Bunting to name a few, moved rather quickly away from these metroplii and spent much of their lives in more picturesque, perhaps ‘rural’ places. Already by 1920, Lawrence had spoken of “leaving London forever”. Around the same time, Pound was to leave too- perhaps then, this leave-taking of the city was also a leave taking of an overly urbanized “history”, and the chief appeal of places as far afield as Mexico or Italy seem to carry with them at least some residue of a past that wasn’t entirely wiped out by urbanization and the standardization of labor. This leave taking of the city for the country was of course a gesture that would be repeated again and again, in England and the United States- one need only think of the renewed importance of “nature” in influential post war British poets like Ted Hughes, and in the ideologisation of the agrarian south in the United States at different times -I will discuss Allen Tate briefly a little later. This gesture of the turning away from the city- articulated in its classic modern form from at least as early as Rousseau in the third quarter of the eighteenth century- is one that never entirely fails to work, nor yet entirely succeeds in failing. Perhaps at some point in the future, in an urban science fiction world, it will lose its ideological charge, but for the twentieth century, beleaguered as it was from the turn of the century, it has failed to wholly fade its charm and fruitfulness.
Nevertheless, among the many uneasy questions such a “rural nationalism” raises, is the danger of the too-easy linking of this rural, organic community to a pre-capitalist age, where then, consequently, by an inexorable logic, capitalism is often signaled by the legitimacy of usury, which again then, is often linked to a fascism/ anti-semiticism. Pound of course was the one most implicated in this line of thinking, of generalizing the individual on supposedly racial or national characteristics- but what does one make of Bunting making comments such as these in the 1936, even he was living amongst the Spanish in the Canary Islands, playing chess with the then Colonel Franco:
I don’t like Spaniards at all as a rule. I like them better than Germans, but they are a cruel people, the Spaniards. One gets tired of their cruelty, of their neglect of comfort, of the horrible food the Spaniards find good enough for themselves even when they’re rich enough to afford decent food. But the climate in the Canaries is delightful. The scenery is very good. The girls are very pretty. (Terrell 1980: 51).
All this is certainly of relevance in following the career of Bunting- after not only London, Rapallo, the Canary Islands, as also Teheran, he returned to the Northumbria of his youth, and sufficient literary criticism has centered on this provincialized, yet thereby renewed, nationalism and commemoration of his “cattle stealing ancestors, Quaker ancestors”. As early as the late twenties, Bunting had said of the city:
I said goodbye to London. I knew London very well, but I never did like towns, especially big ones. My first instinct was to get as far away from towns as possible. I went up to a shepherd’s cottage in the hills in central Northumberland. It was seven miles walk to the cigarette shop and four miles walk to the pub. It was a very pleasant place up thee. I learned a little about how they train sheep dogs”. (Terrell 1980: 47)
And yet, later in life, after the world journeys, when he had to stay for some decades in Northumbria, a little of the charm of the rural wore off as he found himself living the life of a minor proofreader of seedsmen’s catalogs, suburban train times and electoral lists. He was then to say:
Provincial journalists are not capable of any thought of any sort at all… They go to newspaper offices from the most ignorant parts of secondary-modern schools. That’s where they are recruited… They see nothing and their notions of life are probably adopted from out-of-date novels.” (Terrell 1980: 60-61).
Then again, in the more official, formal lecturing that he did after the fame of Briggflatts, he also found himself saying:
Perhaps I am too hopeful in imagining that the impulse of Northumbrian culture may not yet quite have vanished from the North. I think that our best hope of an art of a literature doesn’t lie in imitating what has come to us from Rome or Europe or from the south of England, but in trying to discern what is our own and to develop it…” (Terrell 1980: 234).
But this Northumbrian culture is not merely in the present, in the spoken language of its farmers, but more so in its (vanishing) linguistic history:
There were various characteristics of Northumbrian art which I find repeat themselves through the centuries now and again when you get Northumbrians who are at all sensitive doing anything in the way of the arts. The first great achievement, of course of the peculiar mixture which grew there, which I suppose must have been two-third Celtic and one-third Anglic, the Codex Lindisfarnensis, the big famous pages and some of the initials in it, are among the major achievements of Western art (Terrell 1980: 244).
Furthermore, in some defiance of his earlier organicist thinking, he uses the figure of the craftsman as mediating the metaphysical life (and the literacy of high urban culture or ‘art’ or archived and written ‘history’) with the labor of the peasant- one recalls how central the mason, timing his mallet, is in Briggflatts:
I have never supposed a poem to be organic at all. I don’t think the thing grows, its built and put together by a craftsman (Terrell 1980: 235).
But the craftsman then belongs equally, if somewhat problematically, to the “lower” life of the urban proletariat too, as is indicated in much of the beginning of Part Two of Briggflatts:
Every revivification of poetry has taken the same route, towards the language of the streets and the cadences of song or bodily movement (Terrell 1980: 236).
From the very first reviews that appeared of Briggflatts, this uneasy fungibility of rural mythmaking was at issue. Kenneth Cox was to opine:
Yet it is the long practice of the translator, the persistent testing of every word, which has made possible the unfailing discretion with which the life and appearance of the country is represented without a trace of provincialism or lapse into the banal (Forde 1991: 242).
Briggflatts is named after a place, as is Paterson. The location, and siting, of the poem is thus not a secondary theme but a fundamental semantic horizon. Before I begin a slower and more detailed analysis of Briggflats the better to reflect on the elements that constitute this “narrativizability” of rural space, I would like to digress briefly to two other related works.
ALLEN TATE’S THE RUNNERS
One notices from the very First Book of Briggflatts that the language does not attempt a dense linguistic history- as perhaps Bunting’s friend and contemporary Hugh MacDiarmid (the pen name of Crisdean Mac a’ Ghreidhir, 1892-1978) does in Drunk Man looks at a Thistle (1926). So language specifies place then in a more indirect mode, if at all. Furthermore, Bunting does not bring up the classic rural scene, either in its simple, or in its more elaborated and indirect modes. Such a writing of the rural was used by poets like MacDiarmid’s contemporaries- Robert Louis Stevenson(1850-1894) and J M Barrie (1860-1937), and the group known as the “kailyard” tradition of poets, which brought back folklore and fantasy into a renewed pastoralized (i.e. the stylized rural) landscape (Bold 1988). But one may also say it was used in poets like Allen Tate, a poet clearly, and perhaps primarily, concerned with the agrarian-rural fighting the good fight against industrialization. Tate’s classicism often elaborated precisely such scenes of the stylized rural, the rural often being invoked by simply the proper names of the region- in his famous poem The Swimmers discussed below, the subtitle is: Scene: Montgomery County. The specific-rural could also be invoked by the botanical names of local plants- this single poem, a “long poem” by Tate’s standards, but only three pages long, has the word-names poison-oak, mullein (though mullein has an origin stretching clearly back to the old world, through Latin, Anglo Norman and Middle English), sycamore, sassafras (this being specifically a North American tree, though again with a late Latin and Spanish-origin name), horse fly, stonecrop (again a plant name of Middle English origin), as well as words like scuppernong (a clear North Carolina Americanism, probably of American Indian origin from the early nineteenth century, for the silvery, amber green muscadine grape vine of the south eastern United States)- this last especially leavening Tate’s perhaps over-smooth classicism (American Heritage Dictionary 2006). These scenes were often contemporary- even anthropological, with its perceptive eye for the rural scene, idiom, farmer’s names. They were also often historical, especially in relation to the particular history of the American South. Very briefly then, one may look at the following lines that capture Tate’s keen visual perception of the rural scene (both the image of children at play in a rural landscape, and the marriage of dual accuracies of the phonetic with the visual- (“When a thrush idling in the tulip tree”), his classical allusions (“…mullein under the ear / Soft as Nausicaa’s palm”), his sense of Southern history, and the overall direct clarity of the invocation and interpretation of that history- one can keep all this mind when comparing it to Bunting’s more indirect treatment of similar concerns. Here below are Tate’s lines, in the latter half of the poem, an adolescent (as Bunting would be in large parts of Briggflatts, with a similar loosening of the bonds of innocence) witnessing a lynching. This is written in the same moment of the early fifties (here, 1953) that we have been discussing with regard to Bunting and Carlos Williams, and with whom we are comparing Tate’s use of ‘rural-historical material’.
Kentucky water, clear springs: a boy fleeing
To water under the dry Kentucky son
His four little friends in tandem with him, seeing
Long shadows of grapevine wriggle and run
Over the green swirl; mullein under the ear
Soft as Nausicaa’s palm; sullen fun
Savage as childhood’s thin harmonious tear:
……..
Dog-days: the dusty leaves where rain delayed
Hung low on poison-oak and scuppernong…(Tate 1965)
CARLOS WILLIAMS’ PATERSON
We have thus come up with a cluster of themes- the rural and childhood, the historical- personal for Tate, perhaps a sense of the “mythic” for Bunting. Bunting’s “mythic” world, which I discuss more comprehensively in the next and last section, is insistently not just pre Empire (including the time of the colonial occupation of North America), but pre Norman- a time of that most spectacular mythic political moment of all- that of conquest. This pattern of mythic sovereignty consistently puncturing history is repeated often in Paterson too. I will discuss just one instance for this paper.
If the attempted foreground of Paterson is the building of the cityscape, not quite rural or suburbia or New York, what underlies this foreground and threatens to keep appearing is the underlife of extraordinary crime, or strange physical acts of madness and freakishness. Repeatedly, in Paterson the calm history writing of progressing (and progressive) America is interspersed with the prose of the counter narrative of the insurgent madness of the unaccomodated, yet well loved historical Subject. This excerpt is from very early on, in the first book, on the very ground of the origin and nomination (i.e. naming) of the city of Paterson.
THE GRRRREAT HISTORY of that
Old time Jersey Patriot
N.F PATERSON!
(N for Noah; F for Faitoute; P for short
“Jersey Lightning” to the boys.
[The poem then digresses- focusing less on the great N F Paterson and his founding act of getting the town a large bridge, an engineering marvel- than on his alter ego, the boss of the cotton spinners, Sam Patch. This entire section of a page is almost exclusively in prose. The narrative tells of how this Sam Patch:]
…had declared so frequently that he would jump from the rocks that he was placed under arrest at various times. He had previously been locked up in the basement under the bank with a bad case of delirium tremens, but on the day the bridge was pulled across the chasm he was let out. Some thought he was crazy. They were not far wrong.
[Indeed, the narrative then traces the subsequent legendary character of Sam Patch, who became famous throughout the country, traveling far up west, his only companions being a fox and bear which he picked up in his travels- once he had even thrown his pet bear from a cliff overlooking the Niagara, and then jumped after it to rescue it further downstream. Finally though, Patch died, perhaps because he was suddenly asked to make a speech before jumping, to a large assembled crowd, and this call to eloquence so befuddled him that he confusedly plummeted to his death (Williams 1992: 15,16).
Here we have the contrast of a bridge being built by the great patriot Paterson, ushering in the “place” from its purely “natural-rural” topography into the modern age, the latter with its concomitance of technology and the ‘historic’. But we find that what the poem actually ends up narrating (and what the people of the town reminisce most about) is instead that shadow-character of progressive America, Sam Patch- the itinerant freak, with strange skills of uncertain use, closer to animals and pure physical action and pleasure than to words. Indeed words prove to cause his eventual death, and wordlessness would be the condition of slipping through the archivization required of official historical consciousness, only to be briefly resurrected or ghosted again by prose within a poem.
What I am trying to show here is how the question of rural-space is always shot through with other questions- and that the singularity of narrative and memory can only be glimpsed in the refraction caused by the pull of a teleological modernity against the infarct of the “rural”- this latter always doomed to live within quotation marks, and at least as much as the more self-explicitly constantly constructive category of its conceptual twin- the ‘urban’ (but also, in a further second series of twinning, urban is twinned to ‘written, self-archiving history’). The urban-rural is thus a double headed, spirallous asymptote.
BASIL BUNTING’S BRIGGFLATTS
I will now concentrate the rest of the paper on Bunting’s Briggflatts. Bunting himself had been invisible to written, self-publicizing history a long time after the great “first generation” of the twenties and thirties, when he was a contemporary of Pound and Zukofsky. This first generation had been well institutionalized as “history” by the literary community, and the tales of Paris and London in the interwar years were the staple of much post War scholarship. But Bunting, perhaps not unlike the later Pound, had largely disappeared from the more active literary minds of the same post war generation- history here thus having its double connotation of both being revered and canonized and valued- but also, “as history”, as over, as less piercingly relevant. Thus it was only by the somewhat-accidental encouragement of the much younger fellow Northumbrian poet Tom Pickard, in the early sixties, that Bunting was to seriously begin writing verse again- and perhaps paradoxically, it was this almost forgotten and ex-revered poet who only now set out to write his most memorable poem, and perhaps cause a further reshuffling of key modernist literary genealogies, and inaugurate a new rememoration of modernism.
What then was it that chiefly inspired this flowering of the later Bunting? They were, according to Bunting himself, two key debts. One was to music, to Beethoven’s last quartets, the music of Byrd and Monteverdi. The other was to:
Peggy Greenbank and her whole ambience, the Rawthey valley, the fells of Lunedale, the Viking inheritance all spent save the faint smell of it. The ancient Quaker life accepted without thought and without suspicion that it might seem eccentric: and what happens when one deliberately thrusts love aside, as I did then- it has its revenge. That must be a longish poem… Briggflatts comes from the name of a small hamlet in the Pennine mountains in a very beautiful situation in what the Americans call a valley which we Northerners call a dale. (Forde 1991: 207, 213)
Briggflatts was the place the thirteen year old Bunting spent half of every summer holiday till the end of his school years with his friend’s sister Peggy, who was four years younger than him. There was also an old, much ruined castle there, believed to be King Arthur’s, as well as, in addition and more historically accurately, a Viking settlement. One may also remember that Northumbria was D H Lawrence’s and Wordsworth’s country, and there was a fairly strong tradition, even in Bunting’s childhood, of a self conscious, broadly rural and proletarian regional consciousness, a pride in their distinct kind of life. Bunting’s father used to read out Wordsworth to him when he was a child, and later, Bunting was to carefully use the Whittaker’s North Countrie Ballads and Song’s. In fact, Bunting cited his differences with Pound over the evaluation of Wordsworth as a chief and decisive difference between their historical poetics.
Bunting famously planned the poem from a five part schema, and then
…simply looking at the diagram say obviously what any poet thinking of shape would say which is Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter (Forde 210).
[Then this “natural”, rural reckoning of seasons is juxtaposed to the urban- historical]- “Spring is around Briggflatts, Summer is all over the place- London, the Arctic, the Mediterranean, Autumn is mostly in the Dales, and the last part is mostly on the Northumberland coast. Love and betrayal are spring’s adventures, and the wisdom of elders and the remoteness of death, hardly more than a gravestone. In summer there is no rest form ambition and the lust of experience, never final…Autumn is for reflection…Old age can see at last the loveliness of things overlooked or despise, frost, the dancing maggots (Forde 211).
The poem does not of course follow the schema neatly. In the first few stanzas of the first Part itself, set in a Briggflatts spring, there is already death and betrayal. There are the exquisite first lines on the bull:
Brag sweet tenor bull
descant on Rawthey’s madrigal,
each pebbled its part
for the fells’ late spring.
Dance tiptoe bull
black against may ( Bunting 59)
Bunting does insist that close observation does reveal that the bull in fact does have a melodious tenor voice, in contrast to the raucous contralto of the cow, and that in spring, when with the cows, he does dance on his toes, showing off his protective indispensability to the accompanying cows.
But as said, the rural is not idyllic, and only a few lines later we are introduced to the slowworm- in fact as the line says, the poem is “paving the slowworm’s way”. The slowworm is a non Indo European, Old English word, a shiny snake like lizard feeding on slugs and popularly believed to be blind- “cold squirm snaking flank”. The slowworm also probably references the song of the forest bird in Wagner’s Siegfried, a song that the hero hears only when he has slipped into an unfamiliar world; equally it may have been the song of the wood dove in Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, a work that Bunting had long admired- and one knows how crucial the translation of musical effect into print and reading was to Bunting (Alldritt 1998:160).
This close observation of the rural is nevertheless capable of abstracting itself from such close empiricism-
Delight dwindles. Blame
stays the same (Bunting 62)
And a few lines earlier:
The solemn mallet says:
In the grave’s slot
he lies. We rot (Bunting 59).
It is in this atmosphere that the theme of adolescent love is picturized- and already we are visited, a few lines further on, by the central figure of Bloodaxe-
By such acts
men killed Bloodaxe (Bunting 60).
Eric Bloodaxe, the favorite son of Harald Finehair, was the chief protagonist of the Icelandic sagas composed in Iceland in the early thirteenth century- Eric himself lived in the tenth, frequently invading Scotland, the region around the Irish Sea, and had declared himself King of Northumbria. His wife Gunnhild was often believed to be a powerful witch, perhaps helping him kill all of his brothers for the throne- however, there is no mention of Eric in the contemporary Anglo Saxon chronicle of Athelstan, a fact that would surely have appealed to Bunting who so often insisted on the separateness of Northumbria. Bloodaxe is more widely discussed in the skaldic poem, the Eiriksmal (The Lay of Eric), where he is represented in heroic mode as he enters Valhalla, and is welcomed by the gods after his death at Stainmore (Hall 1984). The skaldic poems themselves were believed to have been composed by poets in chains, in the eye of death.
Thus the coupled organic kinship of the childhood-rural:
her girdle is greased with lard;
hunger is stayed on her settle …(Bunting 74)
This memorable adolescent love is disturbed by the coupling, on the other side, of myth-fractricide- facilitated by the historical memory of the passionate love of the stereotypally gendered Gunnhild the witch and Bloodaxe the warrior-king-one of the Latin texts even rename Eric Bloodaxe as fratris interfector, the brother-killer. Again, my concern in this paper is to show how the evocation of organicity (and in this paper I prioritize the rural, but as we can see, the rural functions often as a mnemonic for other forms of organicity- kinship itself, a sort of almost pre-sexual sexual love, youth) inevitably seems to require the unrelenting counter cluster of images- of vivid murder, scandal, betrayal, the freakish as in Paterson and the lynching as in The Swimmers. The counter-organic is evoked by images of uncontainable violence, conquest and re-conquest with little emphasis on administration- this latter being of course the quintessential modern political preoccupation. In contrast, in Eric’s time, the only sovereign value (and value of sovereignty) was conquest - the great King was the great warrior, not the great administrator. All this is opposed in Bunting to the narrativizable archive, the nameable sequence of events that we can call “history” (this includes bureaucratic notions of progress and administration), this latter, in Bunting’s reckoning, beginning after the Norman-Anglican invasion, with all its originary resonances for later “histories”, with its attendant new understandings of kingship and language.
The poems unfolds in phasic fashion, as the coupling and violent decoupling incarnate in various avatars in spring, summer, autumn and winter- in this very organizing trope of ‘rural, cosmic, atmospheric rhythms’, one can see again how myth is not sublatable to the homogenizing effect of historical time. The city (in the “summer” phase of the poem) is the conventionally classic site of alienation, human crowds, loveless promiscuity, squalor, abortion, failed poem-making, “rash, chancre, fistula”:
he lies with one to long for another,
sick, self maimed, self-hating,
obstinate, mating
beauty with squalor to beget lines still born.” (Bunting 63)
These still born lives of the city are contrasted to the almost specialized knowledge of rural life and Northumbrian terms that recur throughout the poem- tilled acre, steading smell, hearth’s crackle, bergs and fogs.
In the autumnal Part Four, there is a sense of return from travels (and the image of Alexander realizing the vanity of the world) to the specific rural locale of the local Dale. But lest it be understood for the comfort of the return of a prodigal son to the womb of the mother and the law of the father, there is, immediately the evocation of masculinist killing:
I hear Aneurin number the dead and rejoice,
being adult male of a merciless species (Bunting 73)
This evocation is achieved through the figure of the great Welsh poet Aneurin. Aneurin, according to Bunting, deserved to be far more widely known than he was- in the early Dark Ages he “left a splendid poem called Goddoddin, mourning the men killed at the battle of Catterick by the newly arrived English”(Forde 1991: 233). Here again, these great medieval poets are offered as a contrast to the staid conventional English scholarship of the literary mainstream of the South:
Clear Cymric voices carry well this autumn night,
Aneurin and Taliesin, cruel owls
for whom it is never altogether dark, crying
before the rules made poetry a pedant’s game (Bunting 73).
In conclusion then, I wish to reiterate the chief point of this paper, which is that the rural, a persisting crucial fount of value in much modernist poetry, nevertheless is not autonomous or sovereign, and indeed receives much of its power by aligning itself as an equal term in a long, linear series of related organic mnemonics- adolescent love or trauma (like the witnessing of a lynching, history made painful and suddenly clear), rich linguistic histories, the pre industrial pastoral, the ‘innocent’ itinerant Sam Patch close to animals and raw physicality, and finally as obverse of the city’s lovelessness and squalor. The rural thus cannot be a simple idealization of hyperlinked organicities, but rather exists solely in the intertexture of the dramatic contrasting of such organicities with their obverse- the betrayal of that childhood love, of the abandonment of home and the discontents of return, of the provinciality of mofussil intellectual life, of the vacuoles of empty progressiveness, of the richness and vitality of crowded urban proletarian living.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aldritt, Keith. The Poet as Spy: The Life and Wild Times of Basil Bunting, Aurum Press, London, 1998.
Bold, Alan. Hugh Macdiarmid: The Terrible Crystal, Routledge, London, 1983.
Bunting, Basil: Complete Poems, New Directions, New York, 2000.
Forde, Victoria, The Poetry of Basil Bunting, Bloodaxe Books, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1991.
____________ Music and Meaning in the Poetry of Basil Bunting, Notre Dame, Indiana, 1973.
Hall, Richard. The Viking Dig; The Excavations at York, Bodley Head, 1984.
Tate, Allen. Collected Poems, Farrar Straus Giroux, New York, 1965.
Teller, Caroll F. (ed.) Basil Bunting: Man and Poet, National Poetry Foundation Inc., Maine, 1980.
Williams, William Carlos. Paterson, New Directions, New York, 1992.
In this paper I will concern myself chiefly with Basil Bunting’s (1900-1985), Briggflatts (1964), while also briefly glancing at the lineation of an occasionally similar theme in William Carlos William’s (1883-1963) Paterson, finally published in full in 1992, and Allen Tate’s (1899-1979) The Swimmers (1953). This common theme that I am concerned with tracing out is that of the conceptualizations and investments in the idea(l) of the “rural”. I hope to investigate in a preliminary manner how this notion of the rural may be positively conceptualized (if at all- or is it only the obverse of the urban?), and what the criteria of such a “rurality” may be- especially with relations to other literary questions such as language, history, the polity, and the tasks and pleasures of personal memoration. As said I will focus chiefly on Bunting, while occasionally invoking Paterson and The Swimmers.
I do not have a simple answer as to why I bring these works together- by the end of the paper I hope it will be made clearer, but for now, perhaps the biographical facts of literary history might start one off. It is well known that Basil Bunting and William Carlos Williams poets were old friends and mutual admirers from the nineteen twenties onward. Bunting, for example, was to write to his colleague the poet Louis Zukofsky (1904-1978), in 1951-“ My excellence, if I have one, isn’t new or striking…I’d say I remember the musical origin of poetry, the singing side of it, better than anybody else except Ezra and Carlos Williams” (Forde 1973: 125). I will discuss Allen Tate, who wasn’t directly part of this circle, but who was, though perhaps in a different way, equally invested in the question of the “agrarian”, in a separate section.
The theme of the space- (if not perhaps the rural qua rural) is central to Paterson too. In that same year of 1951, Carlos Williams was to write in his A Statement by William Carlos Williams about the poem Paterson:
Thus the city I wanted as my object had to be one that I knew in its most intimate details. New York was too big, too much a congeries of the entire world’s facets. I wanted something nearer home, something knowable. I deliberately selected Paterson as my reality. My own suburb was not distinguished or varied enough for my purpose. There were other possibilities but Paterson topped them (William Carlos Williams 1951: xiii).
Speaking then in telegraphic fashion, one conventionally understands modernism to be interwoven with the names of the great urban centers- Paris (especially in the twenties), New York, London. Sometimes, these legendary urban spaces can be looked at even further down a microscope- not just London, but the northern part of Soho, Charlotte’s street, perhaps Klenfeldt’s Fitzroy Tavern (Alldritt 1998: 155). But what is overlooked is that many of these same major players- Ezra Pound (1885-1972), D H Lawrence (1885-1930) and Bunting to name a few, moved rather quickly away from these metroplii and spent much of their lives in more picturesque, perhaps ‘rural’ places. Already by 1920, Lawrence had spoken of “leaving London forever”. Around the same time, Pound was to leave too- perhaps then, this leave-taking of the city was also a leave taking of an overly urbanized “history”, and the chief appeal of places as far afield as Mexico or Italy seem to carry with them at least some residue of a past that wasn’t entirely wiped out by urbanization and the standardization of labor. This leave taking of the city for the country was of course a gesture that would be repeated again and again, in England and the United States- one need only think of the renewed importance of “nature” in influential post war British poets like Ted Hughes, and in the ideologisation of the agrarian south in the United States at different times -I will discuss Allen Tate briefly a little later. This gesture of the turning away from the city- articulated in its classic modern form from at least as early as Rousseau in the third quarter of the eighteenth century- is one that never entirely fails to work, nor yet entirely succeeds in failing. Perhaps at some point in the future, in an urban science fiction world, it will lose its ideological charge, but for the twentieth century, beleaguered as it was from the turn of the century, it has failed to wholly fade its charm and fruitfulness.
Nevertheless, among the many uneasy questions such a “rural nationalism” raises, is the danger of the too-easy linking of this rural, organic community to a pre-capitalist age, where then, consequently, by an inexorable logic, capitalism is often signaled by the legitimacy of usury, which again then, is often linked to a fascism/ anti-semiticism. Pound of course was the one most implicated in this line of thinking, of generalizing the individual on supposedly racial or national characteristics- but what does one make of Bunting making comments such as these in the 1936, even he was living amongst the Spanish in the Canary Islands, playing chess with the then Colonel Franco:
I don’t like Spaniards at all as a rule. I like them better than Germans, but they are a cruel people, the Spaniards. One gets tired of their cruelty, of their neglect of comfort, of the horrible food the Spaniards find good enough for themselves even when they’re rich enough to afford decent food. But the climate in the Canaries is delightful. The scenery is very good. The girls are very pretty. (Terrell 1980: 51).
All this is certainly of relevance in following the career of Bunting- after not only London, Rapallo, the Canary Islands, as also Teheran, he returned to the Northumbria of his youth, and sufficient literary criticism has centered on this provincialized, yet thereby renewed, nationalism and commemoration of his “cattle stealing ancestors, Quaker ancestors”. As early as the late twenties, Bunting had said of the city:
I said goodbye to London. I knew London very well, but I never did like towns, especially big ones. My first instinct was to get as far away from towns as possible. I went up to a shepherd’s cottage in the hills in central Northumberland. It was seven miles walk to the cigarette shop and four miles walk to the pub. It was a very pleasant place up thee. I learned a little about how they train sheep dogs”. (Terrell 1980: 47)
And yet, later in life, after the world journeys, when he had to stay for some decades in Northumbria, a little of the charm of the rural wore off as he found himself living the life of a minor proofreader of seedsmen’s catalogs, suburban train times and electoral lists. He was then to say:
Provincial journalists are not capable of any thought of any sort at all… They go to newspaper offices from the most ignorant parts of secondary-modern schools. That’s where they are recruited… They see nothing and their notions of life are probably adopted from out-of-date novels.” (Terrell 1980: 60-61).
Then again, in the more official, formal lecturing that he did after the fame of Briggflatts, he also found himself saying:
Perhaps I am too hopeful in imagining that the impulse of Northumbrian culture may not yet quite have vanished from the North. I think that our best hope of an art of a literature doesn’t lie in imitating what has come to us from Rome or Europe or from the south of England, but in trying to discern what is our own and to develop it…” (Terrell 1980: 234).
But this Northumbrian culture is not merely in the present, in the spoken language of its farmers, but more so in its (vanishing) linguistic history:
There were various characteristics of Northumbrian art which I find repeat themselves through the centuries now and again when you get Northumbrians who are at all sensitive doing anything in the way of the arts. The first great achievement, of course of the peculiar mixture which grew there, which I suppose must have been two-third Celtic and one-third Anglic, the Codex Lindisfarnensis, the big famous pages and some of the initials in it, are among the major achievements of Western art (Terrell 1980: 244).
Furthermore, in some defiance of his earlier organicist thinking, he uses the figure of the craftsman as mediating the metaphysical life (and the literacy of high urban culture or ‘art’ or archived and written ‘history’) with the labor of the peasant- one recalls how central the mason, timing his mallet, is in Briggflatts:
I have never supposed a poem to be organic at all. I don’t think the thing grows, its built and put together by a craftsman (Terrell 1980: 235).
But the craftsman then belongs equally, if somewhat problematically, to the “lower” life of the urban proletariat too, as is indicated in much of the beginning of Part Two of Briggflatts:
Every revivification of poetry has taken the same route, towards the language of the streets and the cadences of song or bodily movement (Terrell 1980: 236).
From the very first reviews that appeared of Briggflatts, this uneasy fungibility of rural mythmaking was at issue. Kenneth Cox was to opine:
Yet it is the long practice of the translator, the persistent testing of every word, which has made possible the unfailing discretion with which the life and appearance of the country is represented without a trace of provincialism or lapse into the banal (Forde 1991: 242).
Briggflatts is named after a place, as is Paterson. The location, and siting, of the poem is thus not a secondary theme but a fundamental semantic horizon. Before I begin a slower and more detailed analysis of Briggflats the better to reflect on the elements that constitute this “narrativizability” of rural space, I would like to digress briefly to two other related works.
ALLEN TATE’S THE RUNNERS
One notices from the very First Book of Briggflatts that the language does not attempt a dense linguistic history- as perhaps Bunting’s friend and contemporary Hugh MacDiarmid (the pen name of Crisdean Mac a’ Ghreidhir, 1892-1978) does in Drunk Man looks at a Thistle (1926). So language specifies place then in a more indirect mode, if at all. Furthermore, Bunting does not bring up the classic rural scene, either in its simple, or in its more elaborated and indirect modes. Such a writing of the rural was used by poets like MacDiarmid’s contemporaries- Robert Louis Stevenson(1850-1894) and J M Barrie (1860-1937), and the group known as the “kailyard” tradition of poets, which brought back folklore and fantasy into a renewed pastoralized (i.e. the stylized rural) landscape (Bold 1988). But one may also say it was used in poets like Allen Tate, a poet clearly, and perhaps primarily, concerned with the agrarian-rural fighting the good fight against industrialization. Tate’s classicism often elaborated precisely such scenes of the stylized rural, the rural often being invoked by simply the proper names of the region- in his famous poem The Swimmers discussed below, the subtitle is: Scene: Montgomery County. The specific-rural could also be invoked by the botanical names of local plants- this single poem, a “long poem” by Tate’s standards, but only three pages long, has the word-names poison-oak, mullein (though mullein has an origin stretching clearly back to the old world, through Latin, Anglo Norman and Middle English), sycamore, sassafras (this being specifically a North American tree, though again with a late Latin and Spanish-origin name), horse fly, stonecrop (again a plant name of Middle English origin), as well as words like scuppernong (a clear North Carolina Americanism, probably of American Indian origin from the early nineteenth century, for the silvery, amber green muscadine grape vine of the south eastern United States)- this last especially leavening Tate’s perhaps over-smooth classicism (American Heritage Dictionary 2006). These scenes were often contemporary- even anthropological, with its perceptive eye for the rural scene, idiom, farmer’s names. They were also often historical, especially in relation to the particular history of the American South. Very briefly then, one may look at the following lines that capture Tate’s keen visual perception of the rural scene (both the image of children at play in a rural landscape, and the marriage of dual accuracies of the phonetic with the visual- (“When a thrush idling in the tulip tree”), his classical allusions (“…mullein under the ear / Soft as Nausicaa’s palm”), his sense of Southern history, and the overall direct clarity of the invocation and interpretation of that history- one can keep all this mind when comparing it to Bunting’s more indirect treatment of similar concerns. Here below are Tate’s lines, in the latter half of the poem, an adolescent (as Bunting would be in large parts of Briggflatts, with a similar loosening of the bonds of innocence) witnessing a lynching. This is written in the same moment of the early fifties (here, 1953) that we have been discussing with regard to Bunting and Carlos Williams, and with whom we are comparing Tate’s use of ‘rural-historical material’.
Kentucky water, clear springs: a boy fleeing
To water under the dry Kentucky son
His four little friends in tandem with him, seeing
Long shadows of grapevine wriggle and run
Over the green swirl; mullein under the ear
Soft as Nausicaa’s palm; sullen fun
Savage as childhood’s thin harmonious tear:
……..
Dog-days: the dusty leaves where rain delayed
Hung low on poison-oak and scuppernong…(Tate 1965)
CARLOS WILLIAMS’ PATERSON
We have thus come up with a cluster of themes- the rural and childhood, the historical- personal for Tate, perhaps a sense of the “mythic” for Bunting. Bunting’s “mythic” world, which I discuss more comprehensively in the next and last section, is insistently not just pre Empire (including the time of the colonial occupation of North America), but pre Norman- a time of that most spectacular mythic political moment of all- that of conquest. This pattern of mythic sovereignty consistently puncturing history is repeated often in Paterson too. I will discuss just one instance for this paper.
If the attempted foreground of Paterson is the building of the cityscape, not quite rural or suburbia or New York, what underlies this foreground and threatens to keep appearing is the underlife of extraordinary crime, or strange physical acts of madness and freakishness. Repeatedly, in Paterson the calm history writing of progressing (and progressive) America is interspersed with the prose of the counter narrative of the insurgent madness of the unaccomodated, yet well loved historical Subject. This excerpt is from very early on, in the first book, on the very ground of the origin and nomination (i.e. naming) of the city of Paterson.
THE GRRRREAT HISTORY of that
Old time Jersey Patriot
N.F PATERSON!
(N for Noah; F for Faitoute; P for short
“Jersey Lightning” to the boys.
[The poem then digresses- focusing less on the great N F Paterson and his founding act of getting the town a large bridge, an engineering marvel- than on his alter ego, the boss of the cotton spinners, Sam Patch. This entire section of a page is almost exclusively in prose. The narrative tells of how this Sam Patch:]
…had declared so frequently that he would jump from the rocks that he was placed under arrest at various times. He had previously been locked up in the basement under the bank with a bad case of delirium tremens, but on the day the bridge was pulled across the chasm he was let out. Some thought he was crazy. They were not far wrong.
[Indeed, the narrative then traces the subsequent legendary character of Sam Patch, who became famous throughout the country, traveling far up west, his only companions being a fox and bear which he picked up in his travels- once he had even thrown his pet bear from a cliff overlooking the Niagara, and then jumped after it to rescue it further downstream. Finally though, Patch died, perhaps because he was suddenly asked to make a speech before jumping, to a large assembled crowd, and this call to eloquence so befuddled him that he confusedly plummeted to his death (Williams 1992: 15,16).
Here we have the contrast of a bridge being built by the great patriot Paterson, ushering in the “place” from its purely “natural-rural” topography into the modern age, the latter with its concomitance of technology and the ‘historic’. But we find that what the poem actually ends up narrating (and what the people of the town reminisce most about) is instead that shadow-character of progressive America, Sam Patch- the itinerant freak, with strange skills of uncertain use, closer to animals and pure physical action and pleasure than to words. Indeed words prove to cause his eventual death, and wordlessness would be the condition of slipping through the archivization required of official historical consciousness, only to be briefly resurrected or ghosted again by prose within a poem.
What I am trying to show here is how the question of rural-space is always shot through with other questions- and that the singularity of narrative and memory can only be glimpsed in the refraction caused by the pull of a teleological modernity against the infarct of the “rural”- this latter always doomed to live within quotation marks, and at least as much as the more self-explicitly constantly constructive category of its conceptual twin- the ‘urban’ (but also, in a further second series of twinning, urban is twinned to ‘written, self-archiving history’). The urban-rural is thus a double headed, spirallous asymptote.
BASIL BUNTING’S BRIGGFLATTS
I will now concentrate the rest of the paper on Bunting’s Briggflatts. Bunting himself had been invisible to written, self-publicizing history a long time after the great “first generation” of the twenties and thirties, when he was a contemporary of Pound and Zukofsky. This first generation had been well institutionalized as “history” by the literary community, and the tales of Paris and London in the interwar years were the staple of much post War scholarship. But Bunting, perhaps not unlike the later Pound, had largely disappeared from the more active literary minds of the same post war generation- history here thus having its double connotation of both being revered and canonized and valued- but also, “as history”, as over, as less piercingly relevant. Thus it was only by the somewhat-accidental encouragement of the much younger fellow Northumbrian poet Tom Pickard, in the early sixties, that Bunting was to seriously begin writing verse again- and perhaps paradoxically, it was this almost forgotten and ex-revered poet who only now set out to write his most memorable poem, and perhaps cause a further reshuffling of key modernist literary genealogies, and inaugurate a new rememoration of modernism.
What then was it that chiefly inspired this flowering of the later Bunting? They were, according to Bunting himself, two key debts. One was to music, to Beethoven’s last quartets, the music of Byrd and Monteverdi. The other was to:
Peggy Greenbank and her whole ambience, the Rawthey valley, the fells of Lunedale, the Viking inheritance all spent save the faint smell of it. The ancient Quaker life accepted without thought and without suspicion that it might seem eccentric: and what happens when one deliberately thrusts love aside, as I did then- it has its revenge. That must be a longish poem… Briggflatts comes from the name of a small hamlet in the Pennine mountains in a very beautiful situation in what the Americans call a valley which we Northerners call a dale. (Forde 1991: 207, 213)
Briggflatts was the place the thirteen year old Bunting spent half of every summer holiday till the end of his school years with his friend’s sister Peggy, who was four years younger than him. There was also an old, much ruined castle there, believed to be King Arthur’s, as well as, in addition and more historically accurately, a Viking settlement. One may also remember that Northumbria was D H Lawrence’s and Wordsworth’s country, and there was a fairly strong tradition, even in Bunting’s childhood, of a self conscious, broadly rural and proletarian regional consciousness, a pride in their distinct kind of life. Bunting’s father used to read out Wordsworth to him when he was a child, and later, Bunting was to carefully use the Whittaker’s North Countrie Ballads and Song’s. In fact, Bunting cited his differences with Pound over the evaluation of Wordsworth as a chief and decisive difference between their historical poetics.
Bunting famously planned the poem from a five part schema, and then
…simply looking at the diagram say obviously what any poet thinking of shape would say which is Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter (Forde 210).
[Then this “natural”, rural reckoning of seasons is juxtaposed to the urban- historical]- “Spring is around Briggflatts, Summer is all over the place- London, the Arctic, the Mediterranean, Autumn is mostly in the Dales, and the last part is mostly on the Northumberland coast. Love and betrayal are spring’s adventures, and the wisdom of elders and the remoteness of death, hardly more than a gravestone. In summer there is no rest form ambition and the lust of experience, never final…Autumn is for reflection…Old age can see at last the loveliness of things overlooked or despise, frost, the dancing maggots (Forde 211).
The poem does not of course follow the schema neatly. In the first few stanzas of the first Part itself, set in a Briggflatts spring, there is already death and betrayal. There are the exquisite first lines on the bull:
Brag sweet tenor bull
descant on Rawthey’s madrigal,
each pebbled its part
for the fells’ late spring.
Dance tiptoe bull
black against may ( Bunting 59)
Bunting does insist that close observation does reveal that the bull in fact does have a melodious tenor voice, in contrast to the raucous contralto of the cow, and that in spring, when with the cows, he does dance on his toes, showing off his protective indispensability to the accompanying cows.
But as said, the rural is not idyllic, and only a few lines later we are introduced to the slowworm- in fact as the line says, the poem is “paving the slowworm’s way”. The slowworm is a non Indo European, Old English word, a shiny snake like lizard feeding on slugs and popularly believed to be blind- “cold squirm snaking flank”. The slowworm also probably references the song of the forest bird in Wagner’s Siegfried, a song that the hero hears only when he has slipped into an unfamiliar world; equally it may have been the song of the wood dove in Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, a work that Bunting had long admired- and one knows how crucial the translation of musical effect into print and reading was to Bunting (Alldritt 1998:160).
This close observation of the rural is nevertheless capable of abstracting itself from such close empiricism-
Delight dwindles. Blame
stays the same (Bunting 62)
And a few lines earlier:
The solemn mallet says:
In the grave’s slot
he lies. We rot (Bunting 59).
It is in this atmosphere that the theme of adolescent love is picturized- and already we are visited, a few lines further on, by the central figure of Bloodaxe-
By such acts
men killed Bloodaxe (Bunting 60).
Eric Bloodaxe, the favorite son of Harald Finehair, was the chief protagonist of the Icelandic sagas composed in Iceland in the early thirteenth century- Eric himself lived in the tenth, frequently invading Scotland, the region around the Irish Sea, and had declared himself King of Northumbria. His wife Gunnhild was often believed to be a powerful witch, perhaps helping him kill all of his brothers for the throne- however, there is no mention of Eric in the contemporary Anglo Saxon chronicle of Athelstan, a fact that would surely have appealed to Bunting who so often insisted on the separateness of Northumbria. Bloodaxe is more widely discussed in the skaldic poem, the Eiriksmal (The Lay of Eric), where he is represented in heroic mode as he enters Valhalla, and is welcomed by the gods after his death at Stainmore (Hall 1984). The skaldic poems themselves were believed to have been composed by poets in chains, in the eye of death.
Thus the coupled organic kinship of the childhood-rural:
her girdle is greased with lard;
hunger is stayed on her settle …(Bunting 74)
This memorable adolescent love is disturbed by the coupling, on the other side, of myth-fractricide- facilitated by the historical memory of the passionate love of the stereotypally gendered Gunnhild the witch and Bloodaxe the warrior-king-one of the Latin texts even rename Eric Bloodaxe as fratris interfector, the brother-killer. Again, my concern in this paper is to show how the evocation of organicity (and in this paper I prioritize the rural, but as we can see, the rural functions often as a mnemonic for other forms of organicity- kinship itself, a sort of almost pre-sexual sexual love, youth) inevitably seems to require the unrelenting counter cluster of images- of vivid murder, scandal, betrayal, the freakish as in Paterson and the lynching as in The Swimmers. The counter-organic is evoked by images of uncontainable violence, conquest and re-conquest with little emphasis on administration- this latter being of course the quintessential modern political preoccupation. In contrast, in Eric’s time, the only sovereign value (and value of sovereignty) was conquest - the great King was the great warrior, not the great administrator. All this is opposed in Bunting to the narrativizable archive, the nameable sequence of events that we can call “history” (this includes bureaucratic notions of progress and administration), this latter, in Bunting’s reckoning, beginning after the Norman-Anglican invasion, with all its originary resonances for later “histories”, with its attendant new understandings of kingship and language.
The poems unfolds in phasic fashion, as the coupling and violent decoupling incarnate in various avatars in spring, summer, autumn and winter- in this very organizing trope of ‘rural, cosmic, atmospheric rhythms’, one can see again how myth is not sublatable to the homogenizing effect of historical time. The city (in the “summer” phase of the poem) is the conventionally classic site of alienation, human crowds, loveless promiscuity, squalor, abortion, failed poem-making, “rash, chancre, fistula”:
he lies with one to long for another,
sick, self maimed, self-hating,
obstinate, mating
beauty with squalor to beget lines still born.” (Bunting 63)
These still born lives of the city are contrasted to the almost specialized knowledge of rural life and Northumbrian terms that recur throughout the poem- tilled acre, steading smell, hearth’s crackle, bergs and fogs.
In the autumnal Part Four, there is a sense of return from travels (and the image of Alexander realizing the vanity of the world) to the specific rural locale of the local Dale. But lest it be understood for the comfort of the return of a prodigal son to the womb of the mother and the law of the father, there is, immediately the evocation of masculinist killing:
I hear Aneurin number the dead and rejoice,
being adult male of a merciless species (Bunting 73)
This evocation is achieved through the figure of the great Welsh poet Aneurin. Aneurin, according to Bunting, deserved to be far more widely known than he was- in the early Dark Ages he “left a splendid poem called Goddoddin, mourning the men killed at the battle of Catterick by the newly arrived English”(Forde 1991: 233). Here again, these great medieval poets are offered as a contrast to the staid conventional English scholarship of the literary mainstream of the South:
Clear Cymric voices carry well this autumn night,
Aneurin and Taliesin, cruel owls
for whom it is never altogether dark, crying
before the rules made poetry a pedant’s game (Bunting 73).
In conclusion then, I wish to reiterate the chief point of this paper, which is that the rural, a persisting crucial fount of value in much modernist poetry, nevertheless is not autonomous or sovereign, and indeed receives much of its power by aligning itself as an equal term in a long, linear series of related organic mnemonics- adolescent love or trauma (like the witnessing of a lynching, history made painful and suddenly clear), rich linguistic histories, the pre industrial pastoral, the ‘innocent’ itinerant Sam Patch close to animals and raw physicality, and finally as obverse of the city’s lovelessness and squalor. The rural thus cannot be a simple idealization of hyperlinked organicities, but rather exists solely in the intertexture of the dramatic contrasting of such organicities with their obverse- the betrayal of that childhood love, of the abandonment of home and the discontents of return, of the provinciality of mofussil intellectual life, of the vacuoles of empty progressiveness, of the richness and vitality of crowded urban proletarian living.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aldritt, Keith. The Poet as Spy: The Life and Wild Times of Basil Bunting, Aurum Press, London, 1998.
Bold, Alan. Hugh Macdiarmid: The Terrible Crystal, Routledge, London, 1983.
Bunting, Basil: Complete Poems, New Directions, New York, 2000.
Forde, Victoria, The Poetry of Basil Bunting, Bloodaxe Books, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1991.
____________ Music and Meaning in the Poetry of Basil Bunting, Notre Dame, Indiana, 1973.
Hall, Richard. The Viking Dig; The Excavations at York, Bodley Head, 1984.
Tate, Allen. Collected Poems, Farrar Straus Giroux, New York, 1965.
Teller, Caroll F. (ed.) Basil Bunting: Man and Poet, National Poetry Foundation Inc., Maine, 1980.
Williams, William Carlos. Paterson, New Directions, New York, 1992.
aanchalik dalits, naming & insult
Nikhil Govind
On Name Calling
INTRODUCTION
1. EUROPEAN BILDUNGSROMAN
In this paper I will concern myself with a single narrative of self-attestation- that of Joothan written by Omprakash Valmiki in 1993 (trans. by Arun Prabha Mukherjee, 2003). This type of narrative will, for the purposes of this present paper, be de-linked from the more specifically genetic matrix of the European Bildungsroman. I however do want to begin by speculating in a preliminary way in this first part of the introduction on the possible - if only through difference- linkages between the canonical European Bildungsroman and the novel I discuss. This is partly because I believe that later in my project I do hope to more explicitly return and rethink the modes of commutability between these frames of reference- for example, those involving both certain thematic elements (the labor of memory) as well as narrative strategies (delay, fragmentation) within a complex calculus of correlation and departure from the model of individual subject formation as envisaged in the classical nineteenth century European Bildungsroman.
Thus for example, in relation to this question of self-formation one might begin with the influential theorization offered by the literary scholar Franco Moretti in The Way of the World (Moretti 2000). In the chapter on the Bildungsroman in European Culture Moretti explicitly writes in the very first footnote to the chapter that his work cannot accommodate the non Europeanized Russian novel (i.e. he can write of Pushkin and Turgenev, but not Tolstoy or Dostoevsky) due to “ the persistence of a marked religious dimension (be it the “politico-national” version of War and Peace, or Dostoevsky’s ethico-metaphysical one), which attaches meaning to individual existence in ways unthinkable in the fully secularized version of the Western European Bildungsroman.” (Moretti 63 2000). Later in my project I am invested in precisely these “ethico-metaphysical” aspects of the Russian novel- so for me Moretti leaves out rather too much. But at the same time, one may also take some issue with the way Moretti uses any of these multivalent terms – politico-national, ethico-metaphysical etc, even with reference to the Western European Bildungsroman. The assumption that Dickens, for example, is less politico-nationalist is deeply questionable- one may mention his many opinionated responses to imperialism, especially to charged events like the 1857 “mutiny”. It is also important to challenge Moretti for these reasons - for the hint of purity and insularity that is supposed to mark the Western European Bildungsroman- disinfected as its form is supposed to be from religion, politics, nationalism, ethics, metaphysics- presumably in the name of a purely secular, urbanized, purely self-evolving European citizen. One may remember that Moretti had also excluded the American novel “ where, in addition, “nature” retains a symbolic value alien to the essentially urban thematics of the European novel” (Moretti 563 2000).
In the European Bildungsroman the act of naming itself is often a proof of the achievement of a certain definition and ground of stability. For example, a David Copperfield, in the retrospective moment of self-writing, provides a backward-moving security. At the end of the novel he is a person with a name, an individual one, one who, in the very having of a name, indexes (as the very English phrase of “has achieved a name for himself”) a certain social success. The name thus individuates and provides a foothold for posterity by leaving an individual textual trace. It is from the point of the named moment that retrospectively the “unhinged” past is narrativized and engineered into a telic pattern. Coherence then may be made legible as occurring within the process of narrativisation or memoration, or in an indefinite, yet firmly positable future. This holds true no matter how individually unhinged many moments in David Copperfield’s life may have been. It may be arguable if, likewise, in the naming of A House for Mister Biswas, a large gift has not already been given to the Mister Biswas, notwithstanding the many individual tragedies of his life and death. This moment of naming is thus not only a self –directed calling but one that is uttered by the public- David Copperfield, earns a name for himself in a double movement- he recognizes and “hails” himself only in the moment of his recognition by respectable bourgeois society as Citizen Copperfield, with a respectable wife and respectable employment- it is from the achievement of this moment that the past finally yields to narrativization and full capture.
2. THE LITERARY AND CRITICAL CONTEXT OF JOOTHAN
However, for the purposes of this specific paper I wish to explore two aspects-which are surely significant for any model of self representation, Bildungsroman or otherwise. These polyvalent aspects are naming and speech/voice, and their mutual inflection. As stated I will not, in this paper, keep “looking back” to see how these concepts might have inflected or digressed from the canonical European Bildungsroman. I will limit myself to discussing the single novel Joothan. Joothan belongs, among other categories, to the genre of the so called “dalit novel”. “Dalit” is the self-given name of castes in India that have been understood to have been “depressed” for a long historical period- the term “depressed” was the colonial categorization of such “oppressed” classes/castes. Dalit literature was often opposed to lalit literature- the latter serving as the all-purpose metonymic for traditionalist Sanskrit poetics and literatures.
Dalit literature has been confronted since its very beginnings with this predicament of the presumed impassability of the categories of the “individual” versus the “social”. The important Maharashtrian critic Sharankumar Limbale, in his Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature (2005), writes:
It has been charged that Dalit literature is propagandistic, univocal and negative; that it does not represent the individual person; and that excessive resentment is heard in Dalit literature … because Dalit writers have presented their anguish and their questions in their literature, their literature has acquired a propagandist character (Limbale 56: 2003).
This binary between the individual and the social is as well worn in the literary criticism pertaining to the major regional Indian languages as it was for a long time in the Anglo American Academy. In reference to the same set of terms, Omprakash Valmiki, the author of Joothan, has himself written in his book on Dalit aesthetics:
The Dalit literary moverment is not just a literary movement. It is also a cultural and social movement. Dalit society has been imprisoned for a thousand years in the dark mist of ignorance, deprived of knowledge. Dalit literature is the portrayal of the wishes and aspirations of these oppressed and tormented Dalits. (Valmiki 97: 2001).
One can thus see how vexed and fraught any notion of autobiography is going to be in the face of such overdetermination. Dalit literature is forced to resort to the position of calling into doubt any authenticity of the upper caste writer- for if the upper caste writer’s writing is to be disarmed as an oppositional force, it is often through the mode of questioning his entire life’s legitimacy. One would be unwise to categorize such a rhetoric as a simple and gratuitous ad hominem attack. What is staked is the whole discourse of self representation in all its details- in this paper I will only discuss naming and voice, but many other aspects (the scope of language, art and imagination itself in their very limit or in their redemptive value, the notion of the human and the animal) are subsumed under this. For example, Valmiki writes:
Dragging and cutting dead animals- how will non Dalits write about this experience of Dalits with the power of imagination… only the horse, tethered to its stall after a whole day’s exhausting labor, knows how it feels, and not its owner… Freedom is the highest aesthetic value. Equality, freedom, justice and love are basic sentiments of people and society. There are many times more important than pleasure and beauty. (Valmiki x: 2001).
Dalit theorists argue that it is this quotidian aspect that they know best that makes them the best “realist” writers- and realism is simply assumed to be the highest literary mode and value. To them realism is less a simple adequation of representation to its object, but rather a specific level of the objectness of the object itself. One cannot be a realist writing about “flowers”, no matter how accurately or “realistically” one describes it- the flower turns into paper, it isn’t the res of reality enough. Only the skinning of the dead animal is res enough. And yet the power of this res is precisely the spontaneous transmutation of this most res-ness of the everyday to the most non material- i.e. the abstractable notion of suffering and its linguistic representation (Wankhade 316: 1992).
There are also the allied notions of the witnessing of this suffering, of this everydayness res.
Dalit writers who write autobiographies so that not only our history will stay alive but also our true portrayal of wrongdoers… personal experience brings out reality in a striking way… Ambedkar and Periyar spoke and wrote on the day-to-day experiences of the Dalitbahujan cases. (Valmiki xii: 2001).
ANALYSIS OF GENERAL THEMES IN JOOTHAN
The subtitle of Joothan- A Dalit’s Life- itself complicates simple readings. How is the accent distributed between “Dalit” and “Life”, especially as the indefinite article of “A” persists- are specific reading practices being invited or invoked? This is in some contrast to the European Bildungsroman, with its proper name (David Copperfield, Madame Bovary, Wilhelm Meister). It is perhaps even in some contrast to the variations available in “high” Hindi- the subtitle of Sachidanand Vatsyayan’s (“Agyeya”) important Hindi novel is Sekhar: A Life. Here, perhaps the English translation, “life” does constitute a fair semantic horizon, or perhaps it may signal a specific set of genetic protocols, or invite specific reading practices.
In Joothan, however, it seems that it is the mechanisms of a related series of affects (clustered, one might say around categories like insult and anger) that constitute the motor of the narrative, even if this narrative seems also to parallel a pseudo self making of the protagonist. As we shall see, this self making never quite gets off the ground, and is often violently arrested, or made to regress, precisely by the potency of the insult, which assumes a magical power akin to a curse.
In other words, dalit novels often have no immunity against being unnamed. Joothan by Valmiki is actually a case in a double unnaming- joothan refers to the generic leftovers of the brahminical sacrifice which food alone the dalit is supposed to eat- and this act of eating, never innocent in Hinduism, is what defines and names the dalit. The low caste is he who eats the leftovers of the higher castes, and, in the circular movement of such understandings, he is low caste (or technically, outside the caste system except insofar as he is the receiver of the leftover)- because he eats the food of the higher, twice-born castes. A conventional reading, purblind to the poignancy of what may be at stake here, may read this universalized self naming as a simple gesture to collectivity- this at least would be interpreted as a possible motivation of such a universalizing gesture. But the generic self- naming points further to the impossibility of the subject to rise to a personal name. Valmiki writes:
They did not call us by our names. If a person was older than we were, then he would call us “Oe, Chuhre [Chuhra being the name of the caste- unlike conservative Hindu rationalizations of caste names being simply an instrumental naming of occupation, Valmiki nowhere betrays this occupational sense, and it is clear from the novel that his family has to perform diverse, often unpaid occupational roles].” If the person was younger than we were or of the same age, then he would call us “Abey Chuhre”(Valmiki 2003 2).
One can see thus how naming the caste serves both to de individuate the individual into the collectivity of caste, but also equally and simultaneously serves to individualize the caste against normative collectivities like the abstract citizen of liberal humanism or nationalism. Furthermore, this naming is always a voiced naming. The experiential weight of being called a chuhre is different from just reading of histories which might speak of chuhres being oppressed. It is voice, “calling”, that gives this immediacy- the calling of the insult chuhre, and the not-calling of the individual name. This may not be necessarily due to a generalized immediacy of voice over text per se- however one might choose to speculate on the power of the voice, it is worth pointing out the enormous number and variety of times that this existential morpheme of insult gets repeatedly staged. Throughout the novel- indeed the novel often seems a repetition and elaboration of a single trauma in a single form- the protagonist gets close to someone (a mentor, friend, colleague, lover, employer) hiding (sometimes deliberately, sometimes inexplicitly) his caste till at some point the narrative interlocutor-figure reveals it (the insult, the non name name, for example chuhre or chamar or even the “real” caste name) through, and as, insult. Then the single caste-word-name, uttered sometimes without comment, and often even without enunciatory emphasis (for example, contempt, or wonder, or a feeling of betrayal) collapses the protagonist’s ego- he is literally reduced by that “hailing” into a mere name, one thus exposed retrospectively of a past that now seems fabricated or unreal. Because this event happens face to face, the protagonist cannot hide fast enough, or deny or protest adequately enough. He is reduced to wordlessness, and it is this moment that also collapses time, and strings the various lit events of this uttered naming as an indexical chain that undermines the scaffolding (and it is this moment in which the protagonist realizes that almost everything is now reduced to or recognized as mere scaffolding) and returns him to the moments of his childhood and early youth when this incident used to repeatedly occur. In a certain sense then, the journey to the city had been to get away to where the name could not so easily be discovered- and the learnings of city life and formal education lull the author into thinking he has escaped his past and origins. But at every crucial turn this “lie” is exposed - and thus the past is relinked, relived, and made material for an auto-narrative, perhaps thus making it the anti bildungsroman, where the past can no longer just be shaped into a pattern, either in his individual life(time), or in the gulf of generations stretching back into prehistoric time, in the unfathomable ritual beginnings of the dalit-status. The narrative requires both the remembered voice of naming but also requires as its motor the forgetting of the name- and this chain of event and forgetting and recovery and exposure is what constitutes the movement of the novel.
In the novel, Valmiki does not name his father (simply calling him Pitaji), and his mother and brothers and sisters are also just called that. Much of the poignancy of dalit literature lies in the act of learning to write, for this knowledge now creates an indefinable gulf between the protagonist and his family. His family, and most of his fellow dalits will never be able to read the book he has written. This is a point to which the author repeatedly returns realizing that it is in the naming of the several characters and his experiences with them over time that constitutes his narrative- but his family would be frozen in a land he has left forever, and some of this is indexed by the fact that only the people who participate in his growth are given individual names in the novel. The family itself is only called by kinship terms, and most of them do not return to the book after the early childhood village sections.
The author’s name Valmiki is itself fraught with much semantic accumulation. Here again, the entire caste had taken on this name of Valmiki in the nineteen thirties to escape from the extreme stigmatization of the word chamar- this latter being their specific caste name. But to their keen shame, the word chamar was the most common, and universally understood generic name for untouchables in all India. The protagonist is continually reminded of this throughout the novel- in spite of the renaming, all the upper castes keep the memory of the original name. In choosing the name Valmiki, they were of course caught in the understandable but nevertheless inescapable bind of both claiming Sanskrit’s greatest and first poet as theirs (Valmiki was of course also revered in Sanskrit tradition as Adi Kavi)- this is even as the entire thrust of dalit politics was against the ruinous effects of Sanskrit political and ritual theory. Furthermore, Valmiki has always been represented even within the Sanskrit tradition as being a “primitive”, a former thief, who was only “saved” by Brahmins- so when Omprakash Valmiki expropriates this symbol, he is choosing a particularly potent symbol.
There are further layers of meaning and reading- the novel was published in 1993, at the very height of the Ayodhya movement and the rise of a conservative Hindu party to federal power- this is even as Dalit parties were beginning to enter the political mainstream in the face of the Congress consensus breaking down. The eighties and nineties also witnessed new historical developments like the recruitment of Dalits as a new “lumpen proletariat” for events like the 1984 anti Sikh riots- this is simultaneous with their new demonization as the unfair beneficiaries of the Mandal Commission which increased the percentage reserved for depressed castes in federal employment. If one goes further back in the twentieth century, one would also remember that this historical renaming was squarely in the center of one of the most vexed political projects of South Asian nationalism. One may recall Gandhi’s insistence on renaming Sudras as Harijans, or children of God. This renaming was immediately unpopular and considered patronizing by the numerous dalit intellectuals including the great dalit champion Bhimrao Ambedkar (who, famously, had himself changed his name to a Brahmin one- we have seen figures like Ambedkar and Periyar repeatedly referenced in this book). It may also be noted that even today “hurling” a caste name as an insult is a non cognizable, non- bailable offence under the Indian Penal Code in many states of India.
The question of thus being insulted is also intimately tied to the question of labor- not, as said, merely as a rationalization of a non- hierarchical question of the economic division of labor, but actively, as a particularly powerful tool of power. Some of the loss in translation into English is not merely the mimetic sociological representation of different dialects spoken by different castes- such a loss is inevitable in any translation and may not merit more than a passing comment on linguistic diversity for its own sake. But the greater loss in the flattening of language in English prose is the entire honorific system which is crucial to the language of communication between lower and upper castes in South Asia. The physical postures of address (if address was possible at all, for sometimes even the shadow of the lower caste was considered polluting) often involved not looking directly at the upper castes, looking at the floor, not turning one’s back, placing the palm of one’s hand before one’s mouth, speaking in a low voice etc. This richness of physical self abasement was minutely paralleled by a linguistic system of honorifics whereby the whole syntax and sociolinguistics involved in such “non standard” Hindi changed to a very considerable degree. Much of this honorific system is flattened when converted to standard or even written Hindi (Bhatia 1987). Thus the loss of “voice” constitutes a fundamental site of the loss of not just a neutral socio-linguistic register, but equally a political one- for voice served as a template of power both in its simple physicality (i.e. the low, soft voiced, modest, tentative phoneme) as well as its in its semantic and syntactical modes of address to social and ritual superiors. In most north Indian languages, downstream from Sanskrit, the question of voice is associated with linguistic voice- active or passive forms of speech. Thus one can address social superiors only in the passive voice and only in the third, and not second person. This shift leads to a whole series of syntactic maneuvers- the entire declensional and conjugational system change (Gonda 1966 Kellogg 1995). This encoding of the ritual-social by the linguistic is not sufficiently noted by the translator- the brief comment the translator of Joothan, Arun Prabha Mukherjee makes is with regard to the simple diversity of local dialect-“ The speech and conversations of his family and villagers are in local dialect.” (Arun Prabha Mukherjee xlvii 2003).
However, he aptly notes the significance of how the adult varies from the child- for the educated adult speaks in (perhaps ironically or understandingly, or then again, perhaps not) in a literary sanskritised Hindi even as the child speaks “dialect”. These abrupt shifts are what give sharpness to the sudden switches of memory and time-lapses- it is in the unexpected abutment of the high hindi with the dialect that the “child within” is accessed, a fossil that can nevertheless scream in disarticulate dialect pain. Thus unlike the Joycean maneuver in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man of linguistic registers progressing as a child goes through developmental stages, in Joothan, the point is rather the resilience of childhood, especially in its mode of hailing – the voice of Oe chuhre (or in wider equivalence in contemporary Hindi speaking North India, calling lower class men like waiters in dhabas as chokre (boy), or even the American practice of the early century of calling the adult African American not just nigger, but also “boy”), which always reduces the protagonist in age to a child/young adult. As noted before, this simple naming-hailing- the caste name itself being neither sanskritized Hindi nor village dialect- nevertheless reduces the adult to child, indeed to speechless silence.
This mode of address is especially pernicious when an authority figure uses it disparagingly. If one of the aims of the European bildungsroman was pedagogy- the child using his limited resources and resilience to learn from the world and to finally find success in it up to the point where he has “made” his name (David Copperfield but also Sekhar : A Life), the dalit child’s learning experience is compromised from the beginning by the fact that it is the very figures of pedagogy and trust who abuse by name- the teacher in the government school ostensibly set up to allow Dalits a chance in the new Indian democracy; the literary editor introducing him to new ways of looking at language; the employer in a public sector socialist undertaking where he finds employment through affirmative action or positive discrimination. Thus almost every classic site of the landscape of post-colonial India ends up subserving the opposite of pedagogical transformation. It is not a merely a rhetorical point when Dalit writers speak of the pampered “life” of the upper caste literary establishment- the dalit writers seems to have to need much more resilience and with much fewer materials to be able to carve out a “life”- for much of the time he has to be content and discontent with writing on “ A Dalit’s Life”- where dalit does not represent or index merely a genotype, but also the entirety of a behavioral and psychological mode of interactivity with a hostile politico-literary establishment.
ANALYSIS OF SPECIFIC SCENES FROM THE NOVEL
In a very early scene of the novel, Valmiki’s identity as a new student (among the very first in his caste) in the school becomes continually undermined as he is made to sweep the classroom floor every morning. This sweeping tires him, and often causes him to miss the class itself. Thus he notes that one day:
I went to the class and sat down quietly. After a few minutes the headmaster’s loud thundering was heard: “ Abhey, Chuhre ke, motherfucker, where are you hiding your mother?”
I began to shake uncontrollably. A Tyagi boy shouted, “Master Sahib, there he is, sitting in the corner.”
The headmaster pounced on my neck. “ (Valmiki 6 2003).
Here we see how the concept of gratuitous humiliation underwrites the exploitation of labor. It is as if the entire power of caste can be emblematized in this simple act of hailing the caste. This leaves the protagonist in a perpetual vulnerability to insult, leaving him no available counter response that would give him any sense of self worth. Later in the novel, being teased by boys in his hostel for his used clothes, he works hard to save money to buy a new uniform. He washes this uniform with great care, but having no iron, had to go to a dhobi (a washerman). A dhobi in Hindu society is often looked down upon as belonging to a fairly menial caste- as one who performs labor of low worth, both monetarily and ritually- nevertheless even this dhobi – perhaps in fear of economic censure by higher castes- insults Valmiki, revealing the interanimated nexus of labor and status.
I asked him for help. He told me to come to his house in the evening. I took the uniform to his house that evening. As soon as his father saw me, he screamed, “Abey Chuhre, where do you think you are going”. His son was standing next to him. I said, “ I need to have the uniform ironed.”
We don’t wash the clothes of Chuhra-Chamars. Nor do we iron them. If we iron your clothes, the Tyagis won’t get their clothes washed by us. We’ll lose our roti.” He had answered me bluntly. His reply crushed me. I left without saying a word. My heart was heavy. I lost faith in God. One can somehow get past poverty and deprivation, but it is impossible to get past caste. (Valmiki 21 2003)
What is spectacularly pernicious about caste is the ability of the entirety of its affective history to be invoked by the calling of a single name. As Valmiki tells us, for all the ameliorative rhetoric and institutions of the school, college, literary journals, respectable employment etc, the internal history of the stabilized subject can never be written for all it takes for it to be entirely sabotaged is one’s surname. What one is up against is not merely the regressive political formations of the twentieth century, but an immeasurable history, distended unto an infinity- it is against this that self formation and self naming seems to flounder. When Valmiki falls in love with a Brahmin woman, and courts her over a long time, he has to initially hide his full name. When he finally admits it, she cannot believe it, and accuses him of cheating and being false to her. He had to “convince” her that he was not lying.
Savi appeared grave. Her eyes were filled with tears and she said tearfully, “ You are lying, right?”
“No, Savi, it is the truth. You ought to know this.” I had managed to convince her.
She started to cry, as though my being an SC was a crime. She sobbed for a long time. Suddenly, the distance between us had increased. The hatred of thousands of years had entered our hearts. What a lie culture and civilization are.” (Valmiki 113 2003).
It is also this question of naming and insult that mediate the temporality of the retrospective writing of one’s history. Indeed, the point can be made that insults may well grow in power over time- that every new horizon that the successful Chuhra subjugates (for example by becoming a famous writer highly regarded by numerous audiences and critics alike), only adds to the sharpness of the inevitable insult that is peering over every corner. To be more widely known is also to be more widely known as a Chuhra writer- and while to a certain audience this information is part of a goodwill that only increases one’s regard and respect for the writer, to many other audiences there is an extra edge of harshness that only a combination of insult and perhaps envy and resentment brings. Time and time again- indeed the very flesh of much of the narrative emplotment- is Valmiki attempting to progress in life according to all the conventional and required bourgeois norms (becoming an engineer etc) only to be humiliated in every dinner party by at least one of his new peers or their wives. This is a familiar dalit narrative- as Omprakash Valmiki reminds us with his several invocations of Ambedkar in the text- from at least the days when Ambedkar with his two doctorates in two different disciplines (in sociology from Columbia University, New York and in economics from the London School of Economics, as well as post doctoral work in Germany) came home to India only to be made to sit in corner rooms separate from all the higher castes.
It is however worth dwelling further on how precisely this immediacy of insult collapses narrative time from the past moment of insult to the present moment of writing. The act of writing brings back this insult which remains undiluted by time- indeed it is the very essence of the novelistic experience, constituting its primary mode of interiority and subjectification. It is through insult that the very language shifts from the sanskritized Hindi of the adult self to the village dialect of his childhood, whose pain and now incompleteness he relives again. In contrast, the beatings which the child is continually subjected to, cannot quite retain their pain after all these years- or rather, it is the referential significance of pain (as too, labor) as humiliation that constitutes subjectivity. The dalit subject, without name, nameless even in the tale of himself, even in the autobiographical mode, is constituted by the repeated iterations of an insult- the insult is at the center of his inability to self constitute. It is what abolishes childhood, or at least childhood as separate from adulthood (and likewise other dyads like the urban as different from the rural, the sanskritised hindi from village hindi), for the insult short circuits these binaries and always scathes in the present tense. Childhood can never be evaluated as a whole, or even as truly retrospective, or as a site for nostalgia, recompense, or even a trauma that one can dissociate from. This is why even when the narrator keeps interrupting the childhood narration with his present reading of events, it does not seem jarring in the least- rather we can see quite clearly the co-evolution of the child and adult selves in the moment of narration.
Finally, and briefly, this question of naming does not limit itself to the subject alone. Valmiki does not name the village he comes from- even the spatiality of the rural is remembered only as an interlocking system of caste and power. This is how the novel begins:
Our house was next to Chandrabhan Taga’s cattle shed. Families of Muslim weavers lived on the other side of it. Right in front of the cattle shed was a little pond that had created a sort of partition between chuhra’s swellings and the village. The pond was called Dabbowali….On one side of the pit were the high walls of the brick homes of the Tagas. At a right angle to these were the clay walls of the tow or three homes of the Jhinwars, another untouchable caste. (Valmiki 1 2003).
How easy it is to contrast this with the very names of the metropolii that populate the text, where the mere evocation of those proper names mine a rich semantic load, already implicating one in a whole series of plotted histories, stretching back to a long but finite and narrativizable time- Delhi and Kolkatta, but even the Chandrapur Ordnance Factory where Valmiki worked. It is against the privileged complacence of this calm voice of self naming that the dalit protagonist must stake his claim to language and literary-historical identity.
ps: One may end by remembering that even Ambedkar felt this clearly- for this logician of state representation nevertheless resorted often to a continual history/myth-writing, even a final self-conversion. His narrative enterprise thus reminds us of how ill at home the subaltern still is in the routinized and banalized norms of electoral and representative democracy and how much power and inflationary violence still has to teach us about the truer needs of sovereignty in this land of not just elite but also of a pacifist gandhian nationalism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bhatia, Tej K. A History of the Hindi Grammatical Tradition: Hindi- Hindustani Grammar, Grammarians, History and Problems. Leiden: E J Brill, 1987.
Gonda, Jan. A Concise Elementary Grammar of the Sanskrit Language. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1966.
Kellogg, S H. A Grammar of the Hindi Language. Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1995.
Limbale, Sharankumar. Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature: History, Controversy and Considerations. Translated by Alok Mukherjee. Hyderabad; Orient Longman, 2005.
Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. London: Verso, 2000.
Valmiki, Omprakash. Jhootan: A Dalit’s Life. Translated by Arun Prabha Mukherjee. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
-------------------------- Dalit Sahitya ka Saundaryashastra. Delhi: Radhakrishna Publications, 2001.
Wankhede, M.N.” Friends, the Day of Irresponsible Writing is Over.” In Arjun Dangle, ed., Poisoned Bread: Translations from Modern Marathi Dalit Literature, pp 314-323. Translated by Maxine Bernsten. Bombay: Orient Longman, 1992.
On Name Calling
INTRODUCTION
1. EUROPEAN BILDUNGSROMAN
In this paper I will concern myself with a single narrative of self-attestation- that of Joothan written by Omprakash Valmiki in 1993 (trans. by Arun Prabha Mukherjee, 2003). This type of narrative will, for the purposes of this present paper, be de-linked from the more specifically genetic matrix of the European Bildungsroman. I however do want to begin by speculating in a preliminary way in this first part of the introduction on the possible - if only through difference- linkages between the canonical European Bildungsroman and the novel I discuss. This is partly because I believe that later in my project I do hope to more explicitly return and rethink the modes of commutability between these frames of reference- for example, those involving both certain thematic elements (the labor of memory) as well as narrative strategies (delay, fragmentation) within a complex calculus of correlation and departure from the model of individual subject formation as envisaged in the classical nineteenth century European Bildungsroman.
Thus for example, in relation to this question of self-formation one might begin with the influential theorization offered by the literary scholar Franco Moretti in The Way of the World (Moretti 2000). In the chapter on the Bildungsroman in European Culture Moretti explicitly writes in the very first footnote to the chapter that his work cannot accommodate the non Europeanized Russian novel (i.e. he can write of Pushkin and Turgenev, but not Tolstoy or Dostoevsky) due to “ the persistence of a marked religious dimension (be it the “politico-national” version of War and Peace, or Dostoevsky’s ethico-metaphysical one), which attaches meaning to individual existence in ways unthinkable in the fully secularized version of the Western European Bildungsroman.” (Moretti 63 2000). Later in my project I am invested in precisely these “ethico-metaphysical” aspects of the Russian novel- so for me Moretti leaves out rather too much. But at the same time, one may also take some issue with the way Moretti uses any of these multivalent terms – politico-national, ethico-metaphysical etc, even with reference to the Western European Bildungsroman. The assumption that Dickens, for example, is less politico-nationalist is deeply questionable- one may mention his many opinionated responses to imperialism, especially to charged events like the 1857 “mutiny”. It is also important to challenge Moretti for these reasons - for the hint of purity and insularity that is supposed to mark the Western European Bildungsroman- disinfected as its form is supposed to be from religion, politics, nationalism, ethics, metaphysics- presumably in the name of a purely secular, urbanized, purely self-evolving European citizen. One may remember that Moretti had also excluded the American novel “ where, in addition, “nature” retains a symbolic value alien to the essentially urban thematics of the European novel” (Moretti 563 2000).
In the European Bildungsroman the act of naming itself is often a proof of the achievement of a certain definition and ground of stability. For example, a David Copperfield, in the retrospective moment of self-writing, provides a backward-moving security. At the end of the novel he is a person with a name, an individual one, one who, in the very having of a name, indexes (as the very English phrase of “has achieved a name for himself”) a certain social success. The name thus individuates and provides a foothold for posterity by leaving an individual textual trace. It is from the point of the named moment that retrospectively the “unhinged” past is narrativized and engineered into a telic pattern. Coherence then may be made legible as occurring within the process of narrativisation or memoration, or in an indefinite, yet firmly positable future. This holds true no matter how individually unhinged many moments in David Copperfield’s life may have been. It may be arguable if, likewise, in the naming of A House for Mister Biswas, a large gift has not already been given to the Mister Biswas, notwithstanding the many individual tragedies of his life and death. This moment of naming is thus not only a self –directed calling but one that is uttered by the public- David Copperfield, earns a name for himself in a double movement- he recognizes and “hails” himself only in the moment of his recognition by respectable bourgeois society as Citizen Copperfield, with a respectable wife and respectable employment- it is from the achievement of this moment that the past finally yields to narrativization and full capture.
2. THE LITERARY AND CRITICAL CONTEXT OF JOOTHAN
However, for the purposes of this specific paper I wish to explore two aspects-which are surely significant for any model of self representation, Bildungsroman or otherwise. These polyvalent aspects are naming and speech/voice, and their mutual inflection. As stated I will not, in this paper, keep “looking back” to see how these concepts might have inflected or digressed from the canonical European Bildungsroman. I will limit myself to discussing the single novel Joothan. Joothan belongs, among other categories, to the genre of the so called “dalit novel”. “Dalit” is the self-given name of castes in India that have been understood to have been “depressed” for a long historical period- the term “depressed” was the colonial categorization of such “oppressed” classes/castes. Dalit literature was often opposed to lalit literature- the latter serving as the all-purpose metonymic for traditionalist Sanskrit poetics and literatures.
Dalit literature has been confronted since its very beginnings with this predicament of the presumed impassability of the categories of the “individual” versus the “social”. The important Maharashtrian critic Sharankumar Limbale, in his Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature (2005), writes:
It has been charged that Dalit literature is propagandistic, univocal and negative; that it does not represent the individual person; and that excessive resentment is heard in Dalit literature … because Dalit writers have presented their anguish and their questions in their literature, their literature has acquired a propagandist character (Limbale 56: 2003).
This binary between the individual and the social is as well worn in the literary criticism pertaining to the major regional Indian languages as it was for a long time in the Anglo American Academy. In reference to the same set of terms, Omprakash Valmiki, the author of Joothan, has himself written in his book on Dalit aesthetics:
The Dalit literary moverment is not just a literary movement. It is also a cultural and social movement. Dalit society has been imprisoned for a thousand years in the dark mist of ignorance, deprived of knowledge. Dalit literature is the portrayal of the wishes and aspirations of these oppressed and tormented Dalits. (Valmiki 97: 2001).
One can thus see how vexed and fraught any notion of autobiography is going to be in the face of such overdetermination. Dalit literature is forced to resort to the position of calling into doubt any authenticity of the upper caste writer- for if the upper caste writer’s writing is to be disarmed as an oppositional force, it is often through the mode of questioning his entire life’s legitimacy. One would be unwise to categorize such a rhetoric as a simple and gratuitous ad hominem attack. What is staked is the whole discourse of self representation in all its details- in this paper I will only discuss naming and voice, but many other aspects (the scope of language, art and imagination itself in their very limit or in their redemptive value, the notion of the human and the animal) are subsumed under this. For example, Valmiki writes:
Dragging and cutting dead animals- how will non Dalits write about this experience of Dalits with the power of imagination… only the horse, tethered to its stall after a whole day’s exhausting labor, knows how it feels, and not its owner… Freedom is the highest aesthetic value. Equality, freedom, justice and love are basic sentiments of people and society. There are many times more important than pleasure and beauty. (Valmiki x: 2001).
Dalit theorists argue that it is this quotidian aspect that they know best that makes them the best “realist” writers- and realism is simply assumed to be the highest literary mode and value. To them realism is less a simple adequation of representation to its object, but rather a specific level of the objectness of the object itself. One cannot be a realist writing about “flowers”, no matter how accurately or “realistically” one describes it- the flower turns into paper, it isn’t the res of reality enough. Only the skinning of the dead animal is res enough. And yet the power of this res is precisely the spontaneous transmutation of this most res-ness of the everyday to the most non material- i.e. the abstractable notion of suffering and its linguistic representation (Wankhade 316: 1992).
There are also the allied notions of the witnessing of this suffering, of this everydayness res.
Dalit writers who write autobiographies so that not only our history will stay alive but also our true portrayal of wrongdoers… personal experience brings out reality in a striking way… Ambedkar and Periyar spoke and wrote on the day-to-day experiences of the Dalitbahujan cases. (Valmiki xii: 2001).
ANALYSIS OF GENERAL THEMES IN JOOTHAN
The subtitle of Joothan- A Dalit’s Life- itself complicates simple readings. How is the accent distributed between “Dalit” and “Life”, especially as the indefinite article of “A” persists- are specific reading practices being invited or invoked? This is in some contrast to the European Bildungsroman, with its proper name (David Copperfield, Madame Bovary, Wilhelm Meister). It is perhaps even in some contrast to the variations available in “high” Hindi- the subtitle of Sachidanand Vatsyayan’s (“Agyeya”) important Hindi novel is Sekhar: A Life. Here, perhaps the English translation, “life” does constitute a fair semantic horizon, or perhaps it may signal a specific set of genetic protocols, or invite specific reading practices.
In Joothan, however, it seems that it is the mechanisms of a related series of affects (clustered, one might say around categories like insult and anger) that constitute the motor of the narrative, even if this narrative seems also to parallel a pseudo self making of the protagonist. As we shall see, this self making never quite gets off the ground, and is often violently arrested, or made to regress, precisely by the potency of the insult, which assumes a magical power akin to a curse.
In other words, dalit novels often have no immunity against being unnamed. Joothan by Valmiki is actually a case in a double unnaming- joothan refers to the generic leftovers of the brahminical sacrifice which food alone the dalit is supposed to eat- and this act of eating, never innocent in Hinduism, is what defines and names the dalit. The low caste is he who eats the leftovers of the higher castes, and, in the circular movement of such understandings, he is low caste (or technically, outside the caste system except insofar as he is the receiver of the leftover)- because he eats the food of the higher, twice-born castes. A conventional reading, purblind to the poignancy of what may be at stake here, may read this universalized self naming as a simple gesture to collectivity- this at least would be interpreted as a possible motivation of such a universalizing gesture. But the generic self- naming points further to the impossibility of the subject to rise to a personal name. Valmiki writes:
They did not call us by our names. If a person was older than we were, then he would call us “Oe, Chuhre [Chuhra being the name of the caste- unlike conservative Hindu rationalizations of caste names being simply an instrumental naming of occupation, Valmiki nowhere betrays this occupational sense, and it is clear from the novel that his family has to perform diverse, often unpaid occupational roles].” If the person was younger than we were or of the same age, then he would call us “Abey Chuhre”(Valmiki 2003 2).
One can see thus how naming the caste serves both to de individuate the individual into the collectivity of caste, but also equally and simultaneously serves to individualize the caste against normative collectivities like the abstract citizen of liberal humanism or nationalism. Furthermore, this naming is always a voiced naming. The experiential weight of being called a chuhre is different from just reading of histories which might speak of chuhres being oppressed. It is voice, “calling”, that gives this immediacy- the calling of the insult chuhre, and the not-calling of the individual name. This may not be necessarily due to a generalized immediacy of voice over text per se- however one might choose to speculate on the power of the voice, it is worth pointing out the enormous number and variety of times that this existential morpheme of insult gets repeatedly staged. Throughout the novel- indeed the novel often seems a repetition and elaboration of a single trauma in a single form- the protagonist gets close to someone (a mentor, friend, colleague, lover, employer) hiding (sometimes deliberately, sometimes inexplicitly) his caste till at some point the narrative interlocutor-figure reveals it (the insult, the non name name, for example chuhre or chamar or even the “real” caste name) through, and as, insult. Then the single caste-word-name, uttered sometimes without comment, and often even without enunciatory emphasis (for example, contempt, or wonder, or a feeling of betrayal) collapses the protagonist’s ego- he is literally reduced by that “hailing” into a mere name, one thus exposed retrospectively of a past that now seems fabricated or unreal. Because this event happens face to face, the protagonist cannot hide fast enough, or deny or protest adequately enough. He is reduced to wordlessness, and it is this moment that also collapses time, and strings the various lit events of this uttered naming as an indexical chain that undermines the scaffolding (and it is this moment in which the protagonist realizes that almost everything is now reduced to or recognized as mere scaffolding) and returns him to the moments of his childhood and early youth when this incident used to repeatedly occur. In a certain sense then, the journey to the city had been to get away to where the name could not so easily be discovered- and the learnings of city life and formal education lull the author into thinking he has escaped his past and origins. But at every crucial turn this “lie” is exposed - and thus the past is relinked, relived, and made material for an auto-narrative, perhaps thus making it the anti bildungsroman, where the past can no longer just be shaped into a pattern, either in his individual life(time), or in the gulf of generations stretching back into prehistoric time, in the unfathomable ritual beginnings of the dalit-status. The narrative requires both the remembered voice of naming but also requires as its motor the forgetting of the name- and this chain of event and forgetting and recovery and exposure is what constitutes the movement of the novel.
In the novel, Valmiki does not name his father (simply calling him Pitaji), and his mother and brothers and sisters are also just called that. Much of the poignancy of dalit literature lies in the act of learning to write, for this knowledge now creates an indefinable gulf between the protagonist and his family. His family, and most of his fellow dalits will never be able to read the book he has written. This is a point to which the author repeatedly returns realizing that it is in the naming of the several characters and his experiences with them over time that constitutes his narrative- but his family would be frozen in a land he has left forever, and some of this is indexed by the fact that only the people who participate in his growth are given individual names in the novel. The family itself is only called by kinship terms, and most of them do not return to the book after the early childhood village sections.
The author’s name Valmiki is itself fraught with much semantic accumulation. Here again, the entire caste had taken on this name of Valmiki in the nineteen thirties to escape from the extreme stigmatization of the word chamar- this latter being their specific caste name. But to their keen shame, the word chamar was the most common, and universally understood generic name for untouchables in all India. The protagonist is continually reminded of this throughout the novel- in spite of the renaming, all the upper castes keep the memory of the original name. In choosing the name Valmiki, they were of course caught in the understandable but nevertheless inescapable bind of both claiming Sanskrit’s greatest and first poet as theirs (Valmiki was of course also revered in Sanskrit tradition as Adi Kavi)- this is even as the entire thrust of dalit politics was against the ruinous effects of Sanskrit political and ritual theory. Furthermore, Valmiki has always been represented even within the Sanskrit tradition as being a “primitive”, a former thief, who was only “saved” by Brahmins- so when Omprakash Valmiki expropriates this symbol, he is choosing a particularly potent symbol.
There are further layers of meaning and reading- the novel was published in 1993, at the very height of the Ayodhya movement and the rise of a conservative Hindu party to federal power- this is even as Dalit parties were beginning to enter the political mainstream in the face of the Congress consensus breaking down. The eighties and nineties also witnessed new historical developments like the recruitment of Dalits as a new “lumpen proletariat” for events like the 1984 anti Sikh riots- this is simultaneous with their new demonization as the unfair beneficiaries of the Mandal Commission which increased the percentage reserved for depressed castes in federal employment. If one goes further back in the twentieth century, one would also remember that this historical renaming was squarely in the center of one of the most vexed political projects of South Asian nationalism. One may recall Gandhi’s insistence on renaming Sudras as Harijans, or children of God. This renaming was immediately unpopular and considered patronizing by the numerous dalit intellectuals including the great dalit champion Bhimrao Ambedkar (who, famously, had himself changed his name to a Brahmin one- we have seen figures like Ambedkar and Periyar repeatedly referenced in this book). It may also be noted that even today “hurling” a caste name as an insult is a non cognizable, non- bailable offence under the Indian Penal Code in many states of India.
The question of thus being insulted is also intimately tied to the question of labor- not, as said, merely as a rationalization of a non- hierarchical question of the economic division of labor, but actively, as a particularly powerful tool of power. Some of the loss in translation into English is not merely the mimetic sociological representation of different dialects spoken by different castes- such a loss is inevitable in any translation and may not merit more than a passing comment on linguistic diversity for its own sake. But the greater loss in the flattening of language in English prose is the entire honorific system which is crucial to the language of communication between lower and upper castes in South Asia. The physical postures of address (if address was possible at all, for sometimes even the shadow of the lower caste was considered polluting) often involved not looking directly at the upper castes, looking at the floor, not turning one’s back, placing the palm of one’s hand before one’s mouth, speaking in a low voice etc. This richness of physical self abasement was minutely paralleled by a linguistic system of honorifics whereby the whole syntax and sociolinguistics involved in such “non standard” Hindi changed to a very considerable degree. Much of this honorific system is flattened when converted to standard or even written Hindi (Bhatia 1987). Thus the loss of “voice” constitutes a fundamental site of the loss of not just a neutral socio-linguistic register, but equally a political one- for voice served as a template of power both in its simple physicality (i.e. the low, soft voiced, modest, tentative phoneme) as well as its in its semantic and syntactical modes of address to social and ritual superiors. In most north Indian languages, downstream from Sanskrit, the question of voice is associated with linguistic voice- active or passive forms of speech. Thus one can address social superiors only in the passive voice and only in the third, and not second person. This shift leads to a whole series of syntactic maneuvers- the entire declensional and conjugational system change (Gonda 1966 Kellogg 1995). This encoding of the ritual-social by the linguistic is not sufficiently noted by the translator- the brief comment the translator of Joothan, Arun Prabha Mukherjee makes is with regard to the simple diversity of local dialect-“ The speech and conversations of his family and villagers are in local dialect.” (Arun Prabha Mukherjee xlvii 2003).
However, he aptly notes the significance of how the adult varies from the child- for the educated adult speaks in (perhaps ironically or understandingly, or then again, perhaps not) in a literary sanskritised Hindi even as the child speaks “dialect”. These abrupt shifts are what give sharpness to the sudden switches of memory and time-lapses- it is in the unexpected abutment of the high hindi with the dialect that the “child within” is accessed, a fossil that can nevertheless scream in disarticulate dialect pain. Thus unlike the Joycean maneuver in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man of linguistic registers progressing as a child goes through developmental stages, in Joothan, the point is rather the resilience of childhood, especially in its mode of hailing – the voice of Oe chuhre (or in wider equivalence in contemporary Hindi speaking North India, calling lower class men like waiters in dhabas as chokre (boy), or even the American practice of the early century of calling the adult African American not just nigger, but also “boy”), which always reduces the protagonist in age to a child/young adult. As noted before, this simple naming-hailing- the caste name itself being neither sanskritized Hindi nor village dialect- nevertheless reduces the adult to child, indeed to speechless silence.
This mode of address is especially pernicious when an authority figure uses it disparagingly. If one of the aims of the European bildungsroman was pedagogy- the child using his limited resources and resilience to learn from the world and to finally find success in it up to the point where he has “made” his name (David Copperfield but also Sekhar : A Life), the dalit child’s learning experience is compromised from the beginning by the fact that it is the very figures of pedagogy and trust who abuse by name- the teacher in the government school ostensibly set up to allow Dalits a chance in the new Indian democracy; the literary editor introducing him to new ways of looking at language; the employer in a public sector socialist undertaking where he finds employment through affirmative action or positive discrimination. Thus almost every classic site of the landscape of post-colonial India ends up subserving the opposite of pedagogical transformation. It is not a merely a rhetorical point when Dalit writers speak of the pampered “life” of the upper caste literary establishment- the dalit writers seems to have to need much more resilience and with much fewer materials to be able to carve out a “life”- for much of the time he has to be content and discontent with writing on “ A Dalit’s Life”- where dalit does not represent or index merely a genotype, but also the entirety of a behavioral and psychological mode of interactivity with a hostile politico-literary establishment.
ANALYSIS OF SPECIFIC SCENES FROM THE NOVEL
In a very early scene of the novel, Valmiki’s identity as a new student (among the very first in his caste) in the school becomes continually undermined as he is made to sweep the classroom floor every morning. This sweeping tires him, and often causes him to miss the class itself. Thus he notes that one day:
I went to the class and sat down quietly. After a few minutes the headmaster’s loud thundering was heard: “ Abhey, Chuhre ke, motherfucker, where are you hiding your mother?”
I began to shake uncontrollably. A Tyagi boy shouted, “Master Sahib, there he is, sitting in the corner.”
The headmaster pounced on my neck. “ (Valmiki 6 2003).
Here we see how the concept of gratuitous humiliation underwrites the exploitation of labor. It is as if the entire power of caste can be emblematized in this simple act of hailing the caste. This leaves the protagonist in a perpetual vulnerability to insult, leaving him no available counter response that would give him any sense of self worth. Later in the novel, being teased by boys in his hostel for his used clothes, he works hard to save money to buy a new uniform. He washes this uniform with great care, but having no iron, had to go to a dhobi (a washerman). A dhobi in Hindu society is often looked down upon as belonging to a fairly menial caste- as one who performs labor of low worth, both monetarily and ritually- nevertheless even this dhobi – perhaps in fear of economic censure by higher castes- insults Valmiki, revealing the interanimated nexus of labor and status.
I asked him for help. He told me to come to his house in the evening. I took the uniform to his house that evening. As soon as his father saw me, he screamed, “Abey Chuhre, where do you think you are going”. His son was standing next to him. I said, “ I need to have the uniform ironed.”
We don’t wash the clothes of Chuhra-Chamars. Nor do we iron them. If we iron your clothes, the Tyagis won’t get their clothes washed by us. We’ll lose our roti.” He had answered me bluntly. His reply crushed me. I left without saying a word. My heart was heavy. I lost faith in God. One can somehow get past poverty and deprivation, but it is impossible to get past caste. (Valmiki 21 2003)
What is spectacularly pernicious about caste is the ability of the entirety of its affective history to be invoked by the calling of a single name. As Valmiki tells us, for all the ameliorative rhetoric and institutions of the school, college, literary journals, respectable employment etc, the internal history of the stabilized subject can never be written for all it takes for it to be entirely sabotaged is one’s surname. What one is up against is not merely the regressive political formations of the twentieth century, but an immeasurable history, distended unto an infinity- it is against this that self formation and self naming seems to flounder. When Valmiki falls in love with a Brahmin woman, and courts her over a long time, he has to initially hide his full name. When he finally admits it, she cannot believe it, and accuses him of cheating and being false to her. He had to “convince” her that he was not lying.
Savi appeared grave. Her eyes were filled with tears and she said tearfully, “ You are lying, right?”
“No, Savi, it is the truth. You ought to know this.” I had managed to convince her.
She started to cry, as though my being an SC was a crime. She sobbed for a long time. Suddenly, the distance between us had increased. The hatred of thousands of years had entered our hearts. What a lie culture and civilization are.” (Valmiki 113 2003).
It is also this question of naming and insult that mediate the temporality of the retrospective writing of one’s history. Indeed, the point can be made that insults may well grow in power over time- that every new horizon that the successful Chuhra subjugates (for example by becoming a famous writer highly regarded by numerous audiences and critics alike), only adds to the sharpness of the inevitable insult that is peering over every corner. To be more widely known is also to be more widely known as a Chuhra writer- and while to a certain audience this information is part of a goodwill that only increases one’s regard and respect for the writer, to many other audiences there is an extra edge of harshness that only a combination of insult and perhaps envy and resentment brings. Time and time again- indeed the very flesh of much of the narrative emplotment- is Valmiki attempting to progress in life according to all the conventional and required bourgeois norms (becoming an engineer etc) only to be humiliated in every dinner party by at least one of his new peers or their wives. This is a familiar dalit narrative- as Omprakash Valmiki reminds us with his several invocations of Ambedkar in the text- from at least the days when Ambedkar with his two doctorates in two different disciplines (in sociology from Columbia University, New York and in economics from the London School of Economics, as well as post doctoral work in Germany) came home to India only to be made to sit in corner rooms separate from all the higher castes.
It is however worth dwelling further on how precisely this immediacy of insult collapses narrative time from the past moment of insult to the present moment of writing. The act of writing brings back this insult which remains undiluted by time- indeed it is the very essence of the novelistic experience, constituting its primary mode of interiority and subjectification. It is through insult that the very language shifts from the sanskritized Hindi of the adult self to the village dialect of his childhood, whose pain and now incompleteness he relives again. In contrast, the beatings which the child is continually subjected to, cannot quite retain their pain after all these years- or rather, it is the referential significance of pain (as too, labor) as humiliation that constitutes subjectivity. The dalit subject, without name, nameless even in the tale of himself, even in the autobiographical mode, is constituted by the repeated iterations of an insult- the insult is at the center of his inability to self constitute. It is what abolishes childhood, or at least childhood as separate from adulthood (and likewise other dyads like the urban as different from the rural, the sanskritised hindi from village hindi), for the insult short circuits these binaries and always scathes in the present tense. Childhood can never be evaluated as a whole, or even as truly retrospective, or as a site for nostalgia, recompense, or even a trauma that one can dissociate from. This is why even when the narrator keeps interrupting the childhood narration with his present reading of events, it does not seem jarring in the least- rather we can see quite clearly the co-evolution of the child and adult selves in the moment of narration.
Finally, and briefly, this question of naming does not limit itself to the subject alone. Valmiki does not name the village he comes from- even the spatiality of the rural is remembered only as an interlocking system of caste and power. This is how the novel begins:
Our house was next to Chandrabhan Taga’s cattle shed. Families of Muslim weavers lived on the other side of it. Right in front of the cattle shed was a little pond that had created a sort of partition between chuhra’s swellings and the village. The pond was called Dabbowali….On one side of the pit were the high walls of the brick homes of the Tagas. At a right angle to these were the clay walls of the tow or three homes of the Jhinwars, another untouchable caste. (Valmiki 1 2003).
How easy it is to contrast this with the very names of the metropolii that populate the text, where the mere evocation of those proper names mine a rich semantic load, already implicating one in a whole series of plotted histories, stretching back to a long but finite and narrativizable time- Delhi and Kolkatta, but even the Chandrapur Ordnance Factory where Valmiki worked. It is against the privileged complacence of this calm voice of self naming that the dalit protagonist must stake his claim to language and literary-historical identity.
ps: One may end by remembering that even Ambedkar felt this clearly- for this logician of state representation nevertheless resorted often to a continual history/myth-writing, even a final self-conversion. His narrative enterprise thus reminds us of how ill at home the subaltern still is in the routinized and banalized norms of electoral and representative democracy and how much power and inflationary violence still has to teach us about the truer needs of sovereignty in this land of not just elite but also of a pacifist gandhian nationalism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bhatia, Tej K. A History of the Hindi Grammatical Tradition: Hindi- Hindustani Grammar, Grammarians, History and Problems. Leiden: E J Brill, 1987.
Gonda, Jan. A Concise Elementary Grammar of the Sanskrit Language. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1966.
Kellogg, S H. A Grammar of the Hindi Language. Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1995.
Limbale, Sharankumar. Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature: History, Controversy and Considerations. Translated by Alok Mukherjee. Hyderabad; Orient Longman, 2005.
Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. London: Verso, 2000.
Valmiki, Omprakash. Jhootan: A Dalit’s Life. Translated by Arun Prabha Mukherjee. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
-------------------------- Dalit Sahitya ka Saundaryashastra. Delhi: Radhakrishna Publications, 2001.
Wankhede, M.N.” Friends, the Day of Irresponsible Writing is Over.” In Arjun Dangle, ed., Poisoned Bread: Translations from Modern Marathi Dalit Literature, pp 314-323. Translated by Maxine Bernsten. Bombay: Orient Longman, 1992.
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