Fredric Jameson, _Allegory and Ideology_ (4)

 THE MAIN REASON I picked this up was to see how Jameson worked with more historical, more canonical writers—I think of him as a critic focused on the 20th and 21st centuries, and I don’t think I had til now read him on anybody who dated earlier than Balzac. So chapters 6, 7, and 8 on Spenser, Dante, and Goethe I read with particular interest.

    As with the chapter on Hamlet, I was impressed and a little in awe of how well Jameson knows this terrain. Taste this from the first paragraph of the Spenser chapter:

The two great traditions of medieval literature had both emerged in the twelfth century; on the one hand, in a mystico-erotic lyric that culminates in Dante’s unique epic; the second, in the more properly narrative “romans” of the epoch’s greatest “novelist,” Chrétien de Troyes. Intricate legends are spun from this last, which are dutifully developed for centuries (and fine true literary achievement in Italian “epic”) until they sink under their own weight in Spenser’s megallegory, thereafter only fitly remembered by the Romantics in Novalis […] and Wagner’s Parsifal (to which I suppose we need to add Tolkien and the effervescence of contemporary commercial fantasy literature).

God help me, does that not sound like Harold Bloom? The bravura sweep over centuries of Western Lit, the confidence about what counts as “true literary achievement,” the authoritative summing up? This sentence started me wondering: could Jameson do a Bloom, or something like Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve or Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, get a contract with Penguin and write one of those books that gets embraced by the Intelligent General Reader? I mean…why not? He has the prestige, he’s read everything, he can, as this passage shows, go big.

      Then again—near the beginning of the next chapter, on Dante, Jameson decides he has to clear some ground to talk about Dante and allegory by addressing Erich Auerbach’s famous argument that Dante found a way forward from the stiff symbolism of medieval literature, breaking out of allegory into a precursor of realism. Jameson writes:

At any rate, what I want to argue in the following pages is that Auerbach’s figura is a mediatory concept rather than a structural one, and this authority is not to be invoked against the revivals of allegory such as this one unless it is restaged in a contemporary semiotic arena in which questions of meaning and reference are measured against the philosophical problems of immanence and of representation in general.

Whew. Jameson’s gotta be Jameson, I guess. Penguin will have to keep looking for the next crossover literary critic. In that contemporary semiotic arena, the Intelligent General Reader would just be a Christian to Jameson’s lion.

Nonetheless, all three chapters are loaded with startlingly fresh ideas about these canonical figures. When Jameson talks about “Goethe’s Nietzschean side, the discovery of the life-giving powers of strong forgetting as a way of consigning guilt, the past, one’s own crimes and failures, to oblivion” and then a page later connects this capacity “to capitalism itself,” I thought, damn, he’s right.

Looking for Funny 3: Nell Zink, _Nicotine_

 LIKE THE WALLCREEPER and Mislaid, Nicotine is not sweetness and light, but it is funny. Our main character, Penny Baker, is the daughter of a celebrated anthropologist who adopted, in a way, then eventually married a young orphaned girl from a South American tribe he was studying. When her father dies, this dodgy situation reveals whole new and possibly even dodgier angles, so Penny decides she needs to get away for a while.

One of the questions that has come up after her father dies intestate is what to do with his childhood home, which the family still owns. Checking out the house, Penny discovers it is inhabited by a colorful group of squatters, who have named their community “Nicotine,” since they are all tobacco users.

Penny’s relationships with the community and certain of its members deepen intricately over the course of the novel, especially once her unscrupulous shark of an older half-brother conceives of a grand gentrification project around the house and becomes erotically obsessed with one of the members of Nicotine.

Does it all work out? I would say so. But the novel’s main treat is Nicotine. The only other novel I have read set among squatters is Paul Auster’s Sunset Park, and this one had a livelier representation of the world and culture—funnier, too, but also a shade more vraisemblable, perhaps.

Leslie Jamison, _Make It Scream, Make It Burn_

 THE EMPATHY EXAMS is a hard to act to follow, but I liked this one just as much. 

As with the earlier collection's essay on people who suffer (or believe they do) from Morgellons Disease, the first part of Make It Scream, Make It Burn gives us some intimate, empathetic glimpses at communities that share an unusual but powerful bond: "52 Blue" (about people fascinated by a particular whale), "We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live Again" (about parents convinced their son is the reincarnation of a WW II fighter pilot), "Sim Life" (about the online activity Second Life). 

As with the earlier collection's deeply affecting personal pieces ("The Empathy Exams," "Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain"), the newer book's concluding section has deeply poignant essays on Jamison's relationships with her husband and daughter (although she and her husband divorced last year, I learn from Wikipedia).

Make It Scream, Make It Burn sagged a bit in the middle for me, though, in the extended pieces on James Agee and Annie Appel. The question of how a writer or photographer or any other artist might document the lives of people in much more straitened circumstances than they are in themselves is an interesting one--how does one manage a humane impulse, maybe even a moral imperative, that is so streaked with potential for callousness and exploitation? I'm not sure Jamison had anything particularly illuminating to offer on this question, though.

On the whole, though, there's enough here to keep Jamison in the front rank of American essayists under 40, I would say. 

Ange Mlinko and Adrienne Rich

 QUITE A WHILE BACK--February 2013, going by the print edition date--Ange Mlinko published in The Nation a review of Adrienne Rich's final collection (Rich had died the previous March) and suggested that Rich's standing among younger poets had fallen and was likely to fall further.

JANUARY 30, 2013

Diagram This: On Adrienne Rich

A new collection of Adrienne Rich’s poems does not show her at her best.

ANGE MLINKO

It seemed to me that Mlinko was right (see Loads of Learned Lumber for 3/16/2013), so I was struck by Mlinko beginning a recent review in London Review of Books of a new biography of Rich and a new edition of Of Woman Born by saying "Adrienne Rich's poems speak so strongly to the current zeitgeist [...] that's is astounding to realize they were written twenty, forty, fifty years ago [...]".  The discourses of the Occupy, #MeToo, and Black Lives Matter movements are all close to Rich's wavelength, Mlinko notes. "Her essays employ an argot that contemporary opinion pieces might have cribbed from," she writes.

This got my attention. Has Mlinko changed her mind about Adrienne Rich?

The word "argot" made me suspect that Mlinko had not really changed her mind. Rich may have been right on any number of issues, but she was better at being right than she was at making poems--at least I think that is where Mlinko is coming down. "But one doesn't doesn't read Rich for la comédie humaine, stylistic sprezzatura, or pleasure of any sort--unless one takes pleasure in moral indignation, which Lionel Trilling once claimed was a distinct feature of the American middle-class liberal," Mlinko writes.

It has long seemed to me that Rich is a good poet for people who do not otherwise like poetry much. If you do like poetry, her poems do not provide the kind of pleasures you have come to expect. They do take up important topics, though, and take a forward-leaning progressive stance. It did not seem to me or (I guess) Ange Mlinko in 2013 that those choices boded well for Rich's future reputation, but at this point, her reputation may be doing fine.

Alice Quinn, ed., _Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America's Poets Respond to the Pandemic_

THIS MAKES SEVEN posts on seven poetry collections in seven days, and yes, I am feeling a little pleased with myself.

Here we have 100+ poems, seemingly mainly from spring 2020, doing basically what the volume's subtitle indicates. 

A lot of really good poems from some really good poets here, but the book has mainly served to remind me of the relief I felt when Alice Quinn stepped down as New Yorker poetry editor.

Given the stylistic spectrum of American poetry, the anthology occupies a rather narrow range, one familiar to anyone who read the poetry in the New Yorker during the Quinn era. These are well-educated, well-behaved poems, mainly in conversational syntax, bundles of ingenuity in the figurative language but rhythmically subdued, quite a few loosely-handled closed forms, lots of poems ending with a little fwip like a Tupperware container for which the right lid has been found.

It's not that I cannot or do not enjoy that sort of thing--but when ninety out of a hundred poems in an anthology are all executing the same set of compulsory exercises (so to speak), they start to blur into each other. I was grateful for the occasional Eileen Myles, Shane McCrae, or Claudia Rankine poem that changed things up a bit.

Not that some of the milder-mannered poems were not excellent. I really enjoyed Susan Kinsolving's "My Heart Cannot Accept It All," for instance. Hats off also to Joshua Bennet, Traci Brimhall, Erin Belieu, Aleksander Hemon, Ada Limón, Matthew Zapruder. 

But I found myself wishing Quinn had worked with a co-editor, Cole Swenson perhaps, Jericho Brown, someone who might have wandered farther off the path once in a while.

Bei Dao, _The Rose of Time: New and Selected Poems_, ed. Eliot Weinberger

 SINCE I OFTEN mention how much I admire James Joyce, I am occasionally asked whether I have read Finnegans Wake. I don’t know whether I have, actually. I looked at every word on every page in serial left-to-right, top-to-bottom order, which means I “read” the book in some narrow sense…but did I take it in, grasp it, comprehend it, have some flickering glimmer of what was being narrated? Well, no, not so much. So I have both read and not read Finnegans Wake.

I feel that I have also both read and not read The Rose of Time. Most of the time, I would read the poem’s three or four stanzas, read it again, and read it again, and still draw a blank.

this sky unexceptional at chess

watches the sea change color

a ladder goes deep into the mirror

fingers in a school for the blind

touch the extinction of birds

     (“Another”)

Bei Dao (pen name of Zhao Zhenkai) was one of a group of poets attacked by the state as “menglong,” sometimes translated “misty,” essentially meaning “obscure,” with dismissive connotation. Nonetheless, he was embraced by a broad readership in the 1970s and 1980s, a kind of generational spokesman figure. He was abroad  when Tiananmen Square happened and decided to stay abroad, but he remains widely read and revered in China.

All of which makes sense for me, I have to say, because Bob Dylan means a lot to me, and the Dylan songs that most affected me, that shaped my sensibility I would even say, are almost perfectly opaque. “Visions of Johanna” may be my favorite song; it seems to put its finger precisely on the spot. And yet do I have any idea why lines like “the back of the fish truck that loads while my conscience explodes” or “harmonicas play skeleton keys in the rain” seem so meaningful? I do not.

“Bei Dao” and “Bob Dylan” even have the same initials, in our writing system.

So I loved the book even though I did not understand much of it, since I could read “keyword my shadow /  hammers dreamworld iron / stepping to that rhythm / a lone wolf walks into” and imagine thousands in China thinking, “Damn, he nailed it again.”

 

Jane Wong, _Overpour_

 I COULD SAY this is a debut poetry collection that reflects a second-generation youth and adolescence in an immigrant family…and that would be accurate…but it would fail to convey how remarkable this book is. 

When I say, “ debut poetry collection that reflects a second-generation youth and adolescence in an immigrant family,” do you think of a gothic hallucinatory trip streaked with black humor and populated with raccoons? Probably not. The book’s Amy Tan dimension is overshadowed by its Shirley-Jackson-on-mushrooms dimension.

It may just be due to the Action Books connection, but I sometimes thought of Lara Glenum, or early Ariana Reines.

The book’s most audacious gesture, I’d say, are the five poems, interspersed throughout the volume, in the voice of the poet’s mother at different ages (24, 30, 29, 43, 25). Amy Tan channeling Plath?