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Books in Canada - April / May 2004: |
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| Among the Maggots Merrybegot
by Asa Boxer The year of crisis is 1922, the year of The Waste Land. Negotiations between T. S. Eliot and Dial magazine’s Scofield Thayer were heated. Pound had been pimping The Waste Land as the culmination of twenty years of modernist efforts. Bidding began at $2,850, which Eliot declined, convinced he could get more. Interestingly, negotiations were started without anyone having examined the manuscript. In the end, the Dial Award was promised Eliot––again without anyone bothering to take a peek at the text. “Literary history”, writes Lawrence Rainey, “records few spectacles so curious or so touching as that of the two editors of a major review offering a figure nearly three times the national income per-capita––in 1986 terms, the same ratio would yield over $40,000––for a poem which neither had seen or read”. Rainey calls it a “touching” spectacle because it was an act of desperation. They did not want to risk the esteemed position of the Dial––a review promising to be at the cutting edge of the modernist movement. Upon publication, tensions ran high. William Carlos Williams called Eliot’s poem, “The Great Catastrophe”. Virginia Woolf charged Eliot with stylistic indecorousness, referring to Eliot’s use of parataxis (or lack of connectives), and to the mental acrobatics the poem required of the reader. Leonard Diepeveen, in his fascinating new book, The Difficulties of Modernism, quotes a particularly ugly review by F. L. Lucas: Among the maggots that breed in the corruption of poetry one of the commonest is the bookworm…when the Greek world was filling with libraries and emptying of poets, growing in erudition as its genius expired, then first appeared…that Professorenpoesie which finds in literature the inspiration that life gives no more, which replaces depth by muddiness, beauty by echoes, passion by necrophily. The fashionable verse of Alexandria grew out of the polite leisure of its librarians, its Homeric scholars, its literary critics. Indeed, the learning of that age had solved the economic problem of living by taking in each others’ dirty washing, and the ‘Alexandra’ of Lycophron, which its learned author made so obscure that other learned authors could make their fortunes by explaining what it meant, still survives for the curious as the first case of this disease and the first really bad poem in Greek….Disconnected and ill-knit, loaded with echo and allusion, fantastic and crude, obscure and obscurantist—such is the typical style of Alexandrianism. Diepeveen argues that we are currently in an Alexandrian age, and he contends that, for better or worse, we are now stuck with the “crude, obscure and obscurantist” as an aesthetic. He admits that “the audience for difficult art will always be small, and will always need to be supported by the university classroom or some institution like it”. Unlike Lucas, however, Diepeveen believes that “A two-tiered audience for the products of art is just one of difficulty’s consequences, and it is not completely negative”. But what or who determines the artistic value of work produced by such a system? Diepeveen does not venture an opinion on good and bad difficulty. What he does, however, is present us with the problem (and does so, notably, in eloquent and simple language). Having committed himself to a book-length study of what he admits is a major factor of contemporary aesthetics, Diepeveen dodges the evaluative issue at stake. In part, this review is an attempt to redress this oversight in terms of the two books under review. UN and Merrybegot are both new books of Canadian poetry that, due to their difficult natures, invite comparison. UN is Dennis Lee’s seventh book (the seventh for adults, one should specify, since Lee —of Alligator Pie fame— is also well known for his children’s verse). It follows on the heels of his selected poems, Nightwatch (1996), and the earlier, much-acclaimed Riffs (1993), a long poem written in a startling, spontaneous, jazz-like voice, which (although there were forewarning moments of it in The Gods) was a stylistic about-face from his earlier works (as showcased in Nightwatch). Like Riffs, UN is a departure for Lee. But in the case of these new poems—
—the departure is radical; as radical, coincidentally, as it is for Dalton in her third collection, Merrybegot. Dalton continues her investigation into Newfoundland culture, which she began in Time of Icicles (1989) and Allowing the Light (1993), but what she now brings to her poetry (a poetry hitherto characterized by a patient, alert, simple lyricism) is a surprising breath of new life from the lilting sounds of the Newfoundland dialect (with many of the poems finding their beginnings in the Dictionary of Newfoundland English). Here’s “The Jillicker”:
Lucas’ description of Alexandrianism is especially apt to our situation with UN and Merrybegot, as both books contain unfamiliar diction (“erstlings”, “jillicker”) and both, at times, require the aid of a dictionary. But whereas Merrybegot yields a series of brilliant-cut verbal surfaces, UN abandons the lapidary of poetic craft and sets out to produce what it unabashedly calls a “wordy desyllabification”. I’ve shown UN to a number of poetry lovers, and reactions varied from visceral disgust to reserved indifference. According to Diepeveen my feelings and the reactions of others to UN are symptomatic of its “difficulty”. These reactions are typical of conservative, middle-brow readers confronted by a challenging text. Apparently, it awakens survival instincts: fight or flight. So why then, does a text like Merrybegot, also “difficult” because based on the distinctive vocabulary of Newfoundland English, not awaken these same violent, primordial instincts in the same conservative, middle-brow readers? UN yields some clever new words and collocations that exemplify a postmodernist revel in the detritus of today’s urbane universe. The voice of UN, enacting the disintegration of life and language, wants “verbs of slagscape thrombosis./ Syntax of chromosome pileups” as well as “slubtalk; gerundibles; gummy embouchure”. “Slub,” the title of this poem, refers to the process of twisting splinters of wool in spinning or carding. This image evokes the idea of the double helix of our DNA as well as the arbitrary gluing together of splintered things. “Slubtalk” and “gerundibles” enact the syntax of chromosome pileups, themselves a kind of verbal slubbing. A heavy handed analysis could squeeze still more from these words, but let’s stop here for a moment and compare the effects of a couple of lines from Merrybegot’s “She”: “Was as good a gun/ As ever was put to your face”. Although significantly less satisfying to an analytical or cognitivist approach, this striking image is aesthetically pleasing. These lines speak for themselves far better than they can be spoken for. The best I can do is indicate the poignant imagery, sharp wit, and effective concision of Dalton’s words. Lee’s work, on the other hand, is more vexing to experience due to its rejection of any accessible, music-shaping principles, but, like conceptual art (or idea-driven art), it is very easy to talk about. And as Matthew Kieran indicates in his essay “Value of Art”, “conceptual art, where it lacks aesthetic value, can at best be something akin to art criticism, but [is] not itself valuable as art”. Indeed, UN reads more like a critique of traditional poetic forms and tropes, heralding the inadequacies of canonical poetry in today’s postmodern culture. Consider, for instance, how Lee launches this collection with a poem called “inwreck”—a not too subtle critique of Hopkins’ “inscape” Evidently, Lee has put a lot of work into every syllable, word and line; UN is definitely erudite and subtly complex. But as art, it is unsatisfying. Poems like “skewy”, for example, fall into the category of the ill-wrought riddle:
As Emily Dickinson noted, “The Riddle we can guess/ We speedily despise –”. One of the problems with Lee’s work in UN is that once the riddle is solved, nothing of interest remains. Having rejected an aesthetic dimension, the poem is exhausted by interpretation. Merrybegot avoids this problem by striking a balance between the riddle’s cognitive component and its aesthetic component, so that interpretation, instead of solving the poem, helps one return to it to marvel at its technique. In other words, the meaning of the poem is not the end-all of its being. The kind of difficulty that UN presents is what Diepeveen calls “surface difficulty”. It is of the same genus as Eliot’s The Waste Land: stubbornly opposed to habitual linguistic practices, highly allusive, concerned with the structural representation of its most dominant theme (i.e. modern decadence and the search for hope in a hopelessly fragmented universe). The main difference between The Waste Land and Lee’s “axiodendral badlands”, however, is that Eliot’s poem is an unprecedented sound experience, a musical intermixing of clear images, cultural voices, and foreign languages. Evidently, Lee is following Pope’s advice: “’tis not enough no harshness gives offence,/ The sound must seem an echo to the sense”. In a way, Lee outdoes Eliot; UN is more mimetic of the complexities of our time. On the other hand, Pope also warned, “Words are like leaves; and where they most abound,/ Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found”. According to Diepeveen’s logic though, wordy language is fruitful to the academy; Pope was wrong because he had the same problem as the majority of readers––he was not an academic. The anxiety that arises when we are confronted with difficulty, Diepeveen explains, “separates many readers from academics, for most academics don’t really expect simplicity in a work of art to which they have directed their attention”. True, academics need something to research or they become redundant. UN is a contribution to this kind of professional readership, but to those other professionals, those of us concerned with readerly pleasure, Lee’s surface difficulty is aesthetically barren and cognitively unrewarding. Although UN thematises and formalises nonsense, its word-puzzles fail to achieve a significant and independent existence beyond explication and paraphrase. Nonsense, of course, is not always a sign of bad poetry. Lewis Carroll knew a great deal about nonsense. Here is a stanza from his “Jabberwocky”:
By preserving regular syntax, Carroll creates a poem that any child can understand. Mary Dalton’s Merrybegot uses the same principles. Here are four lines from “Janneying
Alice’s reaction to “Jabberwocky” addresses the mechanics of this kind of difficulty: “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas––only I don’t exactly know what they are!” Alice is able to follow some kind of narrative, and she remarks, “somebody killed something: that’s clear, at any rate”. Alice knows this because enough sentence structure exists for her to follow. “Janneying” uses the same method, fitting unfamiliar words and figures of speech into a familiar syntactical matrix that guides one toward its meaning. By collapsing syntax in UN, Lee creates a monster of impenetrability. In fact, the pieces in UN, arguably, have no surface meaning. They are of the same breed as those modern works derided by Eugenio Montale for deliberately excluding “every syntactical progression”, thereby “providing [only] a possibility for poetry”, and producing instead the kind of paratactical structures that beg the reader’s creative powers to make the poems for himself, because “the author … has not willed something for him”. What makes “Jabberwocky” (and Merrybegot, for that matter) intriguing is that the sense seems to be at hand, it teases, excites. Carroll’s text brings its readers back. People share “Jabberwocky”. The Waste Land, The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost (add Sidney’s Arcadia and Spenser’s Faerie Queene) are extraordinary creations of the human imagination. They are great and have attracted study because people are drawn in time and again by the sound, the structure, the subject matter, the dark and beautiful worlds they conjure. They are attractive: they appeal to our five senses; they engage both body and intellect in pleasurable intercourse. The argument for Lee’s book is that we’re past all that now; the body (earth) and the intellect (world) are at odds in our modern urban setting. Be that as it may, art can appeal to more than one faculty of experience and good art engages several. In “After All That”, the first poem of Merrybegot, for instance, we find our ears and our curiosity engaged by cadences and figures of speech, our minds and imaginations stimulated by metaphor and image:
Mary Dalton’s Merrybegot, like Robert Burns’ Scots poetry, exploits the treasures of a variant English and the culture that produced it. Her muse, as noted, is Newfoundland English. Poem after delightful poem follows in Merrybegot. The moods vary. The images are intriguing, the words expressive. Perhaps most importantly, one has the sense of coming into contact with a living language, its cultural history strongly present alongside its cultural immediacy. The effect, unlike Lee’s self-absorbed and idiosyncratic difficulty, is a sense of inclusion, of being privy to a real world, remote yet invitingly vibrant. In both cases you’ll be turning to a dictionary, but Dalton’s book is a pleasure to share. And people, no doubt, will be encouraging each other to reach for the Dictionary of Newfoundland English. “Merrybegot” means “bastard”, or more accurately, as the word itself indicates, conceived in joy. The contrasting shifts, the chafing of culture on culture are evident already in the title. Dalton’s craftsmanship is impeccable: line after line is packed with image and phrase, allowing one an ever deepening view of the culture it expresses: “He’d the face of a robber’s horse./ And he’d drink the rum off the dead Nelson.” I am not arguing for a complete dismissal
of difficulty as an aesthetic. I am urging us to take a more critical
view of difficulty in poetry. In 1922, people saw an obscure work
celebrated and awarded. The work was so oblique that many were under
the impression that if you can’t understand it, it must be art.
Now, just about anybody can design a text to be part mindbender,
part treasure hunt, and hide behind the initially negative critical
reception of Eliot’s poem. What seems clear is that an honest aesthetic
of difficulty has yet to be developed. There needs to be a line
dividing good art from bad art, and a comparison of Merrybegot and
UN gives us an idea of where this line might run. The difference
between Merrybegot and UN is that the latter was designed to stimulate
the pedantries of the bookworm, while the former was conceived for
the lover of poetry. Diepeveen’s Difficulties of Modernism discusses
the cultural entrenchment of difficulty, and urges academics to
be careful, not to dig up difficulties where none exist, not to
perceive difficulty as the only viable aesthetic. Difficulty does
have an aesthetic value, but when taken to extremes, it becomes
a cloying gimmick, an intellectual stumble into the default mode
of what can be considered “original”.
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