Levity of Design

Levity of Design:

Man and Modernity in the Poetry of J. H. Prynne,

by Wit Píetrzak

This book first published 2012

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

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ISBN (10): 1-4438-4046-7, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4046-0

ABLE OF

ONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii

Introduction ................................................................................................ 1
J. H. Prynne, Avant-Garde and Neo-Modernism

Chapter One............................................................................................... 11
Subjectivity under Siege

Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 41
Disentangling the Subject

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 93
Beyond Stagnation

Chapter Four............................................................................................ 143
Stories of Disentanglement in Blue Slides at Rest

Bibliography............................................................................................ 157

Index of Names........................................................................................ 163

CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is the result of a sudden, yet profound fascination with the

poetry of J. H. Prynne. Not only has his work exerted an enormous
influence over my understanding and appreciation of poetry but also has
brought about changes in my perception of the task of the literary critic.
There are books that we simply have to write, in order to put in writing the
genuine amazement with a particular oeuvre, to phrase the peculiar thrall
in which it has kept us; this is one of those books. Reading and rereading
Prynne’s poems has become a way of conversing with myself and the
world as my experience of his work turned from an unnerving interest into
a thrilling discovery of the unexpected.

I am truly grateful to J. H. Prynne for the illuminating conversations

and insightful remarks about my work; without his advice the present
study would surely have faltered. I would like to thank Dr Rod Mengham
for his assistance and enthusiasm for what then appeared more of an
impression of a study than a real plan. I am also much indebted to
Professor Jerzy Jarniewicz for his unflagging support of my many projects
as well as help and counsel when it was most needed. I am most thankful
to the Dean of the Faculty of Philology, University of àódĨ, Professor
Piotr Stalmaszczyk for his advice and aid. Some of the ideas in this book
are the result of a serious engagement with the issues of poetry and
subjectivity which I fruitfully discussed with Professor Agata Bielik-
Robson and Dr Kacper Bartczak, to whom I express my deep thanks.
Finally, I wish to thank Professor Andrew Tomlinson for his invaluable
support with the final drafts of the present book. Most of all I owe a great
deal to my wife, Paulina, for propping me up, and to my son, Tadeusz, for
reminding me why we read poetry in the first place.

Wit Pietrzak

àódĨ, Poland

NTRODUCTION

RYNNE

VANT

-G

ARDE

AND

-M

ODERNISM

Let me begin with making a multiple acknowledgement: “In an article in
The Times, 3 December 1987, the novelist, biographer and critic Peter
Ackroyd described J. H. Prynne as ‘without doubt the most formidable and
accomplished poet in England today, a writer who has single-handedly
changed the vocabulary of expression.’”

With this praise N. H. Reeve and

Richard Kerridge open their study of Prynne’s poetry. Seventeen years
after the publication of Nearly too Much and almost twenty-five years
since Ackroyd extolled Prynne as the major (if not the crucial) English
poet, his work has still not achieved the wide acclaim that it deserves. Neil
Corcoran concedes that the increasing opaqueness of Prynne’s work after
Brass may well relegate his poetry to “the kind of neo-Modern hermetic
impasse to which traditional English humanists and empiricists have
traditionally consigned the works of the British neo-Modern.”

Therefore

Corcoran suggests that, should no dedicated team of explicators come to
expound on his work, Prynne may appear merely as a provincial neo-
modernist in the wake of such poets as Pound and Charles Olson.

In the following study I try to read the Prynnean oeuvre (as it stands in

the latest Poems [2005]

) as perhaps the single most important voice in the

poetic discussion on late-modern subjectivity. It is here argued that his
poems, which with time undergo radical changes of technique, voice and
focus, seek a language capable of expressing an individual self untrammelled
by the various discourses of late modernity; the difficulty of the task lies in
the fact that it is the very discourses, which Prynne seeks in his own way
to overcome, that comprise the subject’s being in the world. Thus, as I
hope to show, the ostensible arcaneness of his art derives from the fact that

N. H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge, Nearly too Much. The Poetry of J. H. Prynne

(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995), vii.

Neil Corcoran, English Poetry since 1940 (New York: Longman, 1993), 177.

J. H. Prynne, Poems (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2005). All the quotations from Prynne

come from this edition.

Introduction

his poems face up to what he sees as the predicaments of late modernity;
rather than celebrating what freedom and good this era brings to the
Western world, he critically regards those areas wherein the period, subtly
and indirectly, works against the values which it made a point of
defending in the first place.

The idea of discursive entanglement, taken to be the background for

the poems analysed here, is explored in Chapter One, then re-approached
throughout Prynne’s work. I place the poet in a two-fold context of
philosophical investigations of Martin Heidegger and Theodor Adorno.
Even though they are not the only thinkers alluded to, it is between the
poles of Heidegger and Adorno’s thought on art that Prynne pursues the
restitution of the self. In Chapter Two, the return of the subject elaborated
in Chapter One, is identified in Prynne’s work from Kitchen Poems (1968)
to Down where Changed (1979); here the notion of idioms-as-manacles is
further developed as the vehicle of what is termed ossification of the self (I
define this term with regard to Heidegger’s idea of enframing in Chapter
One). Chapter Three delves into the more recent work, dating from The
Oval Window (1983) all the way to Biting the Air (2003). I analyse the
gradual change in Prynne’s poetics from a Heideggerian premise to a more
Adornian negative dialectic. The transition is by no means a severance
from the earlier pursuits but rather a continuation of a direction already
implicit in the first volumes. The last chapter offers a sustained reading of
Blue Slides at Rest that closes the 2005 Poems. This investigation of the
sequence is both a summary of the discussions undertaken in the previous
parts of this study and a delineation of the idea of restituted subjectivity.

The quest for extirpation of the subject is here considered to be a prime

example of the crisis within late modernity. The emancipatory idea of the
death of man (whose significance is more widely presented in Chapter
One) has paved the way for a number of interesting poetic enunciations for
example, the earlier Ashbery and the Language group poets, but at the
same time it has spurred an artistic and largely critical revaluation of the
category of the self (I would tentatively mention the poets who share an
affinity with Prynne: Andrew Duncan, Rod Mengham, Peter Riley and
John Wilkinson, although their engagement with the idea of the subject
needs much more exploration). The demarcation between discarding the
subject and attempting to reclaim it seems partly dictated by the uneasy
position of the idea of avant-garde’s relation to modernism and
postmodernism.

A key voice in discussions of the idea of avant-gardism, Andreas

Huyssen says that the historical avant-garde “no longer offers solutions for
major sectors of contemporary culture, which would reject the avant-

Levity of Design: Man and Modernity in the Poetry of J. H. Prynne

garde’s universalizing and totalizing gesture as much as its ambiguous
espousal of technology and modernization.”

He openly identifies early

twentieth century avant-gardist art with a ruse for discovering a depth at
which the disharmonious reality would find its reorganizing principle. No
doubt that principle undergirds such oft-quoted High Modernist works as
The Cantos or The Waste Land. Huyssen also maintains that in spite of
“the power and integrity of its attacks against traditional bourgeois culture
and against the deprivations of capitalism, there are moments in the
historical avant-garde which show how deeply avant-gardism itself is
implicated in the Western tradition of growth and progress.”

Huyssen

enumerates a list of points of convergence between the avant-garde and
capitalism, and sees the 1960s as the final collapse of modernist avant-
gardism, which died along with the various countercultural movements.

opposed to the modernist yearning after totality, postmodernism offers a
respite from grand narratives and focuses on the surfaces of reality

. Thus

in Huyssen’s view, whereas the avant-garde ceased to exist because it
aligned itself too tightly with totalising projects of modernity, as a result
falling prey to twentieth century regimes, the new wave (1970s and
beyond) of artists gave up their yearnings for unification and celebrated
the contingent, the single and the marginal.

Huyssen’s description of modernism as an avant-garde project focuses

on the features that developed in the late 1910s and early 1920s, when
Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Joyce, Gertrude Stein, W. C. Williams and Wallace
Stevens published or began publishing their best-known and most
typically High-Modernist work. From this vantage point, the avant-garde
does seem a lost project. As opposed to Huyssen, Marjorie Perloff lays the
stresses in different places and the image of the modernist literary avant-
garde that she presents appears to still be very much present in the
contemporary writing. In lieu of once more reverently paying obeisance to
High Modernist literary achievements, she identifies the first fifteen years
of the twentieth century as the point at which there appeared a poetic
revolution which was later to be repressed; “what strikes us when we
reread the poetries of the early twentieth century,” she observes, “is that
the real fate of first-stage modernism was one of deferral, its radical and

Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide (London: Macmillan, 1986), 175.

Huyssen, After the Great Divide, 173,

Huyssen, After the Great Divide, 168.

Its rather long history notwithstanding, Ihab Hassan’s schematic comparison of

modernism with postmodernism remains a most lucid (if a little strained)
delineation, which pertains to the distinction I am making here. The Postmodern
Turn (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987), 84 – 92.

Introduction

utopian aspirations being cut off by the catastrophe, first of the Great War,
and then of the series of crises produced by the two great totalitarianisms
that dominated the first half of the century and culminated in World War II
and the subsequent Cold War.”

The radicalism of what she terms early

modernism mainly consisted in formal experiment. She argues that its
innovations brought to the fore the self-referential linguistic nature of
poetic expression, and that idea still informs the poetics of such
contemporary American poets as Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian and
Steve McCaffery. Although she exclusively draws parallels between early
modern poetries and the new American scene, it also seems that those
same strategies have underpinned the work of avant-garde British poets for
the last fifty years.

Perloff identifies four principal “influences” on the current (mostly

American) poetry: Eliot (until more or less the publication of “The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”), Gertrude Stein, Marcel Duchamp and
Velimir Khlebnikov. However, the key points of continuity between the
formal radicalism of the early tradition and the art of Prynne and other
British revolutionaries appears to be Eliot and Khlebnikov.

Eliot’s

breakthrough poem in Perloff’s view is “The Love Song of J. Afred
Prufrock” in that it most thoroughly epitomises the characteristics of the
early modernist revolution in poetic language.

[T]he imagination continues to be startled by the sheer inventiveness of
[Eliot’s] early poems, in which metonymy, pun, paragram, and the
semantic possibilities of sound structure are exploited to create verbal
artifacts, characterized by a curious mix of immediacy and complexity, of
colloquial idiom and found text in the form of foreign borrowings. Not
linearity or consistency of speaking voice or spatial realism, but a force-
field of resonating words – this is the key to Eliot’s early poetic.

Perloff corroborates her list of innovative features by closely reading
“Prufrock” so as to show its thoroughly modern aura of experiment that
does not aspire to complete pronouncement of some pre-existent order.
Indeed, very similar mechanisms that are indicated as constitutive of

Marjorie Perloff, 21

Century Modernism. The “New” Poetics (Oxford: Blackwell,

2002), 3.

Among the direct influences on Prynne (though not only) one must mention Ed

Dorn and Charles Olson; nonetheless, as it seems, the revolution Perloff observes
in the writing of those early modernists underlies many of the experiments that he
carries out throughout his oeuvre. For the analysis of Prynne’s affinity with Olson
see Anthony Mellors, “Literal Myth in Olson and Prynne,” fragmente 4 (1991).

Perloff, 21

Century Modernism, 41.

Levity of Design: Man and Modernity in the Poetry of J. H. Prynne

Eliot’s early phase are embodied in Prynne’s poems with equal success.
As it is argued below, Prynne also deliberately intensifies the figurative
processes inherent in words (even those seemingly having specialised
meanings only). Also, the tension that Perloff notes between immediacy of
expression and textual complexity informs Prynnean poems, which at the
same time evoke meanings, sets of images kaleidoscopically glimmering
against the mind’s eye while deferring the moment of complete (or even
more sustained) understanding.

It is these mechanisms that create an air of strangeness about the poem

and radically shatter the stability of the language; as Perloff maintains,
“’counterpointed pronouns’ […] the abrupt tense and mood shifts, the
juxtapositions of ordinary speech rhythms with passages in foreign
languages, and especially the foregrounding of sounds and silences
(represented by the poem’s visual layout), relate ‘Prufrock’ to Constructivist
notions of ‘laying bare the device,’ of using material form – in this case,
language – as an active compositional agent, impelling the reader to
participate in the process of construction.”

The tensions in such poems as

“Prufrock” force the reader to make “the text cohere,” although it is a
misleading coherence because whenever a particular lyric is reread, a
slightly new meaning arises. In this respect, Perloff makes early
modernism a path-breaking moment for one of the main postmodernist (in
Hassan’s distinction) developments: that of a transition from a “readerly”
work to a “writerly” text. Therefore, in Perloff’s view, contrary to Huyssen’s
thesis that the modernist avant-garde passed away for good, the
experimentalism of the early twentieth century is still alive and well.

The other key “modernist,” whose techniques may be traced in Prynne,

is Khlebnikov. He operates at the level of a single phoneme; where Eliot
exemplifies the technique of intensifying figurative play between words
and phrases, which results in the invocation of sometimes irreconcilably
discordant images, Khlebnikov’s lyric is “an exercise in verbal incantation
– a study of the power a single neologism can have to arouse sonic, visual,
and semantic references. Zaum [beyondsense], in this context, far from
being ‘nonsense’ is more accurately super-sense – what Pound meant
when he said that poetry is ‘language charged with meaning to the utmost
possible degree.’”

Khlebnikov’s lyrics do not deal in polysemy, showing

from inside themselves a variety of interpretive paths pointing in different
directions, but gather meanings about themselves. They spur signification
by forcing one to supply one’s own reading of a single sound. This radical
shift of sense-making patterns pulls down not only traditional reading

Perloff, 21

Century Modernism, 26.

Perloff, 21

Century Modernism, 126.

Introduction

mechanisms but also requires that one think differently insomuch as
Khlebnikov’s poems begin at a level that no other discourse can penetrate;
yet, they do not relinquish language altogether but rather demand that it be
considered a game in which no rules have been set.

Khlebnikov predates Wittgenstein in calling all language activity a

game. “Once poetry is accepted as the language-game which makes things
strange, which invents new words on the analogy with familiar ones and
puts familiar words in new contexts, creating complex sound structures,
the reader (or listener) instinctively plays along.”

Thus poetry creates

new games and makes the strange familiar. According to Perloff, in this
sense, Khlebnikov paves the way to, among others, the Language group
poets. But in hindsight, there is certain seriousness and devotion to
Khlebnikov’s experiment. The Soviet regime tried to extirpate futurist
techniques such as Khlebnikov’s because they appeared to destabilise the
foundations of ideology. The apparatchiks needed a language absolutely
subservient to the needs of the state. This historical context hints at a more
dialectical nature of Khlebnikov’s zaum poetry in the sense that the further
his lyrics depart from commonly accepted patterns of reading and
thinking, the more they unveil every single ideology as a product of
linguistic totalitarianism.

In order to be able to read Khlebnikov, one must be willing to

participate in the process of meaning constitution. Such reader-engagement
can also be learnt from the early Eliot. Between these two poles, Eliot and
Khlebnikov, it appears that the British poetic revival founded its radical
avant-garde neo-modernist poetics. If, following Perloff, attention is
directed to means of expression and formalist innovations, the British
revivalists show much affinity with, for example, the Language poets.

However, in terms of the goals that Prynne and others set themselves, it
appears that they distance themselves significantly from postmodern
writers; in lieu of extolling freedom and the slow eradication of grand
narratives, the British avant-garde poets are keenly aware of the great
amount of critical work still needing to be done. If there still exists a self
in their work, and in Prynne’s poetry in particular, it needs to struggle with

Perloff, 21

Century Modernism, 142.

David Punter also maintains that the extraordinariness of Prynne’s experiment

has in a large measure “to do with the postmodern.” He proceeds to elaborate on
Prynne’s affinity with a variety of postmodern theoreticians and critics. Persuasive
and lucid though he is throughout his essay, it appears that a certain (critical)
commitment to the tasks of art makes Prynne’s poetry in many respects
irreconcilable with the writings which Punter mentions. I shall severally return to
this point. “Interlocating J. H. Prynne,” The Cambridge Quarterly 31 (2002).

Levity of Design: Man and Modernity in the Poetry of J. H. Prynne

the various attempts by (discursive) modernity to subjugate it to the
unrestrained force of language (an idea amplified in Chapter One). Formal
innovation, which stems as much from the early modernist project as it
does from the association with such American late modernist figures as
Olson and Dorn, and an unflagging preoccupation with the individual in an
implicitly hostile late modern environment, are the fundamentals of the
British Revival poetics with Prynne being a salient example.

It was Tina Morris and Dave Cunliffe who first employed the term

British Poetry Revival around 1965 in an underground magazine Poetmeat.
The term referred to the poets who wrote in reaction to the “commonsense
politeness of the ‘Movement.’”

Indeed, the 1960s through to the 1970s

saw an explosion of avant-garde poetic activity in Britain, which was
largely influenced by American poets, including Olson, Dorn and
Ginsberg. The new British poets gathered around small presses, which
became the most important platform both for publishing new work and
exchanging opinions on the contemporary writing scene. In a way the
situation of this avant-garde began to resemble that of the earlier twentieth
century modernist writers who also relied on the support of little
magazines. However, the affluence and the resultant circulation of The
Egoist or The Little Review far surpassed that of Grosseteste Review or
The English Intelligencer, but it was the latter two magazines that
presented the work of, amongst others, those who would later come to be
known as the Cambridge poets. Grossteste, which was to be longer-lived
than The English Intelligencer, “began to define a style more academic
and austere.” Centred on Prynne’s Cambridge, it gathered such figures as
Tom Raworth, John James, Douglas Oliver and Veronica Forrest-
Thomson, who “fused lyrical precision and speculative abstraction into a
new objectivism, open simultaneously to the inherited patterns of the
English line and a range of globally imported alternatives.”

A conscious association with the modernist avant-garde of the period

before World War II has gone hand in hand with a rejection of
postmodernism’s vision of the immateriality of the world. What Drew
Milne calls late modernism is less concerned with the transcendence of

Robert Sheppard, The Poetry of Saying. British Poetry and its Discontents, 1950

– 2000 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005), 35 – 38.

C. D. Blanton, “Transatlantic Currents,” in A Concise Companion to Postwar

British and Irish Poetry, ed. C. D. Blanton and Nigel Alderman (Chichester:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 150.

Introduction

High Modernist principles than with their critical renewal.

The British

Revival poets, even though they share many formal features with so-called
postmodern writers, seem to display a prejudice against too willing a
support of the textualist perception of the world. They subscribe to
Berman’s recognition of modernism “as a struggle to make ourselves at
home in a constantly changing world [...] Our most creative constructions
are bound to turn into prisons and whited sepulchres that we, or our
children, will have to escape or transform if life is to go on.”

It is this

transformation that lies at the core of the idea of critical renewal, which
takes the form of dialectic engagement with material reality and the forces
that shape it. I will try to demonstrate that those forces take the form of
various discourses that create a world where the self is only needed as a
tool and not a (linguistically) conscious subjectivity. The idea of
discursive reality is derived principally from Baudrillard, and the
mechanism of eradication of the subject is analysed following de Man’s
postulate of the empowerment of language. Between these two thinkers
the self becomes a mere cog in the machinery of late modern reality (as is
shown is greater detail in Chapter One); thus human subjectivity becomes
available only through an act of renewal or, as it is referred to as in the
present study, restitution.

A view of the Revivalist late modernist or neo-modernist critical

strategies that most pertinently expresses the working premise of this book
is offered by Milne, who argues that recent developments in poetry might
best be understood as negative dialectic, “the working through of
innovation fatigue.”

Since no direct access to reality is available and no

clear truth is to be gleaned from language, poetry has only the path of
overcoming the existent stasis that contemporaneity has wrought. This
overcoming in the case of the Revivalists in general and Prynne in
particular takes the form of (Adornian, as it will be argued) dialectic
approach to the world of late modernity. In light of the fact that he cannot
penetrate to the nature of things with his imagination, nor rely on language
as a stable medium to relay his message, the modern-day poet, if he is not
to abandon himself to and celebrate the contemporary hyperreality, is left
with the dialectic method; he needs to strive beyond the ossified languages
that surround him.

Drew Milne, “Neo-Modernism and Avant-Garde Orientations,” in A Concise

Companion to Postwar British and Irish Poetry, ed. C. D. Blanton and Nigel
Alderman (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 161 – 162.

Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air. The Experience of Modernity

(London: Penguin, 1988), 6.

Milne, “Neo-Modernism,” 166.

Levity of Design: Man and Modernity in the Poetry of J. H. Prynne

Prynne’s radical innovations (and those of Roy Fisher, John Wilkinson,

Drew Milne, Rod Mengham and many other late modernist poets), which
sometimes seem to preclude understanding and, as Corcoran feared, make
him a poet for a narrow clique of pundits, are here explored with a view to
demonstrating that only through such experiments can the idiom be
renewed. Prynne appears to realise that by bringing language to the brink
of signification and iterability, beyond which no communication is
possible (indeed, where there is no language), he attains a tension within
his poems that infuses words with a new life. Paradoxically enough, the
less intelligible his poems are, the more meanings they accrue and the
more incisively they penetrate into reality.

It would be most difficult to argue that there are overarching motifs in

Prynne, for his poetry deals with such disparate material that one feels
overwhelmed going from one stanza to another. Yet the theme of the self’s
entanglement in its world, with various connotations as well as in different
modes and degrees of prominence, appears to run through his entire
oeuvre. The volumes discussed here span thirty-five years of writing and
in each one the figure of the human subject undergoes a metamorphosis.
However, one element, as I maintain throughout this study, remains
constant: the notion of man is neither to be dismissed as a remnant of the
Cartesian past, nor regarded as self-fulfilled in the freedom which late
modernity has apparently brought; man needs to be re-valuated and
renewed and this, Prynne’s poems come to suggest, can only be attained
through a restitution of the language. The subject in Prynne is never taken
for granted. The less it seems to be present in the poems, the fiercer the
struggle for its existence is put up; in what follows, it is those moments of
strife for the emancipation of the self that are and investigated.

HAPTER

UBJECTIVITY UNDER

IEGE

In his seminal work Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late

Capitalism Frederic Jameson said that Munch’s “The Scream” is “a
canonical expression of the great modernist thematic of alienation, anomie,
solitude and social fragmentation and isolation, a virtually programmatic
emblem of what used to be called the age of anxiety.”

Irrespective of how

Jameson views the condition of early-twentieth century consciousness in
comparison to what he terms postmodernism

, his words to a large degree

apply to the current historical moment. In our hyperrealist, capitalism-
dominated world, we become cogs in a machine whose purpose we
increasingly fail to comprehend. We grow ostracised from one another and
tend to stay within highly segregated social milieus even though there is
no denying our freedom to socialise with people from other tiers of
society. Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho is a perfect example of the
trauma of late modernity perspicaciously encapsulated by Munch’s
painting; fear, apathy and ubiquitous perils evoke the climate which “the
men of 1914” could only vaguely, if most pertinently, anticipate, since it is
only with the arrival of capitalist late modernity that the human subject’s
independence was finally taken away.

At first, trumpeted as the shedding of the chains that limited the free

play of interpretation (in all fields of human activity), the death of the
subject soon gave rise to the realisation that it is no longer history that

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

(Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 62.

Anthony Easthope pithily explains that “To [Jameson] ‘the alienation of the

subject,’ enforced by modernism, is displaced in postmodern culture by ‘the
fragmentation of the subject;’ there is no affect, no depth, because there is ‘no
longer a self present.’” “Postmodernism and Critical and Cultural Theory,” in The
Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, ed. Stuart Sim (London: Routledge,
2001), 22 – 23. What Jameson does, it seems, is an implicit validation of the
modernist anxiety in that alienation is still very much present in his version of
postmodernism with the proviso that the self is now alienated not from its
environment but from itself to the effect that it melts into a flurry of elements.

Chapter One

needs to be regarded as “a panorama of futility;” the idea of subjectivity
itself had been rendered obsolete. “We” continue to ponder the
consequences of this all-too-hasty annihilation but no ascertainable “we”
can readily be accepted. In this respect, the present may be taken to have
successfully instantiated the modernist desire to destabilise the human
subject. A variety of modernist techniques and groundbreaking inventions
in style and literary technique look for a means to (dis)locate the subject
within the world. However, this task is fraught with far greater difficulty
now than it was in the first decades of the twentieth century; the present
reality is constituted by the discourses of economics, politics and everyday
social practice in such a way that man is left at a complete loss to see
himself as part of a finite and stable environment.

The self is caught in the rhizome of its world, a labyrinth of

intertwining fictions. This condition is evoked in an iconic passage from
Baudrillard: “The transition from signs which dissimulate something to
signs which dissimulate that there is nothing marks the decisive turning
point. The first implies a theology of truth and secrecy [...] The second
inaugurates an age of simulacra and simulation, in which there is no longer
any God to recognise his own, nor any last judgement to separate true
from false, the real from its artificial resurrection, since everything is
already dead and risen in advance.”

The starting premise of this transition

may still be located in the High Modernist yearnings for unravelling or
staging a deeper sense of things; myth, depth psychology or the stabilising
idea of tradition all served the purpose of asserting order against the tides
of chaos. As Astradur Eysteinsson asserts, “Modernism is viewed as a
kind of aesthetic heroism, which in the face of the chaos of the modern
world (very much a “fallen” world) sees art as the only dependable reality
and as an ordering principle of a quasi religious kind. The unity of art is
supposedly a salvation from the shattered order of modern reality.”

From

a point where there were (often semi-divine) mediating powers (for Yeats,
for instance, those were the voices that dictated the automatic script to his
wife) that ensured the existence of truth and facts, the path has led to a
world of living dead where there seemingly are no certainties. This is the
world of hermeneutic powerplay inasmuch as only from a series of
interpretations (of interpretations) can anything close to a fact accrue,
although this is necessarily only a mock fact because “it is now impossible
to isolate the process of the real, or to prove the real.”

The textual world

is Eco’s city of robots, with the difference that the robots are replaced by

Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e) Inc., 1983), 12.

Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990), 9.

Baudrillard, Simulations, 41. Emphasis in original.

Subjectivity Under Siege

shifting contexts in which and against which readings of “reality” (only
possible in brackets) are spun. As a result, in political terms “[s]aturation
coverage in the mass media has the effect, not of creating a better-
informed electorate, but of reducing the whole business to a dead level of
mindless slogans, trivialised issues and a near-total absence of genuine
debate on substantive policy issues.”

This observation by Christopher

Norris may be transposed onto a discussion of the modern subjectivity.
The world that Baudrillard diagnoses, and Norris to some extent endorses
this premise, is covered over with various discourses that overshadow such
old-standing ideas as truth and independent, self-aware subjectivity.

Under such circumstances the human subject appears to dissolve into a

depthless texture of collaged pieces of clichéd discourse; the blurred image
of man’s consciousness is the all-too-frequent lot of contemporary times.
Yet the subject, as J. H. Prynne’s poetry seems to repeatedly demonstrate,
is not to be expunged so lightly. However, before Prynne’s poetry can be
approached, it is essential to sketch the background for the reinstatement
of man in the modern world. The reinstatement, or, as it may here be
called, restitution, is a syncretic notion in that it takes its cue from
different aspects of (neo)Romantic philosophy and the modernist
aesthetics (of Adorno in particular) to construe the self as a formation
pitted against the variously put ideas of the death of the subject. In what
follows I discuss the Romantic-derived strategies of affirming the ego and
set them against certain recent revaluations of deconstruction; finally, I use
Prynne’s theory of poetic language in order to argue that poetry, in this
case Prynne’s, proffers idiomatic techniques in which the subject can
disentangle itself from what will here be defined as (pan)textualist
ossification.

The Returns of the Subject

Among works dealing with the notion of the death of the author (here
understood as synonymous with man in general), Sean Burke’s The Death
and Return of the Author is the most thorough in the scope of its analyses.
He begins by drawing a parallel between Nietzsche’s death of God and
Barthes’s famous death of the author, noting that “[b]oth deaths attest to a
departure of belief in authority, presence, intention, omniscience and
creativity.”

In Burke’s opinion, it is Barthes, as Nietzsche’s ephebe (to

Christopher Norris, What’s Wrong with Postmodernism. Critical Theory and the

Ends of Philosophy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 171.

Sean Burke, The Death and Return of the Author (Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press, 2008), 22.

Chapter One

employ Bloom’s term, which will soon prove vital), who pursues the
critique of modern subjectivity to the limits of its viability. However,
Barthes makes his case against a particular type of author, who is “a
product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with
English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the
Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual.”

The author who

is meant here, although Barthes maintains it is a modern figure, is a re-
construction of the Cartesian Cogito. Therefore, before he can pronounce
the author dead, Barthes needs to first give flesh to this persona and, to
make his quest more congruent with his other works of criticism, endow it
with all the characteristics of the bourgeois. It is only when the author is
demonstrated to be an entity that tyrannises both the text and its reader

that Barthes can passionately dispose of it.

However, Burke notes that what Barthes implies in his essay is not an

ontological abyss to replace an authoritative presence but a need for a new
perception of the author. Where the authorial presence cannot be abided
any longer, there appears a need for the constant recreation of the author
figure: “the author will return as a desire of the reader’s, a spectre spirited
back into existence by the critic himself.”

Burke lays emphasis on the

creative element of Barthes’s essay, suggesting that the death of the author
is only an assertion of its impossibility in the form of a finite construct.
“To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it
with a final signified, to close the writing;”

this “Author” is not only a

dead notion but also an angel of death in that his existence necessitates the
demise of freedom to interpret outside the biographical context or the
Author’s own pronouncements about his/her work. Thus Barthes’s Author
must be done away with if free man is to be born, so that nothing will need
to be deciphered but “everything [may] be disentangled.”

The notion of

disentanglement is synonymous with liberation, unlike deciphering, which
only promises a single hidden message. In lieu of this fully-delimited

Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory

and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al. (London: Norton, 2001), 1466.

Burke observes that both theory and the literature itself had witnessed convincing

disposals of the author figure prior to Barthes’s announcement of 1968; Bakhtin’s
dialogic narrator is in no way a finite construct willing to wield authority over the
text it produces but a figure that deliberately asserts the carnivalesque facet of text.
Similarly, Proust (whom Barthes mentions in his essay as having successfully shed
the desire for authorial credit) and Joyce create texts over which no Cartesian ego
exerts power.

Burke, The Death and Return, 30.

Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 1469.

Subjectivity Under Siege

meaning oppressor, Burke sees Barthes’s author (now with a lower case
“a”) as a creature under permanent construction, and he places the French
theoretician among those thinkers who have radicalised the notion of the
modern self. Burke indicates that Barthes’s criticism of the author-figure
at the same time calls for an idea of the human subject as a discontinuous,
non-finite entity whose essence is infinitely deferred.

Burke summarises his revision of the idea of the contemporary subject

by drawing up a genealogy of thinkers who pave the way for what he
terms new humanism:

The work of Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger – Marx also – opens out onto a
sense of the subject, of the author, which is no longer normative but
disclosive

, not timeless but rootedly historical, not an aeterna veritas but

mutable, in process of becoming, not transcendent but immanent in its
texts, its time and world. Indeed it would seem that all antihumanist
discourse finally makes overture to a new form of humanism, that the
rejection of the subject functions as a passageway between conceptions of
subjectivity.

Burke’s new form of humanism represents an intellectual formation that
does not abandon the notion of the subject; nor does it see the thinkers of
the school of suspicion as dealing a definitive death blow to the subject,
regarding the modern subjectivity as a perpetual search for itself, a
ceaseless redeployment of the limits of man; it is such a subject that is
poised to replace the two irreconcilable visions of either a Cartesian
Cogito or a poststructuralist subjectless and authorless text.

Burke’s “third way” of human subjectivity, the path of constant re-

creation of one’s self in face of the various discourses that discontinuously
flow through consciousness, is arguably rooted in the Romantic conception
of man resembling a work of art. “Romantics emphasised Bildung, as
culture and creation, and insisted on the arbitrariness, artificiality and
deviation of any process of Bildung or formation,” as a result “[h]uman
life, as capable of Bildung, is essentially capable of being other than any
fixed essence.”

This endless process of self-creation and recreation, the

Romantic Bildung, closely corresponds to what Burke asserts is the point

It is no accident that Burke uses the word so resonant with Heideggerian

undertones, since the disclosive nature of the modern subject evokes the
unconcealing potential of works of art. Further on in this chapter this remark will
be taken up so as to show that disclosure constitutes the essential feature of the
contemporary self’s independence.

Burke, The Death and Return, 114.

Claire Colebrook, Irony (London: Routledge, 2008), 48. Emphasis in original.

Chapter One

in later Barthes (and Foucault): what the proto poststructuralists reveal in
their discrete attempts to show the unviability of authorship/subject is not
the essential impossibility of there being a self that dwells in the world or,
for that matter, in the text; instead they seem to present an alternative path
to selfhood. In Burke’s reading they stress the creative aspect of
subjectivity, thereby supporting the Romantic organicist conception that by
composing poetry we emulate the creative process inherent in nature itself;
hence what arises is a world seen in the process of constant becoming. As
Friedrich Schlegel puts it: “In all its descriptions, this poetry should
describe itself, and always be simultaneously poetry and the poetry of
poetry.”

Schlegel’s point paves the way to Heidegger’s path-breaking

observations regarding his poet of poets, Hölderlin, whose strophes echo
with the primordial call of Being that gathers men into the space of their
true being in the world. Before discussing Heidegger, it is necessary to
first elucidate the neo-Romantic restitution of the subject.

Where Burke leaves off, stating that the contemporary self is one that

must constantly seek to recreate itself, Agata Bielik-Robson continues
tracing the return of the subject. For her, the notion of Bildung is
fundamentally important to modern subjectivity under duress. Similarly to
Burke, throughout her output she unearths what has been referred to as the
“third way,” between “pathos of origins” and an anti-pathos of infatuation
with nothingness of dissemination.

In identifying the need for battling for man, Bielik-Robson

acknowledges the poststructural premise of Lyotard’s end of grand
narratives, although she sees it as a cause for anxiety, not jubilation.

Modernity is an epoch of growing ontological uncertainty: a lack of
elementary trust in the world [seen] as a particularly unfriendly place – and
for oneself as a being unaccountably condemned to the condition of
thrownness, of being dependent on something impossible to trust. This is
the essence of contemporary nihilism: an addiction to what “is not
thought” and what resists any analysis, which does not come across as
trustworthy from the point of view of European Cogito.

Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans, P. Firchow (Minneapolis:

University of Minneapolis Press, 1991), 51.

David Trotter, The Making of the Reader: Language and Subjectivity in modern

American, English and Irish Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1984), 197.

Agata Bielik-Robson, Inna nowoczesnoĞü. Pytania o wspóáczesną formuáĊ

duchowoĞci (Cracow: Universitas, 2000), 129. Since she has published mainly in
Polish, all the quotations from Bielik-Robson’s books are provided in my
translation – W.P.

Subjectivity Under Siege

In the light of the fact that there is no metaphysical vantage point,
contemporaneity is plunged into an abyss of uncertainty. Bielik-Robson
traces this feeling of ontological desolation in modern philosophy,
persistently unravelling a process of the annihilation of the subject.
Whether it is Derrida’s concept of the scene of writing, de Man’s rhetoric
of tropes, Heidegger’s thinking of Being, Foucault’s archaeology of
knowledge or Lyotard’s crisis of old-standing lays of human progress and
liberation, the self as a space of experiential abiding in the world has
slowly been falling by the wayside. What is left is a deathly nihilist joy at
the ceaseless play of signifiers. Although it needs to be stressed that
Derrida’s deconstruction retains the idea of the subject as situated in
particular contexts

(and thus resembles the construct elaborated in the

present book), the fact remains that the ego “in situ” is always already
traced in the moment of its dispersal into fiction, which ineluctably makes
the self a function of writing

. It is Paul de Man, however, who most

openly disavows the notion of the subject to replace it with the language of
tropes.

Reading a passage from Proust’s In Search of the Lost Time, de Man

probes into the idea of autonomous creation. Like much writing in general,
Swann’s Way reveals itself to de Man as a dance to the “grammar of
tropes”:

By passing from a paradigmatic structure based on substitution, such as
metaphor, to a syntagmatic structure based on contingent association such
as metonymy, the mechanical, repetitive aspect of grammatical forms is

For Derrida’s discussion of what situated subject means to him see the

discussion after Derrida’s paper “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the
Human Sciences,” in The Structuralist Controversy. The Languages of Criticism
and the Sciences of Man, ed. R. Macksey and E. Danto (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1970), 271.

This move is best seen in Derrida’s analysis of the ego in Freud wherein the

philosopher unravels the self as being a product of an interplay of infinite layers of
writing that constitute the scene of writing on: “we are written only as we write by
the agency within us which always already keeps watch over perception, be it
internal or external – Derrida observes – The ‘subject’ of writing does not exist if
we mean by that some sovereign solitude of the author. The subject of writing is a
system of relations between strata: the Mystic Pad, the psyche, society, the world.
Within that scene, on that stage, the punctual simplicity of the classical subject is
not to be found.” “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” in Writing and Difference,
trans. A. Bass (London: Routledge, 1995), 226 – 227. Although here Derrida takes
issue with the classical notion of the subject, his contention is that the only
subjectivity that exists is always already in a permanent state of dispersal through
dissemination.

Chapter One

shown to be operative in a passage that seemed at first sight to celebrate
the self-willed and autonomous inventiveness of a subject.

The self is not only ousted from a central position in the creative (as well
as epistemological and ontological) act, as it is the case in Foucault’s
“What is an author?” but simply disappears; henceforth it is the “grammar
of tropes” that “governs” the creative process. De Man goes on to show,
this time commenting on Rilke’s “Am Rande der Nacht” (“At the
Borderline of the Night”), that the image of violin strings in the lyric
indicates the “assimilation of the subject to space” in which the subject as
autonomous disappears. This moment is manifestly positive, a “passage
from darkness to light.”

Clinging to the idea of the self is, for de Man, a

terrible blindness to the fact that there is no conscious subject behind any
text but only “a potential inherent in language.”

Texts are created not by

a self that organises the images into more or less coherent wholes but are
constituted by the intrinsic grammar of tropes. As a result, the subject is
thoroughly fictionalised and becomes a function of language. De Man
expresses this idea with all clarity in his essay on Nietzsche: “By calling
the subject a text, the text calls itself, to some extent, a subject.”

The

modification “to some extent” changes nothing insofar as de Man states
what he has already demonstrated in his reading of Proust and Rilke; the
subject does not exist, and even this postulate is no “final truth” free from
tropological appropriation, since de Man merely disposes of the traditional
illusion that selfhood guarantees the existence of truth. The only positive
element in de Man’s project is the constant deconstruction of meanings.
since it is necessarily phrased by means of rhetorical devices, meaning is
always infused with a subversive potential that thwarts every attempt at
complete explication.

In such an essentially hostile environment of fragmented discourses

floating about and resisting synthesis, Bielik-Robson locates her idea of
strong subjectivity. She derives this notion from Harold Bloom’s concept
of the strong poet, an ephebe writer who must overcome the influence of
precursory strong poets before he can become a fully-fledged poet himself.
Bielik-Robson, however, takes Bloom’s vision a step further and makes
his strong poet a model for the construction of the contemporary subject.
As in Bloom, the poet struggles with the deadening (textual) influence of

Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading. Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche,

Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 16 – 17.

De Man, Allegories, 36.

De Man, Allegories, 37.

De Man, Allegories, 112.

Subjectivity Under Siege

earlier strong masters, so in Bielik-Robson the subject must repel the
onslaught of the forces of disseminating discourses that strive to eradicate
it. “The strategy of strong subjectivity consists in a ploy against the
adversary influences. The ego yields to the influences but it is a
paradoxical surrender, since in this way the ego declares war on them. It
does not cut itself off from them, it does not hold them “outside,” quite to
the contrary – it attempts to absorb them.”

The subject thus positions

itself as a formation in constant struggle with flux and foment of the
textualist world. The absorption of this outside is unprecedented, since it
distances itself from all philosophical stances, from hermeneutics all the
way to the idealist Romantic Bildung. What Bielik-Robson understands by
absorption is a ventriloquised and appropriated Bloomian misprision:

Absorption is both defensive and offensive. The subject is still weak and
that is why it needs to defend itself: but the defensive strategy of accepting
the influence [misprision] becomes a fickle source of subjective power.
The weak subject swerves

from the influence, making it assume a new

quality and become a foundation of its own unrepeatable self. Absorbing
defensively and evasively in a long process of incessant swerves and
remodelling whose aim is to wipe out the alien origin of the influence – the
subject itself slowly becomes its own influence. The weaker it once was,
the stronger it now becomes.

Bloom’s poetic influences represent to Bielik-Robson the shards of
fragmentary discourses that constitute contemporary reality; everything
from advertisement slogans, politicians’ procrastinations to widely
circulated and context-devoid scientific jargons comprises this textual
milieu. The subject placed inside the horizon of discontinuity must fight
back against the alien in-flux that wishes to absorb and spread it to a non-
existent thinness. Bielik-Robson rightly intuits the impossibility of
existence in thorough resistance to the deconstructive drive of influences
in that there can be no life outside the world, as Heidegger put it. All
living must be done within the reality one is thrown into, which
necessitates the struggle with the influences that essentially constitute this
reality.

On the one hand Bielik-Robson accepts the conclusion that late

modernity is defined through the irreducible notion of freeplay. Granted
that “we are already, before the very least of our words, governed and

Bielik-Robson, Inna nowoczesnoĞü, 95.

Bielik-Robson deliberately uses Bloom’s terms and tries to endow them with her

own meaning.

Bielik-Robson, Inna nowoczesnoĞü, 95.

Chapter One

paralysed by language,” wherein “there is no autonomous act of
signification, but a simple and endless possibility of exchange” as
Foucault put it early on in his career,

drawing an analogy between the

structuralist approach to language and the Classical theory of money – the
subject becomes subservient to the forces of signification. On the other
hand, and this is Bielik-Robson’s long-term project, the subject need not
go gently into that good night of dissemination; it may tackle the web of
discourses by first absorbing them and then striving to overcome (also in
the Hegelian sense of the term) them. If the former mode is dictated by the
incipient realisation that meaning results from a network of linguistic
practices men dabble in

, then the latter departs from the Romantic

Bildung and progresses through Bloom to an unprecedented vision of an
embattled subject.

It is this Bloom-derived notion of strong subjectivity that can

successfully and ambitiously respond to the deconstruction of the notion of
the subject.

What matters here, however, is not the Romantic idealist

transcendental self but the “I” characterised by “its awareness of influence;
an awareness joining two truths – that of experience, indicating the
existence of the real outside world, and that of the truth of self-knowledge
that teaches the self of its singular autonomy, freedom, creative
openness.”

According to this postulate, the subject in modernitas is a

highly ambiguous construct as it cannot assert itself with any degree of
certainty but must persist in trying to absorb and conquer a morass of
influences.

The strong subject is not born strong but needs to rip its strength from

the claws of tradition if we follow Bloom and from deconstructive drives
if we follow Bielik-Robson. It must “struggle for primacy on the sea of
influences which constitute it, at the same time denying it the right to
absolute originality.”

The subject is adrift, as it were, on a vast expanse

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things. An Archeology of Human Sciences (New

York: Vintage Books, 1994), 298, 179.

Perhaps the best-known supporter of the claim that all truth derives solely from

the language games we choose to play and cannot be reduced to any verifiable
facts, phenomenal or otherwise, is Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 117 – 119. Contingency, Irony,
and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 8.

At the time when this book was written Bielik-Robson’s The Saving Lie, where

she insightfully argues that Bloom’s rhetoric of tropes is an answer to
deconstruction, was not yet available.

Agata Bielik-Robson, Duch powierzchni. Rewizja Romantyczna i filozofia

(Cracow: Universitas, 2004), 27 – 28.

Bielik-Robson, Duch powierzchni, 370.

Subjectivity Under Siege

of the ocean, where it has to muster its strength to resist waves crashing
against its fragile vessel

, threatening it with destruction. The nature of

the strong subject for both Bloom and Bielik-Robson is agon. Bloom’s
ephebes in Anxiety of Influence are forged in the fire of conflict. The Satan
of Paradise Lost rebels against God, thereby assuming his position as the
paradigmatic belated poet; Wallace Stevens openly boasts of never having
read too much poetry despite repressed traces of the poetic predecessors in
his oeuvre

; Ashbery, in his turn, becomes an ephebe to Stevens,

wrestling poetic prowess from the powerful hands of the Canon Aspirin.

The agonic self in Bielik-Robson’s broad sense must contend with
language for its right to exist; Bloom strikes a similar note, observing in
his analysis of Emerson that the philosopher’s language (as well as
Whitman’s) knows “something about agon, about the struggle between
adverting subject or subjectivity and the mediation that consciousness
hopelessly wills language to constitute. In this agon, this struggle between
authentic forces, neither the fiction of the subject nor the trope of language
is strong enough to win a final victory.”

The subject is always faced with

the language proliferating tropes that threaten to engulf all subjectivity in a
perpetual deferral. It is de Man who creates this dangerous language,
stressing that the subject’s autonomy is illusory, since in fact this is merely
a postponement of the final dissipation in rhetorical flux.

Bloom invokes

a vision of struggle whose point is to defer the conclusion indefinitely;
thanks to such a strategy, the subject may retain its qualified freedom, and
enter the strife with the bellicose language as a means to gather strength
for self-preservation.

The agonic self willingly enters combat with language because at stake

lies its own life. Significantly enough, the prize in the struggle is no
eternal life but simply the right to carry on living. Thus Bielik-Robson, by
dint of the Romantic idealists, psychoanalysis, Gnostic philosophers,

Given that both Bloom and Bielik-Robson make an ample use of the Gnostic

tradition in their theories, the word “vessel” is here intended to be a remote echo of
the Gnostic broken vessels, of course appropriately diminished in scope to
resemble the meek human endeavour in the belated time of the present.

Bloom explicitly asserts at the beginning of his most thorough treatment of

Stevens that “the first stanza of ‘Sunday Morning’ is the true clinamen for Stevens,
his grand, initial swerve away from origins.” Wallace Stevens: The Poems of our
Climate (New York: Cornell University Press, 1980), 27. Among the precursors of
“Sunday Morning” Bloom lists Tennyson, Wordsworth, Keats and Whitman.

Bloom, The Poems of Our Climate, 171.

Harold Bloom, Agon. Towards a Theory of Revisionism (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1983), 29.

Bielik-Robson, Duch powierzchni, 18.

Chapter One

contemporary deconstructivists and Harold Bloom, arrives at the notion of
“the post-critical subject.” She explains that such a subject

[A]ppropriates all the techniques of suspicion

that have so far been

implemented in deconstructing it. Therefore what, from the deconstructive
point of view, weakens the position of the subject, bereft of any direct link
with its experiential truth, according to Bloom appears to be a drawback
turned into a merit: irony, figuration, inertia of rhetorical tropes, which in
de Man and Derrida lead inadvertently to the death of subject as the
epistemological centre, are here taken to be the defence mechanisms of
subjectivity which does not desire the Cartesian certainty and truth but
something quite different [...] a separate life.

All the methods used to disavow the subject may, according to Bielik-
Robson, serve the function of the subject’s preservation. This approach
follows a similar line to Burke’s in the sense that the deconstructive
mechanisms which seek to destroy subjectivity in the process of a text’s
emancipation may easily be harnessed to strengthen the ego. The
thoroughly Romantic stance which Bielik-Robson shares with Bloom has
at its foundation the Schlegelian premise of Bildung, even if it is soon
departed from.

What Bielik-Robson proffers is vitally important for the reading that

will be attempted here, for Prynne’s poems stand, arguably, on the same
frontline as does Bielik-Robson. With each succeeding volume Prynne
tries to find a path outside the poststructural impasse, a path that can be
seen more readily through the premise sketched so far. However, there is a
marked difference between the position philosophers and critics of the
kind Bielik-Robson and Bloom represent and the engagement displayed by
Prynne. Thus far the theory of the return of subjectivity has progressed
along the lines of Romantic revision but this path calls for some
qualification.

Bloom carries on with his description of the agon of the subject with

language figuration, and observes that stalemate (lest one should use the
word “deadlock” which Bloom would greatly resent) is reached between
what he calls “authentic forces.” Yet for him such an equivocal position is
not something to sulk over but rather a reason to rejoice; if neither side can
win, if neither deconstruction nor Romantic revision can (or indeed must)

The term derives from Ricoeur’s notion of “the school of suspicion” which

denotes Nietzsche, Marx and Freud. Merold Westphal, “Ricoeur’s Hermeneutical
Phenomenology of Religion,” in Reading Ricoeur, ed. David M. Kaplan (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2008), 111.

Bielik-Robson, Duch powierzchni, 372.

Subjectivity Under Siege

vanquish its rival, then “There is only a mutual Great Defeat, but that
Defeat itself is the true problematic, the art of poetry and the art of
criticism.”

The defeat is a paradoxical one in that “there are no losers,

only intrepid agonists who never yield up to their own recalcitrance.”

For Bloom, criticism and poetry are complementary spheres of man’s
activity wherein the struggle for the self continues. What may be
commendable here from a Prynnean vantage – the implicit dialectic and
the careful attention paid to turns of phrase – is seriously hampered by
Bloom’s further explication of his understanding of poetry and criticism:
“To read actively is to make a fiction as well as to receive one, and the
kind of active reading we call ‘criticism’ or the attempt to decide meaning,
or perhaps to see whether meaning can be decided, always has a very large
fictive element in it.”

Bloom advocates a postulate here that all

philosophy, all writing in fact – inclusive of religious texts and science –
are poetic pursuits.

Therefore all existent modes of reading and writing, indeed all of our

thoughts, are fictions with no claim to validity; it is this idea that most
appeals to Rorty, who maintains that “If, with [Donald] Davidson, we drop
the notion of language as fitting the world, we can see the point of
Bloom’s and Nietzsche’s claim that the strong maker, the person who uses
words as they have never before been used, is best able to appreciate her
contingency [...] She can appreciate the force of the claim that ‘truth is a
mobile army of metaphors.’”

Rorty also extends Bloom’s theory of

poetry to cover the pragmatist philosophy of historicist perception of how
all walks of man’s life develop. Similarly to Bielik-Robson, Rorty wants
his ironist (also a sort of an ephebe of a Romantic ironic self) to be a self-
creating individual, intellectually/linguistically equipped to succeed in a
contingent world. Regardless of the differences between Bielik-Robson
and Rorty, they both appreciate Bloom for his audacity to posit fiction as
the origin of all metaphysics. Bloom affirms lie not in de Man/Barthes’s
sense of “high skepsis, when the freed mind discovers that it has nothing
more to do than happily multiply appearances,” but in a sensibility that
allows the subject to discover “that it would not exist without lie and it
does exist: it possesses a will, desire, it lies in order to be.”

This

conclusion hammers home the message that in late modernity man has no
business occupying himself with epistemology, ontology or any kind of

Bloom, Agon, 29.

Bloom, Agon, 238.

Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 28.

Bielik-Robson, Duch powierzchni, 381.

Chapter One

thinking other than an aesthetics inasmuch as it is the pursuit of a more
beautiful lie, a more convincing fiction that will ensure any given theory’s
success

Such an extremist poetising of human activity seems to lose (an

essentially Adornian) seriousness in that the inherent fictionality of all
discourses entails the possibility of telling beautiful stories of a subject’s
autonomy, which would imperil the well-being of other subjects

. Despite

the best efforts on the part of its advocates, the ethical dimension of
Romantic revisionism is open to radical criticism. However, there seems to
be a path along which the subjectivity’s struggle for identity remains a
viable autocreative procedure, even though this path follows the logic of
pharmakon.

The Laborious Truth of Deconstruction

Christopher Norris famously pitches Derrida’s deconstruction against
postmodernism, the latter understood as a construct following Lyotard,
Baudrillard and Hayden White. For Norris, the deconstructive approach
does not do away with the central theses of Kantian philosophy but seeks
to expose its shortcomings, limits and blind spots. Thus Norris regards
Derrida as a late addition to the Kantian tradition, where one might also
place the Frankfurt School theorists (the Adorno of Negative Dialectics in
particular). Derrida’s deconstruction does not disqualify or simply discard
an entire set of philosophical assumptions; it inquires into the foundations
of a given discourse, which are always already veiled over, in order to
make this discourse self-transparent.

Therefore deconstruction is a truly

critical attempt to uncover the working of the discourse which makes
reason, hence the attempt itself, possible.

Norris, staying well within the deconstructive tradition and taking the

best it has to offer, allows for the existence of facts. Taking history as a
model, he analyses the possibility of claiming truth to be a valid category
in late modernity. Hayden White famously asserts that history is nothing
more than a deft collation of rhetorical devices that serve a particular
(ideological) purpose and adds that there is no history but small histories.

This final postulate is discussed at length by Rorty who reaches a similar

conclusion to the one suggested above although he mentions it in passing as part of
a larger discussion of his idea of the liberal ironist. Contingency, Irony, and
Solidarity, p. 77.

Rorty discusses this problem in the third part of his Contingency, Irony, and

Solidarity, 141 – 188.

Norris, What’s Wrong with Postmodernism, 198.

Subjectivity Under Siege

He transplants Lyotard’s critique of grande recits onto the ground of
history. Yet from this seemingly emancipatory move comes a dangerous
conclusion. Recall Faurisson’s denunciation of the gas-chambers in
Auschwitz; from a Lyotardian/Whitean point of view, his stance could not
be criticised without risking the suppression of the narrative differend and
thus “casting [Faurisson] in the victim’s role.”

To state that on White’s

theory one may say whatever one wants about what historical truth is
would be a sweeping generalisation; still, a threat remains.

Norris counters both the devaluation of historical fact and the criticism

of the notion of truth as a whole. In lieu of an aesthetically alluring fictive
mandate, Norris reclaims what may here be termed “laborious truth”:

Of course there are different historical narratives, of course historians have
different approaches and, very often, widely divergent ideological
perspectives. Nevertheless, there is such a thing as historical truth; not
Truth with a capital T, not some kind of ultimate, transcendent, all-
encompassing Truth, but the sorts of truth that historians find out through
patient research, through criticism of source-texts, archival scholarship and
so forth [...] sceptics tend to suppose that anyone who talks about truth
must be upholding Capital-T truth, a discourse that is repressive,
monological, authoritarian, or bent upon suppressing the narrative
differend. All the same there are standards, principles, validity-conditions,
ways of interpreting, criticising, comparing and contrasting the evidence
which, if consistently applied, will give the historian a fair claim to be
dealing in matters of truth.

However reductive he may at times sound, and regardless of the ambiguous
nature of such ideas as standards, principles and ways of interpreting,
Norris does make a vital point. One should not be beguiled into assuming
that there exists a finite “Capital-T truth.” But this is not to say we practise
an unrestrained freeplay with absolutely no truth value.

The task is to labour over the data to arrive at a position that tallies

with the whole context in hand or that meanders between its forking paths
to produce a balanced position. In other words, Norris is here advocating
dialectics. Never again can there be a fixity of ideas but instead of truth
conditions being discarded, they must be enhanced to embrace the
contingent aspects of discourse. Laborious truth does not aspire to a
transcendentally bestowed term-of-office but it does yearn for a term-of-

Christopher Norris, Deconstruction and the “Unfinished Project of Modernity”

(London: The Athlone Press, 2000), 18 – 19.

Norris, Deconstruction, 19.

Chapter One

office. In this way Norris does not quit the seriousness of human enquiry
but sees it as steps on the path of critical enlightenment.

To return to the considerations of the death and return of the subject,

Norris’s postulate of laborious truth links to Bielik-Robson’s notion of the
strong subject; the point where the self realises that it must forever
struggle with influence, with the deconstructive dimension of language, is
achieved when the self becomes aware that its fight with language is the
fight with itself. If, according to Norris, Derrida searches for the hidden
fundamentals of philosophy in order to expose their invalid claims to
originality (to Truth), then, by inference, his method seeks to do the same
with man. Therefore autocreation that is the condition of the return of
subjectivity turns out to be a process of locating and revealing the ego’s
self-occluding illusions. Paradoxically, those are the very illusions which
professed Lyotardians have learnt to abhor, the ostensible, irreducible
truths about the human condition.

Accepting the Romantic theory of the ironic subject proffered above, it

becomes clear that constant self-creation is both a defence mechanism
opposing the flux of the contemporary world and its consequence.

The subject is nothing other than the empty axiom that allows all life to
flow across one single plane; he is nothing other than a potential for labour
and exchange, devoid of any positive qualities. If we allow for nothing
more than exchange, interaction and the flow of capital, then no single idea
of the self or good will be elevated above any other. The subject is just that
capacity to adopt any and every persona or value; the undetermined ironic
subject who exists behind determined values is an effect of the dominance
and immanence of the capitalist system, a system that precludes any
outside [...] Just as the ironic subject can adopt any discourse or persona,
so capitalism can market any discourse or value.

The real danger to the ironic Romantic subject is the capitalist system,
which will turn every flair of imaginary autocreation into just another
commodity. Modern anxiety results not from the fact that “anything goes”
but from the injunction that “anything sells.” In capitalist limbo fanciful
fictions of self-creation become marketable, thereby falling into the
process of ossification so fast that at one point even the Romantic strong
poet is commoditised.

This may seem a confounding claim in the sense that it was

poststructuralists who set out to forestall the threat of linguistic and
intellectual sedimentation. Yet with the assertion (particularly on the part
of de Man and Baudrillard and largely in opposition to Derrida) that there

Colebrook, Irony, 150.

Subjectivity Under Siege

is no self and no reality, there comes a danger that language games may
(and do, as I will argue, in Prynne’s poems) become ossified within a
certain (for example Western) horizon. If there is no self that can critically
penetrate the linguistic praxis of the day, an empowered idiom turns into a
freeplay that solely serves its own self-preservation

. Furthermore,

without the possibility of critical investigation beneath the “linguistic
surface” of the world, the economy of meaning dissemination might
coalesce with the economy of capital transfer. This in turn could result in
the mutual subservience of language and capital, effecting not so much the
subject’s non-existence as its reduction to a preserver of the
language/market hegemony. Thus what has been here termed pantextualism
and what may be referable to “postmodernism,” as it is shown in de Man’s
“grammar of tropes” and Baudrillard’s hyperreality, turns from a means to
tackling the stagnation into the very agent of this stagnation by asserting
man’s appropriation in language.

Norris notes pertinently that giving up on such ideas as truth and the

subject creates the risk that “any politics [philosophy, literary theory and
what not – W. P.] which goes along with the current postmodernist drift
[away from truth and selfhood – W. P.] will end up by effectively
endorsing and promoting the work of ideological mystification.”

This

ominous possibility seems to underlie Prynne’s entire oeuvre, and self-
edifying fictions of a Romantic kind are unlikely to be of help. The
critique is not aimed at revealing the fallible nature of Bloom’s theory of
agonic self or of Bielik-Robson’s notion of post-critical subject, or even of
Rorty’s neo-pragmatist vision of man; instead the point is to show that
perceiving life as a poetic pursuit (as Bloom does) is at risk of
commodification unless Norris’s view is taken heed of.

The modern subject is an agonic construct, striving to assert itself

against the deconstructive (Demanian) empowerment of language; yet this
conflict does not aim to proliferate beautiful lies about the ego’s autonomy
but rather tries to seek out the zones within the subject’s constitution
where the capitalist forces have already planted seeds of the “Truth,”
enticingly suggesting that capital exchange lies at the core of all. Berman
observes that “because the modern economy has an infinite capacity for

Thomas McCarthy formulates a critique of Rorty to which I owe the present

challenge to pantextualism. It seems that McCarthy’s criticism of Rorty, revealing
though it is, may be forestalled but his insights are even better equipped to
unveiling the implicit dangers of (de Man’s in particular) deconstructivist stance.
On Reconstruction and Deconstruction in Contemporary Critical Theory
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 26.

Norris, Deconstruction, 191.

Chapter One

redevelopment and self-transformation, the modernist imagination, too,
must reorient and renew itself again and again.”

In face of capitalist

hegemony, the self can never attain permanence of identity but has to
struggle with the forces that seek to ossify it. If we hold to this premise,
Lyotard’s postmodernism with its emphasis on small narratives, each
exchangeable for another, would represent a capitalist venture per se.

However, if the modern subject is to remain a valid category, enjoying

its freedom from a variety of discursive/linguistic manacles and living the
way it wishes to, its position in the modern world is more complex than an
agon with the forces of dissemination. What has been argued above needs
to be taken a step further insomuch as the deconstructive poison that the
subject must drink is, in fact, its very medicine which is able to attack the
virus of capitalist ossification.

The task of poetry and criticism (Bloom’s collation of the two remains

in force) is to deconstruct, in Norris’s understanding of the term, the
capitalist discourse in which the modern self is fettered. The difficulty lies
in the fact that the aspects of the ego that call for critical penetration
stealthily eschew interpretive unravelling. For that reason the search for
the recreation of the subject takes the paradoxical path of the ego’s
absorption of the disseminating drives (thereby coming close to an
affirmative side of Derrida’s project

). As has been shown, the subject

absorbs the influence of the language of tropes in order not to weave more
beautiful fictions about itself but so that it can probe the verges of its
constitution so as to purge them of capitalist structures of thought.
Foucault, the pioneer of authentic autocreation according to Norris, argues
that the contemporary revival of techniques of exegesis takes as its aim not
“rediscovering some primary word that has been buried in it, but of
disturbing the words we speak, of denouncing the grammatical habits of
our thinking, of dissipating the myths that animate our words, of rendering
once more noisy and audible the element of silence that all discourse
carries with it as it is spoken.”

The habits of our language are those

structures that percolate through us to the effect that they begin to appear

Berman, All that is Solid, 313.

Derrida argues that, in spite of the fact it cannot come to any form of full

presence as it is situated on the scene of writing, the self “lives on” in an agonic
struggle with death. “Living on: Border Lines,” in Deconstruction and Criticism,
ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Continuum 1979), 131. However, Derrida does
emphasise the self’s eventual dispersal as the “horizon” (in itself forever eluding
capture) of its existence constantly pushes further away, as a result condemning the
subject to perpetual strife for its survival.

Foucault, The Order of Things, 298.

Subjectivity Under Siege

as the foundations of our selves. They work beyond the regions of our
thinking, becoming silent as they continue to ossify subjectivity into a
closed circuit of energies. Bildung is made marketable, and its commodity
status is silenced and hidden beyond the sphere of critical thinking.

It is these silences that deconstructive Romantic revision hunts; as

Eagleton observed about the task of criticism, it is “to show the text as it
cannot know itself, to manifest those conditions of its making (inscribed in
its very letter) about which it is necessarily silent.”

The self cannot

apprehend its fundamentals for they have vanished in the palimpsest-like
past so that they no longer appear to be part of this self but rather an
unthinkable premise; as the text cannot know its conditions of making, so
the subject cannot readily comprehend the petrified foundations of its
dwelling in the world until it enters agon with its reality and begins to
struggle to shake off the manacles that bind it to the linguistic myths it has
grown into. In the agonic struggle the subject commences to recreate its
own self in strife with the world. Victory, as Bloom observes, is
impossible but the conflict itself allows the subject to glimpse and
investigate its own structures and cleanse them of the fossils of market-
induced linguistic habits. The ego struggles to deconstruct itself only to the
extent that it destroys the vernacular frames; this is no jocular lie of
autocreation but a laborious truth of humanism.

Truth and Responsibility of Poetry

The laborious truth of deconstruction is its potential for revealing the
ossified nature of our linguistic habits. What has been taken for granted as
part of man’s received knowledge, deconstructive interpretation seeks to
undo, revealing the false assumptions that lie at its foundation. This
potential is of paramount importance to the vision of the return of the
subject. The onerous struggle of the self with the world of influence will
either fall into an aesthetic fiction-spinning or partake in the process of the
ego’s emancipation from the confines of ubiquitous discourses of
modernity. Therefore the tension between the subject’s desire to free itself
from the constant uncertainty of freeplay and its irreducible need to persist
in absorbing (and implementing) deconstructive tactics finds an unlikely
ally in the later Heidegger. He provides a number of important insights
into the present analysis of the subject’s revival, and serves as a point of
entry into J. H. Prynne’ poetry.

Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory (London: Blackwell, 2008), 43.

Chapter One

In his post-Kehre thinking on art, Heidegger deliberately looks for and

amplifies tensions between irreconcilable passages of thought. In “The
Origin of the Work of Art” (henceforth referred to as “The Origin”) he
sketches what probably is his most sustained understanding of art, which
he will later amend but never abandon.

The central premise of “The Origin” is that artworks ought not to be

understood in terms of the idea of beauty but as spaces wherein truth
happens.

The division into fine and applied arts is misleading, since

associating the former with beauty and the latter with manufacturing
denigrates art to the status of an addition to earthly existence. To
Heidegger, art is not a leisurely pursuit but a central occupation of man’s
life, for in a work of art occurs “a disclosure of a particular being,
disclosing what and how it is;” this is what is here meant by truth. The
truth of any being is disclosed only once the given entity is transferred into
the realm of art, as a result – and this is a vital point – “the road toward the
determination of the thingly reality of the work leads not from thing to
work but from work to thing.”

This postulate informs the rest of the

essay in the sense that Heidegger proposes to view art as the activity
which allows man to understand his world in its true nature. The reality is
not open to the mind unless it is viewed either through or in a work of art.
“The art work opens up in its own way the Being of beings. This opening
up, i.e., this deconcealing, i.e., the truth of beings, happens in the work.”

It is in the artwork that the potential of the world opens up for man.
Heidegger to a large degree remoulds and in places jettisons the analyses
of Being and Time in favour of thinking of art; the project of fundamental
ontology, with its interpretations of the equipmental being of beings and
its view of death as the final horizon of understanding, is replaced by
pondering art.

His interpretation of Van Gogh’s “Pair of Shoes” leads Heidegger to

the conclusion that it is only in art that man’s world is given to him in its
unconcealment; yet it is musing over the Greek temple that brings
Heidegger to comprehending the exact process of revealing this truth.

The temple’s firm towering makes visible the invisible space of air [...] It
clears and illuminates, also, that on which and in which man bases his
dwelling. We call this ground earth [...] Earth is that whence the arising

Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter

(London: Harper Colophon Books, 1975), 36.

Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 36, 39.

Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 39.

Subjectivity Under Siege

brings back and shelters everything that arises without violation. In the
things that arise, earth is present as the sheltering agent.

The materiality of the temple draws attention to its earth-bound origin,
indicating that the earth, which is the plane of man’s daily existence,
conceals the truth of being. What Heidegger calls the “steadfastness” of
the temple helps to assert the earth as man’s “native ground,” that which
spreads beneath his feet as he goes about his every-day activities.

As it sets forth the earth, the work “opens up a world and keeps it

abiding in force.”

Just as the earth is not merely the collection of all the

tangible things that surround man but an essential space wherein he
dwells, so the world is not a motley of “familiar and unfamiliar things that
are just there;” instead, Heidegger explains:

The world worlds, and is more fully in being than the tangible and
perceptible realm in which we believe ourselves to be at home. World is
never an object that stands before us and can be seen. World is the ever-
nonobjective to which we are subject as long as the paths of birth and
death, blessing and curse keep us transported into Being. Wherever those
decisions of our history that relate to our very being are made, are taken up
and abandoned by us, go unrecognized and are rediscovered by new
inquiry, there the world worlds.

Our reality is always informed by the world. The character of our society,
our intellectual clime and philosophical modes of thinking have always
already been conceived by the Heideggerian world. If then the earth is the
“native ground,” the horizon within which man dwells, the world
represents the drive that spurs progress into a different phase of being.
While the penetrating inquiry which seeks to overcome the current
historical moment comes from the world, the actual facet of the reality at
hand results in the setting forth of the earth. As Heidegger further
explains:

Earth is that which comes forth and shelters. Earth, self-dependent, is
effortless and untiring. Upon the earth and in it, historical man grounds his
dwelling in the world. In setting up the world, the work sets forth the earth
[...] the work moves the earth itself into the Open of a world and keeps it
there. The work lets the earth be an earth.

Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 42. Emphasis in original.

Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 44. Emphasis in original.

Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 44 – 45. Emphasis in original.

Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 46. Emphasis in original.

Chapter One

The earth requires no effort, since it is the comfortable plane of the ontic
reality. Man dwells on the earth and does not even notice it, like with the
equipment he uses as analysed in Being and Time.

The earth is historical

in the sense that whatever man has managed to incorporate into the
horizon of his dwelling only exists in time. The work of art, as capable of
setting up a world, opens the earth onto a new quality. Thus Heidegger
formulates an essential premise of his thinking of art in that he understands
man’s environment to be historically motivated; there is no essence to the
historical being of man but only a contingent elevation of particular facets
and this “bestowal” derives from artworks.

The notions of the earth and the world constitute the central tenet of

“The Origin” and may be argued to set the philosophical tone for the rest
of Heidegger’s later thinking of art. Whereas the earth represents the ontic
reality of man’s unobtrusive being in the phenomenal reality, the world is
the realm in which new ideas for the earth are conceived. Yet, given its
historical belatedness, the earth is in no way less important than the world,
since both must be compounded in order that the truth as disclosure might
happen. Heidegger explains further that “The world, in resting upon the
earth, strives to surmount it. As self-opening it cannot endure anything
closed. The earth, however, as sheltering and concealing, tends always to
draw the world into itself and keep it there.”

It is thus clear that the earth

is the ground for the world; while the former seeks to make the reality as
conducive to man’s unobstructed being in it as possible, the latter cannot
brook this peaceful existence in passivity.

For Heidegger, this struggle between the earth and the world represents

the primordial strife which lies at the foundation of modern consciousness
and perception of reality. Truth happens as a result of “the primal conflict
between clearing and concealing” in the sense that “Setting up a world and
setting forth the earth, the work [of art] is the fighting of the battle in
which the unconcealedness of beings as a whole, or truth, is won.”

Heidegger returns to the artwork and notes that it is comprised of the agon
between the native ground of the earth and the drive to unconcealment. It
is solely in the work of art that out of this strife the truth of being happens.

The enigmatic truth that art bestows is “the opening up of disclosure of

that into which human being as historical is already cast.”

Art allows

man to actualise the potential that is inherent in his being in the world in

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Stambaugh (Albany: State

University of New York Press, 1996), 64 – 65.

Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 49.

Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 55.

Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 75.

Subjectivity Under Siege

the first place; insomuch as he is thrown into existence, man is essentially
already equipped with the proper understanding of reality but he needs art
to open up the potential for setting up a world that will then set forth the
earth. Therefore, as it seems Heidegger is trying to emphasise, man’s
condition is a contingent historical compound of his own projections of
what this compound should consist. Truth is a realisation that reality is a
construct of man’s modes of thinking and his language. However, what
separates Heidegger from antiessentialist historians is the fact that he does
not locate the origin of the historical moment in the entirely contingent by-
gone narrations, instead he posits all man’s images of the current moment
to have developed from his inner dormant understanding of his environment.
What founds another guise of reality is art. Since the “nature of all art is
poetry,” it is poetry that is described as “projective saying”:

Projective saying is saying which, in preparing the sayable, simultaneously
brings the unsayable as such into a world. In such saying, the concepts of
an historical people’s nature, i.e., of its belonging to world history, are
formed for that folk.

What poetry allows man to accomplish is the foundation of the new facet
of reality. The totality of our ideas about what to exist in this world means
is thus implied to have originated at one point in the foreseeable past in the
projective saying of poets.

The notion of projective saying returns in Heidegger’s explication of

his concept of Saying. He asserts that Saying means “let appear and let
shine, but in the manner of hinting.”

Granted that “Only where the word

for the thing has been found is the thing a thing,”

Saying proffers the

whole thingly reality in its being for people who do not even notice it. It
may be noted that poetic language projects man’s tangible environment
inasmuch as it allows him to comprehend with no obtrusion or exertion the
purpose of any particular thing. Language is the house of Being

because

in its essential form as Saying, it opens up a new possibility for the earth;
this opening up is instigated by the primal conflict of concealing and
unconcealing.

Saying projects the truth as unconcealment in the sense that it allows

man’s current mode of being in his historical moment to be overcome. In

Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 74.

Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (San

Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982), 47.

Heidegger, On the Way, 62.

Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought,132, On the Way, 135.

Chapter One

this sense Saying is “world-moving” and “relates, maintains, proffers, and
enriches the face-to-face encounter of the world’s regions, holds them and
keeps them, in that it holds itself – Saying – in reserve.”

It is Saying that

propels man to encounter the world’s regions that have so far been kept at
bay. Saying contains the possible images of the future facets of reality. It
is in regard to this understanding of poetry as Saying that Heidegger
observes that “Art is history in the essential sense that it grounds
history.”

Whatever has been “shown forth, let shine” by our historical

heroes-geniuses has happened as a consequence of the poetic language in
which the praconflict instigates itself; from the struggle of the earth and
the world the new and hitherto unheard-of possibilities spring.

Recent critics recognise in this path of agonic thinking the germ of

what has been described as “ontological historicity.” Iain D. Thomson
claims that:

Heidegger thinks that humanity’s fundamental sense of reality changes
over time (sometimes dramatically), and he suggests that the work of art
helps explain the emergence of such historical transformations of
intelligibility at the most primordial level [...] great artworks first open up
the implicit (or “background”) ontology and ethics through which an
historical community comes to understand itself and its world.

Artworks not only capture the reality’s contingent historical outlook but
help initiate new visions of what this reality might and will look like. If
reality can be comprehended, this act of comprehension happens within
the realm of art and reveals the nature of the world to be historically
motivated. “Artworks thus function as ontological paradigms, serving
their communities both as ‘models of’ and ‘models for’ reality, which
means [...] that artworks can variously ‘manifest,’ ‘articulate,’ or even
‘reconfigure’ the historical ontologies undergirding their cultural
worlds.”

This is the postulate of art as projective saying of what might be

into what is. The status quo of existing realities, in which man no longer
realises the sense of his being, is pushed into changing, “history either
starts up or starts again.”

Heidegger, On the Way, 107.

Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 77.

Iain D. Thomson, Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2011), 43 – 44.

Thomson, Heidegger, 44. Emphasis in original.

Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 77.

Subjectivity Under Siege

Thomson maintains that to Heidegger the measure of our inertness in

modernity is the fact that we become ever more subjectivist;

continually seek to establish “mastery over the totality of what-is,”

thus

subjectivism, on this view, “designates the humanity’s increasingly global
quest to achieve complete control over every aspect of our objective
reality.”

It is this desire to control the whole surrounding world that

Heidegger shows Nietzsche’s will to power to consist in. The entire
modern tradition of philosophy, beginning with Descartes, is therefore an
attempt to master the world by the subject as we “come to understand and
so to treat all entities as intrinsically meaningless ‘resources’ [...] standing
by for efficient and flexible optimization.”

The subject, the ego, the self

is thus an agent in the process of persistent enframing of reality into an
ossified pattern. Although it may seem that this postulate stands in stark
contrast to the above notion of modern subjectivity, the idea of subject-
petrified reality is, in fact, only a further explication of the background
hardships that the contemporary subject must bring itself to overcome.

In late modernity “subjectivism becomes enframing [Gestell] when the

subject objectifies itself – that is, when the human subject, seeking to
master and control all aspects of its objective reality, turns that modern
impulse to control the world of objects back on itself.”

It is the ultimate

predicament of the modern man that “nothing halts the omnivorous
progress of Gestell, the transformation of everything into resource, of the
world into a ‘gigantic petrol station.’”

This danger of the subject’s self-

enframing compounds the threat of textual influence that seeks to
deconstruct the self into a network of discourses. On the one hand man is
at risk of being too weak to absorb and overcome the high tide of
dissemination; on the other, in his desire to assert his control over his
historical moment, he may succumb to the drive towards perpetual control
and optimization. The spectre which hovers over man is twofold in that he
might either become a bourgeois author-figure of deceptively unshakeable
omniscience or a Foucaultian author as a mere web of discourse functions.

Thus the modern subject not only stands exposed to the discontinuous

freeplay of signification that engulfs it in its ubiquity but is itself a figure
of internal conflict between the deathly desire to control/optimise and the

Thomson, Heidegger, 52.

Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 132.

Thomson, Heidegger, 52.

Thomson, Heidegger, 57.

Thomson, Heidegger, 58. Emphasis in original.

Julian Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2001), 97.

Chapter One

ceaseless self-recreation. Heidegger’s notion of poetry as “an unending
creative struggle to express that which conditions and informs our worlds
of meaning and yet resists being exhaustively articulated in the terms of
these worlds” is also an inherent agonistic version of truth as
unconcealment. The “essential tension whereby being becomes intelligible
in time,”

which is the central premise of art, may be taken to inform a

similar struggle of the subject to “enown” itself

. The task of poetry as

projective saying is to unearth a path beyond enframing of the current
historical moment; to do so, poetic language plays out the tension between
the earth and the world in order to open up the crevice of the
unconcealment of truth. In other words, what the earth tries to shackle,
hold down and conceal, the world strives to uncover and show forth on the
ground of the earth. Similarly, what imprisons the subject in the late
modern subjectivism of control and optimization is then offset by the
Saying of art.

This premise is remote from Rorty’s belief that literature offers a

redemption from egotism by acquainting us with as many human types as
possible

in the sense that Heidegger envisions a far more grievous

change in the self’s constitution; he wants the essence of man to be
changed by re-inhabiting language anew.

Therefore he endows poetry

with the most serious task which no other human pursuit can hope to
perform: a poem is to become a space wherein the historical framework of
man’s being in the world might undergo a change. Furthermore, it is to be
the engagement with language that will allow man to recreate himself as a
conscious being-in-the-world.

Contemporary art, which rather paradoxically he scorns on a number of

occasions, is to Heidegger a unique form of contemplation of the working
of the primordial conflict: “Klee’s later paintings preserve the
phenomenological struggle of emerging and withdrawing, and so bring the
usually inconspicuous tension between foreground and background itself
to the fore, thereby offering us a glimpse of the underlying structure

Thomson, Heidegger, 75fn.

As a statement of the readily obvious, it needs to be added that Heidegger is

customarily understood to disavow the category of the subject in favour of the idea
of language as the source of meaning. Cezary WodziĔski, Kairos (GdaĔsk:
slowo/obraz terytoria, 2010), 119. There is no intention here to repel that
assumption. However, the unique analyses of art by Heidegger may be argued to
pave the way for what is here considered to be the return of the subject in the
poetry of J. H. Prynne.

Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics, 91.

WodziĔski, Kairos, 90, 92.

Subjectivity Under Siege

hidden within all art.”

Klee is essential to Heidegger in that he

“thematizes both the visible and the (non-metaphysical) invisible” as well
as “the Ereignis or ‘worlding’ of the former out of the latter.”

The

invisible emerges from the visible in a ruse that is permanently countered
by the contrary movement. Therefore what art shows is the tension
between showing forth and withdrawing and it is this agon that instantiates
truth as unconcealment. In the process of reclaiming modern man a similar
tension seems to be at play: what man struggles to shake off is the very
language that allows him to assert himself in the first place. The subject is
constantly exposed to the process of enframing in the language which
seeks to fossilise man into an optimised resource. Thus it may be argued
that every discourse in hand seeks to disseminate the human sediment
across the sandy bottom of freeplay. Against these perils the self has the
saying of poems in which it may seriously re-inhabit the language. If the
truth of being is a perpetual search for insights into the historically-
conditioned reality, then the laborious truth of man’s struggle with
language inheres in constant attempts to disentangle himself from the flux
of dissemination on the one hand and a drive towards sedimentation, on
the other.

It is at this point that we need to turn to Prynne for further guidance in

the agon with the influences of the contemporary world. Prynne has been
engaged with Heidegger’s thinking ever since his earliest poems

but his

most in-depth critical treatment of a Heideggerian approach to language is
to be found in a recent essay “Huts.” Not unexpectedly, in his analysis of
the history of the presence of huts in poetry Prynne comes to observe that
“It is not to be the constructions of art and regulatory tradition that give
shape to formless powers, but encounter with the unprotected real world,
open and without accommodation, and unvoiced. All this in huts, with
dual aspect of benign and hostile shelter, human life simple and serene or
under ominous threat.”

A hut is here shown to be both man’s haven from

the wilderness outside, and a remote outpost wherein man deliberately
seeks contact with the natural world. However, added to it is the fact that
huts denote something hostile in men’s comportment to each other as well
as to the world in hand. A hut is man’s response to the invitation from the

Thomson, Heidegger, 89.

Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, 161.

The most sustained analyses of Prynne’s poetry in regard to Heidegger is

Johansson’s The Engineering of Being; even though the association is perhaps less
of a close-knit dialogue which is suggested in Johansson’s book, she does trace the
influence of Heidegger’s philosophy on Prynne’s thinking of the role of language.

J. H. Prynne, „Huts,” Textual Practice 22 (2008): 624.

Chapter One

world and the expression of his innermost desire to stay apart and screened
off from the dangers from without. Immediately after elaborating on the
various meanings of the word “hut,” Prynne evokes the hut in Todnauberg,
Heidegger’s refuge but also, at one point, Celan’s destination. Thus the hut
becomes a place where poetry and thinking meet: the hut of being and
silence

. In the light of this conference the place is infused with yet

another pair of connotations: the poet’s hope for the future and the
thinker’s mistake of the past, with the spectre of the Holocaust looming
against the horizon.

Prynne traverses the interpretive path, meticulously conjuring up

associations to the word “hut” to construct a dialectic image of hospitality
and hostility at the same time. At the end of this path there awaits an
evocative description of a typical early-modern hut:

[T]imber-framed and clad with light planks or other local materials, to
provide basic shelter, to allow outward watchfulness (originally of grazing
animals), in distant or non-social locations, often at language-margins, with
a low-raked roof and window-spaces and one door, not a dwelling and not
set up for family life but estranged from it and its domestic values. The
very ikon of temporary or intruded fabrication, often dark, an intense
feature in relation to landscape and territory.

This is a place whose main feature is its transitiveness, its short usefulness,
and yet such a hut plays a vital role in the rural areas as a watchtower for
shepherds. It should blend with the surroundings but not too much, for it
must be visible to the returning user. By definition then, the hut is a place
of the conflict between covering and unconcealing, which are at work in it
at all times. The hut as the place of truth as aletheia, however, is not an
innocent phenomenological image of being but a deeply ambiguous
representation of the character of man’s engagement with the world; just
as it may be synonymous with the unconcealment of truth, so the
contemporary hut may be a homologue of the process of framing in its
most deadly consequence.

“Where – asks Prynne – in the mental imagery of modern life have we

seen such structures?”

These would be the watchtowers of “divisive and

punitive regimes” that separated the two Germanies or the ones established
on the perimeter of “the final-solution camps during the Third Reich.”

A thorough treatment of the meeting (not only the one in Todnauberg of July 25,

1967) is undertaken by James K. Lyon in Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger. An
Unresolved Question, 1951 – 1970. and in Polish by Cezary WodziĔski, Kairos.

Prynne, “Huts,” 629.

Subjectivity Under Siege

Furthermore, those could be the Stalinist “huts” of the deportation and
death camps or “the shanty-settlements of desperate refugee populations
and casualties of war.” Finally, those could be the surveillance posts raised
“at the entry to Camp Delta of the detention facility at Guantánamo
Bay.”

These fearsome constructions no longer evoke solitary havens of

thinking but tangible representations of regimes that will go to any lengths
necessary to constrain, silence and extirpate the dissenting individual.
Although times have changed and we now live in a different frame of
reference, those ominous structures remain huts, just as the “sheds on
allotments and tree-houses for kids.”

What must not be done is select the

associations with the benign ones and turn a blind eye to their more
ominous undertones.

Prynne ends his essay by returning to the notion of language as “the

house of being.” The imaginative reverie that he has practised throughout
sheds an equivocal light on the Heideggerian phrase in that the language as
the house of being can no longer be conceptualised as the Greek temple
because “language is not innocent.”

Instead, language is a space where

the fiercest struggles of mankind are fought. Prynne attaches deep
seriousness to any form of linguistic and artistic pursuit, which cannot be
reconciled with the merry agons of the Romantic Bildung tradition down
to Bloom and Bielik-Robson; neither can his gravity be reduced to the
catch-phrase of postmodernist art as it is theorised by such thinkers and
critics as Budrillard, Lyotard, Rorty or Jameson.

The intensities of poetic encounter, of imagination and deep insight into
spiritual reality and poetic truth, carry with them all the fierce contradiction
of what human language is and does. There is no protection or even
temporary shelter from these forms of knowledge that is worth even a
moment’s considered preference, even for poets or philosophers with
poetic missions [...] Poets worth the attention of serious readers are not
traffickers in illusions however star-bright, and entering by choice rather
than necessity into a hut implies choosing the correct moment to come out
again.

The hut is not a place of refuge but the place of gravest involvement with
the problems of the time. This point is not so much at odds with the search
for the modern subject as it may seem at first glance, since the laborious
truth of deconstruction, the poetic conflict that seeks to overcome the

Prynne, “Huts,” 629 – 630.

Prynne, “Huts,” 630.

Prynne, “Huts,” 630 – 631.

Chapter One

enframing and the subject’s Bildung together delimit the plane of man’s
strife with the hostile forces of his contemporary environment. None of the
above can readily be accepted, nor can any of them be discarded if the
return of the self is to be apprehended in the dual sense of the word as
“understanding” and “vernacular capturing.”

Given that the world is a place where man is entangled by various

discourses, forces of socio-political intimidation and omnipresent textual
influences, then it is the poet’s task to reclaim from the nethermost abyss
of non-being the voice of man. After all, imperialism “manifests itself not
only in company balance-sheets and in airbases, but can be tracked down
to the most intimate roots of speech and signification.”

To apprehend this

discursive imperialism, man must first absorb it in order that he might then
seek to overcome it. In this respect it is Heidegger’s thinking of art, as
discussed above, that provides the essential turning point to the return of
the subject in the sense that the withdrawing and showing forth that
happen in an artwork according to Heidegger allow to break off the stasis
of the existent enframing. This premise is corroborated by Prynne, who
asserts that if “ruin and part-ruin lie about us on all sides,” then the “poets
are how we know this, are how we may dwell not somewhere else but
where we are.”

Only seemingly does Prynne depart from a Heideggerian

stance by criticising the escapist drive intrinsic to some poets and
philosophers because Heidegger never really wants to flee the world, he
never actually ceases to be committed. The entangled self of the present
age, from cradle inescapably enmeshed in the discourse-predicated culture,
must turn to the poet for the promise of its salvation.
Thus the sense of entanglement that has here been promoted with
reference to the neo-Romantic philosophy and post-Kantian reading of
deconstruction finds its complementary thinker in Heidegger. Conceding
that he never placed his trust in any form of subject-oriented thinking,
Heidegger offers a series of figurative manoeuvres, which “thematize
[without] representing”

100

and may usefully be employed in the fight for

the emancipation of the self. It is this struggle, in its various manifestations
in different volumes, that is here argued to be a pervasive theme of
Prynne’s oeuvre from Kitchen Poems to Blue Slides at Rest.

Eagleton, Literary Theory, 187.

Prynne, “Huts,” 631 – 632.

100

Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, 140.

HAPTER

ISENTANGLING THE

UBJECT

The affinity early Prynne shares with post-Kehre Heidegger has been

reasonably well delineated. Anthony Mellors states directly that “Prynne
wants to get rid of ‘meaning’ altogether, and replace it with a formal
significance, which, through the indeterminate contingencies of poetic
Saying, moves beyond them to reaffirm a hidden agenda of mystical
return.”

Instigating Heideggerian Saying in place of classical notions of

meaning rightly lays emphasis on the highly elusive strategy Prynne
employed ever since his Kitchen Poems. Poetic Saying is Heidegger’s
shorthand for the agonic movement of truth intrinsic to poetry; the conflict
between the world and the earth is thus immediately put at the centre of
Prynne’s early poetics. As it was argued above, the pre-conflict may be
seen to represent the process whereby the historically new is invented and
ushered into the everydayness in which it then gradually loses its original
appeal. Art as the space of this strife may be seen as an act of restarting
history and it is this crucial contemporary revision of Heidegger that
appertains to Prynne’s hopes for what poetry may actually make happen.

What Heidegger wishes to oppose, with his thinking of art as Saying of

Being, is the enframing [Gestell] of the current historical condition. The
contemporary modes of thinking (here understood as covering all fields of
human intellectual and practical involvement) with time adopt the
novelties and begin to regard them as having always been there; what at
first appears repulsive in many ways soon becomes voguish, only to
eventually contribute to the ossification of the mindsets. In order to
prevent that process, Heidegger weaves his incessantly baffling images of
conflict and overcoming by projective saying. Early Prynne treads a
similar path in the sense that he also seeks to undermine the existent
modes of thinking, which at this point cannot be called thinking at all, but
rather a repetition, a return of the “already thought.” Hence Mellors’s
criticism of the “hidden agenda of mystical return,” which must be

Anthony Mellors, “The Spirit of Poetry: Heidegger, Trakl, Derrida and Prynne,”

Parataxis 8/9 (1996): 175.

Chapter Two

superseded if men are not to trap themselves in their own snares.
Thomson’s postulate that Heidegger envisions the contemporary society as
walking meekly into modernity’s hell of control and optimisation, must
here be evoked as the danger which art must face up to. Among the
flashest paths to such a nightmarish vision is the attempt to vanquish the
human subject and replace it with a free-flowing intertextual web of
language.
For Prynne, as on the face of it to Heidegger and Barthes, the idea of
the self is not valid anymore. Early critics stressed this poststructural and
anti-subjective aspect of Prynne’s poetry, maintaining that he effaces even
the most minute traces of subjectivity.

However, the more recent

commentators have tended to invoke a notion of the subject more
congruent with the discontinuous embattled self that has been discussed in
the first chapter. Taking up Theresa de Lauretis’s criticism of the death of
the subject, David Punter observes that in Prynne,

[W]e are in the presence of a poetry in which nothing is taken for granted,
in which there is no primordially organizing subject, no established
positionality. Instead there is a constant slipping and sliding of words as
language attempts to grasp that which remains beyond its reach, as the
subject tries to find him- or herself in a “hollow,” in the declivities of
experience, in the hall of mirrors.

The subject Punter distances himself from is the same figure that Barthes
sought to dispose of; ridding late modernity of such a subject is by all
means a welcome transition in the direction of greater liberty and comfort
of an individual; however, that move does not trigger the utter depredation
of the idea of the subject. What needs to come in place of the stable and
finite Cogito is an entirely Heideggerian proposition that language reach
beyond itself; only in this ceaseless attempting can the subject remain a
valid and indeed an indisposable figure of modernity. In this passage,
Punter envisions a subjectivity that has been shown to emerge in the neo-
Romantic philosophy of Bielik-Robson. It is this strong subject that
Prynne’s poems repeatedly reveal, as they destabilise and uproot the
enframed modes of modern thinking. “Prynne has extended [Olson’s epic
template] into a reading experience that is uniquely his own, redolent with
acute vocabularies and terse energy points. He offers encounters with
language and the various discourses that impinge upon the individual

Peter Ackroyd, Notes for a New Culture (New York: Alkin Books, 1993), 129 –

131.

Punter, “Interlocating J. H. Prynne,” 124.

Disentangling the Subject

showing how the individual is formed by processes that are outside
immediate perception and cognition.”

Thus David Caddy notes two key

points in Prynne’s poetics; the individual is made not at a single stroke but
constitutes himself through a series of imperceptible moves (which might
be referred to Bloomian swerves), and the process of self-creation takes
place against the adverse influence of vocabularies that are woven into the
fabric of contemporary reality. It is this disentangling of the subject that is
here traced across Prynne’s poems.

Kitchen Poems is the first volume in which Prynne engages in the

battle for the viability of human subject. Quite clearly, throughout the
book, the self as a speaker who offers his ruminations on a particular topic
is foregone in favour of the discontinuous subject that must struggle with
the influences of the world for the possibility to exist. The book maps “the
productive relations inscribed in subjectivity” understood as “mechanisms
of presence.”

Even though the self can never fully assert its

contemporaneity with the world it inhabits (and with whose influence it
battles), it exists in the attempts to accomplish that feat. The book brings
into focus the methods of imprisoning the subject in the modern world,
which will later be developed in the subsequent volumes, at least until the
mid-eighties.
In “Sketch for the Financial Theory of the Self,” the limitations
imposed on the subject are initially shown from a Heideggerian
perspective.

[...] The name is the sidereal display, it
is what we know we cannot now have.
The last light is the name it carries,
it is this binds us to our unbroken trust. (emphasis in original)

The name is here shown to be a figure which represents some underlying
content that cannot be glimpsed. Although this does not mean that the
word is chosen haphazardly, as it is after all “the last light,” the name only
projects an afterglow of the true starry colour. This passage harks back to
Heidegger’s intimations that language is the house of Being, even though
in its everyday form it is mere idle talk. Just as the Greek language was
once a vessel of the truth of Being, so the light that, at one point in the past
shone powerfully, is now reduced to a name that contains only vestiges of

David Caddy, “Notes towards a Preliminary Reading of J. H. Prynne’s Poems,”

in A Manner of Utterance. The Poetry of J. H. Prynne, ed. Ian Brinton (Exeter:
Shearsman Books, 2009), 33.

D. S. Marriott, “’The Numbers’ of J. H. Prynne,” The Many Review 5 (1987): 14.

Chapter Two

the former glorious enchantment. Soon this remotely Gnostic vision of
divinity being lost with time begins to chime with contemporary
undertones. The poem explains that the need for the name to retain some
essential link with the world is, in fact, the need for money, since “we
should / have what the city does need, / the sky, if we did not so / want the
need.” The name for this need which we cannot relinquish is money and

the absurd trust in value is the pattern of
bond and contract and interest – just where
the names are exactly equivalent to the trust
given to them.

It is at this point that the poem identifies the transition from a detached
ruminative stance expressed in its initial parts, to a matter of earthly
concern. There is no pondering over whether the name bears in it the echo
of the truth of Being, instead the poem sees the linguistic investigation as
having an immediate effect on man’s life. “Prynne probes the relationship
between word (name) and object within the economic field and suggests
the ways it impacts on the self. He writes of how words and poems and
quality, as habit, have been reduced to monetary objects by which we
define ourselves. He notes that we are duped into a reductive cash flow
nexus.”

Names and numbers “are just / the tricks we / trust, which / we

choose.” Money, and more broadly the economic conditioning of the
individual in the modern world, seep into the language, enforcing on it the
same “pattern of bond and contract and interest;” as the economic factors
dominate the life of man, so they also come to exert authority over his
language. The trust reposed in value equals the trust reposed in words, as a
result the deceptive nature of names and numbers is forgotten. A belief is
born that language is capable of fully conveying the message intended, and
money is the natural means for the maintenance of modern economy.
Under such circumstances, signification powers that language and
money possess become self-sufficient, “[...] Music, / travel, habit and
silence are all money [...]” (emphasis in original). Man not only becomes
subservient to the economy of language use and money circulation but
indeed disappears, disseminated into a web of discourses. What remains is
the Barthesian scriptor, the one through whom text flows, not only
unrestrictedly but also unreflectively. As Prynne puts it at the end of
“Sketch”: “This is the shining grudge of numbers;” they thwart any
attempt at a restitution so that the language loses all its figuration but the
enframing one: “the star & silk of my eye [...] will not return.” Here the

Caddy, “Notes,” 27.

Disentangling the Subject

return is meant in a twofold sense of “bring back” and “produce a
particular amount of money as a profit or loss;” on the one hand the last
luminosity that is retained in the name cannot be reclaimed, on the other,
“the star & silk” become useless, since they are not profitable. In “Sketch”
Prynne offers his insight into the quality of contemporary language and its
appraisal is negative in that words lose their thought-provoking nature in
favour of a staleness of meaning implicit in the trust in economy. Unless it
can be calculated in plain numbers, language is kept in check.
Such a commoditisation of language results in the enframing of
subjectivity inasmuch as man is turned (but also turns himself) into a
resource to be optimised, as Thomson has been shown to argue. The earth,
in Heidegger’s words, supersedes the unconcealing world and establishes
the rule of forgetfulness of Being. In such circumstances the society
assumes the role of a machine, not very distant from Hobbes’s vision, with
only this difference: that in the contemporary reality this machine-
resembling state is induced not for the sake of the individual, but in order
to harness him to optimal labour. In “A Gold Ring Called Reluctance” this
situation comes under the spotlight. Although the poem is “scornful about
the sort of Heideggerian ‘metaphysic [...] which claims its place like a
shoe,’”

it does register a similar crisis to the one observed by Thomson

As it focuses on the late modern notions of value and how it affects man,
the poem diagnoses the destitution of the subject in the face of the
reification of language by economic forces:

[...] The public
is no more than a sign on the outside of the
shopping-bag; we are what it entails and
we remain its precondition. Even the most
modern shops, if you work at them, will
resolve into streets or thoroughfares; their
potential for transfer has simply been absorbed,
by trade.

The image of “the sign on the outside of the shopping bag” captures the
clichéd form in which the society is pictured. In addition, the bag conjures

Alan Marshall, “The Two Poetries and the Concept of Risk,” Parataxis 8/9

(1996): 209.

It needs to be added that metaphysic is in fact a word Heidegger in his later

writings has come to radically oppose to the point of abhorrence, since it inevitably
ushered in the ontotheological mind-frame. Iain Thomson most pertinently
analyses Heidegger’s attempts at taking the notion apart in chapter two of his
Heidegger on Ontotheology.

Chapter Two

up a suburban mall scene of daily routines. The landscape is that of a
capitalist city in which economic matters seek to remorselessly keep man
within the limits of predictability. The language that is here prevalent is
the advertising jargon punning on the obvious. Furthermore, the people are
the system’s precondition, which emphasises the fact that it is man that has
optimised himself out of conscious existence. Market forces take on a life
of their own but they still need people to spur the capital into wider
circulation, thereby ensuring that, if there is any transfer, it is that of
money.
Not only are the customers fitted in to the system but also the shop
assistants, whose work places are not even perceived to be in any way
separate from the rest of the neighbourhood. Instead, they “resolve into
streets and thoroughfares,” becoming a vast expanse of the money-
propelled field. The line endings consistently tear the sentences apart, in
this way creating an air of stammering separateness between elements of
syntax which “naturally” fit together. There is a pause before “The public”
which is revealed to be “no more than a sign;” similarly, the definite
article is left dangling at the end of the line as though it were to introduce
suspense by withholding another piece of “breakthrough” news. Obviously
enough, no important news ever comes.

The confinement of that is no option:
the public assertion of “value” does not over-run the
channels, seeping into our discretion. Whom
we love is a tangled issue, much shared; but
at least are neither of us worth it. (emphasis in original)

There is no choice whether one enters the capitalist-dominated world. All
human pursuits, inclusive of love and personal matters, are incorporated
into the public ground. For control or otherwise, relationships are
inspected and, deceptively enough, “value” is not attached to the act of
invigilation of others’ personal affairs. One thinks of reality shows which
are to present people “in their natural state” while, in fact, they create
conditions of intensified commercial productivity in that the people try to
play-act into winning the shows, thus falling ever deeper into the
economic stasis of money-production.

One outcome of the general availability of insight into others’ personal

lives is that even the subtlest emotions are vulgarised into an economic
produce. Another is that such a condition of constant exposure results in a
desire to hide away from view. Granted that all is put in the spotlight, the
qualities which would a minute ago have seemed true to one’s constitution
fall into stereotypical drills. Linguistic routines of speaking about emotions

Disentangling the Subject

or hopes become so fossilised that they are abstracted from understanding.
This is the other pole to Heidegger’s idea of undergoing an experience
with language, because in this case language hisses and crackles “like an
old record.” In consequence, we “too are remote within this, like the noble
/ gases, since it’s our discretion that / is affected.” This self-induced
ostracism triggers further dehumanisation, for what is lost is the
communion between people; and if there is a community, it functions
within the frame established in advance by the language routine which
percolates down from the larger strata of social exchange: “Sedately
torpid, we inquire / into our questions, the ‘burning issues’ / that ‘face us
on all sides.’” Plunged into such dead phrases, people exacerbate their
condition, with all possibilities of reflective rescue forestalled by the
flaccidity of the language they use.
Once economic jargon has sifted through into the common language,
man finds himself in a position foreseen by Orwell in his idea of
“Newspeak.” We can neither speak nor think independently of the idiom
of supply and demand:

[...] the splintered
naming of wares creates targets for want
like glandular riot, and thus want
is the most urgent condition (e.g. not
enough credit).

It is directly through the language of marketing that the desire for
possessing more goods is assimilated as a body function; the “glandular
riot” is a simile for wanting, thus bringing the external world of
commodity to the level of man’s physical need. The human condition in
late modernity is no more Malraux’s condition humaine but the horizon of
craving for ever more goods. This entanglement of man in the late modern
economic field happens by way of linguistic appropriation of the subject in
the market discourse.
The poem offers a tentative response to this reality of money-oriented
being. The final stanza pitches a counter statement against the economic
jargon:

I am interested instead in
discretion: what I love and also the spread
of indifferent qualities. Dust, objects of use
broken by wear, by simply slowing too much
to be retrieved as agents [...]

Chapter Two

The “I” of the poem speaks not from the lofty vantage of a poet but rather
from the perspective of one who is thoroughly enmeshed in the reality of
economic domination of the language. Thus he is aware that the words he
uses are no less knotted in the market jargon than the everyday talk of the
people. Yet he tries to hint at a possibility of reclaiming “the star & silk”
of “Sketch for the Financial Theory of the Self” by referring to an
implicitly Heideggerian stance. What holds a possibility of overcoming the
hegemony of the dead language of the market is economically useless.
Neither “dust” nor “objects of use broken by wear” can be implemented in
the process of wealth accumulation because their market value is next to
nothing. At the same time Heidegger’s analysis of equipment provides a
background for Prynne’s attempt to counter the reality of trade, in that, as
it has been argued above, the broken tool brings one to the experience of
the truth of the being of the surrounding world; in a similar way,
Heidegger begins here his criticism of the technological age, it is only the
thing that no longer does its job smoothly that disentangles itself from the
reign of market forces. By slowing down to such a degree that we cannot
be “retrieved as agents,” it becomes possible to stand up to the alienation
of clichéd name and ruthless number.
However, this is not a ready-made answer to the entanglement of the
subject, since such a slowing down would necessitate stark poverty and
inevitable death of the individual. This is part of the difficulty that Kitchen
Poems diagnoses; there is no escaping the market economy if one wishes
to live and, paradoxically, meekly deciding to participate in the money-
exchange process is tantamount to condemning the self to oblivion. Man
stands between choosing to die for the sake of his freedom and resolving
to merge himself with the market forces to the point of non-being. This
problematic position of the entangled subject is carried on to Prynne’s next
volume, The White Stones (1969). Nigel Wheale observes that the book
“dispassionately proposes the personality at a number of intersections, the
axes of which are first geographical and economic, also communal and
singular, but finally historical and ethical. The fluid continuity of the
writing makes it a skein from which it is very difficult to excerpt.”

All

these delimit the field in which the subject needs to struggle with its
entanglement in the discourses. This struggle is primarily linguistic
because, as “Sketch” and “A Gold Ring Called Reluctance” indicate,
man’s enmeshment in the contemporaneity is brought about by the
plethora of various jargons which seek to shackle him.

Nigel Wheale, “Expense: J. H. Prynne’s The White Stones,” Grosseteste Review

12 (1979): 105.

Disentangling the Subject

It may be posited that these poems instigate a clash between two
languages, which closely corresponds to Heidegger’s distinction between
Saying and idle talk

. On the one hand there is the stagnant idiom of the

market, advertising predefined roles man is to play in the society; on the
other, a poetic vernacular which seeks to escape the confines of the market
jargons. However, both are needed in the sense that, analogous to the strife
between the earth and the world, Saying can only manifest itself against
the background of idle talk. This manifestation takes the form of absorbing
the language of the market in order to overcome it and break apart from its
limitations. Thus the poem assumes the same strategy to that of the agonic
subjectivity of Bielik-Robson, inasmuch as it willingly accepts the
disseminating drives and fossilising patterns of idle talk so as to extricate
from them the prospective freedom of being. Wheale adds that the above-
described conflict “constitutes a tension between linguistic ‘competence,’
as a merely sufficient performance that will meet occasions, and then
‘eloquence,’ which is the superabundant lyricism of new connections
being made through the medium of the poem’s discourse.”

Thus the idle

talk of market economy, which seeks to turn man into a resource to be
optimised, is countered by the discourse of poetry that traces and unearths
the dehumanisation of the subjectivity by the jargons.
In “Quality in that Case as Pressure” the personal and the communal
intertwine, revealing the collision between the subject’s desire to assert
itself and the vast forces which try to suppress it. The rhetoric of “A Gold
Ring Called Reluctance” returns towards the end of “Quality in that Case
as Pressure”:

The quantities of demand are the measure
of want – of lack or even (as we are told)
sheer grinding starvation. How much to
eat is the city in ethical frenzy
the allowances set against
tax deductions in respect

Whilst Saying is an agonic construct of “lighting and hiding proffer of the

world” (Heidegger, On the Way, 93), idle talk “not only divests us of the task of
genuine understanding, but develops an indifferent intelligibility for which nothing
is closed off any longer” (Heidegger, Being and Time, 158). Idle talk is never
meant as something negative, it is rather like the earth which begs closure for the
sake of unobstructed dwelling; it is Saying that tries to set up a new world in the
understanding of “The Origin.” Therefore Saying corresponds to the historical
mode of thinking beyond the idle talk as a state of closure of existence, which
retains its essential readiness for setting forth a new facet.

Wheale, “Expense,” 107.

Chapter Two

of unearned income
the wholly sensuous & mercantile matter
of count [...]. (emphasis in original)

Again it is the supply/demand factor that decides what people need and
what must be provided for them. What cannot be bought or sold, what
does not increase the spending power is unimportant. In place of feelings
there are credit capacities of citizens, money circulation replaces
sensuousness and affection. The two italicised words capture the mercantile
nature of the reality, in which the inquiry is limited to “how much” and
“count.” This creates an “ethical frenzy” with people trampling one
another in pursuit of more goods.
What seems to be an alternative to such a money-dominated world is
“poverty the condition, of which I am so clearly / guilty I can touch the
pleasure involved.” The feeling of joy at not participating in the money
chase sets the speaker apart from the society and allows him a vantage of
an observer, even if only seemingly:

For such guilt is the agency of ethical fact:
we feel ashamed at the mild weather too and
when the National Plan settles comfortably
like a Grail in some sculpted precinct
I am transported with angelic nonchalance.

Ethics dictates that the disinterestedness of an observer-figure cannot be
harboured. However, the same ethics prevents the speaker from partaking
in the financial power play which makes citizenry embarrassed at
everything, while the grand economic plans are set up and promoted as the
saving graces of the contemporary world. At this point politics enters the
economic stage but it is not an independent actor, instead it is also
subservient to the current market fluctuations. As the society is entangled
ever more deeply in the discourses of economy and politics, the speaker
retains his position of a casual observer, albeit remorse-stricken.
It is at the end of the poem that another solution to the mercantile
domination is proffered. It is hinted at in the first stanza: “How much we /
see is how far we desire change,” where the desire for change might be
argued to refer to the alternation of the process of economic entanglement
of the self. Yet the transition from the public sphere to the personal
statement that comes in “Quality in that Case as Pressure” once more
restates the individual’s position vis a vis the financial realm: “I am moved
/ by the condition of knowledge, as the / dispersion of form” (emphasis in
original). What knowledge is it that moves the speaker? It is the “prize / of

Disentangling the Subject

the person who can be / seen to stumble & who falls with joy, unhurt.”
Knowledge which does not aspire to finality and closure, but accepts that
it is historically motivated, is achieved through lifetime of investigation –
stumbling and falling with joy. The condition of knowledge is thus
revealed to be a temporal matter which lasts until a new theory is
advanced, one which is more in tune with the current view of reality. In
this poem Prynne suggests what may be argued to be one of his dominant
responses to the culture of money-making; “the dispersion of form” brings
to mind the shattering of the sediments of obsolete mindsets, but also a
process of energy production: “the force / is a condition / released in the /
presence,” as the closing parts of the poem explain. The tension between
idle talk and Saying results in the release of force that, in a sweeping gust,
enlivens the petrified condition of knowledge, and sets forth a new
historical moment. For the subject “the dispersion of form” indicates a
revolt against the mainstream structure of the society. The disentangling of
the subjectivity quite naturally begins “from the ridge and fore- / land.”
Reeve and Kerridge associate Prynne’s notion of the self with
Kristeva’s concept of avant-garde writing, which “allows the semiotic to
disrupt and undo the formation of the ego as a separate, positioned
subject.”

Such a disruption of the subject seems to be the consequence of

“the dispersion of form” mentioned in “Quality in that Case as Pressure,”
in that the condition of knowledge, as the speaker suggests, must be a
ceaseless release of force into the present in order to transform the market-
bound facet of the reality. Kristeva pertinently observes here that “the kind
of activity encouraged and privileged by (capitalist) society represses the
process pervading the body and the subject;” so as to escape the manacles
of this condition, we must “gain access to what is repressed in the social
mechanism” and that can only be achieved through what Kristeva calls
‘signifiance’: “[t]his heterogeneous process, neither anarchic fragmented
foundation nor schizophrenic blockage, is a structuring and de-structuring
practice, a passage to the outer boundaries of the subject and society.”

The structuring and de-structuring which Kristeva mentions, evoking the
idea of jouissance, may here be related to the process of the self’s agonic
struggle with the world of influences, in this case of the economic jargon.
By reference to Kristeva, Reeve and Kerridge stress the importance of the
double drive inherent in Prynne’s poetry which “pushes [the edges]
outwards, re-establishing life on marginal territory, and making lines of
contact between marginality and the domestic security which usually

Reeve, Nearly too Much, 119.

J. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1984), 25.

Chapter Two

suppresses [...] knowledge.”

Thus margins turn out to be the place where

the return of the subject starts. It is furthest from the centre as a place of
“domestic security,” but also implicit bourgeois hegemony that the subject
may strive to win its freedom.
The tension that the poems continuously re-enact is a vital element of
the struggle of the modern subjectivity in that neither escapism (resulting
in the guilt as “the agency of ethical fact”) nor passive assimilation is a
viable path for the late modern ego. Ceaseless striving to disperse the
ossified forms of the society destabilises the jargons of economy and
politics, but also opposes the specialised idiom of science. In its attempt to
explicate the working of the world, the scientific jargon seeks to bestow a
lasting order on reality. In “Sketch for a Financial Theory of the Self” this
drive is expressed in part seven of the poem: “The old cry about chastity,
that we are / bound by the parts of our unnatural frames.” Knowledge is
not chaste, however, nor is it possible to impose finite bounds on the
world, since these will forever be merely unnatural additions to the
phenomena. In this respect Prynne comes close to Kuhn’s description of
scientific progress. Kuhn’s idea that science progresses in leaps and is not
accumulative

finds its complementation, via Gianni Vattimo, in

Heidegger in that, just as science does, arts develop by means of overcoming
the previous facets.

This premise links with the notion of subject as a

formation in constant development inasmuch as, for the self to exist
independently, it must shed the limits of cumulative perception of the
world. Thus such ostensibly all-embracing languages as the idiom of
market economy, politics, and science, must be shaken off.
In “Quality in that Case as Pressure” the wholeness-obsession is
represented by “the children of proof,” whose desire for evidence is
immediately refuted because “The proof is a feature, how the / spine is
set” (emphasis in original). This is a thoroughly Kuhnian point of view in
that what may at first appear to be a validation of a claim is argued to be a
result of the notional apparatus applied to the description of, in this case,
the body. That the spine is one of the central bone structures in the body is
not a Truthful (to have it Norris’s way) statement about the nature of
human anatomy but a proposition which is confirmed only through
reference to the rest of the specialised terminology. According to the
theory thus far available to anatomists it is true to state that the spine is set

Reeve, Nearly too Much, 27.

Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1996), 6 – 7, 52 – 53.

Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-

Modern Culture, trans. John D. Snyder (New York: Polity Press, 1992), 95 – 107.

Disentangling the Subject

in the upper body but in itself such knowledge is not yet a representative
fact. Thus “Prynne makes scientific discourses into lyric expression, and in
doing so appears not only to disrupt these discourses by making the
signifying process and the construction of the subject in language, visible,
but to melt their claim to authoritative wisdom [...] Yet [Prynne’s] poems
also endorse those scientific discourses as propositional systems which
uphold the symbolic.”

Prynne does not seek to invalidate scientific

theories but rather to subject them to poetic apprehension and critical
revaluation. Consequently, the ambitions of science to provide conclusive
theories of everything are shown to be means of covering up their
essentially historical nature.
Similar criticism of apparently final theories is expressed in “The
Numbers” (Kitchen Poems); the speaker sees “the in- / fluence of terminal
systems” to be representative of the imposing governing powers, which
seek to suppress difference. These powers are then identified as the causes
of the self’s dissolution in the grand narratives of progress, advancement
and accumulation of wealth:

elect the principal, we must take
aim. That now is the life, which
is diffused, out of
how we are too
surrounded, unhopeful. (emphasis in original)

The poem’s injunction is that there must be some leader who sets aims to
be achieved by the society. Although this seems to be the way a
democratic state is run, it is also the path to extending economic
hegemony over the people. This is the life which is promoted across the
world and it leaves men destitute of hope. The use of “too” at the end of
the penultimate line in the quoted excerpt catalyses the conflict between
man’s condition and the imposition of the state, in that the passage may be
read to say that we are diffused out of who we are, which (disregarding the
comma but amplifying the meaning which lurks beneath the rule of
punctuation) results in our being “surrounded, unhopeful;” or the lines
highlight that we are diffused out of our being surrounded and unhopeful.
Yet this pairing of effects seems an ironic comment on the methods of
enticing people into feeling that what their economic condition lets them
achieve is the inherent human freedom.

Drew Milne, “On Ice: Julia Kristeva, Susan Howe and Avant-Garde Poetics,” in

Contemporary Poetry Meets Modern Theory, ed. Antony Easthope and John O.
Thompson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 90.

Chapter Two

What the poem insists on is that such “terminal systems” should “not
be approached externally, so as to provide a casual narrative in which the
supposedly prior determinations of such systems upon each particular are
set out, but immanently, through particularity of linguistic, conceptual, and
bodily experience.”

This returns us to the notion of overcoming by

absorption, in the sense that the subject caught up in such a network of
“terminal systems” of economy, politics and scientific theories can only
save itself from diffusion-to-nothingness by critically engaging with their
specific idioms in order to disperse their fossilised forms. The subject can
attempt to supersede the languages of totality only from the margins,
working its way to the ostensible cores of those imposing systems.
This task appears to gain momentum in “Aristeas, in Seven Years”

(The White Stones), for the poem “wishes to surrender the central vantage-
point granted by the extended and settled polity from which nomadic
cultures come to seem peripheral,”

instead “looking to uncover and stay

alert to the transformations of a threshold encounter.”

This encounter

happens between Aristeas as the representative of a “settled polity” and
the tribes of the north after “he took himself out: to catch up with / the
tree, the river, the forms of alien vantage.” It is “the forms of the alien
vantage” that are “the purchase of alien groups of humans, of non-settled
and non-Greek communities, upon the earth. Aristeas seeks to catch up
with, to understand, the relation to a place and its qualities that is not
determined with reference to a fixed city.”

As he traverses the vast

territories of the north, Aristeas adopts ever more to the mores of the
steppes tribes: ‘who he was took the / collection of seven / years to thin
out;” soon he learns to trust portents and himself becomes a quasi-shaman
figure:

[...] The garment of birds’ feathers,
while he watched the crows fighting the
owls with the curling tongues
of flame proper to the Altaic
hillside, as he was himself
more than this.

Simon Jarvis, “Quality and the Non-Identical in J. H. Prynne’s ‘Aristeas, in

Seven Years,’” Parataxis 1 (1991): 71.

The figure of Aristeas is taken from Herodotus and the poem “recounts the

Greek myth of [his] wanderings among the nomads of the steppes, in a seven-year
exile from his culture and his former identity.” Reeve, Nearly too Much, 69.

Jarvis, “Quality and the Non-Identical,” 76.

Reeve, Nearly too Much, 69.

Jarvis, “Quality and the Non-Identical,” 77.

Disentangling the Subject

The spread is more, the vantage is singular
as the clan is without centre.

Clad in what would seem to his fellow citizens a preposterous outfit,
Aristeas understands that beyond the limits of his civilisation the vantage
overlooks a vaster expanse of land, and the experience is more singular, as
it is not mediated through the rigid perceptual scheme enforced by a
cultural conditioning. Granted that “the clan is without centre,” it is
inassimilable to the Greek culture or its heir, the contemporary Western
society, since the clan refuses to accept any form of externally bestowed
reign, be it financial planning, political systemisation or scientific
explicatory theories. Therefore the clan is posited to be residing in the
margins where there are no “terminal systems”

As subjects, the clansmen

live in a constant state of transition, which prevents them from ossifying
into a structure.
However, the poem does not leave it at the simple validation of the
tribal life over that of the settled, since the movement of the clan is not
totally unchartered, the “clan is without centre but it is still a clan.”

Prynne here introduces another swerve in his depiction of the
entanglement of human subjectivity. Even though the nomadic life ensures
that the margins remain free of the limitations of an organised society,
they are still spurred into their journeying by the desire of wealth. Thus it
appears that money percolates down to the margins so that any attempt at
subverting the economic jargon cannot be successful if undertaken solely
from outside of the money-dominated culture. Jarvis observes that
Aristeas’s “departure to the steppes is not simply a spontaneously heroic
expedition but has its own material motives [...] he sets off to discover
where [...] cheap money comes from: bluntly, to find gold” (81). He sets
off not only in search for an “alien vantage” but also “as a response to
cheap money” which the tribes come to possess. He wants to gain access
to their deposits of gold which “in the steppe was no more / than the royal
figment.” The ending of the poem elaborates on the notion of money:

[...] “the western Sar-
matian tribes lived side by side not in a loose
tribal configuration, but had been welded
into an organised imperium
under the leadership of one

I elaborate on the significance of the notion of margins in Prynne’s poetry in

“The Shortest way to Modernity is via the Margins: J. H. Prynne’s Later Poetry,”
Text Matters 2 (2012).

Jarvis, “Quality and the Non-Identical,” 79.

Chapter Two

royal tribe.” Royalty
as plural. Hence the calendar as taking of
life, which left gold as the side-issue, pure
figure.

Gold is here understood to be an ornament, not a source of power, as
Jarvis pertinently explains,

noting that the lack of any kind of resolution

in the poem casts the reader in doubt as to which form of living is more
suitable to man; instead it recognises the steppe life’s “qualitative
difference in all its aspects from that of the trade economy.”

Both

nomads and the settled inflict violence and suffering on fellow men in
pursuit of power, with the difference that while the former do so for a pure
form of authority over the other tribes, the latter see their domination as
mediated by the figurative token of money.
“Aristeas, in Seven Years” probes the margins of civilisation and
arrives at a conclusion that even the reduction of money-struggle, of
scientific explication of the surrounding world, and stripping politics to the
blunt search for authority do not offer freedom to the individual. The
struggle of the subject continues at any moment when discourses are
imposed on it. Thus Prynne retains the initial Kuhnian perspective in that
he stresses that the jargons of economy, politics and science are nothing
more than language games; as a result the subject’s imprisonment in them
stems from the fact that they have developed most rapidly, but it may well
have been other discourses. Even if money, as Prynne explains in the
theoretical piece “A Note on Metal,” is not understood to be “the
metonymic unit” which “replaces strength or power as the chief assertion
of presence,” the self must nevertheless enter the agon with the influences
of the world it lives in.

In “Aristeas” neither is the shaman a persona of pure disinterestedness

nor are the rituals performed for the purposes of renovation of man’s
spiritual bond with the ancestors and gods. Religion is here implied to be
another form of power-oriented discourse which elaborates its potent
images in order to tie down the subject. Thus religion becomes a perfectly
secular means to capital accumulation. In “Crown” a reverse process is
shown inasmuch as both politics and free-market economy are
demonstrated to have become a form of religion:

Referring to Prynne’s “A Note on Metal,” Jarvis concludes that “gold in the

steppe is not the currency of value but the ornament of power: as the gold taken
from Scythian burial chambers is generally worked into figures rather than coins or
ingots.” “Quality and the Non-Identical,” 83 – 84.

Jarvis, “Quality and the Non-Identical,” 84.

Disentangling the Subject

[...] The air is cold; a
pale sunlight is nothing within the con-
strictions of trust in the throat, in
the market-place. Or the silver police
station, the golden shops, all holy in this
place where the sound of false shouts too
much does reconcile the face the hands.
Yet the feet tread about in the dust, cash slides
& crashes into the registers, the slopes
rise unseen with the week and can still
burn a man up. [...]

The first image of this passage conjures up echoes of an early Yeats neo-
Romantic character, only to be struck by the contemporary capitalist
reality. The division of “con- / strictions” leaves the first syllable as almost
a single-word commentary to the previous line; such writing “cons” one
into believing that aesthetics may hold an answer to the late modern
depredation of man. “Pale sunlight” counts for nothing when compared to
“the constrictions of trust” which the market induces; if one cannot be
trusted with one’s finances, one is immediately consigned to economic
oblivion. Furthermore, “Pale sunlight” counts for even less when set
against the true authority figures: “the silver police,” representing the
political mechanism of suppression of possible social unrests and “the
golden shops,” evoking the invisible manacles of the market. Just as the
secularised quasi-religious figure of the shaman in “Aristeas” is surprisingly
unholy, so here the police station and the shops become shrines. Both the
poems, as does the whole book, implicitly launch an assault on such
“social institutions and the attitudes that sustain them.”

  The feet treading in the dust evoke a wasteland in which only “cash
slides / & crashes into registers.” The slopes here might refer to piles of
money the shops are bound to make as cash slides from the people; thus
the final image relates directly to the process of melting man in the
financial furnace. Yet “burning up” might as well indicate a religious
burning, as in the ending of “The Fire Sermon” section of The Waste
Land; therefore the police station/shops turned shrines in the present
society are endowed with the reckoning fire of a god that is capable of
striking down a man if he has failed the divine (market) trust.
  This burning-up instances a threat of aggression against man that is
inherent in the language of late modernity. Since we only do what the
current language games allow us to do, the present age of violence is a

Jim Philip, “An Introduction to the Poetry of J. H. Prynne,” Prospice 7 (1977),

27.

Chapter Two

consequence of the development of the idiom of cruelty which has carried
the Western civilisation through two world wars, a cold war, and the last
decade of the spectre of terrorism. Prynne is quick to notice this nature of
contemporary language and comes to regard it as another in a long line of
discourses that keep man ensnared.
In “Break It” the notion of totality is disparaged for its numbing
quality. Although science jargons are not directly mentioned, they clearly
linger beneath the two opening stanzas side by side with the other means
of bounding life into apparent wholeness:

And again it finishes, as we should
say it’s over, some completeness numbs me
with the final touch
we are sealed, thus
and why it should be so, well, that’s life
not well, you see you see or we
do [...]

The emphasis on finality and completeness creates an aura of sadness and
resignation. Life is closure in all respects: that of plans for the future,
possibilities of change, and the ineluctable horizon of death. Added to it is
the repetitive nature of dwelling in the society, which only exacerbates the
condition of tedium. Furthermore, there also scuttles between these lines a
sense of threat. The first line read separately seems to indicate that our
fate, what we should do, is coming to an end. This distant shadow of
demise is brought a step closer as “some completeness numbs me / with
the final touch” and the puzzling statement that “we are sealed.” These
indicate that death is the condition of man’s being, but also seems to
remind of life’s fragility.
The threat that undergirds the beginning of the poem grows more
pronounced in the middle section where more images of death appear:

[...] the tide turns and
the wick burns and curls and all

the acrid wavering of language, so full
of convenient turns of extinction [...]

A feeling of incipient death is at first conjured up by the wick burning and
curling, a typical image of one’s passing away, only to be brought down to
the level of language; the “convenient turns of extinction” seem to refer to
the language’s ability to condemn to death but also, by dint of the visual
proximity of the word “turn” to “term,” to threaten with execution. The

Disentangling the Subject

ironic statement “Life is a gay bargain” that unexpectedly comes later in
the poem adds to the air of omnipresent menace. The final instant of man’s
entanglement is no implicit control through linguistic ploys, but a direct
hazard language may pose. Here Prynne’s analysis of the seemingly
innocent word “hut” quoted earlier is a case very much in point.

An image of potential catastrophic peril comes towards the end of “On

the Matter of Thermal Packing.” The poem vacillates between the past, the
present and the future, not trying to praise one over the others but simply
indicating that they are linked in many ways. The image of ice and “frozen
forms” recur in the poem and point to an advancing process of melting.
“Ice is glory to the / past and the eloquence, the gentility of / the world’s
being;” in these lines a feeling of certain hardness of the past connected to
the tangibility of the ice is evoked. Referring to Wheale’s distinction
between competence and eloquence in Prynne, it seems that in “On the
Matter of Thermal Packing” the past is linked to a greater poetic prowess.
This could be read as a self-mocking perception, for the eloquence of the
icy past is now understood by the poets as a mere competence, which
would indicate that the poetic vocabularies that were creatively potent in
the times gone by, are still in use, although their evocative potential has
been radically diminished.
If ice and “the frozen forms in familiar remoteness” are no longer
useful in the present, then neither is “the water-pattern,” which cannot be
proof against “wealth, stability, the much-loved ice.” Prynne delimits a
space of the present in which the languages of the past have become
largely obsolete because they cannot apprehend the experience of the
fluctuant contemporaneity, and no language has so far in the present been
developed to successfully supersede the contemporary sedimentation. The
two facets of late modernity, the flux and the search to fossilise man
within the textual world out of conscious existence, cannot be countered
by either past or present languages. Under such circumstances, the future
appears to be a vision of ensuing destruction:

the shade I am now competent
for, the shell still furled but
some nuclear stream

melted from it.
The air plays
on its crown, the
prince of life
or its patent, its
price. The absent
sun (on the

Chapter Two

trees of the field) now does strike
so gently
on the whitened and uneven ice
sweet day so calm
the glitter is the war now released,
I hear the guns for the first time

From “the shell” as representative of the fossilised path that is unrevealed
(“furled”), there is “some nuclear stream” developing. The clear indication
of atomic war hovers over these lines, showing that the passages of
lyricism cannot respond to the commoditisation even of air itself. The
vision of oncoming catastrophe is to put man in check, for he cannot
prevent that calamity from happening, yet it is only he that will be
responsible for it. This is a “turn of extinction” that has been discussed
above in that the poem traces a line of development from the “ice-
encased,” through the increasing destabilisation of the frozen surfaces, to
the spectre of future annihilation. In reference to these lines, Jim Philip’s
observation that “Prynne succeeds in reminding us of an unstillness at the
heart of the most apparently solid realities”

comes to denote a passage

towards a final self-eradication of humanity.
“On the Matter of Thermal Packing” projects images of fixity and
fluidity to show that neither is an option if mankind is to survive. Unlike in
“The Glacial Question, Unresolved” where a clear continuity between the
past and the present is asserted,

the poem under discussion ends with a

deeply ambiguous image, partly ironic, partly resignedly hopeful:

[...] the eloquence of melt
is however upon me, the path become a
stream, and I lay that down
trusting the ice to withstand the heat; with
that warmth / ah some modest & gentle
competence a man could live
with so little more.

On the one hand the ice is pitched against the melting which bears clear
association with nuclear annihilation, and as a result ice represents the
power to oppose the collision course men are on; on the other hand, the
process of melting stands for the search for eloquence, thus making the
heat a synonym to the poetic supersession of the past languages. However,

Philip, “An Introduction,” 25.

James Keery, “Strictly English: A Romantic Reading of ‘On the Matter of

Thermal Packing’ by J. H. Prynne,” fragmente 3 (1991), 50.

Disentangling the Subject

the poem ends with what may be argued to be a wish for remaining
modestly competent. That conclusion is upheld only in one line, since the
last two, in an ironic twist, seem to suggest that the speaker eventually
comes to desire “the eloquence of melt.” This dialectical pondering is
refracted through the speaker’s admission to a possibility of a solipsistic
vision: “Or [I] maybe think so.”
The subject in “On the Matter of Thermal Packing” appears to be
caught up in the space-time continuum (Bergsonian “duration” would be a
fitting analogue) between the past, present and the future, in which there is
a constant danger of atomic war. This baleful shadow, however, might
only be a linguistic construct, since the menace of atomic eradication is a
product of the language game (in the late 1960s) played by the world’s so-
called superpowers. Thus the discourse of incipient danger may be taken
to be yet another form of beating the individual into obedience to the
political (as well as economic, scientific and many another) system

. Yet

the subject will not disentangle itself unless it first absorbs this discourse
and then seeks to reveal its mechanisms of rhetorical persuasion. In “On
the Matter of Thermal Packing” it is accomplished through the
intertwining of points of vantage, which ends the poem. The fear cannot
materialise in the self if it perseveres in shifting its position in relation to
the menace, thus asserting its linguistic nature.

The White Stones describes a panorama of reality as a web of

interrelated entangling discourses which seek to catch man and turn him
into a resource to be optimised. The present historical moment is seen to
be more deceptively perilous to the individual than the nomad tribes of the
past in the sense that the contemporary means of enslaving the self are no
longer straightforward, but assume many different guises. The difficult
thing for the subject is that it cannot turn its back on those discourses once
it realises their potential, because beyond them there is only an outsider’s
death; the other thing that makes such escapism impossible is the ethical
injunction to help others’ realise the implicit dangers of the contemporary
world. The subject in Prynne is thus sorely enmeshed in its historical
moment even as it endeavours to overcome it; so far it seems that the path
beyond the entanglement lies along the vector of incessant linguistic

Analogously to the situation sketched here, Paul Muldoon airs his criticism of

discourses of fear which hover about an individual’s psyche in “Cuba” (from Why
Brownlee Left); the missile crisis is only indirectly alluded to in the second stanza
of the poem and, in fact, shows that the language of imminent catastrophe is more
of a control mechanism which helps subdue an individual than an immediate
jeopardy. After all what do the Yankees and Kennedy have to do with the
speaker’s eldest sister?

Chapter Two

change and destabilisation, as Li Zhi-min pertinently observes: “[t]o
Prynne, a word [...] conjures up a train of historical events or contexts that
have been deployed [...] Prynne often puts some fresh flavour into a word,
enhancing it or simply altering it altogether in his poetry;”

only such

undaunted experimentation with vocabulary can provide the essential
energy for the ego to assert itself against the world of influence.

With the publication of Brass (1971) there comes a marked difference in
the poetic procedure, if not in the main preoccupations of the time, which
continue to comprise the various entanglements the late modern self has to
contend with. The alternation that comes about in Brass, which is
characteristic of the general transition of Prynne’s poetry of the following
books, orients the poems towards a greater formal obscurity by increasing
the web of disseminating discourses of sedimentation. Whereas The White
Stones speaks “from a stable source with lyric-meditative conviction, tone
of voice instructing the reader how to use the information presented by the
poem,” Brass “revokes this promise of tutelage, the pleasures of company.
In the absence of any frame which might tell us where the poems speak
from, and so establish a basis for mutual understanding, we enter into a
brutal clash of solipsisms.”

Therefore it may be argued that in Brass the

condition of equivocation and evasion of straightforward solution
amplifies the transient nature of the world from which their words spring.
Trotter notes in his analysis of “The Bee Target on his Shoulder” that the
poem “persistently [denies the reader] any stable ‘unit’ of meaning which
might be placed by existing categories and put to see.”

This assertion

may refer to the entire volume, which gives up on the idea of pathos of
origins in favour of discontinuity that constantly looks to “make it new.”

The occurrence of the various discourses of entanglement are in Brass

intensified to the extent that the subject is totally “wiped out from the
surface of the poem,”

yet it seems that to deem subjectivity thoroughly

melted would be too hasty a pronouncement. “L’Extase de M. Poher”
focuses on the dangers the self is exposed to in late modernity and its
means of response to the discourses of the market economy. Quite openly
the poems admits that no final answer can be provided to whatever

Li Zhi-min, “J. H. Prynne’s Poetry and its Relation with Chinese Poetry,” in A

Manner of Utterance. The Poetry of J. H. Prynne, ed. Ian Brinton (Exeter:
Shearsman Books, 2009), 57.

David Trotter, “A Reading of Prynne’s Brass,” PN Review 6 (1979): 50.

Trotter, “A Reading of Prynne’s Brass,” 49.

Trotter, The Making of the Reader, 224.

Trotter, The Making of the Reader, 229.

Disentangling the Subject

questions we ask, since craving such a reply is only a “formal derangement
of / the species.” The initial aura of a Prufrockian cityscape, which is
evoked by “theatres, gardens laid out in rubbish,” sets in a mood of
resignation and sadness, as “No / question provokes the alpha rhythm by /
the tree in our sky turned over.” The alpha rhythm mentioned in the poem
might be related to the actual medically-proven state of idleness and
relaxation in the brain.

Thus the indication is that our queries do not lead

to any satisfactory answers, neither is the pastoral landscape capable of
inducing the relaxed mood. The poem exudes an air of resigned agreement
to the state of the contemporary “townscape” where rubbish lies about and
tufts of grass protrude in places, with “the yellow wrapping of what we
do” scattered around.
This late modern metropolis tries to “‘conduce’ to order” by invoking
specialised jargons. Rod Mengham asserts that the poem displays “an
almost hyperbolically systematic application of the basic avant-garde
principle of montage, which undermines the sequential coherence of those
discursive practices that would otherwise ‘conduce’ to the kind of social
and political order that depends of the subordination, or bracketing, of
discourses like poetry, because these represent the threat of a potentially
much freer attitude towards the dominant syntax of history.”

Thus

Prynne responds to the growing intricacy of the web of specialised
discourses, such as economy, politics and science, by absorbing them in
his poems so as to open them to the figurative processes which extract
from them fresher meanings. There is no escaping the languages of the
contemporary world, as Prynne’s poems repeatedly demonstrate, therefore
the search for superseding the current historical moment, for setting up a
new world on the ground of the closed earth – as it has been stated by way
of Heidegger’s strife – must commence with experimenting on the
prevalent modes of linguistic activity: “No / poetic gabble will survive
which fails / to collide head-on with the unwitty circus.” Reeve and
Kerridge comment pertinently on this fragment: “[i]n order to survive,
poetry has to ‘collide’ with the powerful instrumental discourses of the
culture (smashing them to pieces), rather than dodging into alley-ways
while they pass, or lingering in safe places like gardens.”

This agonic

thinking leads directly to the conflict of the subject with its world; the
colliding of poetry with the specialised discourses, effects “the displacement

Reeve, Nearly too Much, 7.

Rod Mengham, “’A Free Hand to Refuse Everything’: Politics and Intricacy in

the Work of J. H. Prynne,” A Manner of Utterance. The Poetry of J. H. Prynne, ed.
Ian Brinton (Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2009), 72 – 73.

Reeve, Nearly too Much, 9.

Chapter Two

of the subject of anthropological humanism,”

thus disposing of the

asserted, stable subject whose ontological richness is to be investigated in
favour of a subject forever struggling with its entanglement in modernitas.
Any attempt at a final self-assertion must immediately “put your choice
back in the hands of the town / clerk.” The jargons of economy and
politics ceaselessly seek to ensnare the subject and delude it into thinking
it is in full command of itself.

As the specialised vocabularies collide in the poetic field, producing
radical displacements of their signification, what is left is rubbish.

[...] Rubbish is
pertinent; essential; the
most intricate presence in
our entire culture [...]

The “townscape” of dilapidation described in the opening of the poem is
thus made into a general condition of our reality. Reeve and Kerridge offer
a particularly apt explication:

Rubbish always stands [...] as a rebuke and challenge to instrumental
systems, and to subject-positions, because rubbish is what is left when the
operation of the system is complete and nothing should be left. When the
rubbish is language, the words which lie around conspicuously on various
surfaces, rather than disappearing once they have been used, contain all
sorts of secondary, multiple meanings not required by the user. These
meanings accumulate and fill the poem, in an unmanageable excess of
meaning which reveals the repressed and concealed relations between
discourses.

Thus rubbish is where the tensions take place between the optimising
economic, political and scientific discourses (and their inassimilable
leftovers) and the subject’s struggle to free itself of them. Reeve and
Kerridge point out that “[t]he exchange between the human subject and the
world is that the world constitutes each subject who in turn, perceiving it,
constitutes it.”

If the world is an implicit heap of interwoven rubbish of

discourses, then the subject must enter the pile in order to see its
contingent nature and try to supersede it. The cultural commentary that
“L’Extase de M. Poher” makes is that the self has not been disseminated

Mengham, “Politics and Intricacy,” 73.

Reeve, Nearly too Much, 10.

Disentangling the Subject

out of existence but it prevails hidden deeply beneath the layer upon layer
of rubbish. However, this rubbish cannot simply be thrown off in that it
would leave the self utterly divested of context, of its world in which it
always already dwells; instead, the subject must exert itself to re-conceive
its reality, as this reality constitutes the subject.
The stance, which “L’Extase” assumes is closely in tune with the
project of the entangled self, for the poem suggests that man is wading in a
world of rubbish which consists of the various jargons whose influence is
even more deadly than that of the Bloomian precursor poet on his ephebe;
in Prynne’s poem it is “1. steroid metaphrast / 2. Hyper-bonding of the
insects / 3. 6% memory, etc” that comprises man, at the same time
spiriting him away in an opaque vocabulary. In order that we might not be
“too kissed & fondled,” the only option left is the path of agon with the
world, since only by entering it can we once more become “instrumental
to culture,” if not to a culture of “verbal smash-up piled / under foot,” then
to one of critical engagement with what it means to be human.
Yet

Brass cannot be reduced to such optimism in that, throughout the

book, the self, frequently returning as a spectral presence at the back of the
poems’ floating discourses, is shown to be suppressed by the modern
mechanisms of stultification. While no open oppression can take place in
the contemporary world, man is by no means free, as some of the more
optimistic thinkers such as Rorty would have it, to assume whatever role
he chooses; Brass offers a far darker portrayal of the situation of the
subject in modernity. The poems present two main means of curtailing
one’s freethinking. On the one hand, the insight of “L’Extase de M.
Poher” that man is caught between the jargons of politics and economy is
developed into a powerful denunciation of money as a yardstick of the
success of any human activity; on the other hand, the condition of man is
demonstrated to be fraught with fear, which is induced by various aspects
of being-in-the-contemporary-world. Indeed, Brass is so infused with
horrific images of death and suffering that the condition of the entangled
man seems to become the condition of being permanently fear-stricken.
“A New Tax on the Counter-Earth” penetrates the implicit rhetoric of
capitalism which impinges on the human subject. The poem opens with
what may be argued to represent a pastoral sentimentalism:

A dream in sepia and eau-de-nil ascends
from the ground as a great wish for calm. And
the wish is green in season, hazy like meadow-sweet,
cabinet of Mr Heath [...]

Chapter Two

The sentimental musing is primarily evoked by the old-photo image of the
landscape. What the dream implies is a praise for a past order, perhaps one
of the Elizabethan period suggested by Mr Heath, presumably the English
sixteenth-century prelate and politician. The greenness of the wish further
emphasises the connection to the natural world which is linked to
primordial calmness and order. The haze and meadow-sweet are associated
with dimness, evoking a Romantic climate of “this studious form” which
the first lines acquire. However, no sooner is this pastoral image complete
than the poem’s mood shifts rapidly.

[...] the stupid slow down & become
wise with inertia, and instantly the prospect of
money is solemnised to the great landscape.
It actually glows like a stream of evening sun,
value become coinage fixed in the grass crown.

The commentary of the initial depiction of the dream reveals it to be naive
wishful thinking. “The stupid slow down” reverberates with a distant echo
of Yeats’s “The Second Coming” and its asseveration that “The best lack
all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” In “A
New Tax on the Counter-Earth” also there is a suggestion of an imminent
change that looms over the world of the dream, but unlike in Yeats, there
is no indication that the old order is superior or, indeed, inferior to the
new. Prynne prefers to assert that the Romantic reverie is downright silly,
since their “inertia” allows money to enter the dream. In place of the “vast
image,” there is the “prospect,” something bound to be the case if the
current course of action is maintained. Money is no imaginary “slouching
beast” but a fact that lours on the dream; a new concept of value as
coinage becomes “fixed in the grass crown.” No longer is this value
associated with weight of goods; hence “natural economy,” as Prynne
argues in “A Note on Metal,” is turned into “money economy” that results
from “a specialised function” of value which is “dependent of the rate of
exchange.”
The poem suggests that separating art from the realm of human
activity, turning it into art for art’s sake, must result in an unwitting
acceptance of the sovereignty of money which replaces the “great wish for
calm.” Brass returns to the issue of money as a predatory form of man’s
entanglement, which – if not kept in check by thinking – immediately
subjugates all human activity. “L’Extase de M. Poher” deliberately
featured an injunction that “poetic gabble [...] collide with the unwitty
circus,” otherwise, if poetry lapses into stupid inertia, money will affix
itself to every sphere of life. Therefore poetry in Brass is put forward as an

Disentangling the Subject

art inextricably linked with morality, in that, if it should “slow down &
become / wise with inertia,” it is certain to result in blunting of the moral
awareness of how market forces dehumanise life: “The moral drive isn’t /
quick enough, the greasy rope-trick / has made payment an edge of
rhetoric.” Thinking critically is immediately relegated to the level of
ensuring that due payments are made on time and rhetoric, which should
be responsible for persuasive argumentation in various spheres, becomes a
method of inveigling people into paying.
Thus Prynne invests poetry with a task of preserving man from
becoming “the asserted instrument,” which might be subsumed under the
above-used metaphor of a cog in a machine. The dangerous inculcation of
money into people’s mindsets is real enough, as “A New Tax” indicates,
for it holds a staying, as well as swaying, power:

The botanist & the collector of shells
&the consultors of dictionaries & those
who light fires with care now hereby
confirm the dream and the segmented wish made
solid in the time of day. It is cash so distraught
that the limbic mid-brain system has absorbed
its reflex message [...]

Scientists, linguists and ordinary people going about their hobbies alike
are caught up in the logic of “exchange rates.” The enumeration is
followed by a formal statement of confirmation as though the people have
signed an official document which binds them to the dream where “money
is solemnised.” Once they have become so entangled, their wish for calm
is no longer green but “segmented,” “portioned off,” and assimilated to the
market. The wish for order is thus fulfilled in the form of market economy
which demands total subservience.
Since the limbic mid-brain system is responsible for processing
external stimuli, cash is demonstrated to have become a condition of being
in the world in the sense that it constitutes vital sustenance for life in the
same measure as air. The use of specialised vocabulary from the province
of anatomy and marketing serves to convince the reader that the condition
of money in the dream is true in an essential way. Unlike the “optional”
truths that are derived from “lazy charade,” “the grand stability of dream”
offers a final solution with all the heinous associations underpinning the
notion. The jargons which comprise the texture of the poem ensure that it
is only now that man’s true condition of being has been discovered beyond
the shadow of a doubt. Thus the poem takes its cue from what Heidegger
calls destitute time, which may be subsumed under the category of

Chapter Two

ontotheological fossilisation of one’s dwelling in the world; the finality of
any solution is necessitated by the Heideggerian earth which yearns after
closure, finitude, and stability, whereas the world seeks to break off this
seal of roundness. “A New Tax” depicts a field dominated by the
discourses of science and economy, which successfully bestow ultimate
order on the society.
As the dream community in the poem has been enticed by the cash
which has contaminated their world, the final stanzas of “A New Tax”
speak from the point of view of the money-oriented, thereby ironically
letting the inhuman vices shine through the discourse of the market. What
has been analysed as the dual process of turning man into resource, which
then needs to be constantly optimised, is approached by way of
ventriloquizing the supporters of ultra capitalist ideology. This is also a
pertinent example of how unhinged disseminating textual processes do not
aim to extend the compass of the self’s freedom, but rather seek to
surreptitiously curtail it.

[...] The truth has lately been
Welsh & smoke-laden & endlessly local, and
“getting it right” held the nagging danger of
not getting it at all. And being right is not so
absolute as being so; the climax community
of the dream brings new eyes, the man in the street
is visible again [...]

Although it might be expected that the “endlessly local” truth is what late
modernity aims at, it is not the case in “the climax community of the
dream,” since for them the danger that local truths carry is that they might
contradict the essential truth of the ruling caste. The Welsh, after all, might
differ significantly from the English in their approach to certain social or
political issues and that cannot be allowed. “Getting it right,” that is,
analysing an issue to the point where all its constitutive differences are laid
bare, is too onerous a process in a society where quickness of decision
matters. Therefore it is the case that there are those who simply see the
actual truth and their enlightenment allows them to help the common man.
The system of the dream ensures true freedom, for “the man in the street
[is] visible” to the eyes of the ruling, who can then put that man in his
rightful place: “‘The spot was the one which / he loved best in all the
world.’” A plethora of options exists even though it is the privileged with
“the absolute perception” who are licensed to choose which option is best
to whom and, being of course never mistaken in their judgement, they
finally “spread calm.” The quote in Prynne’s poem is borrowed from

Disentangling the Subject

Trollope’s The Prime Minister and seems to be used here to exemplify, on
the one hand the imperial ambitions of Great Britain which assumed its
superiority in every matter over all other states in the world; and on the
other, the dangers inherent in refusing to acknowledge the other’s
perspective on things.

What this refusal results in is the slow deracination of “the effort to be

just,” which is stifled through being lulled by the constant affection with
which the rulers surround people. “The moral drive” failed to
acknowledge the imminent danger of money and by the end of the poem
the dream becomes a nightmare of which none is even aware. The trick is
that the society’s every need is pandered to, to the effect that “the moment
of joy self-induced” becomes directly proportional to desire for more; the
self-inducement is not so readily obvious as the joy is rather injected by
the system which knows what one needs “best in the all world.” The state
of contentment results from a curtailment of the deconstructive potential
understood as the critical ability to expose the man-made mechanisms of
keeping one joyous; in place of this Norrisian version of deconstruction, a
process of disseminating the self in the flux of economic and medical
jargons is demonstrated to have swept through the dream community. The
subject is free to become whatever it wants but a “‘reduction in the state of
need current in the organism’” prevents this subject from conceiving of
other options than those delivered to it by the existent language; this in
turn brings the subject to a form of uncritical, unreflective equipment
whose purpose in the world of capitalist freedom is to make sure the
machine continues to work. Even though the poem seems to allow for the
existence of a trace of the “local truth,” the final lines assert the pecuniary
domination insomuch as cash is pronounced to be “a principle of nature.
And cheap at the price.” This is a perverse exemplification of a ruthless
unity which might come from divorcing poetic thinking from everyday
life. Money, supported by the specialised discourses, installs itself in the
society, slowly assuming the part of a foundation of man’s existence.

“A New Tax” proffers a perspective of horrific dehumanisation which

stems from the diffusion of money across all strata of life. The resultant
plurality of visions which money allows one to enjoy is revealed to be an
essential unity of vision, inasmuch as only such social, intellectual and
moral stances that agree with the multiplication of capital are acceptable.
This path leads to a most perilous form of man’s entanglement in that the
self is not beat into submission to the system, but shown that only under
such rule can it achieve its full potential; the risk involved here is the
eradication of locality in favour of unity, and from this vantage the death
of the subject paves the way to most fearsome consequences. Therefore it

Chapter Two

may be argued that “A New Tax” implies the condition of man’s being in
the world is constantly beset with anxiety; in “A New Tax” this fright
derives from the fact that freedom could at any time be (and in fact is)
supplanted with unitary drives that lie at the core of market-oriented
societies. In “The Ideal Star-Fighter” the condition of scare is shown to be
a fundamental state of man. The poem does not orient itself against a
single cause of the self’s anxiety but explores its various aspects. The
point in which both poems converge is the degradation of morality, whose
causes both poems seek in their discrete ways.
“The Ideal Star-Fighter” opens with a pronounced denunciation of
contemporary morality which is underlain with complete lack of devotion
to any radical moral stance.

Now a slight meniscus floats on the moral
pigment of these times, producing
displacement of the body image, the politic
albino [...]

Prynne puns here on the word “pigment” in the sense that the word takes
on a figurative meaning of point of vantage which stems from the literal
definition. This method of punning, mentioned in the above reading of
“L’Extase de M. Poher,” is recognised in Prynne by Reeve and Kerridge,
who explain that

The technical material is not there to be understood by some superbly
informed reader, but neither is it completely opaque. Although there may
be local accuracy, and the line of specialist description is perhaps always
there to be followed by the reader expert in a particular field, this is not the
sole purpose. The uses can also be figurative, in a way that begins to
convert these specialized vocabularies into something more to readers
[...].

Even though the literal meaning of the word “pigment” may not pose
particular difficulties, it is used in the way Reeve and Kerridge describe.
The colour of the times produces a displacement of the body, since
pigment is what gives a race its characteristic tint; if the body is neither
this colour nor any other, if – in other words – man turns out to be an
albino, then this body belongs nowhere. The displacement thus functions
at the level of societal acceptability of a particular individual, but it also
indicates moral hesitancy and incertitude. It is in this clime of timidity that
politic albinos thrive. The excerpt plays on the prevalent inability or

Reeve, Nearly too Much, 18.

Disentangling the Subject

unwillingness on the part of the Western politicians to act decisively, for
such actions may result in alienating some of their supporters. Instead, it is
better to maintain an unbiased position, even if this means utterly
ineffective middle-of-the-roadness.
Similar to “A New Tax,” which depicts the dangers that might be the
consequence of becoming “wise with inertia,” “The Ideal Star-Fighter”
focuses on the image of an anxiety-ridden world in which volition has
been reduced to inaction. What this lack of integrity produces is a
ubiquitous feeling of fear: “The faded bird droops in his / cage called fear
[...].” Man, as the “faded bird,” is not afraid because of some looming
occurrences but is imprisoned in “his cage called fear.” If there is hope, it
is soon converted “to the / switchboard of organic providence / at the tine
rate of say 0.25 per cent.” A metaphysical condition of fear is never to be
alleviated, for providence is a diluted notion. The conclusion which sets in
the tone for the rest of the poem is that “the /condition is man and the total
crop yield / of fear.” Prynne relates here to Heidegger’s assertion that man
dwells in the world as the shepherd of Being and only inside the ontic
structures can he seek his fundamental being in the world; in the poem
man is indeed the only condition of existence, but here his sole “existential
understanding” is fright. It is no longer caring or living-towards-death that
delimit man’s horizon of being, but the single state of scare. This scare is
man-induced, it is “the fixation of danger” that informs “how we are
gripped in the / dark, the flashes of where we are.” Thus beside the
specialised discourses which objectify the subject, Prynne also identifies
the omnipresent feeling of fear as the source of the self’s imprisonment. In
addition to being created by man, this gaol of fear becomes self-
perpetuating, since “It pays to be / simple, for screaming out, the eye /
converts the news image to fear enzyme.” Anxiety, once unleashed, enters
man’s constitution and installs itself as vital to living.

A lack of action returns in the ending of the first part of the poem.

[...] The meniscus tilts the
water table, the stable end-product is dark
motion, glints of terror the final inert
residue [...]

Just as with Heidegger’s inherent modes of being in the world, fear is the
stable, universal outcome of the times. With all said and done, terror
remains as the by-product of our life. Residue here seems to controvert the
logic of rubbish discussed in regard to “L’Extase de M. Poher;” while
rubbish was to be the surplus of signifying potential resistant to
ossification, residue in “The Ideal Star-Fighter” shows this surplus not to

Chapter Two

be system-proof. If there is no moral drive to action, even the margins of
language will be infected by the “unwitty circus.”
Part two of the poem presses the issue of moral action further,
broadening the perception of how money-oriented economy jeopardises
not only man but also his habitat: “Exhaust washes tidal flux / at the crust,
the fierce acceleration / of mawkish regard.” Rubbish is not only the
linguistic residue of freedom but also man’s toxic by-product. The
“mawkish regard” captures the false sentimentality with which we
perceive our planet as well as expresses loathing for this moral insipidity
that allows us to bear with our inaction. The aura of danger formed in part
one is thus given an actual rationale.

However, the poem is far from asserting that the terror-laden being-in-

the-world can be remedied by simply taking a moral stance and expressing
one’s dissatisfaction with capitalist obsession with boosting economy at all
costs. Although “We should / shrink from that lethal cupidity” – the
speaker exhorts, “moral stand-by is no substitute for 24-inch / reinforced
concrete, for the blind certain backlash.” Moral awareness cannot
successfully respond to the hard facts of reality. Nobody paid heed to the
moral counsel the hippie movement tried to impart to the American
Government about the war in Vietnam. More recently, no moral pleading
could prevent the lootings in havoc-stricken England of August 2011. In
this respect Prynne is not an idealist; however, he understands well
enough, and this is the message that was demonstrated to lie at the core of
“Huts” in the previous chapter, that it is in the space of language that the
first step is undertaken to shed the capitalist scales that obstruct our
perception of contemporary moral equivocality. After all, “how can we
dream of / the hope to continue, how can the vectors / of digression not
swing into that curve / bounding the translocal” if not by first
apprehending the need for change in language.
“The Ideal Star-Fighter” ends with a less-than-hopeful conclusion that
recognises the condition of fear to have taken its irreversible toll.

[...] We cannot support that total of dis-
placed fear, we have already induced
moral mutation in the species. The
permeated spectra of hatred dominate
all the wavebands, algal to hominid.
Do not take this as metaphor; thinking to
finish off the last half-pint of milk,
look at the plants, the entire dark dream outside.

Disentangling the Subject

What at first was a “displacement of the body image,” now becomes a
“total of displaced fear,” indicating that anxiety has entered the flesh. No
longer is it a condition of mental existence but it has filtered itself through
to the blood stream and become tangible. Hatred, which accompanies this
promulgating anxiety, has turned from “algal,” spectral presence that lacks
clearly defined qualities, to a physical entity. Again Prynne conjures
figurative meaning from specialised words. However, he then stresses that
this figuration of jargon is not only a means to playing off specialised
vocabulary against itself but there is a far more important agenda here.
This figurative process invokes the conclusion of “Huts” in that what
language games are to uncover is not so much a potentially infinite
freeplay as it is the capacity of the idiom to bring home to us the fact that
we are being goaded into indifference. The poem does not call for
immediate action, as it seems, but rather counsels linguistic awareness of
the dangers that loom large, though we cannot see them. While there is no
way a poem will oppose the “24-inch concrete,” there is every chance that
it will thwart the “moral mutation in the species.” The mutation goes from
“algal to hominid”: from the state of unrecognised ephemeral presence
“the politic albino” reaches the point where he becomes an actual
archetype of late modern self. In this way the discourse of fear both
acknowledges and artificially spurs the process of the sedimentation of the
subject. Man can only struggle with this fear by absorbing and overcoming
it through the apprehension of the linguistic mechanisms of oppression.

This oppressive potential need first be realised at the linguistic level if

the self is to begin to seek a path leading out of the entanglement in the
discourses of economy, politics, science and anxiety. All those jargons,
simplifying only a little, are harnessed by capitalism in order to reduce the
subject to a cog in the wheel of money-making and power-accrual. Such a
political agenda affiliates itself with oppressive regimes in that no dissent
is allowed, for it curtails capital accumulation; everything must be subject
to scrutiny so that it might be better controlled and further optimised.
What appears to be at stake here is not only freedom of the subject but its
life as well. If “the politic albino” is permitted to take over, the capitalist
rule will seek to authorise only those modes of life that match the
economic targets of the big business. It is this grim forecast that comes to
light in perhaps the most terrifying poem in Brass, a lyric dedicated to
Paul Celan “Es Lebe der König.”
The title of the poem is transcribed from Georg Büchner’s Danton’s
Death which Celan discusses at length in “Meridian.” In Büchner’s play
the line “Es lebe der König” is uttered by Lucille and causes her arrest.

Chapter Two

Trotter observes in relation to Celan’s own analysis of the fragment that
Lucille’s call

pays homage not to political totems, but to the humanizing majesty of the
absurd. Only such ‘counter-words,’ which accept the risk of gratuitousness,
can reveal man to himself, and Celan employs Lucille’s statement of
defiance as a paradigm for the estranging function of post-Mallarméan
poetry. This poetry requires self-estrangement, an end less iteration of
mortality and gratuitousness [...].

Self-estrangement and endless iteration are indeed perfect tropes for what
has here been termed disentangling of the subject from the specialised
discourses. It must be noted that to the set of tasks poetry takes upon itself,
which Trotter invokes in this short excerpt, Celan – in passing and
somewhat furtively – adds one more: “take art with you into your
innermost narrowness. And set yourself free.”

Free, importantly enough,

not from but to, as the poet notes, encounter yourself.

Thus Celan may be

argued to suggest an experience with the language of poetry that seeks to
emancipate the self through leading it towards the absurd. This absurd, as
estrangement and endless iteration of mortality, invokes Heidegger’s
ruminations from “The Origin,” if only at the level of a paradoxical line of
argumentation. The self is bound up in its language – it dwells on the
closed earth. Although it may seek to overcome this condition, the path
leads to shaking the very foundations of language as we know it. Thus the
world worlds and the conflict sets in. Freedom begins where logic cannot
hold out.
“Es Lebe der König” departs from the premise that freedom lies in a
gesture of absurdity which conquers logic and confers liberty. This gesture
is quite openly anti-fundamentalist, since it embraces paths of thinking
which constantly fork in new directions, never limited by traditional
routes. The conflict is therefore clear from the outset. On the one hand the
poem affiliates itself with openness and what Eagleton terms liberal
humanism;

on the other, it works on images of tyrannical domination of

absolutism.

Trotter, “A Reading of Prynne’s Brass,” 51.

Paul Celan, Selections, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop et al., ed. Pierre Joris (Berkley:

University of California Press, 2005), 166.

Celan, Selections, 168.

Eagleton, Literary Theory, 180 – 181.

Disentangling the Subject

It is not possible to

drink this again, the beloved enters the small house.
The house becomes technical, the pool has
copper sides, evaporating by the grassy slopes.
the avenues slant back through the trees; the
double music strokes my hand. Give back the
fringe to the sky now hot with its glare, turning
russet and madder, going over and over to
the landing-stage, where we are. We stand
just long enough to see you,
we hear your
fearful groan and choose not to think of it [...]

The presence behind these lines is of course Celan’s “Death Fugue.”
Hence “Es Lebe der König” by way of “Death Fugue” centres its attention
on the Nazi death camps; if Prynne’s poem sides with humanism in the
title, it approaches the most anti-humanist moment in contemporary
history which occupies the furthest pole from humanist openness – the
final solution.
Prynne declares that “it is not possible to drink this again,” thus
establishing a link with Celan’s “black milk of morning.”

This image

performs what in “Meridian” was epitomised as self-estrangement in that
there is no knowing what this “black milk” is to represent, although it is
quite clear that it gathers about visions of torment and death imparted by a
perverse oppressor. Furthermore, “the beloved” who “enters the small
house” evokes golden-haired Margareta and ashen-haired Shulamite; the
house leads indirectly to a line from “Death Fugue” which introduces the
oppressor: “There is a man in this house who cultivates snakes.” The
“double music” may derive from this nameless tyrant’s injunction that a
group of Jews “play up for the dance” as another group “jab [their] spades
deeper.” The sky, hot with the glare of the fringe which may here be used
to indicate a sudden outburst of flame against the morning twilight, seems
to relate to the horrific image: “we scoop a grave in the sky where it’s
roomy to lie.” Celan makes a reference to combustion chambers of
extermination camps over which hovered pillars of smoke reeking of
human flesh, quite literally sky then became the roomiest of graves. Thus
“Es Lebe der König,” displaying a close correspondence with “Death
Fugue,” implies a panorama of heinous genocide which is perpetrated in
order to maintain the one and only ideological postulate.
However, Prynne deploys a powerful twist at the end of the quoted
stanza, which incriminates to some degree the future generations for their

The translation of Celan’s poem comes from Selections, 46 – 47.

Chapter Two

lack of “moral pigment.” The lines “where we are. We stand / just long
enough to see you” seem to evoke the prisoners of concentration camps
who, as it were, cast their last glances across time on the ones that will
never come to experience such horrors. Yet after the space of whiteness,
Celan’s notion of poetry as silence comes to mind here, which separates
the most Celanian passage in the poem, there comes another “we.” The
latter appears to comprise the witnesses of the suffering, but this
conclusion comes only after rereading the previous several lines of the
poem. On first perusal the latter “we” seems not to have changed its
signified. It is at this point that “the landing-stage” turns out to mark the
point where some spectators come to watch the prisoners’ ordeal. In this
way, “we” refers to those who were never kept in the camps but who only
come to express their traditional mourning. “We” hear the groan of pain
but deliberately “choose not to think of it. We / deny the consequence.”
Then the referent of the pronoun is the Jews again. Nevertheless, for a
moment the poem asserts that the fault for the genocide lies in part with
the ensuing generations in that they refuse to face up to the horrid truth,
preferring to engage in “silly talk,” “our recklessly long absence.”
Apart from silently accusing the “politic albinos” of a lack of moral
candour in the face of the history of suffering, “Es Lebe der König”
establishes a link, a meridian, between the past and present victims of
absolutism. Both are shown to fall prey to a powerful ideological coercion;
whereas the prisoners of extermination camps are put to death for their
otherness, the contemporary men are stifled out of conscious existence in
order to pre-emptively eradicate even the faintest traces of any form of
otherness. Thus the modern subject is demonstrated to be threatened with
eradication caused not by physical violence but by slow erosion of the
language of critical awareness of the evils of plunging into universalist
ideologies. It is the subject’s vocabulary that is both the agent of the
annihilation and a remedy for it, inasmuch as the ossification and
deadening of the idiom entails the conscious self’s disappearance, quite
congruent with the poststructural theories, while perpetual experimenting
with figurative repositories of even the most specialised jargons becomes a
promise of life. “Es Lebe der König” reaches a crescendo of the volume’s
preoccupation with discourses of fear in that it reveals man’s loss of the
ability to either understand the spurious nature of late modern anxieties or
acknowledge the need for countenancing the existent moral hazards.

“Es Lebe der König” captures Brass’s key motif of fear and gives it the

clearest expression. Poetry is here understood as a space wherein man’s
anxieties can be brought to light. Even though he remains hesitant as to
whether a lyric is capable of solving the problems which create this aura of

Disentangling the Subject

dread, Prynne does suggest in “Es Lebe der König,” indirectly taking
Celan as a point of reference, that poetry can grant a moment of relief
from the stilling experience of modernity. However, this alleviation only
happens at the cost of putting oneself at ultimate risk, and so the choice the
self faces, according to this view, is that between passive acceptance of
and agonic refusal to abide by the norms of the society. Such a position is
characteristic of Prynne inasmuch as in his poems he never seeks
assertions but rather endeavours to open possibilities, even if they may at
times be rather hard to take. The self is here situated between certain
demise, through being textualised into a network of intertwining
discourses, and a likely demise at the hands of the hegemonic powers of
the system. It is this dramatic moment that links Brass with Wound
Response.

Wound Response (1974) focuses on bodily injuries, pain and death

perhaps more than any of Prynne’s other volumes. It searches for a
language that can enunciate what “to hurt” means, without necessarily
falling into the cliché of an evocation of pangs of conscience. Wounds,
being a consequence of some harm done to us, are also a link between man
and his world. As channels through which the exchange between the ego
and its world takes place,

wounds may be seen as this world’s response

to the self’s being in it. In turn, the wound the subject sustains impels this
subject to focus on the particular detrimental occurrence in the world.
Quite rightly, Douglas Oliver observes that Wound Response “continues
Prynne’s attempts to deepen understanding of the relationship between
what goes on in our minds and in our brains and the rest of our bodies and
in the external world.”

Oliver focuses on the microscopic processes of

the mind which lead it to acknowledging the happening of physical
bruising and concludes pertinently that Prynne seeks to go beyond the
language of “traditional ontologies” and find a means of expression that
would capture mind acts in their working.

For the present reading this

postulate is of vital importance. Wound Response eschews finite claims
about either the source of the hurts or whether the fact we have sustained
them is good or bad; instead, throughout the volume, injuries, bruises and
death are returned to, presumably so as to investigate the moments of
transit between the self and the world.
“Of Movement towards a Natural Place,” as the title itself suggests,
tries to present a moment of transition. It is twilight with day not yet risen,

Reeve, Nearly too Much, 27.

Douglas Oliver, “J. H. Prynne’s ‘Of Movement towards the Natural Place,’”

Grosseteste Review 12 (1979): 99.

Oliver, “J. H. Prynne’s ‘Of Movement towards the Natural Place,’” 100.

Chapter Two

it is also a point of consciousness coming out of the dark and realising
something. There seems to feature a “he,” a “she,” and a “you” in the
poem, but the pronouns might refer to a number of people. The only clear
information we have is that it is a break of day; apart from that the poem
tells multiple stories, which might be assumed to correlate. The beginning
invokes a cinematic focusing: “See him recall the day by moral trace.”
Memory is shown to be caught up in the process of working through past
experiences, perhaps trying to remember where the bruise came from. The
past harm is not the only mystery; “fear of hurt” indicates that there might
be another painful experience coming. The man might be in hospital, for in
inverted commas there appears specialised medical explanation of his
condition: “I mean a distribution / of neurons ... some topologically
preserved transform.” These words, beside the literal significance, open
themselves to figurative senses. The “topologically preserved transform”
implies a process of change that is now only visible in the stable layout of
things. Only a doctor can fathom what alternations have led to the current
“distribution of neurons” and what caused the bruise; similarly only in a
poem can the present form of language be inspected. That words mean
what they do results from various processes of signification, but Prynne is
interested in how the idiom has come to this state of topological
“wordscape.”
The patient in “Of Movement” has not regained full command of his
memory and “His recall is false but the charge / is still there in the neural
space.” The fact that he has yet to recall what happened does not mean the
truth is not hidden in his brain. The “charge” might be read as a repository
of energy waiting to be released whose temporary dormancy may at any
time cease. The second stanza can be read to either continue the patient’s
recovery or shift to another man. Whatever the case, and there is no
deciding really, the emphasis falls on the uselessness of remorse which is
“a pathology of / syntax,” since (I would see here a tentative explication)
“the expanded time-display depletes the / input of ‘blame’ which patters
like scar tissue.” In a quasi-scientific manner the passage asserts that with
time all blame fades, hence revealing remorse as a pathologic feeling.
Whatever took place, it came about as a result of intensified energy of
language; there must be no regretting the past, for it is a living testimony
of explosions of energy.
No sooner does this meaning register than the poem swerves into
another direction. What at first seems to signal hope and perhaps
expeditious end to the pain the patient has endured, turns into an implicit
accusation of the man. Although “The sun comes out / (top right) and local
numbness starts to spread, still / he is ‘excited’ because in part shadow.”

Disentangling the Subject

Staying in shadow connotes some shady business on the part of the man
and perhaps the wound was inflicted as a consequence of his illicit actions.
Additionally, the sun, which ought to bring solace to the suffering, seems
to coincide with the return of the pain. “It makes sense right at the contre-
coup” which is “an injury resulting from a blow suffered on an opposite
part or a part at a distance.”

Thus the fact that “the trace was moral but

on both sides” incriminates the man further, for it turns out his actual
injury and its cause (which again results from a transition of the blow
energy from one side of the body to another) are morally right. The
remorse which the poem describes as “a pathology of syntax” proves then
to be the remorse we might be feeling for the patient. The third stanza
seems to confirm that he is suffering for his ill-doings and as a “she”
appears, it may be assumed that the “you” is the man addressed by the
woman. Her tone is quite clearly scathing when she reminds the man of his
“lost benevolence.”
The poem ends as it began with a cinematic fade which doubles as a
commentary on the scene depicted: “Only at the rim does the day tremble
and shine.” The lyric ends at a moment of transition, just as it began: the
whole situation takes perhaps only several seconds. Regardless of whether
the narration concentrates on a single situation or whether there are
several, the motif of wounding reveals itself as a process of an endless
transit of energies; physical and mental pain demands to be dealt with, for
behind every injury there is a story to be told. Even if narration cannot
alleviate the torment, it can resuscitate the memory which alone promises
to save the “counter-self” – that which is perhaps not tangled in the falsity
of recalling.
“Of Movement towards a Natural Place” is characteristic of Wound
Response as a whole. By focusing on the significance of injuring, the
poem reveals that what is maybe most impaired is language itself, which
“must fend for itself without benefit of metaphysics or myth and,
startlingly, this project is made to extend to scientific language.”

The

title of the volume is, after all, ambiguous on the issue of what actually is
wounded and what is responding. The noun phrase of the title rejects any
final explication and is content with playing on the suggestive level. The
figurative processes that are activated in specialised vocabulary ,but also
in words weirdly pitted against each other, hurt communication but only
insofar as they shatter our illusions of the irreducible logic of
communication intrinsic to language. It is not the case that Prynne
arranges words so that they do not cohere into sensible sentences, for he

Oliver, “J. H. Prynne’s ‘Of Movement towards the Natural Place,’” 97.

Adrian Clarke, “The Poetry of J. H. Prynne,” Angel Exhaust 3 (1980): 6.

Chapter Two

composes words in order that they preclude the possibility of any
sustained interpretation. One or two men? The woman is a wife, a mother
or maybe a figment of the man’s imagination or a projection of his guilt?
Is the man guilty? He is hurt, but is he in hospital? Why does he prefer to
stay in shadow? The questions are endless and beating them into a
systematised reading is impossible. This is the wound response, the
answer that comes from a psyche deeply tormented by the inanity of
cognition. If we identify “The in / fibrillate mem / brane” in “An Evening
Walk” as invoking the moment when the quivering of a membrane stops
and death ensues, can we really say that the poem sets out to capture the
last twitches of a dying consciousness? Or is it rather that our reading dies
after having hit a dead end? It seems that Wound Response deliberately
keeps all readings open and hurt at the same time; even if Oliver proposes
to meticulously reconstruct the meaning of “Movement towards a Natural
Place,” it may be argued that he tries to dress a wound which never really
needs it.
The cuts, slashes, bruises and other wounds are a, (if not “the”) only,
testimony of the self’s dwelling in the world now that language appears to
be an artificial medium. It is in this sense that Wound Response follows the
path of the subject’s continuing disentanglement; once the subject has
been demonstrated to be enmeshed in discourses which try to melt it into a
spectre that blindly follows the dicta of capitalism, it becomes clear that
the struggle of the self with the historic closure might deprive it of the
fundamental comprehension of reality. Struggling with languages of
science and politics, consumerism and various man-elaborated or man-
made threats leaves the subject groundless; what started as agon with the
textual realm will not ensure the self’s survival if it loses touch with
reality. The earth, Heidegger must be paid heed to, is as vital as the world,
for it provides the stable foothold for the process of unconcealment to
commence. In Wound Response, apart from the trepidation with the
suffering that modernity is composed of, the feel of the earth comes from
the painful experience of it, as in “An Evening Walk”: “now he falls and /
lies in the street” but this is still an awareness of being, all the stronger for
being seen against the final horizon of death.

The strife between the self and the deconstructive influences of the world
resurfaces in somewhat summarising News of Warring Clans (1977) and
Down where Changed. In both these volumes (News of Warring Clans
appeared as a separate book) the subject is shown to slowly realise that it
is shackled by modernity. While in News of Warring Clans it is in the
discourse of media that the subject is enmeshed, in Down where Changed

Disentangling the Subject

the focus falls on the process of keeping the language within predicable
limits so that the subject might be controlled all the more easily.

News of Warring Clans is composed of intertwining strings of

newsreels which deal with everything from business to spiritual new
ageism. The poem is a network of information strings which float about
the world and constitute the global village, at the same time stifling what
Heidegger would call the primordial call of Being; this suggestion
precipitates a paradox at the core of the volume in that if the silencing of
Being is tantamount to subverting the strife between the historical new
beginning and the existent closure, then the media, as the poem shows, do
not spur progress but pander to the intellectual (ontological, poetic, etc.)
status quo. What some would consider the blessing of modernity is here
regarded as “yapping,” a most readily available mode of enframing.

The news of the clans is both the news about the clans’ actions and the

coverage by the clans of the dealings of others.

The clans use the

information as a weapon against each other in an endless mutual struggle.
Various registers in the poem bounce against one another, resembling the
contemporary journalist stage: “Oh where is the tribal influx, why the hell
/ isn’t the light ready; if you’re not the cash / you must be the food, yer
dumb git.” This is a talk taken straight from a TV studio where one of the
superior journalists chastises the camera staff member for the lack of
proper lighting. Significantly enough, the rebuke carries a grain of truth in
it because it is not the news that really matters but how profitable the
programme turns out. In this world of warring clans making money is the
goal and reason for the existence of whatever programme. One who fails
to bring income must immediately be devoured. The passage signals that
man is conceptualised through a metonym; he is either the cash or the
food. He must associate with money to retain his job, otherwise he
becomes a prey for a more attuned upstart. Qualifications and honesty
count for nothing, for the speed with which news is passed is so rapid that
it overtakes the actual events it covers. In consequence “Option trading has
become / the hottest game in town.” No longer must news relay what
happened, it has now to speculate about the course of action and then air it.
Only in such a way can the programme outpace the competition. We must
convey what has not taken place as yet, for then we are certain to say it
before others do.
In this way, enframing is preserved because events are not allowed to
follow their course of action, often most unpredictablely and against the
odds; instead, the journalist finds himself obliged to predict what might
most probably follow from a given premise. Prediction is based on the

Clarke, “The Poetry of J. H. Prynne,” 6.

Chapter Two

existent trends and so the current modes of speculation make the geo-
political situation self-preserving. “And does the option / wag the stock,
with peace and gentle visitation?” This is an ironically rhetorical question
inasmuch as the options the journalist comes up with must be peaceful and
the forecast gentle so that the current economic trend might be sustained.
In addition to sustaining favourable forecasts, for the economic spike to
continue consumption must increase. This can be ensured if there is no
dissent from the existent norms, which again hinges on the preservation of
the idiom of spurred demand.

“it has not escaped our notice” that, by
song & dance, men cannot live or move out
in the midst of plenty. We munch and munch
along planned parenthood [...]

The inverted commas suggest that these words are a quotation, it is
impossible to trace because such words are spoken on a daily basis by
everyone. A quote is used for validation of what is being suggested and
since the sentence cannot be ascribed to any particular pundit, the
following idea is as groundless as any claim in the poem. True enough,
“song & dance” have not fed people or helped them to enhance their living
conditions, therefore we are exhorted to “munch and munch” so as to
boost consumption, the most rudimentary rule of economy being that
greater consumption triggers better job prospects. The conclusion evokes a
consumerist inferno of Huxley’s Brave New World – if it is not for sale, it
is no fun and no use.

Such overblown consumerism, the poem notes, “takes / the getting out

of wanting, but in fact / the Kung out of Fu; the final arts are martial”
(emphasis in original). The inflated production and the inevitably resultant
saturation of the market must lead to a situation where one purchases not
out of desire but because one can, which shatters the spiritual equilibrium.
What is thus at stake is the self, the subject as consciously desiring, caring,
using and thinking; News of Warring Clans returns to Heidegger’s
postulate of “destitute time” when no longer is the call of Being heard.
What preserves the saying of being is poetry, but here “all final arts are
martial.” The slight change of “fine arts” into “final arts” and the
association of beaux arts with martial arts signals a tragic failure of
Heidegger’s elucidatory conception of poetry. All that is left for the
warring clans is dead language which can only unreflectively be harnessed
to endlessly fighting the same battles over how much one can buy and sell,
and how fast.

Disentangling the Subject

The immediate result of eradicating art as Saying is the promotion of
the idle talk of journalist babble. In News of Warring Clans the main
discourses of ossification conjoin to produce a space of total erasure of the
subject. Among Prynne’s poems it is the revisionary News of Warring
Clans that best exemplifies the death of the subject:

[...] Since
in an outraged moral system the lying report,
subject to efficient causes, is bound fast
to a truth mostly formal, the efforts
at mendacious gab exceeded all limits. Good
taste was shunted into the slogan vestry and
reconstructed as billboard nostalgia: the purest
central dogma in the history of trash.

The moral outrage is a powerful irony in that the “efficient causes” for it
are linked to the efficiency-obsessed culture of the news programme which
follows the ultramodern motto of “the faster the better.” Such a system has
nothing to do with morality but is an outgrowth of consumerist
propaganda. Under these adverse circumstances “the lying report [...] is
bound fast / to a truth mostly formal.” “Fast” admits both of its meanings
here, depending on whether we read syntactically or by lines; report is
both speedy and inextricably welded to conventional truth. As in the case
of the “outraged moral system,” the formal truth is one that stays in
complete congruence with the established modes of reasoning. As a result
what is left is “mendacious gab” exceeding all limits. Dead metaphors no
longer demand intellectual exertion; everything must be plucked, cooked
and served without a pinch of salt.
The extent to which the diagnosis from the last lines of the above
excerpt can be taken as a sincere criticism remains unclear. Yet it does
seem to be spoken by a Tiresias-like voice that “sees the texture of the
poem” in that the final part of the poem aptly phrases the destitution of
language and the resultant sedimentation of the ego. Man is reduced to
what he consumes and he consumes what billboards tell him to, hence he
is wound into a web of text; it is just that this text is curtailed to fit the
consumerist milieu. Therefore man himself is relegated to “the slogan
vestry” and becomes the actual “purest / central dogma in the history of
trash.” The purity may be argued to stem from the fact that the self
ascends the gallows of capitalism unwittingly, inveigled into doing so
rather than conscious choosing it; its unawareness precipitates the subject
into disposability. As a surplus in his own world, man soon proves to be

Chapter Two

mere food for the process of advancement that it elatedly instigated in the
first place.

Science, politics and market jargons flow through the poem, forming a

plane wherein the subject is wiped out. On the one hand the poem seems
to plunge headfirst into the destructive logic that it perpetuates by
unrestrictedly snatching pieces of news from different sources; on the
other hand, the poem might be quite aware of its potential for reworking
the stagnant discourses into a language of the self’s return:

[...] The most
audacious lies pack the throat with steam,
we mean the full irony of fear and then cancel
all but the head banner (the instruction
to “be frightened”) [...]

The discourse of fear returns towards the end of the poem in a spectral
form of an unspecified threat. The injunction to “be frightened,” to which
the fear is reduced, becomes a means of ensuring that the news is attended
to, since it is the riveting banners and headlines that capture the attention
of the public. Bearing in mind that the news produces events more than
just relays them, the irony of the poem’s terror is that there might be no
actual peril at hand. Thus what has been analysed as the discourses of fear
comes to prominence in the ending of News of Warring Clans as a method
of maintaining readership. It is no matter whether there is any actual
threat, the news tycoons look to preserve the necessary levels of anxiety,
or whatever feeling they deem business-conducive. Hence the audacious
lies are needed to create stories which will then be conveyed from mouth
to mouth, making a fake into an acceptable fact. This fragment of the
poem implicitly takes up Baudrillard’s notion of the simulacra and reveals
it to be a means of retaining power. The poem does not subscribe to any
idea of the “actual fact” of reality that could be opposed to the simulated
truth of the media, for if there is any proof of our existence in a world, it
comes from the mutual wounding, as has been argued in “Of Movement
towards a Natural Place;” rather than investing its hopes in the truthful,
News of Warring Clans (which at this point may read “factions” in place
of “clans”), suggests that any belief in “hard facts” is bound to turn out
deceptive.
It is in the last lines of the poem that the “audacious lies” are
uncovered as being produced on behalf of political and business
conglomerates: “the reporters, in echo of stylish lies, lay / stunned by drab
hints from the sandy empires / of the plain.” The “stylish lies” air a
criticism of the neo-Romantic conception of an agonic self, which was

Disentangling the Subject

discussed in chapter one, in that the dangerous aspect of crediting
aesthetics with a power to bring one closer to truth is that such a belief
may easily be commoditised and used against man. Reporters themselves
are initially stunned by what is suggested they ought now to announce.
Also they are shown to follow not the event they should cover but hints
from “the sandy empires of the plain.” The line refers to every oppressive
political hulk of the past and present, from ancient Egypt to the US; these
are associated with aridity and infertility, indeed an Eliotean “cracked
earth / Ringed by the flat horizon only.” The only focus of those empires is
to sustain the economic growth at all costs, a lie being a useful method
always sure to compel the public’s attention. The reporters, even if
stunned at first, eventually come round to the empires’ point of view, and
as a result “Nerve / and verve broke for lunch & were gone.” Therefore the
poem gives an image of pacification and indifferent acceptance of the
status quo.

Down where Changed, contrary to News of Warring Clans, does not

aspire to presenting a sustained poetic narrative; whereas News exudes an
air of completeness in its layout, which it then proceeds to pull to pieces,
Down where Changed starts off by asserting discontinuity by offering
short mutually disjointed lyrics. However, the latter volume, in spite of its
apparent disjointedness, continuously returns to the same motifs. Such a
strategy will be characteristic of Prynne’s later collections, as it is argued
here, where centrifugal and centripetal drives clash with each other. The
sequence of lyrics in Down where Changed focuses on working class
people who are expected to fit in with the existent demands. The lyrics
briefly touch on various aspects of life in which the society must adhere to
certain standards that ensure the current trends run smoothly and
unobstructedly.
At the beginning of the Down where Changed the lyrics bring up
means of transport that run between the suburbs and the city. It is these
ways of commuting that signal that we are looking at everyday
occurrences; indeed the level down where all social changes first register.
A major traffic jam or derailment adversely affects the journey to work
even though it is of little consequence to the company executives. The
sequence introduces such difficulties in several places:

The rail is interfered with
it is cut up already
libel on the road ahead

Chapter Two

[...] that rail’s done
as a praline, softly
in the airy open

there’s no more to it
so out of true
the rail is sundered
And further on in the sequence:
traffic emerging from the right
it’s too late, worn thin
these few scenes of note.

The rail is out of order and cut up, which might refer to both the literal
state of being severed or to the figurative meaning of despondent that
might reflect the disappointment on the part of the commuters. The “libel
on the road” could refer to a sign somewhere on the road informing, to the
detriment of the road services’ reputation, of the difficulties the people are
likely to experience. The rail, in its layout as seen from a vantage of “a
hot-air balloon / over the stupendous balkans” resembling a praline, is
eventually cut off completely. As a result of the communication breakdown
the streets are clustered with cars which appear at short notice; the general
feeling of frantic hustle and bustle has set in by the end of the sixth lyric in
the collection. Therefore the following lyrics capture brief instants of
everyday problems, the ones happening “down where changed” as it were,
against the background of the arduousness of commuting. The time of day
seems to be morning, and the events that are narrated appear to take place
simultaneously as though the sequence were an eye that is trained on
different moments from a random day in an urban area.
Some of the lyrics quite openly concentrate on representatives of blue
collar jobs in order to emphasise their feeling of perplexed disconsolateness
with the economic reality that surrounds them. In an early poem in the
sequence the spotlight falls on a member of a group of workers as he tries
to muster up the courage to resist the capitalist pressure exerted on his
branch of trade.

Go ahead to the plant rally
down at the heel in the bread strike
you know can’t be long

and will underflow to zero
to take back the land
ripped open like a flood

Disentangling the Subject

The worker is cajoled into attending a rally during which a decision is to
be made on whether the entire group should launch a “bread strike”
against too paltry wages. It is at this point that the lyric becomes
susceptible of at least two lines of mutually-exclusive readings. On the one
hand, the line “you know can’t be long” introduces a degree of resignation
in the participants of the strike (be they the workers or their employees)
who realise the strike is bound to be short and “will underflow to zero.”
“Underflow” is a key word here; it appears in an unusual context and its
meanings derive from complex processes of figuration. “Underflow”
comes from computer jargon and denotes a number to small too be
represented in the device meant to store it, thus stressing the workers’
insignificance insomuch as their protests are most likely to be forgotten
the moment they are pacified. On the other hand “underflow” is a
synonym to “undercurrent” and so opens up a different reading which the
rest of the poem supports equally well. As an underground flow of water,
especially beneath a riverbed, “underflow” suggests the workers’
unwillingness to yield to the big money inasmuch as they may be beat into
dormant submission only so many times before they finally “take back the
land.”
Thus the workers are displayed in a transitional point, dithering
between “going ahead to the plant rally” and forfeiting their claim to a
better salary. The mundane nature of their job can be suffered until “the
blood-struck surface” explodes in a fit of indignation, which at this
juncture can only be noticed in the intrinsically ambiguous use of the
language. Ostensibly “underflow to zero” asserts the workers’ unimportance
in the eyes of the corporate world (in this case perhaps a nuclear power
plant consortium); yet simultaneously the word does not relinquish
contrary connotations in that the irrepressible force of joint impatience is
invested in the lyric. Two drives inhere in the poem: one spurring into
unreflective performance of duties, the other allowing for a possibility of
change. Such a conflict between routine work and a need for overcoming
it returns in Down where Changed on various levels, with neither being
able to wither the other.
In another lyric of the sequence the attention is directed to “The sick
man [who] polishes his shoes / wide awake in the half light / what else
should he do.” The air of some unnamed illness and hopelessness evokes
Larkin’s (however distant Prynne’s affinity with him may be) “Unresting
death, a whole day nearer now, / Making all thought impossible.” The tone
of disenchantment prevails in Prynne’s lyric and similarly to “Aubade” it,
in the end, disconsolately reconciles itself to the thought that “Work has to
be done.” A feeling sets in that there is no escaping daily drudgery, no

Chapter Two

spiritual redemption or intellectual contentment. The sick man is resigned
to performing a mechanical task in order to keep his mind occupied and
carry on.
His disillusionment goes further as “scent from the almond tree /
‘abjures the spirit’ with its air / of mortification.” The image of “scent
from the almond tree” conjures up an ephemeral idea of spiritual salvation
only to swiftly be trodden. The scent does not enliven the spirit but abjures
it. The repudiation is threefold: firstly, the scent carried in the air repels
the spirit, thus revealing the spirit’s unworthiness of the whiff of the
sacred; secondly, the spirit, as it seems, is repudiated by the “air of
mortification,” which indicates that the almond tree might actually be
irreconcilable to the spirit; thirdly, it may be the spirit’s “air of
mortification” that is incapable of becoming congruent with the “scent
from the almond tree.” All those meanings float about the image of the
stanza, creating an aura of inner destitution and incipient doom. The lack
of religious support is further emphasised by the fact that when “a pious
gloss” is displayed for the people to read, it appears to explicate not some
sacred doctrine but “waste;” the last two stanzas rapidly juxtapose a
religious image with an everyday picture of laundry, making one think of
secularisation of faith, which is gradually turned into a myth and then
commoditised. Under such circumstances the spirit cannot undergo any
religious experience, becoming alienated in the process.
Far

Down where Changed, or any Prynne collection for that matter,

is from reposing its trust with religions, the case is that spiritual
bankruptcy adds another aspect to man’s inability to rise beyond the
stagnation of everydayness. The lyric immediately following the one
discussed states it directly: “[...] dishonest misery / in the pink fading
surround / of clouds across a sky.” The dishonest misery, it may be argued,
refers to the deceitfulness of the spirit which is suppressed into obedience
to the system. The middle line of the stanza rings clearly until the last line
seeks to modify its message; the misery takes place “in the pink fading
surround” which associates with the plastic goods to be purchased in all
sorts of malls and markets. The pink which floods the area is also the
colour of the sky slightly overcast at dusk. However, this image, so replete
with Romantic connotations of “the deepening shades,” goes to show the
ease with which language is turned into a product as it is made pink and
shiny, and ready to be purchased.
This light tone of the lyric is then countered by the last stanza which
implies an apocalyptic undertow, evoking “Es Lebe der König”:

Disentangling the Subject

if it were the final demand
we should shine with fear
but it is not.

The final demand retains “a domestic and an apocalyptic meaning:
household bill, day of judgement.”

By associating “the final demand”

with “shining with fear,” the poem instantly changes the aura of the verse
which has run in a partly ironic manner from the beginning; now the
matters are far more serious. It seems, however, that the stanza admits of
another meaning inasmuch as the first two lines present a peculiarly
welcoming alluring image as though “the final demand” and the resultant
fear were to be a kind of redemption; this reading is then further
strengthened by the last line which bluntly and ruefully asserts that the
time of “the final demand” has not come as yet. Therefore the nearing
catastrophe is not only a day of judgement to be feared, but also a day of
salvation. The same ambivalence continues in another poem:

Is that quite all, the stupid creep
under the stairs and in the gloom
will do their best to fall asleep

and in the shadow of that room
we hear the shallow call to deep
and fail the test, and miss our doom.

“The stupid” relate back to “New Tax on the Counter-Earth” in its
apocalyptic undertones and a similar logic to “A New Tax” is followed;
only those not brave and honest enough must fear “the final demand.” This
poem also ends on a positive note, suggesting that “our doom” might
actually turn out not to be so harrowing. All the same, the poem retains a
potential for ironic self-criticism. Whatever the doom is going to be, it is
bound to result from man’s misuse of his habitat. The religious apocalypse
thus clashes with a secular vision of the ultimate catastrophe, producing a
tension between hopefulness and “dishonest misery.”

It is such tension that increasingly Prynne becomes more interested in.

Wherever possible in the volume under discussion there are lines
embracing mutually opposed readings. The workers are revealed to
“underflow to zero” even if “underflow” may well be a token of their
will’s staying power; the spirit appears to be alienated through its “air of
mortification” or by means of the almond tree’s mortifying scent. These
clusters of dialectic enervation happen against the general failure of the

Reeve, Nearly too Much, 111.

Chapter Two

transportation system. If such tension is admitted to be indicative of
language’s instability, then the opening images of transport collapse
simultaneously become analogues of the breakdown in men’s ability to
communicate. This is the point where the poem seems to show a consistent
motivation. Granted that language seeks to enwound the self and then
fossilise it in a set of fixed phrases and clichés – as has been demonstrated
throughout this book – then an attempt to absorb and overcome the
linguistic sediments must impinge on communication, which relies on
phrasings most readily understandable. However, and this will be the
aspect traced in Prynne’s later volumes, it is by way of introducing such
obstructed communication that man is revealed to be able to energise his
thoughts into overcoming the mechanistic process of news exchange. As
in News of Warring Clans, in Down where Changed simplicity and
directness of statement are uncovered to be the most misleading notions
inherent in late modernity; it is solely through extensively figurative
tensions within language that any thought can be formulated, otherwise
what is practised in a conversation or news article is mere repetition ad
infinitum, ad absurdum.
The typical language of communication entails various methods of
emphasising, accepting or disagreeing, which are enforced by the use of
certain words. In Down where Changed these words are mocked:

at all
anyway
whatever
even so
rubbish

In a manner indicative of Pound’s “Papyrus,” Prynne formulates his
criticism of traditional idiom. The first line in the excerpt is a usual
modifier of negation; the second might be used to add information so as to
support a claim, express that something happened or was said in spite of
circumstances, change the subject of a conversation, or correct what has
been said; the third to, among others, express a lack of care; the fourth
indicates that something happened despite difficulties. All of the above
count as emphatic or linking words and are used in order to enhance the
clarity of a piece of speech or writing; in response the last word-length line
disposes of them, since they do not clarify but entangle the user in a web
of adequacy, discourse pruned down to suit the occasion; the best
examples of such trimmed language can be found in scientific, political
and economic texts, all of them hallmarks of entanglement. A similar
notion is expressed by Eagleton when he discusses the tasks of literature

Disentangling the Subject

departments: “Becoming certified by the state as proficient in literary
studies is a matter of being able to talk and write in certain ways;” he then
adds that it is such skills, inexorably affiliated with pre-ordained ideas of
clarity and cohesion, that “are being taught, examined and certified, not
what you personally think or believe, though what is thinkable will of
course be constrained by the language itself.”

Prynne steps against the

trends that expect one to be able to move proficiently and efficaciously
within the bounds of a certain discourse. His reasons, however, are not
only taken to be valid in terms of avant-garde poetics, but perhaps all the
more pertinently in terms of ethics and morality.
He makes the leap from experimental poetry to ethical criticism by
asserting that the human subject, not some vague product of stylised
philosophical discourse but the fleshly being, is only able to understand its
duty to life and other humans if he understands his own difficult condition.
It is in this regard that the neo-Romantic thinkers discussed in chapter one
provide a key transitional idea; comprehending one’s condition means
being able to phrase it in a language which breaks free from the manacles
of tradition which, especially in the world of specialised discourses,
demands above all that one keep to the standards:

whatever we say don’t overdo it
whatever you say don’t overdo it
keep cool and take your time.

The “rule of thumb,” as the lyric puts it, is not to overdo what you say.
The last line implements stereotypical phrases that should help one relax
in order to do one’s best. This is the motto of politicians, scientists and
economists who make a point of never breaking beyond the established
norms. In a way, this fragment finds its dialectical opposite in the ending
of another lyric of the sequence: “Nearly too much / is, well, nowhere near
enough.” Regardless of how far the linguistic experiment is taken, it will
always be constrained and will require more work. What proves to be at
stake here is ridding the society of “the politic albino”:

What do you say then
well yes and no
about four times a day

sick and nonplussed
by the thought of less
you say stuff it.

Eagleton, Literary Theory, 175.

Chapter Two

This ending lyric, concentrating on the notion of discursive ambiguity,
stresses the linguistic aspect of choosing middle-of-the-road ideas. What
you say is “yes and no” so that neither side is offended or alienated. Even
though this is not an expression of a genuine vantage, it does make sure
that, not actually favoured, you at least fall into disfavour of neither side
which demands that a decision be made. Eagleton’s point becomes
particularly valid in reference to this line in that “yes and no,” along with
“it depends,” are frequent interludes students resort to before expressing
their views. Far from making their opinion nuanced, the “yes and no” is a
response which seeks to ensure that the comment will meet all “final
demands.” Thus the “less” is promulgated by constant shuffling of the
same arsenal of phrasings. “Sick and nonplussed,” the voice of the poem
balks at linguistic eternal return; “stuff it” might mean that you no longer
care about “not overdoing it” but may well be a literal call to stuff the “yes
and no” and consign it to the museum wall. It is better to start from a
communication breakdown than to linger on in the unreflective idle talk.
Thus

News of Warring Clans and Down where Changed the subject

is shown to be buried under the textual clichés that influence it to such a
point that it is wiped out. In the discourses of journalism and
everydayness, the subject is perpetually entangled unless it makes an
attempt to force those jargons out of their beguiling smoothness; when
words begin to jar with one another, when conflicting meanings are
impelled to emerge simultaneously, finally when dialectic tension is found
to repose at the heart of every concept so far taken for granted, the self is
shocked into existence. The enframing of man that has been analysed in
chapter one is thus brought to the fore and the vernacular sediments are
demonstrated to be historical constructs which take on the guise of natural
facts of life; the process of absorption of the language in order to
overcome it – the strife Heidegger puts forth in “The Origin” – has
allowed one to trace Prynne’s poetics of conflict. However, once the self’s
struggle with the textual world has been sketched in greater detail, it
becomes vital that this self does not fall into stagnancy again. Therefore
man’s fight to disentangle himself from the network of discourses
becomes a quest in search for nodes of tension in language. If man is to
avoid being fossilised into a stable and marketable concept, he needs to
move to the region of constant dialectic negativity.

HAPTER

HREE

EYOND

TAGNATION

Prynne’s poetry cannot entirely be subsumed under the tag of

Heideggerian strife, which has provided the ground for the analysis in the
previous chapter. The paradigm of the conflict between the self, as
inherent in Prynne’s poetry discussed so far, and the discourses of
multifaceted ossification brings the poet to a near perfect enunciation of
the condition of man in late modernity. However, once it is clear that the
notion of the ego set against the fluctuant textual reality is irreducible,
Prynne seems to realise that what hermeneutic fundamental ontology has
to offer him no longer suffices to sustain his pursuits. The move that his
poems, dating roughly from The Oval Window (although the division will
to some appear tenable), perform relinquishes the hope heretofore invested
in the slow uncovering of the new paradigm of being in the world; the
stance more congenital to Prynne in his later work affiliates itself ever
more closely with what will here be referred to as a dialectics of
subjectivity. Robin Purves notes Prynne’s growing reluctance to root his
poems in the Heideggerian phenomenological ground:

If the earliest of Prynne’s works […] appear to revise his even earlier
philosophical interest in phenomenology so that a re-synthesized unity of
knowledge is depicted by virtue of the equivocality of poetic metaphors,
which are themselves framed inside the various perceptual acts of the
speakers of the poems, these relatively consistent structures of perception
are largely muted or absent (and increasingly so) in the latest work.

The later work Purves exemplifies by reading Not-You (1993), but the
strategies discussed by him may well be traced to the work antedating the
volume by a decade. Purves identifies the increasing “dearth of frames” in
which the signification of the poems, however recondite, might be
organised and asserts that in lieu of a path to a solidified meaning, there

Robin Purves, “Apprehension: or, J. H. Prynne, His Critics, and the Rhetoric of

Art,” The Gig 2 (1999): 59.

Chapter Three

exist determinable readings of these poems which, with careful attention to
the linguistic detail, may be gleaned.

The notorious lack of points of reference in Prynne’s volumes,

beginning with – as it is argued here – The Oval Window, poses
interpretive obstacles at every turn of the critic’s eye. Yet, the “idea of
difficulty for Prynne is bound up with that of reciprocal exchange; the
amount of ‘work’ put into the poetry by the reader is ‘returned’ by the
text.”

What the scant stable ground in these poems affords in return is the

“scriptible” richness of interpretations. The road further into the domain of
complexity entails a greater responsibility laid on the reader, who must
now either become unreservedly engaged in the reading process or he or
she will be repelled by the poems. Allen Fisher observes pertinently that
“because aesthetics is [the dominant function of a work of art] it requires
my engagement to create it, to produce it. The significance I most warmly
value derives from this production, its affirmation of life.”

Thus reading

the later Prynne becomes a most personal affair that requires full
immersion in the poems. One cannot expect to arrive at an interpretive
point where all threads have been connected into a unified picture of the
whole; quite the contrary, even the desire to reach a stage of total
completion/revelation is foregone in the poems in favour of a process-
oriented search for the ceaseless restitution of meaning. In turn, “Where
priority is given to action (work and social praxis) over knowledge,
synthesis suggests knowing must be lived and produced as a process. It is
an alternative that refuses the terrorist practice of search for a whole in the
parts, by refusing co-option into the spectacle perpetuated by the State.”

No longer is the poem to be a sense-bestowing/creating structure that
possesses a coherent systematic body of constituent parts; instead, it is a
process of meaning accretion achieved by being lived through by the
reader. Poetry, (and the later Prynne is a perfect case in point here), does
not strive after a system but does quite the opposite; it seeks to subvert any
mock-synthesis staged by some external authority.

It is this perception of poetic utterance as destructive of conceptual

wholeness that seems to become increasingly dear to Prynne. What
Purves, Jay Basu, and Fisher argue to be the key feature of Prynne’s
poetry from the 1980s onwards is best understood as a passage from a
Heideggerian agon-based hermeneutic vantage to that of an Adornian

Jay Basu, “The Red Shift. Trekking J. H. Prynne’s Red D Gypsum,” The

Cambridge Quarterly 30 (2001): 23.

Allen Fisher, The Tropological Shovel (Willowdale: The Gig Editions, 1999), 23.

Fisher, The Tropological Shovel, 27.

Beyond Stagnation

dialectic aesthetics. The transition is both as sweeping and as nuanced as
that between the stances of Heidegger and Adorno.

The philosophical poles regarding the role of art which Heidegger and

Adorno occupy do not diverge so much as might be thought at first glance
and rather exist in “a mutual dialogue;”

the greatest difference inheres in

the respective hopes they invest in their thinking. In a lucid explication of
Samir Gandesha, to both “the conception of truth, which privileges the
copula ‘is,’ leads to a violent negation of the historical dynamism of the
object under the hegemony of a classifying, calculating gaze;” while for
Heidegger “this tradition precipitously reduces Being to what is
enduringly present and in the process reifies and privileges the present
over the past and the future,” for Adorno, who calls this tradition “identity-
thinking,” it “results from the displacement of mimesis, understood as
approximation, by a reductive form of pure imitation.”

The problem

which to varying degrees propels Heidegger and Adorno is that the
modern man only dwells in the world as what Heidegger calls “standing-
reserve.” Gandesha then posits that “for both Adorno and Heidegger the
experience of the work of art shatters or at least displaces the passive
imitation of that which ‘is’ and makes possible a different, nonreductive
constellation in which the relation between the ‘identical and nonidentical,’
disclosure and concealment, is to be understood.”

Art, in the present case

poetry, as both thinkers seem to concur, provides a path beyond the
optimisation and passive imitation that drive the present Western society.
However, and here Gandesha strikes a crucial note, “While the movement
of truth in the artwork precipitously comes to a halt in a reenchanted
language as the house of Being, Adorno takes leave of such a home by
means of that which is irreducibly ‘other.’”

Departing from the final

remarks made by Gandesha, it may be concluded that, where Heidegger
never loses sight of the possibility of a fulfilled reclamation of Being in its
primordial shining, Adorno makes it a point never to steer towards a point
of total completeness, never to formulate a system; instead, he desires to
remain open to lines of thinking most “other” and mutually exclusive.

These two perceptions of philosophy directly address the issue of

subjectivity insomuch as Heidegger invests in his notion of strife inherent

Thomas McCarthy, Ideals and illusions: on Reconstruction and Deconstruction

in Contemporary Critical Theory (Boston: MIT Press, 1995), 84.

Samir Gandesha, “Leaving Home. On Adorno and Heidegger,” in The Cambridge

Companion to Adorno, ed. Tom Huhn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004), 107.

Gandesha, “Leaving Home,” 120.

Gandesha, “Leaving Home,” 121 – 122.

Chapter Three

in every artwork a hankering after completion whereas Adorno sees art as
a means to perpetual demolition of stability, be it linguistic, social or
economic. If Heidegger’s writings pave the way for the subject’s
overcoming of its condition of ossification into a dead text, Adorno’s
dialectic aesthetics forms a strategy with which the subject may find a way
to elude the eventual fixity and optimisation. Therefore the shift from
Heidegger to Adorno, which is here posited to inform the gradual change
of Prynne’s poetics in his later work, exemplifies a difference between
thinking the conflict (itself a kind of dialectical construct in Heidegger) as
a promise of fullness and a view that the dialectic disparity must persist in
its anti-systemic struggle with all forms of such fullness.

Art is elusively and indirectly essential to Adorno in a similar manner

to Heidegger, for it is in art primarily that the process of eradication of
enforced wholeness takes place. However, Adorno explicitly regards art as
a space of the empowerment of the self. Tom Huhn offers a cogent
analysis of the role of art in Adorno:

The artwork is central to the project of reflection and the possibility of
further subjective unfolding because […] the artwork is the most
thoroughly subjective of objects. The subjectivity of the artwork is an
unfinished, incomplete object, and by dint of this it invites reflection. We
might observe that all objects are incomplete insofar as they are but
truncated aspects of subjectivity. But the artwork, unlike all other objects,
is also mimetic and reflexive insofar as it is an image of the ongoing
incompleteness of subjective activity […] The task is […] for subjectivity
to go on with itself.

The subjectivity goes on with itself through the artwork in that it “is an
occasion for subjective dissolution and reconstitution.” In art the subject
does not locate modes of its own completion, which would be yet another
version of what Huhn calls “static rigidification.” Instead, the truth content
of the artwork is “the open-endedness of an object at rest within its lack of
completion […] The artwork is […] an occasion for the subject to liken
itself to a state of unfinishedness.”

The subject seeks in art the

endlessness of its own means of being; thus the greater the expanse of the
artwork’s interpretive freedom, the more modes of life it offers to the
subject. This point becomes particularly valid for the later Prynne, since in
his frameless poems the space for the subject to dissolve and reconstitute

Tom Huhn, “Introduction. Thoughts beside themselves,” in The Cambridge

Companion to Adorno, ed. Tom Huhn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004), 8.

Huhn, “Introduction,” 8.

Beyond Stagnation

itself becomes staggering. The engagement and emphasis on process
Fisher speaks of bear the hallmarks of Adorno’s idea of art as a mode of
the self’s reformulation, thus pointing to Prynne’s affinity with the
dialectic aesthetics. Once set free from the cliché-ridden language of
modernity, the subject must perform a paradoxical stratagem, which only
dialectics makes possible, for the subject needs to maintain its
separateness from the textual reality by refusing to synthesise itself.

Adorno elaborates the dialectics of subject and object by noting that it

is the object that admits of the irreducible multiplicity of forms while the
subjectivity can only open itself to the multifariousness by engaging the
object. This engagement Adorno calls reconcilement:

Dialectics unfolds the difference between the particular and the universal,
dictated by the universal. As the subject-object dichotomy is brought to
mind it becomes inescapable for the subject, furrowing whatever the
subject thinks, even objectively – but it would come to an end in
reconcilement. Reconcilement would release the nonidentical, would rid it
of coercion, including spiritualized coercion; it would open the road to the
multiplicity of different things and strip dialectics of its power over them.
Reconcilement would be the thought of the many as no longer inimical
[…].

What the subject, in this view, is to experience in its engagement with the
object is the acceptance of the many possibilities of being a self; in other
words, what the subject must reconcile itself to is the idea that it is an
endlessly multifaceted formation which cannot be contained under any
notional banner. This interdependence of the subject on the object, and
conversely, Adorno discusses in his essay “Subject and Object,” where he
observes that the two categories are in fact one construct with the object
being the privileged one. As Adorno argues “by primacy of the object is
meant the subject, for its part an object in a qualitatively different sense, in
a sense more radical than the object, which is not known otherwise than
through consciousness, is an object also a subject.”

Therefore whereas

the subject is “the How,” the object is “the What.” In this dialectics of the
subject-object, what comes to existence is a formation of the self which
derives from the engagement with what it is exposed to. For the subject to
continue living, being itself, there must exist a transit between the object

Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London:

Routledge, 1990), 6.

Theodor W. Adorno, “Subject and Object,” trans. Andrew Arato and Elke

Gebhardt, in The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor (London: Blackwell, 2006),
142.

Chapter Three

and the subject, in which the latter provides the material for the former to
absorb: “since primacy of the object requires reflection on the subject and
subjective reflection, subjectivity […] becomes a moment that lasts.”

This dialectic engagement stresses the importance of constant

transition between the subject and the object. There is no moment of fixity,
which results in debarring a conceptual appropriation of the self, for any
“categorial captivity of individual consciousness repeats the real captivity
of every individual.”

If a term is found to capture what is thought to be

the essence of subjectivity this term will immediately prove a prison to the
unrestrained process of dialectic exchange between the subject and the
object it engages. In late modernity the capitalist societies seek to thwart
the realisation of categorial captivity, for such understanding would break
the existent status quo; this conclusion chimes with Heidegger’s wish to
oppose modernity’s implicit desire to optimise everything so that it is
limited to playing whatever function the society requires for the greater
eradication of critical thinking.

The dialectical relation between the subject and the object seems to

reduce the subject to an experiencer of the many features intrinsic in the
thing; following this logic, the self melts into the object and loses its
independence. Yet, as Adorno stresses towards the end of his essay:

The subject is the more the less it is, and it is the less the more it credits
itself with objective being. As an element, however, it is ineradicable.
After an elimination of the subjective moment, the object would come
diffusely apart […] The object, though enfeebled, cannot be without a
subject either. If the object lacked the moment of subjectivity, its own
objectivity would become nonsensical.

Only with the subjective instantiation does an object remain an object and
solely through engaging the object can a subject preserve its life; what
may seem to be a mutual deracination of independence is in fact a move to
preserve this very independence from the conceptual status quo which is
tantamount to death through ossification. It is this point of so close an
engagement of the subject with the object (with the object itself becoming
a subject and vice versa) that prevents the subject from ever attaining a
conceptual explication. Therefore if there is no end to and no predicting of
how the dialectics should proceed, then the subject-object dichotomy will
elude categorial capturing. Such a conclusion does not sit comfortably

Adorno, “Subject and Object,” 144.

Adorno, “Subject and Object,” 149.

Beyond Stagnation

with the capitalist world of the West insomuch as the dialectic process pits
itself in opposition to the status quo.

In late modernity, the time of optimisation, the subject cannot hope to

achieve its dialectical freedom to be with the object unmediatedly. It is this
situation of the self as entangled in the modern discourses of ossification
that Adorno, amongst others, sought to address in Aesthetic Theory.
Leaving out much of the arguments the posthumous masterpiece sets
going, it is vital for the present discussion to reconstruct Adorno’s
thinking of the practical function of art in modernity.

The role of art in the late modern world is that of the arena wherein the

“other” of that world can express itself. Works of art never derive
straightforwardly from their social environment, for if they did, their
contents would only serve to strengthen the false consciousness in which
the society has been plunged; they would produce further reification of
language and thus also of man. Instead, Adorno maintains, works of art
“depend on diremption, and that means that the concrete historical
situation, art’s other, is their condition.”

Whatever the historical context

from which they spring, works of art must always face towards the
possibility of otherness, towards what their contingent world is most
obviously not. This premise shows Adorno’s desire to remain in the
province of constant disruption of the status quo, he strives to attain a
situation where man never manages to feel perfectly at home in his milieu
(poles apart, as has been mentioned above, is Heidegger’s striving to
access the house of Being). By inference, art “is practical in the sense that
it defines the person who experiences art as a zoon politikón by forcing
him to step outside of himself.”

As man can never fully dwell at home in

his surroundings, so he cannot live at home with himself lest he should
become a conceptual fixity unto himself.

It is the purpose of art to prevent the self from feeling complete in

itself because at the point of full congruence with itself and the world
about it, the self becomes a resource, conceptually appropriated and
linguistically predictable. That is why Adorno, in key passages in
Aesthetic Theory, suggests that the proper response to art is a sense of
concern.

Concern is triggered by great works or art. Concern is not some repressed
emotion in the recipient that is brought to the surface by art but a
momentary discomfiture, more precisely a tremor, during which he gives

Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (London: Routledge,

1984), 328.

Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 345.

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100

himself over to the work. He loses his footing, as it were, discovering that
the truth embodied in the aesthetic image has real tangible possibilities.
This kind of immediacy (in the best sense of the term) in one’s relation to
works is a function of mediation, i.e. of incisive, encompassing experience.
Experience congeals in an instant, and for it to do so the whole of
consciousness is required rather than some one-dimensional stimulus and
response. To experience the truth or untruth of art is more than a subjective
“lived experience”: it signals the break-through of objectivity into
subjective consciousness. Objectivity mediates aesthetic experience even
when the subjective response is at its most intense.

What art does to the subject is destabilise it together with its understanding
of itself and the world around it. The work of art, in breaking through to it,
shatters the subject’s comfortable life; the tremor opens the self onto the
“other” of the self’s environment and, in an enveloping sweep, rips this
self out of its context. Again, the self, through being exposed to the object,
is shown the path to its non-existence; by dint of the logic that the subject
is the more the less it is, Adorno positions art in a dialectical relation to the
subject. In it the tremor serves not as a “particularistic gratification of the
ego” but as “a reminder of the liquidation of the ego” so that “by being
shaken up the ego becomes aware of its limits and finitude.”

This is the

truth of art according to Adorno inasmuch as a work of great art, as an
object with which the ego is engaged, helps transform the ego and prise it
open to the experience of whatever is not part and parcel of its surrounding
reality. Thus “the ego, the subject, is formed through the internalization of
objects that are then transformed into psychic states;”

what art provides

the subject with is an impulse to change this subject’s existent mode of
being in the world and being in/with itself.

The impulse which aesthetic production possesses, may be viewed “as

a formal and imaginative engine for new, experimental (because
previously non-existent) concepts [which] can enable us to glimpse
previously obscured aspects of substantive social reality.”

Art, in a

dialectical engagement with the subject, forges new paths to reality, which
can transform not only the mere perception of this reality by the self but

Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 347.

Joel Whitebook, “Weighty Objects. On Adorno’s Kant-Freud Interpretation,” in

The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, ed. Tom Huhn (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), 72.

Robert Kaufman, “Adorno’s Social Lyric, and Criticism Today: Poetics,

Aesthetics, Modernity,” in The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, ed. Tom Huhn
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 362.

Beyond Stagnation

101

may also effect a substantive and qualitative change in both the subject
and its world. This very point is expressed in regard to poetry in Adorno’s
“Lyric Poetry and Society.” He asserts that lyric poetry “shows itself most
thoroughly integrated into society at those points where it does not repeat
what society says – where it conveys no pronouncements – but rather
where the speaking subject […] comes to full accord with the language
itself, i.e., with what language seeks by its own inner tendency.”

Poetry,

by the same token as other branches of art, speaks to the subject from the
furthest reaches of the subject’s society. Therefore it may be argued that to
Adorno poetry is a twofold process. Firstly, by derailing its customary
uses, poetry brings language to the point where it speaks untarnished by
the current discourses of false consciousness; secondly, the subject, by
approaching poetry in its unfettered language, becomes engaged in the
dialectical process of self-restitution, in which poetry displays its
manifoldness before the subject. In the latter case the subject’s experience
of poetry turns it from a substance, obediently following the dicta of the
world it lives in, into a process of dialectical exchange with the poem.

A late commentator of Adorno and Heidegger, Rüdiger Bubner,

explicates his vision of art and its function, taking as his departure point
Adorno’s above remarks. To Bubner, and from this vantage he illuminates
Adorno’s aesthetic stance, art is more than just an object in that it opens a
space which points beyond objectivity; the difference between the objects
as they exist in the world (what must here be understood by an object is
also a corpus of discourses which constitute reality) and those art shows is
that art “transforms our customary experience of the world.”

Aesthetics

proffers something that theory has yet to comprehend, therefore “aesthetic
experience must be treated as the basis,”

which may variously be taken

to constitute the foundation of a new perception of reality and a revitalised
subjectivity.

The construction of the subject in late modernity continues along two

stages, both of which are traced in Prynne’s poetry. As Bubner most
pertinently notes, whereas “for hermeneutics the experience of art
promises a fullness of sense of what is real,” for critical theory, and
Adorno in particular, “that same experience must deepen the scepticism
towards all theoretical assumption of truth and demonstrate that all faith in
the possibility of piercing the network of blinding connections is an

Theodor W. Adorno, “Lyric Poetry and Society,” trans. Bruce Mayo, in The

Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor (London: Blackwell, 2006), 218.

The translation is mine – W. P. The original quote comes from Rüdiger Bubner,

Ästhetische Erfahrung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1989), 138.

Rüdiger Bubner, Ästhetische Erfahrung, 107. Translation W. P.

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illusion.”

This point informs what in the previous Chapters has been

shown to be the search for the place of the self among the fossilising
discourses of the textualised modern world. Prynne’s oeuvre from Kitchen
Poems to Down where Changed follows this trajectory, recognising the
place of the subject in the world submerged under the clichéd snippets of
texts that percolate across all text-tiers of reality. However, the premise of
the return of the subject is not upheld throughout the poet’s career.
Although the postulates worked out in Chapter One remain in force in that
the modern subject continues to be a strong ego which gathers itself into
being in strife with the various discourses of modernity, still Prynne’s
poetry from the 1980s onwards seeks, as it is argued in the present chapter,
to engage the subject in a dialectical process of exchange with the
subsequent lyric sequences.

In retrospect, Prynne’s “Huts” never ceases to haunt the volumes after

The Oval Window insomuch as the subject is shown never to be at home in
its language, since it is an idiom of reified consciousness which is unable
to notice that the innocent hut harbours deep within itself an echo of
insipid violence. This belligerence may well, and at any moment, be
directed against man. Therefore he must never let himself become stagnant
in the contentedness with what he is, because as a substance, he would
belong to the domain of reification, easy to fall prey to categorial capture
and the resultant sinking back into the world of empowered discourses.
Instead, and Prynne’s poems testify to it repeatedly, the modern self can
only survive as long as it engages poetry that is as far removed from the
existent modes of social being as possible; in other words, the less the self
is in these poems, the more it is.

The Oval Window has been argued to be “not only representative of
Prynne’s later manner, but perhaps the most successful instance of it – and
as such […] the most important and significant long poem of its time.”

Indeed, the book-length sequence of lyrics performs a most protean leap
from what may be termed poetry of assertion to a poetics of critical
restitution. As opposed to assertion, which seeks to enunciate a possibility
of a totalised vision of truth of, in this case, modern subjectivity,
restitution is the process of perpetual dialectic reinvention of the self
through a direct engagement with poetry. While the Latinate “res” in
“restitution” affiliates the verb with the berated idea of reification, the
process it denotes, the return to the former state, implies a restoration of
the ego to the pre-fossilised (following Adorno and Horkheimer of

Rüdiger Bubner, Ästhetische Erfahrung, 11. Translation W. P.

Reeve, Nearly too Much, 148.

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103

Dialectics of Enlightenment) “natural” state;

natural in the sense that the

subject’s particular immanent powers and hidden properties are not
reduced.

In The Oval Window Prynne’s lyrics take their energy from tensions

within them. These tensions have variously been identified as the results of
“mutual abrasions of special languages,” which create “a constant
experience of relative scope, of the moral, or descriptive, or systematic
inadequacy of any given discourse;”

and, by Reeve and Kerridge, as the

consequence of “interplay […] between the ‘giddy’ and the ‘poised,’ in all
their forms and associations.”

Both these observations take careful notice

of the inside dialectics of the poems, which displays itself in the opposing
drives of relativity of languages that comprise the book, or joyful
changeability and utter stillness. The volume, in other words, deliberately
subverts any attempts at deriving from it a stabilised conceptual
framework which would capture a moment of experience. Instead, the
poems engage in a perpetual dissolution of their own premises, and as they
do so, these premises are instantaneously restituted back into cursory
existence.

The Oval Window focuses on the dialectics of visual/auditory

data

and a subjective formation that receives them. Thus the notion of
subjective restitution may be seen to constitute the foundational tenet of
the book. In the following lyrical instants of the poem, a self is seen in its
dialectical engagement with the world which it both sees and hears; at the
same time, the subject is never fully presented (or brought to be present) in
them but rather instantiates itself fleetingly as it beholds the world about it.
The verb “behold” puns here on an important dependence of the self on
the world inasmuch as the subject “be-holds” the world about it, both
holding it before itself as something given and constituting itself through
the act of that holding

. Therefore the self is only in relation to the world

which surrounds it. In Adornian terms, the subject exists only in a dialectal
engagement with the object that itself becomes a subject which faces the

Max Horheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans.

Edmund Jephcott (New Jersey: Stanford University Press, 2002), 3.

Rod Mengham, “A Lifelong Transfusion: The Oval Window of J.H. Prynne,”

Grosseteste Review 15 (1983–84): 205.

Reeve, Nearly too Much, 154.

Reeve and Kerridge trace the meaning of oval window to the anatomic part of

the ear, observing that it “is the aperture in the middle ear through which sound
waves pass to be converted into neural impulses.” Nearly too Much, 152.

This perception of the ambivalent meaning of the verb I owe to Harold Bloom’s

insight into Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” Poems of Our Climate, 57.

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objectified self. It is through such a process that the subject may evade
ossification, as the first lyric notes “What can’t be helped / is the vantage,
private and inert.” “Vantage” introduces here the key point of transition
between the self and the world; man is constituted through and with his
vantage, in fact, to put it in dialectical terms, man is his vantage.

The problem the self must contend with stems, firstly, from the fact

that it must understand its rootedness in the objects that surround it;
secondly, it needs to realise that the world about it is a place dominated by
discourses of ossification. This recognition of the essentially fossilising
potential implicit in the world continues throughout Prynne’s oeuvre. In
The Oval Window the language of fear is invoked as a medium of
optimisation

To be controlled as a matter of urgency:
don’t turn, it’s plasma leaking
a tune on Monday
a renewed drive
not doing enough
to reduce the skin on a grape; the whole
falling short is wounded vantage in
talk of the town.

The “control” evokes optimising drive which is enforced with recourse to
an oblique suggestion of a disastrous “plasma leaking.” Control is a matter
of urgency because we are in biohazard and unless something is promptly
done about it, the situation will be past remedy. Yet, it turns out that the
plasma might refer to a type of a TV, which in this case “leaks / a tune on
Monday / a renewed drive.” The reduction of “the skin on a grape” may
thus be understood as an implication of what the plasma TV cannot do; or,
and this exudes an instantaneous, albeit indistinct, threat, it may suggest
the process of sunning, which is either a welcome evocation of an emblem
of exquisite food or a rather perilous suggestion of withering. However, to
observe the implicit reference to death is “falling short” or disappears if
observed from “wounded vantage.” The phrase invokes a vantage that is
crippled, dwarfed to the point it is no longer capable of noticing less-than-
obvious details. The “wounded vantage in / talk of the town” denounces
the society as living in sore stupefaction that admits of inane gossip and
word of mouth, both of which serve to spread and deepen false
consciousness.

Neither private nor wounded vantage can allow man to come into his

own. While in the former case the result is inevitable egotistic reification,
in the latter the outcome is a cementation of ideological veneer. In the first

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105

part of the poem, before a longer lyrical section, the vantage is represented
by the ability to see through the windows. One of the early reviewers of
the book pertinently notes that “the window maintains its role as putative
threshold, ‘fold line,’ site of dilemma, where information is processed
according to either necessity or choice;”

as putative threshold, the

window stands for a point of contact between the world and whoever
dwells inside of the house, it is also a vantage most obviously wounded
insomuch as it shows the view within its limited frame.

Low in these windows you let forth
a lifelong transfusion, as by the selfsame
hand that made these wounds.

The windows are the orifices through which “a lifelong transfusion” with
the world takes place. The passage resonates with particularly dialectical
undertones in that the transfusion is made “by the selfsame hands that
made these wounds,” suggesting that the self that stands at the windows is
simultaneously sustained by the view and afflicted by it; the window is
both a hole through which vital substances are being injected into the
subject to prolong its life and a wound whereby life slowly flows out. The
fickle reference to Richard III

evokes a devious play with life, giving it

with one hand and taking it away with the other. Life is linked to the
vantage that the window proffers and even if “The vantage stops off / in
arc-light at frosted glass, yet all is shaded / and clumsily mobile. Lately
poor eyes.” Although the movement of things may not be all that
transparent, this inactivity results from “poor eyes.” Fixity here would
necessitate the condition of death.

So far in the poem, the self is only obliquely shown in the form of one

who observes through the vantage of the window. The subject lives in
these lyrics by dint of the logic that the less it is, the more it is. In no
section of The Oval Window does the self come incontrovertibly to the
fore, it has no identifiable background but it clearly exists with-in the
poem; it creates itself by dialectical engagement with the lyrics, thereby
gathering itself entirely only in them.

The process of exchange with the world through the window is not just

a perceptual looking at what passes before the eye but an active “be-
holding” the world: “A view is a window / on the real data.” Yet, the
obvious danger which inheres in the notion of “the real data” is the fact
that there is no guarantee these have not been tinted by ideological

Mengham, “A Lifelong Transfusion,” 207.

Reeve, Nearly too Much, 156.

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reification. And true enough this section of The Oval Window feeds itself
to the operations of “wounded vantage.” The real data are emphatically set
against such trifles as “a lower surplus in oil / and erratic items such as
precious stones, aircraft and corpses of men, tigers / fish and pythons, ‘all
in a confused tangle.’” It is likely that the real data can be suspected of
being an ironic indication of a reified language wherein the important
thing is the broad picture. However, it is clear that through the window the
real data may both be acknowledged and seen: “Changes to the real data /
are visible through the view; and operations against the view are converted
[…] // into operations on the real data.” This dialectical connection of the
view to the real data may be taken to demonstrate the dire need for the
view to be endowed with a critical faculty; provided it does not fossilise
into an acceptance of what it is, provided it is checked against the
landscape it frames, the view will allow the “operations on the real data”
to be scrutinised thoroughly.

The danger the view as wounded vantage poses is that the data it looks

out on are always objects cast in most stupefying discourses of capitalist
economy. When these are taken at face/market value, “the view / loops
round from the test drill sponsor / like a bird on the wing.” A vicious circle
consists in the view, propounding only what has already seeped into the
society’s false consciousness. Thus the window looks out onto capitalist
streets from which emerges a clatter of voices: “Think now / or pay now
and think later;” “one man’s meat / better late than never;” “PUT SKIP
EDIT, / PUT SKIP DATA.” All these clichés are typical of the capitalist
market in that they propel one into buying inordinately, “choose the order /
of choice,” sort through the purchases quickly enough to seek new ones
and “keep mum.” The poem notes the peril of ossification and a truly
Heideggerian optimisation: “So what you do is enslaved non-stop / to
perdition of sense by leakage / into the cycle.” After all, the leaking
plasma does show its pernicious effect inasmuch as the view surrenders
and is enslaved to the cycle of buying and selling with the supply/demand
factor dictating what is currently the man’s only meat.

A remedy for the disease of reification is born in the margins of the

view, away from the domination of the cliché market in the centre. After
two thirds of the book there comes a longer lyrical section which, as it
seems, implies a possible path beyond the dead end hit in the previous
sections. Given the view does not offer a direct link to the world but opens
onto a panorama of reification, the self cannot come to life by simply
entering the world.

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107

At the onset of the single life
it is joined commonly to what
is untasted, lettered out
along the oval window’s rim.

That which is “untasted” is located away from the commonly accepted
false consciousness because it is as yet undigested by the dominant
culture. The lyric achieves this condition by manifestly renouncing
grammar and classical logical development of argument in favour of a
vortex of thoughts. In the best Poundian manner, Prynne composes his
poems of fragments that he shores, not against any ruins, but against the
facets of modernity. Man is connected to the house in which he was born
but the connection is played out in eaves casting forward, “on the inside of
the purlin itself,” in rebates and “Arms in sisal with the narrow gate.” The
specialised vocabulary appears to have been selected on the basis of its
dialectical tension between holding together and pushing out. An eave in a
house is projected, as it holds the roof together; purlin delimits the
horizontal part of the roof and points, as it were, to directions away from
the house; a rebate is a perfectly fitted cog that serves to link elements one
to another into larger units; finally, sisal is a durable fibre but here it is
linked with the narrow gate that promises a path outside. Even though the
meanings are known to everyone even vaguely versed in building
techniques, here they invoke not substances but processes of holding and
spreading. There is no stasis, only movement unrestrained and uncontained;
truly vortex-like.

The lyric thus illustrates an assertion from one of the earlier parts of

the poem: “a picture is not a window.” While in a picture all is “unravish’d
quietness” and eternal repose, the window opens on “breathing human
passion.” Therefore the lyric seems to speak of itself when it asserts that
“This is the place / where, deaf to meaning, the life stands / out in extra
blue.” Meaning must here be understood as clichés, to hand when we need
to buy or sell something; the poem wants no transit with a language which
serves consumption and consumes, primarily, the user himself. Instead of
the simplicity of common languages the poem chooses “the voice
revoked” and “on a relative cyclical downturn / imaged in latent narrow-
angle glaucoma.” This section of The Oval Window suggests that the voice
which does not tally with the society’s ideological position is cast away
under the pretence of illness. If the eye searches the rims of the window
for glimpses of incipient movement, it is immediately regarded as
suffering from “narrow-angle glaucoma.” The disorder, resulting from an
increased pressure of the fluid in the eye, assumes a figurative meaning of

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a pain that stems from the eye’s intensified probing of the view. This,
however, is arranged to replay the central sight:

the field is determined
by the exist window, the lens rim or stop
which, imaged into image space, subtends
the smallest angle at the centre.

The field the eye observes is filtered through the view of the exit window
which adjusts every detail and angle to the central pattern. The “image
space” is the landscape as it is presented through the window; it is the
language used to create the image space that determines the field of vision
and does so in order that the dominant mode of perception might be
preserved.

In one of the many lyrical passages that the book is replete with, the

speaker returns to the image of the hut. At one point the reader’s attention
“Drawn to the window and beyond it” is directed to a vision of a garden:

Pear blossoms drift through this garden,
across the watcher’s vantage clouded
by smoke from inside the hut […]

This time the view of pear blossoms strikes as an honest attempt at a
depiction of a paradise garden. However, before the scene is properly
composed, smoke tarnishes the view. Thus the poem implies the naivety of
a pastoral belief in the objective beauty of nature, for the natural world is
now invaded with smokes from factory chimneys. The hut may evoke “not
quite a cabin, but (in local speech) / a shield, in the elbow of upland water”
with its “sod roof almost gone,” as in the earlier part of the poem,
however, the hut may well be a factorial building, turning out goods veiled
in tumultuous fumes from its furnaces. It was after all from the Industrial
Revolution that the capitalist hegemony got its impetus to the extent that it
has become a natural way of life of the modern man. As Prynne argues in
“Huts,” trafficking in illusions must not be a serious poet’s job, since there
is no escaping the grievousness that seemingly innocent language carries
with it; a hut may be a shelter but it is just as well a construction that walls
all other things outside and pre-empts every attempt to subvert the
capitalist ideology; “They appropriated not the primary / conditions of
labour but their results.” These “primary conditions of labour” have
remained unchanged since the first feudalist earldoms.

The final sections of the poem keep returning to pastoral images which

are then penetrated with visions of labour and trade.

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[…] Endless sorrow
rises from the misty waves, like a wick
in the light of conscience. Not feudal
nor slave-owning but the asiatic mode
as locally communal within a despotic state.

What starts as a post-Romantic echo of Yeatsian character soon shows its
naïve side as the lyric mode turns into an evocation of enforced labour in
Communist states, where, under the guise of common goal and unanimous
support for the government policy (there are no feudalist divisions or
slaves in Communism), the spiritless pursuit of increased production is
staged. Regardless of where it happens, the chase after the big money
reigns over modernity so that “These petals, crimson and pink, / are
cheque stubs.” In the final sections of the poem the wounded vantage
reveals itself to have created the conditions of (self-)enforced mindless
labour, in which choice and self-awareness are reduced to vapour. The
subject is thus trapped in a manifold sneer in that it is caught up in the
discourses of ossification which, in turn, are linked to the economic
shackles.

The subject can only strive to exist in an unappropriated form if it

engages in a critical relation with the object. Since the objects around are
fossilised by the market, the subject needs to approach them in the sphere
of aesthetic production. Therefore the following sections of the poem
repeatedly address various conditions of modernity in a form that both
images forth the vision of reification and, through constant destruction of
the clear line of syntactic development, dismantles it. This process
prevents final assertion from constituting itself, thereby thwarting the
attempt at presenting a complete vision of modernity or subjectivity.
However, in close correlation with Adorno’s postulates, the poem, by
taking away the self’s (physical and psychical) unity, grants it life in
ceaseless negativity. “In darkness by day we must press on, / giddy at the
tilt of a negative crystal” although “At the last we want / unit costs plus
VAT, patient grading.” In spite of the unconquerable desire to become
poised in tune with the times, we retain the strength to press on; there is no
other way but the path towards “a negative crystal.” The trope of crystal,
so dear to High Modernism,

serves as figuration of complexity which

comprises a myriad of elements, each being a myse-en-abyme of the

The trope of crystal is thoroughly analysed in reference to the poetry of W. C.

Williams by Diane Collecott Surman, “Towards the Crystal: Art and Science in
Williams’ Poetic,” in William Carlos Williams: Man and Poet, ed. Carroll F.
Terrel (Orono: University of Maine, 1983).

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whole. In such an intricate object, admitting of a plethora of interpretive
re-configurations, the subject finds its dialectical pair. The danger that the
self faces is death, since it risks inability to reclaim itself from the object.
However, as The Oval Window suggests in its last lines, “Beyond help it is
joy at death: / a toy hard to bear, laughing all night;” if death is the price of
freedom, it is a price that must be accepted gladly. Death is a toy concept
to the self anyway because man is exposed to death on both sides. On the
one hand becoming ossified is for the subject a spiritual destruction
through deconstructive textualisation; on the other, engaging the process
of self-depletion and restitution, though undoubtedly perilous, promises
life. The Oval Window does not reconcile itself with the prospect of
ineluctable demise of man, but rather gives him a hopeful nudge to
continue trying to break the manacles of reification.

The theme of disentanglement of man from the network of late modern

discourses rises to prominence throughout Prynne’s later poetry. The
difference between the earlier oeuvre and the work after The Oval Window
may be correlated with the transition from a Heideggerian poetics to an
Adornian negative dialectics; while in earlier volumes Prynne traces the
ways in which the self can constitute itself against the bellicose situation
of modern dematerialisation, in his later books he searches for the means
for preserving the self from falling into the deconstructive vertigo. As a
result, The Oval Window shuns assertions as to the nature of the subject
that it presents, instead investigating how that subject restitutes itself ever
anew. This strategy is then re-deployed in the following volumes.

Bands around the Throat (1987) probes into the illusory nature of the

pleasures of life in modernity. The title itself implies strangulation or
tethering, while at the same time promising a degree of movement.
Therefore the phrase succinctly presents how man is entangled in the
modern capitalist world of competing discourses; even though his death
through a lack of life-giving air is certain, man is cajoled into believing he
can actually lead his life however he sees fit. Throughout the volume this
stance is severely scathed and revealed to be downright immoral on the
part of those who do not acknowledge that the capitalist ideas of freedom
are mere illusions. These illusions are then shown to constitute not only an
intellectual or ontological threat but a material means of destitution.

The poem that focuses the arguments of the whole book, which are

being unravelled here, is “Marzipan.” Simon Perril, bearing in mind the
date of the first publication of the poem, notes that the title may “ironically
allude to the pasting of natural resources as a result of the reactor
explosion at Chernobyl;” but primarily “Marzipan” evokes the famed
delicacy, which is emblematic of affluence and good life. However, in

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contrast to the luxury the confection brings to mind, the poem may be
taken to be “part of the book’s scrutiny of the lyric rhetoric of pained
outcry as being dubiously confectionary: and of the capacity of such
rhetoric to complicitly sweeten the pill that it claims to be spitting out.”

In line with this dialectically sensitive logic, the poem starts with a
depiction of a modern-day waste land and its inhabitants:

We poor shadows light up, again
slowly now in the wasted province
where colours fall and are debated
through a zero coupon, the de-
funct tokens in a soft regard.

Taking the cue from Perril, who suggests “Marzipan” is “worryingly akin
to Dante and Eliot,”

it may be argued that the opening stanza summons

passages of “The Hollow Men”: “This is the dead land / This the cactus
land.” However, the problem Prynne’s poem faces is that the wasted
province is not a result of a lack of faith but rather economic downturn
suggested by the “zero coupon.” Thus Prynne’s may as well be the dead
land of Pound’s historical “Canto LV”: “and when the price was put up /
they went on buying / and the whole province was ruined.” The “poor
shadows” also echo back to Pound’s dramatic condition described in
“Canto LXXX”: “[Only shadows enter my tent / as men pass between me
and the sunset.]” The bereavement that is invoked here stems from some
unknown monetary crisis, owing to which coupons are either worthless or
cannot be redeemed and tokens are broken apart and “de-funct.”
Furthermore, the people only light up at the prospect of financial
enervation “in the bazaar / where preference wrap is easily / our choice,
what most we want.” Thus “Marzipan” starts with imaging forth a revision
of one of the foundational modernist anxieties that man has lost touch with
his own nature and can only seek to regain it through art.

In Prynne’s

poem this loss is understood in close congruence with Lukács’s
observation that under capitalism life becomes a distortion of the human
character.

Indeed, the first two stanzas of “Marzipan” depict a scene

where man becomes a crippled dwarf of himself.

Simon Perril, “Hanging on Your Every Word; J. H. Prynne’s Bands around the

Throat and a Dialectics of Planned Impurity,” in A Manner of Utterance. The
Poetry of J. H. Prynne, ed. Ian Brinton (Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2009), 96.

Perril, “Hanging on Your Every Word,” 95.

Leigh Wilson, Modernism (New York: Continuum, 2007), 9 – 10.

Georg Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. John and Necke

Mander (London: Merlin Press, 1963), 33.

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In the third stanza the speaker speculates about the viability of

changing the setting of his vision: “Ah, resting alone under the shade / Of
green willows, it is a brave sight – / Such unencumbered gallantry.” The
pastoral image, distantly evoking an image of the poet who reposes “under
this dark sycamore,” strikes the speaker as “unencumbered gallantry”
insomuch as it is escapist to divert from the urgency of the current moment
and willingly be locked in the remote hut (from which one, as Prynne may
be recollected as saying, will have to come out one day). In light of this
line, the bravery of the sight must seem sarcastic because there is clearly
nothing brave about choosing not to face up to the existent destitution. The
“wild secluded scene” is quickly and ironically put to an end when,
following “Azure banners high in the fragrant / breeze along the bank,” the
grim reality transpires: “on the ward / floor the fairface was in point / of
fact congealed vomit.” Thus the Romantic landscape of “green willows”
and “Azure banners” yields to the nauseous and disillusioning fact. The
title of the poem would suggest a close affinity with such pastoral settings
as shown in the two stanzas but the poem well understands that the beauty
of nature is lost and can only be reapproached through reminiscing.

The sharp revelation of the abominable reality continues with a

depiction of the collapse of Romanticism:

Now red dust hangs, and fire drives
the gold star into a dark vapour.
To mark out the pitch of ennui
a strong sense of, well, woodsmoke
in due season makes its offering.

Red dust, fire, a dark vapour, all invoke an apocalyptic vision; however,
there is another ironic shattering of the opening pastoral scene here in that
the images of the end of the world lead not to fear but to ennui. This stanza
is in many respects Prufrockian in tone, suggesting the transition between,
on the one had, the ludicrous rhyming of “Do I dare” with “descend the
stair, / With a bald spot in the middle of my hair” and, on the other, the
lofty query “Do I dare / Disturb the universe.” In the derisive tone the
fragment implies that the desire to avert the gaze from the spoils of
modernity is suppressed by the powerful presence of the landscape of
contemporary reality.

A similar passage features in the second stanza of “Rates of Return”

from the same volume. There “the sights of growth from immortal seed”
lose their mystical allure when it appears that they only cause “restrictions
on the movement of the sheep.” The disillusionment in “Rates of Return”
seems final because, regardless of the poet’s attempts at “Learning to melt

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/ a blade of sugar in the afterlight,” all in all it is the economic stability
that we crave; and this stability is feasible solely if “a smooth surface” of
capitalism, which “takes on the guise of a normal human condition,”

maintained. The poem ends with an image leaving utter victory of
capitalism:

there is no question that the child
will be proof-wrapped, up to the eyes
of what we fade away to gain.

In lieu of “sweet unremembered bounty,” the children will be given the
bounty of material possessions, the very things man sacrifices his
subjective freedom to procure. “Marzipan” invokes that same logic in its
sixth stanza, which apostrophises not some verse-bestowing muse but
entrepreneurial good fortune: “O Fortune / rich in spoil, surfeit in pray.”
Fortune may be assumed to refer to a general notion of good luck, but the
following line dispels all ambiguity in the sense that the fortune is to be
rich in spoil, itself a kind of bounty, although neither sweet nor
unremembered but quite tangible; “surfeit of pray” suggests that religion
follows the same logic as an “additional extra,” which cannot do any harm
if practised but whose “surfeit” is inadvisable, as it will occupy too much
of one’s precious time.

The apostrophe to “spoils” introduces the notion of what modernity

understands to be the natural desire of man; thus beginning with what is
viewed to be the human condition, the poem then moves on to define man
himself in reference to his situation:

[…] The amends
of Central Production set targets
for bright-eyed fury, smash-hits

Ranking the places where happy the man
Who knows nothing more or less. […]

The “bright-eyed fury” seems to be an image of hectic pursuit of
manufacturing boosted to the limits. Central Production is amended only
to push the targets of how large a quantity of goods must be turned out. It
is these circumstances of economic domination that create the environment
for the modern self whose joy of life hinges on how much it can unlearn.
The final line admits of two principal interpretive possibilities. On the one

Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism, 23.

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hand happy is the man who knows more or less nothing; on the other, he is
happy that knows precisely as much as he is allowed, nothing more and
nothing less. In both cases the suggestion is that for a man to enjoy his life
in modernity, he must volitionally limit himself to the standards expected
from him by the dominant cultural modes. This is the state of reification of
human subjectivity which only replicates the existent social praxis and
whose thought “must become limited to socially affirming tasks.”

“Marzipan” incorporates here an image of man present in an earlier poem
from the volume “Fool’s Bracelet.” In it a similar situation is sketched
towards the end:

[…] The issue
hits all-time peaks in no time at all,
buy on the rumour, sell on the fact. Only
a part gives access to the rest, you get
in at the floor too: And his dance is gone. (emphasis in original)

The play with clichés evokes a reification of language which can no longer
be a medium of mediation between the subject and the object, since it is
stagnant and predesigned. Buying and selling are regarded as speculation
that is to ensure flash affluence. Perril rightly sees this fragment as
ironizing “the cult of the transcendental moment that was so much a
hallmark of the ‘egotistical sublime’ of Romantic notions of poetic
genius.”

There can be no transcendental subjectivity, unless it should

take the form of “unencumbered gallantry.” Instead, the poem offers a
vision of self most intricately entangled in the web of reified language. In
“Almost Lunch-Time” “Marzipan’s” idea of the self as a resource to be
optimised is corroborated: “Stupidly good / as a standing order the new
figures // Bear out the old question.” The lines may refer to the ostensible
amelioration of man’s living conditions. The fragment stages a subtle play
of the old with the new. The “standing order” as one that has yet to be
completed is countered with “the new figures” which, in turn, still support
“the old question.” Thus the past queries remain unresolved and
unimproved as the present awaits fulfilment; although each element of this
equation is open to the others, their natural openness does not trigger
movement, which is emphasised by the adjective “standing,” suggestive of
fixity and therefore a lack of life. It is such a deathly stasis that best
characterises the self posited in “Marzipan.”

Brian O’Connor, introduction to The Adorno Reader (London: Blackwell, 2006),

14.

Perril, “Hanging on Your Every Word,” 85.

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The above diagnosis of man’s condition is amplified in the final four

stanzas of “Marzipan” and rises to prominence throughout Bands around
the Throat. The last part of the poem goes from a mood of listless
resignation to that of growing indignation at the condition of late
modernity. The tenth stanza commences with a rather hopeful calling for
“small mercies” but the apparent acts of mercy turn out to be “seasonal
rebate in / the loose change” while the conductor who, “Attuned / to
modest airs,” beats “time to flattened repeats.” What counts as mercy is a
reduction in price and it is up to the market how high this reduction is
calculated. Time is modestly brought to flat repetition of daily routines,
undoubtedly aimed at making the largest profit possible. Mercy may thus
be won as an outcome of a combination of market forces and one’s
diligence at work. Asking for any other sympathy meets with no response:
“to ask grace / at a graceless face it is our own / in the glass of dark
recall.” It is not only the enigmatic others who will not empathise with
man’s condition, for man himself has become one of the insensitive
market factors. The fragment forces one to look back at oneself and what
is revealed is a complete entanglement in the spiritless money-obsessed
reality. This conclusion is informed by another lyric from the volume
“Punishment Routines,” in which the self is revealed to have become a
slave to the object-as-product:

The necklace plugs the blocked echo current
and marks the spot for no comment:
a dainty box of interference like a dashpot
stops outflow in mean free time’s debate.

The luxurious piece of jewellery, in itself a symbol of good and successful
life, blocks discussion by plugging “the blocked echo current,” thereby
obstructing the channel through which the message should be sent back to
the speaker. Pertinently, the “dainty box” is compared to a dashpot, a
device for damping a movement to avoid shock; the beautifully wrapped
necklace loses its implications of a prized gift and becomes a means to
stopping the outflow of debate, or a continuation of discussion. Therefore
it appears that the object has eradicated the subjective involvement with it;
the subject does not find an enlivening multiplicity in the object but is
frozen into the single, best-known meaning the object offers. The threat of
capitalism is the destruction of the subject-object dialectics, which is
caused by the subject’s inability to pierce the conceptual boundaries of the
thing; as a result the thing stays a mere object, but, as such, it effectively
turns the subject into a mindless fossil that accepts the immediate
appearance of things. The “graceless faces” of “Marzipan” belong to those

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who have been stripped of their subjectivity and are only capable of
perceiving reality in its reified form.

Entanglement in modernity is here shown to proceed from the

discursive level, where the self is caught up in the textualised reality, to
the point at which the clichéd capitalist idiom rules praxis. “Marzipan”
enacts the course of the subject’s ensnarement. It begins with the vision of
the contemporary world as an arid plain and moves on to disqualify the
possibilities for Romantic revival as escapist; then the reification of man
and reality are demonstrated and further delimited. The penultimate stanza
proffers an image of the triumph of false consciousness, which has
contrived to inculcate into man the ostensible “naturalness” of his
existence under capitalism:

[…] You see
as in late spring, shrouded in mist,
the bright, smooth water. The price
is right, eau minérale naturelle
from the hypermarket […]

What starts as an image of a pristine landscape instantaneously reveals the
degree of commodification of life. “The bright, smooth water” is good
value for money; it comes from a foreign country and must therefore be of
better quality than the local variety. There is no natural water left but the
“eau minérale naturelle,” since if it is to be natural, it can solely be so if
bottled in France. Nature exists not as a sphere of the experience of
particularity; rather it is contrived to suit the general mode of sensibility.

Thus the final stage of entanglement depicted in “Marzipan” is the

self’s loss of the ability to pierce the false consciousness of its
environment. Objects lose their enervating quality and serve as plugs of
the stream of interpersonal communication. At the same time they lose
their materiality and are incorporated into the body of discourses of
capitalism as a-signifying signifiers, mere pawns in an oppressive and
infinite hermeneutic game. Relating to such flattened languages, the
subject ossifies into a repetition of the surface structure insomuch as it
cannot engage in a meaningful transition with objects distinguished in
their particularity. When language no longer signifies but partakes in a
game for its own sake, the self melts into a fluid entity deprived of any
deeper identity.

The stage of eradication of subjectivity, meaning and particularity that

is reached in “Marzipan” triggers the speaker’s outburst of anger. The
“eau minérale naturelle” is set against an image of destitution of people
who, for various reasons, do not comply with the paradigms of capitalism.

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The contrast invokes the abyss of difference between the well-off and the
impoverished, as against the “eau minérale” stanza the last one offers a
view of starvation:

[…] Ten thousand
families in the mountains, starved
on mountain grass: and made me eat
both gravel, dirt and mud, and last
of all, to gnaw my flesh and blood.

While some few ponder over whether the mineral water is a bargain,
countless others are famished. Furthermore, whereas the former feast on
produce feigning naturalness, the latter ones are forced to live off nature
even if it no longer suffices to sustain them. The contrasts invoked in the
last two stanzas demonstrate the extent to which man has removed himself
both from nature and, in one stroke, from the particularity of his self-
awareness. The speaker seems to align himself with the consumers, which
results in what may be argued to be pangs of conscience. It is the starving
who make him “eat both gravel, dirt and mud” and “gnaw [his] flesh and
blood.” His response is thus poles apart from what the lyric immediately
following “Marzipan,” ironically entitled “Listening to All,” suggests
should be the attitude to the dark side of capitalism; the lyric indicates that
one should be “very still / and quiet, the bond of care annulled.” If there is
anything that should go bankrupt in modernity, the poem implies, it is
care. Once it is gone, man becomes the perfect one-dimensional construct,
deprived even of significant relations with other people. The speaker in
“Marzipan” suffers from remorse which leads him to reviling his own
body: marzipan becomes to him “gravel, dirt and mud,” and these are in
the end replaced with his own “flesh and blood;” the phrase may, in turn,
be a synecdoche of the people in some way akin to the speaker. Therefore
the suggestion is that all those who derive benefits from capitalism at the
cost of the impoverished crowds are the target of the speaker’s anger. In
light of the last line the entire poem seems to be a thorough denunciation
of the course capitalism has run since its inception. Bands around the
Throat, following the logic of what has here been considered its central
poem, sketches a portrayal of late modernity as the time of de-
particularisation of the object and the resultant self-extirpation of the
subject, who is faced with a choice; on the one hand it may strive to rebel
against the dominant modes of profit-infatuation or, on the other, it has to
choose to have its “bond of care annulled.”

It is thus by no means a case of accidental development that Bands

around the Throat, with its diagnosis of spreading capitalist (textual)

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ossification, is followed by Word Order (1989). In a review of the book
Anthony Mellors observes that Word Order is characterised by a tension
between a Chomskyan rational order “set in place by syntax” and disorder
“which cannot be contained by exigencies of rationalism.”

This

dichotomy may be subsumed under a dialectic logic of creation and
simultaneous destruction of the cohesion of the text. In this way the poems
in the volume subvert the very notion of a word order insomuch as
whenever a sentence is begun, immediately it loses itself into a beginning
(or an ending, there is no way of telling where exactly in the sentence we
are plunged) of another one; in this way phrase after phrase hints at a trace
of a meaning which never comes to full enunciation. Such writing, which
sets in the pattern for the entire volume and remains among the defining
features of books to come, shows itself as critical of the everyday
linguistic praxis. The poems cannot be violated into singleness of
expression no matter how hard the reader should try to elicit a unified
image from any of them; they simply refuse to comply with any fixed
reading pattern. In his review of Word Order Mengham points to that
quality of the lyrics, noting that the “retractedness of much of the writing
[in the book] is facing the near-impossibility of genuine word orders, when
the kinds of regulation it verges on are constantly assailed by brutal and
contradictory demands.”

The regulations Mengham refers to are the rules

of syntax, which are pressed to the point of almost breaking; this is so
because language, as has repeatedly been argued above, is forced into
subservience to the market which operates most efficaciously if every
aspect of life is clipped to the current economic requirements.

Thus it may be argued that in Word Order the less customarily

understood order there is, the more expressive the language of the poems
becomes; the lyrics spur signifying processes so that multiple, sometimes
irreconcilable, meanings hover spectre-like about the lines, rather than
inhere in them as substantial products to be obtained through exegesis.
One of the early lyrics in the book demonstrates this point:

We were bribed and bridled
with all we had, in
the forms of marriage
close to the target, very near
we held out brightly

Anthony Mellors, “J. H. Prynne, Word Order,” fragmente 1 (1990): 29.

Rod Mengham, “J. H. Prynne, Word Order,” Parataxis 2 (1992): 40.

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It is all we had that “bribed and bridled” us into fitting the existent modes
of social being. In this respect marriage becomes a form of contract that is
to ensure that the society functions cohesively. The marriage is “close to
the target” in the sense that it may be the best form of social bondage of
two people. Love is a principle alien to the environment of the common
day word order because the very notion has been pauperised and reified
into social compulsion, as another short poem shows: “For the attraction /
take away her long wait / you must pay up.” The notion of attraction
between a “you” and a “she” is emphatically invoked along with
repetitions of the modal verb “must” to the extent that there are more
“musts” than things to be done. Paradoxically, the lyric implies that a
relationship of two people consists more of internal obligations than
mutual joy; what at first is still a complete command: “sooner you must
wait / she must wait,” turns into an open order: “sooner you must / she
must” with the object of the sentence being elided.

What the poem ends with is a suggestion contrapuntal to the above

lines: “better go now.” Instead of endeavouring to be with someone just
because the society requires it, it is better to give up the pretence and part
company. The final line, both commenting and radically diverging from
the previous parts of the lyric, is a frequent ending to the short poems in
Word Order. In the one discussed above the closing line distances the
speaker from the situation of the couple but in an earlier lyric it serves to
unequivocally state what the situation described throughout the poem is.
Here is another lyric in its entirety:

As you knew why
you took me for
just as well you knew
you I took, as you
could hardly, with
me if you offer
taken for anything
as I knew, you as
can lay on nature
deceived your friends

Characteristically for the whole book, on the one hand the lyric never
brings the sentences to completion but rather comprises shreds of phrases;
on the other, it juggles several words, which combined constitute the
poem. Here there are two key words: past form of “know” and “take” in
various grammatical forms. The words, never featuring in the full context
of a finished sentence, create an aura of discursive noise similar to the

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effect of John Cage’s Rozart Mix. Presumably we hear a person, although
there may well be a number of voices, who addresses a “you.” The
fragments clearly evoke a situation in which someone is obliquely trying
at once to explain himself, cajole the other one into some deal, offer
something, and reproach. With the arrival of the last line, we learn that the
above verbiage was aimed at deceiving friends.

The three stanzas are therefore revealed to practice deceitful

prevarication. The strategy of shearing the sentences to the size of
incomplete phrases recurs in Prynne’s book, demonstrating the way the
existent word order functions. Although language retains its grammar,
which has been stressed by Mellors in his review of the volume, and uses
words appropriately, it mixes them into an incoherent babble. Yet, this
overflow of words is not mere pointless rambling but a surreptitious
assertion of ideological status quo. As in the above-quoted lyric, the
phrases may not cohere into a clear-cut message, but they do convey a
point, if subconsciously. Arguably, the words and phrases repeatedly
interspersed throughout the poem send out trails of meanings without ever
stating them directly; in this way one can recuperate those meanings only
by referring to their customary uses in everyday language. Therefore the
poem, as do the others in the book, constructs itself by inviting whatever it
lacks to formulate a sustained message from the existent and most typical
word order of the day.

The opening poem in Word Order seems to hint at that particular

strategy:

We inserted our names would we sing
out on sight and give in full
the free the offer repeatedly, hit as he lay on
the ground stroked no struck to put
words into the mouth the truth the life
and take the ethereal vapour
like a chance
crossing the street. […]

The names we insert and perhaps sing may refer to names as words
bestowed on things at the moment of creation. They are given in full and
for free by being offered repeatedly; therefore it may be argued that
repetition should suffice in place of wholeness and “true meaning.” The
singing that is heard throughout the book hinges on recurrence of words,
as has been shown, and this recurrence should firstly mandate the
correspondence between words and reality; secondly, it should be taken to
represent completeness, and thirdly, it is understood to be a demonstration

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of freedom. However, the latter part of the stanza implies that this method
is underlain with violence. The man lying on the ground was not struck by
truth, freedom and completeness but was assailed by the above-discussed
doctrine, he was “struck to put words into the mouth, the truth, the life.”
The words are put into his mouth, which stands side by side with truth and
life, as though the mouth were capable only of uttering truth and life.
Commas are dropped to emphasise the closeness of these notions and their
inextricability. What the words replace is ethereal vapour, air understood
as chance. But there is no place for contingency in the world of the final
truth revealed in the words. Thus the order in the volume is implied to
result from the act of taking away the ethereal vapour.

This process of inserting meanings from outside, literally putting them

into the mouth, represents a form of the subject’s entanglement in that the
poems can be reconstructed as saying something coherent only if one
refers them to the existent language practice. Unless taken in the broad
context of everyday use of language, they become snippets of
conversations which quite simply refuse to mean. Thus Prynne’s book
demonstrates, by amplifying this rootedness of poetry in everyday
linguistic praxis, two reasons for man’s ossification. On the one hand
modernity has taught man to appreciate stability and believe in substance
rather than process; therefore the poems in Word Order must be affixed to
the larger entity of common language for their meaning to be obtained. On
the other hand, man likes things about him to mean what he has already
been shown to expect of them. Both these points are easily referable to
Adorno’s analyses of the notion of reification. The self in the volume is
thus seen to be intricated in the word order of modernity, which only
admits of such meanings that signify what is already there. Every notion
must eventually confirm the validity of the current version of reality:

Now it is later repeated, get to grips with

the closed circle, the real world towards

which we travel in purity and in truth to tell

the capital is reported to be quiet.

At first it seems the poem advocates struggling with the closed circle, in
which reality is what the majority says it is. However, the words “purity”
and “truth” sound deceitful in view of the fact that truth has already been
suggested to be the result of violence done to the man so that he would
accept the words put into his mouth. Indeed, the last line chimes with the
reified perception of the modern world as a placid and welcoming place.
Significantly enough, the capital is not quiet but is “reported to be quiet;”
the word order in which news is circulated has it that there is not uproar in

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the centre, since the more peaceful and saner the capital, the more stable
the country. Simultaneously, capital may be taken to evoke money, whose
stability and predictability is a guarantee of the state’s healthy economic
situation.

The escape from the closed circle of language can only take place

along marked paths, for otherwise it would put the runner in peril of
getting lost in the word order; and to want that would be unnatural, unless
it were a controlled attempt, as another lyric suggests:

They do not want
it is natural
they do not want to go

to go out is natural
they do not want to go out
want is natural

it is natural to want
to want to go out at all
war is natural

According to this logic, both “escape,” “not wanting to escape,” and the
“want” itself are natural. This is controlled relativism inasmuch as
anything goes provided it goes on within the pre-determined word order.
The poem proposes mutually-excluding courses of action and immediately
assimilates them to a state of normalcy by claiming that they are natural.
In this way the poem accomplishes two things: it suggests that nature is a
bundle of contradictions, hence its inanity; and simultaneously it seeks to
emphasise that the existent word order offers unrestrained freedom, never
disclaiming anything.

Yet, there is a touch of Beckett’s End Game to the lyric, in the sense

that, just as in the play according to Adorno, in the short poem the
meaning of its language comes to the point of self-termination. “Not
meaning anything becomes the only meaning.”

Whether or not going out

is natural, the detached last line states unwaveringly: “they are
underneath.” Underneath would invoke the association with Adorno’s
commentary that End Game may depict the self-mocking time after
apocalypse (which, in fact, is “permanent catastrophe”) wherein “nature
has been extinguished and nothing grows any longer,”

and the last men

Theodor W. Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” trans. Michael J. Jones,

in The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor (London: Blackwell, 2006), 338.

Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” 324.

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live in a shelter underneath the earth’s blasted surface. True enough, there
is an air of eerie post-apocalyptic threat present in Prynne’s lyric, which
accounts for the reason why “they do want to go out.” Yet, why would
going out be natural then? Perhaps because the inferno outside is simply a
myth, much the same as in Ishiguro’s Never Let me Go. The vision of
outer desolation may be promoted in order to keep people within the
shelter where they can easily be controlled and supervised, or in
Heideggerian idiom, optimised. This is a radical claim for the lyric, yet
one that sits well with the logic of the entire volume. The current word
order seeks to ensnare man into submission to the existent false
consciousness. Word Order, less directly than the previous volumes,
acknowledges the actual idioms which effect that entanglement. However,
in the implicit reference to End Game one may discern the echoes of
discourse of fear analysed in the previous chapter; also in the ideas of
bribing and the quiet capital there inhere references to the jargon of
economic supremacy.

As the book opens with an image of forcing into submission, so it ends

with a similar evocation of violence:

A blow on the side of the mouth
strike harder, it is important
to be lyrical and joyous.

Poetry that the dominant word order accepts must be “lyrical and joyous.”
To enforce those features, no viciousness is spared: there are blows on the
mouth and on the neck and strangling: “blow upon / the windpipe, next at
a rush for breath.” Joy ensures that there are no voices of dissent, since
“happy the man / Who knows nothing more or less.” Furthermore, no man
would want to fall out of the state of contentment, which would be
downright unnatural. Ossification is thus completed through a mixture of
enticing and enforcing. The subject is caught up in the word order which
can either be followed all the way down to a reified confirmation/
substantialisation of what the subject has brought with itself, or violated.
Yet such infringement triggers painful consequences.

Word Order does not offer simple answers but rather unveils the risks

involved in and the resultant near-impossibility of not surrendering to
ossification. Even though the volume gives little indication of how to
overcome the manacles of prevalent word orders, it does impel the reader
to engage with the lyrics so as to elicit something from them. Here lies the
dialectic strength of the book in that the further the poems are thrown into
the dominant language, the more clearly they uncover this language’s
resistance to harbour change. Granted that meaning may be recuperated

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from these lyrics through linking them with the outside linguistic praxis,
they draw attention to how meaning itself is constituted. They plunge so
deeply into the reified language that to reach them, the reader must delve
into the nethermost recesses of his knowledge of the linguistic practice of
the day; once there, he may discover that bestowing meaning in this way
does not produce a step towards the poem but only repeats his own
assumptions. The reader, as a subjectivity on the verge of total reification,
can only restitute himself through engaging with the current word order.
This engagement, as Prynne’s volume asserts, begins at the point of utter
stasis where man can see, as in the famous Ashberyan convex mirror, the
panorama of his own entanglement.

Prynne’s poetry since the 1990s and Not-You has progressed away from
everyday word orders towards greater textual freedom and variation.
David Caddy captures the experience of Prynne’s later poetry:

Two words invariably used to describe the initial experience of reading the
poems are “arid” and “difficult.” “Arid,” as if it were written in a desert.
That is to say that it is often missing the props of mainstream metaphorical
poetry that enables a quick grasp of meaning, intention and the scope of the
poem under review. It is what is called “difficult” poetry. It is, as it were,
poetry of the desert.

It is as though the poet, once he has shown the reified and intricate nature
of modernity, has tried, at least partly, to escape the confines of the
communicative idiom. This intensification of word play has brought some
critics to argue that Prynne’s poems refuse “the figure of a persona with
whom the reader might identify, or locate meanings within” in favour of a
“text-voice.”

Although it would do a terrible violence to Prynne’s later

poems to claim they centralise about and derive from a unified persona,
the notion of the human subject entangled in the discourses of modernity
remains a prominent motif.

In lieu of singing and celebrating the self, Prynne works at a less

Romantically-hopeful level. His poems gather shimmers of idioms into a
patchwork vision of modernity, thereby intensifying textual strategies that
have served radically nominalist philosophical stances. In such an
environment the subject is scattered into spectral existence and becomes a

Caddy, “Notes,” 24.

Nigel Wheale, “Crosswording. Paths through Red D Gypsum,” in A Manner of

Utterance. The Poetry of J. H. Prynne, ed. Ian Brinton (Exeter: Shearsman Books,
2009), 168 – 169.

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network of intertextual threads of discourses, as Barthes would have it.
However, the volumes of the last twenty years rise from interesting
metaphors of modernity to voices of breakthrough humanist dissent, only
provided the category of the self is not abandoned. Indeed, Prynne’s work,
as it seems, cannot be discussed with any degree of seriousness unless it is
seen as denouncing some of the modes of existence in late modernity.
Among those the idea of the self is particularly important, since it is the
individual that suffers most if it is lost to the ubiquitous play of language.
Paradoxically, Prynne maintains the self in the most hostile environment
possible by extinguishing it almost thoroughly. As has been argued above,
by dint of dialectic logic, so dear to the later Prynne, the less the self is, the
more it is, and the worst nightmare it needs to contend with is reification,
which has variously been hinted at here through the notions of ossification
and fossilisation. That is why, the later books, by presenting greater
entanglement, seek to restitute man from a final assertion of himself.

It is For the Monogram (1997) that is here taken to best exemplify the

strategies of increased dispersal of narrative development while, at the
same time, pointing to a possible wholeness. All the sections of For the
Monogram at first glance strike as rigidly fixed into sixteen-line-long
lyrics evocative of the sonnet form. However, this fixity is then radically
dispelled by unexpected clause breakings, intensification of the use of
discordant nominal phrases and the use of unfamiliar specialised
vocabulary from, among others, mathematics, geology and computer
science. Thanks to these, the poems repeatedly shatter the hope of ever
producing an interpretation as solid as the lyrics themselves appear to be.
Instead, it is the very idea of stability, rigidity and completeness that the
poems come to ridicule, revealing the artificiality of any notion of fullness.

This mockery is instantiated already by the title in that a monogram

serves to indicate someone’s identity but, on the other hand, it is by no
means a watertight method of acknowledging it. Rather, a monogram may
be used to confirm one’s assumptions, since were I to use here the
monogram JHP, all would leap in the conclusion I mean the poet himself.
Moreover, WBY or TSE written on the cover of any book would in most
cases make one think of Yeats and Eliot; even though these seem to be
innocuous actions of the mind, it may be the case that one wishes to
deliberately convince us that the monogram refers to a particular person so
as to, for instance, incriminate them for something. The poems in the
book, as it may be argued, deceive us into hoping they would be only
slightly modified sonnets, while in fact they escape taxonomy of any kind.
In lieu of being “mono-” they are rather “protean-grams,” as the ending of
the first one suggests:

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[…] Floating star, even up the
score of a radial plot and maze over or spoken by
the sad sea ways. Afloat oblique and limping
at this the monocline in agreement for interrupted
wings, nodding thistle to melancholy orchid.

There is no beating this fragment into firmness of a single utterance
although the lines do gather images that project a familiar landscape. The
star floats on the calm sea; the feeling of sadness is amplified by the lack
of waves, which in the poem is signalled by the “crippled” word “ways”
that miss the letters “v” and “e;” as a result, the sea’s speech is more of a
murmur. The design which the star casts on the surface is a systematic
“radial plot” that will every minute “maze over” and disperse. Then there
is the land which, tilted at the same angle all across the visible scene,
meets the sea’s star. However, despite its monocline stability, the ground
is also “afloat oblique and limping;” it responds to the “interrupted wings”
of birds scudding across the night sky and furls itself back into its
metonyms: waving thistle and “melancholy orchid” both accompanying
the feeling of sadness with suggestions of death.

There is no denying an almost impressionistic eye of the speaker who

depicts the above scene but, at the same time, he will not resort to the
familiar imaging techniques. Those have already lost their evocative
power and may only serve to pander to lazy thinking in that what once
struck as unmatched portrayal of the landscape has by now been to a large
degree absorbed by culture and commoditised; for a pensive scene to be
imaged forth, one would go for Wordsworth’s “These waters, rolling from
their mountain-springs / With a soft inland murmur.” To evoke a
landscape of impetuous blizzards, it may be Milton’s hell. Yet, these lines
cannot be redeployed with their initial force. Aware of it as the speaker of
For the Monogram is, he goes in search for new modes of expression,
which we witness assemble throughout the volume.

The landscape sketched towards the beginning of the first section of

the book keeps returning in each following lyric. The sea remains the
setting and the land, differently metamorphosed, still loses itself in the
expanse of water. In the following poem of the sequence the sea’s sadness
is returned to in the image of “gripped undulation” set against “this
vitreous floating star at dusk.” Waves catch the star in their repetitive flow
and seem to freeze it into glass image. The fixity that sets in this poem is a
background against which there appear demoniac presences inhabiting the
scene:

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[…] More than ever saving a grace,
singing and dying to frequent and haunt the river
from its own wreck in shadow play they too are
hunted down in plate-sunk detachment, star-burst
or cluster pointing, dearest agile daybreak.

Who “they” are is impossible to fathom but it seems they feel more
comfortable in the river’s shadow play, which they can frequent as
spectres. However, as the scene intensifies into a coherent image, there
comes the “star-burst or cluster pointing” which suggests a break not only
of the day but also a cutting of the unravelling scene. The final lines
suggest an attempt at an escape and mitigation of the hunting, but it is
unclear how successful the river spectres are.

The poem opens itself to a possibility that they are actually the nymphs

before they departed and the whole scene sketched in the first two sections
is the image of a land not yet spoiled by urban sprawl. There is a balance
between fluidity and order, with sentences slowly finding their way into
places wherein they are ensconced, if not grammatically then imagistically.
The poems coming next seem to divert from the first two lyrics in that the
former seek more to “connect atonal floats” than to furtively summon up
imaginary landscapes. Instead of the thistles and orchids, there is now “a
bright blue light flashing over the exit plaque” and the place in which we
find ourselves slowly turns out to be the contemporary world of clippings,
short messages and single words replacing entire life narratives.

The poems organise themselves about the motif of the city, which is

depicted as a marketplace where one can purchase not only produce but
also fun. It is the arena of a myriad of images, all for sale, of what man can
become if only he should elect to purchase a given product or engage in a
particular game; the “livid face of a captured city centre immersed in
colorants” suggests both violence done to the city and the resultant
superficial garishness. The city puts on a make-up to disguise its inner
destruction: “search the sea for gain in deception.” The sea is thus
metamorphosed into the space of protean display of colourful images
where no star is reflected anywhere. The principle of change here is
superficiality, inasmuch as identity is an impermanent mask not assumed
but offered on the market of selves and “Bored with fraud rowdy crowds
flip / coin exchange macaronics.” Fraud rules the day and the response to
it are catch-phrases borrowed from niche jargons such as that of stock
exchange. The effect is a certain pliability of the idea of who one is:

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[…] Roll over to
the cheat show of mirror facings, costed mini cheddar
countenance alert losing face show in face of
the city step-out and porch rictus […]

That is the panorama of the modern metropolis, and also the ultimate
threat to the self as it has been described here, in that the city urges one to
surrender to the plethora of possibilities on offer, all of which are mere
“mirror facings.” The words “face,” “countenance” and “rictus” suggest
the different possible fake-identities, the “shadows in concrete” as the lyric
has it, one can assume from an urbane denizen of “the city step-out” to the
grumbling “porch rictus.” The choice rests on whether a particular face
allows for fun: “Fun first fun rest set / as best fit extracts from its smallest
free block.” The shortness of the words, the almost ludicrous assonance of
a variety of /e/ sounds, and implication that any enjoyment at all is indeed
the best enjoyment, all come to suggest the truly unbearable lightness of
being in the modern city.

This lightness is repeatedly evoked in the poems through images

associated with pastimes and selling/buying. These two ideas correspond
with the accepted routines of modern respite, which consists in having as
much fun as possible, whenever possible with the fun being reduced to
shopping sprees. The city offers “Brisket world animation come out to flay
runtime” and “brain peeler” with which to “peel back this vivid failed
bruise, baleful / to scale and burning.” Animation is omnipresent here but,
as the poems reveal, it is a form of “brain peeling.” Cutting, ripping,
bleeding, wounding and bruising recur throughout the poem, always in
contexts dealing with attempts to have fun. As in the above excerpts from
one of the lyrics, “world animation” is coupled with “brain peeling,”
which in turn becomes an advertisement-like idea. The purpose of
products, as it may be argued, is to deaden man’s awareness of himself
and keep him bounded within the confines of the “colorants district.” The
city does not allow for entertainment beyond what it offers, thereby
ensuring that the individual will remain trapped in the dominant cultural
modes, whose sole aim, as it seems, is their self-preservation.

Just as enjoyment becomes a stiffening of one’s critical capacity, so

selling and buying are legitimised as replacements of free thinking. As one
of the lyrics puts it:

Tuck up tawdry attraction for the follow broken air
to separate yield and distort along the floor,
moving flood in a pure scheme they have but them
selves alone flutter drain orphans in ultra wrong

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unit time set. Either dies young or lives (almost)
for ever trailing blab across some bad sequence
of strides, seeking trim animal redress […]

The opening of this poem problematizes the possibility of critical
awareness of what is done to curtail the individual potential. The “tawdry
attractions” that are “distorted along the floor” imply the goods as well as
services that litter the mall shelves in all kinds of forms. Yet, in spite of
their dubious quality, the attractions maintain a tight grip on the people
who flock for them, resembling a “moving flood in a pure scheme.” Thus
even queuing is done so as to fit in with a recognisable pattern. Those
standing in lines become the “drain orphans in ultra wrong unit time set”
insomuch as they live utterly stranded among the many lights with which
the city is replete. Lonely, destitute of spirituality, self-awareness and,
crucially, thinking, the people exist in the wrong time. The world that the
poem images forth sits comfortably with the dystopic Brave New World
and its controlled breeding and up-bringing, with the difference being that
For the Monogram diagnoses the situation very much here and now.

The options the poem allows for are either death, presumably for those

loath to fully embrace the pleasurable status quo, or everlasting life, at
least seemingly so, for the adverb “almost” comes only in brackets. The
vital enjambment occurs in the penultimate line of the above excerpt in
that the (almost) eternal life is shown to be an eternal cycle of “trailing
blab across some bad sequence / of strides.” Thus life is understood to be a
tedious transmission of hearsay, irrelevancies and clichés, which takes
place with different degree of success both in life (a “sequence of strides”)
and through the various media (“bad sequence” as in computer jargon,
where the phrase denotes an incorrect command). That one seeks “trim
animal redress” only serves to indicate that man craves to satisfy his
simplest urges; in turn, those are advertised as desirable effects of “good
fun.” In this way the city creates a society which perfectly fits in the
environment proffered by modernity. As a result of an unsettling twist, it is
man that is adjusted to the existent situation and not the reverse; now the
case of “patters matching the surveillance” and “distal cuts raging in the
street” seems to have become commonplace.

As it has repeatedly been asserted throughout the present chapter,

Prynne composes his lyrics on the basis of an eradication of the subject
which only then returns with a vengeance. In For the Monogram the city
of colorants admits of no strong, agonic self, for that would effectively

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burst the pre-established limits. The modern metropolis

is a place of

complete stagnation, a place where man has been reified and turned into a
resource. However, the recurrent suggestions of pain and violence reveal
the condition as artificial and impossible to maintain; the smallest “defect
of strictness set to a little head or button,” as the poem seems to indicate in
places, may be enough to topple the entire construction. Yet, this is left to
speculation as For the Monogram exists in a gridlock in which man is
caught up in the world he does not fully understand or in the least control.
The rigid stanzaic form of these poems limits the space of utterance
similar to the way the city confines the individual; also the ostensible
syntactic free play is revealed as a burden on the language which appears
to be trying to gain some flow but is thwarted in the process. Whatever
freedom there is in these poems comes from inside the shimmer of words
that retain the unpredictability of meaning when juxtaposed with one
another. There are points in these lyrics, some of which have been
discussed above, when the city regime is challenged, only figuratively and
briefly, but boldly nonetheless. It is in those fleeting moments of
opposition that eternal life promised by the colorants is shown for sheer
blab.

In rather stark contrast to For the Monogram stands Pearls that Were

(1999). The latter represents a hopeful glance towards the future, which is
rather surprising given the end of the century publication date. However,
Prynne seems to be looking with an optimistic eye to the new century and
new millennium, although the later volumes will display a serious flagging
of this initial confidence. Still, in Pearls that Were the story of Orpheus is
retold but with ambiguous “some hope remaining.” The figure of Orpheus,
the arch-poet, is used to illustrate the power of poetry to, if not change the
world, then to assert its insight into the nature of reality. Indeed, the lyrics
comprising the sequence form a most pertinent image of modernity, which
in many ways opposes the false consciousness prevalent in For the
Monogram.

The sequence starts with the poem which proffers the tone for the

remainder of the book: “show to hope again / doubt yet believing, request
the lost, / the blush to shine.” Hope is here known to be a difficult feeling,
neither is it accepted naively, for doubt seems always to be assumed as the
starting point to every poetic utterance. This is a sharp recognition of what
constitutes poetry, if the lines are read self-reflexively, in the sense that the

Recall the modernist cityscape described by Berman: “hundreds of boarded-up

abandoned buildings and charred and burnt-out hulks of buildings; dozens of
blocks covered with nothing at all but shattered bricks and waste.” All that is Solid,
291.

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lyric may be a suitable platform for regaining whatever has been “lost” but
only provided the lost is “requested.” Even if such requesting might cause
harm to the quester, the answers gained will prove worthy of the exertions:
“around the wound / her finest charm glowing.” Recalling the meaning of
wound from Wound Response, it becomes clear that only from a painful
involvement with the world can powerful and penetrating poems spring.
Similarly, as a consequence of the self’s near extinction in the world of
colorants this self can be reborn as an agonic construct: “So Orpheus
tamed the wild beasts.” There can be no freedom, no life without the
dialectic intervention of poetry in the everyday.

Prynne’s response to modernity is still critical, and in Pearls that Were

this criticism may be subsumed under two complementary strains. On the
one hand the poems reject and scoff at the singleness of vision that the
contemporary world would like to retain, with the assumption that reality
can still be harmoniously and comfortably hung between binary
oppositions, primarily of good and evil; on the other hand, the lyrics seek
to offer an unrestrained freedom of boundless imaginative possibility. The
two drives, against binary limitation and in favour of artistic creation, are
both dialectically linked with the world; as the former seeks to challenge
the existent preconceptions, so the latter is an attempt to move beyond the
money-oriented modes of self-development. Neither can exist without the
presence of the other, in that the one represents a critically negative pull
and the other restitutes the reality which would otherwise become a node
of chaotic signs, free-floating signifiers, and thus would return to the
present state of stagnation.

The call at the end of one of the poems best represents the struggle

against limitations:

Too single! caress fronds as to liberate
race hatred’s package tour
whose every touch, kiss the rising hand
will too bleach-whiten yours.

The singleness here is understood by reference to racist yearnings for
purity of race. Even a touch of race hatred can wreak damage by deceiving
one into a belief that only abhorring others can make one into a true –
what? Patriot? White? There is no responding to such a claim. Racism is
here doubly associated with the white society and capitalist culture,
represented by the English tourist invention of a package tour. What is
pitched against racism is a passionate experience of nature. Far is this from
romantic naivety, however, since nature is here only glimpsed and
acknowledged as the other to which we as humans have no access. Yet, it

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is with this other that we must live, since it does constitute a sphere in
which we dwell bodily. Gernot Böhme argues that, as our bodies were,
nature was alienated from human experience, but the time has ripened to
regain it; the reason is not some greater awareness of the world about us
but simply an environmental peril that has dawned on us.

Just as in the

case of Böhme’s call for reuniting with nature, in the poem nature is
suggested to be the place of manifoldness to which we must strive once
more.

This violence done to nature recurs throughout the volume, as though

Orpheus, the singer of beauty, is mourning the modern viciousness. In one
of the later lyrics it is the white man’s culture that is witnessed to deprive
land of its produce for the sake of profit:

In green return, in demented tribunal
as withies flourish and divide
for eggs in bold type, eggs still not sold
so laid in earth to mark a void.

Spare ribs, new knees, trash from the pitch
at fresh-cut vocal submission
to diagram all the working matches
joined up in verdant rejection.

The “green return” might refer to an ostensible realisation that nature
needs protection, which is then revealed to be just as profit-obsessed as the
first colonisers. What this obsession contrives to do is not to save nature
but to attract attention to it so that “withies flourish and divide.” Whatever
is not sold is thrown out “to mark a void” in large trash depots. Nothing is
given back to the earth unless it is utterly useless. Nonetheless, the lyric
ends with a promise of “verdant rejection;” although what is to be rejected
is never unravelled, it seems that it is the litter that finally joins up and
bulks at the consumer culture. From the trash depots, dark spots where
there is nothing modern man can reap, there comes a green force of
verdure. As an earlier stanza of the poem asserts:

Under four-part arachnoid invitation
of songs riven with fresh sound,
the green leaves grew all around the window,
sweet and completely around.

Gernot Böhme, Filozofia i estetyka przyrody w dobie kryzysu Ğrodowiska

naturalnego, trans. Jarosáaw Merecki (Warszawa: Oficyna Naukowa, 2002), 131 –
132.

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The fresh sound also comes from the remote “arachnoid” places and
immediately enwinds the window. Reverting to The Oval Window, it may
be claimed that in Pearls that Were, together with the window, man
himself is embraced by the “green leaves” and “songs riven with fresh
sound.” Herein lies the hopeful note of the volume, the slow decrepitude
of the planet, eradication of both fauna and flora and all the horrors of
possible inundation call for a simple answer, to allow the “song riven with
fresh sound” to take over.

In Pearls that Were the imagery of freshness and newness is linked

with the notion of multiplicity. In its celebration of the various and the
different, the book chimes with postcolonial theories. The obvious
intertext of Prynne’s book is The Tempest and Ariel’s famous song:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.

Without going into the intricacies of postcolonial readings of Shakespeare’s
last play, it may be argued that Ariel’s song comprises many a motif dear
to Prynne. The final couplet suggests that the sea turns Alonso’s corpse
into “something rich and strange.” Richness may be referred to its
multiplicity and strangeness to the novelty with which marine life is
customarily associated. As a result, detaching the song from the body of
the play, Ariel speaks the words in praise of natural difference as opposed
to the limited idea of a dichotomous master-slave relation which
characterises the world of men. Therefore the play, which has been taken
by some critics to be so steeped in its colonialist narrative that it pre-empts
all attempts at making it sound the indigenous voice

from within extols

the variety implicit in the indigenous cultures.

The point taken from Ariel’s song is confirmed in Bhabha’s notion of a

hybrid language. The cultural critic takes his notion from a critical premise
filtered through Derridean conception of writing and elaborates a
theoretical stance which in a large measure corresponds with the counter-
totalising drive in Prynne’s volume. Habib explains it succinctly:

For a postcolonial reading of The Tempest consult Ilka Saal, “Taking on The

Tempest: Problems of Postcolonial Representation,” in Towards a Transcultural
Future. Literature and Society in a “Post”-Colonial World, ed. Geoffrey V. Davis
et al. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 199.

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[T]he language of political critique is effective not because it maintains
rigid oppositions between terms such as master and slave but because it
“overcomes the given grounds of opposition and opens up a space of
translation: a place of hybridity” which engages in the construction of a
new (rather than preconceived) political object and endeavour. Such a
language will be dialectical without recourse to “a teleological or
transcendent History […] the event of theory becomes the negotiation of
contradictory and antagonistic instances that open up hybrid sites and
objectives of struggle, and destroy those negative polarities between
knowledge and its objects, and between theory and practical-political
reason.

Quoting Bhabha, Habib makes a point of stating that the hybrid language
is vested with the power to pull down the simple binary oppositions that
the colonial thinking was founded on. What replaces the master-slave
dogma is a dialectical construal of the subject being realised in the
multiplicity inherent in the object. Therefore postcolonial theory utilises
Adorno’s critique of reification in order to subvert the stasis of the colonial
hegemony and replace it with what Bhabha subsumes under his notion of
hybridity as “in betweenness.”

In Pearls that Were this hybrid language arrives in the form of

response to the “race hatred’s package tour.” It seems to be Bhabha’s
postulates that underpin the dialectical rejection of both philosophical and
political notions of singleness, which the subsequent lyrics in the cycle
make. In preference to the gridlock, both racial and environmental, Pearls
that Were celebrates the pearls in themselves, not because they may once
have been Alonso’s eyes. Next to the crystal of The Oval Window pearls
are proffered as the object of infinite complexity and diversity. Referring
to Adorno’s subject-object dialectic, it may be inferred that the self in
Pearls that Were is the result of the ensuing variety of the hybrid language
which the poems in the latter part of the book offer. Even though it is not
asserted directly, the subjectivity is again retained in the call to greater
freedom in the sense that these lyrics offer an idiom capable of
withstanding the reifying forces of the binary culture. Here Ariel and
Caliban may still speak the language of the invader but they do so on their
own terms and their voice comes from the “in between.” This Orpheus is
no Prospero in that he does not relinquish his music at the end but resolves
to sing in a truly all-embracing language.

M. A. R. Habib, A History of Literary Criticism. From Plato to the Present

(London: Blackwell, 2005), 751. Emphasis in Original.

Habib, A History of Literary Criticism, 750.

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The denunciation of singleness which was made in the invoking of

racism in the above-discussed lyric is compensated in the idea of
multiplicity underlying what one of the poems calls “levity of design.” The
notion is qualified by two adjectives that constitute the previous line of the
lyric: “horizontal, floating.” It is precisely between the two poles, marked
out by those two words, that the entire Prynnean oeuvre appears to be
spread; it is also these two that demarcate the limits within which the
modern subject is restituted. On the one hand “horizontal” relates to the
borderlines of a mapped out territory, one which is flat and easy to
traverse; however, a horizontal design has no outstanding points, all is of
the same stock. In this way horizontal places the design firmly within the
culture of singleness where the Other is forever the inferior outsider who
cannot cross the stalwartly delineated border. On the other hand “floating”
is associated with all that is not stable and that has no fixed boundaries.
There are no easily discernible dichotomies in the landscape that is
constituted by constant flow and change. This is the lush greenery that
surrounds the window, indeed it is the rhizome that the poem hints at.

It is no accident that Deleuze and Guattari come to be mentioned, since

it is their idea of a book as a rhizome that, as it may be argued, informs the
notion of “levity of design” and points to a path of a restituted subjectivity.
They famously distinguish between the root-book and the radicle-system
book. Whereas the former is characterised by “the law of the One that
becomes two, then of the two that becomes four… Binary logic,” the latter
proves “all the more total for being fragmented.”

The book as rhizome is

“an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General
and without an organising memory or central automaton, defined solely by
a circulation of states.”

That understanding of rhizomatics underlies what

the “floating levity of design” seems to mean. Moreover, Deleuze and
Guattari argue that “unity is consistently thwarted and obstructed in the
object, while a new type of unity triumphs in the subject;”

the unity is

that of “ambivalence and overdetermination.” In this respect Adorno’s
subject-object dialectics gets its enunciation closely corresponding with
Prynne’s poetry in that the subject, always dispersed in the language
practice of the later poems, is faced with “rhizomatic (dis)order” which
comprises the untameable diversity; it is in the engagement with this
processual changeability of the poem/object that the subject finds a path to

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “Introduction: Rhizome,” in The Norton

Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al. (London: Norton,
2001), 1603 – 1604.

Deleuze, “Rhizome,” 1605.

Deleuze, “Rhizome,” 1604.

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a new unity, one beyond the reifying drives of modernity. The subject is
restituted forever anew and becomes a viable formation capable of
withstanding textualising oblivion.

By being both delineated and ever changing, the “levity of design” is

in itself a dialectical construct inasmuch as it implies a fixity of pattern
which is at the same time unstable and frivolous. The very poem is a sum
of such tensions inside the language, and these result from the contrary
drives of delimitation and fluctuation. Even though they are untotalisable,
the poems do not cease to mean, to formulate thoughts into syntactic-
syntagmatic segments which are recognisable to any user of the English
language. However, to try to elicit some fixed pattern of meaning would
require either violence or deliberate interpretive bad faith on the part of the
reader. The “levity of design” suggests that although there may be some
beguiling interpretive paths glimmering in them, the poems consist of
intertwining plateaus that are in constant motion.

The last lyrics in Pearls that Were celebrate this lightness of

arrangement in what is perhaps the merriest part of Prynne’s oeuvre. Once
the binary logic has been dealt with and the racist singularity both
philosophical and political has been exposed, the hybrid languages flow
with no restraint and allow for jocular juggling of past and present
intertexts.

Up in sparkling glee, over wide salt sea
oh madam don’t be coy
for all you glory, fear of another day
and another story.

Across the thread a hooked undertow
that could rant and roar over
the level slit of its own horizon, lifted
in fierce, disordered pleasure.

This is “levity of design” at its highest and most evocative. The madam
here relates to Marvell’s coy mistress whom the poet coaxes into a
sporting “while we may, / And now, like amorous birds of prey.” In
Prynne the woman is shown to fear another story, or another possible
narrative, as though the implication were that one can transform one’s life
on the basis of what life story one elects to adopt. Even though such an
ironic attitude is alien to Prynne’s poetry in general, in this lyric the
speaker, courting the woman, half-seriously perhaps, still believes that
there is a chance for a genuine change of morals should a different self-
narrative be assumed. All in all, who one is results from the design put in

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motion before one was even born, and since the design is all but
unswerving, a momentary flair of passion and one might plunge into an
entirely different life. At least, this seems to be the suggestion.

The sparkling sea, ostensibly calm in the first stanza quoted, is

revealed to contain passages of energy in its undertow “that could rant and
roar over / the level slit of its horizon.” The sea thus strikes as a correlative
of the emotional state of the woman inasmuch as the still waters may at
any instant lift “in fierce, disordered pleasure.” This is a pun on the sexual
act or the enjoyment of the “levity of one’s life design.” Disordered
pleasures appear to correspond closely to the dialectics of the “levity of
design” in the sense that in the poem under discussion the tension between
calmness and untamed energies is even more unmistakeable than in the
one previously analysed. There is passion both in the woman and in the
“wide salt sea,” even if neither one betrays the undercurrents of raging
forces; there is, in other words, a will to live, to change the status quo, to
pull down the reified self and experience the burst of life first hand.

The world Pearls that Were projects in its latter part is full of freedom

and openness to novelty. Although there are glimpses at the bitterness of
reality, the predominant mood is that of jocundity. However, mirth never
comes unqualified by disorder as the speaker realises that pleasure cannot
be enjoyed without being interrelated with anarchy. The poems are far
from discounting chaos but the implication throughout is that anarchy
must be dialectically joined with the forces of order. As one of the lyrics
indicates, “arraignment” must remain in force, albeit “loose.”

This chaos is also present in the syntax of these poems, elliptical and

jarring as it is as times, as well as in figurative processes. Quite clearly,
“incipient literal sense of entry / sets all points muted.” Literalness is the
domain of everyday, customary use of language, thus it is pervaded with
ideological jargons discussed in the previous chapter. Communicative
expediency, which is the goal of every language,

is the preserver of false

consciousness which with time becomes so entrenched in the daily
linguistic praxis as to be virtually ineradicable. What Pearls that Were
proposes are “Derisive permuted fictions.” They are the products of the
“levity of design;” these language games, whose function is not so distant
from Khlebnikov’s neologisms, never assume any seriousness of finiteness
inasmuch as they are created through engagement with the multiple object.
These language games are the poems in Pearls that Were, twisting and
turning phrases until they lose their clarity and obviousness; those words
and phrases never cease in their mutual exchange on the page so that they
begin to resemble Benjamin’s constellations. Like “the individual

Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 12.

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existence of stars” in Benjamin,

words are, on the one hand, preserved in

their figurative freedom; on the other, their meaning results from their
relational positions with other words. Therefore the poems offer derisive,
frivolous permuted fictitious designs of words.

What transpires in these poems is a genuine enjoyment of the inner

dialectics of words. As long as those lyrics as constellations of words and
phrases prevail, language will remain a means of restitution and that is
reason enough to rejoice. What is restituted in these lyrics is both the
subject and its world:

And word upon word, step
by next step regaining
they’ll walk and talk, wisely
flicker some hope remaining.

The two people, arguably Orpheus and Eurydice successfully fled from the
kingdom of the dead, but also any couple of the sublunary world, continue
on their path accompanied by an incessant flow of words. Until, the last
lyric of the sequence implies, there is conversation, and words are placed
in the context of other words, some hope remains. There is a shade of
sentimentalism here, a distant tear is perhaps shed for an unknown yet
ineluctable parting but despite the near-emotional stereotype, the poem
works its hopeful magic.

“Levity of design” is a method of arrangement of words, which ensures

that no meaning is final, no sense stable and no reading safe. However, in
spite of this admission of a critic’s incommensurability of stature to
Prynne’s oeuvre, it is by dint of such derisive compositions that language
never falls into false consciousness. Therefore only in such a language can
the self be sure it never finds itself turned into a resource in the world
where productivity is the only yardstick of success. Neither does the
jocose mood of Pearls that Were carry over to the next volumes. Yet, a
certain “levity of design” sets in for good in these poems and becomes the
means whereby the poet can tackle reification of all kinds.

In many ways the volume that may be viewed as directly opposed to

the hopefulness of Pearls that Were and also as gathering the threads of
arguments of this chapter is Biting the Air (2003). Its central motifs hover
about the issues connected with biohazards and reification of both
language and the self; these are sorely assailed by a “levity of design” in

The notion of a constellation is lucidly analysed in David S. Ferris, The

Cambridge Introduction to Walter Benjamin (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2008), 69 – 70.

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139

that the poems seem to be random collections of words hewn into regular
and rhythmical stanzas, but looked at closely reveal a boundless signifying
potential, quite at odds with the seeming orderliness. Individual words,
phrases and longer clauses clash with one another in a dialectical tension
productive of an air of urgency and ironic criticism.

The volume projects a number of threats to man and his world. In the

opening poem the aura of medical experimentation sets in only to recur in
other lyrics in the sequence: “Even hand // bestowing pharmaceutical front
to avoid […] slide under be- / fore matter planning your treat advance
infirm / in legal glowing stunt.” The “legal stunt” is then alluded to later in
the poem: “drug outsourcing denies / active pivotal racer hot-rod.” There
is nothing clear here but the fact that some pharmaceutical mogul
manufactured a drug that turned out injurious to health in some way. Yet,
even this much is left to be inferred as it would be were the situation to
happen in a real medical multinational. There are ways of eradicating the
problem, outsourcing the responsibility being just one that is hinted at.
Elsewhere this medical jeopardy is fashioned into a prophesy of total
annihilation: “This is the cancerous lace curtain fringing / a lake of toxic
refuse, waiting to be born.” The “slouching beast” of Yeats’s poem
becomes a cancer-conducive curtain which seals off an even more direct
toxic peril. Even though there are such dangers present, all that is done
about them is “a start discount epidemic disclosure to fix up / patent
lockage.” If anything is being done to avert the dramatic consequences of
an untested medicine, it is not to keep people safe but to block some
patents and thus prevent the competition from making a huge profit.

Money crops up once more in Biting the Air and as in the previous

books it is not naively considered the root of all evil; rather, it is shown to
be the easiest guarantee of success measured by popular standards, even
though this success might come at a great cost: “it is easy to make / a
country prosperous and blue and bright over / and blindness forever in
hand on hand proverb.” The ease stems from the direct advancement in
social status that money ensures. However, as the first poem in the
sequence notes, such quick financial improvement is tantamount to
blindness to the obvious fact that what is extirpated in the process are
individuality, freedom and openness. Money is here inextricably linked
with the “hand on hand proverb” of a language; together with wealth
comes the utter reification of the idiom which is used only to maintain the
conditions of the best possible profit-making.

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[…] Don’t make sores if
you can’t pay to dress their origin, a globe toll
spoiling for animus. Step to the bar. Be a credit
witness. Speak real slow and with pauses […]

This is the proverbial language that has killed all dialectic productivity; it
is a world of a deceased constellation. All that is left is to “be a credit
witness” and speak slowly as though one were addressing a half-wit or
somebody who only understands the most rudimentary language;
confirmation of the status quo is the only statement needed. Under the
discourse of profit, a “toll” is bound to become an animus of the entire
society.

The world of Biting the Air is fraught with all manner of ideologisms

that seek to reduce man to the function of an optimised resource whose
sole function is to buy and sell. Similar to the city from For the Monogram
that propounded only two goals worthy of striving for: enjoyment and
trade, in Biting the Air one is expected to be “Sated to a faculty / with
snack extras, set on crest.” One should be content and complacent with a
single of his faculties working and with a pack of snacks in limpid hand.
The goal is not to overcome the existent modes; on the contrary, the true
achievement lies in painstakingly going at the average tempo:

the rise to supervise attainment must fast level
off and then diminish, outrun by dilution
and underperformance. By crap easy gambles.

What counts here is not to strive towards something beyond the standard,
even at the cost of underperformance. Should one choose to disobey, there
are means of stalling one’s progress: “Thick mitts for / an early start,
precious upward mounting oval / mannerism, his park molested.” Unless
man wishes to run the risk of violence being done to him, he will observe
the rule “don’t lift or you’ll / break a limit verge.” Moderation and
unexceptionality seem to be the qualities that the money market is on the
lookout for, since they guarantee that one will perfectly fit in the larger
machine of profit-making.

The world that Biting the Air images forth is a landscape of infertility,

causticity and proverbial fixity, all of which delimit modernity in its quest
for economic progress. What counts here is swiftness, also as regards
communication; that is why the language must be proverbial; a sentence
must send the right message before it is even finished, as only then will the
market function to the best of its capacity. Thus is born the ossification
which, despite their mutual differences, Heidegger and Adorno exert

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themselves to tackle. In this situation of intellectual stagnation the poem
can only offer the “levity of design.” Notions must be splintered, syntax
must be mauled if humankind is to survive as the subject. The lyric ending
the book is adamant in its diagnosis:

[…] Don’t you yet notice
a shimmer on bad zero, won’t you walk there
and be the shadow unendurably now calibrated.

In the space of linguistic reification man can only be calibrated to match
the world in which he as been thrown; the bad zero as the ultimate centre
is the place where all are adjusted and optimised to the standard. Even
though the spirit may rebel, may not endure, the calibration must proceed.
However, both questions in the above-quoted excerpt come in the
negative, implying that not all is yet lost. Perhaps bad zero can still be
avoided or even unbalanced given its peculiar shimmers. Perhaps one can
still resolve not to approach the calibration centre.

As questions remain dangling at the end of Biting the Air, it needs to

be stressed that there is a means of escape which the book projects. It is
the “levity of design” that displays itself in the tension that the poems
create between the fixity of their stanzaic form, their world of monetary
obsession, their occasional proverbiality, and the resistance their offer to
an all-embracing, univocal reading. Thus by exuding an aura of the
complete reification of the self, the book speaks in a powerful tone of
where to look for the modern subject. By mapping out the grim territory of
false consciousness, in Biting the Air, but also in all his earlier and later
works, Prynne opens up a path, albeit indirect, leading to the construal of
the new subject. Impossible though it may seem to rescue the ego as
complete in itself and prospectively self-aware, these poems retain an
image of the man restituted, non-finite but also ineradicable from the face
of modernity and still capable of reshaping his own future in a language he
is forever yet to make available.

HAPTER

OUR

TORIES OF

ISENTANGLING

LUE

LIDES AT

EST

In this chapter the notion of levity of design as a frame for restituting

the subject submerged in the discursive entanglements is traced in the
volume that ends Prynne’s latest Poems, Blue Slides at Rest (2004). The
threads of the arguments that have run thus far weave into the present
analysis, making the closing book in many respects a staple of the poet’s
oeuvre. Its summarising character notwithstanding, Blue Slides at Rest
opens up tracks in Prynne’s writing that lead beyond the readings here
proposed and into the most recent volumes, Streak – Willing – Entourage
Artesian (2009) and more obliquely in Subsongs (2010).

In a review of the book, Jim Kerry notes that “much of Prynne’s

writing is a complex response of an intensely serious often anguished
sensibility; or, in Keats’s startlingly psychophysical terms, ‘an electral
changing misery’ in the face of the miseries of the world.”

The

seriousness of response stems from the fact that the speaker(s) of the poem
are trapped in a world of dramatic oppression which calls for grave
revaluation. True enough, by its very title Blue Slides at Rest intuits some
suppressed trauma. Despite the fact that the slides locate us in a
playground, in lieu of children cheering and lounging about, the
implication is that there is no movement. Rest thus invokes a place
deserted by children or perhaps one from which they have been banished.
The image of an empty playground and only slightly moving blue slides
proves rather disturbing in that there is no knowing what actually
happened, who took the kids or why. However, the incipient horror that
overcomes us is immediately qualified by indomitable hopefulness that
after all the children may have been called to dinner and the now
abandoned slides will be infested with the uproarious bunch on the
following day. This ambivalence introduces the volume’s principal theme
of how short a line separates happiness from utter destitution. At this

Jim Kerry, “Controlled Annulment,” The Cambridge Quarterly 1 (2006): 77.

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juncture the answer is that there is no difference between the two because
both are mere illusions created by the modern society. Whether the slides
are at rest due to the children’s having run off home or whether some
tragedy has occurred, the initial anticipation of some disruption of normal
circumstances is in place. In order to thoroughly unpack the possible
reasons for the feeling of something being amiss, the present reading of
the sequence sets out from an analysis of the poem’s formal features and
proceeds to explore the thematic aspects through the methods in which
they are presented.

The poem comprising the sequence strikes as being particularly regular.
There are twenty stanzas, each consisting of twelve lines, thus bringing to
mind the form of sonnet in a manner similar to For the Monogram. The
lines are heavily stressed; the rhythm seems regular but is enervated with
momentary slips and unexpected assonances, which serves to break up the
metronome tonality. There are passages which lull one into fluent
recitation: “Face rental flap to foreign tongues, her no one.” The opening
accumulation of stressed syllables turns into an iamb that peculiarly ends
with a trochee; smoothly incorporated alliteration together with a hint at a
caesura after the fifth syllable make the line, which is by no means
uncommon in the sequence, resemble an Old English epic. Classical forms
of the sonnet and the Old English epic poem come to the fore only
cursorily, as the rhythm varies from line to line. Soon after the quoted
excerpt in the same stanza there juts in the following line: “did you, fill or
kill, tongue and groove. Given.” The long and short /u/ are assailed by the
repetitive /ܼ/ in /dܼd/, /fܼl/, /kܼl/ and the closing /gܼv

n/, which destabilises

the tone and makes the line produce contrarious melodic lines. The long
sounds are only separated from the pounding /ܼ/ by the word “tongue” that
might be seen as a kind of caesura, allowing a contrapuntal jut within the
line.

There are more sound effects in the poem both easily perceptible and

less obvious to the ear. They orient the reading process, serving as signs of
traditional techniques employed in poetry. In spite of the fact that the
sequence of lyrics looks recognisable, resembling sonnets, as well as
sounds familiar when read out loud, its syntax is so violated as to prevent
comprehension even on an umpteenth approach. In a manner similar to
Pearls that Were each part of Blue Slides at Rest mixes parts of clauses,
leaving strains of jagged phrases that refuse to cohere. The impression is
that the sequence is constructed from stumped utterances which feature in
the lines only partly. Therefore the texture of the poem associates with a
large patchwork of incomplete sentences, but unlike in a patchwork these

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145

blocks of text deny totalisation into a whole picture, preferring to remain
only a promise of what such a picture might represent.

However, from those fragments of sentences certain images begin to

form and even if there is no narrative in the customary sense of the term,
there appear what seem to be stories. The poem calls for different reading
habits in the sense that it cannot be brought together by means of
sequential perusal, it abhors linearity of every kind; instead, it demands the
images to be hung up in the mind’s eye at the same time, with each phrase
sending interpretation into a slightly different direction. Only when each
line, sometimes each word, is understood to contain stories in themselves,
do these stanzas display an arrangement of themes and motifs. One begins
to perceive ephemeral stories that comprise the entire sequence.

The poem exists in constant dialectic negativity. On the one hand it

emphatically hints at ordinary reading strategies, invoking traditional
forms and means of composition; on the other, it thwarts every attempt at
recuperating a meaning through classical methods of interpretation.
Therefore the formula which Blue Slides at Rest may be said to perfect is
that of the “levity of design.” The poem creates a tension between long-
standing order of poetic writing and a chaos, for want of a better term, of
disordered pleasures of derisive permuted fictions. Such a design must be
employed in order to oppose the reification of both subjectivity and
society; reification whose principal aim is to transform free thinking into
brainless labour, Heidegger’s Saying of poetry into idle talk and Adorno’s
dialectic into false consciousness.

The jagged syntax reveals the traditional ordering mechanisms, such as

the division into stanzas, patterns of sonnets and the use of metrical feet,
as artificial and inherently historical constructs. The case is similar to that
in For the Monogram inasmuch as the arrangement of words into fixed
stanzas, in the case of Blue Slides at Rest resembling solid bricks of text, is
demonstrated to scarcely correspond with the subject matter in hand.
There is no more congruence between the sonnet and love poetry than
there is any relation between the signifier and the signified. Therefore
historical nature of poetic forms as well as language itself, both subject to
contingent circumstances, indicate that there is no inherent truth in poetry;
instead, there is only the meaning produced through clashing words with
one another and with material reality. The levity of design thus lies at the
core of Prynne’s later poetics. The dissonant syntax, creating incongruent
images that need to be viewed all at once, works against the enforced
incidental order of words, patterns and entire discourses, which constitute,
each in their own way, means of entanglement of the modern subject.

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It may then be argued that Prynne’s levity of design allows the poems

to speak of man’s ensnarement in a way that avoids sedimentation of both
the self and the language. The less these lyrics follow the patterns of
syntax and logic, the greater the freedom of expression they display. In
“Lyric Poetry and Society” Adorno remarks that the “greatness of works
of art lies solely in their power to let those things be heard which ideology
conceals. Whether intended or not, their success transcends false
consciousness.”

If the late modern Western world is clouded over with

the film of capitalism that demands thorough optimisation of the
individual, then Prynne seeks to liberate this individual, even though such
a liberation must necessarily mean man’s estrangement from what has
been inculcated into him as “natural rationality.” Herein lies man’s
greatest peril, since he willingly reposes faith in a system which he at the
same time repudiates and wishes to flee, even if only in literature, as
Romantic and neoromantic thinkers would have it. By demanding what
Adorno calls “the untouched virgin word,” man protests against “a social
condition which every individual experiences as hostile, distant, cold, and
oppressive;” it is this protest that makes poetry a voice of social
repression: “the more heavily social conditions weigh, the more
unrelentingly the poem resits, refusing to give in to any heteronomy, and
constituting itself purely according to its own particular laws.”

Blue

Slides at Rest is an apt illustration of Adorno’s postulate in the sense that
the poem violates the very laws the society holds dear: the expediency of
communication, easy understanding, and clarity of contents of an utterance.

The aim of poetry according to Adorno is to convey the criticism of the

social situation, which to him is permeated with ideology. Hence the very
place of poetry in society, and only in such environment does it exist, is
dialectical:

Lyric poetry, therefore, shows itself most thoroughly integrated into
society at those points where it does not repeat what society says – where it
conveys no pronouncements – but rather where the speaking subject (who
succeeds in his expression) comes to full accord with the language itself,
i.e. with what language seeks by its own inner tendency.

Poetry is most successful when it repeats neither what society says nor
how it says those things, since the inner tendency of language is to explore
particularities and not ossify into concepts. Whereas concepts become

Adorno, “Lyric Poetry,” 214.

Adorno, “Lyric Poetry,” 215.

Adorno, “Lyric Poetry,” 218.

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147

received wisdoms and assume the guise of eternal truths, particulars only
show inassimilable cases and differences. Thus, in Blue Slides at Rest, that
tendency of language is brought to the fore in that the poem speaks from
the furthest removed place from the society. Yet, it never loses sight of the
reality which it derives from, since it seeks not to shed the veneer of
modernity but to see through this veneer to the heart of entanglement; “the
subject negates both his naked, isolated opposition to society as well as his
mere functioning within rationally organized society.”

The subject must

be neither inside nor outside its social realm, for that would amount to
reification or escapism. Rather, it must operate “in between” rationality
and boundless freedom, between order and disorder.

Prynne’s “levity of design” may therefore be viewed as a late

enunciation of Adorno’s dialectics of lyric poetry. Through permuted
fictions the society’s reification in capitalist ideology is destabilised so that
what cannot be spoken of is actually uttered. The theme of the volume is
focused on life stories of people who, in one way or another, have fallen
outside the system. Therefore it is the subjects who have not contrived to
be integrated into the fabric of society that become the central characters
of the book. Presented in a levity of design, sorry though their fate turns
out to be in the end, they are restituted from discursive ossification into
page five stories. The process of this restitution is glimpsed by Allen
Fisher, who argues that “There is a liberation of the self in the complex of
a meaningful multiplicity, provided by the interrupting shifts of different
voices, which simultaneously avoids a discarding of that integrity that the
becoming of the self perpetuates.”

The different voice Fisher alludes to

may be referring to what has been termed jagged syntax. The shifts of
phrases liberate the self into self-expression. The sequence, through its
intensive violation of syntactic order, effects an idiom of expression that
allows the particular stories to be told outside the limits of everyday
speech. The poem is about lives which, perfectly known on the surface,
cannot be reduced to a simple heading, and in what follows I attempt to
reproduce, reading through the lenses of the “levity of design,” the
narrative(s) inherent in Blue Slides at Rest.

The opening poem of the sequence ushers in all the qualities discussed

above; despite its seeming regularity, the phrases do not display meaning
in accordance with any pre-set rules of the language:

Adorno, “Lyric Poetry,” 219.

Fisher, The Tropological Shovel, 37.

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Alt for allowed part, etch only into a folding
deeper there to follow if evenly graft aside
for low rent parented, palmar grasp […]

“Alt” may be an abbreviation either for altitude or for alternate which
seems the more likely option in that the first line then comes to suggests
that alternations are only possible within a pre-defined scope. The low rent
in line three strongly suggests that the situation here is house or apartment
renting, in which case the palmar grasp obviously denotes a successful
signing of the contract. Yet, there is also a less benign implication of these
lines. “Etch” might indicate an act of signing the lease with the proviso
that if something should go awry, the occupants are to remove themselves
from the premises and literally transplant themselves somewhere else. As
in Chekhov, a possibility of eviction hinted at in the first stanza is bound
to actually happen at a later point in the poem. Eventually the lease is
made: “ranging off to rental skip / better sever tap alleged child shelf.” The
implication here is that the occupants are a couple expecting a baby and
for whom this “mere ingression” is a step towards their own place.

The next stanza, whether it is a continuation of the story begun above

or a new narrative, further develops the background for the drama to come.
The situation is analogous:

Face rental flap to foreign tongues, her no one
no nation tilt prospecting so far a loan perplex
did you, fill or kill, tongue and groove. Given
all back minim advance to chill sprites ahead,
skin knowledge so forwarded allusive trance at
copious raw broken. Snapped even so. Far sway

In view of the increased interest in property rental among foreigners, as
the first line seems to suggest, the couple that is in no way connected to
the one of the first stanza resolve to get a mortgage, “a loan perplex,” so as
to purchase the premises. They clearly overstep the mark, since the
mortgage interest is going to prove a deathly burden. The short “fill or
kill” might be taken to illustrate the moment of signing that points towards
the fact that the couple have no real choice, since it is either fill in the form
and survive or kill (lest you be killed). As soon as all bank formalities are
completed, the buyers must only “back minim advance to chill sprites
ahead.” The sprite may playfully hint at the present owner, who requires a
down payment. With these done, there comes “skin knowledge,” another
figurative expression of a “palmar grasp,” and the purchase is “snapped.”

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149

So far everything has been well but “Breath fast fortune nothing” augers ill
for the future.
The third section of the poem instantiates the first blow to the couple.

[…] Will he advance
in ambit to her, her words inferring to a curvature
for time given and back. Privation settlement his
strung out unceasing meteor sense of high play,
get returned […]

The word advance puns here on the ideas of getting promotion at work and
approaching someone in a daring manner. While the former bodes well for
the man, the latter summons up rather grim prospects. The fact she needs
to infer the “curved” message which he is relaying to her shows his
prevarication on the topic. The enjambed line three of the excerpt exudes a
sudden air of resolution inasmuch as the curvature proves to be a circle on
which the wins and losses are interchangeable, time is given and taken
back. In the rest of the line it becomes clear that the man has been
downsized and the privation settlement alleviates his “strung out
unceasing meteor sense of high play.” Despite the dreams that things
would come to a better pass, they do not and “fast fortune” remains
“nothing.” The comment of the last lines of the stanza befits the tragic
situation which the couple have found themselves in: “know your way /
through this temporal occlusion in volt check-off.” It takes some “volt
check-off” to “know your way” in the time of “shadows calibrated.” A
lack of understanding for the economic situation results in being laid off
and the stanza ends with a detached admission of the man’s failure.

The following stanza, somewhat surprisingly, begins with an image of

intimacy and closeness: “Touch the face, even this time too.” The family
refuse to be daunted by the inopportune concurrence of events and it
appears that they are poised to bounce off the rock bottom. “Make next /
assent also by inference, by a swing silent pass.” It is imperative that a
new job be found to “prove its future, ambit of the necessary outside.” The
aura of uncertainty percolates through this stanza; there is nothing sure but
assumed “by inference,” the day must be won and a new position of
employment secured “before day [is] declared.” There is no other way and
the forcefulness and immediacy of the need is stressed in the short phrase
“Reach to this.” The woman does not “aggrieve his ambit fix,” giving all
her support to the plans. They do not surrender to the drama of
unemployment and soon it appears that the man decides to enter the army:
“concept of service invoke / conscript retention. Each time so reached
outer / placement.” He is accepted and sent to a distant post, placed on the

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outer rim of the world in some distant city under some marshal law: “all
navy blue conurbate.”

In the decision to be separated, neither realises the consequences:

“Partition blurred caloric engine his spiral transfusion.” His departure
disturbs their mutual organism, which may be read in figurative terms as
indicating some imbalance in the couple’s mental constitution that affects
their daily lives, “Both recessive / to malabsorb, lapse of thought.” Despite
the visible symptoms of a slow exacerbation of their respective conditions,
“Neither remembered this” because all that matters is that she receives
basic sustenance: “allumette profusion.” The stanza continues the
investigation of the growing decrepitude of the woman:

[…] Her bevelled spectral glide furnish,
unusual: maps to gene margin prior frivolous ought soon
to lift off ransom by choice, cantilena. Flitting under her
breath in catches, bird on briar hydroxyl filament he raids
a temper vane limit venture payout. Imitate less. Apart
low-rent voices motion entire neighbourhood respite dowel.

She seems to be suffering spiritually from the unnatural situation as is
suggested by the “bevelled spectral glide.” The angle at which they stand
in respect to each other in no way “makes his circle just” and will not
“make him end, where he begun.” At the same time her glide appears to
indicate the outward ease with which she deals with the situation. The use
of “cantilena,” a sustained lyrical passage, informs the image of the “bird
on briar” which describes her entanglement in the situation. As much as
she is in distress, he finds himself in no better a position, with the
implication of a mental breakdown: “a temper vane limit venture payout.”
The accumulation of nouns (“venture” does not seem to be used as a verb)
conjures up notions of fixity and an inability to move, which is further
compounded by the fact that he requires artificial means of dealing with
his temper; “vane” might refer to him being inconstant and in need of
something to redirect his flow of body humours. Still, money keeps
flowing. “Respite dowel” clearly ends the stanza with an image of stability
and connectedness that brings a temporary relief to the tormented couple.

The subsequent stanza works to subvert the mood of strained

acceptance of the previous sections in that the man presumably melts in
his duties, “Reaching colloid to serve.” Although “day butters a slice
promise,” he is plunged ever deeper into the life as a resource. As before
in Prynne, the Heideggerian optimisation is signalled by a sudden
emergence of clichés: “You know / not to fall back, not to press on” and
“Never in all for all in.” Ironically enough, it is such phrases that, on first

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151

reading the poem, rivet one’s attention and become orienting points even
though they are exactly those to be discarded as meaningless. They are
part of the levity of Prynnean design inasmuch as they allure the
inattentive reader and ostensibly yield some signification to the otherwise
cryptic lines. However, one soon realises this is a playful deception, by
means of which one’s traditional and reified reading habits are exposed.
The stanza hints at the senselessness of those two phrases, recommending
“shudder fix servitude.” The servitude of the man is also revealed in the
sense that he learns to maintain a middle-of-the-road position and fit in the
system for fear of being consigned to the margin and eventually excluded.
In the meantime the woman’s pregnancy develops, as “next to last the
cambium shower is hers.” The specialist word “cambium,” relating to a
layer in plants that gives rise to new cells and is responsible for secondary
growth, underpins the link between the woman and the natural world and
introduces the following suggestion at the commencement of labour pains:
“Bind will so for / open pulse will start both heard, principle stamen garnet
/ rose crypted.” With a persistent use of biological jargon the stanza ends
with images of blood and a new beginning, an inception of a new life.

For the next two stanzas there is a running suggestion that the initial

joy and determination fade: “Will they will to pass, as in passion
assumed.” What at first gives the strength to both, with time becomes
another burden and “live long [is] soon rescinded.” The additional
implication of the phrase is that it is unlikely to be the case that the family
will actually “live long.” In spite of those hints at the inevitable hardships
that will mar these lives, there are still to be found tokens of happiness as
in the next stanza’s image of blue skies: “for ever the blue / sky bends
fluently over all wand purchased.” Yet, the line unfolds into a passage that
recalls the financial worries:

[…] As if
stencilled slipware will more flood item to claim
opportune tympanic pitch impressment, first lender
signs here. Watch her watch: lifted clouds as light
on her cheek arch to fit […]

The financial situation of the family seems good enough to purchase
“stencilled slipware” for the money borrowed from the “first lender.”
There is no mistaking the woman’s happiness at being able to afford
decorated pottery. It is suggested that she desires “tympanic pitch
impressment” and praise from the neighbours. The overblown language
used to describe them implies that the newly-obtained possessions might
not be of a quality which the woman sees in them but in her eyes the house

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is associated with a stylised chamber, an idea strengthened by the
association with “tympanum” over the door or a window. Again, the
general mood of elation, “lifted clouds as light on her cheek arch to fit,” is
set against the plain fact that she is in debt. Soon it transpires that
borrowing is a vicious circle and money is never enough: “Wage in hope
down to rip / a ticket, borrow offset, don’t quarrel.” Wages are desperately
needed and in the meantime borrowing becomes the only method of
offsetting the mounting debts with other lenders. It is with the advent of
the next stanza that the woman and the child are evicted

They attend once more in precarium, to take apart
by simple mission broken off. To view them. Instance
talent reckless in situ, buzzing up ahead even be-
fore tendence to flight path notice given, as latent
hits to fit a chance, side-on. Knowing this by so
already not to success planted, climbing they do
on time, in storm […]

The situation gets precarious with “flight path notice given.” There is no
longer any thinking of a future success and the “simple mission” of
surviving is “broken off.” The moment of leaving the house is framed in
an almost cinematic image; they are viewed to be descending the stairs “in
storm,” with all their “fitment” being requested. There is nothing
“unrightful” about what happens to them, the stanza asserts, since “Not
ample grip loan out on circuit / inclined security to lowered clouds made a
brow / blue by starts.” They cannot incur another “loan” to come to
“grips” with the situation. Clouds that just a few lines above lifted from
the woman’s cheeks lour on her brow once more. It is insecure to loan
them any more money, for security of the sum is unsure.

Once uprooted, the family are on the move, looking for a place to stay,

“The placard of renewed angular motion naval for / on-stream suited
vibrancy can and will open, will / also unsafe advance.” The “renewed
angular motion” suggests that they wander aimlessly in search for a place
to stay for longer. She begins to crack when it turns out that the relatives
do want to assist her but indulge in acrid criticism: “her life of contract

It is likely that the same story continues in the subsequent stanzas, although just

as probable is the suggestion that the opening pronoun “they” effects a sudden
change of focus to another family, since later on it is clear that the father
accompanies his wife in hospital; I continue the analysis as though the same family
are concerned for the sake of keeping the narrative of the volume cohesive,
perhaps more so than the poem itself acknowledges. Nevertheless, assuming there
are numerous small narratives does not change the predominant motifs.

Stories of Disentangling in Blue Slides at Rest

153

free given like / arm jerking investment, baby elbow side to centre. / Typic
kin elation argue this.” The life of contract, temporary agreements to do a
certain job or to stay in a particular place, fades away, as she appears not
to be able to endure the hardships with a baby at her side. She is not a
centre as the tellingly stumped phrase “typic kin elation” maintains; just as
“typical” is trimmed to “typic,” so “relation” becomes “elation,” additionally
informing the insipid pleasure her relatives take in her misfortune and life
on the breadline: “Again mark out on labels historic up wallet / in water
volume real pulse, on the red wall chart.” Her purchasing power, as the
grand cliché has it, is limited and “the red wall chart” does not promise
that things are going to improve.

Further calamities befall the woman as she develops fever: “On her life

line gently flamboyant by exchange at / the rate kiosk. Living fervid child
likeness astonish / at medium cross.” The life line looks good and wavy
but her inflammation puts the woman’s life in jeopardy. The child’s
fervidness completes her misery because “for herself helpless,” she is now
incapable of looking after it. Eventually, all that seems left to her is
“Random thrown forward quick shout.” At this point the family appears to
have metamorphosed into another one. Now the husband is revealed to be
planning to abandon the woman, “she / knows he’ll go, white span day
breaks in the eastern / sky not indic not critical.” However, the element
that stays unchanged is the precarious situation of the woman.

The next three stanzas focus entirely on the woman, who is turned into

the sole cause of the child’s grave condition, whatever this condition
should be. She is shown to suffer from various ailments whose causes are
sometimes the fact her baby has been taken away from her, as in “Lactic
burning lip creases novel / advance measures” and “her white / throat rabid
nuisance icterine shingle.” Subsequently, it appears she has escaped
presumably from hospital and while “Search lamp / party cress-market
begins,” “She’ll lay / this cover topmost powers, cloudy dram front pitch.”
Such an ending of the stanza seems to imply that she is now the fugitive
and not an abandoned mother any more. When finally found and
apprehended, she is tied up and taken to hospital to be examined. “her lung
cavity / dilated before. Riot babble scented, sleepless with / anxiety
unknowing.” It transpires that she may be an addict in that her
“unknowing” might refer, through the intertextual association with The
Cloud of Unknowyng, to drugs which replace prayer in inducing spiritual
experiences; in which case the anxiety would be connected to her suffering
from detoxification. This, in turn, tallies with the description that features
in the next stanza:

Care taken, took into by a glance. Her hair loosened,

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cheek more red, plasma lactic acid dropping utter spread
like raid to her knee, so freely downwards. Entranced
restricted cub in this tunnel, lissom case notes asperge
crevice woeful did they either. Why did they […]

The image of the woman resembles a wild semi-conscious animal, secreting
some heinous substances, entranced to the extent that she is implied to be a
“lissom” devilish fiend that needs to be sprinkled with holy water. She
becomes a threat not only to the people around but to herself, with “lips
swelled crimson laden bite marker engaged / loaded burial.” From a
distressed mother she is turned into a blood-thirsty rabid beast as much in
need of tranquilisers as exorcisms: “Each one tissue-wrapped phoneme
sedative to give out / for slip finish her nest.” “Phoneme sedative” may
denote soothsaying as well as prayer to banish evil spirits. Eventually, as
the hint might be, she is declared insane and in need of professional help
from either a doctor or a priest: “such cheek frisson inflated pine cone /
help penitent in a dream collar brief;” she is also pronounced unable to
look after the child.

[…] Mouth to mouth unfit
either to plead, yet more slight utter frenzy assessment
if not lost to level right […]

Impaired of speech and inarticulate, she cannot defend her case. As a
result, the verdict is “slight utter frenzy” and past recovery.

The father is vested with the right to keep the child. The penultimate

stanza, however, unveils the man’s true intentions in that the suggestion is
that he has taken the child so as to gain financial profits from it:

[…] Claiming up
tender placement not recoverable for grief or sorrow yield
no dictates value this loss yielded, bond consortium make
a twilled mouth shut […]

The man’s claim to be rewarded for “tender placement” is rejected on the
grounds of the fact that “grief or sorrow” do not translate into value, and
about that the “bond consortium” are adamant. That emotions count for
nothing is a running motif in Prynne; from “Sketch for a Financial Theory
of the Self” all the way to Blue Slides at Rest it has been demonstrated that
in the modern world only money is exchangeable for both tangibles and
intangibles, the transfer does not work the other way round. In the stanza
there follows what may be viewed as a short exchange between the man
and the “bond consortium”: “Give outright,” says he, to which they

Stories of Disentangling in Blue Slides at Rest

155

respond “minor exempted / by love perpetual struck in held to count.” His
injunction to be given his share immediately is countered by a reference to
“love perpetual.” Therefore it turns out that while “grief and sorrow”
cannot be transformed into money, love can block its transmission. What
transpires from the passage is that it is the “bond consortium” that decide
what can and what cannot be made over into financial value.

The closing stanza projects an aura of sadness over what has happened;

the first line starts with a solemn lyrical cliché: “Go down in earth like a
feather.” Yet, the cliché is turned inside out by the fact that nothing, as far
as Blue Slides at Rest is concerned, goes down like a feather, there is no
smoothness of passage and no final feeling of completion. Rather, the
poem plunges “Into this / world of darkness, of a kin deducted justified
reproved / to end without, companion hooded unseen.” The stories told,
only begun, or vaguely implied, those reconstructed above and those I
have never even thought of being a part of the poem, all come to the point
where nothing more can be said of them. “Better broken / keep house
yielding softly gnomic cataract depressed / inwardly sent away.” Dramas
and tragedies, but also moments of mirthful light-heartedness, which
comprise the book-length poem, are nothing but “gnomic cataracts;” they
blur the vision of those interested to find out about them, for they court a
certain approach. I like to think that the poem recounts a single story, even
if it does so in many a narrative, because to think of the woman as being at
once a plucky mother, an abandoned wife and a demonic inmate, each
excluding the others in the eyes of the majority, uproots the stereotypical
fashion in which such stories of destitution are told.

The idea behind the above reading is to invoke (a possible) meaning

from the “levity of the poem’s design.” Although the particular stanzas
oppose linear reading, they could not be more vivacious in conveying their
story. “Have words not / joined to fit right, under water endued to a slip
fault / assuming in place of thus declared.” This is perhaps the only
metatextual commentary in Blue Slides at Rest but it informs the entire
volume, and maybe even this entire oeuvre. Words joined right speak the
language of false consciousness; in their expeditiousness such words never
pierce the veneer of the reified idiom of modernity, whose principal aim,
uncovered by Heidegger and related in Chapter One, is to transform man
into a resource to be optimised. Using words to swiftly get the message
across is a veiled strategy of modernity that requires of individuals
complete subservience to the law of efficiency: at work, at school, at
communication. Therefore it becomes vital that words “not be joined to fit
right” so as to oppose and keep in negative dialectic conflict the language
of the society and the language of the poem.

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Blue Slides at Rest is best integrated into society’s linguistic praxis

because it speaks in a way directly opposed to how the society does.
Creative agon is the first step but it would fossilise into ideology the
moment it lost sight of the initial foe; the jargons deconstructive of the
human self. In order to avoid that, a dialectics of the subject and the
object, the self and the world both textual and material, is mandatory; in
the negative relation between the subject and the language surrounding it
the diversity of the ego is forever opened to the multiplicity of the idiom it
faces. The subject is liberated only in a liberated language and this can
happen solely in an act of ceaseless restitution. Prynne’s last poem does
nothing if not that; it restitutes the subjects, the characters whose stories
are relayed, by recovering them from entanglement in traditional
discourses. They do not escape their dramas, neither is it the point, but
their stories are not ossified into a pre-existent narrative, always ready to
devour all such tales; instead, the intertwining pronouns become nameless
personas. Disentanglement is propounded through the perpetual “levity of
design,” destruction and restitution happening at the same time. Blue
Slides at Rest is an ultimate poem about the condition of man and a lasting
achievement in the struggle for the modern self. All in all, what Prynne
has accomplished in the volume is the near total dispersion of the subject,
which is the only way to make this subject heard fully. The disappearance
of the fully present, stable and complacently rational Cogito, played out
throughout Prynne’s works, marks the moment of ingression of the late
modern subject.

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NDEX OF

AMES

Adorno, Theodor W., 5, 16, 27, 99-

107, 114, 119, 126-128, 139,
140, 145, 150-152

Barthes, Roland,16-18, 26, 45, 46,

130

Baudrillard, Jean, 11, 15, 27, 30, 88
Bielik-Robson, Agata,19, 21-26, 29,

30, 42, 46, 53

Bloom, Harold, 16, 21-26, 30, 31,

32, 42, 108

De Man, Paul, 11, 19, 20, 21, 24,

25, 26, 30

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari,

140

Derrida, Jacques, 15, 19, 20, 25, 27,

29, 30, 31, 45

Eagleton, Terry, 32, 43, 78, 94, 95,

Heidegger, Martin, 5, 17, 19, 22,

33-41, 43, 45, 47, 49, 50, 52, 56,
67, 71, 75, 78, 84-86, 96, 99,
100, 101, 103, 104, 106, 145,
150

Huyssen, Andreas, 5, 6, 8
Mellors, Anthony, 45, 123, 125
Mengham, Rod, 5, 11, 67, 68, 108,

110, 123

Milne, Drew, 10, 11, 57
Norris, Christopher, 15, 27-31, 56

Perloff, Marjorie, 6-9
Prynne, J. H., and neo-modernist

poetics 4, 5, 7, 9, and the
Revival, 10-12, and neo-
Romanitc subjectivty 16, 25, 30,
and Heidegger, 33, 39, "Huts,"
40-43, Kitchen Poems, 45-48,
The White Stones, 52, 55, 56,
58-65, Brass, 66-72, 74-80,
Wound Response, 81-83, News
of Warring Clans, 85, 87, Down
where Changed, 89, 91-96, and
dialectics, 98-101, 106, The
Oval Window, 107-109,112,
113, Bands around the Throat,
115-117, Word Order, 123, 125,
126, 128, 129, For the
Monogram, 130-134, Pearls
that Were, 135, 136, 138, 140,
141, Biting the Air, 143, 146,
Blue Slides at Rest, 148, 150,
152, 155

Reeve, N. H. and Richard Kerridge,

4, 55, 58, 67, 68, 74, 81, 92,
107, 108, 110

Rorty, Richard, 23, 26, 27, 30, 39,

42, 69, 142

Trotter, David, 19, 66, 78

Document Outline