Reading as Belief: Language Writing, Poetics, Faith

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Reading as Belief

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Language Writing, Poetics, Faith

Joel Bettridge

10.1057/9780230101265 - Reading as Belief, Joel Bettridge

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Reading as Belief

READING AS BELIEF

Copyright © Joel Bettridge, 2009. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–61942–5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: November 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

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Acknowledgments

vii

Permissions

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One

“No One to Drive the Car”

1

Two

A Brief History of Language Writing

15

Three Faith, Belief, Poetics

29

Four

The (Calvinist) Spirit of Understanding

39

Five

Ghosts, Jokes, Shadowtime, and Faithful Interpretation

51

What It Means to Be Reader-centered: Jonathan Edwards

83

Six Seven Eight

Bruce Andrews’ Lip Service and the Character of True Reading

103

Reading Alone

131

Notes

137

Works Cited

179

Index

185

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CON T E N T S

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Although I had already left when I started to write this book, it began in many respects at SUNY Buffalo, and I want to thank those professors whose time and attention were so crucial to my immersion in poetry—Bob Creeley, Joseph Conte, and Kenneth Dauber. And I want to thank in particular Charles Bernstein whose intellectual generosity and support continues to be immensely valuable to me. Special thanks to Marjorie Perloff and Hank Lazer for their guidance and encouragement. Thanks as well to Sam Chambers, Rebecca Brown, and Roberto Tejada for their camaraderie. To Peter Nicholls who published a version of “Ghosts, Jokes, Shadowtime, and Faithful Interpretation” in Textual Practice, and John Tranter and Nick Lawrence for publishing my first extended response to Lip Service in Jacket, and Mark Stricker for publishing an earlier rendering of Chapter Seven in Nanomajority. I especially want to thank Kim Evans and Richard Deming whose conversation over the years and thoughtful reading of my various drafts make up the true content of this book. Finally, I want to thank Liz Ceppi who in the end saw the shape my argument needed to take. This book is dedicated to my parents Joe and Becce Bettridge who filled our house with books and who were always interested in what I thought about them.

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AC K NOW L E DGM E N T S

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Acknowledgment is made for the permission to reprint material from the following sources: Selections from Fabrice Fitch’s booklet note to the CD recording of Brian Ferneyhough’s opera, Shadowtime, for NMC (2006) are used with the permission of the author. Lip Service, by Bruce Andrews (Coach House Books, 2001). Excerpts from Bob Perelman, “China” in Ten to One: Selected Poems (c) 1999 by Bob Perelman and reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. Passages from Shadowtime are used with the permission of the author and publisher.

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PE R M IS SION S

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ON E

“No One to Drive the Car”

Talk of poetry is embarrassing, I think, in the way talk of God is. Poets and critics who fess up to their literary activities and interests leave strangers on planes, distant relatives, and even a good many academics with very little to say. Qualifying their confessions with words like “avant-garde” and “innovative” can make these same poets feel like Wittgenstein’s lion who, if it speaks, nobody understands. The kind of awkwardness they produce is familiar to people who admit they believe Yahweh led his people out of Egypt or Muhammad ascended to heaven on a creature named Buraq. Poets and believers share the same sense of discomfort, the same struggle for response, which comes from not being able to explain their lives in familiar parlance. Simply in being spoken, vocabularies in the service of God and innovative poetry put enormous pressure on what they are doing as language—they mark themselves as systems of value, which reveal the demands they make on listeners, demands those listeners might resent or not understand. If only to appear less dogmatic, poets or religious people who begin to talk about what they mean and why they believe what they do often find that their explanations make matters worse, for commitment itself is embarrassing. It makes everyone vulnerable; it expands the gulf between people even as it leaves them without anything to hide behind. When it comes to talk about Language writing, these feelings of uncertainty can be particularly acute; to pair these two words, even in major

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CH A P T E R

Reading as Belief

university and poetry circles, is to feel like nobody knows what you are talking about, but not because people have never heard of Language writing. We are embarrassed by Language writing because it acts like religion does.1 (It is no coincidence that those who find Language writing and its related innovative poetries compelling gather together regularly to perform their affection and consider their texts in sympathetic company.) Certainly, the multiple, shifting, and competing affections of poets associated with Language writing make it impossible to define, although Christianity has the same problem, and for the same reasons—as do Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism. Each major world religion contains internal divisions over what counts as proper theology and observance, but we still think of individual religions as recognizable practices. We do so because competing sects share a particular orientation rather than a set of doctrines. The same holds true for Language writing, which does not reduce to a set of principles; Language writing is identifiable as a series of texts that, despite their significant differences, are concerned with the way representation constitutes meaning. Self-consciousness about this process makes each text under the umbrella of “Language writing” intelligible. The academic question of Language writing’s coherence as a unified practice misses the point. To say Language writing acts like religion merely points to the way people invested in it orient themselves in terms of a belief about method’s compositional force.2 Which is to say, Language writing unsettles us in the way monotheism does: it moves a certain intellectual orientation outside the realm of the debatable. Take Christianity as a parallel. We may argue about how Christians should understand and live out their relationship to Jesus, but a central attention to Jesus makes Christianity what it is; a debate over the appropriateness of his foundational presence in the lives of Christians is not possible within the terms of Christianity. (I do not here mean Christian doctrine is off the table for Christians; I mean to observe simply that a Christian’s life is initiated by and develops in response to perpetual thinking about Jesus’ resurrection.) In the same manner, while the implications of form’s connection to meaning remain open to study within Language writing, the reality of their connection does not—it is given.3 Committed advocates for, or practitioners of

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language-centered, innovative writing trust that how people speak and write actively constructs the world as we know it. They begin with the belief that aesthetics are never a matter of taste, but always ethically and politically loaded. Critics and poets committed to Language writing’s innovative practice are no less able to jettison their belief in this insight than Abraham would be of getting God off his back. We have not yet gone a handful of paragraphs, however, and I have begun to write a solution to a problem I’ve left undescribed, a problem that goes to the very heart of Language writing’s concern with the way meaning gets produced. And the problem is this: in what terms can we establish a new confidence in what we think we know? In her account of the rise of the counterculture, and her sense that “we had aborted ourselves and butchered the job,” Joan Didion captures the tone and the character of our hermeneutical impasse as it entered the social landscape of the late 1960s.4 Didion, with her description of the narcissism and idealism of youth who define themselves through a triumph over “middle-class Freudian hang-ups,” suggests that no single political problem, or collection of problems, ails us—as terrible as the Vietnam War and segregation were then, or as pressing as our own wars seem presently (97). The hemorrhage she describes is the failure of the narratives that ground our social orders, the underlying stories we tell ourselves about who we are as a country, as particular people within it, or even as human beings who transcend national borders. The onset of the “Summer of Love,” for Didion, exposes a country gone haywire, not from postwar materialism or the atom bomb, but because at “some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell” the “children” f locking to the Haight-Ashbury District “the rules of the game we happened to be playing” (127). She fears that “maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling”; and in her reading the young people fuelling the social upheaval of the 1960s were “less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts” (127). Each time I read Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” I feel again the shock she does at the end of the essay when she meets a

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five-year-old girl on acid given to her by her mother in order to turn on the girl’s mind. Undoubtedly we must not equate the personal failings Didion shows us to the full spectrum of 1960s radicalism, but the emotional and intellectual impact of her diagnosis, in its structural attention, looks ahead importantly to the political theorist Wendy Brown, a quarter century later, who describes the crisis of our moment as a problem of confronting the broken narratives of modernity that, although discredited, remain the stories by which we guide our lives. In Politics Out of History (2001) she writes, while many have lost confidence in a historiography bound to a notion of progress or to any other purpose, we have coined no political substitute for progressive understandings of where we have come from and where we are going. Similarly, while both sovereignty and right have suffered severe erosions of their naturalistic epistemological and ontological bases in modernity, we have not replaced them as sources of political agency and sites of justice claims. Personal conviction and political truth have lost their moorings in firm and level epistemological ground, but we have not jettisoned them as sources of political motivation or as sites of collective fealty. So we have ceased to believe in many of the constitutive premises undergirding modern personhood, statehood, and constitutions, yet we continue to operate politically as if these premises still held, and as if the political-cultural narratives based on them were intact.5 Brown’s analysis goes directly to our hermeneutical condition, and while she depicts it largely to establish her particular political concerns, especially her discussion of liberal subjectivity and possible alternative forms of agency, I want to highlight her baseline observation: we have talked ourselves out of our ability to believe anything with confidence, and we are unsure about what to do about it. After the linguistic turn of the twentieth century, after poststructuralism and the terminus of effective identity-movements, after the triumph of international capitalism and the persistence of political and social violence on a global scale despite the proliferation of nongovernmental organizations and

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the United Nations, we philosophically attuned intellectuals and citizens of westernized democracies find ourselves living in an impossible moment. We know that our words and selves, that what we take each to mean or be, are (at least in part) linguistic and social products, and yet we do not know how to apply our knowledge of the world, language, and ourselves to the world: or perhaps more accurately, our knowledge does not matter. As Françios Cusset observes, pointing out the constructed quality of any given political reality does not change anything; we succeed only in undermining the rationalism of the Enlightenment narrative and its accompanying liberal subject.6 And the familiar grounds for making justice claims over the past few centuries or advancing any political or philosophical arguments at all depart with them. We now do not see a way to find our claims on the world and one another reliable even as our longing to do so grows more intense, a longing we must fulfill if we are to forward the cultural or personal arrangements in which we put our trust. I do not want in this book to take up the political and cultural veins of this situation directly—such a study requires a volume all its own, as the ever growing number of books dedicated to political theory and everyday politics indicate. Instead, I want to remain focused on the question of how we can establish hermeneutical confidence on new foundations, for any political thinking we will do must stand on more secure philosophical bases. And I want to begin to make such ground available by exploring the ways in which Language writing engages in a practice of faith. (For those readers who are unfamiliar with the particulars of Language writing, the opening of chapter two provides a brief explanation of the work.) There are two compelling reasons for turning to Language writing. First, this work self-consciously puts the lessons we’ve learned about language at its center. In this sense, to look at how Language writing produces meaning and establishes hermeneutical ground is to look at ourselves—that is, subjects who need to learn how to make meaning knowing what they do about language. The second reason follows from the first: despite the fact that Language writing emerges from the linguistic insights of the twentieth century, it, ref lecting Brown’s diagnosis, suffers from what troubles all of us,

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political theorists, savvy artists, intellectuals and politicians, language philosophers, literary critics, and cultural activists alike, all of whom are familiar with the philosophical judgments of the last one hundred years, and are yet still inscribed in some measure within liberalism. If we can read Language writing out of its divergence into liberalism (a situation I will discuss in more detail in the next chapter) and inside an alternative hermeneutical tradition, we can find a way forward for everybody who shares the same impasse, a way not beholden to the notion of a sacrosanct self. The reading I hope to offer turns on gaining a better sense of how Language writing’s most fundamental impulses align it with religious, or faithful, modes of thought. Recalling Language writing to its beliefs about what it actually takes the character of texts to be will allow us to tell a new story about Language writing, and the avant-garde more broadly. A story about Language writing’s faithfulness can, in turn, provide the larger artistic, philosophical, and political community with new narratives for establishing our cultural discourses and rereading our own habits of mind and philosophical traditions.7 Before moving on, though, I want to make plain a number of my philosophical assumptions and rhetorical strategies. First, my discussion of Language writing and faith turns largely, although not entirely, on a reading of Reformed Christianity, the writings of John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards in particular. We can move between Language writing and Reformed theology because both Language writing and the faith of much Protestantism begin with an understanding that a gap divides our words from the world, and that the space between them requires the world and ourselves to be authored. This poetry and this theology force us to see that no necessary connection exists between words and things, cause and effect, and understanding and right action. Neither attempt to close the breach between these separate bodies; they hope instead to allow their congregants to use the room separating words from referents, knowledge from deeds, to better read and occupy their environments: Reformed theology recognizes that people need to persistently remake themselves through the discipline of a text that itself perpetually f luctuates. Language writing knows that readers author themselves through what they read by attending

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carefully to words as they are experienced. Protestant theology and Language writing equally hinge on readers who involve themselves with the texts before them, and who know their participation to be a constructive, complex act depending on belief, thus shaping what readers read, become, and conceive the world as. I do trust, therefore, that it will become clear in the course of this book how theologians like Jonathan Edwards and John Calvin initiate the radical hermeneutics upon which much innovative poetry and modern language philosophy come to depend. Second, I hope that, if nothing else, readers will by the end of this book come to recognize that if they have poetics, or art, science, or politics, where others have God—if they believe that we begin within a signifying system in which all of us are constructed by culture and language, or by supposed laws of nature, rather than by a deity—they are still left with the burden of faith. I mean to argue that readers invested in the language-centered philosophy of the last century need to embrace their beliefs about language as beliefs and recognize how agreeing to this philosophical and linguistic turn that now defines our ways of knowing means holding fast to faith. Given the history of religious conf lict and our current political moment, allowing this truth to take hold is difficult, especially if you mean to inscribe it within a secular point of view. The word faith makes most of us nervous, and our skittishness does not look misplaced. Even if we could put the burden of history and politics aside, a specific faith, as a means for ordering one’s day and justifying one’s actions, does not provide compelling evidence for those who do not agree to its particular assumptions, although this is not to propose that faith is without evidence or that it maroons us on intellectual and cultural islands. Indeed, in the face of all that makes us hesitate, a central contention of this book is that being tossed back onto faith for epistemological traction is a useful state of affairs. Because faith is a decision to read one way rather than another, articulating why you make the choices you do does not put you out of reach of other people or hide your beliefs behind an impenetrable rhetorical façade. The effects of your choices and how you carry them out remain open to discussion, available for agreement and disagreement in and beyond

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your immediate community. As soon as we recognize that we begin thinking from devotion we can no longer excuse ourselves from such scrutiny, and we lose the lie we tell ourselves that our motives, evidence, and desires are somehow more secure than those belonging to others. And if we do not learn to admit honestly that our value claims stand in relationship to truth in the same fashion as the claims made by self-conscious people of faith, we cede the only means we possess now to articulate legitimate grounds for our hermeneutics and our politics. In a world of radical disjunction, faith is the method available to us to make personal and intellectual bonds with one another and develop useful, sophisticated understandings of our environments and the materials we use to shape our lives. I want to be clear as well from the outset that I am not going to offer a survey of the literature that stands where faith and Language writing or innovative poetry come together.8 Given the trajectories it could take, no such study could hope to appear anything other than inadequate. I will focus instead on the work of Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews. I want to turn to the latter because Andrews’ work is among the most disruptive of the poetry produced by writers associated with Language writing, and for this reason it provides a crucial test case for our ability to find language meaningful when it is knowingly divorced from a natural connection to the world. I want to look at Bernstein’s work because Bernstein has, arguably, done more to advance and refine the poetics of Language writing than any other poet, and his own poetry, as a body of work, has evolved over the years in ways that argue powerfully for the continued significance of Language writing. There is a political, aesthetic, and philosophical attention at work in Bernstein’s poetry that keeps the central concerns of Language writing relevant, and not confined by literary history and period style. Moreover, I want look at these poets in detail because I agree with Bob Perelman’s argument, with its emphasis on the particular, that the “consideration of individual career trajectories allows for more complete and complex readings than a generalized formal grid meant to apply to all language writing,” and so it is my hope that my discussion of Bernstein and Andrews, while focused on specific texts and not the whole of their

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careers, will give readers a place of departure for their own writing and thinking about Language writing and its epistemology.9 That being said, I imagine my reasons for focusing on these two poets, neither of whom is known for an interest in faith or spirituality, still needs a bit more explanation; my selection of these writers appears especially strange, I think, given the fact that there are a number of significant poets associated with Language writing, and the larger innovative tradition, for whom matters of faith do not seem the least bit odd. Simply put, it is precisely because Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews do not attend to questions of faith and belief that I want to forge this connection; I mean to test how productively they can be read in this counterintuitive context. And more important still, I selected Bernstein and Andrews because the absence of faith (as a topic) in their work keeps my argument distinct from a religious discussion. Writing about the faith of poets who decidedly do not make religion or God their concern highlights the methodological and philosophical elements of my argument, and it should help readers not to mistake my study for an attempt to appropriate the avant-garde, Language writing, or these two poets, for a religious or theological cause. I am more than willing, though, to confess that my strategy will naturally open my reasoning and project up to a great many weaknesses, omissions, and contradictions, and I confess that before I even begin I regret a number of poets, theologians, and philosophers that I will not discuss. I’m thinking in particular of Susan Howe, Karl Barth, Emily Dickinson, Blaise Pascal, Baruch Spinoza, Robert Creeley, Søren Kierkegaard, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, Rae Armantrout, Fanny Howe, Ronald Johnson, Robert Greiner, Martin Luther, Bob Perelman, and Jack Spicer. I do recognize, however, that the novelty of pairing Language writing and Reformed Christianity does not, in itself, fulfill the promise of my opening sentence—and it is this gambit, finally, that most fully responds to the question that hangs around the margins of these opening paragraphs, “why this poetry and why faith?” To say that talk of innovative poetry and God are embarrassing lays bare the manner in which commitments of faith and to poetry stake so much of one’s life on so little. Faith, from the outside, appears to demand great sacrifice in

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the name of something nobody can verify, for something that appears no more than a f light of fancy or superstition, or that is, from the perspective of neurobiology, merely the result of chemical reactions in our brains. Poetry, on the other hand, remembering Auden’s remark, does not make anything happen. For a small percentage of the population, poetry provides a great deal of pleasure, but, contrary to the claims often made on its behalf, poetry’s ability to accomplish political ends or improve our characters seems unlikely in the hard light of day, where such assertions appear forgivable, but largely romantic, reveries. But herein lies the strength of poetry and faith—wagering one’s life on them in the full knowledge of their insubstantiality turns us perpetually back to our imaginations as a means to come to terms with the impossibility of securing our lives from ambiguity, doubt, and the suspicion that we will get hit by a bus tomorrow. Despite all we know and desire, we are unable to control our lives or reliably effect the changes we want in our homes and on our bodies, or in our cities and country, or in the ones that belong to other people. In response to the tenuousness of our circumstances poetry and faith embrace that tenuousness; they keep us always on edge, always unable to rest, forever foregrounding all that we do not know, all that intrudes on what we believe and hope to be the case; their frailty keeps forcing us to admit that reason, that science, that politics, that our own strength, are not enough to save us from our epistemological, emotional, and physical vulnerability. With our thoughts, anxieties, loves, and hesitations loaded up together in the thin, fragile vessels of faith and poetry, we are cast back on the imagination to help enliven and guide us in our uncertain state. The imagination, infusing the intellect with intuition and sensation, is crucial to faith and poetry. The imagination—fundamentally tied to what William Connolly calls “the visceral register of subjectivity and intersubjectivity”—cultivates an emotionally inf lected habit of mind that helps us to organize our lives and think harder, and more clearly, about the most complex social, ethical, philosophical, personal, and even scientific questions.10 Where rationalist discourses seek to wean us from the imagination, innovative poetry and faith seek to increase our dependence on it; a poem or a prayer, when pregnant with the

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imagination, allow us to grant ourselves the roving honesty, expressive tension, and intelligence we need to read our constantly shifting ideas, dispositions, and experiences. On this admittedly shaky ground we can make our case for the power and uniqueness of innovative writing. Reading Language writing or other innovative poetries is more like living than any other art—the shifts between understanding and confusion, the breaks in our grasp of what words and experiences mean, captures the disjunctive intellectual and emotional experience of getting through the day. Poetry that embraces and explores these disruptions and moments of nonsense holds us fast to the workings of the imagination (not treating it as a vehicle for a more important theme), showing us how the imagination enables us to respond to the challenges presented by the radical uncertainty of our lives in language. When Language writing or other innovative poetries entangle readers in disorienting shifts and collapses of meaning, they force readers to practice the intellectual dexterity they need to make sense of the much larger, disorienting problems of our cultural and material environments. I am only now riding alongside what William Carlos Williams writes in Spring and All, where he addresses himself to the imagination. Williams dismisses art that holds a “mirror up to nature,” that looks “about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images.”11 The imagination, instead, creates new objects, but not in the sense that art is “divorced” from our lives—rather, the imagination allows us to “refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live” (89). The imagination makes the world tangible through our experiences, our circumstances, our thoughts, by transforming them into art: “life becomes actual only when it is identified with ourselves. When we name it, life exists” (115). Without the imagination, the “inevitable f lux of the seeing eye toward measuring itself by the world it inhabits can only result in . . . crushing humiliation”; but seeing “the exact moment” we are in by way of the imagination raises us “to some approximate co-extension with the universe” (105, 89, 105). I do not take Williams here to be elevating self-absorption to an art form. When Williams writes that it is “the imagination on which reality

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rides”; that poetry, as an embodiment of the imagination “does not tamper with the world but moves it”; and argues that the imagination is “an actual force comparable to electricity or steam . . . not a plaything but a power that has been used from the first to raise the understanding of—” he piggybacks on a guiding principle of the innovative poetic tradition: namely, that the imagination and understanding share the same borders, or boarders (139, 149, 120). Williams puts a dash after “of ” and leaves the subject of this “of ” hanging—open; the question “of what,” and the absence of an answer, puts every possible answer into play, suggesting that nothing exists apart from our particular imaginations. The imagination, for Williams, is a force that drives us, a way to more accurately name the emotional richness that animates our intelligence. He sees that we are always thinking, but knows too that this thinking does not happen apart from our bodies and lived experience. Spring and All is a testament to Williams’ poetic perception that, wonderfully, we think and live more by way of our hunches, inconsistencies, dispositions, and prejudices than we often admit. I will make only one last restatement of my reasons for turning to faith and Language writing, and one last move to widen my range of reference, before ending this initial foray of my argument. Since the late 1990s Hank Lazer has organized his poetic and critical project around an interest in “spirit.”12 In “Returns: Innovative Poetry and Questions of ‘Spirit,’ ” Lazer tells us that, “For Derrida, ‘spirit’ is supposed as ‘that which gathers or in which what gathers is gathered’ ”; he moves on to say that it “seems . . . that what is gathered in that place and action of gathering is an intensive summoning into the thinking of being.”13 This thinking, in Lazer’s account, points us to the experience of poetry’s particular “form of truth”: “Poetry is, and sacredly so, most direct in its indirection and in its habitual concealment, in its very refusal to ‘mean’ directly. Knowingly, the poem is a hymn to the unknowable— poetry as an approximation and an intimation” (238, 239). Innovative poetry is thus a “ ‘return’ or ‘re-engagement’—of the ‘spiritual,’ of certain fundamental questions of being”; when concerned with the spirit, writing in the innovative tradition “is no longer principally an anecdotal recounting of ‘spiritual’ experiences and lyricized epiphanies, but

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a poetry ad-venturing in language the complex, elusive location that we bear (and bear witness to) in our intimate and proximate relationship to alterity” (239, 260–261). Dovetailing with Lazer’s interest in spirit is Stephen Fredman’s history of mysticism in avant-garde American poetry, especially in the work of poets like Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, H.D., Gary Snyder, and Denise Levertov. At the same time as he takes into account the sincerity of these writers’ mystical beliefs and practices, Fredman suggests that, for “American poets in the twentieth century, recourse to mysticism also acts as a countercultural gesture.”14 In Fredman’s reading, this gesture, by “claiming the kinds of knowledge that mysticism underwrites,” has taken aim at the “moral and political shortcomings of capitalism and consumerism” even as “mysticism has provided poets an alternative way of knowing” and means to show how “dominant American institutions and attitudes” are “at variance with both the individualist and the communalist ideals at the heart of American democracy” (192). The mysticism Fredman sees running through American innovative poetry is in many ways the social and political extension of the spirit Lazer identifies, for the avant-garde’s countercultural disposition emerges from similar philosophical pressures as Lazer’s spirit, as his invocation of alterity and Fredman’s naming of American democratic ideals indicate. Both the spirit and the mystical, as described here, address the overarching desire to forage more dynamic states of understanding, community arrangement, and experience. Lazer’s reading of the spirit and Fredman’s account of mysticism weave themselves throughout the reasons I think innovative poetry, and Language writing especially, bend, often unknowingly, toward faith, and why faith itself provides us with a rich, dense form of life most fully connected to the hard philosophical truths, hard won over the last century, about the nature of the physical and cultural world as well as our lives in language. Faith, or a move toward the “spirit” or mysticism, is the one mode of thought and embrace of visceral experience we have that enables us to live with and name our constant encounter with the inexplicable, whether identified by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gertrude Stein, Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin, Werner Heisenberg,

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or Wendy Brown. No doubt, a turn to faith might appear naive in a cultural moment exhausted by the scale of its social and economic violence, but only if we forget what Williams said. When we organize our lives in faith and through innovative poetry, we are most at risk, most unself-deluded, most attentive to the “eternal moment in which we alone live”; we are after a life able to occupy ethically the discordant world in which we are situated.15 We are holding out for the possibility that thoughtfulness and imagination might triumph over barbarism.

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A Brief History of Language Writing

I want to take a moment to more fully set up my own context for reading Language writing, but I want also to provide an introduction to Language writing for those readers who are less familiar with it. Inevitably the tension in this chapter is between glossing over the very real differences among the poets and poems gathered together as Language writing and presenting uninitiated readers with a broad enough characterization of the relevant works and poetics to enable them to continue reading. I recognize as well that my treatment in this book of Language writing as exemplar of our philosophical and cultural situation only exacerbates the risk of presenting it as a monolithic entity. I mean to account for these interpretive strains by marking my own presentation of Language writing in this chapter as a description of its evolution as I understand it (not as an attempt at definition); this acknowledgment will, I hope, allow me to give new readers a critical foothold and show readers with more expertise how, exactly, I am approaching this diverse body of work and establishing the initial terms for my consideration of it. That being said, Language writing came to prominence in the late 1970s and 1980s most directly through the work of poets in San Francisco and New York who were interested in exposing the constructed character of the speaking subject in our literary texts. As Marjorie Perloff explains, “One of the cardinal principles—perhaps the

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CH A P T E R

Reading as Belief

cardinal principle—of American Language poetics . . . has been the dismissal of ‘voice’ as the foundational principle of lyric poetry. In the preface to his anthology In The American Tree (1986), Ron Silliman famously declared that Robert Grenier’s ‘I HATE SPEECH’ manifesto, published in the first issue of the San Francisco journal This (1971), ‘announced a breach—and a new moment in American writing’—a rejection of ‘simple ego psychology in which the poetic text represents not a person, but a persona, the human as unified object. And the reader likewise.’ ”1 In a parallel vein, Bob Perelman—a central poet, critic, and historian of Language writing—argues that this poetry, rather than functioning as a vehicle for personal expression, “is best understood as a group phenomenon, and that it is one whose primary tendency is to do away with the reader as a separable category.”2 Perelman emphasizes how the literary works organized around Language writing address their public as writers: “The formalisms and disruptions of convention that variously mark language writing function to remind readers that they are also producers and not just receivers of language” (36). It would be unfair to characterize these concerns as an articulated group platform in the manner of the historical avant-garde, although they are, at least, recognizable as part of a shared project, one that, according to Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews, involves “exploring the numerous ways that meanings and values can be (& are) realized—revealed—produced in writing.”3 As the editors of the seminal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine (which ran between February 1978 and October 1981, and was one of the main venues for the writers now associated with Language writing), Bernstein and Andrews published essays, statements of poetics, and other prose that took the materiality of language as a primary concern, investigating disruptive, nonlinear forms, and the consequences of recognizing that words do not stand in for things. The magazine’s theoretical framework drew significantly on Continental philosophy, Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language, and reader-response theory, and, importantly, it emphasized reading a poem with attention to the method of its production—the means by which a poem was made and the material circumstances of that making, as well as the cultural values implicit in the poem’s construction.

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A book of poetry written exclusively in the first person and straightforwardly focused on the author’s experiences and emotions, for example, might, consciously or not, privilege an understanding of our human subjectivity as coherent and singular, however troubled, over a conception of our agency as manufactured and deeply unstable. Calling attention to the process of representation became a significant element of a poem’s meaning within the context of Language writing. The ideological importance of linking this theoretical framework to a disruptive method rests in the way it demonstrates to readers that how we speak and write determines what we mean. In the absence of a coherent organizing principle, readers must self-consciously participate in a poem by making associative connections of their own as they move through the poem—for meaning to occur readers must recognize that they shape it. Readers are then in a position to see the constructed nature of their cultural values as well, and a whole series of social critiques become available, from capitalism’s ability to naturalize itself in the transparent language of public dialogue and entertainment to the cultural construction of gender norms. The critical essays published in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E regularly carried out these investigations at the same time as they turned to the poetry and poetics of the writing community associated with the magazine’s readership; essays also focused on the pioneering work of figures like Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky. As the poets involved with Language writing continued to explore the limits of their reader-centered poetics over the next few decades, they began to move from a concern with revealing the ways ideology functions as a constructive force to an interest in the complexities of particular moments of cultural production. To cite Marjorie Perloff again, who accounts for this shift by explaining, the referential fallacy, to begin with, has given way to a more nuanced emphasis on the how of poetic language rather than the what. The dismissal of instrumental language as the commodity fetish has come under criticism from both Left and Right, as readers have realized that so-called innovative writing—writing

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A Brief History of Language Writing

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that is fragmented, asyntactic, non-sensical, etc.—can be just as fetishized as anything else. And the emphasis on readerly construction, an article of faith in the semiotic theories of Barthes, Foucault, and Eco, and, in the United States, of reader-response theory, has given way to a renewed perception that the alleged authority of the reader is, as Ron Silliman has remarked in a recent essay, merely a transfer of power whereby, in ways Barthes could not have foreseen, “the idealized, absent author of the New Critical canon has [merely] been replaced by an equally idealized, absent reader.”4 The shift from the “what” to the “how” of poetic language, although remaining concerned with literary form, moves writers away from repeatedly explaining that form shapes content and toward an interest in intricate and surprising instances of form’s active compositional force in culture, instances that both trouble and build our understanding of form and content’s enmeshed character. Critiques carried out on the micro scale thus became more widespread—“how” particular uses of language define their given social spaces and the people who live in them: Barrett Watten’s The Constructivist Moment (2003) employs the models of cultural studies to reconsider the history of Language writing as well as the urban space of Detroit, the poetry of Jackson Mac Low and Louis Zukofsky, post-Soviet subjectivity, and theories of negativity in the avant-garde, among others. Rae Armantrout’s memoir TRUE (1998) moves into the terrain of personal history and her struggle with the religious fundamentalism of her mother, a theme she harkens back to in her 2004 essay “Cosmology and Me,” where she discusses science and religion; her recent book of poetry Next Life (2007) deals with topics as wide ranging as physics, mortality, global politics, and popular culture. Jed Rasula’s Syncopations (2004) surveys the multiple, and often unorganized factors that gave the wide range of innovative writing in the United States its cultural force after the Second World War, including the increasing importance of literary theory and the role of women as producers of poems. Lyn Hejinian’s recent poetry—including Saga/ Circus (2008), The Fatalist (2003), A Border Comedy (2001), and Happily

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(2000)—and her collection of critical writing, The Language of Inquiry (2000), remain philosophically concerned with how we think about language and the role of poetry, but do so by extending the scope of their attention to include questions of fate and being, to name only two. These shifts of attention parallel changes in the texture of the literary works many of the writers linked to Language writing now produce. Kit Robinson’s The Crave (2002), Bob Perelman’s IFLIFE (2006), Playing Bodies (a collaboration with painter Francie Shaw [2003]), and The Future of Memory (1998), and Nick Piombino’s Hegelian Honeymoon (2004) and Theoretical Objects (1999), for instance, experiment with more lyrical, although still disjunctive forms. The writing of Ron Silliman on his widely read blog differs dramatically in form and purpose from the work in The New Sentence (1985). Where the latter primarily addresses questions of poetic form and politics, the former gives its attention more to close readings of definitive avant-garde texts as well as the work of younger writers. Not so gently, critics skeptical of Language writing’s project have, over the years, hurled reviews and essays at its self-described politics and poetics, accusing it of a good many failures, perhaps most damningly, of reproducing the liberal subject it sets out to replace.5 If true, these critiques suggest that Language writing too potentially suffers from the hermeneutical crises Wendy Brown diagnoses—even a project that aims to make an alternative epistemology and form of identity available ends up falling back onto the now-debunked philosophical narratives that preceded our own linguistic frame of mind. Responding to Charles Altieri in particular, but helpfully tracing the contours of this larger debate, Juliana Spahr writes, of all the critics who have taken on language writing, Charles Altieri has questioned the claim of reader freedom and its political aims the most cogently. In an extended reply to a defense of language writing by Jerome McGann, he . . . points out that empty claims of reader freedom at times resemble “the free, pleasureseeking consumer that L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Writing’s doctrines so pompously revile” (306). In another article that covers

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A Brief History of Language Writing

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Spahr counters by arguing that, while she shares “some of Altieri’s concerns, many of them disappear when one turns to what is crucial about reading in the time of language writing. Freedom is, of course, impossible to even imagine as a concept related to reading. . . . Instead of freedom, which tends to imply that readers are somehow freed from meaning’s mandate, what interests me about this work is how connection becomes the crucial value” (59). Reprising the role Spahr played in response to Altieri, I want to say that even though I agree with Spahr’s reading of Language writing, I am unsure if her turn to “connection” goes far enough in answering the charge that liberalism has crept into Language writing, especially given Perloff ’s already-noted recognition that innovative writing is easily fetishized and that readerly construction is at times “merely a transfer of power” from the author to the reader.7 As the prominence of Language writing increased, and arguments like the one put forth by Altieri started to f ly, critics and poets invested in Language writing began to insist that they were misunderstood by readers who believed they had total autonomy in reading. But such insistence has not lessened the intensity of either the critiques or defenses of Language writing on this score. In a larger section of his essay that Perloff cites above, Ron Silliman argues that Barthes’ notion of the reader who “ ‘is without history, biography, psychology,’ ” merely being “ ‘that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted,’ ” does not fundamentally change the operational subjectivity within a text: “The idealized, absent author of the New Critical canon has here been replaced by an equally idealized, absent reader. All that remains are the reports of other readers—call them critics—whose texts endlessly read textuality itself, whose claim to authority lies precisely in the self-knowledge of their texts as infinitely deferred, deferring, acts.”8 Silliman is decidedly not discussing Language writing, but Barthes’ “The Death of the Author.” His larger

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similar territory, he worries that these works “risk trapping us in wordy prisons because they do not make sufficient demands that we try out identifications with how others construct meanings for situations.” (“Some Problems about Agency” 215)6

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target is what he calls ventriloquism, the project of academic and nonacademic readers alike who insert their own presence “into” a “text while aggressively denying those of [the] author” and those of other readers (375). What Silliman champions instead is a reader, or a “self,” who is conscious of history, biography, and psychology “and posits it explicitly or implicitly behind each sentence or line in a work—a feature that much ‘language poetry’ shares with writing that arises from new social movements” (369). Furthermore, Silliman claims, “In poetry, the self is a relation between writer and reader that is triggered by what Jakobson called contact, the power of presence. There is no subject that is not, strictly speaking, intersubjective” (373). Nevertheless, Silliman’s argument about Barthes’ essay and for an alternative reading self in poetry pushes up against our thinking about Language writing and its active reader, as both Perloff ’s above use of his essay to discuss Language writing, and Silliman’s own move to build on Barthes’ reader in order to tie Language writing to a self-conscious reading self, indicate. Silliman’s confession in this same essay that he used to read Barthes’ argument as “intending to include the reader as a participant in the creation of meaning” only strengthens the urge to read Silliman’s analysis of Barthes as at least tangentially related to Language writing, for it tests our credulity to imagine that this former reading did not exist in some proximity to the emergence of Language writing and its claims about the reader, a time when Barthes’ own reputation was on the rise (364). It would seem, then, that Silliman’s essay is, at least in part, also a defense of Language writing, an attempt to separate it off, after the fact, from Barthes’ theoretical failure, as Silliman sees it, to truly alter our model of subjectivity inside a text; at the very least it takes part in the ongoing development of Silliman’s poetics. As such, his essay speaks as well, however indirectly, to a deep anxiety, a poetic stress, within Language writing—the knowledge that disrupted language, or even the recognition of language’s disrupting character, does not guarantee a disrupted subject. It is the anxiety that Altieri might be right. To sum up the problem more simply, as I understand it, and borrowing Silliman’s and Barthes’ language: if readers control the poem as authors once did (repeatedly filling the shoes of the “absent reader” with their

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own feet, fetishizing disjunctive, materially attentive language, taking that language as a playground for their private imaginations), then no shift in their practical understanding of what a self looks like occurs (365). The same pattern holds true when the idea of readerly participation creates an “idealized” reader who bears all the hallmarks of liberal subjectivity—a self “who holds together in a single field” all that makes a literary work readable, a self who authorizes that text’s meaningfulness, which is a self that stands outside its linguistic circumstances (365).9 And if Silliman’s and his company’s anxiety is realized, and Altieri is correct, we are right back where we began before Language writing; liberalism lives on in its active reader, and any new, confident relationship to understanding that this reader appears to stake out beyond the confines of liberalism is illusory—as readers of Language writing, Wendy Brown’s account of the political moment becomes our condition in the most personal of ways.10 That being said, and in spite of Language writing’s own apprehension, the possibility that it perpetuates liberalism can only be sustained if we read Language writing’s interest in readerly participation as a resistance to the establishment of authority as such—to the idea of authority in the most general, theoretical, and abstract way. Only if readers genuinely hold to the poststructuralist critique of identity and textual meaning at the same time they employ its critical tools against all that would discipline the individual humanist subject, especially their own, does Language writing appear troubled by liberalism. The fact that a debate over what kind of readers Language writing produces accompanied the development of Language writing over the past few decades indicates that a percentage of readers do in fact read Language writing’s poems and poetics in just this way, or at least assume that others do. But to the already cited argument that it is particular readers, not Language writing, that persist in liberalism, I would join this sense that it is a potential reader’s resistance to authority in itself that protects above all else a self that can’t be told what to do or what to mean—a self that is untouchable, a self that is beholden to none.11 Like the intellectual who takes an antifoundationalist philosophical approach to subjectivity, while, on a practical, emotional level, remaining

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enmeshed in the liberal worldview of a rights-based politics, such readers of Language writing at times find themselves holding irreconcilable interpretative strategies. They agree to a critique of the lyric subject that displaces the liberal agent even as they enact that agency in their reading, believing that their own readings predominantly give these poems their shape. Ref lecting the political agent who recognizes the failure of liberalism, but who struggles forward with it because he does not know how to live in the world as a decentered subject, these readers cannot practice on an interpretative, psychological level the poetics to which they say they cleave. Their sympathy with liberal individualism might very well not be an intellectual position at all, but an emotional response to cultural and political realities. When readers’ intuitive affinity for the rights of the individual, or their own desire to remain free from the claims of others—when the protest-based, rights-focused politics of the 1960s and 1970s holds sway over their political and literary imaginations, for nostalgic or idealistic reasons—they cannot read the work of Ron Silliman, Susan Howe, or any poet associated with Language writing, as the poems ask them to.12 And if readers cannot in their daily lives and convictions dispense with the idea that their individual rights and exclusive personal spaces ground our political, philosophical, and aesthetic discourses, then it should not astonish them that they find a liberal self in whatever poems or texts they read, which is evidence that readers have not let Language writing into their hearts, however much they let it into their heads. Believing they have sole right to their own meanings and lives—just as citizens with civil liberties— they make liberal individualism their philosophical foundation. There is perhaps no stronger evidence for the fact that Language writing’s potential complicity in our epistemological crisis lies with readers rather than with the poems than the fact that Language writing, at every step, works toward its readers’ conversion (if they are not already believers in its poetics), for no strategy is more antithetical to the professed dictates of liberalism and political pluralism than the drive to remake another in one’s own image. When I say the poems and poetics of Language writing are bent on conversion I mean to point out that readers will not find a poem composed in a nonlinear, disjunctive

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style meaningful unless they believe it will be found meaningful—they need to agree to the framework of its poetic discourse before they begin reading. The example of Frederic Jameson’s reading of Bob Perelman’s “China” as “schizophrenic” (and George Hartley’s response to that reading) is a case in point. Perelman’s poem begins: We live on the third world from the sun. Number three. Nobody tells us what to do. The people who taught us to count were being very kind. It’s always time to leave. If it rains, you either have your umbrella or you don’t. The wind blows your hat off. The sun rises also. I’d rather the stars didn’t describe us to each other; I’d rather we do it for ourselves.13 Jameson first responds to “China” as an “interesting exercise in discontinuities,” even as he sees “across these disjoined sentences . . . some more unified global meaning,” indeed he confesses that the poem “does seem to capture something of the excitement of the immense, unfinished social experiment of the New China.”14 But Jameson moves on quickly to dismiss his own initial reading, writing that Perelman’s poem “turns out to have little enough to do with that referent called China” when he discovers that Perelman wrote his poem in response to a book of photographs he discovered while strolling through Chinatown: “The sentences of the poem in question are then Perelman’s own captions to those pictures, their referents another image, another absent text; and the unity of the poem is no longer to be found within its language but outside itself, in the bound unity of another, absent book” (30). The problem with such poetry, for Jameson, is the political implications of its aesthetic choices (its disconnection from the real world; its generalized, fragmented cultural style), a critique George Hartley responds to in great depth in Textual Politics and the Language Poets. Hartley begins his reply to Jameson’s reading with the argument that Jameson confuses “poetic language with schizophrenic speech.”15 Hartley demonstrates that “Jameson implicitly attributes Perelman’s

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schizophrenic aesthetic to the process of reification in late capitalistic society,” even though Perelman and other poets connected to Language writing base their aesthetic “on a critique of precisely that same fragmenting process” (49). In the following paragraph he continues, “Evidently for Jameson the material signifier exemplifies the process of reification” that he so fears hamstrings political agency and praxis in our particular capitalist moment, and “Indeed, if all that these poets were doing was isolating language from its social context, then they would be perpetuating reification. But is that what Perelman and others are doing? A material signifier by itself neither perpetuates nor liberates us from reification. Only how we perceive the social relations inscribed within the signifier will determine its particular political effect” (49). Hartley then goes on to give “China” a detailed analysis, illustrating “the aesthetic complexity and political resonance of the poem” (49). Building as he goes, Hartley argues, among other things, that the line “Nobody tells us what to do” might, for instance, bring to mind “a Chinese student straightforwardly proclaiming her independence”; and that line seven hints “at China’s geopolitical positioning between the two stars—the USSR and the USA. . . . The Chinese would rather be a third world” (50, 51). Hartley closes his reading by writing, “What is missing from ‘China’ are the standard syntactical conjunctions and explicitly coherent subject matter common to everyday speech. But when have these components been necessary for poetry? At least since Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’ parataxis to many has seemed the ‘poetic’ form of juxtaposition, with its demand that the reader fill in the gaps between the lines, as we have been doing with ‘China.’ Unlike Pound’s poem, however, the gaps in ‘China’ are . . . metonymic” (51). In the end, Perelman’s poem demonstrates to Hartley that “(1) the particular narrations into which we are inserted are coded justifications for the status quo, and (2) there are alternative ways of structuring (constituting) our experiences. Such alternatives foreground our social relations, not reify them” (52). I only cite Hartley’s argument at length because it testifies less to Jameson’s misreading than to the fact that, for “China” to cohere, readers must not simply be familiar with the vocabulary of productive

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A Brief History of Language Writing

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textual disruption and readerly participation, as Jameson no doubt was, but also embrace that vocabulary as a kind of new first language— readers must let the operating principles of this vocabulary become the medium in which their understanding takes place.16 In other words, objecting to the poem’s difficulty, incoherence, schizophrenic speech and political shortcomings, or straightforwardly defending its meaningfulness, distracts us from the crucial understanding that asking readers to find “China” expressive in the way Hartley does is the same as asking them to embrace an entirely new hermeneutics. No amount of reasoned conversation will make this agreement necessary. If readers do not already believe the poem’s disruptive formal strategies generate meaning, then they need to overhaul the way they think (which is to say, the way they experience the world) for the poem to make any sense at all. Thus Language writing tries, as it must, to teach readers a new way of interacting with language, which will itself bring readers over to an alternative account of culture, truth, identity, and history.17 The emotional and intellectual challenge of such a change is massive; a person must feel compelled by particular texts and ideas from the inside out, and by a vision of her environment as decidedly different than the one to which she was accustomed; she does not simply succumb to reason and evidence. And a new belief in method’s compositional function can’t help but affect the way we encounter words. Once this alternative interpretive frame becomes part of a reader’s perspective, her substitute understanding of language is the discovery of a different world. It’s not unlike being on the road to Damascus—everything looks different than it did before.18 To tell a story about Language writing’s faithfulness, then, does not mean salvaging what we can from the work, or highlighting what is convenient for our reading and forgetting what is not. Rather, because Language writing already possesses a faithful posture, seen here in its desire to colonize our foundational conclusions about meaning making, discovering how Language writing engages in a faith practice is only to relearn what the work wants from us as readers. That is to say, Language writing has already abandoned liberalism and provided an alternative epistemology, so we do not need to perform any critical

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CPR—we need to fix ourselves. Our attempt to use Language writing to establish new hermeneutical terms by way of that work’s faithfulness is simply the job of close reading followed by an adherence to what we learn. If we can gain this clearer sense of what Language writing thinks readers’ responsibilities toward texts are, and if we can come to a sharper understanding of what drives this sense of reading, then we will have provided ourselves with the intellectual groundwork we need to find our words, and the meanings we make with them, reliable once again.19 I hasten to affirm as well that locating Language writing in the philosophical brambles and ruins of belief speaks to Language writing’s force, not its inadequacy, and suggests that when we talk of belief and faith we are most fully inscribed within the bounds of disjunction and imagination.

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A Brief History of Language Writing

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T H R E E

Faith, Belief, Poetics

We are now in a position to explore in detail how Language writing aligns itself with religious modes of thought, and I want to begin this inspection by looking to St. Thomas Aquinas’ notion of faith and belief. In Summa Theologica, written during the middle of the thirteenth century, Aquinas, following Augustine, writes, “believing . . . is giving assent to something one is still thinking about. Strictly speaking, we think about what we cannot yet fully see to be true. . . . Believing . . . means putting faith in something, and this resembles knowing in giving firm assent, but resembles doubting, suspecting and holding opinions in having no finished vision of the truth.”1 We must, of course, as Frederick Crosson reminds us, take pains to “understand Saint Thomas as he understood himself,” in particular what he meant by “fides” and “credere,” which are normally translated as “faith” and “belief ” respectively.2 In his review essay, “ ‘Fides’ and ‘Credere’: W.C. Smith on Aquinas,” Crosson tells us that, “credere does not mean ‘to believe’ in the modern sense of the term,” with its explicit recognition of possible error, “but, rather, ‘placing one’s heart on,’ ‘pledging allegiance to’ ” (401). It “is the act of the virtue or habit of faith” (400). And, as Crosson argues, in Aquinas’ view, “to have faith . . . is . . . to believe A that φA because A is absolutely trustworthy” (407)—which is like saying “we believe John that it is cold outside because John is reliable.” What is crucial about Crosson’s discussion is that it points to the way

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in which Aquinas’ notions of faith and belief are relational: acting in faith does not suggest that we have knowledge because we have direct perception of a thing. Instead, we have knowledge because we put our “heart on” something (we “give assent”; we “believe”), which in turn gives us a way to think in, or know, the particular.3 Now, for Crosson and Aquinas, that something we pledge “allegiance to” is always God, and to take their formulation out of its orthodox Christian context does some violence to it. Still, I think it is fair to say, in the line of Aquinas, that this understanding of believing and faith appears already fit for our own intellectual moment (think of Stanley Fish calling interpretations “beliefs”).4 When we believe something essential about our material experience (something about language, or about how gravity works) we can “know” particulars in the world; to allow that this is right is to act in faith. Faith grants authority to what we fundamentally take to be true, and lets that truth as we know it guide each act of reasoning and interpretation. But as Aquinas reminds us, believing, which puts faith in motion, does not mean acting as if one’s knowledge is complete; in fact it means just the opposite, for we continue to “think about what we cannot yet fully see to be true.”5 Proceeding according to faith does mean, however, that we cannot incorporate skepticism about that which permits reasoning (God, or a philosophy of language) into our definition of it: Aquinas’ “doubt” largely names our human inability to come to the end of understanding. Believing is then what makes living and thinking possible, and faith is itself an act of thinking by way of what we believe, a way of reasoning that we must persistently renew. To be clear: for Aquinas, God, as the target of belief, is not known with complete certainty. He remains a mystery. But by involving oneself with God, by affirming an understanding of him—that is, by adding faith to a reading of God’s words—Aquinas says that people come to know God and his world more fully, even as their vision of him and what they know through him continue to change. As he traveled between Paris and Rome, and sat reading the rediscovered works of Aristotle, Aquinas came to realize that belief allows rather than excludes (or for us, hinders) critical inquiry. We do not arrive at our

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reasons for calling one thing true instead of another by way of objective observation; our evidence is itself an interpretation and arrangement of the cultural and literary texts at our disposal. Distinct from radical skepticism, doubting is a thoughtful inquiry into the particular character and consequence of what we think is the case. Without a finished “vision of the truth,” we study our circumstances through faith, refashioning our understanding as new events and ideas protrude into our deliberations: we learn of our perception’s shortcomings as we stumble onto them, taking what we believe at each moment as the guide in that moment and in our step toward the next (331). A firmly held belief (the act of believing) pulls in and accommodates the complexities its particular situation brings to light. If we challenge our beliefs on the basis that they are beliefs, and are therefore uncertain, we do not draw close enough to the world to see where our ideas are in need of change and refinement; we end up with a false sense of security in the nowhere of so-called objectivity, or the smug comfort of singular suspicion, instead of learning to think faithfully in a way that permits adaptation and intellectual rigor. Which is to say, believing something to be true, and then thinking according to the mandates of faith, helps us recognize our thoughts as claims on our shifting circumstances, just as it authors a developing understanding of what we hold to within the context of those circumstances. A full account of our beliefs describes where at a certain point we take a reading for granted; we all move into the territory of belief when our evidence for feeling comfortable with our ideas and interpretations appears more subjective to others than it does to us. A sunset proves God to one person and not another. A poem’s use of broken syntax demonstrates the disconnection between the world and words to one person, but reads like a poem that does not make any sense to somebody else. Both beliefs require a web of texts, experiences, and communities to become possible as reasonable conjectures. God and the trouble with representation operate within believers’ lives and practices of inquiry in the same way. In Frame Analysis, Erving Goffman shows that the “definitions of a situation are built up in

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Reading as Belief

accordance with principles of organization which govern events—at least social ones—and our subjective involvement in them.”6 We can know that we have frames of reference, however our place inside them precludes our seeing them completely, or even being aware of all the ways they determine our thinking. We know method makes meaning, however we do not understand the full implications of our knowledge, just as people believe in God without knowing God wholly. Believing, when on task, when it produces faith, builds up richer, more creative relationships with what we believe, and through faith we gain increasingly complex interpretations of the objects and events that confront us each day—as a frame of reference, a particular belief helps bring into focus what falls within our boundary of understanding. Although Language writing does not put its belief about aesthetics under suspicion, that orientation allows poets to consider the specific facts of their cultural circumstances with care, which is a continuous act of reading that takes place within, and even as, the conversation around innovative poetry. It is this conversation in turn that helps its poets understand their beliefs about aesthetics with more sophistication. The same holds true for the religious faithful who use God to think about the world within their religious communities, and that world to think about God—the existence of God is not up for debate, but his character is, a more complex understanding of which, however incomplete, provides further nuanced reasons for and manners of living faithfully. (The reality of our blind spots is the reason why when a crisis of faith does come along it means finding a whole new world and a whole new self; to challenge the truthfulness of the subject of belief is to short-circuit the system it enables, which is always one’s life.) For us, the question is rarely which frame of reference is right and which is wrong, but which one has the most useful system of inquiry. Which appears to account best for the world as you experience it? Let me underscore that I am not arguing for religious belief per se—I do not care if people believe in God or the primordial ooze. I mean to point to how faith functions as a critical method, which has no necessary connection to religion or particular conceptions of the

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divine. On the other side of the twentieth century, what begins to become apparent is that faith, when taken as an approach to knowledge, helps us negotiate a world of radical disconnection, a world in which we have given up on the idea that we can have a direct perception of things as they are.7 Nothing, to be sure, might seem more ridiculous than the suggestion that a group of Marxists and secular Jewish poets have anything in common with the likes of St. Thomas Aquinas. Yet Charles Bernstein, from the outset, set the stage for a reading of his literary project as a practice of faith, with much of that word’s disquieting connotations. Bernstein’s essays of the late 1970s and early 1980s persistently sought out ways to intensify poetry reading experiences for author and audience alike—he argued for opening up our understanding of what makes poems meaningful to include the material dimensions of language, and suggested that nonlinear forms, the slips between words and referents, the way words sound and look, even typographical experiments that render poems unreadable, or unpronounceable, are sites for evocative intellectual play. The faith Bernstein puts in words’ ability to cohere through, not despite, their fragility and multifariousness guides his poetics up into the current moment; his faith that we can think with our f luid, linguistic situation in fact becomes, by the late 1990s and early part of the following decade, manifestly an explicit, definitive function of poetics, which is not to suggest that it was ever otherwise: “To practice poetics is to acknowledge the inevitability of metaphor, the linguisticality of perception, the boundedness of thought, the passion of ideas, the beauty of error, the chains of logic, the possibilities of intuition, and the uncanny delight of chance. . . . [P]oetics is situational, shifts with the winds, courts contradictions, feeds on inconsistency.”8 The very unsettledness at the heart of poetics, as Bernstein has it, locates poetics as “an ethical engagement with the shifting conditions of everyday life” (129). It turns away from the “idea that knowledge must be observer-independent and reproducible” or based on “invariant, often religiously derived, principles” (religion here stands in for the work of universalism): it contrasts “ethics, as a dialogic practice of response in civil society, with morality, as a fixed code of conduct and belief ” (129). Echoing

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poetics is an activity, an informed response to emerging circumstances. As such, it cannot claim the high ground of morality or systematic theory. Poetics is tactical, not strategic. Indeed, it is the lack of strategy, the aversion to the high ground, that often causes poetics to appear weak or confused or inconsistent or relativistic. Yet, in the struggle between ethics and morality, ethics has the advantage even when it appears to be wandering in the wilderness. This advantage is too rarely taken advantage of. What is needed is a poetics of poetics; that is, a defense of the ethical grounding of poetics. (129–130) In the following paragraph, Bernstein argues that “A poetics of poetics refutes the charge of relativism” and “makes the case that value judgments are better when they take into account multiple, and often competing, factors and refuse the simple solution of preexisting rule” (130). We should not mistake Bernstein’s suspicion of “preexisting rule” for a critique of belief as Aquinas defines it—we already know that, for Bernstein, for Language writing (even when left amorphous), an open, Wittgensteinian conception of language is a critical feature of poetics, and, as a core belief, it is outside the realm of the debatable. However, this orientation toward language does not function in the way what Bernstein calls “systematic theory” does; what is objectionable about claims that purport to be “observer-independent and reproducible” is their refusal to consider how uncertainty, facts on the ground, and particular instances of language use, all intrude upon and shift what we can say we know at any given moment (129). Like Aquinas’ belief in God, Bernstein’s understanding of language allows that, as the object of attention, this conception of language, and what he reads through it, must be constantly reproached, “doubted” in the sense that he and we continue to think about what we take to be the case; we and he continue to look for “multiple, and often competing, factors” to complicate our insights (130).9

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Aquinas’ relational understanding of faith, and his reading of belief as open ended, Bernstein continues,

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Where Aquinas has faith, Bernstein has poetics—both are “activities”; both allow that social, personal relations produce knowledge, not scientific perception; both depend on recognizing the limits and relentless un-fullness of understanding. And if Aquinas “puts his heart” on God, and then uses his belief to know his circumstances, which is the move of faith, then Bernstein “puts his heart” on “the inevitability of metaphor, the linguisticality of perception, the boundedness of thought” and faithfully uses them to read the “shifting conditions of everyday life” because “the uncanny delight of chance”—that is, our words’ persistent slip—is “absolutely trustworthy.”10 Bernstein’s belief that method produces meaning expresses itself most fully in these terms; what he cannot doubt, his particular orientation toward a disjunctive method allows him, in faith, to find even the most chaotic texts relentlessly meaningful. The faith of poetics, the practice of it, no doubt often makes reading look like “wandering in the wilderness,” but for Bernstein this commitment to “emerging circumstances” is, as an insistence on the “ethical,” a commitment of the most profound order; it ref lects the rhetorical force of Aquinas’ commitment to the truth, the incarnate Word of God.11 While Bernstein’s and Aquinas’ primary terms are no doubt dissimilar, how they hold to them, how they use them, and what they take them to allow, reveals a striking harmony. Assuming the eyes of Aquinas, for a moment, poetics is no less than a faithful response to our linguistic reality that enables us to interpret the world, an undertaking we may achieve because we let what we believe we know about words to guide our attempt to “take into account” the “multiple, and often competing, factors” present in the cultural and literary texts we use each day to render each day meaningful (130). We know the world—we find a way to live ethically in it—in our poetics. Living those poetics, and this amounts to fashioning a literary Horarium, means assiduous talking and writing, reading and responding—attending to our own and each other’s words as they are used at each given moment and in each given place. This insistence on multiplying conversations is what I take Bernstein to make room for in his elevation of the short-term aims of poetic “tactics” at work in our various and varying social milieus. How we handle the immediacy of

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our words and the consequences of those manipulations—the contradictions, conf licts, and circumstances our words find themselves in at a particular juncture—together become the means we employ to critique and sustain the legitimacy of our resolutions: what definition of a word seems most useful, reasonable, or ethical can be worked out in conversation according to the demands of that conversation (with all its historical, personal, and cultural branches). Bernstein looks to aesthetics in particular for productive exchange, as it invokes “a contested arena of judgment, perception, and value where artworks and essays operate not as adjudicators of fixed principles but as probes for meaning, prods for thought. To investigate the conditions that make value possible is not to abandon value to historical contingency but rather to insist that values be argued for, demonstrated, and enacted.”12 When we speak, and when others speak to us, we make, as they do, a case for our cultural values and textual interpretations; we interrogate each other’s ideas and push back against others’ words as they push against ours, and as we talk, we confirm, challenge, and shift what we mean and believe. Once again insistently in the mode of Aquinas, Bernstein, here in the case he makes for aesthetics—both as a definitive subject of poetics, and the avenue of its most faithful dialogue—does not elide commitment or evolution, but dismisses habits of conversation that only go through the motions of talking and listening to others; although we can know meaning is contextual we can’t live as if it were merely contextual, that is, unassertive. When our aesthetic attention insists “that values be argued for, demonstrated, and enacted” it keeps us, if we are to remain constant at least, from excepting ourselves from difficult social, literary, and political encounters, and forces us to respond to one another (11). This is not to say that we grant ourselves permission to be impolite, just that we must take one another’s troubling thoughts and interpretations seriously. I would only add that particular literary works remain central characters in our conversations, just as they do for Bernstein and Aquinas. As Aquinas turns to the Bible, Bernstein turns to the tradition of innovative poetry and much of Western philosophy. Whoever would take up poetic, faithful dialogues must subject their words to the scrutiny of the central literary works in their intellectual and cultural context and

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heritage; and they must submit their words to a reading by those works’ other readers, for those texts and other interpreters play leading roles in the development and shaping of our shared environments. My reading of Language writing as enlivened by faith and belief is a response to Bernstein’s call for a poetics of poetics. To defend “the ethical grounding of poetics” is not to argue for the preeminence of ethical discourse, but to make a case for the way poetics, and the tradition of innovative writing that propels it, renders objects and events meaningful in the “wilderness” of our unrelenting self-consciousness.13 A poetics of poetics, with its belief about what we know of words, grants a text’s, or a person’s, particular meaning claims just enough authority. With a renewed confidence in our ability to mean what we write and say, we can begin again to assert our ethical thinking and advance propositions about the truth as we understand it, and this confidence and these claims allow us to fashion more useful narratives about our political, cultural, and personal surroundings. Innovative poetry and poetics, the work of writers like Charles Bernstein, Bruce Andrews, Marjorie Perloff, Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, Bob Perelman, and Rae Armantrout, do not suppose language’s disconnection from a preexisting reality is a problem to be overcome, but the reality to be relied upon. Their faithful poetics, as a commitment to a language-y world, calls to mind William James’ insight that just because we “give up the doctrine of objective certitude, we do not thereby give up the quest or hope of truth itself.”14 To find meaning reliable at the moment we give up on certainty is the moment we reimagine what we take ourselves to be doing when we read, and it is to have faith that this act of reading gives us all we need to understand the words on the page in our hand, or coming out of the mouth of the person sitting across from us. I do not mean here to equate writing and speaking, but make room for the legibility of the various, and ever-changing texts and bodies that call out for our interpretation. No matter then how much the poets associated with Language writing, and even the poetries that proceed and follow it, differ in the particulars of their politics and aesthetic choices, their texts, rooted in innovative poetics, ask readers to move with the bodies of the devout—by fits and starts, by mysteries, interruptions, and in reading.15

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FOU R

The (Calvinist) Spirit of Understanding

Perhaps something in the nature of faith lends itself to homily, to repeatedly telling allies and skeptics alike that faith is good for them, although I do tend to think such mystification f lows from its apologists’ failures of imagination and lapses of hard thinking rather than from faith as such. Whatever the case, after surveying the proceeding pages, I worry that I do not draw far enough away from the pontifical tradition. I’ve argued that for Charles Bernstein, and in many ways the larger association we call Language writing and the tradition of innovative poetry, poetics is a practice of faith that enables interpretation. This act of faith sees meaning made and sustained by what we tend to think puts it at risk—the break between sign and referent, or what we saw Bernstein call “the inevitability of metaphor, the linguisticality of perception, the boundedness of thought . . . the beauty of error . . . and the uncanny delight of chance.”1 In the course of this argument I have tried to suggest that such a faithful model of poetics makes room for the imagination to persist beside reason, just as it seeks to allow what is mysterious, absolutely other, and inscrutable, even impossible, about our experience of the world into our thinking about it. Still none of these discussions show clearly how faith actually works. It would be easy to embrace many of the aesthetic arguments I’ve forwarded without embracing faith itself as a poetic procedure or a philosophical model. It is one thing to argue for faith, but quite another to experience

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it at work as a method or see it performed in a way that identifies it as a necessary part of our reading and thinking habits. So I do not think I can put off any longer a full discussion of the manner in which faith functions in poetic practice, not just theory. I begin by extending the analogy between poetics and faith I outlined in the last chapter and argue that meaning holds the same position in Language writing and innovative poetry that salvation does in Reformed Christianity. As it stands, the sense that language is our condition so thoroughly saturates our thinking that to name our inability to get outside language and mark the gulf that stands between understanding and ourselves often, as in the present case, serves as a common point of departure in literary studies and philosophy.2 We grow so comfortable with these once radical ideas that we begin, unknowingly, to see and treat them as scientific observations about the natural world, not affected by the variances of human intuition; nevertheless our attention to sentences and grammar carries more the whiff of the sanctuary than the laboratory. However, tracing out the terms in which we can read the impossibility of salvation that Reformed Christianity offers as the circumstance of actual salvation, and this condition as the paradigmatic illustration of meaning production, wakes us up again to the daily mystery of words cohering. It is this metaphor too that exposes most clearly how faith stands at the heart of Language writing and our thinking about language, and that will, perhaps, give us richer insight into both. Kierkegaard memorably wrote about faith as the attainment of the impossible, although for my own purposes, I want to look to John Calvin’s understanding of faith and his formulation of justification by faith alone because I think they more usefully clarify the practical operations of faith. In his commentary on Romans, perhaps his most important Biblical exegesis, Calvin writes, “Faith then is not a naked knowledge either of God or of his truth; nor is it a simple persuasion that God is, that his word is the truth; but a sure knowledge of God’s mercy, which is received from the gospel, and brings peace of conscience with regard to God, and rest to the mind.”3 Contrary to almost all modern talk about God, religious or secular, knowledge of God

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is almost beside the point for Calvin; a recognition of God’s mercy is instead the pivot of faith, a theological concern that we will later see Jonathan Edwards take up to great effect. With special reference to Paul’s account of Abraham’s righteousness, Calvin goes on to unpack Abraham’s faith as a move against literalism or a materialist disposition too narrowly conceived: “the sense is, that when there was no probable reason, yea, when all things were against him, he yet continued to believe. And, doubtless, there is nothing more injurious to faith than to fasten our minds to our eyes, that we may from what we see, seek a reason for our hope” (176). The “belief ” Calvin refers to is Abraham’s faith in God’s promise to make him the father of many nations. Abraham (at this point still Abram) does not have a son when God calls him in Genesis, and he says to God, “Behold, to me thou hast given no seed: and, lo, one born in my house is mine heir” (Gen. 15:3).4 God then brings Abraham outside and says, “Look now toward heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them: and he said unto him, So shall thy seed be” (Gen. 15:5). Abraham responds by putting his faith in God who “counted it to him for righteousness” (Gen. 15:6). Standing outside the tent, Abraham has no reason to imagine he shall ever have children unless he trusts God’s promise over natural evidence—his and Sarah’s age make their bearing children impossible. Abraham’s willingness to believe God is, in Calvin’s reading, the act of faith. Calvin’s commentary on Paul’s use of Abraham emphasizes that when faith is counted, or reckoned as, righteousness “God confers not righteousness on us because it is due, but bestows it as a gift,” like God’s gift of a son to Abraham.5 For Christians’ part, the gift they receive from God is the assurance of redemption through the crucifixion of Jesus, and Calvin prods them to respond as Abraham did—living as if the promise is already fulfilled. Calvin insists on all people’s inability to achieve righteousness on their own; nobody can follow the law completely and by their own striving justify themselves before God: after considering the Holy Spirit’s role in the distribution of grace in Book Three of Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin turns to the moral crises the law creates for its people: “God lays down for us through the law what we should do; if we then fail in any part of it, that dreadful sentence of

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eternal death which it pronounces will rest upon us. . . . [I]t is not only hard, but above our strength and beyond all our abilities, to fulfill the law to the letter; thus, if we look to ourselves only, and ponder what condition we deserve, no trace of good hope will remain; but cast away by God, we shall lie under eternal death.”6 Calvin’s argument suggests that the unmanageable difficulty of our lives and our persistent failure to uphold our obligations to God and one another testify against us and are evidence enough for the truth of his words. Only by accepting God’s gift as Abraham did can we become righteous, and therein make ourselves pleasing in God’s sight. As Abraham’s trust made him righteous, Christians’ trust in Jesus’ redemptive power makes them righteous; where Abraham believes God will provide him with a son, Christians give themselves to God’s mercy, his desire and ability to cancel the liability of their sinfulness. Trusting God’s grace constitutes faith as righteousness. A person’s faith in God’s grace makes it as if he had fulfilled the law and it relieves him of the debt he accrued through his failure to always do as he ought. This is what it means to be justified by faith alone, which is Calvin’s understanding of how we can live in our impossible circumstances.7 In the structure of the world it imagines we should recognize in Calvin’s thinking an understanding of signs that looks ahead to our own, and for this reason adapting his sense of how we achieve salvation, or meaning, in that system as a way to think about our own situation is not as big a leap as it might at first appear. Writing centuries before the emergence of structuralism, Calvin confirms the absence of a connection between words and referents, in his case the material signifiers of circumcision and baptism and what they represent, namely salvation and eternal life. In his just cited consideration of Abraham’s justification by faith, Calvin argues further that, “As there are two points in baptism now, so there were formerly in circumcision; for it was a symbol of a new life, and also of the remission of sins. But the fact as to Abraham himself, that righteousness preceded circumcision, is not always the case in sacraments, as it is evident from the case of Isaac and his posterity: but God intended to give such an instance once at the beginning, that no one might ascribe salvation to external signs.”8 In a footnote

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Calvin explains that the word “sign” “seems not to mean an outward token of something inward, but a mark, circumcision itself, which was imprinted, as it were, as a mark in the f lesh” (165–166). As physical marks, circumcision, and later baptism, do not necessarily confirm, much less bestow or express salvation. They make the idea of salvation possible and readable, but do not work as the thing itself. Calvin takes Abraham’s (and his descendants’) circumcision as an “initial work,” and insists on interpreting it as a “symbol of God’s favor” (163). His stance counters what he understood as the ancient Jews’ legalistic reading of circumcision as a “meritorious observance of the law,” where circumcision is the fulfillment of the law, the moment a boy and his family are justified before God (163).9 In our own time such a stance would be like believing that the word “horse” is necessarily tied to the animal. In severing the connection between word and referent Calvin noticeably does not trust signs as indicators (as somehow joined to a so-called real world), however, he does trust their usability, the possibility they open up for people to read themselves as belonging to God. Salvation, like the meanings found in the texts of Language writing, will occur, if at all, inside a world of signs connected only to their own representations.10 To echo and extend our use of Calvin’s justification as a metaphor, we can recognize that where Calvin has sin (what cuts us off from God) Language writing has disjunction (what inscribes us in language), which is not to say that disjunction is a kind of failure or moral collapse, or that readers should hope to make their words leap the chasm separating those words from a purported truth of things. Like Calvin’s notion of man’s fallen state, readers inside the logic of Language writing face disjunction as the fundamental fact of their situation of being in the world. As we’ve seen throughout this book (and the many books it follows), textual disjunction cannot be separated from reading, just as Calvin says sin initiates our entry into experience. Calvin’s justification—his decision to privilege the “knowledge of God’s mercy” that “brings peace of conscience . . . and rest to the mind”—consequently highlights a particular emotional, visceral response to our sin, or in the case of Language writing, the uncertainty we experience when we

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Abraham did not try to find out, by weighing the matter in the balance of unbelief, whether the Lord was able to perform what he had promised. . . . He indeed asked, how it could come to pass, but that was the asking of one astonished. . . . The saints then, when a message is brought them respecting the works of God, the greatness of which exceeds their comprehension, do indeed burst forth into expressions of wonder; but from this wonder they soon pass on to lay hold on the power of God: on the contrary, the wicked, when they examine a message, scoff at and reject it as a fable. (179) Calvin does not say Abraham, or “the saints,” must reject inquiry; he says they do not begin with doubt. When confronted with what they do not fully comprehend Abraham and the saints proceed as if God can be trusted. In the same way, it is our response to disjunction that—if hopeful and aware of a text’s grace (its literariness)—constitutes disjunction as meaningful: that is to say, mirroring salvation, meaning follows from our ability to trust that it will come in our reading of a particular text despite our material condition, like a Jew’s reading of circumcision or a Christian’s reading of baptism enable their justification before God. This sense of trust, or attitude toward what we believe, makes more explicit the emotional resonance of Aquinas’ formulation of belief as “placing one’s heart on” God, which is the “habit of faith,” a register of experience that I left unnamed when I first discussed Aquinas.11 Taking meaning in the manner Calvin presents salvation, and disjunction as he depicts sin, gives us permission to find comfort in the impossibility of our ethical, linguistic and political situation, and live with the observation that meaning is always a kind of miracle, even though it happens each minute of each day. A mind so attuned allows us to abandon our lamentations over language’s difficulty and stop compensating for our books’ impoverishment, or reveling in unreadability as some more insightful, more profound, more savvy intellectual orientation, which is a relief. Indeed, Calvin’s description of justification by faith

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work at interpretation (171). Calvin in fact calls the response of faith a state of astonishment, writing that,

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alone also reminds us of, and opens up, the less rational, more spiritdriven elements of our poetics that I only began to touch on in the first chapter. For better or worse, what people dislike about Calvin (or often more accurately, what they have been told about Calvin) usually has less to do with the fine points of his theology than it does with his particular apocalyptic thrust, with his telling people they might go to hell. It is annoying to hear that your soul stands in danger of eternal damnation, even when you do not believe in hell, and perhaps especially in that case. However, a little historical context can, I think, quickly help us overcome our understandable hesitation and begin to approach the above argument from another angle, hopefully making Calvin’s formulation of faith more available and useful to those who might balk at his picture of the universe. Finding himself at the center of the Reformation, Calvin dedicated his work primarily to helping people apply the Bible’s teaching to everyday life. He wanted to make piety available to common believers through Scripture, and he thought that people needed an informed understanding of faith’s purpose if they were to live in the world well and devote themselves to God. With holiness in mind, Calvin aimed to reaffirm what he understood as the essential, plain meaning of the Bible, as opposed to its allegorical meaning, the often-dominant concern of the scholastic medieval theologians immediately preceding him. In a letter to his friend Simon Gyrnaeus that appears at the start of Commentaries on The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans, Calvin describes the job of the Biblical commentator as laying “open the mind of the writer whom he undertakes to explain.”12 In his own view, Calvin’s dedication to restraint in interpretation set him at odds with his Catholic forerunners, although his own departure from them was cause for some anxiety on his part. Attempting to distinguish between his orthodox transformation (itself an interesting idea) and personal innovation, Calvin writes, “It is therefore an audacity, closely allied to a sacrilege, rashly to turn Scripture in any way we please, and to indulge our fancies as in sport; which has been done by many in former times” (xxvii). Knowing the impossibility of “universal consent” in the interpretation

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of the Bible, Calvin adds, “when we depart from the sentiments of our predecessors, we may not be stimulated by any humour for novelty” (xxvii). And yet, what Calvin’s hermeneutics meant in practice is more complicated than this letter might at first appear to suggest. Motivated by his desire to speak to an audience outside theological circles, Calvin translated his work into French. He also developed an accessible, straightforward style out of keeping with the theological writing of the time, and in his sermons and books Calvin favored basic moral and religious teaching over abstract principles like the nature of God’s omnipotence, or the composition of the Trinity. Abandoning the specialized discourse of theology and its academic history, Calvin regularly left his sources nameless, or used them primarily for his own ends, not as positions to be argued with at length. When he did name a source Calvin often quoted from memory or took a reference from an intermediate text.13 In so far as his authorial method includes a degree of piracy or collage (although Calvin would never have called it such), even as it draws on subjective experience, Calvin’s writing has a great deal in common with the essays of the poets connected to Language writing, or a philosopher like Stanley Cavell. All of which is to say that Calvin privileged intellectual insight and practical usefulness. He did not try to coerce his audience with a manipulative, self-justifying strategy based on expertise nor shut down those same readers’ and listeners’ personal, interpretive responsibility by way of the cold literalism we might prefer to associate with traditional Biblical scholarship.14 We need to understand Calvin’s concern for the plain meaning of Scripture, and the hermeneutics that developed out if it, as Calvin’s means of embracing the complexity and difficulty of the Bible as useful to lay believers. Unlike many of his contemporaries, for instance, Calvin refused to limit himself to a strictly Christological perspective that pushed away from the difficulties posed by historical context and Jewish interpretation of the Torah.15 A standard reading strategy of the time took the Psalms as exclusively focused on Christ, not David, although in “contrast to Faber, and even to Luther, Calvin attempted to respect both the ‘Jewish’ and the ‘Christian’ reading of the Old Testament, but his results

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did not please every Christian reader. Calvin does read some psalms for their messianic content, just as the New Testament does, but even the Psalms he regards as genuinely messianic do not lose their character as Psalms also genuinely about David, whose kingdom foreshadowed a grander kingdom to come without losing its own historical integrity.”16 Calvin’s commitment to reading Psalms in regard to David and Jesus allows readers to consider David, a f lawed but holy man, as a model of faith at the same time it permits readers to explore Jesus’ suffering on the cross. In Calvin’s hermeneutics, Christians must read in numerous directions to read well—they must take into account the complexity of Biblical meaning to do justice to their foundational text. However much Calvin was himself convinced of the Christ-centered continuity of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament he did not seek to find Christ everywhere in the Bible at the loss of any other characters, characters who might help readers with their own lives. Calvin’s regard for the Bible’s many authors ends up dismissing ever-more-simplifying readings of Scripture. Where professional theology of the time tended toward allegorical interpretation resulting in more ornate but less multidirectional understandings of the Bible, Calvin drew closer to the material condition of the Bible’s composition, as well as to the complicated interweaving of its major themes—God’s love, human error, and faithfulness. The lives Calvin’s readers were then to undertake grew more spiritual and intellectually strenuous. Given Calvin’s move away from allegorical interpretation and its implication that certain individuals can achieve mastery of the text, or special knowledge of it, we should not be surprised that Calvin also believed that Christians could only read the Bible well, immersing their lives in it, with the help of the Holy Spirit. Interpretive skill derived from training is altogether different from grasping the Bible’s complexity with the help of divine (perhaps even poetic) inspiration— where the former reinforces the interpreter’s authority the latter necessarily involves the reader’s life with the text (a fact we will see more clearly when we turn to Bruce Andrews’ Lip Service). As the site of faith, the Bible in Calvinism is where one encounters and experiences God, and reading it carefully is the practical means of beginning to live

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faithfully. In so far as justification by faith depends on readers accepting the Bible’s witness to Jesus’ life and resurrection, Christians have evidence for their beliefs, not certainty; however, even this evidence does not, for Calvin, present itself to us obviously, as his own hermeneutics, to say nothing of his break from the Roman Church, make evident. Instead, to be justified by faith, to find the claim of Jesus in the New Testament meaningful (trusting God’s mercy “which is received from the gospel”), is a particular kind of physical, emotional, and mental response to Scripture.17 Wittgenstein writes of the Bible, “God has four people recount the life of his incarnate Son, in each case differently and with inconsistencies—but might we not say: It is important that this narrative should not be more than quite averagely historically plausible just so that this should not be taken as the essential, decisive thing? So that the letter should not be believed more strongly than is proper and the spirit may receive its due.”18 Wittgenstein and Calvin are not so far apart from one another. There is certainly the direct, personal relationship Christians say they have with God, but this relationship is developed and nurtured by persistent study and, to borrow Alan Jacobs’ phrase, “loving contemplation,” of the Bible.19 As in the case of Psalms and the Gospels, to read in the Bible with and for the Spirit, holding onto several meanings at once, looking for where the text alters the way we live and think, is to experience faith as a hopeful, personal engagement with what is difficult about the Bible. And even if we do not accept Calvin’s Holy Ghost, we can put Calvin’s legacy in slightly more ordinary, secular terms: Calvin’s belief that the Holy Spirit enables us to experience the Bible as comprehensible demonstrates that the emotionally charged, even astonished response to Scripture that defines faith essentially erases the line between reading and faith; the Bible Calvin gives us requires rigorous and constant attention, without which faith has no place to become manifest. The act of reading oneself through circumcision or baptism as a person who trusts God, and is therefore forgiven by him, makes it so. Similarly, the Bible, or any text, only becomes readable when we trust understanding to the terms of the text in which we hope to find it—we must adjust our lives, our ways of thinking and interpreting, to what we are reading.

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Or more simply still, our texts, the Bible perhaps most especially, makes sense when one trusts the way its sense is made, which is what it means to be justified by faith as a reader. Even my own arguments to come concerning Bruce Andrews’ Lip Service, Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” and Charles Bernstein’s Shadowtime will be made possible by my not so self-conscious belief that these literary works are merciful—they will become meaningful despite all I know about how texts operate. I will not arrive at this conviction after turning a few pages and finding out that I like what I am reading; because I trust these literary works to be meaningful I can read them.

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F I V E

Ghosts, Jokes, Shadowtime, and Faithful Interpretation

A scan of the social landscape suggests that Calvin’s formulation of faith is out of keeping with many Americans’ popular understanding and political use of faith, regardless of their liberal or conservative bent. When Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) makes reference to the book of Isaiah in her defense of the Endangered Species Act, reminding us that it is “an act of worship” to “minister to the needs of God’s creation, and that includes our beautiful environment,” and moreover, “To ignore those needs is to dishonor the God who made us,” she makes believing in God synonymous with supporting her environmental policy.1 A political, or at least a social, agenda that might otherwise be up for question is located inside a sphere that cannot be reasonably contested, namely, the divine. (And she demonstrates as well that conservatives are not the only ones who attempt to marry their legislation to righteousness.)2 For secular humanists who equally take faith to stand in stark contrast to thoughtful debate, this use of religious conviction is not surprising. As Stanley Fish explains, “For the modern liberal, beliefs are what the mind scrutinizes and judges by rational criteria that are themselves hostage to no belief in particular,” although Fish is quick to dismiss the possibility of such a vantage point.3 In a secular-liberal worldview, any conviction that does not put itself into doubt is antithetical to intellectual investigation. Indeed, the understanding that faith and critical

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inquiry occupy different logical systems appears to be one of only a few ideas that many present-day people of faith and modern liberals can agree about. And yet, as Aquinas and John Calvin have already shown us, even if we cannot inspect the object of its devotion, removing faith as a method from the field of philosophical analysis runs counter to an older, perhaps even more orthodox conception of faith. Let me stress again that the analogy I want to draw between John Calvin and Charles Bernstein, or traditions of faith and innovative poetry more broadly, is not meant to be exact. Tying salvation to meaning and sin to disjunction is misleading to the extent that Bernstein, obviously, does not think disjunction is something to be overcome; as we well know, it is disjunction that Bernstein uses to make meaning available, and Calvin certainly does not put his faith in, or look fondly on, sin. I want to insist on the analogy despite its problems, though, because I continue to believe that Calvin’s move to erase the distinction between faith and reading best highlights what is too easily overlooked in Bernstein’s poems and poetics, namely, the profound confidence he puts in textual disjunction’s readability. In chapter three we saw Bernstein claim that disjunction in poetry makes meaning available in a way that reminded us of Aquinas’ discussion of belief and faith; however, as became apparent in our discussion of Calvin’s justification, putting one’s heart on disjunction only follows from emotional registers of experience like trust and hope. But here, too, Bernstein is faithful, and we can begin to see his attitude of faith, his hopeful stance toward disjunction and uncertainty, in a reference he makes to Emerson. Alluding to Stanley Cavell’s discussion of Emerson in This New Yet Unapproachable America, Bernstein, in “Optimism and Critical Excess,” argues for the usefulness of nonconventional poetry that grounds its meaningfulness on investigation and haphazard reading practices. In his essay Bernstein demonstrates his trust for knowledge that is unproven and incomplete; he writes, “Yet, without the expectation of correctness or the assurances of closure, what ground do we have for going on, for taking positions, for speaking with assurance or conviction?”4 Bernstein responds, “Optimism is my Emersonian answer, at least today, as my mood allows (or else, more

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blackly disposed, I fall silent): a willingness to try, to speak up for, to propose, to make claims; enthusiasm versus the cautiousness and passivity of never advancing what is not already known” (160). Optimism for Bernstein works as a literary and emotional response to the uncertainty and tenuousness of meaning; the very fact that we do not know where our words will take us when we try to make sense with them as we read gives Bernstein hope. In the manner of Calvin’s elect, he persistently makes room for “what is not already known” in his thinking, and he clings to the confidence that reading authorizes, as the tone of his engagement with Emerson makes evident (160).5 Commenting on Hebrews 6:19 (“Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast, and which entereth into that within the veil”) Calvin writes, this is an eloquent comparison between an anchor and faith resting upon the Word of God. It is obvious that while we wander in this world, we do not stand on firm ground; on the contrary, we are as in the middle of the sea, tossed about by turbulent waves. . . . In whatever direction we look, we see only water, and the waves keep rising with deadly threat. Just as the anchor is thrown into the midst of the waters to some dark and secret place, and while it remains there, it keeps the ship from being broken up by the waves surrounding it—so our hope needs to hold fast to the invisible God.6 From what we have already read, we know that Calvin is not foolishly suggesting he has access to unmediated truth. Nevertheless he does give us a glimpse of the epistemological confidence made possible by finding faith “anchored” in reading (the “Word of God”), itself undertaken in hope. Calvin, as Bernstein after him, sees no possibility to “stand on firm ground” “while we wander in this world” (23:238). Still, continuing to make way for those writers yet to come who are committed to incongruity, Calvin fastens his “hope” to what he cannot see for certain—“the invisible God” who keeps us from being broken “by the waves” surrounding us (23:238). That Bernstein seeks no “assurances of closure” and thereby echoes Calvin’s allowance for uncertainty in

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relation to an “invisible” deity is not surprising.7 However, the confidence Bernstein takes in his relationship to meaning, a confidence that takes part in the faith of Calvin, is harder to square. The uncertainty in which we know we are immersed when we speak, read, and write leads most of us to turn that knowledge into a lack of conviction for what we, and especially others, claim to believe. All the same, following Calvin in faith, Bernstein, marking his “optimism,” speaks “with assurance,” “conviction,” and “enthusiasm” as a means to provide “ground . . . for going on” (160). If Calvin trusts the Word of God, then Bernstein trusts words and texts, and this trust contains a great deal less skepticism and irony than those of us disposed toward innovative poetry and literary theory might be otherwise comfortable confessing ourselves or recognizing in a writer we admire. All of which is to say that despite the fact that the language of faith and the language of progressive politics or intellectual sophistication are so often pitted against one another, Calvin’s and Bernstein’s faith reminds us of a different interpretive strategy, one that holds onto debate and critical inquiry and still locates knowledge in the f luid, difficult-to-pin-down sphere of sensation, uncertainty, and conjecture. Their faith recalls, too, Aquinas’ understanding of faith as something one does—a practice of belief that gives people a means to pursue understanding. As such, the faith Aquinas, Calvin, and Bernstein make available is well suited for answering the questions that speak to the anxieties of religious people and secular liberals alike: “how can we live in a world without certainty; on what can we base understanding and knowledge?” Just as Aquinas holds to a vision of the truth while letting it evolve along previously undetermined lines, and Calvin stakes his life on what he reads, Bernstein proceeds with the gaps in meaning, and with his words’ slipping. Rendering Calvin’s justification by faith alone into poetic, secular, and still faithful terms, Bernstein—most notably in his recent libretto Shadowtime—trusts the disjunctive character of his text’s words to be readable. Because he partakes in Calvin’s confidence derived from faith Bernstein knows his poem is meaningful, and he expects readers to believe the same; and it is this attitude toward disjunction that renders the lines of the libretto interpretable even if we

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have no “expectation of correctness” (160). In other words, when readers commit themselves all at once to textual discipline and interpretive imagination, even as they give themselves over to Shadowtime’s graciousness, they overcome the apparent impossibility of making meaning in a world after theory. Shadowtime is the practical example of how faith works in Language writing and innovative poetry.8 Its Synopsis tells us that Shadowtime is “a ‘thought opera’ based on the work and life of Walter Benjamin (1892–1940),” who “died on the Spanish border while trying to escape the fate that awaited most of his fellow Central European Jews.”9 The opera “explores some of the major themes of Benjamin’s work, including the intertwined natures of history, time, transience, timelessness, language, and melancholy; the possibilities for a transformative leftist politics; the interconnectivity of language, things, and cosmos; and the role of dialectical materiality, aura, interpretation, and translation in art” (13). Beginning on the night before Benjamin died, “Shadowtime projects an alternative course for what happened on that fateful night. Opening onto a world of shades, of ghosts, of the dead, Shadowtime inhabits a period in human history in which the light f lickered and then failed” (13). After Scene One, in which Benjamin is on the Spanish border, he descends into the underworld and moves through a series of dialogues and encounters with figures from history, myth, and his own life. Although a libretto for Brian Ferneyhough’s opera, Bernstein’s poem is in its own right, at Ferneyhough’s request, “an independent poetic text.”10 In an interview with Eric Denut, Bernstein says, “I remember once asking Brian what the relation of my own performance of the libretto of Shadowtime—I had sent him a tape of a reading I gave from the libretto—would be to that of the text as performed in the opera. He answered: none.”11 Bernstein’s poem does maintain a dynamic relationship with Ferneyhough’s composition; still, in his interview, Bernstein speaks to the way his text “becomes absorbed, subsumed into the music of the opera” and reminds readers that “the setting of a poem is always also a translation of the poem.”12 Ferneyhough’s and Bernstein’s tendency to discuss the libretto as a poem, a practice strengthened by the fact that Bernstein regularly reads Shadowtime as a distinct piece, allows

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us, I believe, to consider Bernstein’s text as a singular literary work. Given its clearly vital relationship to Ferneyhough’s opera, however, I will on occasion read the libretto in light of the London Coliseum production of the opera in July of 2005 (NMC 2006), particularly when that reading will help advance our understanding of Bernstein’s poem. Following Ferneyhough and Bernstein, though, I primarily want to recognize the autonomy of the libretto so that I may consider it as a crucial instance of Bernstein’s poetic and philosophical project, as I think we must. In his readings of Shadowtime at Kelly Writers House on October 13, 2000, and at Harvard University on February 21, 2001, Bernstein speaks the parts of Walter Benjamin (the opera’s central character) in a slow, quiet, even rabbinical fashion. He stretches the words out, inserts moments of silence into lines and extends the pauses of line breaks. The rhythm of Benjamin’s speech carries the sound of a person thinking, working to get the words just right. The tone is reassuring; his voice sounds like one we can trust, as if Benjamin knows something we do not. Alternatively, the voices of Benjamin’s interlocutors tend to be shrill; even Benjamin’s longtime friend and scholar of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem, sounds strident (at the Harvard reading). Only when reading the part of Hölderlin in Scene I (at both readings) does Bernstein give the voices of Benjamin and his partner the same slow pace and thoughtful character. The voices of Karl Marx, Groucho Marx, Kerberus, Pope Pius XII, Joan of Arc, the Baal Shem Tov Disguised as Vampire, Adolf Hitler, and Albert Einstein, each with varying degrees of speed and intensity, push against Benjamin’s, moving at a much faster pace, giving their conversations a dissonant, humorous quality.13 Scholem in particular sounds frustrated and angry with Benjamin. In the middle of their dialog Benjamin and Scholem discuss literary criticism and the philosophy of language: WB: Language as such, that is the text That we interpret And that interprets us

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SCHOLEM: Are you ready to be the new Rashi Raising commentary to new heights So that the art of criticism Becomes a sacred process Releasing the sparks inside the words? WB: Critique cannot confine itself to letters But must also confront That which animates the letters SCHOLEM: And how can we grasp What animates the letters? WB: It is never enough to grasp But also to grapple SCHOLEM: Do you mean to put divinity on trial?14 In Bernstein’s performance the emotional resonances we normally associate with philosophy and Jewish mysticism shift; the effect is a particularly spiritual reading of the libretto’s concern for what we can know and say, and how. Scholem’s quick, irritated voice conveys his dissatisfaction with Benjamin’s elliptical account of criticism’s goal and process. Scholem sounds not shocked or worried, but combative; he sounds like he finds his old friend ridiculous. If Scholem spoke more slowly, or with a more melancholy air, it would create the sense that Benjamin’s words confused Scholem, or gave him cause for foreboding. But Scholem’s frustration makes its sound like he thinks Benjamin is missing the obvious, which for Scholem has to do with the practical limits of what can and should be done with God and criticism. His question “Do you mean to put divinity on trial?” is incredulous, not fearful or horrified (51). His question “And how can we grasp / What animates the letters?” is, in Bernstein’s mouth, rhetorical, meant to point out the misguided purpose of Benjamin’s aim (50).

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Although Scholem—the man, and perhaps the character—believed in the ability of language to convey mystical reality, he sounds frustrated here with Benjamin’s Kabbalah-like approach to secular ends. Scholem’s own project explored what “animates the letters,” but in Shadowtime he appears less sympathetic with Benjamin’s secular linguistic and materialist philosophy, his interest in the study of language for nonreligious reasons. As Scholem says to Benjamin, Metaphysics and materialism Are the peas in your shell game And you are the Adventurer King Of Ambiguity and Obscurity Skimming the textual profits From the fragments you have gleaned[.] (53) The meditative response Benjamin makes to Scholem takes on the tone one might expect Scholem to assume when unfolding the complexities of the Talmud. If Benjamin’s voice were faster, sharper, it would give his words an intellectually aggressive, scientific quality. Instead Benjamin’s linguistic materialism sounds emotionally and spiritually focused; he is mystical about language and representation whereas Scholem strangely becomes the skeptic. Where Scholem sounds as if theological objectives are his only concern, what he must defend in the face of Benjamin’s method and purpose of engagement, Benjamin’s mysticism emphasizes the way he investigates. And by inf lecting his speech with wonderment Benjamin offers us an alternative, less suspicious response to language’s incongruity. Both how we think in language and what we think about it become central to Shadowtime through the figure of Benjamin.15 Not that Bernstein’s reading of Benjamin’s voice makes it religious, exactly, and yet Bernstein’s performance does complicate what we take to count as a materialist understanding of the world and language. His delivery of Benjamin’s lines, and what Benjamin’s words mean as he says them, open up what falls into the realm of the corporeal. In the libretto Benjamin does not limit “the material” to “things,” what can be grasped by rational understanding—he includes hesitations, moods, and memories. Demonstrating how meaning occurs with the way words

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are said, Benjamin’s intensely subdued and indirect manner locates the libretto’s concern for comprehension and representation in the realm of emotion and cognitive leaps. The skepticism toward the spiritual and expressive spheres we might take as a hallmark of a materialist, linguistic understanding of the world gives way in Benjamin’s mystical sounding of language to a concern for the initial ambiguity of the material world, an ambiguity heightened by, and including, the mysterious. The quiet, contemplative mood in which Benjamin says “Language as such, that is the text / That we interpret / And that interprets us” and “Critique cannot confine itself to letters / But must also confront / That which animates the letters,” for example, figures language as an active agent (50). Language does not stay put in Shadowtime but “interprets” its users just as its readers act on it. Alive but not human, language is a kind of monster, and we cannot understand it simply as material; the way it sounds and looks, and its signifying function, cannot completely explain language’s meaningfulness. Confronting “that which animates the letters” means looking for their soul, or their God, or their Dr. Frankenstein. Benjamin does not say explicitly who or what gives words their life, but circles around his subject. He says, “It is never enough to grasp / But also to grapple” (50). With an eye toward linguistic struggle, noting the way words and people twist back on one another, Benjamin’s concern for “critique” seems to consider how words at times elude us—how in the slips of meaning they often seem ephemeral despite their materiality (50). Nevertheless, Benjamin does not sound troubled by his observation. In fact, his faithful search for the animator who stays just out of reach, who “interprets” you as you read, that search itself appears to be Benjamin’s animator: the need to pursue words because their meaning remains unsteady makes words available to us (50). In pursuit, Benjamin says, we know our words, if only for a moment. Benjamin is a ghost hunter, and the mysteriousness of his business comforts him; he is not anxious or cynical. His elliptical response—a response that emphasizes language’s ghostliness, its elusive quality—shows us how and why Benjamin reacts to language as he does. And engaging indirect language to sound reassuring and careful about our words’ obliqueness, and making a readable point about

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language by way of this cryptic tone, lets Benjamin turn the slipperiness and uncertainty of words into an anchor where readers can moor their hope for understanding. In his exchange with Benjamin, Scholem is practical about mystical realities, acting as if we clearly know the limits of God, words, and ourselves. Countering Scholem, Benjamin’s rabbinical materialism makes clear that an investigation of language focused on where words begin to fail—where we come to the edge of their utility—is paradoxically uninterested in the incongruity of language, for if words have clear limits then their specific qualities can be taken for granted, which Benjamin does not do. His response puts a great deal of pressure on what we can say about what we do not know, and the manner in which we can put our critical faculties into practice. The way Bernstein performs Einstein’s interrogation of Benjamin in Scene V intensifies the libretto’s spiritually charged refiguring of what it means to concern one’s self with representation. In the Kelly Writers House reading Bernstein adds or repeats words and stresses words other than the italicized “now” of the text. As he reads, the repeated line “What time is it now?” becomes a series of lines like “wa, what time is it now? / what, whattimeisitnow? / What TIME is it now? / WHAT TIME IS IT NOW?! / what time is it NOW?”16 After reading a few lines Bernstein starts to play a prerecorded tape of him reciting the same poem, as well as a female computer voice saying “it’s 9:10 PM” and then “it’s 9:11 PM” every two to three seconds. His recorded voice is quieter for the most part, and more contemplative, however, as the live Bernstein reads he becomes increasingly distressed. At several points he breaks to answer his own question with “it’s 11:04.” The sound of chimes also runs through the reading, and at the end you hear an electronic novelty gift-like voice saying “stop it, st st stop it, stop it” over and over again. Layered as it is, Bernstein’s performance changes what on the page comes across primarily as a joke on the impossibility of saying what time it is into an account of the hell of understanding time and using language effectively—a philosophical and scientific demonstration transforms into a moment of frenzy. Bernstein’s reading of Einstein’s

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interrogation is still very funny, but its humor is also taxing. The overlapping of Bernstein’s voice, the clanging of chimes, and the anxiety of his question, present an Einstein who is experiencing the uncertainty his science demonstrates as a highly distressed emotional state. The crisis of representation, here the impossibility of being able to say and know what time it is, is a crisis of comprehension. In his anxiety Einstein’s frustration does not rise from an abstraction; Einstein does not appear troubled by the idea that language and time are unknowable in themselves. He sounds consumed by the practical impossibility of understanding either exactly. He cannot speak a specific idea that he or anyone who is listening will fully understand. The intensity of Einstein’s angst makes his disturbance over what he can say and know appear existential. And Benjamin does not answer, and his silence underscores Einstein’s material, spiritual dilemma. He is in the kind of circumstance you cannot address adequately, like the death of somebody who is loved by somebody you love, and Benjamin knows better than to attempt a consolation. Einstein’s predicament, we could say, is the failure of the direct approach. The impossibility of understanding where we are, and when we are, in a world where time and space and language bend and are never on target makes it impossible to know anything with the adverb “completely,” or understand a word because it is fixed or an object because it is simply what it is. Unlike Ferneyhough’s setting of Scholem’s and Benjamin’s conversation in Scene One—where the performers regularly shift between singing and occasionally speaking their lines, and listeners move between clearly hearing specific lines and hearing lines obscured by characters singing their multiple parts at the same time—Einstein’s interrogation in the opera parallels Bernstein’s reading more closely. In the London performance several male voices speak the first four words of Einstein’s question, “What time is it” and the female voices of the chorus sing the final word “now.” The singers, like Bernstein, alter their speed and inf lection. The “now,” however, is most often louder and at a higher pitch, and the slower, slightly stretched voices singing the first half of the question stand in contrast to the voices at the end. The resulting discord makes the question sound urgent; it emphasizes the question’s

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recognition of, and anxiety about, the f lexibility and uncertainty of time, just as Bernstein’s shifting speed and tone do. If we ignore the singers and Bernstein’s reading, or hear them too one-dimensionally, we might give in to the temptation to take Einstein’s interrogation as an example of language’s inability to do its job. Bernstein’s performance wants us to resist that impulse; it asks us to read with a bit more care, or at least hear Einstein’s words in more than one way. When we do—when we comprehend why Einstein’s question is philosophical, funny, and full of angst—we remember that despite Einstein’s impasse we still know what Einstein is talking about, whether we are reading the libretto or hearing it sung or read. He does make a claim about how time works, maybe even despite himself. And we understand him. Einstein might not know the exact time, although he does express something exactly about time: Einstein recognizes and demonstrates to us the vast complexity of how time moves and affects how we live. His words do not convey a specific piece of information even as they create the conditions for knowledge, which Shadowtime values more. In his frustration Einstein displays the surprising truth that language does its job when it fails to communicate in a linear fashion. Moving between Shadowtime’s conversations and characters, listening to the various ways we hear what they say, readers find themselves asked to forget what they thought they knew about words. The libretto directs its request as much at those who take words’ representation of the world as the world’s creation as it does at those who still think words merely stand in for things. Hearing Bernstein’s performance of the opera, and reading the text in isolation, considering all at once the anxiety, frustration, and mystery of trying to understand another’s words, makes plain that Shadowtime does not simply hope to restate how words, as material, f luid objects, shape our experience (as if its readers did not already know). It wants to teach us to have faith in our perpetual estrangement from our words. Having just left Calvin’s and Wittgenstein’s argument that we need to read for the “spirit” of the Bible, be it Psalms or the Gospels, Shadowtime cannot help but appear to take up company with them. As readers of the Bible must seize multiple meanings at the same time, and look for the way this act alters how

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they live and what they think, Shadowtime asks its readers to take up a trusting relationship with it, finding the poem meaningful in its textual circling and slips, perambulations that require them to read in several different ways and toward multiple ideas at once if they are to find the libretto comprehensible. Turning to nonlinear forms as it does, Shadowtime continues in the vein of much twentieth-century opera that, as Patrick Smith describes it, threw off narrative guideposts and included the disjunctive musical and linguistic elements that came to define the age. Discussing The Mother of Us All, a libretto by Gertrude Stein, Smith writes, “Stein characteristically destroys the concept of time in her pageant, so that many American historical figures of different periods coexist, moving in and out of the frame of the stage. . . . The structure here is an elaborate mosaic of parts.”17 When discussing a debate between Daniel Webster and Susan Anthony in Scene One, Act Two in particular, Smith claims, “Stein emphasizes the historicity of the characters by conducting the debate entirely in a pastiche of snippets from speeches made by Webster and rejoinders by Anthony. Yet the total non sequitur of the snippets underlines the total non-understanding of the two” (400). The correspondence in subject and formal strategy that Shadowtime has to The Mother of Us All is suggestive, specifically when Smith argues that Stein “created a positive approach to a redefining of language and play structure out of an essentially negative, or at best only immediately pleasing, tradition, which was DaDa” (401).18 Although I can hardly agree with Smith’s account of Dada, his sense that Stein’s experiments did not destroy meaning, but “heightened the mythic and pageantic qualities of the libretto,” points ahead to Bernstein’s own formal practice (401). Smith does not go as far as to say that Stein’s textual play enhanced the opera’s coherent, referential components, or even constituted them differently; even so, his perception that narrative interruption in early twentieth-century opera is not necessarily an interruption of meaning itself, allows us to read Stein’s libretto as a touchstone for Bernstein’s: in Stein’s text (as with her poetry) we see the beginnings of Bernstein’s belief that disjunction and uncertainty create the conditions for understanding.

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I will not startle anyone, though, when I say that the above argument stands on slightly shaky ground, for no literary device in the text of Shadowtime specifically cues readers to hear the voice of Benjamin’s interrogators and companions as rushed, or antagonistic, and my account of the London performance of the opera as ref lecting Bernstein’s reading is certainly not definitive. Without the aggressive uncertainty of Bernstein’s reading, Einstein’s repeated question “What time is it now?” makes him appear more disorientated and caught in a loop than emotionally troubled.19 An ellipsis punctuates his interrogation, and Benjamin’s silence appears less a failure to answer than a quiet watching. Readers get the sense that Einstein will never stop asking his question, and the knowledge that he is in the underworld gives him a ghostly, mysterious quality as he asks over and over again for the time. Although you still hear Einstein’s anxiety, what predominates in a reading of the text on its own is the strangeness of Benjamin’s circumstances—figured here in Scene V as a series of conversations bordering on the incomprehensible. Scholem’s tone is equally different when read in the quiet of one’s own room. In the text of Shadowtime his lines take the same form as Benjamin’s and Hölderlin’s—short to medium length, with a f lush left margin, and capitalized letters at the start. All their lines also bear a similar philosophical character. The interrogators in Scene V do have longer lines, perhaps indicating that we should read them faster, but then Benjamin’s lines are longer there as well, and in Bernstein’s reading he still speaks Benjamin’s lines as he did before while rushing and intensifying the voices of the interrogators. Without the accusatory tone in the voices of its other characters, the text of Shadowtime gives readers a Benjamin who does not possess more insight than his companions, and without the violence of their words to shore up his own, Benjamin’s ideas appear provisional. From this standpoint, Benjamin and Scholem quite possibly share a similar perspective because the poem indicates that we need to read their lines in the same manner. Absent their aggravation, Scholem’s questions look concerned with the sheer magnitude of Benjamin’s project: “Are you ready to be the new Rashi / Raising commentary to new heights / So that the art of criticism / Becomes a

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sacred process / Releasing the sparks inside the words?” (50). A famed scholar of Hebrew Scripture and the Talmud during the middle ages, Rashi worked through texts with unprecedented slowness and deliberation, taking each word and phrase as fundamentally meaningful. If read as other than frustration, Scholem’s words and reference to Rashi emphasize the “sacred process” of attending to language, and the overwhelming difficulty of grasping the essence of words, of “Releasing the sparks inside” them (50). Despite these textual facts, I remain sure of my reading because it draws closer to Shadowtime’s concern for an ethical discourse than the bewildered, skeptical philosophical stance demanded by the above evidence. Shadowtime, as much as any text we’ve looked at so far, begins with that recognition familiar to us now, that we live in an impossible world, ethically, as well as epistemologically. Just as Calvin argues we cannot fulfill our obligation to God, Shadowtime knows we cannot fulfill our obligation to words. Indeed, the claim we saw Calvin make before that it “is not only hard, but above our strength and beyond all our abilities, to fulfill the law to the letter,” and that “if we look to ourselves only, and ponder what condition we deserve, no trace of good hope will remain,” applies equally well to readers in Bernstein’s poem, for readers cannot with their own strength and intelligence fulfill the potential of the poem’s meaningfulness down to each “letter.”20 However Shadowtime, like the other literary works this book considers (Calvin’s most especially), does not take this impossible circumstance as the end of our ability to find our words meaningful, which would strip us of ethical accountability and agency. Instead, recalling Bernstein’s claim that ethics, as “a dialogic practice,” has “the advantage even when it appears to be wandering in the wilderness,” Shadowtime turns to the ghostly and to lamentation as a way to undertake an ethical consideration of how we respond to our situation in language.21 To modify a passage of Calvin’s, readers in Shadowtime must, despite the fact that there is “no hope of ” meaning “left us,” bind their lives to the text, proceeding with enough confidence to make their reading part of an ethical-aesthetic occupation of the world, which is what Shadowtime is after.22

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Benjamin’s final interrogator in Scene V is Golem, who in Jewish folklore is an artificially created human supernaturally endowed with life, and it is in his conversation with Benjamin that Shadowtime makes its understanding of our linguistic condition most evident. Golem’s questions are incomprehensible; he asks “Infantibicia oag reboo nebullia sob expleanur / gendithany?” and “Fogum, fogum are be gridit etsey?”23 Benjamin for his part still answers. He responds “If not by running then by walking if not by / walking then by climbing if not by climbing / then by sliding if not by sliding then by stalling” and “First you know it, then not. That’s when you / begin to find out” (98, 99). Like Golem himself, Golem’s language is artificial, but it is not gibberish. It has grammar—punctuation, vowels, and a pattern of letter arrangement. Next to it, with the same syntax and characters, Benjamin’s English looks no more natural; it is as made up as Golem’s. Mixing together, their sentences both look strange and liable to come up short of meaning in their aberrant structures, an experience emphasized by Benjamin’s own abstruse words, whose ideas, without clear subjects, are also difficult to grasp.24 Benjamin’s apparent comprehension of Golem’s questions makes Benjamin’s English even more unfamiliar to us, for if Benjamin in his language understands and is understood by Golem then it is a language we do not fully share. What communication takes place between them sounds supernatural, a part of the shadow world Benjamin and Golem occupy: we might say meaning itself, like Golem, occurs for abnormal reasons. The otherworldly figure of Golem makes it impossible for readers to understand completely what is going on; with Benjamin’s answers they get the drift of the conversation, but they cannot be certain of their inclinations. The clear meaning of the words on the page slips by readers; they find the sentences before them insecure and strange. In the final line of his interrogation by Golem, Benjamin says “Keine Kaddish wird man sagen” (100). The note to Scene V tells us that the words come from a poem by Heinrich Heine, and translate as “No one to say Kaddish for me.” It also describe the line as “the lament of a secular, or assimilated, Jew” (100). The Kaddish itself does not reference death; instead the prayer is a public sanctification of God’s

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name and expresses a longing for God to establish his kingdom on earth. I take the note, and the final line, to point out that without a belief in God there is no name to praise and so there is no reason to say Kaddish—there is no kingdom to come. In the context of Golem’s interrogation that is indecipherable to us, Benjamin’s lament sounds like a crisis of self-knowledge: it is the loss of prayer, the act of representation that gives Jews some understanding of God, who in turn gives them some understanding of themselves as God’s peculiar people. When Jews cannot speak or grasp the words of the Kaddish because those words have no direction, no way or hope of becoming materialized, assimilation is a struggle with identity, which in Shadowtime resembles a struggle with language. With Benjamin in the underworld, God’s Kingdom does not seem as if it is about to be realized on earth, a fact emphasized by the unspoken presence of the Holocaust running through the libretto. Here the Messiah who fails to appear is not only the disappearance of God but the abandonment of a confident relationship to the world and the words with which we understand it. In his dialog with Scholem, Benjamin says “I am the prosecutor / Who will put divinity on trial / For breach of contract. / For God promised a Messiah / But no Messiah comes” (51). The word of God, his promise, is not achieved, and the failure of his words to realize themselves is the potential failure of all words to become interpretable. In the absence of the Messiah, each word spoken now escapes our grasp: with only the name of the “new David” and no person—that is, without a connection between the Messiah’s name and the Messiah as a referent—God’s word is in doubt. And with God’s words disconnected from the world, no words appear reliable. In epistemological terms, we could say the crisis of comprehension Shadowtime presents its readers with is the understanding that if we cannot fully grasp our words, and our world is made of language, then we cannot fully grasp our world—meaning we are not fully in it, meaning, we are ghosts. Where every other hero who descends into the underworld comes back out—Ulysses, Dante, Orpheus, Aeneas— Benjamin stays there. Not surprisingly, the people he meets are all haunting figures, but as with the Inferno, several of these ghosts are

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still above ground in 1940—Hitler, Einstein, and Pope Pius XII, to name three. From the outset, the libretto unmakes the clear distinction between Benjamin’s underworld and the world of our own turmoil. Remembering the Synopsis, Shadowtime begins “on the last evening of Benjamin’s life” and “projects an alternative course for what happened on that fateful night. Opening onto a world of shades, of ghosts, of the dead, Shadowtime inhabits a period in human history in which the light f lickered and then failed” (13). As an “alternative” account of what happened to Benjamin, the libretto does not clearly establish his death in a way that removes him from us. Whatever Benjamin’s shadowy condition is, we share it, a point Fabrice Fitch makes when he quotes Ferneyhough’s hope that what the opera suggests about Benjamin “ ‘will be seen to apply to each of us.’ ”25 Shadowtime occupies a time in our own history when human life, the “light,” goes out on a massive scale. We are all like Benjamin, living in a shadowtime after the extinguishing of that light, and his experience is an account of our own. Like him we are ghosts haunting our words. Here Shadowtime revises what we might otherwise take our linguistic crisis to be: it is not our words that have failed us; it is ourselves and our use of words that appears questionable, or out of joint. Our understanding of how we make meaning is a spiritual quandary, a moment to perpetually contend with what we thought we understood, or what we hope to make sense of. In his interview with Eric Denut, Bernstein explains why he is so attracted to Benjamin’s work, which is, for Bernstein, a good example of multipolar, rather than linear, thinking. Benjamin’s form of ref lective writing suggests a poetics of multiple layers or figures. A line of thought may seem to go off into one direction then drops back to follow another trajectory, only this new direction is not a non sequitur but rather echoes or refracts both the antecedent motifs and—this is the uncanny part—the eventual ones. I mean this as a way of rethinking what is often called fragmentation or disjunction. Think of fragments not as discontinuous but as overlays, pleats, folds: a chordal poetics in which synchronic notes meld into diachronic tones.26

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Reminiscent again of his Wittgensteinian and Calvinist spirit, Bernstein’s attraction to Benjamin’s work is one that he shares with a wide range of artists, theorists, and literary critics who see Benjamin’s style and philosophical critique as a crucial moment in modern thought. Benjamin’s attention to language as a subject and to inescapable misreading in “The Task of the Translator,” for one, ties the linguistic attention of twentieth-century philosophy to questions of politics and cultural “texts” and it points ahead to thinkers like Derrida.27 Interestingly, Bernstein’s reading of Benjamin’s prose shares an affinity with Gershom Scholem’s reading of the same. Largely concerned with what he sees as the irreconcilable tension in Benjamin’s writing between mysticism and Marxist “materialism,” Scholem emphasizes Benjamin’s “discursive thinking” in which “strict conceptual exposition takes second place to a descriptive method by which he seeks to let his experience speak.”28 As Benjamin proceeds in this manner “he is liable without warning to switch from the profane to the theological approach. . . . For all his renunciation of system, his thought, presented as that of a fragmentarian, yet retains a systematic tendency. He used to say that each great work needed its own epistemology just as it had its own metaphysics. This constructive tendency in his mode of thinking . . . also conditions his style” (182). In Scholem’s reading, Benjamin’s tendency to stress technique produces “authoritative sentences” that lend “themselves to quotation and interpretation. What is illuminating in them is meshed with the thoroughly enigmatic” (199). Despite the fact that Bernstein celebrates what Scholem finds in turn breathtaking and frustrating, Scholem’s sense that Benjamin’s prose proceeds in fragments and with an element of the unfathomable reinforces Bernstein’s depiction of it as moving through a series of “overlays,” “pleats, “and “folds.”29 Even Bernstein’s description of Benjamin’s thinking as “multipolar” ref lects Scholem’s proposition that Benjamin shifts between a profane and theological stance.30 And when Bernstein suggests that the “new directions” generated in Benjamin’s writing are not non sequiturs but echoes of antecedent and eventual motifs he speaks as well to Scholem’s insistence on the “systematic tendency” that remains in

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Benjamin’s essays (182). In these respects, Bernstein’s poetic reading and use of Benjamin appears to appropriate rather than exclude Scholem’s mystical and aesthetic portrayal of his friend’s writing. Given the strangeness of our words, and the intellectual, emotional disorder they impose on us, it is not surprising that, just as there are those who do not believe in ghosts, there are those who—counter to Bernstein, Benjamin, and Scholem—do not believe we can adequately respond to our haunting and haunted state in language; for them even Bernstein’s poetic reading for the multipolar spirit of a poem or an essay will not suffice for an interpretive foothold. No doubt, from a position of despair, the hopefulness of Bernstein’s performance of Benjamin’s speeches will continue to sound far fetched. For those who anguish (or turn to gleeful, self-satisfied nihilism) over language’s condition, language appears fractured beyond repair; the possibility that it can connect us to one another and to the world seems as unlikely as the prospect of consulting Abraham Lincoln on what to do about the degeneration of American politics. Be that as it may, I want to suggest that rather than countering the text of Shadowtime, or the opera, Bernstein’s readings serve to emphasize what we may too easily overlook: where those already committed to the idea of language’s brokenness find their evidence, Shadowtime sees a means to ground ethical thinking and behavior without dogma. For Calvin, God’s grace grants us a way out of despair, if we only respond in joy to it. He writes, Christ “in fact bids us live always in the joy of the love with which he once and for all loved us, warning us not to deprive ourselves of it. For many reject the grace offered them, and many throw away what they have in their hands. So then, once we are beneficiaries of the grace of Christ, let us see to it that we do not fall away from it through our own fault.”31 Shadowtime, in the same manner, as the text for Bernstein’s reading of Benjamin, offers us a way out of our linguistic impasse by showing us how literary works become available to us in unexpected ways, if only we would respond to their grace, their willingness “to go off into one direction then [drop] back to follow another trajectory,” which is what we need if we are to read as our minds and lives allow.32 As Bernstein’s performances create alternative versions of his poems these new texts make the collective argument that the signifying, cognitive

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function of words survives when we take an expansive view of how representation operates.33 In our spectral world, as we have seen, the trust that Shadowtime puts in language allows us to fulfill our duty to our words and enable understanding; it provides, too, an ethical way of reading and responding to the subjects of our linguistic attention. The libretto is not interested in moral teachings or lists of ethical behaviors. It aims to locate ethics in the attempt to read carefully. The ability to interpret our texts and each other well, using the whole range of our linguistic situation, with all its troubles and uncertainties, is for Shadowtime the foundation of all the individual ethical decisions people make each day. Rather than suppress its doubt or abandon a concern for what is or is not true, Bernstein’s libretto participates in the kind of ethical, aesthetic attention that it hopes will permit readers to respond thoughtfully to the multifarious and changing texts, ideas, and bodies with which we live. The use Shadowtime makes of words’ unfixedness for its thinking about readerly ethics finds its most crucial employment in the thread of grief weaving through the libretto, for the poem takes the impossibility of saying the inexpressible as a way to make the inexpressible interpretable. Or, in the language of ghosts we’ve been using, Shadowtime, in its turn to lamentation, hopes to make the dead present in the world; it hopes to come to terms with the emotions and intellectual tensions that exceed words. Poem 7, “Sometimes,” in Scene III presents the possibility of both burning a book and reading a book “to keep warm,” and then makes clear that its proposal is not a “theory of reading,” but is about “staying alive / in a particular place and / a particular time.”34 The poem continues, This is not because you are weary of learning but what it means to die in a particular moment and a particular space. (70) The lines in the first half of the poem are not especially disruptive; however, they are not particularly direct or descriptive either. No

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identifiable person emerges in the poem to become the subject of its desperate circumstances; nor do we get an account of what might lead to such a trying situation—the poem remains in the subjunctive and does not attempt to express what the suffering at its center is, or is like. And in spite of its profession not to be a theory of reading, “Sometimes” does trouble the difference between reading and living. Without a clear object at the poem’s center, readers focus on the one substantial connection it provides: how reading and burning books both provide warmth. In that association reading becomes a practical necessity rather than something you do only after your livelihood is secure, something more fanciful and therefore secondary. Because reading keeps you warm like a fire does it is an act of desperation, what you do on the run, or when you are homeless—you use books to generate heat. “Sometimes” is not instructing readers on the limited worth of books; the poem is not sequestering imagination and intellectual stimulus. The libretto tells us that books and our engagement with them are central to bodily survival. Tied to what it means to die in a “particular moment and / a particular space,” the “heat” of books is a response to the specific instances of intellectual impoverishment we witness around us each day, losses that put us on the run, and make us feel as if we have no place to live or think (70). Those who turn books into energy for other reasons hide just out of view as the counterpoint to the heat of books offered in “Sometimes.” The unspoken figures in the poem are the Nazi students at the University of Berlin burning books in May, 1933 to destroy the warmth they might produce for other readers. The specter looking ahead to this moment is Heinrich Heine, who wrote in his play Almansor that “Where one burns books, one will, in the end, burn people.”35 As books and people burn in our minds we see plainly the danger that comes with a weariness “of learning,” and recognize at the same time what books make possible and what they are useful for—our lives and the lives of those around us. The uncertain and lyric beauty of these lines uses the vague context of the loss it implies to reinforce the desperate tone of the poem. The necessary, even if disruptive, heat of

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books that “Sometimes” focuses readers on appears both more bodily and more elusive, more spectral than we might have imagined, and therefore more in need of nurture. The second section of the poem is a variant of the first; it has the exact same lines but in a different order. It reads: you are weary of learning a particular time a particular space it is cold this is about staying alive you read a in a particular place and this is not a theory of reading but what it means to die and you need the fire book for the same reason in a particular moment and This is not to keep warm because sometimes you burn a book because and sometimes[.]36 Reordering the lines opens gaps in the poem, like “you read a / in a particular place and” as well as “you burn a book because / and”; it also gives rise to awkward parataxis, as in “and you need the fire / book for the same reason” and “a particular space / it is cold” (70–71). These holes, fragments, and strange juxtapositions reconfigure readers’ experience of the poem. When readers come across “you read a / in a particular place and” they still hear the word “book”—their memory of the first section makes the word a disturbing figure (70). The same happens in “you burn a book because / and” as well as “and you need the fire / book for the same reason”; readers hear “it is cold” and remember

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the need to “keep warm” (70–71). Rearranging the lines while leaving the lines themselves the same gives the resulting lacunae in the poem an active presence; as readers hear what is missing the gaps stand out; readers then hear these absences as part of the poem even as they recall the now-overlapping words of the previous section. As the first section haunts the second, the tension created in the first becomes more resonant in the very act of leaving it behind. Hearing the first section in its absence charges the physical and still ghostly connection between living and reading with emotional urgency. In the broken spaces of the second half of “Sometimes” readers draw together thoughts of books, fires, dying in the cold, and managing to live through the cold. Depending on the particular movements of their imaginations, individual readers might very well think of the books that keep them warm, or, remembering Benjamin, think of refugees f leeing the Nazis. At the same time, the punctures in the poem lend these thoughts a sense of increasing anxiety and desperation—reading reads like a matter of life and death, a matter of stumbling through the crises we perpetually face, a matter of fear, hope, and survival. Without the openings of the second section the desperate tone of the first risks becoming mute; as a general civic virtue endorsed by the First Lady, reading, as a cultural activity, remains in constant danger of turning into something merely important. The breaks in “Sometimes” fight our tendency to turn reading into an abstraction alone. In its insistence on reading’s crucial presence in our lives, a presence made material by the strange relation between the two sections, “Sometimes” establishes its intelligibility: the poem’s argument comes about through its divergence from explanation. In bearing witness to its own failure to provide us with a theory of reading, or explain exactly how reading books keeps us warm as a fire would, the poem, like a lament, points to what it can’t do as a way of making its subject comprehensible.37 In its inability to offer an overarching picture of reading, and in its gaps and moments of cognitive and emotional intensity, “Sometimes” moves its audience into a visceral reading experience. From the inside, in the act of interpretation itself, reading’s necessary function in our lives becomes manifest and understandable.

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By finding Shadowtime meaningful in its digressions from its own subjects, readers begin to understand that they need the company of ghosts (the texts of those authors we will never know) to make sense of themselves and their circumstances. Departing from straightforward language practices in the service of direct communication, the libretto pulls readers through a series of appropriated translations, absurd encounters, fragmented poetic lines, and tragic histories. Moving from scene to scene in Bernstein’s poem feels like being a specter. In it we haunt the words and experiences of others; we discover a house to possess instead of a world secured by our ownership of its language. The libretto does shove to the foreground the grief we find in the world of ghosts and in the slips of meaning that happen there—it is impossible to read Shadowtime without becoming lost and uncertain at times and without becoming acutely aware of the violence of our own history. Pushed together, our uncertain words and the terror of living with our past become metaphors for one another; in symbiotic relationship they create the emotional and intellectual frameworks readers need to give each matter critical attention. The loss of understanding in the line “and you need the fire / book for the same reason,” or the collision of tone, rhythm, and association in some of Shadowtime’s other poems like “dew and die,” make more sense of the Holocaust than the sentence “Hitler killed 6 million Jews and 6 million other ethnic and cultural minorities” (70). It is a sentence impossible to get your head around. The emotionally loaded cognitive uncertainty of Shadowtime begins to move readers closer, if never fully to, comprehension. The cultural knowledge derived from holding the indefiniteness of our words and lives in tandem argues for our ability to read ethically and create meaning in the most troubled occasions. If our words were necessarily connected to referents then our discovery of their disconnection would be the end of us, which is perhaps the best secular translation of Calvin’s reading of the law as bringing death if the law is all we have to figure our righteousness. However, knowing that we can talk as, and with, ghosts, allows us to make our individual readerly experiences the site of interpretation and ethical decision making, acts near enough to what we once thought of as understanding to be nearly indistinguishable from it.38

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SHADOWTIME and Faithful Interpretation

Reading as Belief

But don’t get me wrong; amidst its lamentations Shadowtime is still a startlingly funny poem, and we must not lose sight of the libretto’s humor for the reason that in making a joke about its grief Shadowtime fulfills the purpose of that mourning—it gives us a way to keep reading. Like most of Bernstein’s poetry, Shadowtime revels in the comic and the absurd, a tendency that, on the one hand, provides a form of relief (like pointing out the banshee in the corner) and, on the other, works to expose and scrutinize the cracks in our cultural and personal facades. Scene V, “Pools of Darkness,” is particularly comical: Three Giant Mouths who question Benjamin about memory and the future, a Headless Ghoul who asks his question in a medieval musical form, the heads of Karl Marx and Groucho Marx occupying one body, all come at readers as if from a carnival. Even Pope Pius XII becomes a stand-up with his questions “Why didn’t you take a gun and blast them out / of this world?”; “Why didn’t you swing and shoot and go down / in a f lame of transcendent immolation?”39 The discordance created by a man of God celebrating violence (recalling, in part, questions about the Pope’s relationship with Germany before the Second World War) is funny because it performs a kind of puppetry, but one that remains acute, like cutting the mouth out of a picture of the President and saying silly or scary things through it with your own lips. A scene at the start of the libretto where an excessively polite Innkeeper informs Benjamin that he cannot cross into Spain (a decision that results in his death) strikes us similarly as ridiculous when the Innkeeper repeats Henny Gurland’s and Walter Benjamin’s names to the point of clownishness, and so the cruelty of his actions appears toothless despite their outcome.40 One of the most bizarre and hilarious moments of Shadowtime occurs when it manages to make Adolf Hitler introspective and funny. As an interrogator in Scene V he becomes ref lective. He asks, Can you go nowhere? Be no place? Come into nothing? Can you hold air? Can you be transfixed by transitions alone? Can you embrace the aimless? Embody ether? Lose yourself

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Hitler, it seems, can consider but not accept the usefulness of nothing, a nothing in which we hear the echoes of Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialectics. Adorno’s attempt to found thought on differentiation, paradox, and ruse rather than on the mastery of the object of inquiry aimed at undercutting a dialectical understanding of history—for Adorno, the center of fascism and other totalitarian ideologies. If the individual subject did not need to fit into a larger rational system in the name of progress, then the individual subject could remain unconsumed. In his reading at Kelly Writers House, Bernstein plays up what sounds like Hitler’s persistent curiosity about the force of irrationality and inaction. Where Ferneyhough takes a more dramatic tone and slightly obscures the words by overlaying them (a move that emphasizes the musical aspects of the opera), Bernstein plays up Hitler’s earnestness, which lays the groundwork for his ridiculousness. Bernstein raises his voice, keeps it in the same intense pitch, and takes only slight pauses between questions. His voice, although quick, is not rushed. He pronounces each word clearly and gives the word its own space. The weight of Bernstein’s performances falls squarely on the specific negative possibilities Hitler puts forward. The potential answer of “yes” to Hitler’s query as to the possibility of a negative dialectics gives his interrogation a haunting seriousness; the millions he killed hover around the edges of his questions, and the Holocaust itself appears as the end result of history thought of as a teleology, and as the outcome of Hitler’s philosophical deliberations. Readers can’t help but think of the history that did not happen; they can’t help but wish somebody had convinced Hitler he could go nowhere and be no place. At the same time, the way Hitler carries out his inquiry makes us laugh. The image of Hitler asking if it is possible to “embrace / the aimless” or “Embody ether” makes him sound poetic in the way of early Greek philosophers like Heraclites, with their concern for what kind of f luid the earth f loats in, or their interest

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without finding another? Can you be numb to necessity and insensible to sobriety? Wander and not be alone? Be alone and not wonder? (94)

Reading as Belief

in the directionlessness of the f lux determining the world (94). The idea of Hitler asking if it is possible to “Wander / and not be alone? Be alone and not wonder?” makes him appear isolated and lonely as well, and a forlorn, poetic, and philosophical monster is nonsensical, and humorous for that reason (94). Hitler’s questions in Shadowtime estrange him from the horror he caused. The discord set up between the history we know and the picture of Hitler we see in the libretto steals the formidability of his terror away, leaving him a peculiar, neurotic little man, as he probably was, which is also funny. The fact that Shadowtime would answer “yes” to Hitler’s questions where he answers “no” suggests, too, that the humor of the libretto is not ironic distance; if Shadowtime’s and Hitler’s answers are different their questions are the same—the amusement Hitler provides does not remove his situation from our own. There is a disquieting sympathy at work, or at least the strange sense of a shared anxiety. As we laugh at Hitler we come to the uncomfortable realization that the difference between us and him is not entirely clear. In a funny and sympathetic Hitler, Shadowtime presents the comic as a philosophical approach to the tragic—humor makes the burden of lament bearable. As a performer Bernstein is often hilarious; nonetheless, for all his antics, Bernstein regularly reads in a somber, emotionally inf lected voice; at times it seems tongue-in-check and at others more sincere. His tone’s shifting affect gives his poems an unsettling effect. Moving between saying funny things in a serious way, serious things in a serious way, serious things in a funny way, and funny things in a funny way, Bernstein’s performances let the comical and heartbreaking take turns framing one another for interpretation. Nowhere do we see Bernstein take up Calvin’s injunction to blend reading and faith more clearly than when Bernstein compels our laughter. When Calvin joins reading and faith he positions it as putting one’s life under God’s protection; he argues of the Bible (specifically Matthew 16: 18, although it is a theme repeated elsewhere) that “it teaches us to glorify God, even in the most desperate situations, by not doubting that he is true and faithful; it also teaches us to be content with the Word, as though God himself appeared to us from heaven”; “we are to put our

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well-being in God’s hand as we put our possessions in the hand of a trustee whom we trust as a faithful man.”41 The act of making a joke in even “the most desperate situations,” in a life or in a poem, similarly is for Bernstein to place the well-being of meaning in the hands of the text; it is to be “content with the” words we have to read and have faith that they are readable. And the fact that we do laugh means that we are right to do so (236). In this sense the difficulty in Shadowtime of learning to trust the perpetual shifting of our words is sustained by laughing at their shifting. Humor gives us a perspective on our lamentations and ethical attention. Taking even our sorrow to be funny allows us to perceive our grief as a condition open to change, or alternative readings, rather than as a final state: it gives us a new lens through which to read our anguish and see our daily tragedies as not the world’s final ruin. More philosophically, in keeping with Adorno, humor breaks us away from history’s blind plunge and the self-deceit that comes with identifying oneself as the agent of history. Jokes, in other words, turn slips of meaning to understanding, and for this reason Shadowtime suggests we keep our gags and our lamentations together; otherwise, without a sense of humor, without being able to make jokes at our own expense, seeing the world in all its incongruity becomes too overwhelming to bear. When we find our own absurd condition of living in an impossible world amusing we rejuvenate our minds’ and our hearts’ ability to persistently resituate us in relation to others—and we gain a way to see the breaks between our words and our world as the room we need to negotiate with ourselves as beings who think, disagree, and get confused. It is the space we need for self-awareness, without which nothing would be funny. With Bernstein’s poems and poetics, and Calvin’s justification, out in front of us now, recalling my claim that the aesthetics Shadowtime values operate more like religious conviction than science or philosophy appears to me quite ordinary. Despite that, we need to keep the contempt bred by familiarity from numbing us to what is remarkable about the devotion of Bernstein’s poetry: the faith his work puts in humor, discordance, and the constant slide of words sustains ethical

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SHADOWTIME and Faithful Interpretation

Reading as Belief

and linguistic interpretation much like believers’ faith in God makes their own circumstances decipherable. Shadowtime is no prison house of language; like a faithful individual, the libretto depends on the belief that texts can talk, and that readers can understand them. We can trust a poem, a novel, or a letter because we can read them, and we can read them because we do not take these texts to represent the world as it is, but know the world in our words’ departures. Their wobbling marks them as objects in need of interpretation, and an interpretation offered up provides us with an idea to locate ourselves with—an idea others can interrogate and we can modify. Reading reckons a literary work as meaningful. We do get close to a tautology here, but we avoid one in the end because understanding our relationship to literary works as dependent on the ambiguity of language embraces the broken logic that tautologies attempt to hide. Benjamin’s response to Karl Marx’s interrogation in Scene V captures best the understanding of understanding that I want to call faithfulness. Benjamin says “I made my way and my way made / me,” which I read as Benjamin returning us to where this book began with what is embarrassing about the sacred commitment to method in innovative poetics, although with a qualification.42 Benjamin reminds us that how we frame and carry out our actions and interpretations makes them what they are; but crucially, too, whatever our words and actions become defines us in turn. If the way we speak to a friend sounds cruel, we are cruel in that moment. If our actions appear well considered they are so functionally. The meanings we arrive at in relation to our words and actions do not stay fixed, and they might not correspond to our intentions as we understand them afterward. Nor do the readings we give what we do and say remain the same as more factors come into play. Our readings do, on the other hand, provide us with a way to interpret our intentions and bring our words and actions in line with them, or vice versa. They do give us a way to alter what we say and do as more considerations impose themselves upon us. We give up meaning’s relationship to a fixed deeper truth without giving up on truth in everyday experience. As our moments of cruelty and thoughtfulness pile up we amass larger

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and larger readable records, which are records that construct us as we are in the world. To make your way as your way makes you, these are the movements of authorship and they happen at the same time as one act of reading: I read my book and my book reads me; I say my words and my words say me. Understood as a moment of mutual production, reading, undertaken in faith, makes readers and literary works responsive, and hence responsible, to one another.

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SHADOWTIME and Faithful Interpretation

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SI X

What It Means to Be Reader-centered: Jonathan Edwards

I have tried to tell a story about Language writing’s faithfulness, and yet I suspect that we are left wondering how recognizing reading as a form of belief changes the manner in which we interpret texts on a daily basis. What does the faith of Bernstein’s poetics suggest about the reading strategies we need to employ if we are to remain loyal to the epistemological framework of his poems, as well as the poems written by his company? What interpretive tactics mark faithful reading? These questions are important not just because they inform the present study’s desire for a new hermeneutical foundation on which to establish a confident relationship to meaning. We have now a measure of clarity about how faith generates meaning, but such understanding does not necessarily make plain what it means practically to read faithfully, and without that knowledge any new poetic or philosophical prescription remains inert. To provide a brief sketch of such a reading method I turn to the work of Jonathan Edwards and Bruce Andrews. Initially, the faithful reading practice that Bernstein, Andrews, and Edwards (as well as the larger work of Language writing) require will seem familiar, easily encapsulated by the phrase active reading. But we have reached a moment when this phrase has become a cliché, and, as we saw Ron Silliman argue in chapter two, what it means to read actively no longer corresponds to a specific, and limited, antifoundationalist

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CH A P T E R

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poetics or politics. To retool this sacrament of Language writing and much innovative poetry I want to explore active reading as a constant balance of readerly agency and textual discipline, and in doing so I hope to demonstrate that faithful reading is secured in the equilibrium between readers’ involvement with a text’s meaning and their submission to that text. Beginning with Jonathan Edwards and Bruce Andrews serves a variety of purposes.1 First, recognizing that active reading, despite its recent refurbishment and more fashionable company, has humble roots, animating, as it does, the interpretive practice of Reformed theology, helps reinforce the sense that Language writing takes part in a tradition of faith. Second, unpacking the freedom Edwards takes for granted in his reading of the Bible, despite his reputation for theological inf lexibility, forces us to reconsider what we think readers are actually doing when they read actively. Third, considering how Bruce Andrews’ Lip Service still disciplines its readers’ reading methods by way of its exemplary openness show us the limits of our readerly authority. Simply put, over the next two chapters I undertake a discussion of active reading by approaching it from two sides. On the one hand, I look at how active reading occurs in the most attentive, rigorous, and religious readings. On the other, I lay bear the manner in which we must submit to a text’s discipline in even the most disruptive of poems. Taken together, these accounts will help us identify where and in what circumstances we find ourselves involved in a text’s meaning and understand more clearly what it means to come up against the legitimate demands of a text on our desires for it. (And in the process I hope we will begin to see, too, how we can make justifiable claims on the interpretation other people produce on the same texts we are reading, for we are always reading over one another’s shoulders). When we acknowledge our participation in a text’s meaning, at the same time we make room for that text to censure our involvement we are, in the most daily of ways, undertaking reading as a work of belief. In 1741, Jonathan Edwards preached his famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Today high school students, religious conservatives, literary and theological scholars alike remember Edwards as the poster boy for hellfire and damnation oratory. To both

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the modern secular and religious eye, the Puritan preacher’s style, a cause of anxiety and annoyance for many, a source of pleasure for some, marks him as a brilliant and orthodox reader of Scripture. Herself torn between frustration and esteem, Susan Howe argues that the “Puritan consciousness of Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) shadows and prefigures that of Emily Dickinson”; “Edwards’ negativity, his disciplined journey through conscious despair, humiliation, and the joy of submission to an arbitrary and absent ordering of the Universe, presaged hers.”2 For those directly concerned with the development of American poetry, Howe cites “Edwards’ conviction . . . that words are annexed to reality by sensation, facts charged with meaning by an intelligence behind them,” as a principle to illuminate Dickinson’s writing process, and, presumably, her own (49–50). Although if Howe is right, as I believe she is, I do not think we may continue comfortably to assume that Edwards’ work actually partakes in the dogmatism regularly associated with it. Despite the company Edwards keeps—or more to the point, the company traditional minded Christians keep him to—the enactment of his hermeneutics appears to explode the more restrictive epistemology familiar to religious orthodoxy. The way Edwards reads the Bible depends on the text’s malleability and misalignments; he does not take the Bible to simply represent the revealed truth. Despite her clear admiration for Edwards, Howe obscures his textual radicalism and aids the common misreading of him when she describes Dickinson’s use of Edwards’ theological approach. She writes, “I say that Emily Dickinson took both his legend and his learning, tore them free from his own humorlessness and the dead weight of doctrinaire Calvinism, then applied the freshness of his perception to the dead weight of American poetry as she knew it” (51). In keeping with the modern, familiar suspicion of the Puritans, Howe fails to see that what she calls his “doctrinaire Calvinism” is the radical reading practice on which Dickinson’s work depends. Because she assumes that Edwards’ Christianity makes it impossible for him to read the Bible in any way other than the strictest manner, or rather because she mistakenly conf lates Edwards’ theological discipline with interpretive rigidity, she misses how he inherits the Torah, an inheritance that moves away from

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fundamentalist-literalism and unbending hermeneutics. The Calvinism by which Edwards assumes God’s covenant with Israel requires a reading strategy that takes a word’s f lexibility as the terms for its becoming meaningful. In fact, Edwards’ use of Scripture, not just the “freshness of his perception” or his “legend and his learning,” prefigures Emily Dickinson (51). More to the point, Edwards’ concern for a relationship with God realized in an engaged reading of the Bible anticipates the method and concerns of thinkers like Gilles Deleuze (as we will see) and poets like Howe herself and Bruce Andrews. By actively interpreting the Bible as a way to remain loyal to it, Edwards allows reading to constitute the Bible’s authority, and in doing so he does not move away from Calvinism—he reaffirms its own formulation of theological responsibility. In “Sinners,” Edwards begins with a selection from Deuteronomy 32: 35: “Their foot shall slide in due time.” Part of a larger prophesy, the whole verse reads “To me belongeth vengeance, and recompense; their foot shall slide in due time: for the day of their calamity is at hand, and the things that shall come upon them make haste.”3 Following the instructions of the Lord, Moses speaks these words as “a witness for [God] against the children of Israel,” for the Lord knew that when he brought the Israelites into the Promised Land they would turn to other gods, break their covenant with him, and provoke his wrath (Dt 31: 19). After quoting his selection, Edwards draws four primary points from the text. 1) The Israelites “were always exposed to destruction, as one that stands or walks in slippery places is always exposed to fall. This is implied in the manner of their destruction’s coming upon them, being represented by their foot’s sliding.”4 2) In Edwards’ view, the verse also “implies that they were always exposed to sudden unexpected destruction,” again as “he that walks in slippery places is every moment liable to fall” (89). 3) The Israelites “are liable to fall of themselves, without being thrown down by the hand of another” (89). 4) “That the reason why they are not fallen already, and don’t fall now, is only that God’s appointed time is not come” (90). As he moves into the next section of his sermon, Edwards takes the verse from Deuteronomy to speak to him and his congregation in colonial America; his characterization of

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the Israelites then naturally applies to all other people as well, those in his own audience in particular. As he continues to unpack “Their foot shall slide in due time,” Edwards claims, “There is no want of power in God to cast wicked men into hell at any moment” (90); the wicked “deserve to be cast into hell” (91); no one is secure even though “no visible means of death” are “at hand” (93); “men’s prudence and care to preserve their own lives, or the care of others to preserve them, don’t secure ‘em a moment” (93); and finally, “God has laid himself under no obligation by any promise to keep any natural man out of hell” (94). An account of the worldly condition of his congregants, Edwards’ exegesis sets up his argument about how they should respond to their circumstances, which, as he says in the next section of his sermon, is repentance. When it comes time to comment on “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” scholars regularly pause to suggest we overlook its theology and focus, as the editors of A Jonathan Edwards Reader do, on the “sheer power of its imagery,” and the way Edwards’ attention provides an important counter to “humankind’s optimistic excesses.”5 The by-now canonical academic reading of the Puritan minister’s sermon takes it to depict a God indifferent to people’s suffering; most especially, these sinners appear to modern eyes as held dangling over the fires of hell by the slimmest of threads, a plaything for God to do with what he will: Edwards’ tone and argument are disproportionate and overbearing—those who still feel drawn to his work feel compelled to provide apologies both for Edwards and their sympathy with him. But if we follow the lead set by the editors of A Jonathan Edwards Reader and turn away from Edwards’ central concern for salvation out of enlightened distaste for his theological conviction we cannot understand what Edwards is doing with the Bible. Far from the common picture of Edwards as a fire-and-brimstone preacher calling on sinners to repent, this New England theologian, not unlike many poststructuralist theorists, hopes to unsettle his Christian congregation’s assurance of their own salvation—he hopes to disrupt the grounds of their confidence, in their own identity, and in their own reading habits. To achieve salvation, Edwards reminds the members of his audience, they must be born again; he claims that Christian deeds

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and words matter not at all, that “We know not who [the damned] are, or in what seats they sit, or what thoughts they now have: it may be they are now at ease, and hear all these things without much disturbance, and are now f lattering themselves that they are not the persons, promising themselves that they shall escape.”6 Edwards takes for granted that the damned of whom he speaks self-identify as Christians. Although Edwards preached his sermon in Enfield, Connecticut, a community thought arrogant and lax by the surrounding towns, the congregation there still largely consisted of faithful people who took heaven and hell as realities. Edwards is speaking to people who believe they know what their words mean—words like Christian, Bible, God, and salvation—and he is telling them not to assume so much. Edwards troubles how the members of his church relate to and use the Bible: he makes the position of the reader a place of uncertainty. When we object to Edwards’ use of the word “sin” and its requisite punishment we think too much about sin as a kind of superstition, rather than, as Edwards thought, a vehicle for self-knowledge and transformation. If we do not understand the distinction, we cannot understand Edwards. Edwards’ insistence on his and his congregants’ indefinite relationship to the Bible makes way for him to establish the authority of Scripture on its need to be reemployed, its need to move beyond its former context and into the lives of those who happen to be reading it presently. If the congregation were to inhabit and make productive the insecure textual place to which Edwards hoped to lead them, he knew he had to enable them to experience the Israelites’ sin as their own. He had to make it possible for them to self-consciously understand themselves as inheriting the prophesies of the Torah, willingly taking on the full implications of a Christological perspective. And yet, somewhat contrary to a populist Christian sensibility, prophetic language, for Jews, does not reveal anything new—it tells you what has been told all along. Composed by the Levite priests after the Babylonian exile as a way of explaining to the Israelites their suffering, Deuteronomy gives the Israelites a way to proceed. By recognizing their sin as the cause of their exile the Israelites can begin to see their way toward repentance, and subsequent restoration to the Promised Land, itself a return to the

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Lord. When Moses in the Torah speaks of the sins Israel will commit, he speaks, from the perspective of the text’s readers, of the relationship Israel already finds itself in with God: reading from inside a broken covenant is the interpretive framework of Deuteronomy’s audience from the beginning. The laws that must be obeyed, the rituals that must be performed, the fact that these laws and rituals have been, and will continue to be, disobeyed and disregarded, all point to how Israel must take on the weight, that is, the knowledge and performance, of the covenant. The burden of living in the covenant is one’s constant return to it. To move forward, Israel finds the infinite and the everyday in the same place, perpetually recalling the demands the covenant makes on its people’s hearts, thoughts, and actions, requirements in need of constant reaffirmation. Like the Israelites before them, these New England Calvinists take their sinfulness as already confirmed. Edwards does not warn against damnation; he reminds people that their damnation is justified—his congregation’s right action is a secondary concern. He counts cheap “however you may have reformed your life in many things, and may have had religious affections, and may keep up a form of religion in your families and closets, and in the house of God, and may be strict in it” (97). In a manner reminiscent of the Levite priests, Edwards aims less to instill fear in his audience with a vision of what is to come than he hopes to remind them what it means for Christians to live in a Christian way as an extension of the covenant. Equally people whose feet will “slide in due time,” the people of Edwards’ congregation only escape their due reward when they hear, respond to, and inherit Moses’ prophesy as their own, and the key to a proper life in the covenant turns on a loving response to God’s love as experienced in his mercy. But here Edwards does, in one respect, shift what it means to be in covenant with God: where the Israelites might very well have better lives when they obey and love God, they remain God’s people regardless, whereas a Christian’s inheritance of the covenant radically transforms his character and his life—he is redeemed. To grasp this redemption it is necessary for Christians to come back to a God they were never formally bound to, although this return requires the same

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What It Means to Be Reader-centered

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loving recognition of God’s love that marked the Israelites’ homecoming. While to our modern ear Edwards’ attention to those who live in an “unconverted” state sounds especially vengeful, to Calvinists it persistently points to God’s love and compassion, what Edwards variously calls God’s restraint, grace, pleasure, and mercy: “there is no other reason to be given why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God’s hand has held you up” (98, emphasis added). Or several paragraphs previous: “So that thus it is, that natural men are held in the hand of God over the pit of hell” (95, emphasis added). Even the title of the sermon frames God’s care: after all it is Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, not Sinners at the Hands of an Angry God. And it is this divine love and a person’s response to it, appropriating God’s covenant with Israel that stands at the heart of Christian salvation, for Edwards that which requires and drives his active reading of the biblical text. Contrary to the familiar understanding, the sinners over hell in Edwards’ sermon are not hanging; they are lifted from below. Critics as well as general readers regularly miss the importance of the metaphor, commonly reading the sermon as a vision of God suspending people over the fires of the abyss; the image of the spider is the standard example (Robert Lowell’s “Mr. Edwards and the Spider” is a classic instance of the widespread misreading). But the sermon contains only two images of a spider. The first is “Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure towards hell; and if God should let you go, you would immediately sink and swiftly descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf, and your healthy constitution, and your own care and prudence, and best contrivance, and all your righteousness, would have no more inf luence to uphold you and keep you out of hell, than a spider’s web would have to stop a falling rock” (96). The second comes five paragraphs later: “The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked” (97). In the first image, the web is man’s own strength; Edwards depicts a person’s inability to hold himself up with his own righteousness. In the second image, God does not clearly dangle anyone—the

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image is indefinite. God holds sinners over the fires of hell, but how he does so is not stated. How we hold “loathsome insects” depends mainly on who we are, and our relationship to bugs (97). When readers imagine God dangling people over the fires of hell by a thread, that if broken will send them plummeting into torment, it seems evident that they conf late these two passages, making the web that which temporarily keeps the spider out of hell, over which God suspends the creature. Critics already convinced that Edwards, and Puritans more generally, obsessed over a vengeful God tend to project a dangling image onto the figure of the spider, but the language of the sermon does not support that reading, especially considering how God holds people everywhere else in the sermon. For a Calvinist, the sinfulness of man, and God’s just ability to punish sin, highlights God’s grace. The more Edwards points to the dangers of hell and people’s loathsomeness, the more, from a Calvinist perspective, God’s grace stands out. The language Edwards marshals to depict the predicament in which people find themselves appears as the vocabulary of restraint, protection, and refuge; it is a superficial reading that makes the spider a hanging thing when everywhere else in the sermon Edwards emphasizes God’s hand holding people up. In his essay “Jonathan Edwards at Enfield,” Robert Stuart points out that “Sinners” is, in our most familiar interactions with it (in textbooks especially), “Cut out of its original context, cited generally with major deletions”; the butchered text tends to include, “typically, only the most dramatic of its passages picturing the plight of the damned”; consequently, “the sermon has been misunderstood for generations.”7 The tendency to misread and only partially quote Edwards leads critics and Christians both to fail to entertain the possibility that “some of Edwards’ congregation were comforted by the sermon” (46). Stuart quotes as a witness to the congregation’s joyful response the diary entry of Reverend Stephen Williams who heard Edwards’ sermon; he wrote, “ ‘And several souls were hopefully wrought upon that night. And oh the cheerfulness and pleasantness of their countenances that received comfort’ ” (46). However foreign it seems, we need to remember that to a Calvinist the last thing God is, is detached; the dominant image of

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God in Calvinism is a God who cares for his people despite their lack of care for him. His anger, in fact, emerges from his love, and if it weren’t for the years of misreading Edwards, it would be a truism to say God, for Edwards, shares our very human characteristic of finding that those he loves most hold the greatest power to hurt him. The hopefulness of Edwards’ sermon stands firmly on this understanding of God’s anger as love, a notion that points to the peace and gladness derived from finding God after one has f led from him.8 The delight Edwards looks to enable his listeners to experience follows from a change of heart; he wants his congregants to love God not because they want to be saved from hell, but because love is the proper response to God’s enormous love for them, which is why he questions their salvation and denies the importance of their good works. Only their genuine love for God matters to Edwards—as a marker of true devotion, the joy that permeates their spirits enables salvation rather than their piousness. His reading of Deuteronomy sets up his purpose from the beginning. Assuming the prophesy of the Torah, Edwards’ and his congregation’s potential escape from damnation mirrors Israel’s exodus from Egypt; to escape from sin is to escape from enslavement. The first commandment subsequently falls to the Puritan community as well: “I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:2–3). Answering to God’s jealousy and requirement of fidelity, Edwards holds out to the people hearing his words that a fitting reaction to liberation is joy, joy that intimately involves them with their savior. In the fourth to last paragraph of his sermon Edwards writes, and now you have an extraordinary opportunity, a day wherein Christ has f lung the door of mercy wide open, and stands in the door calling and crying with a loud voice to poor sinners; a day wherein many are f locking to him, and pressing into the kingdom of God; many are daily coming from the east, west, north and south; many that were very lately in the same miserable condition that you are in, are in now a happy state, with their hearts filled

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Note in particular that the image of people f locking to God emphasizes the transformation of their emotional state: once “miserable” the redeemed are now “happy”; their hearts overf low with “love” in response to “to him that has loved them” first, a love they witnessed when he washed them free of sin (103). All the language of the passage highlights the penitents’ exuberant recognition of God’s care for them. “Flocking” to God, no one appears to act out of duty, fear, or coercion (103). They acknowledge God’s affection and mercy by “daily coming from the east, west, north and south . . . rejoicing in hope of the glory of God” (103). They come because God stands in the door “calling and crying with a loud voice to poor sinners” (103). The intensity of their feeling underlines its emergence from the intuitive aspects of the repentants’ character. Three paragraphs later Edwards even figures redeemed Christians’ loving response to God as familial devotion; they “become the holy and happy children of the King of Kings” (104). The anger of God that Edwards stresses throughout his sermon gives his listeners a way to see their lives as intimately mixed up with the Lord as he remains available to them and able to provide them with overwhelming happiness. The only real danger people face is the risk they take when they, like Pharaoh, “harden” their “hearts” and “blind” their minds, refusing to recognize God’s love (104). What continues to be vague, I imagine, about the intricacies of Edwards’ theology is how it demonstrates his radical interpretive strategy: that Edwards adapts God’s covenant with Israel for use by Christians and their need for salvation might be of some interest to academically or religiously inclined readers, but how such a self-interested appropriation indicates a hermeneutics that prefigures twentieth-century language philosophy and avant-garde poetics does not leap into clear view. The answer lies in the way Edwards achieves his ends by way of exegeses attuned to the persistent proliferation of meaning in texts, much in the way of Wittgenstein’s discussion of the Gospels. Whatever its faults, Calvinism is an insistently textual religious tradition, and when Edwards

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with love to him that has loved them and washed them from their sins in his own blood, and rejoicing in hope of the glory of God.9

Reading as Belief

takes the openness of Scripture, its inability to be closed off from more illumination, as that which engenders meaning in the Bible (and thus redemption) his way of reading becomes familiar to us. Edwards testifies to the dynamic and intimate relationship he believes people are able to have with God in the Bible when he reads it organically, instead of from duty and cold literalism—he takes his investigation of the Bible as the site of divine encounter. Like the Law of the Torah for religious Jews, Scripture gives Christians a means to understand how to live in relationship to God, but as Christians. The dilemma for Edwards, as we have seen over the last few pages, is finding a way to legitimately read Christians as heirs to God’s covenant with Abraham and his descendants, and therein take on the burden of Biblical authority, despite their historical, non-Israelite status. The New Testament certainly helps, but it does not change the original context of the Hebrew Bible, and Edwards did not shirk the epistemological problem—like Calvin before him, he would not lessen Scripture’s authority even to make it more available to himself and his church. In this light, Edwards’ treatment of the verse from Deuteronomy as intended for eighteenth-century Protestants and attentive to their spiritual lives and the motivations of their hearts at the same time he reads the passage as aimed at the Israelites millennia before and focused on the reaffirmation of Mosaic law, is telling. Edwards’ exposition of this single verse of Deuteronomy as available for multiple audiences and meanings is not a special case; rather it reveals the reading strategy upon which he relies: Edwards inherits the Hebrew Bible by requisitioning particular verses toward his own ends while remaining loyal to those verses’ first use, and it is this duel attention that points ahead to the active readers of Language writing and the avant-garde. In his sermon Edwards mentions twenty-three different verses from the Bible. Speaking of the wise man’s inability to keep himself from damnation, Edwards quotes Ecclesiastes: “There is this clear evidence that men’s own wisdom is no security to them from death; that if it were otherwise we should see some difference between the wise and politic men of the world, and others, with regard to their liableness to early and unexpected death; but how is it in fact? Eccles. 2:16, ‘How

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dieth the wise man? as the fool’ ” (93). The quotation from Ecclesiastes occurs in an account of the author’s search for meaning: “Then said I in my heart, As it happeneth to the fool, so it happeneth even to me; and why was I then more wise? Then I said in my heart, that this is also vanity. For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever; seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be forgotten. And how dieth the wise man? as the fool. Therefore I hated my life; because the work that is wrought under the sun is grievous unto me; for all is vanity and vexation of spirit” (Eccl 2:15–17). Now the writer of Ecclesiastes, who represents himself as the son of David, or as the Teacher, is not talking about damnation at all, nor even the inescapability of death; he wants to find out what gives life meaning. In this still relatively early passage of the book, the author confronts the genuine futility of relying on material possessions and intellectual pursuits for lasting fulfillment, or ultimate value. Later, Ecclesiastes confirms the appropriateness of taking satisfaction in the daily activities of love and work, and the pleasures of youth, and he affirms the goodness of following the instructions of the Lord in an otherwise vain life. Edwards’ sermon shares Ecclesiastes’s concern with knowledge’s limited worth, and agrees with its sense that death trumps what knowledge secures. They begin to depart over how we should respond to the knowledge of knowledge’s inadequacy. Like Edwards, the Teacher condemns wickedness and says that all deeds will come into judgment (although in Ecclesiastes there is no indication of a final Day of Judgment), but repentance, as Christians understand it, does not matter to him—no Christological reading strategy exists in Judaism to require it. The Teacher writes “wisdom excelleth folly, as far as light excelleth darkness,” and yet he does not hope to comprehend or protect his life with the light of wisdom, even if he does not think a better option than pursuing wisdom presents itself (Eccl 2:13). The worldview from which Ecclesiastes speaks takes God’s existence for granted; the author does not try to convert idolaters or atheists; he does not even argue for a particular vision of God’s character. Nor does he spend much time providing reasons why people should obey and love the Lord. Wisdom helps us only to recognize that our responsibility to God rests on his

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divinity—Ecclesiastes says we worship God because he is God. No clear distinction divides the choice to follow God’s law and the process of becoming wise; the two come together to give life an identifiable purpose, even though recognizing that purpose does not lead to a reward. Wisdom cannot keep the ills of life at bay or help us transcend the corporeal reality of our days. Honor, money, faith, and knowledge do not provide doors to a new world, or a better life on earth, even when we use them wisely and with benevolence. They merely help make our lives on earth less impoverished. The Teacher initially despairs of all his toil when he sees wisdom’s inability to secure his life or make it more significant. Later he uses his despondency to temper his relationship to the world; he makes it a lens through which to look at all the vain objects available to us and pick those he takes as superior—he chooses wisdom, mirth, wine, and labor. He does not, however, put any confidence in them as epistemological foundations (their usefulness remains of particular value). At the close of Ecclesiastes the Teacher formulates his despair of wisdom’s inability to preserve his life or establish it on something certain as the belief that it is better to know than not, and that what is known is itself not stable. Knowledge, he thinks, fills us up more than foolishness, but fulfillment will not come. How we live in the world now is the Teacher’s concern, and the path of the Lord appears as our best option. Finding comfort in righteousness for its own sake and in wisdom’s limited worth is the project of Ecclesiastes. We might not understand the world, or God, but we can understand better how to live in the world with God in mind. The Teacher’s decision not to look for final satisfaction or transcendence of his life, and his choice to accept the insecurity of wisdom and knowledge as the condition of being in the world, is in the end what returns him to Yahweh. By taking his recognition of the world’s essential ambiguity as grounds for decision making, he builds his understanding on what the world depends upon, namely God. Being born again, in the Christian sense, is obviously a nonfactor for the author of Ecclesiastes; he does not concern himself with a life after this one or an argument as to the identity of the Messiah. Still, we cannot cast Edwards in the opposite light and accuse him of disregarding

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our present lives in favor of the life to come. Edwards’ difference from the Teacher instead resides in his use of sin. Focusing on our impiety and God’s love, Edwards attempts to secure our worldly lives by putting them in a relationship with possibly redeemed lives, which themselves materialize through the conversion and saving of our original, physical bodies. The focus for Edwards remains the transformed life in the life we live now—the life defined by its love for God and the joy accessible in his mercy.10 Edwards’ point of departure from Ecclesiastes occurs where the Teacher despairs over wisdom’s inability to satisfy—its failure to make life something more than it is. When reading Ecclesiastes, Edwards draws the conclusion that wisdom does not help us; in particular it does not enable us to understand our need for redemption. Edwards’ concern for death’s challenge to wisdom rises from his desire to remove what obstructs repentance including, perhaps, wisdom itself. He does not so much want to convince people of wisdom’s failure to make life meaningful, as the Teacher did, as he wants to show them that when death comes, wisdom will not have secured their salvation. As much as Edwards’ desire for his congregation to undergo a change of heart approaches what the Teacher means by wisdom (they both locate our motives for action in a proper relationship to God, not self-interest), his concern for salvation through Christ separates him from Ecclesiastes’s original account of wisdom. Edwards’ use of the Teacher’s wisdom splits wisdom into two kinds: worldly knowledge (understanding nature, business, or philosophy) and eternal insight. The first, which Edwards rejects as an ultimate good, does not necessarily lead to God; it potentially impends repentance by providing people with worldly confidence. Insofar as Edwards refuses wisdom as an end he follows the Teacher. He begins to build on Ecclesiastes when he claims that the evidence for wisdom’s limited worth is the fact that wise men do not outlive other people. The Teacher said no different, but for Edwards death brings the chance for repentance to a close, which is why he repeatedly warns his listeners to repent before they die unexpectedly. Worldly wisdom’s inability to bring about salvation in the face of death proclaims that an individual alone with only his own knowledge is insufficiently prepared to

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make the most crucial decision; he would do well to repent and not let confidence in his own understanding get in the way of redemption: remembering Deuteronomy, responding to God’s call only occurs as an emotional recognition of God’s love; wisdom, as acquired learning and rational discernment, plays no part. From the perspective of the redeemed Christian, a person’s choice for God appears wise, but it did not follow from wisdom. Only on the other side of repentance does clinging to Jesus as one’s redeemer begin to become a form of eternal insight we can call wisdom. There, people may grow in faith and study Scripture and draw even closer to God. In “Sinners,” neither worldly nor saintly wisdom produces repentance in the way wisdom leads the Teacher to choose God’s law—the first gets in the way of salvation and the second follows from it, rendering each equally useless for coming into our proper relationship with God. Both Edwards and the Teacher accept wisdom’s particular value, and both want to undermine wisdom as a way to know God, but where the Teacher recovers a meta-wisdom to live out one’s relationship with God, Edwards places true wisdom on the other side of gaining a new life in God. Edwards’ rejection of wisdom does not lead one, as it did with the Teacher, to affirm a wisdom that understands itself, which in Ecclesiastes appears as a fitting end because it takes on the burden of living in God’s world in a godly way. Edwards thinks wisdom of the worldly kind does lead to knowledge of the world, although he does not think it deals with what we really ought to be concerned with—the achievement in our material lives of an eternal wisdom produced by salvation. Edwards’ subtle adaptation of the Teacher’s wisdom makes a webwork of their texts. He does not disregard the insights of Ecclesiastes, but neither does he straightforwardly adhere to them. Edwards and the Teacher want to get to a place that looks similar; they want a life secured by the recognition of the world’s ambiguity. How they get there differs. Where the Teacher takes the insecurity of the world and our knowledge as given, indeed as a starting ground for a relationship with God, Edwards argues that Christ is reliable while our understanding is not, hence our need for repentance where wisdom fails. Edwards cannot go straight to God in the way the Teacher does because of Jesus.

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Calling for repentance, the crucifixion of Jesus presents God as personally available to people in a way not clearly envisioned by Ecclesiastes, whose God, while loving, remains present but perhaps unapproachable. Faced with the peculiarly Christian predicament of needing to make individual knowledge insecure in order to find security in an intimate relationship with God, Edwards fashions a reading practice that unsettles received wisdom, understanding attained without personal conviction (in the sense of being slain spiritually): abandoning intellectual sophistication as the exercise of one’s own strength gives people a way to read the Bible with the insight and joy that comes from the Holy Spirit (for non-Christians I think the best translation of the Holy Spirit would be the imagination and the poetic sensibility it inspires, as my discussion of Calvin began to suggest). The more complex spiritual and emotional force of loving God, or being pierced by the Holy Spirit, enlivens mere scholastic study—understanding now grows poetic, imaginative, rich, and f lexible. Put in broad terms, Reformed Christianity, and Edwards specifically, does not think people recognize on their own wisdom’s tenuousness or achieve an intellectual life infused with imagination, joy, and love; it argues first that the world is insecure where Judaism begins with that knowledge (the need to recognize one’s sinfulness, for example, interrupts what Reformed Christianity anticipates will be its people’s tendency toward unifying intellectual systems). When Christians subsequently lose themselves and the world, and then regain them through a humanized Christ they achieve, in their own perception, a more intimate relationship with God—an understanding of their lives as remade and thus infinitely more trustworthy, however mysterious and incomplete, than the ones they lost at first. To make this movement of faith Edwards does retain Ecclesiastes’s sense of wisdom’s inability to satisfy us, but he goes on to say our wisdom will not satisfy God either (it will never recognize Christ whose crucifixion is beyond comprehension). Edwards achieves his scriptural account of human understanding by reemploying the Teacher’s wisdom. He embraces a f luid intellectual and emotional perception of the world through the failure of our own knowledge, rather than through the failure of knowledge itself, as the Teacher had it.

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Through his entire sermon Edwards makes use of the Bible’s full range in the same way he does Ecclesiastes, from Genesis to the prophets, from the Gospels and Paul’s epistles to Revelations. The habit of reading Edwards cultivates creates a network of relationships across the text, connections that employ verses in new ways and give them new readings, even as these new uses do not seem out of keeping with the given verse’s first context. It would miss the point to simply call Edwards’ inspired exegesis evidence for his exceptional biblical literacy, as if all he were doing was drawing on verses to support his argument. Edwards actively shapes his understanding of the Bible, his understanding of God, and humanity’s responsibility to God. He complicates and unifies the Bible through his readerly involvement with the Bible’s own unique veins of thought and attention. In light of Edwards’ hermeneutics, we might properly ask about the kind of encounters he encourages readers to have with the Bible. If Edwards’ own use of Scripture is any indication, it is a reading practice with striking, if unexpected, correlations to Gilles Deleuze’s method of writing and thinking so as to get beyond the confines of French academic philosophy. Describing his own work, his way of reading thinkers like Henri Bergson, as a form of buggery, Deleuze imagines himself as “getting onto the back of an author, and giving him a child, which would be his and which would at the same time be a monster.”11 Deleuze illustrates well the reading practice and form of meaning Edwards subscribes to when he goes on to write, “It is very important that it should be [the author’s] child, because the author actually had to say everything that I made him say. But it also had to be a monster because it was necessary to go through all kinds of decenterings, slips, break ins, secret emissions, which I really enjoyed” (8). The queer language Deleuze brings into play might strike some as inappropriate to Edwards, but I do not believe so. Edwards’ religious profession does not exclude him from Deleuze’s queer metaphor when the metaphor holds; and we cannot say Edwards is somehow more interested in the intent of his primary text than Deleuze is, as if Edwards does not play a major role in what Christians will understand Ecclesiastes to mean after they have read or heard his sermon. Quite the contrary, for nowhere does

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Edwards let go of his own involvement with what Scripture means or with its authority. Deleuze and Edwards remain loyal to the texts they read by using those books’ words to understand something for themselves—they make meaning in these works work for them. Ref lecting Deleuze, literary fidelity for Edwards does not equal reading the Bible as static. Accountable exegesis responds to the claims particular verses make on readers by testing how those claims may be applied, and what they can be used to mean—it explores and bends a passage as a way to give it texture and shape.12 Edwards and Deleuze are of course not alone: Jacques Derrida’s reading of Marx and Heidegger, Stanley Cavell’s philosophical approach to Emerson and Thoreau, Susan’s Howe use of Herman Melville (to name only one), or John Ashbery’s quotation of William Le Queux’s Beryl of the Biplane, all lead to literary works singularly unique to their authors, but produced on the backs of their hosts. Readers invested in the tradition of innovative poetry are familiar with multiple forms of literary piracy, so much so that it in fact arguably rises to the level of a genre convention in avant-garde literature. Although poets experimenting with compositional methods regularly treat the texts they hijack largely as source material (think of William Burroughs’ cut-ups), the manipulations of which produce literary works that bear little resemblance to the texts that bore them, many more writers in the avant-garde line, as the ones cited above, just as often use the works they draw on as guides and to generate literary constraints. In the case of Ronald Johnson’s Radi os (his erasure of Paradise Lost) all the words in the poem remain in the same order and on the same place on the page, and Johnson does not add any language to the poem. Kathy Acker’s fiction deliberately borrows from and manipulates the work of writers like Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Marcel Proust to examine gender identity and patriarchal authority. We see a similar practice of authorship too in the foundations of Judaism and Christianity, whose Scriptures take shape as collections of reinterpreted texts, initially stories from the oral tradition—the priestly composition of the Pentateuch centuries after the time of Moses in the former, for instance, or Paul’s account of Jesus in the latter. What all these works share is a commitment to

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establishing authorial presence (and authority) on an active and still authentic use of a previous text, rather than on an attempt to grasp and transmit it purely. The notion that readers produce meaning has, as we conceded at the outset of this chapter, become a commonplace, and this fact has served to make it too easy to give up on the hard work of interpretation. Our agency as readers is predicated on the knowledge that our texts are unmoored from the world and our own understanding is unloosed from certainty. If we could confidently pick up a book and know what it meant, if we could rely on the literal obviousness of language acts, then active reading would be unnecessary and heretical. But we do not know what our books mean and literalism more often than not obscures understanding. My naming Edwards as a forbearer in a queer, active readerly tradition, is not then meant to somehow recoup him from his own stodginess or record another victory over the hegemony of tradition and religious orthodoxy. I want to highlight Edwards’ authorial method because I believe that seeing how Edwards produces meaning in textual spaces that he cannot ever fully posses, and identifying in his sermon procedures that resemble our own innovative poetics, provides a necessary check on our tendency to fetishize disruptive styles and roving meanings, or mistake active reading for ventriloquism. If we are to read faithfully, it helps to see where Edwards does in fact self-consciously read in a manner familiar to us, even as he refuses to leave the Bible’s authority behind. More to the point, a glimpse of the balanced reading that faith requires begins to emerge from Edwards’ interpretation of Scripture when his reading forces us to recognize what liberties and what disciplines enable his active reading strategies to participate in the difficult task of making sense with a text that, like all texts, we have come to admit will not stay put, which more than any other acknowledgment characterizes the interpretive context we occupy. And with that said we are, shifting to the other side of faithful reading’s injunction, now in a position to consider how textual discipline settles on readers in a poem, namely Lip Service, that we know demands their participation.

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SE V E N

Bruce Andrews’ Lip Service and the Character of True Reading

“Bruce Andrews is not a poet,” a professor to whom I had shown Andrews’ Getting Ready To Have Been Frightened as an undergraduate told me. (I can’t remember what he said Andrews was, but it wasn’t complimentary.) I am not entirely sure Andrews would disagree with the characterization, although he might point out that nobody else is a poet either, at least not in the sense my professor meant the word. Andrews likens his role as an author to that of an editor: he weaves together slices of political speech, overheard conversation, pop culture, and literature, and in the process examines how intellectual, cultural, and literary production occurs through shifting social relationships, not from the minds of isolated individuals. In “Paradise & Method: A Transcript,” Andrews tells us that “what runs through” his long poem Lip Service (itself a recasting of Dante’s Paradiso), “is a focus on thematic differentiation; an associative, or drifting, lacework of thematic argument; polyphonies of utterance, shapes of talk, of streams of consciousness & preconsciousness; a drastic constructivism of syntax: with twists & turns, normative tilts & detonations, with interruptions as grammar.”1 He describes the connection between Lip Service and the last section of the Divine Comedy in formal and methodological terms: “The Dante works its way through ten ‘bodies’: Earth, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn,

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CH A P T E R

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Fixed Stars, & Primum Mobile. And Lip Service is divided into ten ‘planets’. First I sorted [my material] into two uneven parts, five ‘planets’ each—(the second half a little less critical & more optimistic than the first). Part One would correspond with Dante’s Cantos 1–13 & the larger Part Two with Cantos 14–33” (252). Andrews explains also that the Paradiso’s “shifts & stanza structure” determined where the breaks in Lip Service came—“Fixed Stars 1,” for example, “equals [Dante’s] Canto 24, lines 1–51”; the “cues” Dante’s poem gave Andrews then helped him divide his own material “into a paragraph structure (ten to twenty-five paragraphs per poem) within each of the ten poems in each of the ten planetary bodies” (253). It is interesting to note, though, that Dante’s poem actually begins with the Moon—having already left the earth far behind—and ends with the Empyrean, the highest heaven at the center of the revolving universe. Lip Service does not correspond exactly to Dante’s poem because Andrews retains only the first nine spheres of the Paradiso; he then drops the “Empyrean” and adds the “Earth” as the first section of his own poem. In effect Lip Service grounds itself on the earth and elides the pure heaven of Dante’s epic, ending instead with “Primum Mobile”—the “first mover” and second to last sphere in the Paradiso. The fact that heaven disappears and the material world appears points, it would seem, to the materialist perspective of Andrews’ poem, even though it pictures the physical world overf lowing with surprising, strange, violent, and exhilarating experiences—erotic encounters most especially. In his essay “This Just In: Past Haunts Lip Service,” Bob Perelman confesses, for different reasons, that he is “dubious about the results of Andrews’ matching procedures,” and points out that when placed side by side the lines of Andrews’ poem have little clear connection to the Paradiso.2 He mentions as well that the material Andrews shapes Lip Service from “pre-existed the sorting-out, so it would be an unthinkably remote coincidence for his roughly 100,000 words to be sortable into a pattern that matched the Paradiso in any significant way.” And yet Perelman does read the more romantic—what he calls “tender”— vocabulary of Lip Service as reminiscent of Dante’s poem. Despite his reservations, Perelman takes as an example the lines “I do not see

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through words / sight as dream gratefully certain,” and interprets them to mean “I insist on simply reading the words, not peering through, behind or beneath them. What I see when I do this is a sight as certain as a dream, for which I’m grateful.” On its own, the first line underscores Andrews’ commitment to “an anti-transparent materiality of language,” but joined with the second line it causes Perelman to wonder if Andrews’ use of the Paradiso enters him into “areas of romance and suggestiveness that, according to his poetics, should be off-limits.” Allowing that the romantic passages in the poem do not represent its entire body, Perelman ends with a self-professed tentativeness, comparing Andrews’ claim “that he’s working ‘toward an Other or an Outside which is both a “not us” and a “not yet” ’ ” in Lip Service to the start of Henry V and the first canto of the Paradiso, both of which ask readers to enter the imaginative realm of the literary work. Hesitant in the face of his own reading, Perelman leaves us to consider whether or not the romantic impulse peppering Lip Service undoes “a strict adherence to the anti-transparent, material text” and links to “the most old-fashioned poetic tropes, where the poem acts like a door, a camera obscura, a magic carpet.” For my part, Perelman’s questions appear suggestive: worried by his reading, the hole into Lip Service widens; it begins to show us readers who possess less authorial power than Andrews would have us believe. Tracing out Perelman’s line of thinking, it appears that when readers move into the world of the poem they give themselves over to the logic of Lip Service—philosophically, erotically, and politically. To go a step further, building from our last chapter, the requisite willingness of readers to forego their autonomy in Lip Service most clearly resembles the form of discipline Jonathan Edwards describes in his theological writing.3 Working in the midst of the Great Awakening, Jonathan Edwards argues in “A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections” that the nature of true religion is characterized by an absolute surrender to God, although what that submission looks like is, unsurprisingly, not so straightforward. As we already know from “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Edwards does not think simply obeying the law is enough; instead, the nature of “True religion, in great part, consists in holy affections.”4 And

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“the affections are no other, than the more vigorous and sensible exercises of the inclination and will of the soul” or, as Edwards writes some paragraphs later, “the fervent exercises of the heart” (141; 143). Again, in language reminiscent of “Sinners,” the affections of true religion largely take emotional and spiritual form, such as love of and joy in Christ, “gratitude to God, for the mercies we receive of him,” and “strong desires after God and holiness” (150). Edwards is clear as well to tie these emotional and spiritual affections to our corporeal experience: because of “the laws of union of soul and body. . . . The greater those affections be, and the more vigorous their exercise . . . the greater will be the effect on the body” (151–152). Here is where Edwards swings back to the law: rather than emerging from charismatic revelation, the affections exist in dynamic relationship with Christian practice, what Edwards calls the “fruit” of the affections (164). He writes, “Gracious and holy affections have their exercise and fruit in Christian practice. I mean, they have that inf luence and power upon him who is subject of ‘em, that they cause that a practice, which is universally conformed to, and directed by Christian rules, should be the practice and business of his life” (164). What leaps out to me in Edwards’ last sentence is how hard he returns to “Christian rules”; after arguing for the predominance of the affections for a great many pages he ends up constraining them within an exacting legal and textual framework (164). Edwards is not, however, pulling a bait and switch or downplaying the importance of the affections he began with, but refocusing how we read righteousness; he eliminates the difference between desire or intention and action: “to forsake all for Christ in heart, is the very same thing as to have a heart to forsake all for Christ. . . . To deny ourselves in heart for Christ, is the same thing as to have an heart to deny ourselves for him in fact. . . . Godliness consists not in an heart to intend to do the will of God, but in an heart to do it” (169). The emotional, spiritual force of the affections permeate the Christian’s experience of and life in the world. Edwards’ language—his argument that to “deny ourselves in heart” is the same thing as to “have” a heart to deny ourselves—stresses possession of the affections as a public reality, not an invisible, purely emotional state hidden away inside a person (169). Essentially, while

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we may usefully begin with an understanding that the love of God is expressed in submission to his law, once accomplished, that submission is more clearly recognized as the love of God. Edwards quotes John 14:21, “He that hath my commandments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me.” In other words, we can say that sincere Christian practice is fused with the love of God when that practice makes a Christian’s love of God material and readable (insincere Christian practice is another matter). In this light, Edwards’ claim that affections “cause” a practice “directed by Christian rules” to become the “business of his life” is another way to transform our understanding of what it means to follow the law of God, or, what amounts to the same thing, it is to describe total submission to God; when Christian practice merges with the affections to the extent that they become indistinguishable, the Christian life is wholly other than it was previously—the body and the spirit are annexed by God whereby he produces “a new creation” (164; 161). For Edwards, what matters is the way the affections charge Christian practice so as to take possession of the Christian—together they, in effect, are him, through and through. Edwards ends his essay with the parable of the pearl of great price, wherein a man leaves his whole life behind to seek a great treasure in a distant place: “the motions of his body in his journey, are not considered alone, exclusive of the actions of his mind, and a consciousness within himself, of the thing that moves him, and the end he goes for” (171). What Edwards establishes by the close of his account of the religious affections is a reading of textual discipline as inextricably joined to a form of life. Physical obedience to God (as found in Scripture) is “not considered alone,” apart from spiritual discipline, love of God, one’s thoughts, desires, and hopes, or even God himself (171). The “business” of life is the task of learning to love the discipline of the Bible, which is the same as loving God, both of which make “the soul a partaker of God’s beauty and Christ’s joy” (158). Lip Service, no less than Edwards’ “A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections,” sticks its nose in its readers’ business. Needless to say, their subject matters vary in no small degree, but the way they ask people to experience textual discipline bears striking similarity; harkening back to our discussion of conversion in chapter two, they both mean to make

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readers’ literary practice their life practice. Where we saw Edwards in the last chapter read Scripture as pregnant with meaning, we see Lip Service now on the f lip side of that same readerly mode; Andrews’ poem enforces the textual logic that comes with active reading. When readers enter the poem they must find disjunction, shifting interpretation, and association meaningful, and they must begin to understand this procedure as what it means to read. This textual discipline ref lects Edwards’ “true religion” insofar as it demands a total surrender to a particular understanding of the world, a vision that reworks not just what a person does, but what he loves, thinks, and feels. Just as Edwards longs for his readers to experience a proper joyful and spiritual relationship to God and his law, Lip Service hopes for the political transformation of its reading subject, a transformation that takes place when readers submit to the poem’s aesthetic order, and author themselves accordingly. Practically speaking, Andrews’ poem takes readers’ participation in the making of meaning as a matter of course so as to lay claim to their lives. What we see in Lip Service are readers who must engage in a dynamic relationship between their own readerly freedom and surrender to a way of reading, just as Edwards’ Christians have to find a highly personal experience and love of God within the structures of God’s already articulated law.5 Lip Service begins its siege of its readers’ lives by requiring them to negotiate a f luctuating, abusive textuality. As they move through the poem, readers confront an occasionally explicit vocabulary mixed with a decidedly anti-descriptive poetic line, a combination that keeps readers shifting their interpretive force and direction: valet gravy in a groin, Berlin so many well whittled abortion gymnastics: I hate your sleep, I am openly contemptuous, saturated chest hostages to be whitewashed jelly apposite aftermath.6 While both “valet” and “gravy” are familiar enough words, in combination they are difficult to render into a mental picture or idea. Is valet

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gravy gravy made by valets? Made of valets? Or do I juxtapose the idea of gravy and the idea of valets in my mind? When I first read the phrase I pictured a footman in a red coat standing outside a hotel and then saw a gravy bowl hanging in empty space—the gravy was brown, not white; I read the line as I did in part because the absence of an identifiable object of description left me nothing for my imagination to modify, and so it seems unreasonable to compare these images to the kind I get from the opening lines of Wordsworth’s The Prelude (“Oh there is blessing in this gentle breeze / That blows from the green fields and from the clouds / And from the sky: it beats against my cheek, / And seems half-conscious of the joy it gives”).7 When Lip Service combines a more complicated vocabulary in longer sequences, such as “shy votive nymphomania pennywhistled foreplay,” the difficulty of making sense of the poem increases.8 How feeling reserved modifies a wish for foreplay of the “nymphomania pennywhistled” variety is not entirely clear to me, and I don’t even get the kind of associations I did with “valet gravy,” mainly because the noun “pennywhistle” is now a verb, a switch that effectively turns an inexpensive fipple f lute into an abstraction (194). Even a potentially loaded phrase like “abortion gymnastics” gets us no closer to an argument, or to a narrative. Readers depend on their own imaginations, storehouses of graphic images, stories, and memories, which they can’t help but read onto the poem (194). Associations different from my own will no doubt occur to other readers, although we will have a similar reading experience—we will struggle with the poem in the same way (reading Lip Service as we saw Edwards read the Bible in the last chapter) and for the same reasons: however concrete individual words are in the poem, Lip Service makes them, at least initially, abstract. I know the words I am reading, but in combination and in the form they take, they put enormous stress on my mind (the altering of nouns into verbs or adjectives, which themselves become nouns, is common). At times I get a series of associations, at times I get nothing much at all. For all practical purposes I move in and out of thought, even as I continue to push for it, trying to make sense of the words I am given. The pressure of chasing meaning in this constantly

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moving, abstract language accounts for a significant portion of the violence readers experience in Lip Service, but it also provides the context for readers’ confrontation with the poem’s more overt sexually aggressive language. The musically dense, quick-paced lines of the poem redouble the already difficult task of reading Lip Service’s textual violence. The scarcity of grammatical markers like periods and commas, and the abundance of long lines, push readers forward, with little time for pause. The periodic use of one and two word lines, regularly indented, actually helps speed up the poem by allowing readers a well-timed breath just before they continue onto the next series of extended lines. The reader’s associations start to pile onto each other and build a strange network of memories, references, and images. Increasing the affect of this intellectual pileup, the lines contain quick-hitting syllables and sound repetitions like the s in “contemptuous, saturated chest”—the rhythmic frequency of the poem’s soundscape matches the speed of the poem’s syntax (194). The multiplying associations, gaps in meaning, and concentrated sound texture combine to pound on readers’ brains. Over the course of 380 pages these bruises begin to add up, creating a dense and abrasive texture occasionally intensified by grotesque, exhilarating, and even banal stills, and it becomes difficult to read these shifting and thick lines for very long before feeling a bit overwhelmed, no matter how much you like that sort of thing. When, in the midst of a disruptive and highly stressed poetic field, readers stumble onto lines like “a sexual diversion for the noontime meal / but then he said my vagina was too big,” or “what’s the matter with fucking dead persons / as long as you don’t kill them?” they feel a strange relief, which is a strange place to find it (195, 123). The appearance of grammatically straightforward, sexually violent, or disturbing lines anchors Lip Service in abusive associations by giving readers’ minds something to grab onto—something to ease the mental pressure of reading—while moving through an otherwise antinarrative poem. The sexually aggressive, grammatically normative language of Lip Service is relatively scarce, but its f leeting presence allows it to stand out and dominate readers’ experiences of the poem. By no means an exception,

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henride come hard paste half-faced f lirt espousals to me. I’ll talk to you just as long as you’re fucking me, wounded lips pawn a milky roll mixture bouquet hesitant stiff kittens’ heartbeat finger[.] (114) While full of potentially erotic words and phrases like “come hard paste half-faced” or “wounded lips pawn / a milky roll” and “stiff,” the only overtly sexual lines in the passage are “I’ll talk to you just as long / as you’re fucking me” (194). The referential ambiguity of “paste half-faced” or “wounded lips” open the lines up to association in a way not available in “I’ll talk to you just as long / as you’re fucking me” with its initially more clear description of the power relations and activities involved (194). The lines that follow are even less erotically charged and retain a more abstract character: “fitters harping spoon—it’s hard to hear / infinite maybe, an entire devotion winced passion convertibles” (114). The degree to which the more abstract phrases suggest gender violence rests on their association with the one strikingly erotic line; next to it, these more uncertain lines quickly invoke a series of sexual references, and not sentimental ones given the character of what they are framing. Connected to “I’ll talk to you just as long / as you’re fucking me,” “come hard paste half-faced,” and “wounded lips pawn / a milky roll” could insinuate fellatio, and the explosive f lowering of a “bouquet” might very well bring to mind a facial come-shot (114). As with the other concrete passages in Lip Service, the tone and idea of these narrative lines—the possibility of two people distancing themselves from one another through sexual intercourse—begin to infect the whole poem. A violent and manipulative passage makes it easier for readers to hear sexual cruelty in less obvious, more rhythmically powerful, language, and much of what goes for Lip Service’s erotic aggression occurs for just this reason.

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only one of the thirty-eight lines on the first page of Lip Service comes near misogyny, “You can’t portray women as they really are”—just eight of 287 total words, and yet the poem feels permeated with erotic fury (8).9 An early moment in “Venus 4,” reads:

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The intellectual relief readers achieve in the poem’s familiar grammar does not, however, provide comfort—readers find themselves articulating political and social positions they might very well detest. Phrases like “you can close / your mouth or I’ll put it back in” (115), “Did the victim ovulate?—quake?—tremble?—” (94), and “fetus using your body without your consent” (380) intersperse Lip Service. Coaxing readers to vocalize misogynistic and pornographic sentiments, or articulate a politically ambiguous version of the language of sexual law, Andrews’ poem begins to eat away at readers’ confidence, their sense that these violent wishes and disturbing ideas are not their own. In addition to proposing a meta-reading of the poem (the poem will “talk” to us if we force ourselves onto it), the previous lines “I’ll talk to you just as long / as you’re fucking me” might compel readers to wonder what such an affair is like, or recall a similar relationship with which they are acquainted (114). They might even think theoretically about the potential heterosexism of such an ultimatum, or supply a context for the speech. But without a protagonist, nobody appears to say “I’ll talk to you just as long / as you’re fucking me” other than the individual reader, and his grammatical comfort while reading the lines, and the poem’s demand that he make them his own, intensify his possession of their erotic violence (114). Lip Service rarely uses quotation marks and does not indicate from whence it specifically gathers its words, and the absence of recognizable references unifies the poem in a way unattainable by modernist collage, at least in the sense that Lip Service gives our cultural violence back to us as a twisting, uncertain, and powerful social discourse. The fact that we do not have the exact sources of the poem, and know only that Lip Service draws its language from our public spaces, implicates us in their expression; as social subjects we are the material with which the poem builds itself.10 To treat Lip Service as if it were a collection of shorn fragments—a bundle of voices and literary allusions disconnected from ourselves—undermines the poem’s request that we read it as part of our own bodies, for much of our job as readers is to explore how we live in our destructive and confusing environments. Lip Service sees sexual violence as more than a depersonalized social problem, as more than a difficulty unconnected to our

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enlightened, progressive lives, and as more than a personal struggle for other people. We cannot entirely refuse possession of these lines without rejecting the very method of Lip Service. Although Andrews’ poem does not simply loathe the sexually violent language it draws on; Lip Service presents readers with the allure and temptation of predatory and misogynistic impulses. No sexual principles guide the poem, only a critical attention to the language of sexual desire: as they move through Lip Service readers shift between titillation, embarrassment, boredom, excitement, anger, and fatigue. A line such as “being faithful almost gets me hard,” with its suggestion that infidelity is erotic, is sexually suspect, but perhaps compellingly so; the idea of a strange erotic thrill attending a new and taboo body undoes readers’ emotional and intellectual mastery of themselves as they experience a strange mixture of mental, and perhaps physical, pleasure and pain (278). Becoming strangers to themselves, readers begin to respond to their responses to Lip Service’s erotic brutality; they begin to ask themselves a series of questions: when the lines of the poem are more abstract like “send a CC to my breast / straight sheath—no slit sweat looks / encounter silence on blonde. / A rodent-sized organ attachment / covet absent conjure daze slush topaz / nothing gays me, are you pinching yourself?” readers first ask questions such as “is the ‘rodent-sized organ attachment’ a dildo?” “How do you ‘CC’ a breast?” “Can we read ‘straight sheath’ as a penis, and if so, does its slit not ‘[sweating] looks’ make it macho or mark it as trying to become less self-conscious? or both?” (185). And individual readers begin to wonder why these particular questions came first to mind: “why does a rodent make me think of a dildo?” “Am I a walking cliché when I move promptly to the idea of self-consciousness when penises come up?” When encountering sexually explicit images and phrases readers move even more quickly toward a consideration of their own reactions, questions that take the form of psychological inquiries: recalling the various readings I have forwarded so far, I wonder “what impulse does sexual blackmail cause in me?”; “why did I focus on infidelity as erotic when the line’s subject is faithfulness?”; or earlier, “why do I associate ‘come hard paste half-faced’ with hard-core pornography?” In the midst

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of questions like these readers find themselves thinking and feeling emotions they enjoy and dislike; they find themselves imagining sexual encounters they want to have but don’t think they should desire; they also find that they are considering sexual subjectivities that frighten them, but perhaps entice them as well. In the mix of these emotions readers do not get to think and feel what they would like, but explore the shifting, personal, and social nature of their erotic sensibilities. Like Edwards’ Christians, readers of Lip Service look to the fruit of their reading as evidence for “what is in [their] hearts.”11 As the audience for their own interpretations, readers’ desires, and their responses to them, as well as their particular interpretations, hold a similar place in Lip Service as actions do in Edwards’ discussion of religious affections. Readers at this stage of our cultural politics know what they ought to think and say and feel and desire—politically, sexually, emotionally—but Lip Service looks to the fruit of our reading and prods readers to follow suit, considering how their desires, emotions, and the meanings they make in the poem, mix. In the more complicated and uncertain territory of visceral experience joined with conscious thought and action, Lip Service thinks readers can face the sexual politics present in their hearts, and perhaps how those politics move into the world, just as Edwards believes affections and actions come together to tell the real story of the Christian life to the owner of it and at times to other Christians. In both instances, the reading subject interrogates her own righteousness as it emerges from her heart and inside a text, which provides the interpretative frame. At these junctures, readers of Lip Service as well as Christians may easily find themselves out of step with the narratives they tell themselves about their own politics, sexual subjectivities, and faith. Unable to disown their own meanings, but not entirely in control of them either, readers discover, perhaps to their discomfort, that they have been forced to turn inward, to see how their social subjectivity has been embodied, and where their mental and emotional life creeps into the public realm. The particular form of readerly authority available in Lip Service, in this case, ends up staging the poem’s assertion of power over how we read and what we read for, not unlike Edwards’ Bible.

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By compelling readers to find themselves in its disconcerting language, Lip Service includes readers in a modern tragedy (or comedy, depending on your sense of humor): the moment a person sees that he is the monster he hates. Think of Pound at the end of the Cantos. Think of Rufus in James Baldwin’s Another Country. Unlike Oedipus, who had little choice in the authorship of his undoing, readers of Lip Service must see themselves as at least in part willing participants in and creators of their condition, and see their condition as a series of conf licting relationships with other people, social norms, and institutions, relationships that are both empowering and debilitating—productive and caustic for their transgressiveness. Readers experience neither comfort nor catharsis: the hostility and gloom of “your royal Slutness, put some skull / in those blondes, constipated cherubs” and “I hope I’ll be excused from being interested” is ours, and as Lip Service puts these words in our mouths we have little choice but to consider how their depiction of power is erotic, dangerous, funny, and awful.12 Lip Service does not permit reading to be the mere identification of dark, foreign things that have slipped into us, and it does not allow us to think that in identifying what we detest about ourselves that we undergo a purge. The self in Lip Service is a made self, and the violence we see in our lives partakes in our decisions and longings, and while we certainly do not exercise complete command over our psychological impulses, we do not escape the ethical implications of our words, desires, and actions. As Edwards makes clear throughout his theological writings, the fact that people at every moment act in ways contrary to their best hopes—for Edwards, such loss of control is part of what it means to sin—relieves nobody of responsibility or agency. As they f luctuate between each new line and desire, each new textual pleasure or pain, mastered by the way Lip Service and sexual desire overthrow their brains and hearts, readers perpetually look to interpret themselves differently than they did at first. If their reading of themselves at one moment exposed them to their own sexual violence, then the ability to reread this violence remains possible in the poem’s own f lexible, disjunctive body; readers might try to find the productive potential for their violence or find a way to read it as less compelling.

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An opportunity for self-authorship and the chance to find one’s understanding of oneself compromised await readers on each page of Lip Service. The poem shows us that we constantly reinterpret ourselves when we read books and respond to the readings that others give them. The idea that our lives in the world and our lives as readers abide in separate spheres makes no sense if one accepts the reading conditions of Lip Service; as we read Andrews’ poem we read ourselves. Edwards everywhere in “A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections” discusses a “man’s actions” as his “proper trial,” and when combined with his claim that “Christian rules, should be the . . . business of his life,” his understanding of Christian practice appears equally as an ongoing attempt to reshape one’s heart through the word of God.13 It is this model of agency found in textual discipline and the ongoing move to merge reading and living that I suggest Lip Service similarly takes up. To find new ways of making sense in the poem is to look for new ways of making sense of our bodies in their social circumstances. The agency readers carve out for themselves in the domineering body of Lip Service is the authority of reading subjects—subjects who interpret their literary works and their own lives, both of which are acts of response and surrender. One of the more powerful tropes that draws out this readerly submission in Lip Service is the poem’s repeated invocation of fetishistic sexuality. All through Lip Service we get lines like: “bulimics in stilettos crucified in the negligé-”; “like masturbating with a block of ice”; and “There’s romance in a zipper, reaching for that little / membrane of lambskin.”14 Typical of the sexual scenarios in Lip Service, no whole bodies appear here, just “stilettos,” “a block of ice” to masturbate with, a “zipper,” and a “membrane of lambskin” (28, 271, 274). Male, female, homosexual, heterosexual, or otherwise, bodies materialize in the poem primarily through metonymy—readers’ own ideas of reaching for a condom and undoing a zipper create the idea of a sexualized body: fetish objects, not images of other people, allow readers to imagine their own erotic encounters. I suspect that most of us think that the person reaching for the condom also reaches for whoever shares his or her bed, but of all the reaches to choose from, Lip Service foregrounds

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a reach toward an object that comes between lovers; as a mediator the condom makes the lovers available to each other and to us. Permitting their pleasure and our reading, the reached-for condom frames what sex can be in this passage, and at the very least, with the invocation of somewhat safe-sex (lambskin, after all, does not prevent HIV) with all its health, fetishistic, and political implications, it is sex that includes a degree of surrender—to fear, to uncertainty, to desire, to the body of another. Although Freud claimed that the fetish object is a boy’s defense against castration anxiety, Andrews’ poem emphasizes the necessary role fetishes play in sexual encounter; we need them to turn bodies into objects, and to excite each other’s and our own bodies. The representation of fetishistic sexuality in Lip Service celebrates the pleasure and agency that comes from yielding self-governance. The powerlessness we experience as sexual and social agents speaks usefully to the situation readers find themselves in Andrews’ poem: if I can get off only when I lick somebody’s black leather high heels I can’t really say that I am in control of myself; if I can make meaning only by substituting my accustomed reading strategies for Lip Service’s preferred method of association and disjunction I can’t really imagine that I’m having my way with the poem either. The reoccurring theme of sexual powerlessness in Lip Service that serves both as a political topic and as a metaphor for reading the poem finds its echo in Leo Bersani’s “Is the Rectum a Grave?” Bersani theorizes the ethical necessity of powerlessness as a critique of phallocentrism and as the acceptance of a more complex understanding of subjectivity. To achieve either we must reject the ego-based identity standing at the center of a heterosexual, masculine worldview by refusing to reproduce its power dynamics in our own sexual relationships. Embracing the “appeal of powerlessness,” a “radical disintegration and humiliation of the self,” moves us, Bersani claims, “beyond the fantasies of bodily power and subordination” where we achieve “a transgressing of that very polarity which, as Georges Bataille has proposed, may be the profound sense of both certain mystical experiences and of human sexuality.15 For men, the passive act of getting buggered is not demeaning, but a valuable negation of the attempt to part sexuality from all

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its complexities and from all the ways it disturbs us. The rectum is the grave in which “the masculine ideal . . . of proud subjectivity is buried” and the place where the risks of the sexual to the self f lourish—where the internalized phallic male is the repeated object of sacrifice (222). In Andrews’ poem, the reader, too, must sacrifice his ego to the logic of the poem—even when the reader creates meaning with the material the poem provides, he is, on a structural level, embracing powerlessness in the face of textuality itself. The loss of self that produces a new self, found by way of anal sex for Bersani, reading for Andrews, and devotion for Edwards, speaks profoundly to the way all three writers understand the production of meaning as a transformation of personal agency. What we see running through their literary works is a desire to compel readers to transform their initial claims of understanding and readerly authority into an acceptance of occupation by another, be it a person, a poem, or God. While dissimilar in subject, Bersani’s formulation prompts us to recall that classic Christian theology also locates strength in weakness, power in service, and life in death. Bersani’s ability to remind us of the full measure of Christian devotion, with its celebration of absolute physical, not just spiritual, powerlessness, highlights a detail of Edwards’ “Treatise” that we would do well to fill out in more detail, for a further reading of how the Spirit occupies the Christian body models well the full implications of readers’ submission to Lip Service. In Edwards’ telling, the presence of religious affections in a person makes way for the Holy Spirit to occupy her body, a haunting that produces a new subject, one who thoroughly belongs to God. Edwards writes: “The Spirit of God is given to the true saints to dwell in them, as his proper lasting abode; and to inf luence their hearts, as a principle of new nature, or as a divine supernatural spring of life and action. The Scriptures represent the Holy Spirit, not only as moving, and occasionally inf luencing the saints, but as dwelling in them as his temple, his proper abode, and everlasting dwelling place.”16 Inhabiting the body of the saint, the Holy Spirit is “so united to the faculties of the soul, that he becomes there a principle or spring of new nature and life” (157). The new life Edwards imagines entails the transformation of the Christian’s actual body and

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character, and hence, life in the world, as Edwards observes, “if God produces something thus new in a mind, that is a perceiving, thinking, conscious thing; then doubtless something entirely new is felt, or perceived, or thought” (160). Edwards is quick to add that “this new spiritual sense is not a new faculty of understanding, but it is a new foundation laid in the nature of the soul, for a new kind of exercises of the same faculty of understanding. So that new holy disposition of heart that attends this new sense, is not a new faculty of will, but a foundation laid in the nature of the soul, for a new kind of exercises of the same faculty of will” (161).17 When a Christian has the Spirit of God in her, the way she experiences the world is remade because she has been remade—she now engages her environment with a body and mind built to love the Lord and long for charity and joyful fellowship with her neighbors. As is the case with Bersani’s claims about powerlessness (itself an argument for changing the very structure of our cultural values) Edwards argues that such a transformation makes a whole new world available to us. The new mode of life Christian affections produce so thoroughly reorders our experience that the world around us, although the same physically, is brand new, and that experience in turn becomes our project: as Edwards has it, the love we have for God changes our understanding of and interaction with the world, and it also makes us work to realize that love even more fully in our lives and circumstances. As new subjects with new hearts and new critical faculties, how we live and what we live for stands as what we continually try to make manifest in our bodies, actions, thoughts, feelings and experiences—meaning that we lovingly, willingly become God’s creatures. As we approach the end of this book, after its many claims and detours, Edwards’ argument cannot but yet again remind us of our earlier discussion concerning conversion (to say nothing of Calvin’s and Wittgenstein’s spirit); and I want to return to, and build on that theme for a moment because Edwards’ vision of being remade by the Holy Spirit provides a great deal of insight into what it means for readers to surrender to the logic of Lip Service. I have argued that reading Andrews’ poem productively means embracing its textual process that

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equates reading with a form of life: here the act of interpretation inf luences not just what we think, but all aspects of our experience, from what we feel to how we choose to live and make decisions. And in that vein, the claim I put forward at the end of chapter two about conversion points to the way that embracing the textual logic of disjunctive poems like Lip Service depends on readers exchanging their own language for explaining how texts produce meaning for the poetics of the work they are reading (an exchange that alters readers’ understanding of understanding itself, and that happens by way of shock, or sudden insight, not rationalist discourse). But what Edwards makes clear in his discussion of the Holy Spirit (which Bersani echoes in his invocation of mysticism) is that such moments of conversion, moments where we open our hearts to God, essentially relinquishing our authority over our bodies and minds, disappear the line between ourselves and God. Expressed in Lip Service, this ultimate capitulation manifests as the poem’s demand that readers accept it as always prior to themselves. Like the Holy Spirit, the words of Lip Service take up residence in readers as they read them; these words in turn drive readers toward a constant making and remaking of meaning that resembles the Christian’s attempt to make her love of God more and more manifest in the world. Just as Edwards argued that the Christian’s love of God reshapes her life and the world, which then become the business of her life, Lip Service insists that readers give up on the idea that their thoughts and its meaning are different than one another. Where their readerly will tries to depart from the poem, they must surrender that will, letting the poem discipline their thoughts, bringing the meanings readers are attempting to produce back in line with a full acceptance of the poem’s poetics, which is the acceptance of Lip Service’s language use as that which they must always be loyal to and love. The moment of conversion for readers in Lip Service is the moment they accept the terms of its textual strategy and forgo the belief that they have thoughts and emotions other than those demanded by the poem, which is why learning to read the poem well is not simply a process becoming a better reader, or interpreter of difficult texts. With their understanding yielded to Lip Service, readers are then in a position to use their understanding to live in and act on their circumstances, for

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the world they find themselves living in now comes at them perpetually through the poem.18 In his recent essay, “Meaning, Method, Motive,” Bruce Andrews suggests just such a reading of his work when he cites “motive” as a “contextual front” for Language writing.19 Building on the poetics of his early career where he discusses the horizontal (material) and vertical (referential) axes of language, Andrews writes, “method sustains motive; motive propels method” and continues some paragraphs later, “How near to some stripped down, generic [or departicularized] making of potential meaning do we need to get—to show off our texts’ affinity with unconventional structures which allow for a f lowering of a different motive, a more open reader-centered experience?” By suggesting that motive both produces and is reordered by “method,” Andrews puts motive where Edwards has the heart—both are fundamentally tied to how we think and read and act in the world. And Lip Service gets at our motives in the same way Edwards gets to the heart—by practice; what Christian devotion to God’s law is for Edwards, method is for Lip Service. As we’ve already begun to realize, reading attentively in Andrews’ poem, by way of disjunction and association, exposes readers’ most basic, often troubling thoughts and personal, cultural dispositions to them (we see how “motive propels method”). Nonetheless, like Christian practice, reading according to Lip Service’s method has the ability too to restructure those motives: “method sustains motive”; “unconventional structures . . . allow for a f lowering of a different motive.” When readers give their lives to Lip Service, they are, in a way reminiscent of Edwards’ Christians, allowing the poem, like the Bible, to mediate the constant, indistinguishable back and forth between their hearts and actions. They are committing themselves to finding their lives always inside the poem, and to presently making their actions a material extension of the poem into the social order that surrounds them. Reminding us of poetry’s useful lack of practical power, Lip Service’s dependence on conversion to advance itself and make its new world available to readers attunes us to the reality of Language writing’s passive, poetic praxis: if Edwards depicts God waiting for people to

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embrace him so he can help transform their hearts, Lip Service keeps putting itself in readers’ way, offering itself up to readers as the experience or stumbling block they need to jar their understanding. If the shock of producing meaning inside a radically disruptive text is strong enough, if the experience of reading a poem like Lip Service is intellectually and emotionally intense enough to turn readers aside, toward the poetics of Language writing, then readers find that they have already chosen its textual discipline, which is the reason I argued before that no logical argument convinces the convert to Language writing of her new belief. My own first encounter with Language writing is a small testament to such a fact. Standing outside my professor’s door in the Fall of 1996, reading Andrews’ Getting Ready To Have Been Frightened, and his essay “Poetry as Explanation, Poetry as Praxis,” I realized, all at once, that how we read and make meaning determines what meanings get made, and at that point, suddenly, the whole world changed. It was, as Edwards writes, like being given “eyes to see, and ears to hear.”20 I cannot, then, make clear how a conversion to Lip Service, or Language writing broadly, occurs (or does not occur) for each different person, but I can, I hope usefully, show how Lip Service puts itself in a reader’s way, primarily mine. I want to undertake a close reading of a single passage and detail how that reading, when it loves the words of Lip Service, remakes itself, always trying to bring itself in line with the poem’s desires for its readers. Such a reading will, I trust, demonstrate how embracing epistemological powerlessness and accepting the discipline of the poem moves readers toward the new mode of life Lip Service wants for them, where their physical lives become extensions of their textual lives, and acting in the world is the materialization of Lip Service’s radical politics and poetics.21 I will begin with the larger passage around the “lambskin” lines from “Saturn 6” that I quoted before, which is as follows:22 cervically correct cuckold this sleeve perpetrator dressed as a trap do as I false. There’s romance in a zipper, reaching for that little

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membrane of lambskin—de-heinous denunciamento clings to clitoridean penalty dissolves co-fecund craving cleft bliss bare wax won horror only intoxicates zest & languish denim orality: abject adore harder bedroom[.]23 In the absence of an obvious narrative thrust, the oral texture of these lines make readers’ initial encounter with the words largely an encounter with their linguistic texture. The heavy alliteration in “cervically correct / cuckold,” the hard-hitting c sound of which is repeated in “clings,” “clitoridean,” “co-fecund craving cleft,” added to the sound density created by the relative scarcity of articles and the preponderance of near-nonsense words like “clitoridean,” permit readers to chew on the poem’s rhythms and feel the pleasure of their metrical density without at first worrying about what the words combine to say (274). But as readers continue to revel in the words they find those words beginning to exert themselves; to keep away from the ways the poem signifies, readers would need to persistently skim the poem, not lingering over any one particular passage. I would guess that most readers, like myself, move back and forth between reading quickly through a passage (absorbing the poem’s sound quality) and giving particular lines more careful attention, which is often necessitated by especially dense language—passages that make us pause for the sake of pronunciation, an extra breath, or to follow the grammar. In the pauses readers take to get Lip Service’s next mouthful of words in, each reading begins to become a close reading—as readers hesitate, the words begin to signify as our minds leap at their referentiality, and without a story to follow, each moment of understanding occurs as an attempt at organizing the poem’s now suggestive language. As I pause to get this passage’s words straight, the erotic vocabulary begins to appear genuinely romantic, genuinely interested in the productive possibilities of bodies losing themselves in each other. The stress on verbs like “clings,” “dissolves,” “craving,” “intoxicates,” “languish,” and the sound play of “penal” (sounds like penile) in “clitoridean

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Reading as Belief

penalty” give rise to the idea of the primary nouns in the passage breaking down and becoming something else (274). Or, following the initial dash, the verbs might point to our imagined couple with the condom in the midst of intercourse. Within the clause itself, the action of these verbs could also just as easily modify nouns like “clitoridean penalty” or “denim orality” (274). And in the absence of clear subjects, the verbs “clings,” “dissolves,” “craving,” and “intoxicates” invoke the thought of being wonderfully and usefully overwhelmed as much as they refer to a possible couple or to the lines’ more abstract phrases, and the language of surrender in the passage begins to look as if it applies equally to readers’ experience of these lines and Lip Service itself (274). Be that as it may, just as I finish this optimistic assertion, it occurs to me that my reading does not go far enough; the possible emotional isolation of depersonalized sexual encounters hangs on these words. Reading only the erotic tenor of submission does not take notice of the more strained, troubled undertones of the passage: “penalty,” “cleft,” and “languish” do not hint at joining or productive powerlessness (274). The orgasm I intended to associate with “intoxicates zest,” with its joy in an altered state of consciousness, is reached “only” by “horror” (274). Or, preceding “& languish denim orality,” the same line (“horror only intoxicates zest”) also appears to call up a dread that makes drunk the excitement of desire; whatever pleasure is reached diminishes as “orality”—be it oral sex or intimate conversation—“languishes” (274). And even though “Fecund,” taken alongside “co” and “craving,” brings to mind the possibility of jointly beneficial couplings, any hope for mutual creation is “dissolved” by the “clitoridean penalty” of the previous line (274). With its pseudo-Italianization of the word “denunciate” combined with the word “de-heinous,” the phrase “de-heinous denunciamento” suggests that the fetishized condom makes accusation not gross (274). In the context of a sexual encounter, the “accusation” would seem to be the body with which the about-to-be-penetrated partner confronts his or her lover, a body that the lover finds disgusting and does not want to touch without protection. Nor does a great deal of useful surrender appear in the lines “cervically correct / cuckold this sleeve perpetrator dressed as a trap / do as I false”

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and “abject adore harder bedroom” (274). The colon preceding “abject adore harder bedroom” makes the line’s hopeless love, tied as it is to the difficult sexual encounters of a “harder bedroom,” a possible attribute of the languishing lover horrified by his partner’s body (274). Or, if the colon calls attention to what terrifies the lover, the hopeless love of these lines might rather belong to a female lover (the owner of the already mentioned clitoris) who endures the violence of her lover’s retreat. Although changing who experiences love’s failure most especially does not displace the desolate tone of the passage—regardless of who suffers more, the collapse of their love remains a consequences of the condom-wheeler’s revulsion in their “bedroom” (274). Eight lines before, the predatory language of “perpetrator dressed like a trap” mixed with the shame of the “cuckold,” goes even further toward portraying a grim domestic space where sexually injury abounds (274). Is a “cervically correct” cuckold a wronged, politically correct husband (274)? Is he also, even if wronged, a “perpetrator,” his politics in fact a “trap”? his “sleeve” a disguise, or something to keep a trick up (274)? How do we read the “I” of “do as I false”? The wronged husband (274)? The wronged husband who, with his liberal politics, still becomes the masculine, fear-driven misogynist that emerges in the next few lines? Is this “I” possibly the women doing the cuckolding? If so, is cheating on a bastard like him so wrong? Still, even as these questions and the various answers I begin to provide in response to them start to fill out my reading of this passage, I also see how the fear and violence emerging in the troubled sexual dynamics of the poem remain sexy. It is not difficult, it seems necessary in fact, to read the aggression of the “perpetrator” as titillating. In the lines following the description of how the man dresses “as a trap” we get the “romance” of a zipper and the “membrane of lambskin,” the latter apparently suggesting volition on the part of both parties as they pause to get the condom in position (274). In the midst of “horrors” and “penalties,” the phrase “clings to clitoridean” still imagines clinging to a clitoris (274). We have, too, the “craving” of a “cleft” in the following line, and the climatic words “bliss” and “intoxicates” (274). In repeatedly turning back to the poem, lovingly attending to the difficulty of its textual body, readers begin to submit to Lip Service’s

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discipline when they create increasingly complicated conceptions of what it means to be a sexual agent. Rather than let readers do what they will with its erotic material, the poem asks them to consider how violence is erotic and how powerlessness is exhilarating. An attentive reading of Lip Service’s notion of sexual agency acknowledges the poem’s proposition that fear and at least the hint of violence can cause damage or lead to profound moments of intimacy and desire. It accounts as well for the equally relevant possibility that intimacy cohabits with emotional and physical harm. Moving readers though such an array of positions allows Lip Service to place immense pressure on what readers do with its words, arguing that it makes a big difference what associative connections they forge.24 If in my former reading of “I’ll talk to you just as long /as you’re fucking me” I took the lines as erotic as well as unproblematic, reminding me as it does of my own relationship to whiny and needy women, my connection affirms my hatred and I am worse off than when I started, as is the world (114). But, as I hope my reading demonstrates, I don’t think reading the poem as corroborating my chauvinism handles its language use particularly well.25 Lip Service does not, in other words, rely on a reader’s morality to find what is distasteful in the poem actually distasteful, what it would take if readers actually authored the poem. Lip Service instead confronts readers with the necessary public nature of the poem’s language use: “cuckold” invokes shame and betrayal, and “horror” suggests fear and violence, not because these words have necessary meanings, but because they perform cultural functions and take part in a social order, as well as any particular, personal contexts in a reader’s past. Stripped of narrative in the present, the words of Lip Service assault readers with these public as well as private associations, pressing readers into executing strained and knotty interpretations; the sexually violent and thrilling language in Lip Service has significance before readers arrive on the scene—our linguistic contexts load “cuckold,” “perpetrator,” “zipper,” “membrane of lambskin,” “cleft,” and “bliss” with a range of sexual and moral overtones (274). Readers who come to these words must include what is brutal, repugnant, and erotic about them in whatever meanings they make, and they cannot, as I tried at first, to exclude

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what ill suits the interpretation they wish to advance.26 If readers love the poem, they must attend carefully to its language use, regularly traveling down interpretative paths they would prefer to avoid. It is by way of the social character of language that Lip Service puts itself in the way of readers—if they disregard the demands the poem places on their language use, then the poem falls silent. If, however, readers begin to trip over the poem, and begin to recognize the claims Lip Service makes on their words and bodies, then readers enter into the fundamentally different reading experience that I’ve tried to outline in this chapter: in contrast to the drift of secular thought, accepting the thinking that accompanies such reading depends on the belief that man is not the measure of all things—Lip Service is, at least for the poem’s readers. Andrews’ poem grants readers their ideas in response to itself, demonstrating the fundamental fact that we think only within the terms a given text provides. In this respect, Lip Service’s view of itself is not far off from Terrence Deacon’s description of language as a behavioral adaptation that our ancestors acquired, an adaptation that then determined the development of our brains. Deacon’s insight is that the human brain and language coevolved: our ability to employ symbolic reference shaped our brains to use language more fully, and to develop more complex language systems: language occupied the human species, fundamentally altering and determining its evolution. And to live in language is to inhabit an entirely different world than other animals do—ours is a world of symbols, abstract thoughts, and narratives; “Mentally,” Deacon writes, “we are a new phylum of organisms.”27 It does not diminish the mystery of God (or language for that matter) to say that God works in a similar way—God too, as Edwards argues, works on people from the inside out once they accept God as prior to all things, and therefore worthy of devotion. And Lip Service, echoing Edwards, and Deacon, recognizes itself as a particular embodiment of the linguistic reality that precedes readers, that gets inside them when they start to read, and itself grows and adapts. Forcing readers to reconsider each possible meaning they arrive at, or pushing them into specific complicated ways of thinking about its main topics (or sets of vocabulary), like sexual agency or radical politics, Andrews’ poem

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Reading as Belief

moves readers into their environments as its own children: the thoughts in their heads, the emotions and physical sensations they feel, all gained by reading, locate readers in time and place, and propels them forward, often in ways beyond their control. Accepting the discipline of reading in this manner marks us as belonging to the poem, at least for the duration of our reading, and perhaps longer, too, if the book sticks in readers’ heads, as Lip Service certainly has for me.28 In his argument for a “hermeneutics of love” Alan Jacobs describes clearly an approach to reading that would-be interpreters of Lip Service would do well to assume; he depicts reading as “Loving contemplation” that “neither circumscribes a work within rigid boundaries, ignoring all elements of the work that cannot be assimilated to a presupposed theoretical schema, nor does it enumerate a mere chaos of details.”29 Referencing Martha Nussbaum’s Love’s Knowledge, Jacobs argues that a reader’s affection for a literary work enables interpretation. Contemplating a work lovingly, a reader regards its unique particulars, not in the adversarial manner of much literary criticism, but with a generous interest in what a literary work does with its figures of speech, narratives, language use, and philosophical frameworks. Building on Bakhtin’s concern for answerable deeds, Jacobs describes the charitable relationship readers may have with their books in terms of Christ’s injunction to love our neighbors as ourselves: “if we consider that we owe a debt of loving and constant attentiveness (of faithfulness) to all the books we read—whether they be friends, foes, or neighbors—we provide for ourselves what Bonhoeffer calls the cantus firmus, the ground over which variations can be elaborated and developed” (67). By “variations” Jacobs means the “products of discernment” that come from attending to something with care and compassion (67). Given the trajectory of my argument so far, I only want to supplement Jacobs’ otherwise remarkable poetics with a concern for the mystical and erotic force that reading a literary work lovingly entails. There is in generous reading a love that is not polite, although no less intimate. There is a measure of the grotesque, the terrifying, and the ecstatic in our love of particular books and people because meaning is persistently excessive; we reread treasured and founding texts precisely

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because we cannot exhaust them.30 If my argument demonstrates anything it is that meaning and understanding are hardly in danger in texts like Lip Service, despite what their critics might claim. The practical problem of interpretation is instead the proliferation of possible meanings—understanding in Lip Service appears vibrant and expansive like a colony of ants. It’s gross to see such a seemingly limitless swarm of minute discernments, even if we profit from standing in its midst rather than f leeing from it. Readers so inclined f ling themselves into Lip Service like mystics f ling themselves into God and lovers f ling their bodies into one another. When taken not as a quality in need of control, but as that which gives us material to shape knowledge, meaning’s excessiveness in Andrews’ poem allows readers to feel thrilled and overwhelmed as they use the poem’s own body to cut away at it and themselves to make the poem visible, to let it speak—and it is the glut of meaning that permits readers to hear the poem demand new cuts for itself, and for readers, over and over again, as, I hope, we no longer doubt. In the conversation surrounding Andrews’ poetry and Language writing more generally, much has been made of the pleasures of the text, and I do not mean to discount the genuine delight available in the material texture of language, as I trust the previous paragraph indicates. Even so, we must recognize now that remaining in the easy amusement of immediate connection and linguistic play runs the risk of too easily glossing over the larger philosophical demands of innovative poetry and the requirements of our words as they are found in particular poems. The connections I make when reading, the meanings I arrive at, are particular to me because it took my responses to accomplish them, but they are not my own. When I assert a reading, I have, at most, made clear my affiliations and alliances and defined myself for that instant, but these claims do not belong to me insofar as they situate me as a social, linguistic creature, one whose words and body become the material for another’s reading. Only painful readings, ones that give themselves over to other readers and the texts at hand, have a chance to approach what Andrews calls “paradise” (“a total repertoire of possibilities”), or, remembering Perelman’s reading, move closer to

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Reading as Belief

“an Other or an Outside which is both a ‘not us’ and a ‘not yet.’ ”31 If I may shadow the moralist, I want to call Lip Service’s hope for paradise the expectation of a true reading: one adjusted to the difficulty of the world as we find it always again in interpretation. Where the liberal subject demands autonomy and freedom, the reader of Lip Service discovers an obligation to the irregularities of reading. The pleasure of our duty to read Lip Service well is the joy of thoughtfully considering what is more essential in the world than ourselves, which is almost everything—what we believe at the moment, the words on the pages before us as well as on the lips around us, and the demands they would all have us fulfill.

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EIGH T

Reading Alone

In the end faithful reading escapes technical prescription, which should not astonish us given the authors who have attuned us to it. Perhaps the simplest description of faithful interpretation is relentless close reading and the willingness to go where it leads you, even when you are more comfortable (intellectually, politically, or artistically) where you are—like Abraham. But that is hardly a satisfying conclusion, and I think, looking back at our attempt to hold the two preceding chapters together, we can see a better last formulation of what it means to understanding reading as an act of belief: when we balance Edwards’ active reading with Andrews’ textual discipline we recognize that both authors, while pushing from different angles, require readers to remain in pursuit of themselves.1 To read in belief is to awaken to the fact that our ethical, readerly selves are made available to us as the selves we persistently write and talk toward. It will come as no surprise that I imagine the best way to make this idea available is to reach, one last time, to the models provided by religious practice, for to be in pursuit of oneself is to be pulled back to decidedly Christian and Jewish notions of agency. Let me turn, first, to the latter: responding to the Talmud’s commentary on the Israelite spies who return from their exploration of Canaan afraid of its inhabitants, Emmanuel Levinas, in “Promised Land or Permitted Land,” focuses on the relationship the Israelites have

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the date of their exile is fixed before that of their conquest. They do not know that their crisis is the source of their right, for there is no right that cannot be revoked. They assume a responsibility without indulgence and are summoned to pay for their own injustice with their exile. Only those who are always ready to accept the consequences of their actions and to accept exile when they are no longer worthy of a homeland have the right to enter this homeland—You see, this country is extraordinary. It is like Heaven. It is a country which vomits up its inhabitants when they are not just. There is no other country like it; the resolution to accept a country under such conditions confers a right to that country.2 The Talmud, or considering the ongoing work of thinkers like Levinas, what we might call the tradition of Jewish thought, relies more on the deferral of answers for its answers than it does on finely tuned Greek logic. For my purpose, I want to highlight this tendency toward digression and postponement—a tendency embedded, as Levinas points out, in Israel’s founding as exile—as one moment of connection between Calvinism, Jewish hermeneutics, and innovative poetry. Repeatedly the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud refuse the possibility that ownership or knowledge is natural. In Scripture the Promised Land is regularly referred to as the land of the Canaanites, Hittites, and Amorites, even after Israel takes control of it, and often God is the one talking about it that way. Then there is the Babylon exile, after which most of the Pentateuch is written down as a record of the oral tradition of Israel, making much of the text self-consciously directed toward the exile to come. And as Levinas demonstrates, Israel’s disobedience occurs before they take the land, and so their exile from it precedes their occupation. The overwhelming force of knowing that their land is not securely or naturally their own makes the Israelites a people in exile even when they are at home, exiles from their land and from themselves. The Israelites and the land they inhabit are defined by what they potentially

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with their land that is not theirs yet. With their refusal to take possession of Canaan, Levinas argues,

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might not be (rulers, God’s obedient people) and what they might not possess (Israel, a homeland). Israel’s relationship with its God and with other people is similar. Judaism’s constant regard for the other and for God, who is often figured as the Other, begins with the recognition that one’s own understanding is lacking; accounting for the foreigner, for God, for oneself becomes the work of reading—in the guise of the law, its commentary, and worship. Broadly speaking, Jewishness is as much a particular way of relating to oneself, a certain way of beginning to read, as it is a nationality or an ethnicity. The Talmud itself powerfully ref lects this manner of reading in exile. Its arguments over “the right to eat or not to eat ‘an egg hatched on a holy day,’ ” and other similar controversies, suggest an overwhelming conviction that the Bible’s meaning is not fixed before interpretation begins (4). Similarly, not knowing who they are as a nation, beginning from exile, is the condition of Israel’s getting to know itself, of becoming a people. And as Levinas shows us in his reading of Israel as gaining the right to enter the Promised Land after they accept exile and their own unworthiness of a homeland, the authority to interpret one’s self and one’s land emerges only after their idiosyncrasy is recognized. In Calvin’s hands the Reformation is in many respects a return to a Jewish form of agency and attention; as we’ve seen, Calvin recalls Christianity to a founding metaphor of exile through his sense that we cannot reside with God on our own, or his, initial terms. Calvin’s insistence that we need God’s grace, and that we receive it through the crucifixion of Jesus, effectively exiles Christians from the world understood as a stable, linearly organized, and natural place; Christian life is defined by its inability to match up with the world as it is defined by the law, God’s good creation. And if the Messiah has already come, for all intents and purposes ending history, everything else becomes an extended afterward. People’s lives depend on what has happened already, not on what is to come next. God’s grace pushes Christians away from organizing their understanding and experience through an orderly, comprehensible, and logical system. Here the teleology of Christianity undoes itself, and I would add, intentionally so. The exile of the Christian life is an expression of its

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Reading Alone

Reading as Belief

otherworldliness, although, as both Calvin and Edwards maintained, not in the sense of being removed from the present world. Heaven in Christianity is the sign that determines how people should live now while they wait for Christ’s return. The Gospels and Paul’s epistles all direct Christians to love like Jesus loved, an impossible and unrewarding task unless a person understands himself as redeemed from his wretchedness by the love of God—a Christian can only live in this world, trying to love as he should, from the perspective of heaven. Heaven keeps focusing Christians’ attention on the current world, historically over or otherwise, not as their own, but as their burden. In exile from the world as God would have it (by way of his law or by way of heaven) while in this world, Christians remain sinful even though they are not trapped by sin. The task of the Christian in exile is to realize the already redeemed world as well as their own redeemed lives, each of which already came in the crucifixion of Jesus. Although Christians are already saved, they are not removed from the condition they need saving from. Although history has already ended, they must continue to live in it. Christians have to believe in and occupy a redeemed world and their redeemed bodies in order to achieve them both. Effectively, time is out of joint for Christians in the Reformed tradition, just as it is for Jews, and it is the loss of personal and environmental congruity that defines the agency of each. In “Beginning at the Beginning in Genesis,” Kenneth Dauber describes how Judaism takes Genesis less as a story of origin than as a recognition of limitations. He writes, “you must, indeed, begin somewhere. But that is because somewhere is where you are, a somewhere, as we should say, not therefore anterior to you but the very where, as Genesis enjoins, that, to become your beginning, you must make begin.”3 Like a Messiah who has already come and changed nothing and everything, a Genesis that is less a start than a starting off focuses people’s attention on where they are, but as a place that must be interpreted if it is to materialize. Israel’s arrival at the Promised Land is another such beginning. And recognizing a beginning as a beginning creates it as a subject, which creates a space between it and oneself. The space between Israel and the Promised Land is the space of ethics in Judaism. Following

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closely behind, exiled from history, Christians in the Reformed tradition experience a gap between themselves and the world, and between themselves and their own bodies; this space gives these Christians a way of proceeding toward God by remaining in the world. A Reformed Christian’s goal is always to become oneself, and oneself is always a righteous self, exemplified, as we just saw, most perfectly by Christ; the pursuit of this Christ-like self, a self that Christians will have eventually in heaven, is the ethics of Calvinism. The space created in exile from history and from one’s longed for self defines the self by what it hopes to be, and the space between the self one has now and the self one lives toward gives Reformed Christians a way to become material to themselves. The hope to become oneself also gives the power to interpret the Christian body over to whoever happens to be nearby. When a Christian in the line of Calvin does not act like a Christian he provides you with the means to critique him by the harsh standard he judges himself by—he is not Jesus. And the Calvinist Christian must not stop reading himself by this measure if he aims to be who he claims he is. Consequently these Christians’ inability to be exactly themselves, like a word’s inability to be exactly itself, makes them comprehensible. Once Israel’s exile and Calvin’s insistence on our need for grace locate us in the space between our selves, and between our words and our cultural realities, what is left to us is to draw them continually closer together. Attending to the selves we find ourselves as, and the selves we mean, or hope to be, and sorting through the complexities of their cultural and political situations, and the demands our many selves make on and receive from the people and environments around them, is the challenge and circumstance of interpretation. The more insistently we read these selves, others, and social realities the more insistently our lives and our words pursue themselves and each other, and the more they all become themselves—good reading authors more useful readings still. Reading one another, our own several lives, and the spaces between them all closely, or to ever close what divides them, is what will allow us as well to stabilize ourselves as social, political, and spiritual subjects still awake to the fundamental unsteadiness of our identity. Which is something like what I think Kenneth Dauber

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Reading Alone

Reading as Belief

means by “beginning”; which is something like what I imagine Bruce Andrews means by Paradise; which is something like what I take Jonathan Edwards to name in his thinking about love; which is something like what I judge Charles Bernstein means by poetics or a poem; which is something like what I trust John Calvin means by faith. All of which is to suggest that each time we read a book we place our hearts on reading—we act in faith, thinking that a certain literary work will provide us with an emotional, philosophical, or even a distracting experience, just as to pray is to have faith that God is there, just like leaning in to kiss somebody is to have faith he or she will kiss you back. Or, to put a finer edge on our situation, when we read we make it possible to feel, have an idea, or be distracted. When we pray we make it possible for God to be present to us. When we lean in to kiss somebody we make it possible to be kissed. We might very well not understand the book, hear God, or get kissed, but believing that we will helps create the opportunity for these moments of connection to occur. Only by way of faith is understanding in a disjunctive world available. What meaning occurs in our words is grace bestowed on them by our books, friends, or God in the midst of our own linguistic incongruity. Just as for Calvin it takes our faith to find justification before a God we failed from the beginning, it takes “the habit of faith,” our belief, in this case that our words will cohere, for them to do so.4 And it is this belief that I am calling reading. You could say we are justified by reading alone.

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A Note for the Notes: In addition to placing many of the more complex considerations of the work I’m discussing in these notes, I have, on occasion, included the ghosts of former drafts—arguments that eventually fell away, or more expansive, additional close readings and commentaries that did not make it into the final version of the present study. I chose to leave behind a small percentage of these critical remnants because I have tried, throughout this book, to undertake the kind of writing and thinking I am arguing for in the body of the text. Which is to say, I want to mark this book as a work of poetics, and as a literary project that does what it is talking about. In the present case, that meant, in part, giving evidence of where my thinking took a wrong turn, spun its wheels, butted up against itself, digressed, or emerged from. But not to worry, in consideration of the reader, I have left in only what I hope are the most useful and interesting examples of these stages of the writing process.

One

“No One to Drive the Car”

1. Because I am sure somebody will point out that those poets associated with Language writing and other innovative poetries don’t exactly have a record of being embarrassed about their poetic commitments, I think I should say that I use embarrassment here to reference a philosophical dilemma, one that people mainly have with themselves: I want to point to the self-consciousness of people who feel a conviction strongly, but who also believe in that ambiguous public virtue variously named tolerance, progressivism, or accepting difference. A psychological and intellectual tension occurs when these tendencies occupy the same mind, and naturally people can react to it in any number of ways, be it aggressively or modestly. I do not want to venture into the territory of pop psychology so much as include the emotional and mental components of our particular philosophical difficulties in our discussions of those difficulties, and I think the word embarrassment helps us do so. This word is useful, too, because it also makes room for the strained ambivalence many younger poets feel about naming a poetics, which appears in some respects to be a reaction to the robustly held aesthetic convictions of the previous generations;

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NOT E S

Notes

such hesitancy looks to me as well like a form of embarrassment, a resistance to not looking at oneself through the eyes of others. My generation’s move to embrace multiple aesthetics, seen most clearly in the popularity of magazines like Fence, resembles the pluralism liberals employ to keep from the embarrassing move of taking up a position. What joins these generations, and what the word embarrassment allows us to name, is the problem believers of any stripe face when they become explicitly concerned with and aware of the philosophical structure of belief, even as they try to hold onto what they know to be true. 2. Marjorie Perloff has, in a number of studies, discussed this belief about method’s compositional force by linking Language writing to the historical avant-garde and its affirmation of the aesthetic realm’s predominance; recently she has specifically argued that Language writing remains a powerful, living project for the very reason that it continues to develop the textual radicalism of the early twentieth century (21st-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics [Oxford, UK: Blackwell , 2002]). To grasp the full measure of her argument, we must recall that elsewhere Perloff describes how the latter occurred in a “ ‘Futurist moment,’ ” an “ ‘arena of agitation,’ as [Renato] Poggioli calls it,” that f lourished brief ly around the first World War, and “produced a short-lived but remarkable rapprochement between avantgarde aesthetic, radical politics, and popular culture” (The Futurist Moment: AvantGarde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986, xvii). “[H]ere” she continues later “is a program that points the way to our own urge to break down the boundaries between ‘world’ and ‘text,’ between the reality out there and the art construct that re-presents it” (xvii). Language writing’s “politics of poetic form,” in keeping with the artistic endeavors of the futurist moment, draws revolutionary politics, cultural critique, and innovative aesthetics back together, and when discussing Language writing we must not lose sight of this grounding system of belief. In the preface to The Politics of Poetic Form, Charles Bernstein writes, “The particular focus of this collection is on the ways that the formal dynamics of a poem shape its ideology; more specifically, how radically innovative poetic styles can have political meanings” (Preface to The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy, ed. Charles Bernstein [New York: Roof, 1990], vii). The belief that poetic “styles” have “political meanings” reveals a profoundly aesthetic sensibility; unavailable in this mindset is any vision of social and political realities that do not follow from specific ways of writing, or procedures of representation (vii). Ron Silliman’s early essay “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World,” for example, argues that the rise of capitalism went hand in hand with the development of artistic modes (like the novel) that erased the materiality of language—as a consequence, the cultural values of capitalist social orders began to appear natural (in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, ed. Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein [Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984]). Writing of Futurism, but in words that could just as easily describe Language writing, Andrew Hewitt points out that this “supposed fusion of life and art” means that “it is no longer a question . . . of art compensating for life, but rather of art offering another way of living life” (Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics, and

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the Avant-Garde [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993], 137). A profound “aestheticization” is “not simply a subjugation of political discourse to the discourse of aesthetics, it entails the subjugation of all value to the dictates of a central organizing metaphor” (137). As is now clear, when it comes to Language writing, the organizing metaphor is not a metaphor per se, but its commitment to aesthetics, its belief about how language works. Because reading Language writing and innovative poetry as a practice of faith highlights this unwavering instance that method determines meaning, then looking for the poetic and intellectual implications of such an account demands that we follow out, as far as we can, the consequences of holding aesthetics as constitutive. To give readers an initial sense of why approaching Language writing as a mode of belief about aesthetics is important, I want to remind readers that Language writing’s modernism speaks as well to its fundamentally romantic sensibility. And its modernist attempt to unite aesthetics and politics is in many respects the continuation of the romantic, or Emersonian, or later Wittgensteinian, project of joining aesthetics and ethics. One of the best recent discussions of this somewhat surprising tradition is Richard Deming’s Listening on All Sides. He writes: “In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein writes, ‘Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.’ In that sense we see what, among other things, motivates Wordsworth, as he claims in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads, to ‘imitate, and . . . adopt the very language of men.’ Wordsworth’s commitment is to ‘make use’ of the language of the everyday, rather than a poetic diction, as that is where and how relations among people are formed. The emphasis of ‘a man speaking to men’ foregrounds language as a network of relations rather than as a vehicle for communication. To want to be part of the text of the everyday is to invest in the tribulations of circulating within a community of language users and to offer a means of perspective by aetheticizing that speech. However, it is more accurate to contend that lyric poetry simply changes perspectives and thereby illuminates the aesthetics of the ordinary use of language” (Listening on All Sides: Toward and Emersonian Ethics of Reading [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007], 23). 3. Not surprisingly, the criticisms poets and scholars committed to more familiar poetic modes level at those partial to Language writing sound a good deal like the kind aimed at the religious faithful: they’re intolerant; they don’t make any sense; they are exclusive. A good example of such lines of attack came a number of years ago by way of Joan Houlihan in her review of The Best American Poetry 2004 edited by Lyn Hejinian. In her review Houlihan appears amazingly to dismiss, with only the barest qualification, nearly two millennia of Catholic history (with all its complexities, triumphs, as well as shortcomings) and innovative poetry all at once, writing that, “Catholicism found a way to inf luence millions with a language no one spoke or understood by using other means, distractions both beautiful and bestial. And, as Luther found out, criticizing such an organization led to some nasty reactions. Perhaps there is a parallel, cult-like aura of inviolability protecting this new writing from critical inquiry: such writing, which verges on a kind of liturgy, comes with its own form of worship and its own tenets of faith. True believers do not question its methods; they accept its sacramental texts as the

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Notes

4. 5.

6.

7.

Notes

Word. In neither case is readability or critical inquiry at issue. Like artifacts of automatic writing, these liturgical offerings are akin to divine revelation—believe in it or don’t, but do not examine, question, or evaluate it. The church of new writing has established what every church needs: their articles of faith. They call theirs ‘poems’ ” (“The Best American Liturgy: How Contemporary American Poets Are Denaturing the Poem, Part IX,” http://www.bostoncomment.com/ bostonc9.htm). The idea that Language writing and innovative poetry attempt to be immune from critical inquiry makes little sense, of course, given the amount of critical writing on this body of work, much of which comes from the very poets who produce it. Joan Didion, “Slouching toward Bethlehem,” in Slouching toward Bethlehem (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981), 95. Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 3–4. First made explicit in her books Manhood and Politics (1988) and States of Injury (1995), Brown’s larger project joins a wider attempt within political theory to forge a leftist politics without liberalism. (As Brown points out though, the problem of learning to live with the knowledge of our constructed, cultural bodies is significantly different from the problem of still denying the epistemological critiques of the twentieth century. For Brown’s discussion of how moralism leads people to refuse the loss of teleology and continue to insist on the universal narratives of modernity see chapter two, “Moralism as Anti-Politics,” in Politics Out of History.) While she does not consider herself part of the ongoing project of radical democracy—or post-Marxist thought as understood in relation to the work of writers like William Connolly, Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe—she does, like them, build from the critical discourse around Marx and Foucault with the hope of theorizing a progressive politics on a foundation other than the universal liberal-humanist subject. For all of these writers, liberal subjectivity leads to a conception of the self based on its isolation and self-interest, and therefore it also leads to either abusive or self-destructive power relations. For an informed reading of what the debates around Radical Democracy look like, see Samuel Chambers, “Giving Up (on) Rights? The Future of Rights and the Project of Radical Democracy,” American Journal of Political Science 48, no. 2 (2004): 185–200. François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). I should make clear that while I refer to innovative poetry only occasionally, my account of Language writing turns largely on the aspect of its method that joins it to the larger practice of innovative writing. I do not want to attempt a study too large in scope, but I do think my reading of Language writing has implications for the larger tradition of innovative poetry because innovative poetry, broadly conceived, and Language writing share a poetics. To open that avenue of thought, I aim through my occasional reference to the innovative tradition to blur, somewhat, the line between Language writing and its forebears

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and contemporaries. But to be clear, when I invoke innovative poetry, the tradition I have in mind, following the critical and artistic custom, includes radical and high Modernism, the “Objectivists,” the various poets published in Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry, the associated body of work organized around the phrase “Language writing,” and the recent work of younger poets (in North America, and beyond its boarders) who follow in these modes. And these poetries, of course, as most readers know, in turn look back to Whitman, Dickinson, and Emerson, to name only the major American predecessors. 8. I do not want to minimize the importance of historical accounts of Language writing, for my own work could not have developed without them. I am particularly indebted to Bob Perelman’s The Marginalization of Poetry, Marjorie Perloff ’s 21st-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics, Jed Rasula’s This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry, Peter Quartermain’s Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe, George Hartley’s Textual Politics and the Language Poets, and Barrett Watten’s The Constructivist Moment, to name only a few. 9. Bob Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 25. 10. William Connolly, Why I am not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 163. 11. Williams Carlos Williams, Spring and All, in Imaginations, ed. Webster Schott (New York: New Directions, 1971), 150, 120. 12. In poems and a number of essays, Lazer connects his own project to a larger strain within the tradition of innovative writing, and suggests, at one point, that “the evidence for a growing interest and accomplishment of new poetry of ‘spirit’ is considerable” (“Returns: Innovative Poetry and Questions of ‘Spirit,’ ” in Lyric & Spirit: Selected Essays, 1996–2008 [Richmond: Omnidawn, 2008], 210). He cites, for instance, a list of poets as wide ranging as Robert Duncan, H.D., Ronald Johnson, Jerome Rothenberg, Armand Schwerner, George Oppen, Norman Fischer, C.D. Wright Norman Finkelstein, Susan Howe, Allen Ginsberg John Taggart, and Philip Whalen. 13. Lazer, “Returns,” in Lyric & Spirit, 238. 14. Stephen Fredman, “Mysticism: Neo-paganism, Buddhism, and Christianity,” in A Concise Companion to Twentieth-century American Poetry, ed. Stephen Fredman (Malden: Blackwell, 2005), 192. 15. Williams, Spring and All, in Imaginations, 89.

Two

A Brief History of Language Writing

1. Marjorie Perloff, “Language Poetry and the Lyric Subject: Ron Silliman’s Albany, Susan Howe’s Buffalo,” in Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 129. 2. Perelman, Marginalization, 31.

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Notes

Notes

3. Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, “Repossessing the Word,” in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, ed. Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), ix. 4. Marjorie Perloff, “After Language Poetry: Innovation and Its Theoretical Discontents,” in Differentials, 162. 5. By liberalism I mean, if it is not already apparent, to refer specifically to liberal subjectivity. Wendy Brown argues that liberal democracy (understood as pluralism in particular, and established for the people and in the name of the private citizen), separates people and groups off into exclusive spheres where the ideological rhetoric of their equality hides their actual differences. The thinking goes, because we are all individuals, we all deserve the same rights and protections. Theoretically, the liberal state maintains the borders between people in order to protect their universal personhood. In practice, politics in the liberal state becomes a matter of individual groups exerting power against each other in the name of universal personhood (think of the rhetoric of states’ rights during the Civil War and again during the Civil Rights movement, as well as the push back in the latter by way of personal and collective rights), a dynamic that leads to the domination of some groups by others. In States of Injury, Brown argues that the political arrangement of the liberal state, focused as it is on the civil rights of individuals and groups, forces so-called oppressed peoples to construct themselves in reaction to dominant cultural forces. The identity and worthiness of marginalized groups as political subjects depends on their demonstrating the severity of their hurt—to possess political agency they must perform their cultural wounds over and over again. These groups, as they articulate their identity in terms of rights, codify the “modalities of subordination or exclusion” that produce their social injury (States of Injury [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995], 12). The coherent “self ” of liberal democracy, the self that fuelled 1960s radicalism, leads, in Brown’s reading, to a necessary philosophical stalemate, one we cannot escape until we find alternative notions of the human subject and her place in the political landscape. Alasdair MacIntyre makes plain that the “individual,” as liberalism shaped it, emerged from the particular historical path liberal philosophy followed, and in this sense we can trace the collective reasoning that brought us to our current predicament. In MacIntyre’s reading, liberalism began “as an appeal to alleged principles of shared rationality against what was felt to be the tyranny of tradition,” but in the course of its development liberalism “transformed into a tradition whose continuities are partly defined by the interminability of the debate over such principles. An interminability which was from the standpoint of an earlier liberalism a grave defect to be remedied as soon as possible has become, in the eyes of some liberals at least, a kind of virtue” (Whose Justice? Which Rationality? [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988], 335). Initially, liberalism aimed to create a framework in which those who “espouse widely different and incompatible conceptions of the good life for human beings” could share the same political rights and maintain mutually beneficial economic relationships (336). Everyone was free to adhere to their notion of the “good” as long as it did not interfere with the lives of others. MacIntyre is

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quick to point out that this last qualification means liberalism does have its own “broad conception of the good, which it is engaged in imposing politically, legally, socially, and culturally wherever it has the power to do so, but also that in so doing its toleration of rival conceptions of the good in the public arena is severely limited” (336). Preferences f lourish in the liberal arena, not arguments for particular notions of the “good” that potentially run counter to the sovereignty of others; only if expressed in the form of a self-ref lexive personal choice do larger claims about the good appear moral. The best possible outcome for liberalism is the development of effective rules for governing civil life. And “what each individual and each group has to hope for from these rules is that they should be such as to enable that individual or that group to be as effective as possible in implementing his, her, or their preferences. This kind of effectiveness thus becomes a central value of liberal modernity” (337). What follows from MacIntyre’s analysis is the crucial insight that “the procedures of the public realm of liberal individualism” were not “cause and the psychology of the liberal individual effect nor vice versa” (339). Rather, “each required the other” and “in coming together they defined a new social and cultural artefact, ‘the individual’ ” (339). No longer does liberalism tolerate arguments for the “good” other than those based on the rights of the liberal subject, an internal inconsistency that renders liberalism potentially incoherent. More importantly, this inner contradiction points irresistibly toward the political subject who perpetually enacts his own injury and toward the paralysis that follows the linguistic, antifoundationalist thinking of the twentieth century, which settles us into our impossible moment. 6. Juliana Spahr, Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001), 58. 7. Perloff, “After Language Poetry,” in Differentials, 162. 8. Ron Silliman, “Who Speaks: Ventriloquism and the Self in the Poetry Reading,” in Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, ed. Charles Bernstein (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 365. 9. Nor does the problem end there entirely, for, as Silliman indicates, the lyric agency we thought banished reappears too when critics and readers employ, as a form of power (over texts or fellow interpreters), the knowledge of language’s active role in each instance of meaning’s production. Properly speaking, such power takes the form of resistance, a way to keep off the claims a text might make on a reader, or that one reader might make on another. In both cases, a reader’s resistance to an argument about a given meaning based on that meaning’s linguistically constructed, perpetually shifting quality keeps that reader’s self safe, unified behind a conversation ending observation about ever-receding signs. The sound play of words and the gaps in reference, and a theoretical attention to language, when given over to readers alone, maintains their liberal egos where instrumental language preserved their liberal political and social values. In these instances, liberal subjectivity remains intact. 10. Moreover, authors too (somewhat troubling to Language writing’s supposed dismissal of voice) seem no less in attendance in Language writing than they do in

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Notes

Notes

more traditional forms of poetry; the distinctive style of individual poets remains despite the disruptive tendencies of their poetics. Perloff affirms this disquieting observation matter-of-factly, writing “we can easily tell a Charles Bernstein poem from one by Steve McCaffery, a Tom Raworth sequence from one by Allen Fisher, a Maggie O’Sullivan ‘verbovisivocal’ text from one by Susan Howe” (“Lyric Subject,” in Differentials, 133). Perloff comments as well on the parallel case of literary theory, remarking that “even as Jameson rejects the image of the ‘great demiurges and prophets’ like ‘Proust in his cork-lined room’ or the ‘ “tragic,” uniquely doomed Kaf ka’ (Postmodernism 305), on page after page he cites names like Theodor Adorno and Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze and Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Ernesto Laclau. If genius theory is passé, if there is no such thing as unique or individual authority, why are these names so sacred? If Foucault has pronounced so definitively on the death of the author, why are we always invoking the name of the author Foucault?” (133). 11. As Perloff ’s argument develops in her previously cited essay in the above note, she uses the word “signature” to help Language writing, and its readers, appear less as houses divided when she employs it as “a more accurate term to refer to the mark of difference that separates one identity from another, no matter how fully the two share a particular group aesthetic” (“Lyric Subject,” in Differentials, 135). A “signature” recognizes that, in practice, despite what we know about their instability, we take the unique attributes of people and their artistic productions as characteristic, be they the recognizable architectural style of Frank Gehry or the character of Bruce Andrews’ gathered language. Perloff locates her argument in a reading of Ron Silliman’s Albany (1981) and the much later Under Albany (2004), as well as Susan Howe’s Frame Structures (1996). In her detailed close reading of Silliman’s and Howe’s signatures, Perloff does not pretend that their poems are less personal than the work of other poets. What distinguishes their work from the poems of writers like Robert Lowell and Charles Wright is the “authority ascribed to the speaking voice” (152). For Perloff, Silliman’s and Howe’s poems do not depend on “ideas or facts outside the language that names them”—they do not attempt to express an inner life that stands in for human experience; “Rather—and here the difference in epistemology is profound—language constructs the ‘reality’ perceived. And this means that perspective . . . is always shifting and that the subject, far from being at the center of the discourse . . . is located only at its interstices” (152). When we take the implications of Perloff ’s argument concerning “signatures” to heart, it becomes clear that liberal subjectivity f lourishes in Language writing only when readers bring it with them—the formal structure of the poems themselves gives no quarter to notions of a self independent from social discourse. Which is to say, the understanding of signatures that Perloff brings forward applies equally well to readers, who have signature reading strategies and concerns, one of which might easily include a vision of oneself, or an idealized reader, as a liberal individual, or as “someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which” a “written text is constituted” (Ron Silliman, “Who Speaks,” in Close Listening, 365). Simply put, to speak of readerly signatures allows for the now familiar sense that people

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bring themselves to a text, but without necessarily going so far as the apologist of liberalism who takes such a fact to mean that readers are the dominant producers of meaning. If readers experience their reading self as that which primarily determines meaning in Language writing then it is a liberal subject of their own devising. 12. The rhetorical f lurry of certain elements of Language writing’s early liberatory poetics does not obscure its more foundational social conception of meaning formation, a model that disallows readers’ sole ownership of meaning and shuns politics in which people exhort no claim on the lives of others. As wide ranging as their practice was, and remains, the poets most associated with Language writing maintain that reference cannot disappear from words (an assertion that makes readers accountable for language’s social-referential quality no matter how disrupted poems become). Neither do writers like Barrett Watten, Bruce Andrews, Ron Silliman, Bob Perelman, and Lyn Hejinian try hide the fact that their disjunctive organization of words still significantly involves them in a poem’s meaning; one of the points of experimenting with nonlinear forms in Language writing is to disrupt the authorial subject and reveal the ideological dynamics of authorial intention and literary method, not dispense with authors completely. Language writing’s poetics, in this sense, mirrors Foucault’s and Derrida’s commitment to writing, which itself prevents the theoretical slide toward eliminating authors. Readers and critics who ascribe near total authority to readers, or refuse to allow people to lay political and theoretical siege to each other’s lives, depart equally from Language writing’s poetics and the poststructuralist critique of identity. 13. Bob Perelman, “China,” in Ten to One: Selected Poems (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1999), 32. 14. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 29. 15. George Hartley, Textual Politics and the Language Poets (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 42. Hartley specifically responds to Jameson’s essay “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” that appeared in New Left Review 146 ( July—August 1984: 53–92) but because the argument concerning Perelman’s poem remains the same in Jameson’s book of the same name, and because that book is more widely available, I’ve cited Jameson’s argument as it appeared there. 16. I am borrowing here from Alasdair MacIntyre’s discussion of the problem faced by people who try to talk between different traditions of moral inquiry; he argues that to fully understand and respond to a tradition that is not one’s own, a person must learn a “second first language” (Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, 374). While MacIntyre is dealing primarily with traditions as they are found in distinct cultures, thus requiring actual linguistic translation (and his point is that simple modes of translation do not go far enough, that in fact, to actually understand another person’s moral reasoning, you have “to become a child all over again and to learn this language—and the corresponding parts of the culture” as well as a native speaker), his point applies equally well to citizens whose philosophical and ideological frameworks inside the same language make the words in that language

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signify quite practically in very different ways (374). Even if we all speak English, or Spanish, or French, etc., if our poetic or philosophical frameworks vary radically we will need to undertake a form of translation—we will need to find a way to bridge the gap between our various ways of using and understanding the same words, words like freedom, justice, and equality. 17. Commenting on the wider avant-garde impulse toward conversion, Stephen Fredman writes, one of the most pronounced qualities of the avant-garde wing of twentiethcentury American poetry is its initiatory stance: like heads of mystical brotherhoods, poetic gurus propound esoteric doctrines demanding that one be initiated in order to understand them. Doctrines like Ezra Pound’s Vorticism, Louis Zukofsky’s Objectivism, Charles Olson’s Projectivism, Robert Bly’s Deep Image, and Charles Bernstein’s Language Poetry are purposefully obscure, asking fellow poets or readers to make a kind of mystical leap by accepting a set of intuitive or nonrational propositions. The esoteric quality of American avant-garde poetics acts as a gateway, inviting “believers” into the fold while keeping out those imagined to be too obtuse or wrongheaded to understand. Adherence to one of these movements becomes more than an aesthetic decision, for the adherent receives an esoteric key that ties the poetry and poetics to celestial, political, or erotic realms (“Mysticism,” in A Concise Companion, 193) 18. In chapter seven I address more fully why reading Language writing operates like a moment conversion rather than as the development of mastery. I want to make clear at this point though that Language writing’s desire to convert readers to it does not, to my mind, demonstrate its shortcoming. New converts to a religion, and new, excited readers of innovative writing share a reordering of experience by an experience, be that experience a vision of God or an encounter with a poem. Nor are these experiences somehow deficient (as William James makes clear repeatedly; see specifically The Varieties of Religious Experience). Importantly though, the circumstances of conversion are never the same; one event just as easily as another might stage it. And a person cannot creep up on conversion. Even if, in retrospect, the progress toward conversion appears as a patient series of steps, the moment it occurs feels sudden. If people hold to radical aesthetics from the early stages of their lives it is like being raised in a religious home, raised to have faith. Only familiarity can make innovative poetics, like an old lover, feel unremarkable or obvious. 19. In chapter seven I address more fully why reading Language writing operates more like a moment conversion, rather than as the development of mastery (or consciousness of one’s form of life).

Three Faith, Belief, Poetics 1. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica: A Concise Translation, ed. and trans. Timothy McDermott (Allen: Christian Classics, 1991), 331.

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2. Frederick J Crosson, “ ‘Fides’ and ‘Credere’: W.C. Smith on Aquinas,” The Journal of Religion 65, no. 3 ( July 1985): 401. 3. Crosson, “ ‘Fides’ and ‘Credere,’ ” 401; Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 331. 4. Stanley Fish, “Demonstration vs. Persuasion: Two Models of Critical Activity,” in Is There a Text in This Class? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 365. 5. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 331. 6. Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986), 10–11. 7. What I will assert has theological consequences, but only for the devout and what they can take their Scriptures to mean and demand. For others I only hope that a richer understanding of belief might provide tactics for thinking, reading, writing, and proceeding through our discordant cultural and intellectual landscapes— whatever people approach with faith I leave to them. But we need to have a better sense of how a faithful reading practice works if we intend to have a coherent political project now, and if we are going to know how to live with the knowledge we arrive at in our f luid social and linguistic situations. 8. Charles Bernstein, “Poetics,” in Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures, 3rd ed. ed. David Nicholls (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2007), 127. 9. We are mistaken if we think deliberately undercutting belief as a practice aids ethical behavior or makes us intellectually more secure and self-aware. Comfort with the way our circumstances surprise us and force us to shift what we believe certainly helps our temper and mood, but it does not make intellectual, political, artistic, and personal surprises any less surprising; to orient oneself by the expectation of surprise, to inoculate oneself against the interruptions our beliefs perpetually suffer by always watching for their coming, disallows the experience of surprise altogether, which is to disallow the grounding of innovative poetics. We lie to ourselves when we think we can live in accordance with what we don’t yet know. All of which is to say that a commitment to the uncertainty of meaning above all else is fundamentally different from believing in a way that accommodates meaning’s insecurity, and the method of Language writing belongs with the latter. If meaning and our beliefs are to succumb persistently to interruption (as we say they do and aught) specific meanings and beliefs must continually present themselves. We can take comfort knowing that interruption does not destroy belief or knowledge, but grows them by forcing our particular beliefs and ideas to become richer and more complex. This comfort is not available to those who believe in disembodied truth, or those who refuse belief altogether, which amounts to the same thing because both abandon the material condition of being in the world. 10. Bernstein, “Poetics,” in MLA, 127, 129, 127; Crosson, “ ‘Fides’ and ‘Credere,’ ” 407. 11. Bernstein, “Poetics,” in MLA, 129. 12. Charles Bernstein, “The Revenge of the Poet-Critic, or The Parts Are Greater Than the Sum of the Whole,” in My Way (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 11.

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13. Bernstein, “Poetics,” in MLA, 130, 129. 14. William James, “The Will to Believe,” in The Writings of William James, ed. John J. McDermott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 726. 15. Unfortunately, a large number of people on the intellectual left fail to understand their cultural values and hermeneutics as movements of faith. The reasons are, I think, at least two-fold. First, and most broadly, the antireligious tendency of progressive political ideologies—seen in the history of Marxism most clearly, and the movement in philosophy away from discourses of faith and toward rationality and humanism during and after the Enlightenment—makes it almost natural for large portions of the left-leaning intellectual class to see their own philosophical foundations as antithetical to the principles of faithfulness. Second, and closer to home, the orthodox religious communities in the United States that now dominate the public use of the word “faith” tend to take conservative cultural positions. The increased visibility of evangelism after the Second World War (the Billy Graham crusade most notably) and the rise of politically motivated groups of Christian conservatives during the 1980s with their entry into cultural debates surrounding lifestyle choices and the government’s role in policing them (sex education, for example), made the public discourse around faith a conservative Christian one. The oversimplified Red State/Blue State divide of the 2004 presidential election and the “family values” sloganeering of the 1990s are immediate examples of the success conservative Christians have had in naturalizing their cultural values as the faithful Christian’s values, at least in the national psyche, although there are signs that these cultural forces are perhaps on the decline. However, in regard to the immediate past, and the short-term future, because those who speak the loudest and the most openly about faith also take conservative religious and cultural positions, faith itself, in the eyes of those on the political left, has become associated with a wide range of reactionary politics, from positions that reinforce gender and racial inequality to regressive tax policies that punish the poor in the name of personal responsibility and economic growth. The reality is, of course, much more complicated. Not only have Christians historically invested themselves in fights for social justice (abolition being the most obvious example), but the Christian church in the western hemisphere has grown increasingly liberal, especially among the church leadership. Because the liberal elements of the church tend to focus their energy internally toward institutional and theological reform, or outwardly in nonsectarian programs for social justice, their voices are not heard as often as their conservative counterparts outside individual denominations and congregations. Equally troubling to a clear secular-liberal/religious-conservative dichotomy is the fact that many socially conservative churches across the United States are multiethnic and/or heavily invested in the social justice programs progressives advocate for in the public realm, such as school tutoring programs for underprivileged children, Habitat for Humanity projects, food kitchens, AIDS education networks, and homeless shelters. Moreover, the number of self-identified evangelicals who are not fellow travelers with the politically motivated Christian right is significantly on the rise; these Christians, often younger evangelicals, are

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more concerned with issues like poverty and environmental stewardship than traditional bread and butter conservative causes.

1. Bernstein, “Poetics,” in MLA, 127. 2. Because it provides an interesting insight into contemporary theology, and might perhaps come as a surprise to some readers (and, I hope, acknowledge another of my intellectual debts), I want to mention that a good many Christian intellectuals embrace the insights into language and identity that have emerged over the past few decades. Often associated with the term “postsecular thought,” thinkers like John Milbank, Graham Ward, and Catherine Pickstock draw postmodern theory and theology together to inquire into the spiritual life. A central insight of postsecular philosophy is the recognition that our daily activities and nonreligious texts are still fundamentally theological. There are no secular spaces at all; unless one still holds to the Enlightenment claim of objective reason, all of our cultural and intellectual positions are religious in character ( James K.A. Smith and John Milbank, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-secular Theology [Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004]). Postsecular thought reminds us of Calvin’s remark that an absence of faith is impossible (one either has faith in God or idols, be they money, another person, or an idea) at the same time it reaffirms the more recent philosophical understanding that we do not possess neutral grounds for interpretation. These writers, and an increasing number of theologians, have, in part, turned to literary theory to cut against the liberal theological drift of the last century. Most notably, the emergence of a radical orthodoxy (a continuation in many ways of Barth’s Neo-Orthodoxy), with its regard for poststructuralist thought, departs from the last hundred years of historically focused theology aimed largely at reconfiguring the mysticism of Christian practice. Starting at the end of the nineteenth century and continuing up through and beyond the middle of the twentieth century, scholars like Julius Wellhausen (interested in the various genres evident in the Hebrew Bible) and theologians like Rudolf Bultmann, focused Biblical scholarship on an examination of the historical origins of the received Biblical text. For Bultmann and his followers especially, these studies led to an interest in demythologizing the Bible. At the root of their project stand two Enlightenment concepts: history is an objectively knowable quantity, and the supernatural can be rejected and explained away by natural phenomena and social realities. As you would expect, these rationalist theologians came to make distinctions between the “historical Jesus” and the “Christ of faith.” Against their hermeneutics of doubt, some recent orthodox theologians, under the inf luence of postsecular thinking, reject fixed objective realities, like History. A believer’s personal relationship with God occurs, for these thinkers, within a constructionist paradigm, much like the relationship poststructuralist philosophers say people have with one another. God remains a person’s ultimate reality, they claim, but a relationship with him is more f luid than dogmatic and takes place in language through

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4.

5. 6. 7.

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the Bible. For radical orthodox theologians, the “historical Jesus” and the “Christ of faith” is the same person made available to Christians in Scripture. John Calvin, Commentaries on the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans, ed. and trans. John Owen (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans 1947), 171. Calvin here follows Aquinas’ understanding of faith (that we saw in chapter three) as trusting what God says because God is absolutely reliable. The translation of John Calvin’s Commentaries on the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans by John Owen that I am using cites the Authorized (King James) Version of the Bible. For that reason, I will follow the same practice. All subsequent passages quoted from the Bible in this chapter will be from the King James. Calvin, Romans, 158. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, vol. 1, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 1: 542–543. My own argument crosses over into territory already inhabited by Jacques Derrida’s body of work, although I’ve left this fact largely unmentioned, the humor of which I think Derrida would himself appreciate. Despite my elisions, however, I do want to call to mind Derrida’s own interest in the fulfillment of the unattainable, which he called Justice. There is in Derrida’s work on law, for example, a concern for the ways Justice resists deconstruction, or is deconstruction ( Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’ ” in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar, trans. Mary Quaintance [New York: Routledge, 2002], 228–298). In his discussion of ethics too, especially in The Gift of Death, Derrida describes profoundly the ethical impossibility of our lives that stood as the focus of this book’s beginning, and which, given the concerns of the current chapter, we can see ref lected in Calvin’s conception of sin. The central ethical crisis for people occurs for Derrida in the realization that our responsibilities to one person make us responsible to all others, although in each act we make for the one we betray all the others to which we are equally accountable. Abraham’s decision to sacrifice Isaac captures Derrida’s understanding of our ethical dilemma. If Abraham kills Isaac he sacrifices all of the generations of children to come from him, and he betrays God’s promise to fulfill his word through Isaac. If Abraham does not sacrifice Isaac, he betrays God himself. To Derrida’s mind, we face Abraham’s crisis every moment of our lives; “every one being sacrificed to every one else in this land of Moriah that is our habitat every second of every day” (The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills [Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1996], 69). He writes, “By preferring my work, simply by giving it my time and attention . . . I am perhaps fulfilling my duty. But I am sacrificing and betraying at every moment all my other obligations: my obligations to the other others whom I know or don’t know . . . my fellows who are dying of starvation or sickness. . . . I betray my fidelity or my obligations to other citizens, to those who don’t speak my language and to whom I neither speak nor respond, to each of those who listen or read, and to whom I neither respond nor address myself in the proper manner, that is, in a singular manner . . . thus also to those I love in private, my own, my family, my son, each of whom is the only son I sacrifice to the other” (69). Although Calvin and Derrida begin to depart, as they must, over

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questions of grace and Jesus’ forgiveness of sins, their separate routes emerge from a shared understanding of our material context. Their thinking begins in the sense that we cannot do our duty. For each, we are lost from the outset; our failure to hold up the requirements of the Law or ethical action defines our entry into the world. Derrida’s vision of ethical life as beyond reach does not look structurally different than Calvin’s formulation of original sin. 8. Calvin, Romans, 165. 9. I would add to this account one of the more significant Reformation illustrations of Calvin’s understanding of signs: the sacrament of the Eucharist. In Catholicism the bread and wine of Communion becomes the body and blood of Jesus. The change is called transubstantiation; the sign is what it names, and the connection between word and referent is absolute. When the Reformation occurred, Protestantism rejected the Catholic understanding of the Eucharist. While the varieties of Protestant understanding of Communion are too complicated to explore here, we can see the most extreme version of its break from Catholicism in those Protestant denominations, such as many Baptist churches today, that speak of Communion more as a memory meal. In their sacrament of Communion no vital connection exists between the bread and wine and Jesus’ death on the cross—the relationship is strictly symbolic. Eschewing both the literal and purely symbolic formulations of Communion, Calvinism takes the bread and wine as a sign permitting people to interpret the sacrifice of Jesus. While there is not a necessary connection between the body and blood of Jesus and the bread and wine of Communion, the sign of the Eucharist gives Calvinists a way to understand and make present in their lives the grace of God and his forgiveness. The sign of Communion is more than a memory, but not forgiveness itself: it is that which allows a Christian’s relationship with God to become livable and negotiable. 10. Given that God’s supposed willingness to punish sinners gets so much ink, it is interesting to note that Calvin’s refusal to join signs and referents rises from the Bible’s consistent refusal to link events with consequences or tie certain actions to certain penalties. The Bible is full of people who reject God’s word (Adam and Eve eat from the Tree of Knowledge, and David sleeps with Bathsheba, for example) without receiving the promised punishment. Although these people do not end up better off for their sin, what happens to them is more complicated than simple retribution (Adam and Eve do not die as was promised, but must go till the earth and bear children; David lives, despite being a murderer, and keeps his kingdom, but his family is thrown into turmoil). God regularly grants the same grace to Israel as a nation. He does not wipe the Israelites out after they worship the golden calf; nor does God, many generations later, leave them in Babylon as a result of their continued sinfulness. Even when he does punish Israel he gives his people a way to get back in covenant with him—no circumstances are final. Responding to the fact that sin leads to death, and yet, people do not die in the Bible, but obtain eternal life, Calvin’s argument suggests that grace breaks the connection between the law and its requirements, in a way, its meaning: it is less a suspension of the law than the ruin of the law as a signifying system. Grace honors

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drastic incongruity—with it people get what they do not deserve and don’t get the punishment the law says they are owed. To be justified by faith is to trust and depend upon God having created a f lexible world. We can safely say that in Calvin’s reading of the Bible words like “circumcision” and “righteousness” are useable because they are not anchored; they are meaningful to Calvin primarily for the way sinners employ these words to overcome their initial meanings, and faith in God’s mercy and a love of his language practice are the means of their doing so. 11. Crosson, “ ‘Fides’ and ‘Credere,’ ” 400. 12. Calvin, Romans, xxiii. 13. John L. Thompson, “Calvin as biblical interpreter,” in The Cambridge companion to John Calvin, ed. Donald K. McKim (Cambridge, U.K: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 65. 14. Calvin’s movement away from literalism often becomes manifest in his fundamentally anti-legalistic stance. Rom 4:14–15 reads “For if they which are of the law be heirs, faith is made void, and the promise made of none effect: Because the law worketh wrath: for where no law is, there is no transgression.” Commenting on these verses Calvin writes, “for as the law generates nothing but vengeance, it cannot bring grace. It can indeed show to the good and the perfect the way of life: but as it prescribes to the sinful and corrupt what they ought to do, and supplies them with no power for doing, it exhibits them as guilty before the tribunal of God” (Calvin, Romans, 171). Important to his interpretation of Paul’s letter is Calvin’s already mentioned reaffirmation of Paul’s basic tenet that no person possesses the strength of character to achieve righteousness by way of the law. Arguing from there, Calvin tells us in this ref lection that the law itself intensifies a person’s guilt because it informs him of his transgressions, making that individual accountable for and aware of his sins. Still, constructing the law as the herald of our failure to live up to it allows Calvin to abandon the law for grace; as he does so Calvin moves away from the pedantry of legalism and its refusal of the law’s spirit, which depends on a more organic relationship to the Bible. In Calvin’s reading of the gospels, legalism strangles new knowledge, in particular the new revelation of Jesus’ death on the cross. In effect, legalism kills salvation. Refusing the possibility of open investigation and interpretation, legalism ends up preventing the introspection and thoughtfulness that the law sets out to push people toward. One of the more obvious contexts for Calvin’s distrust of legalism is Jesus’ response to the Pharisees’ question in Matthew 12:10: “Is it lawful to heal on the sabbath days?” Standing before Jesus and the Pharisees was a man with a withered arm, and Jesus said to the Pharisees, “What man shall there be among you, that shall have one sheep, and if it fall into a pit on the sabbath day, will he not lay hold on it, and lift it out? How much then is a man better than a sheep? Wherefore it is lawful to do well on the sabbath days” (Mt 12:11–12). Jesus then restores the man’s arm and the Pharisees grow angry with Jesus for breaking the sabbath and challenging their religious authority. Jesus’ reading of the sabbath law focuses on its intention to honor God; any use of the law to ignore the needs of another violates the sabbath

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16. 17. 18. 19.

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and dishonors God by disobeying his more important commandment to love your neighbor. In the eyes of Jesus, the Pharisees’ refusal to interpret the sabbath law kindly and actively undoes its purpose; he prods his audience to suspend locked down versions of what laws or words mean by requiring his listeners and readers to go beyond the law’s obviousness and concern themselves with its heart. Christological interpretation is a way of reading the Hebrew Bible as pointing to Jesus Christ as the Messiah. An early example is the Gospel of Matthew quoting the Torah in a way that renders Jesus the fulfillment of its prophesies. Such a manner of reading is naturally the bedrock of much Christian doctrine and theology. Thompson, “Calvin as biblical interpreter,” 69. Calvin, Romans, 171. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: The University Of Chicago Press, 1980), 31. Alan Jacobs, A Theology Of Reading: The Hermeneutics Of Love (Cambridge: Westview Press, 2001), 53. I will discuss in more detail in chapter seven what Jacobs means by loving contemplation of a text.

Five Ghosts, Jokes, Shadowtime, and Faithful Interpretation 1. Office of Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, “Pelosi: Republican Bill Undermines Protections for Endangered Species,” Press Release. 29 Sept. 2005, House of Representatives, http://www.house.gov/pelosi/press/releases/Sept05/ESA.html. 2. In an earlier version of this essay published in Textual Practice I cited Charles McVety, the president of Canada Christian College in Toronto, arguing that with “the legalization of gay marriage, faith has been violated and we’ve been forced to respond” (Christopher Mason, “Gay Marriage Galvanizes Canada’s Right,” New York Times, Sunday, 19 November 2006, late ed., sec 1). As a conservative argument that makes a similar rhetorical move as Pelosi’s, McVety’s claim is illustrative of where Christian conservatives agree, however unintentionally, with secular critics’ argument that faith exists apart from critical inquiry. Following the logic of his statement—quoted in a New York Times article on religious conservatives’ opposition to same-sex marriage in Canada—makes clear why the last thing McVety is interested in is a political discussion. What the word faith refers to in McVety’s sentence is unclear, or more precisely, it seems to refer both to Christians’ belief in God and to heterosexual marriage. With their differences collapsed into the single word faith, the opposition to same-sex marriage and the act of believing in the Christian God amount to the same thing—they occupy the same cultural and intellectual turf, where nonbelievers, or even Christians of a different kind, cannot treed. 3. Stanley Fish, “Why We Can’t All Just Get Along,” in The Trouble With Principle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 247.

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4. Charles Bernstein, “Optimism and Critical Excess,” in A Poetics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 160. 5. Bernstein’s reference to Emerson in this quote is important enough to warrant a brief discussion, for Bernstein’s relationship to Emerson stands at the very heart of his poetics. Or, to be more precise, Emersonian perfectionism, for Bernstein, is an engine of secular faith; it recognizes our places in the world as precarious, but gives us confidence to take the steps we do even as we know our ground to be temporary and discrepant. Arguably though placing any American poet in Emerson’s company only goes so far—from different vantage points most American writers look a little Emersonian. But Bernstein’s relationship to Emerson goes through Stanley Cavell, his onetime teacher; the perpetual debate over which Emerson we are talking about, the philosophical and academic argument that strains the link between him and any other writer, plays little role here. Bernstein’s Emerson is Cavell’s, and taking his literary heritage as such gives us the philosophical context we need to read Bernstein’s use of his predecessor. As Cavell observes, we are in the field of American letters often handed back Emerson’s ideas by thinkers like Nietzsche and Heidegger, but without, unfortunately on our part, knowing it. Repeating this tendency, critics who discuss Bernstein’s work tend to mention Emerson in passing, if at all, and more often than not quickly move to consider Bernstein’s relationship to continental thought. For his part, Bernstein has not encourage this exclusive Europhilia, choosing instead to persistently foreground his thinking’s connection to Cavell, and through him to Wittgenstein and Emerson. In “The Objects of Meaning: Reading Cavell Reading Wittgenstein,” Bernstein writes “What Derrida ends up transforming to houses of cards—shimmering traces of life insubstantial as elusive—Wittgenstein locates as meaning, with the full range of intention, responsibility, coherence, and possibility for revolt against or madness without. In Wittgenstein’s accounting, one is not left sealed off from the world with only ‘markings’ to ‘decipher’ but rather located in a world with meanings to respond to” (“The Objects of Meaning: Reading Cavell Reading Wittgenstein,” in Content’s Dream [Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1986], 181). First published in boundary 2 in 1981, Bernstein’s essay draws largely on Cavell’s The Senses of Walden, the book initiating Cavell’s move to draw Wittgenstein and American transcendentalism together. (The reprinted edition of The Senses of Walden put out by North Point Press in 1981 appeared with two essays on Emerson, essays signaling Cavell’s major shift toward Emerson’s writings. The first essay, “Thinking of Emerson,” was originally given as a talk at the 1978 Modern Language Association convention in New York.) And the roots of Bernstein’s faithfulness lie here—his desire to trust language’s uncertainty as that which makes words meaningful comes by way of Cavell, who inherits it from Wittgenstein and Emerson. Eleven years later, after Cavell develops his thinking about Emerson more completely in This New Yet Unapproachable America, Bernstein turns again to Emerson (and Cavell’s reading of him) in “Optimism and Critical Excess,” the essay that grounded the opening of the current chapter. In an Emerson-like interruption Bernstein writes several paragraphs after the quote I cited previously, “(Why

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do I mention Emerson here? Is it purely a rhetorical gesture to try to pull someone with that kind of legitimating authority into an otherwise . . . )” (“Optimism,” in A Poetics, 161). The ellipsis is Bernstein’s. In “Revenge of the Poetic-Critic” Bernstein proposes “a modular essay form,” which provides a near exact description of Emerson’s essay style; it is a “form that allows for big jumps from paragraph to paragraph and section to section. In such essays, it becomes possible to recombine the paragraphs to get another version of the essay—since the ‘argument’ is not dependent on the linear sequence” (“Revenge,” in My Way, 7). In a recent interview with David Caplan, Bernstein says “I share that Emersonian concept of moral perfectionism in which prosody, like poetry, is a process where we don’t know where we’re going to end up. It’s all about being attentive to what is happening along the way” (“A Conversation with Charles Bernstein,” interviewed by David Caplan, The Antioch Review 62, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 141). What stands out in these passages is Bernstein’s inheritance of Emerson’s use of style as argument, a blending central to the Emersonian perfectionism Bernstein cites. Cavell describes Emerson’s playing with “contradiction” an “aversion” to conformity; by writing in a way that revolves and twists his essay’s subject, Emerson practices his philosophy of “Self-Reliance” (This New Yet Unapproachable America [Albuquerque: Living Batch Press, 1989], 81). Bernstein makes this philosophical approach his own in his critical prose, and in Shadowtime, and in the larger body of his poetry. As Emerson moves and thinks with the revolving of his sentences, Bernstein proceeds, as we see further along in this chapter, by way of “overlays, pleats, folds,” by way of “multipolar” thinking, by way of thoughts that “may seem to go off into one direction then [drop] back to follow another trajectory” (Charles Bernstein, “Charles Bernstein Interview,” interviewed by Eric Denut, The Argonist Online, http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Bernstein%20interview.htm). Cavell, who coined the phrase, first addressed in detail what he meant by “Emersonian perfectionism” in the Carus lectures for the American Philosophical Association, lectures that, after some revision, became Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (1990). In the first essay, “Aversive Thinking,” Cavell responds to John Rawls’ critique of Nietzsche’s perfectionism, which Rawls takes to aim at establishing a class of great men for whose good everybody else directs their lives. Cavell does not believe Nietzsche is the bad moralist Rawls takes him for, and in his rebuttal Cavell works through an alternative account of what “perfectionism” means. Because he reads a great deal of Emerson in Nietzsche, Cavell stages a defense that goes on to establish the perfectionism to which Bernstein later refers in his interview with Caplan. Circling around his definition of the newfound phrase, Cavell makes clear that it spurns the notion of an ideal, or a sense of ultimate, achievable perfection. He also takes pains to divide “moralism” from perfectionism’s recognition that “a certain relation to words (as an allegory of my relation to my life) is inseparable from a certain moral-like relation to thinking” (Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990], 46). For Emerson moralism is simple conformity, a notion of the good to be maximized in public life regardless of the personal

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conceptions of the good held by one’s fellow citizens. Discussing what he calls remarriage comedies (The Philadelphia Story is his classic example), Cavell describes this moral orientation as a matter of people choosing “what kind of life they wish to lead, what kind of person they mean to be” (Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004], 39). Questions of right and wrong—“crises of conscience”—do not enter the thinking of the characters Cavell writes about, nor for that matter does Cavell fret over power relations; how people think about their lives as such consumes the characters’ and his own attention (38). The conversations between lovers in these films touch on matters of inattentiveness, brutality, vanity, thoughtlessness, unimaginativeness, and heartlessness, themes that shape the moral encounter “as one soul’s examination of another, and of itself ” (Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow [Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2005], 121). Cavell understands the process the lovers undertake as a matter of their becoming intelligible to one another, and to themselves, which does not mean justifying or explaining themselves. It means transforming their own lives, and not on the basis of what they have been told they must believe. What Emerson calls genius Cavell describes as “the capacity for self-criticism, the capacity to consecrate the attained to the unattained self ” (Handsome, 49). He reads Emerson’s desire for “self-reliance” as an attempt to turn away from a reliance on “ourselves as we stand” and toward a method where we find ourselves by first recognizing the shame we feel for being part of a society in which “the moral law is nowhere (or almost nowhere) in existence” (47). The problem is not, for Emerson, in Cavell’s reading, “that we are ashamed of our immorality,” but that “we are exactly incapable of being ashamed of that; in that sense we are shameless. Our moralized shame is debarring us from the conditions of the moral life, from the possibility of responsibility over our lives, from responding to our lives rather than bearing them dumbly or justifying them automatically” (48). To become self-reliant is to come out of that inhuman herd and state of violence; it means domesticating culture (not letting it determine you). Aiming for self-reliance you must engage in a conversation with oneself about oneself. Inside these exchanges you find yourself in need of becoming other than you are because you are not yet yourself, you are not quite human—you cannot connect with your life and the lives of others on your own, or their own, established terms. Undercutting knee-jerk reliance on universals in order to focus on daily engagements as the means to our transformation, Cavell writes, “Maximization is roughly the last thing on the mind of the suffering individual in this state of selfdissatisfaction, the state of perceiving oneself as failing to follow oneself in one’s higher and happier aspirations, failing perhaps to have found the right to one’s own aspirations—not to the deliverances of rare revelations but to the significance of one’s everyday impressions, to the right to make them one’s ideas” (51). Crucial to perfectionism is the challenge friends and lovers provide (Cities of Words, 27; although this theme is a common one in Cavell’s work and he addresses it elsewhere as well). The presence of a friend creates the pressure we need to become self-reliant, and, for Emerson, we understand friendship best through reading and

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writing, interactions in which we begin to see what we want from ourselves. The ethical compulsion conversation offers creates a largely internal rather than external conf lict. Considering comedies of remarriage further, Cavell points to the way couples, in order to reunite, do not need to overcome obstacles established by their parents or the culture in which they live. Instead they must work through personal conf licts—their own snobbery or failures of character (Cities of Words, 10, 17; although, again, Cavell’s discussion of this subject is not, to say the least, limited to these pages). In a film like The Philadelphia Story, lovers needs to transform themselves and the film shows this struggle. Perhaps most important to those invested in innovative poetry, Emerson’s elliptical style enables readers to experience these moments of personal encounter and transformation. To read Emerson you must work with and against his sentences, and with and against your own interpretations of them. A sincere engagement with Emerson’s work, or with work of a similar kind, turns the requirements of inquiry, call it living, into a matter of self-scrutiny. With all their consequences and implications, evidence and argument become the claims readers make on themselves. And “What counts as serious demands upon oneself, genuine caring for the self, is what perfectionism concerns itself with, after rational calculations have been made and standing obligations have been assessed and met, or found unworthy” (48). Perfectionism does not allow you to know what precisely you can hope for—you cannot target your thinking, or predetermine your reading. It does provide you with a way to proceed critically in relationship to yourself through your circumstances. The nature of Bernstein’s Cavellian Emersonianism becomes evident, perhaps most explicitly, in “Reznikoff ’s Nearness,” where, in a discussion of Charles Reznikoff ’s use of serial form, Bernstein develops his understanding of “adjacency,” or “nearness.” Bernstein writes, “There is no poet more dedicated to foregrounding the detail and the particular than Reznikoff and no poet more averse to blending these details into a consuming or totalizing form. The numbers that obtrude into the visual field of almost every page of Reznikoff ’s verse represent both this commitment and aversion. This is not to deny that the individual sections add up to a larger form, but to affirm that the particularity and integrity of each detail is not diminished by the newly forming whole” (Charles Bernstein, “Reznikoff ’s Nearness,” in My Way, [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999] 204). Writing his own discrete series of paragraphs, Bernstein continues on the following page, “As a term of art, adjacency is distinguished from adjoining or abutting, as land that is adjacent to a common square, but nowhere touches. Reznikoff ’s is an art of adjacency, each frame carefully articulated and set beside the next” (205). In Bernstein’s reading “Reznikoff ’s cubo-seriality is modular and multidirectional, marking a series of sites available to rearrangement in ever new constellations of occurrence” (205). Crucially too, for Bernstein, Reznikoff took court records as his source material; his seriality rises from what is native and common—the stuff of Reznikoff ’s and other Americans’ everyday experiences. As Bernstein writes, the fact that in Reznikoff ’s poetry the ordinary material of life shapes the work as a series of nondeveloped and disjunctive moments argues there is “no loss of

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prior foundations, no absent center . . . but ‘finding as founding’ to use Stanley Cavell’s Emersonian phrase” (206). And “finding as founding” means in Cavell’s words “finding yourself at a loss,” a loss not to be overcome, but used for creating moments of understanding; it means exchanging the idea of secure grounds for knowledge (philosophical, scientific, or otherwise) for “thinking as knowing how to go on, being on the way” (America, 114, 116). Our encounters with the world’s uncertainty and our own failures at comprehension put the world’s pieciness squarely before us. The moments we witness the disconnection between our words and the world do not evidence a Fall we took. Rather our lives are always already incomplete, recombinable, and mobile, and livable because they are so. Attending closely the ethical stance of Reznikoff ’s project, Bernstein suggests that in their ordinariness Reznikoff ’s poems “can no longer be read with the trivializing appreciation of being plain, descriptive, f lat, simple, artless, and unassuming; or as being without rhetorical affect or ‘modernist discontinuity’ ” (“Nearness,” in My Way, 210–211). “NOT f latness or absence of rhetoric but . . . a nearness to the world not seen as ‘nature’ but as social (urban). Materials of the world at hand, as found: words as materials” (214). Being near the world, being unable to turn away from the tenuousness of our lives in favor of an abstract, lost absolute brings us face to face with what is peculiar about each of us, which entangles us with other people: “In the poetics of nearness, others exist prior to oneself; you do not look out onto other people as if through a preexisting subjectivity, but find whomever you may be as person, as poet, in relation to them, by virtue of your acknowledgement of their suffering, which is to say their circumstance or bearing in the world. This is the ethical grounding of Reznikoff ’s work” (217). Bringing readers into contact with familiar histories, although ones they might very well rather put out of mind—the history of strikebreaking, violent crime, and inhumane factory conditions; that is, the history of the United States as a record of personal and public violence on a mass scale—the difficulty of Reznikoff ’s poems resides in the commonness of what they recount and how they do so: “Reznikoff ’s poetry reminds of very general facts that we already knew—are in plain view—but which we have difficulty accounting for. Above all, we have difficulty accounting for the fact that the poetry is difficult, because it doesn’t seem, at first, to be difficult at all, but patent; as if the difficulty of such patency isn’t the first thing we might wish to deny (repress)” (221). Reznikoff ’s literary form, as with Emerson’s, Cavell’s, and Bernstein’s, invests itself fundamental in enabling readers’ self-perception. Working through description after description of abuse and catastrophe in commonplace language is hard to take, as a literary procedure and as subject material. The poems ask readers to look on the fact of our country—they invite readers to draw near to their nation’s history and to their fellow citizens: “to found America means to find it—which means to acknowledge its roots in violence, to tell the lost stories because unless you find what is lost you can found nothing” (225). “Nearness” depends on formal difficulty because literary struggle manhandles and delights us into understanding, makes us work for discernment rather than take it as given; and instead of guiding readers to a final, restful explanation, textual disjunction moves us through series

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of particular interpretative encounters—the move of perfectionism, or finding as founding. As we will come to see with Shadowtime’s faith, establishing nearness (to the world, to ourselves, to our books, to our country) permits readers to recognize their lives as not exactly different from what they do, or what is done, with them; focused on how they are in the world makes readers take their lives and interpretations as the places they work out their obligation to themselves as a commitment to the materialization of what they would have as true. I would add, finally, that Bernstein’s inheritance of Emersonian perfectionism refigures significantly what we can take ourselves to be doing when we read innovative poetry. In “Revenge of the Poet-Critic,” Bernstein argues that the “parts are greater than the sum of the whole”—which I take to point to the manner in which nearness requires us to give up on fragments understood as brokenness. (“Revenge,” in My Way, 9). Even at its most disjunctive, Bernstein’s work makes no room for innovative uses of language understood as an absence of wholeness. Bernstein claims we must “differentiate between works of art that suggest new ways of conceiving of our present world and those that seek rather to debunk any possibilities for meaning. To do this, one has to be able to distinguish between, on the one hand, a fragmentation that attempts to valorize the concept of freef loating signifier unbounded to social significance . . . and on the other, a fragmentation that ref lects a conception of meaning as prevented by conventional narration and so uses disjunction as a method of tapping into other possibilities available within language” (Charles Bernstein, “Centering the Postmodern,” Socialist Review 19 [1989]: 48, quoted in Marjorie Perloff, Radical Artifice [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991], 14). At the organizing level of thought, making this distinction between linguistic fragments that are pieces of a broken whole (signifiers now unconnected to “social significance”) and slices of language that are cultural materials available to produce meaning with, makes all the difference (14). It is the difference between holding the truth you’ve abolished as your center—which is to say, holding that loss as a center—and giving up centers altogether. We cannot embrace a language able to be broken to pieces without holding that each word evidences our isolation, that the best we can manage is relative meaning and what we might call justice is a question of arrangement—at its most elevated a kind of guarded multiculturalism. But if we believe that disruption primarily takes us someplace else, that our means produce our ends, then when our words shift that is what we are; nothing has been broken or lost. Intellectuals, artists, and poets invested in innovative poetics often hold close what we call fragmented language because it appears to reveal the particular and the unresolved, demonstrating as it does a world comprised of more than any one person can account for. Encouraged by a desire for social justice we employ the fragment to f ly in the face of the self-proclaimed universal and natural. And yet, even though, like Abbott and Costello’s “whose on first,” Bernstein’s commitment to the slipup is unwavering, his poetic rendering of Emersonian perfectionism, his concern for how words mean multiple things in multiple ways, is not an interest in remnants. Rarely do the lines of his poems or the sentences of his essays feel exhausted—they do not come up short in the way

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broken, fragmented things do. What Marjorie Perloff in The Dance of the Intellect calls the “mis-seaming” in Bernstein’s work jumbles divergent discourses together into a single poem so that even when his lines appear full of holes their drive to multiply meaning overpowers any indication of intellectual wreckage (The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996]. 230). 6. John Calvin, Calvin: Commentaries, vol. 23 of The Library of Christian Classics, ed. and trans. Joseph Haroutunian and Louise Pettibone Smith (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1958), 23: 238. 7. Bernstein, “Optimism” in A Poetics, 160. 8. Even though Vincent Pecora, in Secularization and Cultural Criticism, argues that secular modernity’s move toward “universally acceptable moral truths . . . may provide the only ethical ground we possess within a nontheological (and nonteleological) intellectual framework,” his discussion of a secular, or political faith is particularly relevant to my account of Bernstein’s intersection with Calvin and Aquinas (Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006], 23). In his study Pecora traces the philosophical attempt within secular modernity (from its early manifestations up through the work of Emile Durkheim), to reconcile reason and faith, effectively filling in the gap between Aquinas, Calvin, and Bernstein. Specifically, Pecora explores the way faith lingers in a secularized form in the work of writers like Walter Benjamin and Virginia Woolf. As he explains, the process of “secularization through which magic or myth is eliminated by reason may never in fact be complete,” a state of affairs that is “not simply a function of language or geography but is perhaps something to be acknowledged as the result of an irreducible set of needs in human and group psychology” (22). Pecora goes on to suggest that “One might then conclude that the society that produces Enlightenment never fully outgrows its desire for religious sources of coherence, solidarity, and historical purpose, and continually translates, or transposes, them into ever more refined and immanent, but also distorted and distorting, versions of its religious inheritance” (22). Against the historical background Pecora outlines, my argument that faith is a mode central to our learning to negotiate uncertainty appears less a befuddling claim than an alterative, and even affirmative account of faith’s persistence in the philosophical development of twentieth- and twenty-first-century thought. 9. Charles Bernstein, Shadowtime (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2005), 13. 10. Brian Ferneyhough, “Words and Music,” The Argonist Online, http://www. argotistonline.co.uk/Ferneyhough%20essay.htm. 11. Bernstein, “Argonist interview.” 12. Bernstein, “Argonist interview.” 13. For sound files of these readings go to Penn Sound at http://www.writing.upenn. edu/pennsound/. 14. Bernstein, Shadowtime, 50–51. 15. Despite the fact that the scope of my argument precludes a detailed discussion of Charles Bernstein’s relationship to pragmatism and to contemporary American

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philosophers like Robert Brandom and John McDowell who write about language, we do need to keep them in mind as part of Shadowtime’s philosophical heritage and context. Where Brandom and McDowell look back to pragmatism through Richard Rorty and Wilfrid Sellars, Bernstein, as I discussed in the previous note, looks back to Emerson through Stanley Cavell. While Cavell is hardly a neo-pragmatist, his work still allows Bernstein to occupy a broader American philosophical tradition emerging from the nineteenth century, in which pragmatism and ordinary language criticism participate Understood in part as a response to European thought (Continental philosophy most recently), this larger American tradition becomes more clear when read through Wittgenstein, for it is Wittgenstein—from our current perspective and despite his nationality—that centers the line of language philosophy running from pragmatism to Stanley Cavell. In this regard, Bernstein’s contemporary company is as much with philosophers like Brandom and McDowell as it is with Susan Howe, Ron Silliman, or Tom Raworth. 16. Bernstein, Shadowtime, 95. 17. Patrick J Smith, The Tenth Muse: A Historical Study of the Opera Libretto (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), 400. 18. For those listeners more familiar with Shadowtime’s literary company, Fabrice Fitch, in the CD notes, helpfully places the libretto in its musical context: Ferneyhough’s attitude to genre is not iconoclastic, let alone disrespectful, but speculative. . . . In each scene, Bernstein’s libretto creatively reinterprets aspects of Benjamin’s ideas. In this connection, Ferneyhough cites Mozart’s Magic Flute, and also the tradition of the early oratorio. . . . More explicitly, the adventures of Benjamin’s “shade” have distinct echoes of Greek myth, particularly the Orpheus legend. . . . To be sure, these references ref lect Ferneyhough’s abiding affection for Italian music of the early Baroque; but they also allow him to speculate on the paths that the genre might have taken during the early stages of its development, when its definition and conventions . . . were yet to become fixed or standardized. . . . Seen in this broader historical context, Shadowtime begins to make more sense: neither “anti-opera” . . . nor “anti-anti-opera”, but “ante-opera”. (Fabrice Fitch, Liner notes to Shadowtime, Brian Ferneyhough [NMC, 2006], 7–8.) Fitch then goes on to discuss Shadowtime’s debt to modern scores like Stockhausen’s Licht and Berg’s Lulu. 19. Bernstein, Shadowtime, 95. 20. Calvin, Institutes, 1: 542–543. 21. Bernstein, “Poetics,” 129–130. 22. Calvin, Commentaries, 23: 226. 23. Bernstein, Shadowtime, 98, 99. 24. Although Benjamin’s words do ref lect in some part the idea that meaning occurs where words become unmoored. 25. Fabrice Fitch, Liner notes, 9. 26. Bernstein, “Argonist interview.”

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27. Equally relevant to our discussion of Charles Bernstein’s poetics is the place Benjamin’s work holds for those writers inf luenced by the Frankfurt School who are working on the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. For a philosopher like J.M. Bernstein, for example, Benjamin is a crucial touchstone for joining these discourses so that the ethical, aesthetic, linguistic, and political realms become lenses for thinking about all the others. In this regard, J.M. Bernstein’s work—in Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (2002), Beyond Representation (1996), and The Fate of Art (1992), among others—provides a useful context for reading Shadowtime as well. 28. Gershom Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis, ed. Werner J. Dannhauser (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 179. 29. Bernstein, “Argonist interview.” 30. Bernstein, “Argonist interview.” 31. Calvin, Commentaries, 23: 195. 32. Bernstein, “Argonist interview.” 33. Because it ref lects Calvin’s own sea language of hope and helps us grasp what it looks like to take a more expansive view of representation, I want to cite K.L. Evans’ discussion of Moby-Dick as a philosophical exploration of how the world is knowable because we “do not see everything”; in Whale! She writes, “Whenever I speak I am at sea—my words are surrounded. The picture I have in my head of being in a leaky boat seems to show that my circumstances (being at sea) are what stand in the way of any future certainty. When in fact my circumstances (being at sea) are exactly the state that supports my actions. They are what justify my knowing how to go on in a certain way. Whenever I speak I’m at sea. Which means I am in no need of rescue” (Whale! [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003], 135, 137). 34. Bernstein, Shadowtime, 69. 35. Heinrich Heine, Almansor (1821), quoted in Michael Berenbaum, The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Boston: Little, Brown 1993), 25. 36. Bernstein, Shadowtime, 70–71. 37. Discussing Bernstein’s early poem “Sentences,” Gerald Bruns—a critic who has written extensively and insightfully about poetry and philosophy—describes a more lighthearted instance of a Bernstein poem cohering through its disjointed style in the way “Sometimes” does. He writes: This is also a paratactic poem. Its sentences do not (quite) form a context. One reason they do not is that the poem’s subject, what it is about, is illusory—the poem is built around an “it” that has no referent, rather like the diathetical “it” in “It is raining,” where the verb “to rain” can only be articulated in what grammarians call “the middle voice” between active and passive, or between transitive and intransitive, constructions. The speaker of the poem occupies this same neutral space: It is a voice made of found language, and yet, for all of that, it acquires a certain personality as the poem develops. In truth the poem is a parody of the confessional lyric in which the poet can’t quite put it into

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words. So on several readings the poem can be said to come together, in its way, after all. (The Material of Poetry: Sketches for a Philosophical Poetics [Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005], 32.) 38. Because it would overlap too much with arguments already forwarded in this book, I’ve cut my discussion of Melancholia in the final two scenes of Shadowtime. However, I want to include just that portion of my reading that relates to Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectics, as this connection is central to the libretto’s philosophical and poetic project. In Scene VII, “Stelae for Failed Time (Solo for Melancholia as the Angel of History),” Melancholia closes her song, and the libretto with: The negative pictures the picture better than the picture just as I picture you without ever having seen you or touched you as now you fall from my arms into my capacious insomniac forgetting. (Shadowtime, 122) Many of the same words and phrases reoccur throughout Melancholia’s solo as it loops through a series of variations. Within her song, particular sets of lines work as comments on time, history, intimacy, or knowledge, though none of these line clusters clearly address only a single subject. Each new topic rises up to turn into a point of departure for the next subject, most often by way of a negation, even as it recalls earlier moments in Melancholia’s melody. Her solo does not consist of fragments, or demarcated sections, but curls. The “picture” in the second line of the above quotation sets up the fact of “never having seen you,” which establishes the beloved’s “fall” from Melancholia’s arms (122). Never “having seen you” also recalls the “negative” of the first few lines in the poem, which the above quotation echoes as well (122). In effect, the libretto uses each subject, be it time, history, or desire, to ref lect on all the others through a series of circles. More importantly, however, because the figure doing the dropping of “you” is Melancholia as the Angel of History, we can read the “you” of the poem as the subject of history, namely, us, as long as we don’t take our dropping out of history as an irreconcilable tragedy (122). Enacting Adorno’s negative dialectics, the Angel compares her loss of us to the “negative” that “pictures / the picture better / than the picture” (122). Her forgetting of us in her “capacious” insomnia provides a vast back wall against which we picture the picture of our lives more clearly without the violence that unself-conscious intellectual assertion requires (122). As Adorno writes, if negative dialectics calls for the self-ref lection of thinking, the tangible implication is that if thinking is to be true—if it is to be true today, in any case—it

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must also be a thinking against itself. If thought is not measured by the extremity that eludes the concept, it is from the outset in the nature of the musical accompaniment with which the SS liked to drown out the screams of its victims. (Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton [New York: Continuum Intl, 1973], 365.) The understanding created by negative space gives the Angel confidence in her picture of us, and through her eyes we begin to see ourselves; we begin to think against ourselves—we consider our bodies and ideas from the perspective of their limits—the “curls” of Melancholia’s solo. Adorno and the Angel are not invoking mere humility; they figure our lives as ref lected in the world’s particular ambiguities, failings, mistakes, and endings. The self-regard of that critical perspectives forces us to understand ourselves as subject to history, not standing as history’s grand purpose as the SS; imagined themselves. Falling from the Angel’s arms, falling out of history (that is, no longer standing as the fulfillment of history), our lives become interpretable: as we fall she “pictures” us “without / ever having seen” or “touched” us (Shadowtime, 122). Remembering Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (the relevant part of which Shadowtime includes in its notes) we, the readers in Bernstein’s libretto, lie in the rubble hurled at the Angel’s feet. (Recall that the Angel, whose face is “turned toward the past” does not see a “a chain of events” (as we do), but “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet” (Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn [New York: Schocken, 1968], 257.) The ruin history makes of us—our deaths, our inability to understand the world or hold ourselves in place within it with our words— allows us to use our failure to master our circumstances as the constitution of our agency. Our “negative picture” of our lives makes us comprehensible subjects of (beholden to) history as subjects who fall out of history, subjects who partake in the “single catastrophe”—the wars, personal traumas, and loves—of being in a world that itself occupies time and place (257). 39. Bernstein, Shadowtime, 87. 40. None of which is to say that Shadowtime’s humor is targeted satire—the jokes in Bernstein’s libretto depend on farce and word games. The anagrams of Benjamin’s name in Scene III, for one, riff on the word “Jew” in lines like “I’m a lent barn Jew / A mint bran jewel / A barn Jew melt in / a rent Jew in balm”; “An altern IBM Jew / Ran tan lib Jew me” (Shadowtime, 71). And the last three poems in Scene VI work through a series of puns that reduce to gibberish or become playfully preposterous in lines like “if you can’t see it it can still hurt you // you can’t see if it can it hurt you still // can’t if can you you still see it it hurt // see it still you hurt you can’t it can if ” (107–108), and “Madame Moiselle and Mr. Moiselle / Went for a walk with their gazelle” (108). As with all the jokes in Shadowtime, these lines leave readers not entirely sure of where they are, not entirely sure as to the meaning of what they are reading. They can only be sure the poems are silly. To become oriented, readers need to embrace the ludicrousness in these poems

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as a point of reference—they must rely on the constantly multiplying perspective of puns, nonsense, and sarcasm for guidance as an interpretive frame. When I try to read the word play surrounding the “hurt” in the above lines, for instance, the awkward phrasing forces the “hurt” to become more nuanced (108). While the lines are amusing, they link a nearly unpronounceable “pain” to an undifferentiated “it”; the difficulty of reading the jumbled lines where notions of suffering and the incomprehensible mix begins to point Job-like to the inexplicable suffering Shadowtime has constantly on its mind, in the form of the Holocaust and the history leading up to it (108). 41. Calvin, Commentaries, 23: 236–237. 42. Bernstein, Shadowtime, 84.

Six

What It Means to Be Reader-centered: Jonathan Edwards

1. Although how readers interact with Andrews’ poem Lip Service will not seamlessly stand in for the way readers engage other works written by poets associated with Language writing, Andrews is certainly not alone in his attempt to actively involve readers in the making of a poem’s meaning. Bob Perelman’s insistence on reading Language writing as a group phenomenon self-consciously opens poems to readerly participation. The “open text” Lyn Hejinian argues for in “The Rejection of Closure,” “by definition, is open to the world and particularly to the reader. It invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies” (“The Rejection of Closure,” in The Language of Inquiry [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000], 43). Therefore, while troubling Andrews’ account of the role of the reader in his poems cannot provide a complete rereading of Language writing in mass, its does, I hope, open up a particular inquiry into one of the foundational, shared interests of the poets working under the sign of Language writing. And at the very least, staging this rereading permits us to begin thinking again through what we can take readers of so-called Language writing to be doing when they turn to its texts. 2. Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1985), 47, 49. 3. Jonathan Edwards quotes from the Authorized (King James) Version of the Bible, so I will follow the same practice. All subsequent passages quoted from the Bible in this chapter will come from the King James. 4. Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” in A Jonathan Edwards Reader, ed. John E. Smith, Harry S. Stout, Kenneth P. Minkema (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 89. 5. John E. Smith, Harry S. Stout, Kenneth P. Minkema, introduction to A Jonathan Edwards Reader, xvii.

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6. Edwards, “Sinners,” in Reader, 102. 7. Robert Stuart, “Jonathan Edwards at Enfield: ‘And Oh the Cheerfulness and Pleasantness . . . ,’ ” American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography 48, no. 1 (1976 Mar.): 46–47. 8. The joyful response Edwards intends his congregation to experience is not as farfetched as contemporary readers might be inclined to think. As Stuart points out, the hopeful moments of Edwards’ sermon are positioned to receive maximum attention: “Edwards did not leave his listeners merely frightened of the future, with no hope of receiving regenerative grace”; although “the passages holding out hope to the congregation are few and brief in Edwards’ ‘Sinners’ sermon . . . their placement within the total architecture of the sermon gives them far more importance than can be measured by the number of words devoted to them” (“Jonathan Edwards at Enfield,” American Literature, 55–56). Stuart goes on to cite Willis J. Buckingham, who has noted that “if in the first two-thirds of Puritan sermons there is a sense of wading into deeper and deeper waters, of great energy expended but of slow progress, there is in the final section a sense of release and of ease of motion as the speaker’s voice moves rapidly toward a number of plain and urgent appeals.” Edwards used this formula, Buckingham argues, with consummate skill in the [Sinners] sermon. He fails to note, however, that in crucial position among those “plain and urgent appeals” is the offering of hope to the congregation. (56) 9. Edwards, “Sinners,” in Reader, 103. 10. Stuart points to the tradition of Calvinist worldliness when he writes, “Joseph Haroutunian was right, I think, in asserting that Edwards’ personal religion was fundamentally unconcerned with the life to come; that although Edwards preached about future punishments and joys, his attention was focused on the implications of that future vision for life now” (“Jonathan Edwards at Enfield,” American Literature, 55). 11. Gilles Deleuze, “letter á Michel Cressole,” in Michel Cressole, Deleuze (Paris: Editions Universitaries, 1973), 111, in Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, translators’ introduction to Bergsonism, by Gilles Deleuze (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 8. 12. We aught to distinguish this form of active reading from Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of inf luence.” Bloom limits transformative reading to strong poets, rather than to anyone who reads. Although I do not want to sound dismissive, for I do think that Bloom’s project still speaks wonderfully to the thorough instability of our words and bodies, the manner in which there are no “interpretations but only misinterpretations,” the sense that every poem or work of criticism is a misreading of a previous text (The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd ed. [New York: Oxford University Press, 1997], 95). As Bloom has it, a literary work is not an “overcoming of anxiety, but is that anxiety” (94). But what Bloom takes as the act of genius asserting itself is, in fact, I want to argue, just reading, what we all do when we pick up poems, newspapers, novels, and books of philosophy—the only real difference between us, or our various interpretations, is how well we read.

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1. Bruce Andrews, “Paradise & Method: A Transcript,” in Paradise & Method: poetics & praxis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 253. Andrews has spent little time shifting away from his foundational poetics, as much as he continues to expand the range and attention of his poetry. In an essay about Lip Service, Andrews writes that the “reading subject gets to be valorized” (“A Transcript,” in Paradise, 263). And in a talk at the 2008 National Poetry Foundation Conference on poetry of the 1970s, Andrews opened his essay, “Meaning, Method, Motive,” by reconfirming his commitment to reader-centered, anti-transparent poetry, writing: A little sketch about Language Writing from the 1970s on. How to frame it? How to distinguish it?” Crucial distinctiveness: a radically reader-centered writing— that honors claims about the experience of the reader—“in motion” & open to selftransforming. . . . So, what’s the method of making meaning which this more open & “in motion” type of reading calls for? . . . First: on its horizontal axis of making meaning—in the shape of Time. With pointedly disjunct results: dishonoring a linear narrative push, as well as the systematic rigors of metronome or breath or normative grammar. . . . And second: its vertical axis of making meaning—taking up (referential or expressive) Space. With distinctively (surface-hugging) nonrepresentational signifying results: instead of language transparent enough to let a text as a whole service illusion, or hidden fictive depths, or description, or anecdote, or the self-expression of an author. (“Meaning, Method, Motive,” paper presented at the National Poetry Foundation Conference, Orono, ME., 14 June, 2008) Andrews’ poetics, too, remain tied to the political project described in chapter two, as anyone familiar with Andrews’ project knows. 2. Bob Perelman, “This Just In: Past Haunts Lip Service,” Jacket 22 (May 2003), http:// jacketmagazine.com/22/and-perel.html. All quotes cited in this paragraph are from this Perelman essay. 3. I imagine that a number of readers have begun to think I have set up straw men, that my discussion of active reading thus far, and my previous short history of Language writing, depend on a too narrow account of the poems and poetics involved. I might agree if not for the fact that, as much as the various poets associated with Language writing have continued to push their styles and concerns beyond their original formulations, their attention to the central place of the reader in this poetry, and their interest in the material text and registers of meaning other than the strictly referential,

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Seven Bruce Andrews’ Lip Service and the Character of True Reading

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have not diminished. Therefore the texts that result do not, I think, fall outside my characterization of them. And in so far as my critical approach to Language writing sets up an account that in some respects reads Language writing against itself, I would say that to get at the full richness of the work we must endeavor to examine the consequences and implications of its poems and poetics, even if such a study leads us now to think about Language writing itself in ways that are perhaps unavailable to some of the writers who set it in motion. With that concern in mind, I would say that a largely history-centered reading of Language writing so close to the time of its production—in fact, still policed by some of its practitioners—risks privileging the poets’ accounts or agendas over the texts themselves (however much they might object to the very idea of a text “itself ”). I do not mean to argue for a return to new criticism or for the exclusion of cultural histories from our deliberations, but to suggest that poems and statements of poetics are more compelling, readable texts than their authors’ retrospective longings for them. With this recognition in mind, we still need, I trust, a much more clear sense of what readers do exactly in the material texts produced within the project of Language writing. 4. Jonathan Edwards, “A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections,” in A Jonathan Edwards Reader, ed. John E. Smith, Harry S. Stout, Kenneth P. Minkema (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 141. 5. In an earlier version of this manuscript, I compared the relationship Lip Service forges with its readers to the relationship between the victim and torturer in Gilles Deleuze’s account of masochism: In Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuze argues that within masochism we see “a victim in search of a torturer,” a victim “who needs to educate, persuade and conclude an alliance with the torturer” (Coldness and Cruelty, in Masochism, trans. Jean McNeil [New York: Zone Books, 1989], 20). For Deleuze, the torturer cannot be a sadist, at least she cannot enjoy her role as a sadist would because a sadist’s pleasure depends on his victim’s not enjoying her pain; similarly, a masochist’s pursuit of punishment creates a situation in which it is “he [the victim] who forms her [the torturer], dresses her for the part and prompts the harsh words she addresses to him. It is the victim who speaks through the mouth of his torturer, without sparing himself ” (22). In the masochistic relationship the victim instructs his torturer on the method and use of punishment and the torturer learns her role as she goes, bending to the will of her victim; rather than countering the masochist’s desire, punishment ensures it by delaying his gratification and intensifying his body’s senses. To call Lip Service a masochistic literary work figures readers as executing their allegiance to the poem when they act violently on it according to its epistemological method. It is readers who, in the position of the torturer, feel pain, or find that reading hurts because the poem requires readers to manufacture meaning out of an uncertain, occasionally violent vocabulary. When projecting themselves into Lip Service, readers do take on a kind of agency, but just as Deleuze’s torturer, readers find that the exercise of their authority is a reconstruction of their own words and bodies by the subject of their blows. Putting Lip Service in the position of the tortured—in Deleuze’s reading the pleasurable position—is

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only to say that the poem forwards its project through the discomfort readers feel when engaging its difficult material with the kind of attention it demands. That this metaphor might be troubled by questions like, “how would a text feel pleasure?” or “why can’t reading Lip Service be pleasurable?” does not so much invalidate the metaphor as point to how Lip Service forces us to redefine much of our literary experience. If reading Lip Service provides pleasure it is not of the kind most people refer to when they speak about “pleasure reading”—the type of reading they do on the beach or on airplanes—for the ironic, self-conscious reading strategies the poem demands make little room for being lost in the story, or being moved by the poem’s immediate imagery and emotional insight. 6. Bruce Andrews, Lip Service (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2001), 194. 7. William Wordsworth, The Prelude: Or Growth of a Poet’s Mind (text of 1805), ed. Ernest De Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 1, lines 1–4. 8. Andrews, Lip Service, 194. 9. Much of what goes for misogyny in Andrews’ work turns on readers reading it that way. Without any overt narrative context, a line like “You can’t portray women as they really are” leaves readers significant room for alternative interpretations (Lip Service, 8). Likewise, there are plenty of moments in Lip Service with men as their focus, as in the line “whenever he gets a full hard-on, / the loss of blood to his brain makes him pass out” (143). However, given the poem’s overtones of violence and critique of the white, male, heterosexual observer, I read the poem first as if the more open lines are gendered with a female subject in mind, and from the point of view of a heterosexual male, and second, with eye toward complicating those readings. 10. As I am sure is already evident, there is in Andrews’ poetry a close connection to queer theory, in particular the work of theorists like Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, as well as to the related writings of Michel Foucault; in “Be Careful Now You Know Sugar Melts in Water (On Sexuality),” Andrews himself describes his desire for his poetry to trouble the sexual assumptions and identities of a poem’s readers, a project that starkly aligns his work with the former thinkers. 11. Edwards, “Affections,” in Reader, 167. 12. Andrews, Lip Service, 143, 147. 13. Edwards, “Affections,” in Reader, 169, 164. 14. Andrews, Lip Service, 28, 271, 274. 15. Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” in AIDS: cultural analysis/cultural activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 217. 16. Edwards, “Affections,” in Reader, 157. 17. Edwards is careful to distinguish the force the Holy Spirit might have on a natural man from the transformation that the spiritual man undergoes: “The Spirit of God, in all his operations upon the minds of natural men, only moves, impresses, assists, improves, or some way acts upon natural principles; but gives no new spiritual principle. Thus when the Spirit of God gives a natural man visions, as he did Balaam, he only impresses a natural principle, viz. the sense of seeing, immediately exciting ideas of that sense; but he gives no new sense; neither is

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there anything supernatural, spiritual or divine in it” (“Affections,” in Reader, 161–162). 18. To help frame this reading of conversion I want to cite William James’ argument about the psychological aspects of belief because I think it provides a useful account of why some beliefs make sense to a number of people, but not to others (which does not diminish what is absolutely sudden and unexplainable about conversion). James argues that “A live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to him to whom it is proposed,” and he illustrates his claim with a proposition to his nineteenth-century American readers to convert to Islam, a notion that “makes no electric connection with your nature—it refuses to scintillate with any credibility at all” (“Will,” in Writings, 717–718). The aliveness or deadness of an idea depends on the individual thinker—in James’ example a proposition about God that sounds dead to a Christian does not sound so to a Muslim. James goes on to discuss living options, in which “both hypotheses are live ones” (718). Living options are choices between hypotheses with genuine appeal. Choosing between Christianity and Islam is not a living option for most westerners, but choosing between Christianity and agnosticism is—both make reasonable appeals to us in our cultural context. Lastly, James talks about forced and momentous options. A forced option is a choice that cannot be avoided; James gives as an example the demand “ ‘either accept this truth or go without it,’ ” which is different from the demand to “ ‘Either love me or hate me,’ ” a choice that may be avoided by remaining indifferent (718). A momentous option is unique—it will not come around again and is irreversible once the choice to go with it is made. James’ example is a trip to the North Pole, a trip that could mean life or death, and cannot be opted out of after it has been undertaken. I do not want here to discuss the place the Holy Spirit has in Christianity’s conception of understanding, nor the affect of James’ account on that idea; I do, however, want to highlight the implications his argument has for our own thinking about the structures and consequences of our readerly response to the texts that compel us. With James’ essay in mind, it seems to me that when we choose to read a literary work seriously we are doing so because it speaks to us in a way that resonates, and when we do so we begin to treat it as a living document—the ideas we find there are live hypotheses to us, and the options it presents us with resonate similarly. The more we immerse ourselves in that work, exposing ourselves to its literary demands, taking our active interpretations of it as central to our understanding of ourselves and the world, the more momentous its claims on our lives become, and the more those claims rightfully shape our lives. Naturally, then, while we actively read all works, and need to do so responsibly, we read within a network of texts that have a loose hierarchy in our minds. If in the process of reading a work we begin to take it as fundamental to our lives—like Christians tend to take the Bible, or many contemporary poets and intellectuals take specific works from our literary and philosophical canon—we must be careful not to back away from its demands too suddenly when those demands begin to counter our previously held politics and opinions, for to do so would be to misunderstand the

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momentousness of our interpretative path, a mistake that potentially separates us from the very roots and means of our understanding. 19. Bruce Andrews, “Meaning, Method, Motive” (paper presented at the National Poetry Foundation Conference, Orono, ME., 14 June, 2008). All quotes cited in this paragraph are from this Andrews essay. 20. Edwards, “Affections,” in Reader, 161. 21. The constant question of Language writing’s political efficacy is a related problem. Critics of Language writing regularly dismiss its politics as impractical, to which the various authors associated with it continually respond that its practical application is less the point than the kind of thinking it makes available, or they turn to the larger question of how our cultural spaces are organized and how our lives work in those spaces. In this regard, these poets sound a good deal like religious people who are constantly asked to justify their belief in God. Any reasonable person who believes in God, naturally, says that demonstrating God’s existence is impossible; the point is rather the way of living and thinking that a belief in God produces. In this manner the devote are no different than those poets invested in Language writing who are more concerned with how readers engage their work than defending their commitment to the linguistic and political truths that Language writing turns on. In an interview with Andrew Levy, Bruce Andrews was asked: “Is this kind of practice that you’ve developed going to be meaningful anywhere outside of your social class and intellectual background” (Bruce Andrews, “Discussion,” interview by Andrew Levy, in Paradise, 63)? Andrews answers: “Unanswerable question. If you’re attempting to prefigure the constructedness and reconstructedness of things at various levels, it seems to me that that’s going to be perceivable, that’s going to be able to be part of the reading process; so that you could see how things appear to have been levitated to a certain degree—out of the general framework. On the other hand, there may be a certain kind of apprehension of the way the system works at all these levels that isn’t going to be readily available to large groups and categories of readers. I think that’s something we all recognize. . . . [O]f course it’s the most common way of dismissing all experimental or avant-garde or modernist writing or art of the last century, in political terms. When everything is framed in terms of efficacy, the work that gets promoted as efficacious is work that simply, to me, reinforces the very blindnesses that I think are so central to the way the system holds itself together” (63–64). 22. I have endeavored to preserve the development of my reading of this passage as it occurred to me. 23. Andrews, Lip Service, 274. 24. Often we are tempted, out of sheer exhaustion, fear, or uncertainty, to fix a particular body in place—God’s, our own, a lover’s. We are tempted by the hope that we might bring our world more to rest. Lip Service asks us to refuse the lure, and choose instead to be always at risk in interpretation, and when we do we begin to take on the joy and pleasure of finding ourselves compromised in, and by, our texts. Performing our duty to a work like Lip Service means looking for all the

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ways it thrills and exposes us, and it means admitting, despite ourselves at times, that words do not protect us from what is disturbing about other people and their perversions and their desires and their meanings, but immerses us in them. Just as it immerses others in what is disturbing, delightful, and perverse about us. 25. It is important to point out as well that because Lip Service commits itself to making a life practice available to readers, one that includes their active participation in the making of meaning, Lip Service provides no guarantee it will be read progressively, and in this choice it once again reminds us of religion, which also cannot guarantee that its practitioners will love God or devote themselves to following his law. Readers can only reread their hearts and actions in the way Lip Service would have if they submit to its discipline, and only by surrendering to this discipline do my tendencies toward brutality and other failures in fellowship find their undoing. If I do not yield, I will discover in the poem the prejudice and useless violence I bring with me. Although I am sympathetic with Juliana Spahr’s claim that Andrews’ work does not allow the space of privilege to emerge in it, and that what is important about his poetry is the way it “privileges the sharable” and “encourages connection,” I think it is important to not mistake readers’ participation in the making of meaning for authority (Autonomy, 59). If we make that mistake too often we will begin to believe that readers’ predispositions rule the poem, which will undercut the very process that makes Andrews’ radical politics available. 26. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations is the backdrop that illuminates Lip Service’s forceful language use. Recalling Wittgenstein’s “beetle in a box” illustration reminds us that meaning does not depend on individual experience (like having a beetle in a box), but on having words that enter their users into a public sphere. Wittgenstein writes, now someone tells me that he knows what pain is only from his own case!— Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a “beetle.” No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle—Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing—But suppose the word “beetle” has a use in these people’s language?—If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might be empty. (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2nd ed. rept. trans. G.E.M. Anscombe [Oxford: Blackwell , 1958], 100.) 27. Terrence Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain (New York: W.W. Norton 1997), 23. 28. The presence of a form of mysticism in my argument—in this chapter certainly, but also throughout the book and in the texts I cite—is significant enough to warrant a bit more comment. The line connecting my various references to and uses of mysticism, which at times I know informs the tone of my argument as much as its direction, becomes most clear when attached to notions of the literary. A central claim of this book is that we can trust literary works to sustain meaning because they are literary: as we’ve seen repeatedly in this chapter and book, the

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formal and linguistic qualities of a literary work create the possibility and location of meaning; as we read we interact with those qualities, disciplining ourselves to them, and pushing back against their requirements. In large measure our agreement or disagreement with a given literary work depends on how convincing we find its language use, and the more we engage a text—the more we carefully consider a literary work’s literariness (what I called a text’s “grace” in chapter four)—the more material it provides us with to sustain meaning in the place of now suspect authors, universals outside language, and the isolated desires of readers. And we have watched such a turn to the literary become exceptionally apparent in Lip Service as it hammers away at the readerly and authorial ego, and yet, despite Andrews’ materialist philosophy, it is this formal strategy that ref lects, quite overtly, the practice of mysticism: Lip Service imbues language with the mystery the Paradiso grants God even as it forces readers to manufacture their readerly presence in conjunction with this unmoved mover (and here Lip Service is only doing literally what the larger tradition of the avant-garde and Language writing do formally, which is one reason why I’ve chosen it as illustrative). In doing so Lip Service formally replaces God with language, giving it all the attributes of a divine creator, which in turn grants the literariness of the poem (language made manifest) the authority and mystery of the Word, an authority and mystery Lip Service asks readers to trust. In this respect, the expansive registers of understanding we’ve witnessed readers capable of experiencing in the poem—including the visceral, emotional, and imaginative movements of readers’ minds and bodies—ref lect religious ecstatics’ total immersion in, and surrender to, God. When readers produce meaning in Lip Service’s disciplinary, shifting and mysterious textual practice they experience the ways we cannot grasp language, or meaning, fully—the ways it remains beyond our control, even as it produces our thoughts and gets inside our heads by way of the texts we read. The meanings that result speak to Lip Service’s sense that when we read, when we create the necessary relationships, contexts, and materials for meaning’s embodiment and f lourishing, we have the same kind of body we have when we have sex, or worship. Lip Service puts language in the place of God most starkly at the end of the poem. The last two sections of Lip Service (Primum Mobile 9 and 10) correspond to Canto XXXIII of the Paradiso, where the poet reveals the Empyrean (the heaven at the center of the universe). By including nine of Dante’s celestial spheres and cutting out the final Empyrean and adding the Earth as the first sphere, Andrews lines up his “prime mover” with Dante’s heaven. Dante’s Canto opens with a prayer to the Virgin Mary and depicts a world understood fully through a vision of the Trinity and the Incarnation. As the poet proceeds he considers the divine mystery of God, his reunion with Man through Christ after the Fall, and the possibility of our salvation by faith. Theologically speaking, Dante experiences the mystery of the Absolute firsthand and thereby finds it certain and everlasting. The Paradiso concludes: High phantasy lost power and here broke off; Yet, as a wheel moves smoothly, free from jars,

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My will and my desire were turned by love, The love that moves the sun and the other stars. (The Divine Comedy 3: Paradise, trans. Dorothy L. Sayers and Barbara Reynolds [Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1962], 347, lines 142–145.) The failure of the poet’s language and intellect, the “High phantasy” that lets him write, matters little because Christ, “the love that moves the sun and the other stars,” sustains his “will” and “desire” (Comedy 3, 347, lines 142, 145, 144). Surrendering his will to Christ resolves Dante’s initial metaphysical crisis of being lost in a forest at the outset of the Divine Comedy. He no longer tries to find his own way, but follows the way of the Lord, where the poet’s desire and motivation are most satisfied. Dante here endorses the Christian view of Jesus as the one who gives people to themselves: as the site of salvation, Jesus makes the Christian’s life of faith and hope possible. Commenting on the deliverance to come through Jesus, Paul writes, “And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body. For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it” (Rom. 8:23–25, AV). The faith that Jesus will redeem Paul’s body is his hope, and the poet of the Paradiso shares his faith. Dante’s anticipation of redemption finds resolution, as Paul says it does, in the resurrected Christ—the “love” centering the poet’s “desire” and “will” (Comedy 3, 347, line 144). In the metaphor of the wheel the poet becomes what he should, finally recognizable to himself in harmony with God. But “hope” lays “still late” in Lip Service. The poem ends: cope lush coda abruptless, risk disappears closing perfume row of exclamation points unleash all tenderness suspends future to voice vote to heat for hope lay still late let’s start all over stars. (Lip Service, 380) As a redeemed “future,” Christ—the now absent “Love” that “moves” the stars in the Paradiso—is “suspend[ed]” by a “row of exclamation points” (380). The injunction to “start all over stars” replaces the “Love that moves the sun and the other stars” (Lip Service 380; Comedy 3, 347, line 145). Standing in awe of grammar (the “exclamation points” are the catalyst of these lines), not the Incarnation, readers understand their lives, bodies, and ideas as fully inscribed within language (Lip Service, 380). Composed of celestial bodies, Lip Service’s move to “start all over stars” traps readers in the poem (while the stars of this line are not clearly planetary bodies, they certainly bring the formal structure of Andrews’ poem to mind); readers simply keep reading, presumably returning to the “start” of Lip Service “all over” again (380). With the poem as their linguistic context, readers possess no means of becoming recognizable without Lip Service; when they start

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all over with Lip Service, they affirm their inability to get beyond language and acknowledge themselves as bodies made sense of by words. Eliding transcendence, Andrews’ poem leaves behind the Paradiso’s teleological progression toward the divine and makes living in language, reading Lip Service, the definition of who we are. Readers’ everyday experiences are mystical: they are in communion with, and are inseparable from, the maker of their world—language, the “Primum Mobile” in Andrews’ formal vision, materialized here in Lip Service. And in the end, the constant return to the theme of language’s creative, ubiquitous presence in our lives, when paired with the poem’s desire to expand the ways in which readers experience meaning in language, testifies most clearly to Lip Service’s mysticism, for mysticism itself relentlessly moves away from an impoverished notion of perception and toward a full joining with the divine. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James argues that while “no authority emanates” from mystical experiences that require those outside them to accept their governance, they are “authoritative over those who have them” because “mystical experiences are as direct perceptions of fact for those who have them as any sensations ever were for us” (The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, Modern Library Paperback ed. [New York: Random House, 2002], 461–462). The “existence of mystical states absolutely overthrows the pretension of nonmystical states to be the sole and ultimate dictators of what we may believe. . . . [T]here never can be a state of facts to which new meaning may not truthfully be added, provided the mind ascend to a more enveloping point of view” (465–466). James readily confesses that mysticism does not provide sure ground for a single belief, but opens up a wide range of possible beliefs—he emphasizes the relationship mysticism creates with our perceptions. I want to cite the end of James’ essay at length because his sense that understanding and evidence continually develop finds its fullest expression as an interest in approaching truth: It must always remain an open question whether mystical states may not possibly be such superior points of view, windows through which the mind looks out upon a more extensive and inclusive world. The difference of the views seen from the different mystical windows need not prevent us from entertaining this supposition. The wider world would in that case prove to have a mixed constitution like that of this world, that is all. It would have its celestial and its infernal regions, its tempting and its saving moments, its valid experiences and its counterfeit ones, just as our world has them; but it would be a wider world all the same. We should have to use its experiences by selecting and subordinating and substituting just as is our custom in this ordinary naturalistic world; we should be liable to error just as we are now; yet the counting in of that wider world of meanings, and the serious dealing with it, might, in spite of all the perplexity, be indispensable stages in our approach to the final fullness of the truth. (466–467) James trusts realms other than the strictly intellectual to discover knowledge: throughout his lecture what James calls the mystical he repeatedly ties to art,

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Notes

Notes

fiction, poetry, and antiestablishment religious expression, and in the ecstatic, strange, and artistic he locates reliable avenues of perception. Mystical experiences productively destabilize understanding, as James’ willingness to part critical uncertainty from anxiety demonstrates. The more complicated the idea the closer it comes to veracity, and accounting for the world outside the dictates of realism or literalism might be the most difficult task of all. As discernment becomes harder to come by, James seems to want to reassure us. In both his tone and his argument James says the loss of rationality is not the loss of knowledge, and the loss of universals is not the loss of truth. On comfortably unsteady ground James pushes us to bring everything available to us to bear on our acts of interpretation, even those experiences and visions we can’t quite make sense of, so that we may approach what is true. His confidence that we can do so turns the goal of interpretation from explanation to thinking—knowledge produced by our mind’s careful and imaginative exposure to the “wider world” (466). As I have tried to demonstrate, Lip Service persistently makes such a mystical experience and understanding of language available to readers by asking them to organize their thoughts through its disjunctive grammar. That a close reading of one passage creates the potential for evolving, limitless meaning makes absurd the idea that readers could ever arrive at a definitive interpretation of the poem, although, as we have seen, readers do repeatedly gain particular meanings in Lip Service, and the more they gain the more rich their experiences of the poem become. Readers, in effect, constantly approach meaning in Lip Service just as James’ mystic approaches truth. Practically understanding and experiencing reading as a pursuit of truth that makes understanding available gives readers an ecstatic and optimistic experience of the inexhaustibility of knowledge and language. The mysticism of Lip Service casts off radical skepticism and makes the impossibility of finalizing truth the agent that sustains meaning in individual acts of reading, acts that cleave to the words, tone, sounds, and lines of a specific passage. In Lip Service, readers perpetually seek a bigger and more complex world by way of what at first does not fit their perceptions or their expectations of wholeness. 29. Jacobs, Reading, 53. 30. Some religious conservatives would, I think, citing C.S. Lewis’ The Four Loves, label what I am describing as “eros.” In his book Lewis provides an account of the four Greek words for love, which are “storge” (natural affection), “philia” (friendship, or familial devotion), “eros” (sexual or romantic love) and “agape” (self less love). As “eros,” the argument would go, the compulsion I advocate for does not correspond to the highest form of love, which is “agape,” the kind of love God has for his people, and is the kind of love people should, by means of a relationship with God, aspire to have for each other. I imagine too that these same readers might go on to suggest that my argument reproduces a form of pagan idolatry, making the same mistake the Greek worshipers of Aphrodite did when they confused erotic desire and expression for spirituality and worship, thus failing to keep their various relationships in their proper, natural bounds. While Lewis’ categories of love are useful for framing the ways we love, and individual

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expressions of love do have obvious limits within particular relationships (a parent sexually abusing his child is clearly not love), I would respond to such a reading of my argument by pointing out that it does not seem to be the case that the borders between these kinds of love are clear, nor do we experience only one of these loves at a time in our relationships with one another, or even with God, especially when a relationship is healthy. The Bible, for one, regularly talks about God as a lover and as a friend, and repeatedly invokes the picture of a savior who loves people unconditionally. Taking the Bible seriously it seems to me means that these descriptions are not metaphors unattached to a believer’s relationship with God, but are actual expressions of how she experiences God in multiple ways at the same time—just as a father can enjoy his son’s company, not because the child is his son, but because the man likes the kid. Strictly policing the lines between these kinds of love impoverishes them rather than letting them, as they must, work together to enrich our relationships. My turn to eros, if we can even call it that, is not an attempt to elevate it above other forms of love; I mean only to come to terms with how our interactions with our books and one another in language can regulate our lives and teach us about them—and it is an attempt to be honest about how this instruction is an act of submission to what we are often unready for. 31. Andrews, “A Transcript,” in Paradise, 268, 251.

Eight

Reading Alone

1. This notion of being in pursuit of oneself, needless to say, has a great deal to do with Emersonian perfectionism, which I previously discussed in relationship to Charles Bernstein’s work (see chap. 5, n. 5). 2. Emmanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 68–69. 3. Kenneth Dauber, “Beginning at the Beginning in Genesis,” in Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking after Cavell after Wittgenstein, ed. Kenneth Dauber and Walter Jost (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 334. 4. Crosson, “ ‘Fides’ and ‘Credere,’ ” 400.

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Notes

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CI T E D

Adorno, Theodor. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.B. Ashton. New York: Continuum, 1973. Andrews, Bruce., and Charles Bernstein. “Repossessing the Word.” In The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. Edited by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984. Andrews, Bruce. Lip Service. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2001. ———. “Meaning, Method, Motive.” Paper presented at the National Poetry Foundation Conference, Orono, ME., 14 June, 2008. ———. “Paradise & Method: A Transcript.” In Paradise & Method: poetics & praxis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996. ———. “Discussion.” Interview by Andrew Levy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996. Aquinas, St. Thomas. Summa Theologica: A Concise Translation. Edited and translated by Timothy McDermott. Allen: Christian Classics, 1991. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1968. Bernstein, Charles. “Centering the Postmodern.” Socialist Review 19 (1989): 48. Quoted in Marjorie Perloff, Radical Artifice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) 14. ———. Introduction to The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy. Edited by Charles Bernstein. New York: Roof, 1990. ———. “Optimism and Critical Excess.” In A Poetics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. ———. “Poetics.” In Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures. 3rd ed. Edited by David Nicholls. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2007. ———. “Reznikoff ’s Nearness.” In My Way. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. ———. Shadowtime. Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2005. ———. “The Objects of Meaning: Reading Cavell Reading Wittgenstein.” In Content’s Dream. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1986.

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Bernstein, Charles. “The Revenge of the Poet-Critic, or The Parts Are Greater Than the Sum of the Whole.” In My Way. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. ———. “A Conversation with Charles Bernstein.” Interviewed by David Caplan. The Antioch Review 62, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 131–141. ———. “Charles Bernstein Interview.” Interviewed by Eric Denut. The Argonist Online, http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Bernstein%20interview.htm. Bersani, Leo. “Is the Rectum a Grave?” In AIDS: cultural analysis / cultural activism. Edited by Douglas Crimp. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Brown, Wendy. Politics Out of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. ———. States of Injury. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Bruns, Gerald. The Material of Poetry: Sketches for a Philosophical Poetics. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. Calvin, John. Calvin: Commentaries. Vol. 23 of The Library of Christian Classics. Edited and translated by Joseph Haroutunian and Louise Pettibone Smith. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1958. ———. Commentaries on the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans. Edited and translated by John Owen. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1947. ———. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Vol. 1. Edited by John T. McNeill. Translated by Ford Lewis Battles. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960. Cavell, Stanley. Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. ———. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. ———. This New Yet Unapproachable America. Albuquerque: Living Batch Press, 1989. ———. Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2005. Connolly, William. Why I am not a Secularist. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Crosson, Frederick J. “ ‘Fides’ and ‘Credere’: W.C. Smith on Aquinas.” The Journal of Religion 65, no. 3 ( July 1985): 399–412. Cusset, François. French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Dante, Alighieri. The Divine Comedy 3: Paradise. Translated by Dorothy L. Sayers and Barbara Reynolds. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1962. Dauber, Kenneth. “Beginning at the Beginning in Genesis.” In Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking after Cavell after Wittgenstein. Edited by Kenneth Dauber and Walter Jost. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003. Deacon, Terrence. The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. Deleuze, Gilles. Coldness and Cruelty. In Masochism. Translated by Jean McNeil. New York: Zone Books, 1989.

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———. “letter á Michel Cressole.” Quoted in Michel Cressole, Deleuze (Paris: Editions Universitaries, 1973), 111, quoted in Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, translators’ introduction to Bergsonism, by Gilles Deleuze (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 8. Deming, Richard. Listening on All Sides: Toward and Emersonian Ethics of Reading. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Derrida, Jacques. “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority.” In Acts of Religion.Edited by Gil Anidjar. Translated by Mary Quaintance. New York: Routledge, 2002. ———. The Gift of Death. Translated by David Wills. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1996. Didion, Joan. “Slouching toward Bethlehem.” In Slouching toward Bethlehem. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981. Edwards, Jonathan. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” In A Jonathan Edwards Reader. Edited by John E. Smith, Harry S. Stout, Kenneth P. Minkema. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. ———. “A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections.” In A Jonathan Edwards Reader. Edited by John E. Smith, Harry S. Stout, Kenneth P. Minkema. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Evans, K.L., Whale!. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Ferneyhough, Brian. “Words and Music,” The Argonist Online, http://www.argotistonline. co.uk/Ferneyhough%20essay.htm. Fish, Stanley. “Demonstration vs. Persuasion: Two Models of Critical Activity.” In Is There a Text in This Class?. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980. ———. “Why We Can’t All Just Get Along.” In The Trouble With Principle. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Fitch, Fabrice. Liner notes to Shadowtime by Brian Ferneyhough. NMC, 2006. Fredman, Stephen. “Mysticism: Neo-paganism, Buddhism, and Christianity.” In A Concise Companion to Twentieth-century American Poetry. Edited by Stephen Fredman. Malden: Blackwell, 2005. Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986. Hartley, George. Textual Politics and the Language Poets. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Heine, Heinrich. Almansor (1821). Quoted in Michael Berenbaum The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), 25. Hejinian, Lyn. The Language of Inquiry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Hewitt, Andrew. Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-Garde. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. Houlihan, Joan. “The Best American Liturgy: How Contemporary American Poets Are Denaturing the Poem, Part IX.” http://www.bostoncomment.com/bostonc9.htm. Howe, Susan. My Emily Dickinson. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1985.

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Jacobs, Alan. A Theology Of Reading: The Hermeneutics Of Love. Cambridge: Westview Press, 2001. James, William. “The Will to Believe.” In The Writings of William James. Edited by John J. McDermott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977. ———. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Modern Library Paperback Edition. New York: Random House, 2002. Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. Lazer, Hank. “Returns: Innovative Poetry and Questions of ‘Spirit.’ ” In Lyric & Spirit: Selected Essays, 1996–2008. Richmond: Omnidawn, 2008. Levinas, Emmanuel. Nine Talmudic Readings. Translated by Annette Aronowicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. MacIntyre, Alasdair. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988. Mason, Christopher. “Gay Marriage Galvanizes Canada’s Right.” New York Times, Sunday, 19 November 2006, late ed., sec 1. Office of Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi. “Pelosi: Republican Bill Undermines Protections for Endangered Species.” Press Release. 29 Sept. 2005, House of Representatives. http://www.house.gov/pelosi/press/releases/Sept05/ESA.html. Pecora, Vincent. Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Perelman, Bob. The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. ———. Ten to One: Selected Poems. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1999. ———. “This Just In: Past Haunts Lip Service.” Jacket 22 (May 2003), http:// jacketmagazine.com/22/and-perel.html. Perloff, Marjorie. 21st-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2002. ———. “After Language Poetry: Innovation and Its Theoretical Discontents.” In Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004. ———. The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996. ———. The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. ———. “Language Poetry and the Lyric Subject: Ron Silliman’s Albany, Susan Howe’s Buffalo.” In Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004. Scholem, Gershom. On Jews and Judaism in Crisis. Edited by Werner J. Dannhauser. New York: Schocken Books, 1976. Silliman, Ron. “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World.” In The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. Edited by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.

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———. “Who Speaks: Ventriloquism and the Self in the Poetry Reading.” In Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. Edited by Charles Bernstein. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Smith, James K.A., and John Milbank. Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-secular Theology. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004. Smith, John., Harry S. Stout and Kenneth P. Minkema. Introduction to A Jonathan Edwards Reader. Edited by John E. Smith, Harry S. Stout, and Kenneth P. Minkema. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Smith, Patrick J. The Tenth Muse: A Historical Study of the Opera Libretto. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970. Spahr, Juliana. Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001. Stuart, Robert. “Jonathan Edwards at Enfield: ‘And Oh the Cheerfulness and Pleasantness . . . ’ ” American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography 48, no. 1 (March 1976): 46–59. Thompson, John L. “Calvin as biblical interpreter.” In The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin. Edited by Donald K. McKim. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Culture and Value. Translated by Peter Winch. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1980. ———. Philosophical Investigations. 2nd ed. Reprint. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1958. Williams, Williams Carlos. Spring and All. In Imaginations. Edited by Webster Schott. New York: New Directions, 1971. Wordsworth, William. The Prelude: Or Growth of a Poet’s Mind (text of 1805). Edited by Ernest De Selincourt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970.

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Abraham, biblical story of, 3, 41–44, 131, 150n7 Acker, Kathy, 101 active reading, 83–84, 90, 102, 108, 130, 166n12, 167n3 Adorno, Theodor, 77, 79, 144n10, 163–64n38 aesthetics: belief as basis for, 32; and Language writing, 3, 36, 139n2; Wittgenstein on, 139n2 allegory, 45, 47 Allen, Donald, 141n7 Althusser, Louis, 144n10 Altieri, Charles, 19–20, 21 Andrews, Bruce, 8–9, 16, 37, 83, 86, 136, 144n11, 145n12, 171n21; on poetics, 121, 167n1. See also Lip Service antifoundationalism, 22, 83–84, 143n5 Aquinas, Thomas, 29–30, 33–36, 44, 52, 150n3 Armantrout, Rae, 9, 18, 37 Ashbery, John, 101 astonishment, faith as, 44 Auden, W. H., 10 Augustine, 29 authorship, critique of, 6, 17–18, 20–22, 143–45nn10–12, 168n3. See also readerly authority Bakhtin, Mikhail, 128 Baldwin, James, 115

Barth, Karl, 149n2 Barthes, Roland, 18, 20, 21 Bataille, Georges, 117–18 Baudrillard, Jean, 144n10 belief: Aquinas on, 29–30, 34; and Bernstein’s theory of poetics, 34; compared to doubt, 29, 30–31; as frame of reference, 31–32; interruption of, 147n9; William James on, 170n18; in Language writing, 6, 27, 32, 34, 37, 139n2 Benjamin, Walter, 55–61, 64, 66–70, 74, 76, 80, 160n8, 161n18, 162n27, 164n38 Bergson, Henri, 100 Bernstein, Charles, 8–9, 16, 83, 144n10, 146n17; and Cavellian Emersonianism, 52, 154–59n5, 161n15; and disjunction, 52, 54, 63, 68, 159–60n5, 162n37; on optimism, 52–54; on poetics, 33–37, 39; and pragmatism, 160–61n15; on Reznikoff ’s work, 157–58n5. See also Shadowtime Bernstein, J. M., 162n27 Bersani, Leo, 117–18, 120 Bible: Calvin on, 40–48, 53, 78, 151–52n10, 152–53n14; and Dante’s work, 174n28; Edwards on, 84, 85–86, 88–90, 92, 94–102; and radical orthodox theology, 149–50n2

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I N DE X

Index

Bloom, Harold, 166n12 Bly, Robert, 146n17 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 128 Bowles, Samuel, 140n5 Brandom, Robert, 161n15 Brown, Wendy, 4, 5, 14, 19, 22, 140n5, 142n5 Bruns, Gerald, 162–63n37 Buckingham, Willis J., 166n8 Bultmann, Rudolf, 149n2 Burroughs, William, 101 Butler, Judith, 169n10 Calvin, John, 6, 7, 40–48, 51, 133–36, 150–53nn; and Bernstein’s work, 52–54, 62, 65, 70, 75, 78, 79; on the Bible, 40–48, 53, 78, 151–52n10, 152–53n14; on damnation, 45; on divine mercy, 43, 48; and Edwards’s work, 85–86, 89–92, 93–94, 166n10; on faith, 40–45, 47–48, 52, 54, 78–79, 136, 149n2, 150n3; on God, 40–44, 53–54, 70, 78–79, 136; on grace, 41, 42, 44, 70, 91, 133, 135, 136, 151nn9–10, 152n14; on righteousness, 41, 75, 152n10; on salvation, 40, 43, 44, 152n14; on sinfulness, 42, 43, 44, 91, 151–52n10, 151n7 capitalism, Language writing’s critique of, 17, 25, 138n2 Caplan, David, 155n5 Catholicism, 139n3, 151n9 Cavell, Stanley, 46, 52, 101, 154–59n5, 154n5, 161n15 Christological interpretation, 46–47, 88, 95, 153 circumcision, 42–43, 44, 152n10 Connolly, William, 10, 140n5 conservatism, 51, 148–49n15, 153n2, 176n30 constructionism: and aesthetics, 3; and faith, 7; and Language writing, 17; and political change, 5; and theology, 149n2

conversion experience, 23, 119–20, 121–22, 146nn17–19 counterculture, Didion’s critique of, 3–4 Creeley, Robert, 9 Crosson, Frederick, 29, 30 Cusset, François, 5 damnation: Calvin on, 45; Edwards on, 88, 89, 91, 92, 94, 95 Dante Alighieri, 67, 103–4, 173–74n28 Darwin, Charles, 13 Dauber, Kenneth, 134, 135 David, biblical story of, 46–47, 151n10 Deacon, Terence, 127 deconstruction, 150n7 Deep Image, 146n17 Deleuze, Gilles, 86, 100–101, 144n10, 168n5 Deming, Richard, 139n2 Denut, Eric, 55, 68 Derrida, Jacques, 12, 69, 101, 145n12, 150–51n7 Dickens, Charles, 101 Dickinson, Emily, 9, 85, 86, 141n7 Didion, Joan, 3–4 disjunction: and biblical narrative, 151n10; and faith, 8, 33, 39, 42–44; and grace, 151–52n10; as sin, 43, 44, 52 disjunction, in Language writing, 6, 19, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 43; and Andrews’s work, 103, 108–10, 120, 121, 122; and Bernstein’s work, 52, 54, 63, 68, 159–60n5, 162n37 doubt, compared to belief, 29, 30–31 Duncan, Robert, 13, 141n12 Durkheim, Émile, 160n8 Eco, Umberto, 18 Edwards, Jonathan, 6, 7, 83–102, 134, 166nn8,10, 169n17; and Andrews’s work, 105–8, 114–16, 118–22, 127; on the Bible, 84, 85–86, 88–90, 92, 94–102; on damnation, 88, 89, 91, 92,

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94, 95; on divine mercy, 41, 90–92; on God, 41, 86–100, 105–6, 118–19, 127, 169n17; and joyfulness, 85, 91, 92, 97, 99, 106, 107, 108, 166n8; and Judaism, 85–86, 88–89, 93–94, 95; and love, 89–90, 92–93, 97, 98, 106–8, 119–20, 134, 136; and readerly authority, 86, 100–101, 102; on redemption, 89, 94, 97, 98; on righteousness, 90; on salvation, 87, 88, 90, 92, 93, 97, 98; on sinfulness, 88, 89, 91, 92–93, 97, 99; works by: “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” 84–102, 166n8; “A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections,” 105–8, 114, 116, 118–19, 169–70n17 Einstein, Albert, 56, 60–62, 64, 68 embarrassment, 1, 137–38n1 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 52, 101, 139n2, 141n7, 154–59n5, 161n15 Enlightenment, 5, 148n15, 160n8 epistemology: and Bernstein’s Shadowtime, 65, 67; and faith, 7–8; and Language writing, 19, 23, 26; and postliberalism, 4–5, 140n5 ethics: and Bernstein’s Shadowtime, 65, 71; and Bernstein’s theory of poetics, 33, 35, 37; Derrida on, 150–51n7; and Wittgenstein’s aesthetics, 139n2 Eucharist, sacrament of, 151n9 Evans, K. L., 162n33 exile, in Judeo-Christian tradition, 132–35 Faber, Johannes, 46 faith: Aquinas on, 29–30, 34, 35, 44, 52, 150n3; and astonishment, 44; and Bernstein’s work, 33–34, 35, 39, 54–55, 78–80, 83, 154n5; Calvin on, 40–45, 47–48, 52, 54, 78–79, 136, 149n2, 150n3; as critical method, 32–33, 39–40, 48–49; and disjunction, 8, 33, 39, 42–44; epistemology of, 7–8; and

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imagination, 10–11, 39; interpretation based on, 30, 31, 32, 36, 37, 39, 44, 49; Kierkegaard on, 40; in Language writing, 5, 6, 13, 26–27, 37, 39, 55, 83–84; and Pecora’s work, 160n8; and political relations, 8, 14, 51, 147n7, 148–49n15. See also reading, faith as basis for Fence (periodical), 138n1 Ferneyhough, Brian, 55–56, 61, 68, 77, 161n18 Finkelstein, Norman, 141n12 Fischer, Norman, 141n12 Fish, Stanley, 30, 51 Fisher, Allen, 144n10 Fitch, Fabrice, 68, 161n18 Foucault, Michel, 18, 144n10, 145n12, 160n10 fragmentation. See disjunction frames of reference, 31–32 Fredman, Stephen, 13 Freud, Sigmund, 13, 117 Futurism, 138n2 Gehry, Frank, 144n11 gender, cultural construction of, 17 Genesis story, 134 Ginsberg, Allen, 141n12 Gintis, Herbert, 140n5 God, 1, 3, 7, 9, 136; Aquinas on, 30, 34, 35, 44, 150n3; Calvin on, 40–44, 53–54, 70, 78–79, 136; Edwards on, 41, 86–100, 105–6, 118–19, 127, 169n17; as frame of reference, 31–32; and Judaism, 132–33. See also love, in relation to God Goffman, Erving, 31–32 grace: Calvin on, 41, 42, 44, 70, 91, 133, 135, 136, 151nn9–10, 152n14; as literariness, 44, 173n28 Grenier, Robert, 9, 16 H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), 13, 141n12 Haroutunian, Joseph, 166n10

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Hartley, George, 24–26, 145n15 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 101 Heidegger, Martin, 101, 154n5 Heine, Heinrich, 72 Heisenberg, Werner, 13 Hejinian, Lyn, 9, 18–19, 37, 145n12, 165n1 Heraclites, 77 hermeneutics: and Calvinism, 46–48; faith as basis for, 8, 83; and Language writing, 5, 19, 26–27; and political relations, 3, 4 Hewitt, Andrew, 138n2 Hitler, Adolf, 56, 68, 76–78 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 56, 64 Houlihan, Joan, 139–40n3 Howe, Fanny, 9 Howe, Susan, 9, 23, 37, 85–86, 101, 141n12, 144nn10, 11 humanism, 22, 51, 140n5, 148n15 identity politics, 4, 142n5 imagination: and faith, 10–11, 39; and Language writing, 11, 27; and W. C. Williams’s work, 11–12 individualism, postliberal critique of, 22, 23, 142–43n5 innovative poetry: compared to religion, 1–3, 9; faith in, 9–11, 13, 14, 37, 39, 55; and Fredman on mysticism, 13; and Lazer on spirit, 12–13; tradition of, 140–41n7. See also Language writing interpretation, faith as basis for, 30, 31, 32, 36, 37, 39, 44, 83–84; and Andrews’s Lip Service, 49; and Bernstein’s Shadowtime, 49; in Calvinism, 44, 45, 46, 47, 152–53n14; and Edwards’s work, 49. See also Christological interpretation intersubjectivity, 10 Jacobs, Alan, 48, 128 Jakobson, Roman, 21

James, William, 37, 146n18, 170n18, 175–76n28 Jameson, Frederic, 24–26, 145n15 Jesus Christ, 41, 42, 46–48, 70, 98–99, 106, 134, 135, 149–50n2, 152–53n14, 173–74n28 Joan of Arc, 56 Johnson, Ronald, 9, 101, 141n12 joy, Christian sense of: and Calvin’s work, 70; and Edwards’s work, 85, 91, 92, 97, 99, 106, 107, 108, 166n8 Judaism, 2, 44, 46, 57, 58, 64–65, 66–67, 131–33; and Edwards’s work, 85–86, 88–89, 93–94, 95 Kabbalah, 58 Kaddish, 66–67 Kaf ka, Franz, 144n10 Kierkegaard, Søren, 9, 40 Laclau, Ernesto, 140n5, 144n10 L=A=N=G=U=A-G=E (periodical), 16, 17, 138n2 Language writing: and aesthetics, 3, 36, 139n2; belief in, 6, 27, 34, 37, 139n2; compared to religion, 1–3, 6–7, 9, 40, 43, 139–40n3, 146n18, 171n21, 173–74n28; and constructionism, 15, 17, 18, 20; and conversion experience, 23, 122, 146nn18–19; disjunction in, 6, 19, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 43; and epistemology, 19, 23, 26; faith in, 5, 6, 13, 26–27, 37, 39, 55, 83–84; and hermeneutics, 5, 19, 26–27; and imagination, 11, 27; and liberalism, 6, 19, 20, 22–23, 26, 143n9, 144–45n11; and materiality, 16; meaning in, 3, 5, 11, 20, 21, 49, 145n12, 147n9; method in, 2, 35, 138–39n2, 167n1; and modernism, 139n2; and political relations, 23, 138n2, 171n21; readerly authority in, 16, 17–18, 19–23, 86, 143n9, 144–45n11, 172n25; reification in, 25; representation in, 2, 17; role

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of author in, 17–18, 20–22, 143–45nn10–12; as shared project, 16, 165n1; signature in, 144n11; and social relations, 17, 18, 25; style in, 144n10; subjectivity in, 5, 6, 15–16, 17, 20–23, 143n9, 144–45n11; and textuality, 6–7, 20–21; “voice” critiqued in, 15–16, 143–44nn10–11 Lazer, Hank, 12–13 legalism, Calvin’s critique of, 152n14 Le Queux, William, 101 Levertov, Denise, 13 Levinas, Emmanuel, 131–32 Levy, Andrew, 171n21 Lewis, C. S., 176n30 liberalism: Wendy Brown’s critique of, 4, 5, 22, 140n5, 142n5; and faith, 51–52, 148n15; and Language writing, 6, 19, 20, 22–23, 26, 143n9, 144–45n11; MacIntyre’s critique of, 142–43n5; and readerly authority, 19, 20, 22–23, 130, 143n9, 144–45n11; and religious organizations, 148n15 Lip Service (Andrews): and Bataille’s work, 117–18; and Bersani’s work, 117–18; and conversion experience, 119–20, 121–22; and Dante’s work, 103–4, 173–74n28; and Deacon’s work, 127; and Deleuze’s work, 168n5; and Edwards’s work, 105–8, 114–16, 118–22, 127; and Jacobs’s work, 128; and masochism, 168–69n5; meaning in, 108–10, 114, 117, 118, 120–22, 126–29, 176n28; and misogyny, 111, 112, 113, 125, 169n9; and mysticism, 117, 120, 128, 129, 172–76n28; Perelman on, 104–5; and queer theory, 169n10; readerly love for, 125, 127–29; readerly submission to, 114, 115–16, 118, 122, 126–28, 130; sexual description in, 122–26; sexual fetishism in, 116–17; sexual powerlessness in, 117–18, 124; sexual violence in, 110–14, 115, 125,

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126; textual association in, 103, 109–10, 120; textual discipline in, 84, 107–8, 116, 122, 131, 172n25; textual disjunction in, 103, 108–10, 120, 121, 122 love, in relation to God, 176–77n30; and Calvin’s work, 47, 70; and Edwards’s work, 89–90, 92–93, 97, 98, 106–8, 119–20, 134, 136; and Lewis’s work, 176n30. See also readerly love Lowell, Robert, 144n11 Luther, Martin, 9, 46 Lyotard, Jean-François, 144n10 lyric poetry, 16, 19, 23, 72, 139n2, 143n9, 162n37 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 142–43n5, 145n16 Mac Low, Jackson, 18 Marx, Groucho, 56, 76 Marx, Karl, 56, 76, 80, 101 Marxism, 69, 148n15 masochism, 168n5 materialism, 3, 41, 58–60, 69, 104, 173n28 materiality, linguistic, 16, 59, 105, 138n2 McCaffery, Steve, 144n10 McDowell, John, 161n15 McGann, Jerome, 19 McVety, Charles, 153n2 meaning, in Language writing, 3, 5, 11, 20, 21, 49, 145n12, 147n9; and Andrews’s work, 108–10, 114, 117, 118, 120–22, 126–29, 176n28; and Bernstein’s work, 52–55, 58–59, 62–63, 65–66, 68, 75, 79–80 Melville, Herman, 101, 162n33 mercy, divine: Calvin on, 43, 48; Edwards on, 41, 90–92 metaphor, 40, 139n2, 177n30; in Andrews’s Lip Service, 117, 169n5; Bernstein on “inevitability” of, 33, 35, 39; in Bernstein’s Shadowtime, 75; in Calvin’s work, 43, 133; in Dante’s

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Index

work, 174n28; in Edwards’s work, 90, 100 method, in Language writing, 2, 35, 138–39n2, 167n1 metonymy, 25, 116 Milbank, John, 149n2 modernism, 139n2, 141n7 modernity, critique of, 4, 140n5 Mouffee, Chantal, 140n5 Mozart, W. A., 161n18 mysticism, 13, 57, 58, 59, 69, 70, 146n17, 149n2; in Andrews’s Lip Service, 117, 120, 128, 129, 172–76n28; William James on, 175–76n28 negative dialectics, 163–64n38 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 154n5, 155n5 Nussbaum, Martha, 128 Objectivism, 141n7, 146n17 Olson, Charles, 13, 146n17 Oppen, George, 141n12 optimism, Bernstein on, 52–54 Orpheus legend, 161n18 O’Sullivan, Maggie, 144n10 Pascal, Blaise, 9 Pecora, Vincent, 160n8 Pelosi, Nancy, 51 Perelman, Bob, 8, 9, 16, 19, 37, 104–5, 145n12, 165n1; Jameson’s reading of “China” by, 24–26, 145n15 perfectionism, Emersonian, 155–57n5, 159n5, 177n1 Perloff, Marjorie, 15–16, 17–18, 20, 21, 37, 138n2, 144nn10–11, 160n5 Pickstock, Catherine, 149n2 Piombino, Nick, 19 Pius XII, 56, 68, 76 pluralism, 23, 138n1, 142n5 poetics: Andrews on, 121, 167n1; Bernstein on, 33–37, 39 poetry. See innovative poetry; lyric poetry

political relations: faith as ground for, 8, 14, 51, 147n7, 148–49n15; and Language writing, 23, 138n2, 171n21; and mysticism, 13; and postliberalism, 4–5, 22, 23, 140n5, 142n5 postmodernism, 4–5, 149n2 postsecularism, 149n2 poststructuralism, 4, 22, 145n12, 149n2 Pound, Ezra, 13, 25, 115, 146n17 pragmatism, 160–61n15 Projectivism, 146n17 Protestantism. See Reformed Christianity Proust, Marcel, 101, 144n10 Puritanism, 85, 166n8 queer theory, 169n10 Rashi, 57, 64–65 Rasula, Jed, 18 rationalism, 5, 10, 51, 149n2 Rawls, John, 155n5 Raworth, Tom, 144n10 readerly authority: in Deleuze’s work, 100–101; in Edwards’s work, 86, 100–101, 102; in Language writing, 16, 17–18, 19–23, 86, 143n9, 144–45n11, 172n25; and liberalism, 19, 20, 22–23, 130, 143n9, 144–45n11; in literary history, 101 readerly love, for Andrews’s Lip Service, 125, 127–29 readerly submission, to Andrews’s Lip Service, 114, 115–16, 118, 122, 126–28, 130 reading, faith as basis for, 48–49, 83–84, 131, 135–36. See also active reading redemption: Edwards on, 89, 94, 97, 98; and exile, 134 Reformed Christianity: and Calvinism, 40–48, 133–35; and Eucharist, 151n9; and Language writing, 6–7, 9, 40, 43; and self, 134–35; and textuality, 6–7 reification, in Language writing, 25

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religion, compared to Language writing, 1–3, 6–7, 9, 40, 43, 139–40n3, 146n18, 171n21, 173–74n28. See also Catholicism; Judaism; Reformed Christianity representation, in Language writing, 2, 17; and Bernstein’s work, 58–62, 67, 71 Reznikoff, Charles, 157–58n5 righteousness: Calvin on, 41, 75, 152n10; Edwards on, 90 Robinson, Kit, 19 romanticism, 139n2 Rorty, Richard, 161n15 Rothenberg, Jerome, 141n12 salvation: in Calvin’s work, 40, 43, 44, 152n14; in Edwards’s work, 87, 88, 90, 92, 93, 97, 98 Scholem, Gershom, 56–58, 60, 61, 64–65, 69–70 Schwerner, Armand, 141n12 secularism, 7, 48, 51, 58, 75, 127, 149n2, 153n2, 160n8 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 169n10 self, pursuit of, 131, 134–35, 177n1. See also subjectivity Sellars, Wilfrid, 161n15 Shadowtime (Bernstein): and Adorno’s work, 77, 79, 163–64n38; Benjamin as figure in, 55–61, 64, 66–70, 74, 76, 80, 161n18; and Benjamin’s Angel of History, 163–64n38; Bernstein’s performance of, 55–56, 57, 58, 60–62, 64, 77; and book-burning, 71–75; and Calvin’s work, 54, 62, 65, 70, 75, 78, 79; and criticism, 56, 57; and disjunction, 54, 63, 68; Einstein as figure in, 56, 60–62, 64, 68; and epistemology, 65, 67; and ethics, 65, 71; faith in, 54–55, 78–80; and Ferneyhough’s opera, 55–56, 61–62, 68, 77, 161n18; and ghostliness, 55, 59, 64, 65, 67, 68, 70, 71, 74, 75;

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Golem as figure in, 66–67; Hitler as figure in, 56, 68, 76–78; Hölderlin as figure in, 56, 64; and Holocaust, 67, 75; humor in, 56, 60–61, 76–79, 164–65n40; and Judaism, 57, 58, 64–65, 66–67; and language, 56, 58–60, 61–62, 65–67, 69–70, 75, 80; and materialism, 58, 59, 60, 69; and meaning, 54–55, 58–59, 62–63, 65–66, 68, 75, 79–80; and mysticism, 57, 58, 59, 60, 69, 70; and representation, 58–62, 67, 71; Scholem as figure in, 56–58, 60, 61, 64–65, 69–70; and Stein’s work, 63; and time, 60–62, 64; underworld in, 55, 64, 67; and Wittgenstein’s work, 62, 69 Shaw, Francie, 19 signature, Perloff ’s concept of, 144n11 Silliman, Ron, 9, 16, 18, 19, 20–22, 23, 138n2, 144n11, 145n12 sinfulness: Calvin on, 42, 43, 44, 91, 151–52n10, 151n7; disjunction as, 43, 44; Edwards on, 88, 89, 91, 92–93, 97, 99 Smith, Patrick, 63 Smith, W. C., 29 Snyder, Gary, 13 social justice movements, 148n15 social relations, 3, 4, 5, 14; and Language writing, 17, 18, 25 Spahr, Juliana, 19–20, 172n25 Spicer, Jack, 9 Spinoza, Baruch, 9 spirit, poetics of, in Lazer’s work, 12–13, 141n12 Stein, Gertrude, 13, 17, 63 Stuart, Robert, 91, 166nn8,10 subjectivity: and exile, 134–35; and imagination, 10; in Language writing, 5, 6, 15–16, 17, 20–23, 143n9, 144–45n11; postliberal critique of, 4, 22, 140n5, 142–43n5

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Index

Taggart, John, 141n12 Talmud, 58, 65, 131–33 textual discipline, 55, 102, 107–8, 116, 122, 131, 172n25 textuality, 6–7 This (periodical), 16 Thoreau, Henry David, 101 Torah, 46, 85, 88–89, 92, 94, 153n15 “ventriloquism,” Silliman’s critique of, 21 “voice,” Language writing’s critique of poetic, 15–16, 143nn10–11 Vorticism, 146n17 Ward, Graham, 149n2 Watten, Barrett, 18, 145n12

Wellhausen, Julius, 149n2 Whalen, Philip, 141n12 Whitman, Walt, 141n7 Williams, Stephen, 91 Williams, William Carlos, 11–12, 14 wisdom, as theme in Edwards’s work, 94–99 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1, 13, 16, 34, 48, 62, 69, 93, 139n2, 154n5, 161n15, 172n26 Woolf, Virginia, 160n8 Wordsworth, William, 109, 139n2 Wright, C. D., 141n12 Wright, Charles, 144n11 Zukofsky, Louis, 17, 18, 146n17

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