Posts
Post 38: 8/26/07
Continuous Reading,
Interrupted (Part II)
è Part I: Daniel Bouchard; Brenda Coultas; Suzanne Doppelt; Robert Fitterman; Merrill Gilfillan
è Part II: Ted Greenwald; to be continued.
26 August 2007: Ted Greenwald, The Up and Up (Berkeley: Atelos, 2004)
Ted Greenwald's Up and Up is a nonobjective, language-centered prose/poetry hybrid that makes absolutely no concession to the reader; it only presents. The reader finds herself in the position of a kind of bar-code scanner, tracking variations between bars to come up with some kind of code that maps in turn onto an unknown database of language experience. The work itself is a fractal of its undecodable meaning, where degrees of variation and irregularity are reproduced at different levels of scale: phrase, sentence, paragraph, section, work. Otherwise put, the work is a book-length series of two- to six-page prosoid sections composed of six-to-eight phrase or sentence nonnarrative paragraphs. Formal description intersects with the phenomenology of reading to provide minimal cues for constructing a theory of the work; such a theory is without question required to process it.
A "series of prosoid experiments" may be the simplest way to describe Greenwald's project. The phrase assumes that someone reading this note would know what prosoid means, or what it is used for, and that would be a small proportion of all possible readers. I first encountered the word in discussions with Clark Coolidge in the 1970s over his "longpoem" (as yet otherwise untitled and still unpublished), a hybrid form that he was developing after the line-and-stanza'd long poems The Maintains and Polaroid. A bit earlier, Robert Creeley was publishing his own hybrid poetic prose—Presences and Mabel—and a while later Ron Silliman would theorize the "New Sentence" to account for the use of individual sentences as poetic units, opposed to lines and stanzas. Silliman's own long poems, the prose sections of my 1–10, Lyn Hejinian's My Life, Carla Harryman's miniature poetic narratives, and Bruce Andrews's Shut Up would all tend in the direction of the New Sentence. Greenwald's usage follows from that series.
But there is something hitherto unattempted here, and I want to try to put my finger on what it is. First would be the suspended nature of the linguistic units within the prosoid blocks. These look generally like noun phrases, seldom complete sentences, with quite a number of speech elements that are not subordinated to the structure of the sentence. The writing is being undertaken at the "nonsentential" level, which is often how what we think of as sentences are conveyed if you analyze real speech, with a high proportion of discourse-level effects that refer to other levels of speech than propositional argument. The noun phrases hang suspended, there are seldom complete sentences, and there are plenty of phatic or gestural, speech-based elements. At the same time, there appear to be "psychological" cues for the deployment of these phrases, referencing external materials:
No soap, radio, go-by, stop over you, who knows, once draw wing KO over se habla Don't Know cherubs with the grain works innings It's, this is, pretty great a local species use by daily No soap radio weather crossing You who know, make parole It's, this is se habla Don't Know a local species works innings If we do mind's eye weather crossing foe taos ace plié make parole [129]
That's complicated; formalism won't cut it. When reading this work (scanning, often, paragraph at a time), I imagine a series of scenarios where language might be produced in this way. These are not interior monologues, but intersections of inner speech with external actions such as: I am swimming laps, and every 25 meters I touch the edge of the pool. At the moment I do, the thought chain I have been entertaining changes; I note the change itself as a thought, as having content. The blank space is then articulated within interior speech, making meaning. I open the refrigerator door, looking for something. The intention for the thing I am looking for meets the things I see first: an act of substitution occurs, which I observe as qualifying my intention. What systems theory would call "second-order observation," looking at language as it is being thought, becomes the primary reality. I am clicking on the television, and with each click an image appears that conveys a severed narrative. My continuous thought sees a level of reality in the conjunction of isolated image and interrupted narrative that narrative itself would never provide. In each of these instances, a frame of action intersects with the production of consciousness as observed language.
At the same time, Greenwald is solving a technical problem that had become a virtual chiasmus in his work (as a development of art). In his early writings—for example, the still neglected long poems You Bet! and Word of Mouth—he works in grammatically continuous seriality; in later collections like Exit the Face, he begins to explore repetitive structures, linguistic loops that evoke the "changing same" of consciousness in language (like counting laps, opening the refrigerator door, clicking channels). The work is unsettling for risking the effects of recurrence as what it is to be conscious—one could easily get stuck there. In Up and Up, both seriality and recurrence intersect; we see partly repeated linguistic cues, subject half rhymes, homophonic mimicry—a series of devices that both exteriorize and cue, or interiorize and frustrate, our consciousness in language. Up and Up is a rare attempt in art to take the risk of "real" consciousness in its time-based recursivity. It is as if inner speech were proven to be a combination of gestural spontaneity and machinic automatism: abstract painting meets the Turing test. And of course, at the bottom of our consciousness, so-called, in the postmodern is an automaton; if not, we would lose consciousness altogether. Subject-centered reason is impossible as a temporal event. Greenwald's work is difficult in this sense. It is not an easy work to read, or aesthetic to understand; it pushes past such easy decoding maneuvers, creating a valid paradigm for experience as it is lived in language.
[To be continued.]
[Copyright © Barrett Watten 2007. Not to be reprinted without permission, except in short excerpts in electronic media.]