The Constructivist Moment. Barrett Watten
the demonstration of his argument — why the “visiter” wears a “vizor,” if not explained by the contiguity of nouns, appears to be simply the “vizor’s” function.37 There is nothing culpable about wanting to protect one’s eyes from interlocutors; definition supplies explanation for the cultural opacity the visitor feels. If definition could explain social relations, it would seem that merely learning a language would provide adequate criteria for cultural legitimacy. The fact that Zukofsky knows that to be an absurdity (and as it was elided by technocrats like Ogden and Richards) gives the work its hidden drive to present cultural meanings as disarmingly linguistic:
The child of Uriah’s wife, very sick, and David all night upon the earth. The child dead. — “He shall not return to me.” And David comforted Bath-sheba. A son, his name Solomon. Absalom the son of David had a fair sister, whose name was Tamar; and Amnon the son of David loved her. Being stronger, forced her, lay with her, then hated her exceedingly. Tamar crying. And Absalom her brother: “Peace, sister, he is thy brother. Amnon dead; Absalom fled. . . . 38
The hidden meaning of this passage invokes not the definieda of definition but the original betrayals conveyed as much as obscured by the cultural text. Stylistically, Zukofsky’s paratactic narrative makes a text out of actions that he will then patch in to the same continuum as definition in language — with both to be presented as opaque and other. Zukofsky is reducing cultural narration to the level of substitute symbols that should provide unity of meaning for suitable interpreters if it were not for their cultural differences. The reduction of shared narratives to substitute symbols attacks cultural uniformity at the same time that it celebrates the purported efficiencies of scientific notation.39 As if to insist on the irreducible materiality and idiosyncratic meaning of “Thanks to the Dictionary,” Zukofsky later published a broadside edition of an excerpt in his own handwriting.40
Zukofsky reserves skepticism here for a culturally homogenizing poetics, but when in 1943 he made a direct critical response to BASIC there is also sympathy for its version of the “scientific definition of poetry” he would call for in 1946: “Someone alive in the years 1951 to 2000 may attempt a scientific definition of poetry. . . . All future poems would verify some aspect of this definition and reflect it as an incentive to a process intended to last at least as long as men.”41 Zukofsky clearly supports the production of a language that can account for both poetry and science by appropriate use of definition. A poetics of definition is everywhere in Zukofsky’s critical prose, as witness the title of his book, Prepositions, as well as the heading of its index, “Definitions.”42 In his assessment of BASIC, in fact, Zukofsky seems to be saying he can do better than Ogden and Richards in reducing the number of symbols necessary to communicate exact meaning. In his poetry as well as in his prose, Zukofsky maximizes the condensation of speech, and he thus finds stylistic flaws in BASIC’s operating manual in its failure to achieve optimal compression. As he writes in a passage on the status of linguistic fictions in objectivist vocabulary: “This quotation is not uninteresting rhetoric, but suffers from a stuffiness of extra words that flaw the thought. Why need a fiction be ‘loosely described’ if the author knows all about it?”43 Critical judgment and the compression of style to the least number of symbols needed to communicate meaning are often identical for Zukofsky.44
Zukofsky wants to move toward a kind of scientized visuality as a way to bring together the ostensive definition at the heart of BASIC with the aesthetic compression developed by modernist poets after Imagism. Such conflation of art and science conveys two kinds of authoritarian baggage: the first is inherited from Ezra Pound’s paratactic method of juxtaposing self-evident assertions (clearly the primary influence on Zukofsky’s development of an Objectivist poetics). A second is compelled by BASIC’s hypotactic derivation of meanings in strings of substitute symbols: “The simple English verbs, a full number of which BASIC uses as nouns, are a shorthand for act and thing that the Chinese sees perhaps in his ideograph. . . . What seems to be arbitrary neglect of these verbs is a loss” (160). Rather than restore more action words to BASIC’s list of “operators,” however, Zukofsky would like BASIC to be even more condensed in order to raise the value of its self-evident substitutions, and he suggests further cuts to its lexicon (much like his editorial approach to the work of fellow poets).45 “Since the purpose of the BASIC word list is to be both short and complete, its total of 18 verbs might be cut down perhaps”:
1. Go can be used with certain directives (prepositions), in accordance with BASIC practice, to cover come.
2. Either get or take can be dispensed with, their shades of meaning are so close.
3. The same is true of have or keep.
4. Used with certain directive, put can probably achieve the meaning of send and give: e.g. ‘Put it in my hand’ instead of ‘Give it to me’; ‘Put a letter in the box’ instead of ‘Send a letter.’
5. Make and do are very close, and make can include the uses of do. . . . (P, 162)
It is hard to tell how far Zukofsky is going in the direction of parody here. In arguing to “clean slay” (the phrase is Ezra Pound’s) what remains of connotation in BASIC, it is clear he is not being entirely serious, but there is a curious fascination with linguistic eugenics even while he goes on to admit the risk of what might be lost in the reduction of terms.
Zukofsky’s account of BASIC argues, finally, for a synthesis of the objectivity of scientific method with the opacity of cultural practice. Thus when Ogden and Richards argue for commonsense standards for grammatical usage based in cultural practice (“It would be foolish to take exception to the placing of the preposition at the end of the sentence. The word-order is sanctioned by old-established English idiom”), Zukofsky retorts, “Good, and it would be foolish to take exception to anything that makes sense” (163). BASIC’s efficient reduction of polysemy to substitute symbols is here caught up in a contradiction when it cannot recognize the cultural biases of its managerial overview. Zukofsky concludes: “Ogden is against ‘Babel,’ the confusion of many languages. But the refreshing differences to be got from different ways of handling facts in the sound and peculiar expressions of different tongues is not to be overlooked” (163). There is, in short, a higher standard of objectivity than Ogden and Richards’s merely objectivist one: “Good writing means a grasp of and a closeness to subject or object rather than an addiction to a small or large vocabulary. . . . If the BASIC versions come close to the originals, the use of the BASIC word list has not much more to do with it than mulling over a good text and a desire to keep it simple” (163). Zukofsky argues for standards of common sense that go beyond the advantages of a reduced vocabulary. This preference is given a paradoxical and relativist twist at the end of his argument, where he quotes a text on “The Value of Science” that states: “To change the language suffices to reveal a generalization not before suspected,” which translated into BASIC reads, “To give a language a different turn is enough to make it take up a train of thought that we had no idea of before” (164). BASIC’s poetic vocabulary, rather than transparently rendering the original, would indicate, in Zukofsky’s ventriloquism of its project, a material difference between texts (here, original and translated) that generates new meaning in the name of science.
“Thanks to the Dictionary” and “BASIC” show Zukofsky to be fascinated by two competing aspects of poetic vocabulary. He wants to preserve as much as possible the confusion of many languages, but at the same time he wants a guarantee of objectivity in which words as things become minimal units of meaning. Both aspects are developed in Zukofsky’s subsequent investigations of a poetry based on restricted vocabularies, “A”-9 and Catullus.46 “A”-9 stands as the inaugural moment of the creation of new meaning by the use of a predetermined poetic vocabulary in American literature. In the first half of the poem (as is generally known to Zukofskians but not otherwise), Zukofsky translates Guido Cavalcanti’s canzone “Donna mi prega” (used as a touchstone for value in Pound’s Cantos) into a vocabulary taken from the Everyman edition of Karl Marx’s Kapital. In the second half of the poem, Zukofsky rewrites his original Marxist commitments by retranslating