Manifesto of a Tenured Radical. Cary Nelson
facts, self-contained and awaiting collection. Facts are icons for cultural investment, an index for what we consider important and worth remembering, a guide to how we organize and categorize the past. They are thus already meaningful, already embedded in relational structures. A sheer uninterpreted fact would have no meaning at all; it is also, one might argue, a largely hypothetical entity.
I suppose that an author’s birth and death dates would represent something like the zero degree of facticity, an almost material facticity that seems outside any interpretive practice. Yet the effort to retain those dates in current historiography, the belief that a particular writer’s birth and death merits repeated reciting, carries considerable baggage with it, a sense of why that writer’s work mattered then and why it matters to us now. Yeats died in 1939, and for some critics modern literature effectively came to an end at that moment as well. Moreover, that was the year the Second World War began, so Yeats’s death can also be dramatized by narrating it in company with other watershed moments of historical change. (In this case, of course, the relationship between the dates is merely coincidental and the linkage thereby purely symbolic. But it helps suggest that we need always to ask what criteria lead us to conclude that one historical fact stands in an anchoring relation to another.) Similarly, to recite T. S. Eliot’s birth and death dates is to commemorate one of the poets in whom modernism (and our identification with modernism) is most fully invested. Those dates evoke the pathos of that cultural and disciplinary investment. The poet H. H. Lewis’s birth and death dates, on the other hand, suggest little more than the irrelevant detritus of lived time to most modern poetry scholars. Those dates do not matter in the same way; they do not resonate as T. S. Eliot’s do in modern literary culture, though of course H. H. Lewis’s birth and death dates do matter to me. He serves in Repression and Recovery as the most extreme case of a political poet well known in his time but wholly outside any taste a New Critical sensibility could underwrite.3 On the other hand, the very difficulty of establishing Melvin Tolson’s or Zora Neale Hurston’s birth dates resonates with the exclusions of the canon and the pathos of their rediscovery. So if the abstract notion of birth and death dates appears to suggest a realm of neutral data with no complex semiotic effects, reflection on actual material dates suggests otherwise. We encounter them variously embedded in and thus also variously constituted by webs of meaning or the denial of meaning. Thus we must overcome the notion that the dates themselves are neutral but that our discursive operations convert them from facts into ideological constructs. Their material existence depends on the work of ideology.
Since this issue is so readily misunderstood, let me press it further. Yeats’s birth and death dates may mean somewhat different things to an Irish nationalist than they do to a literary critic. An Irish nationalist might well take 1916 as the key modern date and see Yeats’s dates only in relation to it. Ezra Pound’s birth and death dates signify rather differently within a literary paean to his lyrical genius and a legal brief against his fascist radio broadcasts over Italian radio during the Second World War. Of course our sense of history is generally punctuated with dates whose importance is continually reinterpreted and reconstructed. Assuming such dates are not in dispute, the argument, then, is not over whether such facts exist but over what they mean. Moreover, if they are only available either in consciousness or within some discursive practice, then they do not effectively exist apart from one or another interpretive framework, a framework which even places in doubt the material boundary of a fact. Traditional literary historians often throw up their hands in exasperation at poststructuralist doubt, thinking that it denies the existence of historical fact. If poststructuralism did make such claims, it could then, in effect, be employed by the sort of pseudo-historians who imagine the Holocaust did not take place. What poststructuralism places in doubt, however, is not the existence but the meaning of the Holocaust. Pressed far enough, poststructuralism suggests that facts have no inherent meaning and that they can never be extricated from systems of meaning and apprehended on their own.
Extending this perspective to the problem of writing literary history, and recognizing that there is no innocent information, at one point I actually considered trying to write Repression and Recovery without authors’ names, since I was interested in part in discursive patterns in the poetry of the period, and I felt organizing poetry by author blocked recognition of verbal parallels that cut across the categories in which we habitually place individual authors. Moreover, there were numerous points in the modern period—including the Harlem Renaissance and the Great Depression—when poetry was clearly being written as part of a collective, partly dialogic cultural process, not as the wholly isolated creative effort of individuals. At these times there was, in effect, a chorus of overlapping and divergent voices that took up images, themes, slogans, arguments, and forms in a continual registering of similarity and difference. Poetry in the process became a different kind of social activity than it had been before.
I was prepared to read the poetry in this way by a number of theoretical developments. Marxism had long struggled to define the social and economic determination of art. Poststructuralism, on the other hand, had in other ways broken the links between the image of an organically unified text and a comparably coherent human subject; indeed, it gave us many reasons to stop thinking of people as consistent and unified subjects at all. Postcolonial theory has since taken our sense of the fragmented, conflicted nature of subjectivity still further. Detaching poets’ names from poems helps us recognize as well that many of the discursive elements of poems reflect and contribute to diverse cultural processes. Linking poems with their authors, conversely, sustains a romanticized notion of individual creativity that a wider sense of texts published in a given period tends to undermine. More importantly, to be confronted with texts that are no longer taken to be vehicles of self-expression is to be drawn to consider what other cultural functions poetry may have served.
It is this effort to rethink the social meaning of poetry that required the most elaborate negotiation of multiple theoretical traditions. Combining in particular the poststructuralism of Derrida and the Marxist cultural studies of critics like Hall and Laclau and Mouffe, I tried to work out a position that I think of as a kind of politicized Saussurianism. From the poststructuralist radicalization of Saussure I drew a semiotics that is differential but also mobile and partly unpredictable. From Marxist cultural studies I drew the recognition that differences are a site of political contestation, that various interests compete to gain power over images and meanings and integrate them into a common persuasive enterprise. The politicized Saussurianism that results is one in which meanings are recognized to come not from inherent and essential identity but from a structured and differential field of struggle. A politicized Saussurianism recognizes the linguisticality of the cultural field but tracks meaning as a discursive struggle involving the continual rearticulation of all discursive domains to one another. Literature, politics, religion, law, all struggle over the limits of a relative autonomy in which all these discursive domains are defined in relation to one another and in which potential social functions are both lost and recaptured. Not only the meaning of poems but also the meaning and social functions of the notion of literariness and the genre of poetry are constructed, I argue, by this sort of cultural process. Far from a book that simply adds a number of poets to the ongoing conversation of the profession, then, Repression and Recovery argues for a reconsideration of the shifting, unstable, and contested meaning of poetry.
In the end, while pursuing that wider inquiry into the social meaning of poetry, I decided to retain authors’ names and to present biographical information about them. I did so in part because the sheer quantity of unfamiliar poets cited in the book can, on its own, persuade people that the narrow story of modern poetry we constructed and now repeatedly retell is wholly inadequate. Moreover, the citation of this wide range of interesting modern poets suggests that the slow process of reevaluating individual poets for possible recovery is insufficient; we need as well a more thorough critique of our cultural memory and of the role literary scholarship plays in constructing and maintaining it. Finally, authors’ names remain one of the major ways we select and recover texts of interest from the almost overwhelming number of texts actually published. Tracking an author through journals, books, and archives was one of the major ways I worked, so I preserved that structure for the reader. But that is not a disinterested decision, and I still feel the project of writing about modern poetry—and about literature in general—without authors’ names remains unfinished.
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