Manifesto of a Tenured Radical. Cary Nelson
remains quite another matter. I gave a draft of the book that excluded poets’ names to a few friends to read, and all of them found it intolerable to read large numbers of quotes unmoored to any writer’s identity. A year or so later I wrote an essay on 1930s political poetry without any authors’ names linked to the quotes and had the same results. The sense of literary discourse as inherently and necessarily authored is so strong now that people are generally unwilling to process it in any other way. For a critic to withhold a writer’s name is, in any case, clearly an affront, one for which I have not yet found a way to gain a hearing.
Some other deliberate aims and strategies were probably more successful. One of these was to make it clear that this historiography could never actually contain or fully represent the history it engaged. The actual literary history of the times would remain elsewhere, outside our grasp. I was not, therefore, aiming to invoke the familiar claim that texts are primary and commentary secondary. Neither in any historical reconstruction nor in the original poems would we find the lived time of history. It is no longer available to us. Conventional literary histories often aim for a confident sense that history is effectively relived within their narratives. I wanted to make it clear that I consider that goal impossible and that effect of narration either illicit or misleading.
One simple way to register the inadequacy of the presence of history in my narratives, I decided, was to limit most of my quotations to fragments, rather than complete poems. For the most part, the texts I discuss are always elsewhere, sometimes in an elsewhere difficult to recover, since many of them are out of print. That was frustrating to some readers, but it had partly the disabling effect I wanted. My book would thus always display a certain lack.
Another deliberate strategy was to be inconsistent about what kinds of information and what sort of prose I placed in the text and the notes. I once read a reader’s report on someone else’s manuscript that expressed annoyance that the text and notes were not devoted to different kinds of writing and different categories of knowledge. A reader has a right to know, the report argued, what to expect in the main body of the book versus what to expect in the notes. I wanted to take that “right” away, to overturn the implicit hierarchical relation between text and notes. I did not want the sort of confident relationship of mastery between these textual domains that prevails in most academic writing. So while I did put most bibliographic information in the notes I also deliberately saved some particularly enjoyable stories for the notes and included in the text information about some authors that in other cases was relegated to notes. Some reviewers have found this frustrating; others have recognized what I was doing. One recognized that my decision to place one illustration in the notes was a way of signaling my intentions about their status. In any case, the overall aim was not to deny the presence of hierarchized domains of knowledge but to put them into question in terms of both the book’s argument and its structure.
A more complex historiographical strategy was built into my decision not to break the book into chapters and to mix chronology with a spatial presentation of different texts and styles. In part this reflects my conclusions about the diverse and often distinctly nonlinear nature of literary influence during the modern period. Modern poetry, in other words, did not develop in a clear progressive fashion. Some of its most radical innovations—notably in Gertrude Stein’s poetry—came almost immediately and took decades to gain wide influence. All its familiar traditions and styles overlapped and interpenetrated. There were, moreover, recoveries of earlier styles under new names and conservative count-erreactions along with unexpected experiments. Dividing literary history into chapters tends to segregate discursive impulses that should be seen relationally. When the resulting categories—minority poetry, women’s poetry, imagism, political poetry—become mutually exclusive, the effects are both political and discriminatory. Eliminating chapters and mixing chronological narration with cultural and stylistic groupings spanning several decades made all our descriptive categories unstable and subject to contemporary critical intervention. Nothing was to be taken as given to us unproblematically.
In some cases, I chose both to imitate and undermine standard critical structures. The decision to have notes at all, while making them distinctly textual, was one choice of that sort. Another was the choice to include an introduction but let the separation between the introduction and the main body of the text be somewhat arbitrary. Though physically divided, the introduction and the main body of the text in fact flow together. None of these decisions, however, carries with it a moral or political imprimatur for future work. These may be exemplary strategies, but they are chosen within history and in response to immediate professional and cultural needs. They have no inflexible warrant over other peoples’ work or my own work in the future. I feel free to abandon these strategies myself; while I hope other people find them suggestive, I do not offer them as models to be imitated uncritically. The style and structure of the book, I would hope, match the provisional nature of its interpretive claims.
So I do not, in summary, see the facts assembled about numerous writers in the text and in the notes as neutral, innocent, or uninterpreted. A similar recognition informs my readings of poems and poets throughout the book. While I try to make persuasive claims about how we might read these poets and why we might value their work, my readings make no pretense to be permanent and decisive statements. From feminism, Marxism, and poststructuralism I have learned that criticism is an interested, politically implicated, strategically positioned, and historically specific activity. My readings are efforts to influence how we might read these poets now; I am not interested in the fantasy of commentary that pretends it may last for all time. From time to time I comment on how readings of particular poets have shifted to meet contemporary interests. To avoid being tiresomely repetitive, I decided not to repeat that argument continuously, so not all my analyses are framed in those terms. But the general claim, I hope, will remain implicit throughout: When I make a strong assertion about a poem, it is not a claim about the poem’s essential nature but rather an urgent claim on the interests and commitments of contemporary readers.
Some would argue that poststructuralism’s insistence on the undecidability of texts makes such strategically designed readings either impossible or fraudulent. And it is true that one current in poststructuralism is an ecstatic assertion that texts can mean anything, that texts are polymorphously inventive and perverse. But the claim that texts can mean anything does not necessarily imply that they can mean anything here and now. There are too many constraints on how we see texts and too many constraints on how we can imagine using them for an infinite range of meanings to be immediately available. This claim for unlimited potential meaning is often balanced within poststructuralism by a commitment to trying to understand the nature of the interpretive inducements and constraints in both our own and other periods. It is that strain within poststructuralism that I have adopted and tried to put to use. That sense of variable but positioned and multiply determined meaning to some degree opens up a potential to argue for interpretations that are designed for a contemporary audience and that are responsible to the current social environment. Indeed, if a text has no inherent, immutable meaning, then the struggle over what kinds of meanings will be important is all that is left. To say that poststructuralism denies that possibility is to collapse a series of positions disingenuously into a single spectacle of excess.
That is not to say, however, that my belief in the undecidability of texts and the ultimate impossibility of historical knowledge places no strain on a project of recovering forgotten texts. When recovering texts that have clearly been repressed or marginalized for political reasons or because of the culture’s history of racism and sexism, there is a strong desire not only to disseminate the texts again but also to come to understand the experience of their authors and even to imagine that disseminating these texts gives their authors a voice in the culture and an opportunity to communicate again. Thus, when people first began to recover slave narratives, they wanted to believe the texts were reliably representational, that they gave us secure access to the experiences of their authors and the communities of which they were a part. In this commendable desire to compensate for a century of cultural repression, the well-known unreliability of language’s mediations was forgotten. Forgotten too was the knowledge that authors often have purposes other than straightforward communication or representation when they write. And not so much forgotten as unthought was the still more knotty problem of our own historically determined interests and perspectives, interests that can never be fully cast aside. These are