The relationship of these two works epitomizes the creative tensions governing antropofagia. Staden's cannibalistic story, embedded in Brazil's colonial background, foregrounds the modernists' paradoxical relationship with European culture, from distaste to fascination, and shapes their reception of European primitivist currents. 12 Through primitivism, the Brazilian modernists resolve an intellectual dilemma that concerned Latin America in general: the desire to maintain close connections to European intellectual culture, and to preserve the racial and cultural heterogeneity that characterized their own societies. Antropofagia carves out a space between these desires, claiming descent from two primal fathers, Staden and Abaporu: the new primitivists would take pleasure in reading Staden's diary while eating him. Andrade would later write, "Since Bilac, we are internationalists and junior Portuguese." 13 The manifesto's outrageous claims against Europe acquire an uncanny verisimilitude because of Brazil's dual nature as a primitive and independent New World and as a colonial vice-world of Portugal. In the ritual banquet of incorporation, the abaporu absorbs the sacred enemy to assimilate his virtues. 14 For the modernists, the symbolic meal is gratifying yet ultimately ambiguous, since it represents both overcoming and becoming Europe.
If cannibals belonged to Brazil, the cannibal text had originated in Europe; 15 since Montaigne and Staden, cannibal tales have been a prime source for the Western imagination, documenting indigenous barbarism with judgments and perspectives ingrained in most of Brazil's elite. The desire of antropofagia to affirm cultural autonomy, political decolonization, and emancipation from European literary traditions leads the learned cannibals to invert the primitive banquet text. Andrade quickly perceived in the near devouring of the German traveler a liberating metaphor that would, if inverted to the Tupinambá per-spective, exorcise the national appetite for all things European. The goal of his inversion, in its shock effect, is to replace the oppressive patriarchal system identified with Europe, which Andrade saw both as legacy and disease, with the utopian matriarchy of the tribe: "The paterfamilias and the creation of the Morality of the Stork.... In the matriarchy of Pindorama [a Tupy word referring to the land now known as Brazil]." Through this substitution, the cannibal not only appropriates the technology of the discoveries through ingestion, but at the same time remains a mythical source for these positive qualities of civilization that Europe had lost: "Joy is the proof by nines." European primitivism is therefore marshalled against itself, its meaning inverted in favor of Brazil. Antro-pofagia repatriates the cannibal library, while posing as a pseudocatechism of salvation. In view of Brazil's lack of pre-sixteenth-century history, antropofagia further provides a subtext for the missing mythical, epic fable of national origins. Abaporu is Ulysses posing as ethnographical hero. The savage hero, an explorer invented in Europe, returns as the native son of a more original civilization, organized from the heartland and governed by the powerful icons of nature's luxuriance.
Though European paradigms and intellectual traditions are explicitly used as reference points in the formulation of Brazilian modernist theories, much of their work also derives from unsung antecedents in their national historiography. These include works on ethnography, Tupy-Portuguese grammars, early religious drama, sermons, travel accounts, writing about the Amazon, and epic poems on Indianist themes. 16 One can also perceive in antropofagia a recasting of stereotypes of romantic Indianism and Amazonian exoticism, both remote enough from contemporary awareness to be mythical. Is the abaporu not a distant relative of the noble savage Peri, hero of Alencar's novel O Guarani and Carlos Gomes's opera? 17 Does the utopian matriarchy of Pindorama in the "Cannibal Manifesto" not suggest the myth of the Amazons, rumored in texts of discovery to be a jungle tribe of female warriors who sacrificed their male offspring? Interest in the Amazon is shared in works by other Brazilian artists in Paris. 18 In this sense, primitivism is a national movement that could be equated with traditional symbols of an autochthonous Brazilian culture, located in the timeless, vast interior, and emanating from the racial and geographic diversity of the population. Primitivism, seen as a higher form of regionalism, is thus placed at the service of ethnology, while the assertion of the superiority of miscegenation and cultural diversity replaces an earlier prejudice concerning the racial inferiority and degeneracy of Brazilians on a national level.
Motifs representing vastness and fecundity, long a part of national histor-iography, are reformulated as part of an ambitious aesthetics of excess. "In a radiant land live three sad races," repeats the São Paulo intellectual and planter Paulo Prado in his 1928 "Portrait of Brazil," as if it were a truism. Prado's phrase first invokes references to radiance, grandiosity, and sensuality commonly used by Portuguese chroniclers to describe the qualities of the newly discovered land, which the modernists themselves still considered pure, inexhaustible, and ahistorical. 19 In contrast to the races saddened by history and genetics, nature's radiance contributes to the Brazilian modernists' aesthetic of excess. The implications of this concept are crucial to our understanding of the role of the non-European intellectual in constructing a peripheral primitivism. First, excess is an aesthetic that is derived from the European avant-garde movements themselves, in their rejection of the past and the status quo. Through primitivism, antropofagia transforms this relationship to the past into an enhanced, imaginative, and paradoxical treatment of national primitivism, whose aggressive components are turned against their European sources. Furthermore, in a move that is decisive for the aftermath of the movement, the Brazilian cannibals seek to associate avant-garde primitivism with national identity through the metaphor of devouring. Finally, this move also strengthens the idea that Brazilian or Latin American art is fundamentally characterized by excess, whether it be found in colonial chronicles, in the whimsical local baroque style of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in modernist manifestos, or in the graphics of concrete poetry. Excess is linked with themes of utopia and libertinism, both of which apply to readings of Andrade's literary cannibalism.
Antropofagia locates excess in a telluric primitivism, and illustrates it in the extravagance of its ringing claims: "Down with the vegetable elites. In communication with the soil.... Before the Portuguese discovered Brazil, Brazil had discovered happiness." To promote a different historical awareness, the manifesto also ridicules the prophetic texts of Western discovery: "Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. The Carib instinct." The "Cannibal Manifesto," with its extravagant claims, becomes the Brazilian avant-garde's epiphanic recapitulation of epic texts such as the colonial chronicles that recount miraculous and unexpected discoveries. The cannibalists' critical writings displace the chronicles and reclaim the land in the name of indigenous cultures. Language itself is also carried to excess, whether in the invocation of untranslated Tupy verse garnished from Couto de Magalhães ("Catiti Catiti / Imara Notiá / Notiá Imara / Ipejú") 20 or in the reduction of Shakespeare to comic paranomasia: "Tupy or not Tupy, that is the question." The destruction of the colonial text through parody and rewriting wipes out colonial historiography and amounts to an atavistic declaration of independence, whether in the name of indigenism or of avant-garde techniques. By appropriating the metaphor of discovery, the cannibal modernists create a new tropical vocabulary and a mythology of nature's riches that are shaped by the indigenous cultural perspectives they have invented.
Prado's lyrical description of the sadness of Brazil's native Americans, Africans, and Europeans recapitulates the synesthesia of a verse by poet Olavo Bilac (Brazil's music was the "amorous flower of three sad races"); both reflect different degrees of assimilation of the racial theories and concerns prevalent in Brazil since romanticism. Various theories exist to explain racial sadness: perhaps it stemmed from existential anguish resulting from a history of conquest and slavery; or it was the result of "scientific" racialist theories of inferiority and degeneracy that had been applied to the majority of Brazil's multi-racial population. 21 The racial ideals and attitudes of the modernists, in spite of their explicit alliance with indigenism, were of necessity imbued with the positivism, materialism, and evolutionism that were widespread in Brazil after 1876. Centered in the Recife school of Tobias Barreto, materialist theories fed a reaction against Catholic humanism and in favor of applied science, through readings of Comte, Darwin, Taine, Renan, and Haeckel. 22 Skidmore notes that positivism was attractive to a largely white elite interested in economic development without social change, and was bolstered by the general belief that the historically multiracial society of Brazil was free of racial prejudice (BW, 13, 22). Miscegenation and evolutionary processes, it was thought, were acting in favor of "civilization" through a successive "whitening" of the general population over time, a result of the long-term effects of European immigration; racial fusion, whose end result would be a unified Brazilian population, could be promoted because of confidence in eventual white predominance. As Andrade dryly observed in his poem, "Capital of the Republic":
The pride of being white
In the swarthy conquered land...
The artificial Sugar Loaf. 23
Liberal ideas of the late nineteenth century, however, were propounded in a society not essentially different from what it had been in the early days of the century (BW, 27). A contradictory state of affairs was created whereby liberal reformers first advanced theories of social Darwinism, and many intellectuals were affected by categories of scientific racism. 24 Brazilian intellectual circles were in fact dominated by concerns with backwardness, inferiority, and degeneracy that had been put forth in racialist theories of Brazil, found in the works of such European and North American res as Henry Thomas Buckle, Arthur Comte de Gobineau, and Agassiz or the Argentine José Ingenieros. Critic and essayist Sílvio Romero, while unsure what miscegenation would ultimately contribute to the nation's future, gave a pessimistic assessment of the three major racial groups: "the senility of the Negro, the laziness of the Indian, the authoritarianism and miserly talent of the Portuguese had produced a shapeless nation with no original or creative qualities" (BW, 36). 25
Partially echoing Romero forty years later, Mário de Andrade's multiracial character Macunaíma, 26 emperor of the jungle Amazons, is vaunted as a new national symbol in the novel's subtitle, "a hero without any character," even though his talent for racial metamorphosis and his sexual prowess are presented as magical, positive qualities. Through Macunaíma, modernist primitivism asserts that indigenous societies lack a history or a blueprint for the future, and occupy a space that is vacant of organized culture, save what repeats or replies to the West. 27 The primitive is conceived through difference and inversion, qualities vocalized in Macunaíma's endearing cry of pleasure, "Ai! Que preguiça!" 28 Macunaíma serves Mário de Andrade's desire to satirize modern culture by subjecting it to the Amazon hero's critical eye. In the chapter "Letter to the Icamiabas," for example, Macunaíma writes from São Paulo to his subjects, the Icamiabas, using the latinate language of Lisbon and signing himself "Imper-ator." Playing on the themes of culture and barbarity, Macunaíma reveals to his female subjects that they are spuriously called "Amazons" by the uncultured inhabitants of the city. Parodying discovery texts, the letter cast Macunaíma in the role of classicist, defending the humanism of the Amazons against the nascent materialism of São Paulo's industrial modernization. Thus, while modernists such as Mário de Andrade brought folklore into being as a discipline in Brazil, indigenous traditions and cultures were at the same time inevitably read with modernist eyes and shaped by the literary desire to transpose and filter the primitive hero into Western terms. 29
Mário de Andrade begins his novel by describing Macunaíma as "the hero of our people, born in the depths of the virgin jungle as black as the son of the fear of night." Racial difference in Macunaíma is profoundly connected both to nature and to mythology; it is not a fixed quality, but rather is subject to sudden transmutation. In the chapter "Piamã," Mário de Andrade constructs a modern myth of race and society.  Shouting because the water is so cold, Macunaíma reaches the grotto and takes a bath, not knowing the water is enchanted because the footprint was made by a saintly missionary who had been evangelizing the Indians. The water's effect leaves Macunaíma white, blond, and blue-eyed. When Jiguê witnesses this magical transformation, he too rushes to enter the water. But so much blackness has been washed off Macunaíma that the dirty water leaves him only bronzed. When Manaape goes to bathe, there is so little water remaining that he is able only to wet the soles of his hands and feet, which become reddened because of the holy water. While as a result of this episode Macunaíma is the best prepared to enter "civilization," Manaape is said to be the true son of the Tapanhumas: a combination of black and red. Racial "whitening" as an ideal is parodied as the occult desire of Catholic evangelicals to change indigenous peoples into themselves. The saint's gigantic foot, ironically, finds an unexpected ally in the cannibalistic metaphor of Amaral's Abaporu, whose enormous foot symbolizes being in nature. Mário de Andrade's command of the primitive, magical powers of metamorphosis brings mythology and linguistic virtuosity into contact with the magical transformations of the folktale. Notwithstanding the flaws of their times, these modernist writers and artists succeed in counteracting the pervasive influences of the sad theories of the past by placing the primitive at the top of the human scale and by inverting racialist theories, affirming supposed defects as superior features. Through modernism's literary and largely fictional ethnographies, the Indian, the black, the mestiço, 30 and the European immigrant become the glad races, sources of national strength and definition.
Oswald de Andrade's "Brazilwood Poetry Manifesto" and the volume of Brazilwood Poetry , 31 illustrated by the colorist, geometrical "brazilwood"-style paintings of Tarsila do Amaral, are crucial predecessors to the "Cannibal Manifesto," for they attempt to redefine Brazil by assimilating mechanical modernization to telluric ethnicity. When Andrade proclaims, in his first manifesto, the symbiosis of "the forest and the school" in a new Brazilian society, he places shamans alongside military airfields and electric turbines in the National Museum. In a modernist world, Brazil's savage territory is the most modern of all, drawing deepest both from nature and mechanization and ultimately demonstrating their interdependence. European traditions are more deeply felt in Brazil because their coexistence with indigenous and Afro-Brazilian cultures brings them closer to the dark heart of their own primitive origins and occult meanings, where their symbolism is made more glaringly apparent as ritual and artifice. The 1924 manifesto, for example, reacts against the false erudition of the Empire: "Misfortune of the first white brought over, politically dominating the wild wilderness. The alumnus. We can't help being erudite. Doctors of philosophy. Country of anonymous ills, of anonymous doctors." Pero Vaz Caminha's letter of discovery of 1500, quoted in Andrade's poetry, relates how European food and eating habits were imposed on the astonished Indians, who had no interest in Portuguese fowl; the raising of a giant cross on shore with the participation of the Indians convinces the conquerors that religious conversion was all but complete. In this world of assimilation, European customs are taken out of their milieu and melded with indigenous and African practices. The Afro-Brazilian religion, condomblé, unites African, indigenous, and Catholic religious practices and beliefs. Macunaíma performs a macumba ritual in order to punish the villain who possessed his magic amulet; and Mário de Andrade quotes widely in his novel from the cordel literature of Brazil's Northeast, a literature that was printed in popular chapbooks, and combined features of the medieval Iberian folktale, the chivalric epic, and performed lyric verse. Such fusions yield a nationalized tropical folklore, later claimed and authenticated by the purists of local tradition mentioned by Osman Lins.
The "Brazilwood Poetry Manifesto" advances an iconography of cultural transformation whose modernizing ambitions are confirmed in Amaral's paintings, and whose purpose is, in Andrade's terms, a general reconstruction of society. Their shared vision flashes exuberantly with the bright colors observed in popular society: "shacks of saffron and ochre in the green of the Favela, under Cabralin blue." Tropical nature and a hybrid culture, colored by race and ethnicity, generate images of ostentation and excess that incongruously unite opposites and appear out of context: "Rui Barbosa: a top hat in Senegambia.... Negresses at the jockey club. Odalisques in Catumbi." Brazilwood poetry, agile and candid like a wandering kodak--to borrow its own striking simile--was to be the country's first exportable structure in a new poetic mercantilism. Promoting a national style through a program of simplicity, irony, ingenuousness, and naturalness, this new perspective humorously describes and justifies what amounts to an excessive penetration of modernity into land and society at all levels. Brazil's past, epitomized by a lawyer citing Virgil to the Tupiniquins, becomes but a painful and anonymous memory; the present, under the slogan "barbarous and ours," is constructed from a synchronic cultural perspective using the techniques of modernist art: synthesis, invention, and surprise. Both as a way of life and as a modern style, Brazilwood's carefully constructed naturalness cultivates a self-conscious tropicality: "Pau Brasil poetry is a Sunday dining room with birds singing in the condensed forest of cages, a thin fellow composing a waltz for flute and Mary Lou reading the newspaper. The present is all there in the newspaper." Those cultural images that had been selected to constitute the modernist style are transformed into enduring scenic and sensual icons of tropicalized Brazil: carnaval, sertão, and favela. Andrade locates the luxuriance of Brazil's modernity partly in its open ethnicity, from the vatapá of Afro-Brazilian cuisine to the dance, and partly in "brazilwood" nature: the silent, tranquil energy of botanical and mineral wealth under an enervating sun. Ethnicity resembles nature in its sensual, energetic, and indolent wisdom; the portraits of the glad races are redrawn using the pure lines and colors of modern art. 32
One of Amaral's finest works is Carnival in Madureira ( 2), another canvas in the style of geometrical cubism that she learned in Paris from Léger and used to depict cultural landscapes that document Brazil's modern identity as it was being theorized in Brazilwood Poetry. Amaral employed this style in some forty paintings from 1923-27, known as her Pau Brasil phase. The painting succeeds in creating a particularly rich fusion of European structural elements (geometric cubism) and American realities (folklore, popular culture, rustic folk from the interior), with the resulting incongruities that give the work its characteristic Pau Brasil identity. The scene of a popular Brazilian rural celebration of carnaval by the town's black inhabitants, a world summarized by the shapes and colors of a village of the interior, is invaded by a strange and overpowering central structure that we recognize as the Eiffel Tower with its geometric cubism. It overshadows the only other re rising above the village houses and hilltops, a palm tree representing tropical nationalism. The tower was perhaps built by the celebrants as a carnivalesque fantasy originating in the village. But as an allegory of the carnivalesque imagination, its strangeness suggests a transposition of the technological, civilized city of its origin to the animated space of the primitive village of mulatto or black Brazilians. In the same fashion, the villagers carry their Afro-Brazilian and primitivist roots to the European carnival, itself transposed to a propitious environment of tropical excess. In an inversion justified by the "Brazilwood Poetry Manifesto," the native women dominate the Eiffel Tower by appropriating its geometry, in the shape of an inverted V, for their own bodies. In the foreground, an extremely tall, thin woman assumes the same position as the tower, which now becomes a popular projection of tropical playfulness and folkloric nationalism. There are still other levels of significance and irony, in the choice of the Eiffel Tower. Paris had been the center of Brazilian cultural aspiration since colonial times and, further, was the source of inspiration of Amaral's painting. The painting's excess stems from the incongruity of its juxtapositions, whatever historical and cultural antecedents may justify them; for the viewer, this creates an effect of ethnographic surrealism, as a modernist icon is transformed into a fetish that infiltrates and dominates both imagination and society.
Language is also subjected to brazilwood simplification and synthesis. Andrade's goal is to Brazilianize the Portuguese language, rejecting archaisms and erudition while proclaiming the naturalness of neological forms, which should come into everyday usage from contact with languages such as Tupy-Guarani and Yoruba. Taking a position against normative linguistic rules and Jesuit grammars, Andrade praises "the millionaire contribution of all mistakes." He thinks popular speech will contain the mythical truths of indigenous lore, which should be capable of totemizing mystery and death when uttered by the glad races as pure sound. In the poem "Brasil," the nation is defined by ethnic speech that conveys meaning exclusively through chant, rhythm, and incantation: "Tetteray tettay Keezá Keezá Kaysay!" (the Guarani); "Uuh! Uah! Uuh!" (the jaguar); "Canyem Babá Canyem Babá Cum Cum!" (the Negro). In the manifesto, the excessive, sensual, and alogical qualities of pure language express the two symbolic extremes of human activity: carnival and prayer.
The crucial role of Afro-Brazilians in modern society is another central theme of Andrade's manifesto and his poetry: "You have the train loaded, ready to leave. A Negro churns the crank of the turn-table beneath you. The slightest carelessness and you will leave in the opposite direction to your destination." The black engineer supplies not only the physical labor for this allegorical train ride into the interior but also guides the controls that will keep it on track and determine its destination. 33 In the poem "sabará," the name of a colonial city in the mountains of Minas Gerais, Andrade contrasts the sun and the metallic gold of the streams to the black wave of human slaves whose mythical strength was continuously sifting the riverbed: "There used to be black men lined along the shore, to siphon the metallic river." "Combat" brings to life a match between black and white prizeters: "Benedito attacks and lands / right-hand punches / He's pushed the white man against the ropes." 34 In "On the Plantation," "a roça," Andrade ties the strength of the slaves to the linguistic rhythm and musicality of their food (lost in the English translation): "os cem negros da fazenda / comiam feijão e angu / Aban against the ropes."erbed: "There usema roda de carro / Nos braços" (The plantation's hundred negroes / Ate beans and mush / Chickory squash and squash greens / They could pick up a wagon wheel / In their arms). Andrade's retrospective constructs a panoramic vision of Negro civilization during slavery, with all its attendant mixture of horror and humanity, seen in "Incident,"
The mulatto girl died
And appeared
Shrieking in the mill
Pounding the pestle
as well as in "Old Black Man,"
Full of splotches
On his face on his crutches
Begging the same alms twice
Because all he sees is a cloud of mosquitoes. 35
Antropofagia also includes claims about race and gender in its reordering of national priorities. In the poem "Portuguese Error," Andrade sets up nudity as the opposite of colonization, referring to the manifesto's association of dress with oppression: "Down with the dressed and oppressive social reality."

Had it been a sunny morning
The Indian would have undressed
The Portuguese. 36
The nudity of the tribe represents both a return to the golden age and an inversion of Freudian repression. As one of the natural "goods" of Pau Brasil nature, nudity has a dialectical role, simultaneously symbolizing an unclothed, alogical mentality and intimating a subversive, prohibited sexuality.
A mulatto woman in a carnival procession links race to eroticism, as the ritual's primitive forces spill over the boundaries of propriety and reveal a sexuality that further challenges European norms. In Brazilian historiography, as in modernism, eroticism is often expressed through the paradisiacal theme of libertinage; here, the dancer's rhythmic vitality originates in a languid sensuality that connects the depths of colonization with the modern present:
"Rio by Night"
A mulatto woman struts down the avenues
Like a star on stage
There are a million sambas
In the resident laziness...
From the heart of the colony. 37
In "The Girls at the Wharf" Andrade similarly returns to the founding letter of discovery by Caminha to cut out ready-made passages in which the Portuguese scribe projects the shame engendered by his own culture onto the open, tropical sexuality of naked indigenous maidens:
There were three or four in number very young and very fair
With very black hair draping their shoulders
And their shame so straight and tall
That when we stared at them
We felt no shame at all. 38
Through his ready-made history of Brazil, Andrade equates the luxuriant eroticism of nature with cultural and racial heterogeneity; the erotic encounter of nature with race thus drives the paradisiacal vision of the glad races.
The first declaration of the "Cannibal Manifesto" in which cannibalism is extolled as a universal metaphor for societies at large is its most excessive and subversive: "Cannibalism alone unites us.... The world's single law." The "Cannibal Manifesto" sets forth an ideological framework for the Brazilian avant-garde, borrowing from the language of European manifestos in order to proclaim a new Brazilian cultural cannibalism. 39 Jumping across boundaries--whether the law, the text, or society--is a practice directly advocated by the metaphor of cannibalism, in that it evokes a contagious, ritual, and obsessive devouring of limits. Since the cannibal had been relegated to the status of alien by Western society because of his forbidden yet hypnotizing taste for human flesh, Andrade strikes a sensitive chord in probing the forbidden, consuming desires sanctioned by cannibal "law," which becomes a central point in the modernist critique of society, psychology, and art. The Brazilian is incorruptibly indigenous, Andrade hints, and has always harbored primitive impulses under a playful veneer of European politics and vestments: "The Indian dressed as senator of the Empire." The perverse intermingling of racial boundaries implicit in Staden's woodcuts--indigenous eaters and European victims--becomes a matter of justice in the "Cannibal Manifesto." Cannibal justice is even more eagerly applied to questions of gender through the supremacy of matriarchy. An unsublimated sexual instinct is the revenge of the matriarchs; it is also the sublime limit of the cannibalistic metaphor that symbolizes a Brazilian utopia that is carnal both in the undressed flesh of the tribe and in the dressings of the banquet. The cannibalistic metaphor thus becomes an aesthetic that reaches across the boundaries of race, gender, and ethnicity by representing the nature and laws of the glad races through their difference from colonial realities. 40
In Amaral's 1929 painting, Antropofagia ( 3) primitivism is an aesthetic, a theory, and the source of a modernist national mythology. This canvas in effect synthesizes the forces of her earlier treatments of ethnicity and cannibalism, A Negra and Abaporu . Amaral works with forms that are icons in the semiotics of tropical indigenism as rediscovered in its modernist luxuriance.  She is all shape, with a few large features symbolizing race and social function.  The woman is almost pure form, sitting in her habitat in an eternal pose. The painting Antropofagia repeats the gigantic images that threaten to overflow the margins with their volume and presence.  The sun, now overwhelmed by monolithic forms of green tropical foliage, is a more clearly drawn lemon slice than in the previous painting.
Everywhere the painting gestures toward excess--the energy in the gargantuan forms; the power of natural forces conveyed in the serendipitous hyperbole of form and concept; and the tiny heads and enormous feet that represent a rejection of ideas and a oneness with an exuberant nature. Out of the jungle's "spectacular tranquillity"--to quote Pau Brasil--comes an irrepressible vitality. Eternal and depersonalized, the human res are icons of primordial space and embodiments of the newly discovered "primitive mentality." Cannibalism vitalizes the serene iconography into a visual and "theological" feast, an appetite for an ethnographical ambrosia of flesh, sun, nudity, and foliage. Color, like language in poetry, connects force with simplicity, and in this painting, it is revitalized through the radiance and excess of a constructed tropical purity. Containing parody, stylization, and habitat, the painting is self-reflective about its construct-ivist and postcubist borrowings. Tropicalization of form, space, and color adds to the myth of excess and to the ideology of luxuriant emptiness that characterizes primitive space and culture in the modernist imagination. Like the subsumed cannibal banquet, the painting is a celebratory ritual of voracious and predatory expansiveness; the scene orates an epic fable of erotic, exotic, and unconscious geographies. Being and acting instinctually, the black and the Indian look out of the painting at the Western observer, not with the longing of saudade (a medieval Portuguese word, considered untranslatable, conveying a kind of intense longing and melancholy), but with what the observer imagines to be unalienated joy, ritual fulfillment, and unrepressed appetite. Amaral's iconography enhances antropofagia's portrait of the primitive as a young, glad, racially mixed Brazilian.
Two Europeans, Bishop Sardinha and Hans Staden, serve to set the emblematic parameters of the cannibal banquet seen as a rebellion by homo ludens. Antropofagia, like the French Revolution, establishes a new calendar dating from the devouring of Bishop Sardinha (Sardine) by the Caetés in 1556; Staden's woodcuts and narrative give the revolutionary dinner ethnographic credibility. In view of its debt to Staden, the "Cannibal Manifesto" can be read as the transatlantic bridge between a New World "savage utopia," rooted in the body and developing as an erotic perversion of origins, and a traditional pagan neoclassicism, represented in the earthly paradise. It is a dialogic banquet of culture and food, eating and reading, raw and cooked, speech and text, in which one discursive domain passes into another.
In the "Cannibal Manifesto" primitivism and ethnicity are joined to reveal an alternate, savage eldorado: 41 "The Golden Age heralded by America. The Golden Age. And all the girls." The manifesto's inventive key phrases can be considered parallel to the giant feet in Amaral's paintings:
Tupy or not Tupy, that is the question.
Joy is the proof by nines.
We can only answer to the oracular world.
In these synthetic, capsule inscriptions, Andrade cannibalizes European cultural and theoretical statements and opposes the rationality that sustains them; antropofagia digests its European referents. The voices of the glad races call out from the depths of Brazil's interior, at once echoing and correcting Europe with the newly found authority of primitive and mythical origins: "I am only concerned with what is not mine. Law of Man. Law of the cannibal." Excess and allusion are the subversive tools used to invert European practice and replace it with a revolutionary primitivism based on nature and instinct: "We want the Carib Revolution. Greater than the French Revolution. The unification of all productive revolts for the progress of humanity. Without us, Europe wouldn't even have its meager declaration of the rights of man." Andrade's goal is modernist autonomy not only in literature but in society as well.
Since the language and logic of historicism have failed, they are to be substituted by the alogic of ethnographic surrealism. Guaraci and Jaci are the goddess-matriarchs of the new order in which rationality is supplanted by instinct:
We already had justice, the codification of vengeance. Science, the codification of Magic. Cannibalism. The permanent transformation of the Tabu into a totem.... We already had Communism. We already had Surrealist language.... We never had speculation. But we had divination. We had Politics, which is the science of distribution. And a social system in harmony with the planet. The Golden Age.
In an imagined "Carib Revolution," the glad, strong races, secure in a sane land isolated from Old World diseases identified by Freud, mock Europe while appropriating the occult objects of its desires. Freudian psychology, in fact, is Andrade's main source for describing the defects of the European mind: "Down with the dressed and oppressive social reality registered by Freud." His task is a complex and utopian rediscovery of origins and rewriting of history: "reality without complexes, without madness, without prostitutions and without penitentiaries, in the matriarchy of Pindorama." Whether read socially, economically, philosophically, or ethnographically, the cannibalistic metaphor cuts across all boundaries. It answers Europe's dialectical obsession with heavens and hells by combining in the Tupy feast of cannibal rhetoric the leisure and eroticism of natural luxuriance, the joy incarnated in an icon or a totem, and the technology of social and psychological machinery. Primitive gladness replaces Western themes of utopia and salvation.
Antropofagia's program stages an attempt to use modernity for the purpose of subverting European primacy and paradigms. For the Brazilian cannibals, the primitivist idea is a useful catalyst for changing the relationship between national literature and art and their European background. As a program for local authenticity, however, the cannibal enterprise contains inherent contradictions and paradoxes--limited contact with Brazil's racial and geographical diversity, the manifesto's dependence on literary sources, and the use of cosmopolitan models to construct a national modernity out of Brazil's primitive world of the interior. Although one of their major contributions is to legitimize the positive values of race and ethnicity as lasting components of national identity, the modernist program as a prototype for contemporary art can be criticized for an excessive confidence in its ability to speak for native peoples; the massive destruction of ecology and extinction of tribes in Amazonia since 1960 shows that the modernists never questioned the ability of the tribal primitive--the new heart of national identity--to survive the forces of modernity and modernization that they endorsed. They are neither sufficiently aware of the implications of their highly centralist and reductionist concept of national autonomy, nor wary of the power of cannibalism to consume Brazil's own interior. Albeit ingenious, the movement's position was thus inauthentic because, to use Clifford's terms, it was "caught between cultures, implicated in others." 42 Perhaps this is simply to say that it was international. It was, after all, in the rebellious atmosphere of the continental avant-garde movements that Amaral and Andrade learned to value primitivism as part of their Latin American domain. The tensions in their intellectual position, denoting constant exchange between self and other, reflect their own historical moment. The dynamic but unstable dialectical system of antro-pofagia is likewise descriptive of Brazil's own past, which had depended upon both telluric and metropolitan traditions.
Referring to North American authors who portray another race, John R. Cooley condemns the simplification of the primitivist subject, the lack of regard for the reality of primitive life, and the exploitation of the primitive as a sounding board for the writer's own perspectives. 43 In the Brazilian case, although the writing ascribed to the primitive voice from the outside is similarly feigned and inauthentic, the illogic and surreality of a cannibal's manifesto falls within the spirit of Andrade's project and thus constitutes a convincing text. Andrade seems keenly aware of the irony of his appropriations as an outsider; he justifies them by changing European prime materials into a different language, a savage discourse: "Children of the sun, mother of the living. Discovered and loved ferociously with all the hypocrisy of saudade, by the immigrants, by slaves and by the touristes. In the land of the Great Snake." On a rhetorical level, the manifesto can be defended both as a parody and as the apotheosis of the genre. It begins by mocking Marx--"Cannibalism alone unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically"--and ends by suggesting the rediscovery of an actual pagan paradise through cannibalism.
Yet the limitations of avant-garde indigenism are betrayed by a superficial familiarity and romantic identification with the tribal primitive. Why do the Tupinambá cannibals eat so much European food? Staden is necessary to authenticate the description of a national cannibal (re)past that, for antropofagia, had no historical presence. Given the founding role assigned to his "fieldwork," one may ask whether antropofagia's symbolic modernist ritual is really a barbarous transgression or just a synthetic, if also subversive, self-renewal. In this sense, the elite urban cannibals never really escape the ambiguous heritage of their colonial education, since by adopting the characteristics of Europe's imaginary other--albeit in an aggressive ingestion--in order to define their new self, they tacitly accept the identity that the West has foisted upon its primitive other. 44 Acts of supposed anticolonial incorporation or devouring, in effect, leave the Brazilians in a position more equivocal than ever before. 45 Situated between cultures, antropofagia runs the risk of erasing the narrating self by removing the distinction between self and other, between subject and object. What remains is only the tedious vagueness and timelessness of an "artificial Sugar Loaf" para-dise. Ironically, by consuming the pristine interior of Brazil, the modernist can-nibals are eating their own hearts. From our contemporary perspective, the enduring contribution to modernity of this movement in favor of indigenous artistic autonomy resides less in its dynamism and more in its instability--the tension of its double desire to situate cultural autonomy in Brazil's ethnicity and to stand at the cutting edge of the cosmopolitan avant-garde.
K. David Jackson is Professor of Portu-guese Language and Literature at Yale University. His books include Sing Without Shame: Oral Traditions in Indo-Portuguese Creole Verse and Vanguardism in Latin American Literature: An Annotated Bibliographical Guide. His essays on Brazilian modernism include the afterword to Patrícia Galvão's newly released novel, Industrial Park.
* All translations, unless otherwise noted, are the author's own.
1. Osman Lins, A Rainha dos Cárceres da Grécia, trans. Adria Frizzi (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1994, in press).
2. Antropofagia can be described within James Clifford's term "ethnographic surrealism" because of its dialogic relationship with European primitivism, of the type he calls "modernist collage" (The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988], 13). Paulo Medeiros, among others, notes the nominal surrealist models for antropofagia: the magazine Cannibale (Paris, 1920) and the "Manifesto Cannibale Dada" by Francis Picabia. Benedito Nunes agrees that in the French publications, the term "cannibal" is meant only to shock and lacks the precise political, cultural, and literary program of the Brazilian movement (Benedito Nunes, "Antropofagia ao alcance de todos" in A Utopia Antropofágica [São Paulo: Secretaria de Estado da Cultura/Editora Globo, 1990]). For studies of the Revista de Antropofagia consult Maria Eugênia Boaventura, A Vanguarda Antropofágica (São Paulo: Atica, 1985) and Augusto de Campos, "Revistas Re-vistas: os antrop of the reesRevista de Antropofagia ed. Oswald de Andrade (São Paulo: Editora Abril/Metal Leve, 1975).
3. For an analysis of the different modernist schools of thought from a philosophical perspective, see Eduardo Jardim de Morais, A Brasilidade Modernista (São Paulo: Graal, 1978). There are two lines of development that treat similar material in different ways: the Pau Brasil or "Brazilwood" group of 1924 is a precursor of Antropofagia (1928-29), while the Verdamarelo (Green Yellow) faction, taking its name from the colors of the national flag, is followed by the Anta (Tapir) group. The split between a theoretical, in the first case, and a literal reading of primitivism, in the second, becomes apparent in an analysis of the manifestos published by each group.
4. Tarsila do Amaral returned to Paris in 1922 after the São Paulo Modern Art Week, where she studied with Léger and exhibited her paintings at the Galerie Percier. Amaral introduced Oswald de Andrade to Blaise Cendrars, Jean Cocteau, and other avant-garde res who frequented her atelier. The interdisciplinary and international dimensions of this Brazilian style come to light through paintings, poetry, and music developed by Brazilian and French artists who were in contact in Paris in the early 1920s and shared an aesthetic interest in Brazilian culture. Of a large group including Paul Claudel, Darius Milhaud, Cendrars, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Anita Malfatti, and Amaral, the Swiss-French poet Cendrars, who was to travel to Brazil in 1924, had the greatest influence on the nascent Brazilian style. Amaral and Andrade led an elegant life among the artistic and literary elite. Their collaboration included her illustrations for Andrade's Brazilwood Poetry, published in 1925, and a corresponding "brazilwood" phase in her own paintings. See Stella de Sá Rego, "Tarsila/Pau Brasil: Her Sources in the French Avant-Garde and the Significance of Her Work in the Context of Brazilian Modernism," (Master's Thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 1984); Aracy Amaral, Blaise Cendrars no Brasil e os Modernistas (São Paulo: Martins, 1970); and Alexandre Eulálio, A Aventura Brasileira de Blaise Cendrars (São Paulo: Quíron, 1978). Mário Carelli describes the euphoric and exotic details:
Dans l'atelier de Tarsila, rue Hégésippe Moreau, à Montmartre, se réunissaient non seulment les Brésiliens mais encore toute l'avant-garde artistique parisienne pour les déjeuners typiques: "Feijoada, composé de bacuri, pinga, cigarettes de paille de maïs étaient indispensables pour donner la note exotique.... Premier échelon: Cendrars, Fernand Léger, Jules Supervielle, Brancusi, Robert Delaunay, Vollard, Rolf de Maré, Darius Milhaud, le prince noir Kojo Tovalou (Cendrars adore les Nègres).... La ravissante Tarsila, habillée par Poiret, héritière d'une dynastie de planteurs, offre un singe à Léger, assumant sans complexe sa "brésilianité." ("À Paris, les Brésiliens à l'affût de la modernité," in Art d'Amérique latine, 1911-1968 [Paris: Éditions du Centre Georges Pompidou, 1992], 94-99.)
5. Natural philosophy is defined as cosmology or a metaphysics of nature, which is an attempt to understand natural phenomena by tracing them back to the conditions of their possibility. Its rules are considered universally valid and discoverable by reason alone. Walter Brugger, Dictionary of Philosophy (Spokane: Gonzaga University Press, 1972), 269-70.
6. Susan Bassnett discusses the literary interest in antropofagia among recent Brazilian authors in Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 153-54. A brief analysis of the movement as indigenism is found in Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: the National Romances of Latin America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 138-39.
7. Oswald de Andrade, "Manifesto Antrop1991), 1Revista de Antropofagia 1 (May 1928); "Cannibal Manifesto," trans. Leslie Bary, Latin American Literary Review 19 : 35-47; also in French, "Le manifeste anthropophage," trans. Benedito Nunes, in Surréalisme périphérique, ed. Luis de Moura Sobral (Montréal: Université de Montréal, 1984), 180-92; and in Spanish, Oswald de Andrade: obra escogida, trans. Héctor Olea (Caracas: Ayacucho, 1984), 65-72. On Oswald de Andrade, see Maria Augusta Fonseca Abramo, Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954): biografia (São Paulo: Secretaria de Estado da Cultura, 1990).
8. Andrade makes a sarcastic reference to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, French philosopher and ethnologist (1857-1939) who had published La mentalité primitive in 1927.
9. Hans Staden, Varhaftige befchzeibung eyner Landichafft der wilden nacketen grimmingen menschfresser leuthen in der newen welt America gelegen...(Marburg: Andres Colben, 1557). The volume included forty-six large woodcuts and ten smaller woodcuts, with the title page printed in red and black. It is one of the coincidences of the European primitivist vogue that Staden's work appeared in English translation in London in 1928. There was also a modernized German edition in 1925.
10. Amaral's painting Abaporu (Tupy, "man who eats") captivated viewers in 1992-93 on both continents in the traveling exhibit, "Art in Latin America, 1911-1968."
11. The most comprehensive study of Amaral is found in Aracy Amaral's Tarsila, 2 vols. (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1975). Many of her works are reproduced in Sérgio Milliet's Tarsila (São Paulo: Lázara Gráfica, 1966). In English consult Stella de Sá Rego's "Tarsila/Pau Brasil."
12. Staden's text is the anthropophagists' obligatory reference for information on cannibalism.
13. Andrade's verse is from "O Escaravelho de Ouro" : "Desde Bilac / Somos internacionalistas e portugueses júniors." Olavo Bilac was a Parnassian poet.
14. On the symbolism of cannibal rites, see Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Araweté. From the Enemy's Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 301.
15. Consult the comparative analysis of Marjorie Kilgour, From Communion to Canni-balism (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1990).
16. Consult for example, Couto de Magalhães (1837-98), O Selvagem; José de Anchieta (1534-97), autos; Antônio Vieira (1608-97), sermons; Antonio Ruiz de Montoya (1585-1652), A Conquista Espiritual and Arte, Bocabulario, Tesoso y Catecismo de la lengva gvarani; José Veríssimo (1857-1916), Cenas da Vida Amazônica and Estudos Amazônicos; Basílio da Gama (1740-95), O Uraguai .
17. José de Alencar (1829-77), writer and politician of Ceará, whose Indianist novel O Guarani was the basis for Carlos Gomes's (1836-96) opera, which opened in the Teatro alla Scala, Milan, on 2 December 1870.
18. A rare example is Pierre-Louis Duchartre's book of legends, illustrated by Vicente do Rêgo Monteiro, Légendes, croyances et talismans des Indiens de l'Amazone (Paris: Tolmer, 1923).
19. Even Henry Thomas Buckle's theories of racial inferiority were posited on the natural excess of the Brazilian land over the powers of individuals in an indigenous, black, or miscegenated population.
20. The paraphrased "translation" of this verse offered in recent editions of the manifesto must be viewed as pure fantasy. What interested Andrade was certainly the repetition in inverted structure of a "concrete" poem stripped to its essential four words.
21. See David T. Haberly, "Introduction," in Three Sad Races (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1-9.
22. Consult Thomas Skidmore, Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 10-11. Hereafter abbreviated BW.
23. The unpublished translations of Brazilwood Poetry are by Richard Zenith, prepared for the UNESCO Archives edition of Andrade's work in English (University of Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming).
The originals were published in Pau Brasil (Paris: Au Sans Pareil, 1925). The original of this poem reads:
o orgulho de ser branco
Na terra morena e conquistada...
O Pão de Açúcar artificial.
24. Richard Graham, "Introduction," in The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870-1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 3.
25. Romero published an influential history of Brazilian literature in 1888 and was one of the early researchers of popular and folkloric traditions.
26. Mário de Andrade, Macunaíma (São Paulo: Cupolo, 1928). Andrade's "rhapsody," composed in six days in 1926 on a São Paulo plantation, praises the jungle and condemns the city in a magical folktale of linguistic, thematic, and narrative virtuosity. Its Amazonian lore is based on an ethnography of the Taulipang and Arekuná Indians of the upper Northwest Amazon published in Germany in 1924 by Theodor Koch-Grünberg, whose fieldwork dates from 1911-13. The subject of a large bibliography, Macunaíma is considered the major novel of Brazilian modernism and one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century Latin American literature. The English translation published by Random House is considered a failure, and the work is currently being retranslated.
27. Richard Graham states in his Introduction that even those who opposed racism sometimes unwittingly repeated its premises and categories, often unconsciously or through reverse racism (Graham, The Idea of Race, 3). The concept of the lack of indigenous culture as vacant space dates to the sixteenth century. The Jesuit Nóbrega wrote in 1551 that "these heathen...believe in nothing, and are therefore like a sheet of paper on which we can write what we like..." (Translated and quoted in Boxer, Race Relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, 88-89).
28. The phrase has not been successfully translated into English. The preguiça is a sloth, and the exclamation sums up Macunaíma's cosmic laziness as a view of life. In the "Cannibal Manifesto," laziness is one of the keys to a natural and vital energy, an excess perhaps associated by the authors with other forms of being: "Lazy in the mapamundi of Brazil."
29. This argument is presented in Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), 244.
30. The Portuguese term mestiço signifies any racially mixed category, and is therefore different in meaning from the more specific Spanish term mestizo (Indian and European).
31. Oswald de Andrade, "Manifesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil," Correio da Manhã (18 March 1924). The English translations are "Brazilwood Poetry Manifesto," trans. Stella de Sá Rego, Latin American Literary Review 14 , 184-87, and Zenith's manuscript.
32. "Cabralin" refers to Pedro Alvares Cabral, who discovered Brazil while on his way to India in 1500. Other cultural references: carnaval is a mardi-gras celebration with roots in ancient ceremony; favelas are slum dwellings; the sertão is an interior geographical region of dry brushland, associated with the São Francisco river and the Northeast, with conservative cultural and linguistic practices mixing indigenous lore with Iberian folk traditions. Vatapá is a recipe from Bahia of Afro-Brazilian origin whose main ingredients are cashew nuts, shrimp, and palm oil (azeite de dendê).
33. Richard Morse compares the intense physical involvement of the Brazilian blacks in a cultural perspective with the cool North American mechanization of William Carlos Williams's "red wheelbarrow" in "Triangulating Two Cubists: William Carlos Williams and Oswald de Andrade," Latin American Literary Review 14 : 175-83.
34. The originals are: "Outrora havia negros a cada metro de margem, para virar o rio metálico"; and "Benedito ataca e coloca / Diretos direitos / Levou ás cordas o branco."
35. The originals read:
"caso"and:
A mulatinha morreu
E apareceu
Berrando no moinho
Socando pilão
"pai negro"
Cheio de rótulas
Na cara nas muletas
Pedindo duas vezes a mesma esmola
Porque só enxerga uma nuvem de mosquitos.
36. The original reads:
Quando o português chegou
Debaixo duma bruta chuvaVestiu o índio
Que pena!
Fosse uma manhã de sol
o índio tinha despido
o português.
37. The original reads:
"noite no Rio"
Uma mulata passa nas Avenidas
Como uma rainha de palco
Há um milhão de maxixes
Na preguiça...
Que vem do fundo da colônia.
38. The original reads:
"as moças da gare"
Eram três ou quatro moças bem moças e bem gentis
Com cabelos mui pretos pelas espáduas
E suas vergonhas tão altas e tão saradinhas
Que de nós as muito bem olharmos
Nao tínhamos nenhuma vergonha.
39. For an analysis of the philosophical dimensions of Brazilian modernism, see Eduardo Jardim de Moraes, A Brasilidade Modernista (Rio de Janeiro: Graal, 1978).
40. A direct influence between cannibalism and aesthetics is suggested by Paulo Medeiros ("Delectable Structures: Consumption and Textuality in the Western Tradition" [Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1990], 189).
41. For an exposition of the theoretical and literary parameters of Andrade's manifesto, see Paulo Medeiros's essay on the cannibalistic text in "Delectable Structures"; also consult Benedito Nunes, "Antropofagia ao alcance de todos."
42. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture.
43. John R. Cooley writes, "All primitivism involves wish fulfillment and by consequence a sentimental disregard for the facts of primitive existence or for the persons being 'primitivized'.... The white writer as primitivist simplifies and stylizes life in nature not so much to understand 'primitive character' as to rationalize and presumably to clarify his own experience, to justify his racial attitudes, or to supplement his cultural needs" (Savages and Naturals: Black Portraits by White Writers in Modern American Literature, [Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1982], 176).
44. An essay on the concept of primitivism as a flaw in Western perception, as well as a gap through which to observe bizarre psychic mechanisms, can be found in Torgovnick's Gone Primitive. Antropofagia, however, was more firmly theoretical and analytical than her examples of Henry M. Stanley, Tarzan, Joseph Conrad, and O. H. Lawrence.
45. When indigenous peoples finally wished to speak for themselves, national intellectuals often began to talk of an "Indian problem." The point is emphasized in Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
In June 1912 members of the American Academy of Medicine gathered in Atlantic City for a conference on medical problems of immigration. Among the papers presented that year was a Marine Hospital officer's account of "The Medical Examination of Arriving Aliens." Dr. Leland E. Cofer described the screening procedures administered to the three to five thousand immigrants--mostly Italian, Russian, Slovak, and Polish--now landing daily at New York's Ellis Island:
In the case of the large stations...it has been necessary to effect an organization by which the mentally sound immi-grants can be eliminated from the line.... On the average line...there are never less than two men on duty, and usually three or four.... If one of the medical examiners sees one of the stigmata of mental degeneracy, a certain mark is put in white or colored chalk on the immigrant's clothing. Every other medical examiner noticing this as the immigrant comes down the line knows the meaning of it. The next medical examiner may discover some deformity, in which case another check mark is placed on the clothing of the immigrant. Finally the examiner detailed for the eyes may discover a...defect...in which case another mark is placed on the clothing of the immigrant, so that when he is pre-sented later in a private room for further examination, no less than three men are called upon to demonstrate the presence of the disease.... 1
Examiners scanned aliens for defects of both body and mind, but screening practices were most keenly focused on "the stigmata of mental degeneracy." In private booths set off from the main lines at Ellis Island Station, intelligence tests involving flags, playing cards, and wooden puzzles awaited those who had been tagged for further scrutiny as mentally unfit. 2
Asked once about her work's layout and typography, Marianne Moore claimed never to have planned the odd shapes of her trademark syllabic stanzas: "Words cluster like chromosomes, determining the procedure." 3 The genetic metaphor is certainly an important one for the kind of poetry Moore was writing during the first decades of the century; but her answer to Donald Hall was an artist's evasion. Moore's verse was crafted. By the early twenties the poet was known for her practice of sifting through various printed materials--natural histories, travel guides, Protestant divine tracts, magazine ads and feature articles--and singling out sentences and phrases, circling words that rhymed, and then connecting these with penciled lines. From splices in paraphrase and in quotation she sometimes then patterned out rhymed syllabic stanzas, and sometimes buried her rhymes in free verse. "When the poem reached a stage that pleased her, she turned to the typewriter, often making multiple carbons of a draft. Each carbon was an opportunity for revision, some bearing signs of six or seven reworkings with different colored inks and pencils. Colored pencils had another role: Moore often marked her 'a,' 'b,' and other rhymes with different colors to facilitate proper repetition of the pattern throughout a poem." 4 Even at its unruliest during the period just after the war, Moore's verse was always carefully pieced together from a variety of sources.
...Principally throat, sophistication is as
it al-
ways has been--at the antipodes from the init-
ial great truths. "Part of it was crawling, part of it
was about to crawl, the rest
was torpid in its lair." In the short legged, fit-
ful advance, the gurgling and all the minutiae--we have the
classicmultitude of feet. 5
Moore's democratic combining of all types of textual materials, both literary and popular, is a practice with intricate historical roots, particularly in view of the poet's countervailing claim to "the eagle's perch" of artistic selectiveness. But it was this mixture of the common with the highbrow that distinguished Moore among her modernist peers. Early detractors like the poet-critic Pearl Anderson, who branded Moore's poems "hybrids of a flagrantly prose origin," objected to the classical prose locutions that filled out her stanzas; but critics were equally disturbed by her quirky variety of diction. 6 Colleagues like T. S. Eliot, on the other hand, admired Moore for her "impeccable" rendering of "clenches and clevelandisms" into an "aristocratic" "American language" that merged "the jar-gon of the laboratory and the slang of the comic strip." 7 For William Carlos Williams, the metrical and syntactic dexterity with which Moore combed seventeenth-century English prose rhythms toward modern journalism's "promotional prose" was rendered vital with a "swiftness" of "transit" through an "intensely, intentionally selective" manipulation of materials. 8 Democratic but not indiscriminate, Moore's red-pencil habit of picking and choosing from among "all these phenomena" was from the beginning portrayed as a radical aesthetic re-conration of the place and the practice of the modern American poet.
By referring to clustering chromosomes as a structuring principle for her stanzas, Moore was not locating the origins of her modernist technique and aesthetic in such sociohistoric issues as immigrant screening and eugenics. But her reference to genetics does suggest that the poet's work was shaped in something other than a purely personal and idiosyncratic remoteness from her time. Moore's most important formal practices, including her broadly inclusive diction and her overburdened syntax, were rather the outcome of a self-conscious reflec-tion on the nature of language and poetry, a reflection grounded in an ongoing engagement with a network of contemporary debates about genetics, immigration policy, and the nature of "American" language in her time. Moore's poems and essays, and her reading notes from the late teens and early twenties especially, evince not only a direct knowledge of and involvement with genetics and eugenics, but a deliberate adaptation of the conceptual foundations of these sciences to language and writing. In developing her own modernist aesthetics, Moore was explicitly concerned with how the generational transmission of life forms might address the transmission of meaning in language.
Moore's manner of elaborating formal practices from contemporary social debates has broad critical significance insofar as it challenges basic assumptions about modernism, not least among them the assumption that modernist poetic practices turn on a dichotomy between radical contingency and a reactionary insistence on stable linguistic reference. Moore's case shows us that, although postmodern models may be useful in describing some varieties of modernist contingency, the roots of this feature lie in the anti-rationalist moments of philosophical pragmatism, an epistemologically "evasive" philosophy based in part on paradigms drawn from evolution and eugenics. 9 Pragmatism resembles post-modernism in its rejection of a firmly grounded presence behind words, but it diverges from many postmodernist positions by asserting that contingency of meaning can in fact produce the ethical certainty that funds both personal and political commitment and action. Guided by pragmatist mentors William James and John Dewey, Moore derived from modern genetics an aesthetic based on semiotic contingency that enabled her uniquely to confront the essentialist logic of modern eugenics, or the science of racial engineering. In semiotic contingency, Moore found something other than a deconstructionist's challenge to conventional structures of meaning and power. Instead, contingency left Moore with an understanding that ethical positions were powerfully significant not when they were written in stone, but when they were adopted as choices. The route from semiotic contingency to ethical certainty in Moore's work is one that cuts across the lines of the dichotomies most critics construct to chart modernism and modernist writers. And Moore's own placement of modern genetics and eugenics at the conceptual center of her ethical aesthetic of accident challenges long held critical assumptions that modernist aesthetics, and especially Moore's, were formed in isolation from public and political considerations.
Contemporary critics who pay warm or cool homage to the aesthetic directives of modern poets might themselves urge that we historicize Moore's sampling of eclectic materials by viewing it as a typically modern aestheticizing of such historical phenomena as the practice of immigrant screening, wherein the massing of aliens at Ellis Island Station restages for American poets the exotic rush of new European aesthetics into the poem on the page, or the clamor of mass taste and opinion. But either of these aesthetically-based historical approaches to Moore's writing would serve mainly to color in existing critical assumptions regarding modern American poetry. And both approaches would overlook the role that Moore's study of biology played in shaping her writing. For Moore, readings in natural history and hybridization supplied a unique perspective on the issue of immigration, particularly as new steerage from eastern and southern Europe raised debates over race and heredity during the teens and early twenties. Moore's aesthetic of inclusive selection, and her distinguishing technical features--her elaborate stanzas, complex nominal compounds, abrupt lineation, and the strong tendency in her poems toward punningly metonymic modes of reference--these formal and rhetorical qualities can be usefully seen as a biologist-poet's response to the nativist controversy over immigrant selection. Merging her studies of evolution, genetics, and eugenics into a modernist aesthetic through the conceptual lenses of philosophical pragmatism, Moore developed a writerly practice that should distinguish her poetry from that of modernist peers, particularly Pound and Williams.
As Dr. Cofer went on to describe them, medical checks at Ellis Island in 1912 were both a liberal cultivation of "the generic opalescence of humanity in...our immigrants" 10 and an exercise in racial selection. In an effort to streamline mass screenings, examiners scanned aliens for those "racial characteristics" that might index potential diseases (MPI, 37-38). According to the Marine Hospital doctor, "proven" and "trustworthy" physicians knew that "dangerous and loathsome diseases preponderate" in the citizens of particular European countries. The "ability to recognize nationality immediately upon the line" was pronounced "a necessary factor in this examination" (MPI, 39, 38). With a premium placed on the spot detection of ambiguous "Class A-I diseases"--"idiocy, imbecility, fee-ble-mindedness, epilepsy, insanity and tuberculosis" (MPI, 32-33)--the screenings mandated by 1907 law appear to have been driven by racial concerns.
Distinguishing among the "racial characteristics" even of various European immigrants, Cofer invoked a modern conception of race that divided Europeans into several distinct categories: long-headed Teutonics, stocky round-headed Alpines from central and eastern Europe, and slender Mediterraneans. Cofer's polygenist conception of European races was rooted in essentializing taxonomies of multiple racial stocks such as those set forth in 1899 by the American economist William Ripley in The Races of Europe. Such popular racialist schemas as Ripley's were attractive to Americans who wanted to distinguish between the modern "new immigration" from eastern and southern Europe and the old one from the British Isles, Germany, and Scandinavia. 11 If the Marine Hospital doctor was shading his talk on immigrant screening with racialist assumptions, however, the medical screening procedures he spoke of could only have been applauded by his colleagues as gestures at racial selection. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, steerage swelled to nearly one million newcomers per year. Physicians' chalk marks were cosmetic in the face of such numbers. With immigrant families accounting for up to 80 percent of the populations of America's largest cities, demographers began to speculate that the declining birth rates of old-stock Americans could be attributed to growing fears of future economic competition. 12
Newly discovered genetic principles--like the law of hybrid reversion--were hastily adapted to polygenist notions of race, feeding a growing nativist fear of American "race suicide" in the early twentieth century. Popular studies like Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race of 1916 charged that the new immigration was weakening the nation's gene pool in a biological analog to America's democratic transfer of power from old-stock "Nordic" Americans to inferior European races. 13 Tabulations from immigrant intelligence tests and from two million Alpha and Beta tests administered to Army recruits would soon confirm a widespread tendency toward feeblemindedness in the swarthier European races (SL, 156). 14 President Coolidge added fuel to the racist restrictionist campaign in 1921, writing in Good Housekeeping of the proven degenerative effects of mongrelization on America's Nordic genetic legacy (SL, 318). Eco-nomic unrest, combined with postwar isolationism and the statistical fruits of eugenists like the mental tester Robert Yerkes, provided potent summons for more comprehensive port restrictions. In 1924, with the issue of racial engineering debated openly in Congress, the National Origins Act was passed and signed into law by Coolidge, implementing quotas that maintained a constant influx of Nordic stock while cutting to less than one fifth the numbers previously flowing from countries populated by Mediterranean and Alpine races (TE, 177-78; HA, 155-57). 15
During the late teens and early twenties, amid controversy over quotas and Bolshevism and labor agitation, the nativist literary critic Van Wyck Brooks railed against the "weak and sickly" condition of the arts in America, complaining that commercialism and an attendant "immigration from without the Republic" had wrecked efforts to build a cultural "nest" for literary development. 16 Radical cultural critics like Randolph Bourne were meanwhile cautioning against the puritanical foundations of the "cultic" "superstition" of "eugenics" and "racial perfection." 17 John Dewey's writings on immigrant culture as a source for American art suggest that early modern calls for the renewal of language through "a freshly evolved localized personality in modern poetics" may have been sounded as a reaction against the popular "middle class" nativism that pushed Ku Klux Klan membership to peaks of two and a half million after World War I. 18 But however American writers and intellectuals of the teens and twenties positioned themselves with respect to issues of nativity and immigration and race, the National Origins Act leads us to some important extraliterary sources for the distinctive verse that Moore and her colleagues wrote during this period. The work of geneticists and eugenists caught Moore's attention and shaped her understanding of how meaning is transmitted in poetry. Poets like Williams championed a localized idiom through an aesthetic of contact with indigenous cultural and racial material that, "rich / in savagery," could maintain a "primal and continuous identity with the ground itself." 19 Under the pressure of immigration and eugenics, Moore developed a less romantic nativist aesthetic by adapting modern theories of heredity to semantic transmission. Genetics grounded her belief that America's material and racial foundations were in fact hard to locate. Indigenous essences could not be fixed in words or poems themselves; instead they flashed like meaning through language, trailing "zigzag inscriptions" (MM, 35) across series of word accidents and biological puns. The new discipline of experimental biology showed Moore that the very contingency that determines the generational transmission of life forms might serve as an enriching and constitutive force in language itself.
Granted an immediate political significance by the issue of immigration, early modern models of genetic transmission might be considered as sources for the branching metonymic associations that critics have noticed in Moore's poetry and prose both (LL, 206, 233). 20 In his 1956 study of "The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles" of language, Roman Jakobson drew on aphasia research in formulating a distinction between the substitutional semantic principles of romantic poetry and the contiguous ones of realist prose. The Russian formalist recounts "a well-known psychological test" in which children linked words of their own choosing to the key word hut. 21 These children exhibited predilections toward words that were either semantically "substitutive" of, or "contiguous" to, the object in question. Substitutive, or broadly metaphoric, reactions to hut ranged from synonyms like hovel to antonyms like palace to metaphors like den and burrow; while contiguous, or metonymic, responses included thatch litter and poverty (FL, 91). Situating Jakobson's antinomy within the framework of a larger discussion of semantic transmission, Paul de Man elaborated the formalist's "substitutions" and "contiguities" as metaphoric "necessities" and metonymic "contingencies." 22 For many critics, De Man's writings on metaphor and metonymy are more eccentric than definitive; and his elaboration of Jakobson's terms should not be seen to mark a progressive aesthetic continuum against which Moore can be graded as a precociously poststructuralist modernist poet. But "contingency" is nevertheless an apt term for the accidental procedure of Moore's associative writing. Moore's 1919 poem "In the Days of Prismatic Color," for example, is motivated by contingent semantic relations.
...Principally throat, sophistication is as
it al-
ways has been--at the antipodes from the init-
ial great truths. "Part of it was crawling, part of it
was about to crawl, the rest
was torpid in its lair." In the short legged, fit-
ful advance, the gurgling and all the minutiae--we have the
classicmultitude of feet.
Metonymy unfolds this deeply creased statement about the seductiveness of poetry. In the first of the passage's three segments, the floating "principle," "throat," finds its synecdochal body as the instrument of the smooth-voiced sophisticate. Throat and sophisticate stand in a contiguous part-for-whole relationship much as do Jakobson's thatch and hut. Through a metaphor of physical structure, this throated sophisticate then becomes a serpent uncoiling from inside its lair. Yet again, a set of synecdochal substitutions--"short legs" and "feet" for a centipede--trigger the insect that gurgles from the snake's skin. Lacking a central stated metaphor that links the arthropod to the slinky medium containing it, few of the terms in this semantic chain stand in necessary mutual relation. But the whole passage flows as an account of how language deceives.
De Man contends that the terms of the part-for-whole and whole-for-part substitutions of synecdoche are organically fused, rendering them "borderline" tropes that convey essences as well as contiguous relations. 23 Every throat, by this reasoning, is honeyed with the sophisticate's oil. But if contiguous synecdochal relations convey shades of necessity, Moore qualifies the necessity of this poem's terms by predicating their synecdoche on puns. All of the tropes in this passage--whether metonymic, like the sophisticate's throat, or metaphoric, like the throat's serpent--turn on the short legs of the centipede that springs from the snake. The bug's multitudinous feet are themselves contiguous to the sophisticate-snake's shadowy abode, which is fixed at the footless "antipodes" of great truths. Only through the most flagrant linguistic coincidences--through the pairing of "antipodes" with "centipedes"--do this poem's metrical feet flutter the shadows of verse.
With the accidents and contingencies that determine the particulate shuffle of biological heredity providing a conceptual ground for Moore's metonymic and punning verse structures, discussions of language and life forms and native identity in poems like "England" point toward local political sources for Moore's writerly aesthetic. In Moore's poems of the late teens and early twenties, issues of essence and accident in linguistic and biological forms are fundamental to questions of both semantic and genetic transmission.
...The
letter "a" in psalm and calm when
pronounced with the sound of "a" in candle, is very
noticeable but
why should continents of misapprehension have to be ac-
counted for by the
fact? Does it follow that because there are poisonous
toadstools
which resemble mushrooms, both are dangerous? In the
case of mettlesomeness which may be
mistaken for appetite, of heat which may appear to be
haste, no con-
clusions may be drawn.
(MM, 46-47)
In this poem about American landscape and language, meaning, like poison in look-alike plants, doesn't cling to the literal form of a word. Common sense and a knowledge of mushrooms should tell us that messages, though conventionally determined, are inflected by semantic and social occasions. Calling in a 1920 Dial essay for an awakening of the arts in America, the pragmatist John Dewey championed democratic localism over empty nativist standards that demanded that immigrants "be either Americanized or...go back where they came from." Dewey looked to immigrant quarters for a renewal of the American tongue, claiming that semantic vitality was not dissolved, but rather hardened and faceted, in a melting pot where citizens are "too busy making the American language to devote much time to studying the English." 24 The poet Moore did not carry a localist imperative to the lengths of Williams's new idiom of "the speech of Polish mothers." 25 But hidden among the toadstools and mushrooms of "England" is a complaint against the essentializing "Americanism" of racist restrictionists. The poison-fearing enemies of dialect in Moore's poem speak pointedly to American advocates of new standards of language and breeding. By posing a nominalistic spirit of occasional identity against floating linguistic and biological forms, "England" challenges the essentialism that underlies nativist visions of a distinctive American race.
Moore held long to a vision of language and life forms as keys to a fluxional native identity. Her reading diaries from 1907 onward track the studies in biology and natural history that served to counterpoint her readings in philosophy, aesthetics, and the arts. In notes from her readings of 1919, shortly before "England" first appeared in The Dial, Moore copied passages from an 1889 edition of Darwin's Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication. Darwin's featuring of New World plant and animal forms--of the "tiger-like" markings of "dark-brindled" caterpillars, of "candlestick-like opuntias" and "dirty door-mat" fleeced goats--resemble the metaphors and compounds soon to crowd the poet's lexicon, suggesting Moore's stylistic debt to this admirably businesslike Victorian expositor of phenomena. 26 Of special interest to Moore as she read Variation were accounts of New World floral and faunal nativity.
When I visited the Galapagos archipelago...[Moore's ellipses] about 500 miles fr. S. America I found myself surrounded by pecul. species of birds reptiles & plants existing nowhere else in the world. Yet they all bore an American Stamp. In the song of the mocking-thrush, in the harsh cry of the carrion hawk, in grt candlestick like opuntias I clearly perceived the neighborhood of America (1250/2)
Moore's further attention to Darwin's comparisons of New World dogs, cats, and boars with their counterparts in England and Europe suggests that questions of native identity and biological form were linked for the poet throughout her reading of Variation.
Among Darwin's writings, Variation's broad canvas of domesticated plant and animal forms offers indefinite answers to the question of racial essences. While the monogenist implications of evolutionary theory provides a logical counter to early modern notions of distinct racial types, the Darwin of Variation searched among domesticated life forms for evidence of the direct genetic inscription and transmission of environmentally derived traits. The dirty door-mat fleece on the goat backs that Moore culled from Darwin was a feature browned "directly" into generations from parental exposure to the Antigua sun (1250/2; VAP, 103). Such neo-Lamarckian notions of the inheritance of acquired characteristics offered American polygenists like Ripley and Grant a topographical ground for modern racial essences. People pressed together in homogenizing cities could be sorted on the basis of the genetically cast stamps of their ancestral environments.
While Moore did not look to the Lamarckian Darwin as a source for polygenist conceptions of race, she noted something akin to a hereditarian aesthetic foundation in Darwin's rendering of accounts such as "Mr. Blyth's" on the origins of goldfish in China.
The Chinese are just the people to have selected a chance variety of any kind and to have matched and paired for it....[Moore's ellipses] In an old Chinese work it is said that the fish w/ vermilion scales were first raised in confinement during the Sung Dynasty (960 AD). & now they are cultivated in families everywhere for the sake of ornament. (1250/2)
Predating the young poet's fondness for brilliant "Chinese vermilion" ("People's Surroundings," 1922) and "Chinese cherry" ("Picking and Choosing," 1920), Moore's attention to Blyth's account suggests that, for her, aesthetic essences like purity of color were linked to the practice of selective breeding. Aesthetically remote from the occasional shadings of partisanship, the poet's own writerly practice might have been metaphorically conceived as a breeding of language toward painterly truths. But if there are racialist overtones to the breeding of decorative goldfish toward stable aesthetic essences, the example of the MacKenzie River dogs in Darwin's Variation can be said to supply Moore with sporting evidence of the hollowness of racial essentialism. Dewey's nominalistic scolding in The Dial of essentializing nativists who hold immigrants to an "Americanizing" standard of proper English can be teased from Darwin's account of that North American dog species which, "when brot. to Eng., never learned to bark properly." Anglicization was happily marked for one river pup "born in the Zoolog. Garden" who soon learned to make "his voice sound as loudly as any other...of the same age and size" (1250/2).
Moore's attention to the story of the MacKenzie River dogs marks her playful awareness that culturally bound traits, such as habits of "dialect," are not as easily graded as the redness of fish scales. The continuum of variation that Darwin charts in his study, along with the zigzag genetic contingency of hybrid production, helps to unravel the ill-conceived terms of fixed formal essences. Comparisons of New World with European dog species remind us that, lacking the gold standard of red fish from China, our own cultural norms are fluid, ever shaped and reshaped by accidents of transmission and by the changing complexions of locales. American nativists are an offshoot of the stiff-lipped imperialists who believe that their subjects should bark like the Queen. When filtered through Moore reading Dewey and Darwin, "England'"s rendering of "pure English" shows that nativist versions of American racial identity are lacking in culture.
If Moore gathered evidence against linguistic and biological and nativist essences from readings of Dewey and Darwin, her modern understanding of the instability of generational transmission provided a distinguishing model for the kinky semantic chains that the poet fashioned especially during the teens and twenties. The metonymic unfolding of "England"'s lesson on resemblance and identity is finally more descriptive of Moore's adaptation of genetics to poetry than the lesson itself. "England" is prismatically a poem about America, with its musings on the nature of wild and tame forms splintered from an overall account of nation and nativity. Toadstools and a New England accent and temperament follow from an evaporating catalogue of American character and tone.
...and America where there
is the little old ramshackle victoria in the south, where cigars
are smoked on the
street in the north; where there are no proof readers,
no silkworms, no digressions;
the wild man's land; grass-less, links-less, language-less
country in which letters are written
not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in short-
hand
but in plain American which cats and dogs can read! The
letter "a" in psalm and calm....(MM, 46)
Cats and dogs; psalms, calm, and candles; mushrooms and poisonous toadstools; heat, haste, mettlesomeness, and appetite. All these phenomena materialize here not as the conceptual components of an overarching metaphor of identity and resemblance, but as surveyed and surveying features of a national character and landscape. Meaning proceeds by fundamental leaps and skips in Moore's poetry; and these are leaps both of contiguous surveillance, and of accidents of language. The same punning directive that pushes contiguity to contingency in the metered centipede of "In the Days of Prismatic Color" conditions the metonymic logic of "England." Does it follow from the 'a' in candle that, because there are poisonous toadstools, mushrooms are dangerous? Yes, but only because scaled against "continents of misapprehension," toads perched on stools describe an attitude of purists who watch over "calm." The literal frog in Moore's mushroom is yet another false poison, but it is one that affects a fortuitous identity in "England."
William Carlos Williams might have been speaking of the frog-pedants of "England," or of the "humbug"-"hummingbug" of "Picking and Choosing," when he described the "unbridled leaps," the semantic collisions that result in Moore's verse from "a multiplication of impulses" "crossing at all eccentric angles" ("MM," 59, 53). Modern visual art forms like collage set edges and fragments into arrangements that sharpened particular qualities by foregrounding distinctness rather than blending parts into a whole (FL, 92). A similar crispness resulting from Moore's "lack of connectives" led Williams to describe her work as a procedure geared to restore a natural freshness to fragments of language. Moore's poetry was predicated on a radical removal of word pieces--"cutting them clean out"--from their disease-ridden sources. Removed "bodily" from the "greasy contexts" of sense and sentimental attachments, old words were then "treated with acid to remove the smudges" and reassembled into structures that invigorated them as resonating terminals of artistic intelligence (CCE, 57-58). It was in the "porcelain garden," the "primitive masonry" ("MM," 58) of Moore's apple-edged ("MM," 55, 59) "unstandardized" "units" that new meaning moved "easily and completely," enabling "the thought" to reveal "the 'thing'" otherwise masked by the stale fragrance of reason ("MM," 58). In his 1925 appraisal of Moore, the imagist Williams implied that words were somehow innately vibrant and meaningful, but that they lost their discrete vitality within the rationalist thought systems that support the enervating principles of humanism. Poems performed a service to words by wrenching them from common conventional sense. A textual collage practice like Moore's worked both to restore the intrinsic vitality of words and to juice them with life by placing them within the artist's intuitive new circuitry of relations ("MM," 52-54, 58). The freshness of Moore's language was both natural, or necessary, and accidentally, or contingently, wrought.
While philosophical pragmatism, with its burrowing into "the particulars of experience," 27 was a likely support for the imagistic standard of "things" Williams brought to Moore's "insoluble" writings (LL, 161; "MM," 58), it was for Moore herself a conceptual conduit channeling Darwin's theories of evolution and even Mendelian genetic theory into the aesthetic of semantic collision at work in her writings. Charles Molesworth reads Dewey as a source for the poet's broadly modern concern with "the dialectic between tradition and innovation, between the stable form and the individual act" (LL, 161). But pragmatism also supplied Moore with a conceptual route between Darwinian notions of species and fluid Emersonian appraisals of language, as well as a foundation for her aesthetic elaboration of genetic contingency. Moore shared something of Williams's imagist aesthetic of presence in poetry, and she may have drawn this as well from nominalistic and "structuralist" relational moments in the philosophies of Dewey and James. But the more rigorous attention to semantic contingency that distinguishes Moore from her peers can finally be traced to the pragmatists' philosophical and semiotic adaptation of the lessons of natural history and genetics.
Moore's favorite teacher at Bryn Mawr was Theodore de Laguna, a philosophy and government professor who wrote on the impact of evolutionary theory on pragmatism (LL, 41, 54). 28 Shortly after graduating, around 1910, Moore made a note of de Laguna's new book Dogmatism and Evolution in her reading diary; 29 and then seven years later she made careful study of the pragmatist Dewey--as if in prelude to her 1919 reading of Darwin's Variation. Pragmatist tenets themselves bear directly on the relations between Moore's aesthetic and those of Williams and Pound. Passages from Dewey's Essays in Experimental Logic and Democracy and Education that Moore noted in her reading diary of 1917 express an imagist poet's contempt for literalists who assume "that wherever there is a name, there is some reality corresponding to it" (1250/2). Moore saw that the Dewey of Essays blamed reason for the pettiness and pedantry of literalists. Engulfed in abstract thought systems, those who trafficked excessively in theories reduced "truth," or the "correspondence of idea and fact," to a "static, inert relation," wanting a pragmatist's attention to the "lead[ing]" and "guid[ing]" function of thought (1250/2). The colorful dig at Bertrand Russell that Moore had earlier copied from an issue of The Nation echoes a pragmatist emphasis on the mechanics of contingency that momentarily joins, but finally distinguishes the biologist-poet from her avant-garde American peers: "I should say that the symbolic reals are about as truly representative of life and experience as a bishop whose activities were confined to diagonal squares would be representative of the archbishop of Canterbury...." (1250/1). For Moore, the verbal sorcery that swaps the archbishop for a chess piece is an illuminating lesson itself, one that beams on Dewey's nominalist caution: "the barest glance at human history shows that mistakes have been the rule...." (1250/2).
If Moore in 1917 found in the writings of Dewey philosophical support for the imagist aesthetic of presence that she tentatively shared with modernists like Pound and Williams, it may have been because she could situate Dewey's nominalism within the context of her earlier interest in pragmatism and language. During her student years at Bryn Mawr, the young poet read William James appreciatively, absorbing more or less directly his Emersonian vision of a language not of substantives, but of fluxional relations (LL, 50, 70). 30 In his well-known 1890 essay, "The Stream of Thought," James contrasted the syntactic parcels of Western language with his vision of a unity between the "substantive" and "transitive" aspects of fluxional thought. 31 Asserting that the "transition between the thought of one object and the thought of another is no more a break in the thought than a joint in a bamboo is a break in the wood," James reckoned that we "ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold" (PP, 240, 245-46).
There is not a conjunction or a preposition, and hardly an adverbial phrase, syntactic form, or inflection of voice, in human speech, that does not express some shading or other relation which we at some moment actually feel to exist between the larger objects of our thought...the relations are numberless, and no existing language is capable of doing justice to all their shades. (PP, 245)
In poems of the "National Origins" period of the late teens and early twenties, Moore appears to have aesthetically realized James's substantiation of the transitive tissue of speech through quotational collages forcing a modernist compression of syntax. Compression of syntax is a distinguishing characteristic of much American poetry written during the period after World War I, and its debt to avant-garde visual and conceptual arts has been discussed at some length. 32 Partly from a wish to obscure, and partly in an effort to foreground what James called the "shadings" of conceptual conjunctions, poets like Mina Loy wrote dense poems that eliminated the pragmatist's and, if, but, by, so that reading her work was, in one poet's words, "like walking through granite instead of air." 33 In her free-verse collage poems of the early twenties, however, Moore restores transitive shadings to language through more complicated varieties of compression that extract not just the connective tissue of speech, but such integral indexes to meaning as subjects and verbs. Amid the breakdowns of syntax that attend the densest of Moore's documentary collages (in poems like "An Octopus" and "Novices"), dislocated phrases--many of them wrapped in quotation marks --themselves emerge as the Jamesian linguistic "substantives," assuming the semantic burden of key syntactic referents. The quotational object-poems that Moore composes in this manner are deceptive. Retaining many of James's ands, ifs, buts, and bys, they have the tendrilly appearance of syntactically overfed prose. But they are as conceptually austere as many imagist verses. Set in forbidding juxtaposition, Moore's "substantive" quotational phrase-objects are rendered "transitive" not by syntax but by the raw performance of metonymic and metaphorical transactions among them.
The stamps of natural selection and modern genetics that distinguish Moore's collage practice and her nativist aesthetic from the work of her peers can be partly deciphered through James's and Dewey's appeals to Darwin and to his modern genetic predecessors. In Dogmatism and Evolution, Moore's teacher de Laguna wrote explicitly of the impact of Darwin on pragmatist philosophers Peirce, James, and Dewey; 34 and as a student of biology, the young "Individualist" Moore must have been particularly intrigued by James's Darwinian polemic against Spencerian environmental determinism in her reading of The Will To Believe (LL, 50, 70). James saw natural selection as a powerful antidote to an enervating belief in a continuous identity between individuals and societies and their environmental situations. Darwin's significance to zoology and sociology alike lay for the philosopher in the Victorian evolutionist's distinction between the causes that produce variation and the causes that maintain it in the process of selection. 35 Environment played a small role in selection, but the greater generative production of variables, a bounty based on "internal molecular accidents," was itself an unknown (WB, 223).
You know about the invisible factors of fermentation, and how the fate of a jar of milk--whether it turns into a sour clot or a mass of koumiss--depends on whether the lactic acid ferment or the alcoholic is introduced first, and gets ahead of the other in starting the process. Now, when the result is the tendency of an ovum, itself invisible to the naked eye, to tip towards this direction or that in its further evolution,--to bring forth a genius or a dunce, even as the raindrop passes east or west of the pebble,--is it not obvious that the deflecting cause must lie in a region so recondite and minute, must be such a ferment of a ferment, an infinitesimal of so high an order, that surmise itself may never succeed even in attempting to frame an image of it? (WB, 225)
James's freefalling ovum is an antiquarian oddity, but his account of biological reproduction as determined by an infinitesimal ferment of a ferment anticipates the variable shuffling and reshuffling of modern genetic combination. In his 1906-1907 lectures on pragmatism, the philosopher went on to blend language study with life sciences in appraising the evolutionary findings of "geologists, biologists and philologists." 36 Here James argued that natural history, and studies of natural selection especially, had engendered wide philosophical and linguistic repercussions. By showing us "the power of chance happenings to bring forth fit results," "darwinism has once and for all displaced design from the minds of the 'scientific,'" recommending to the "contemporary imagination" "some kind of an immanent or pantheistic deity working in things rather than above them" (P, 111, 70). Lecturing just as cytologists were beginning to demystify Darwin's account of natural selection, James tagged pragmatism itself "a genetic theory of what is meant by truth" (P, 65-66). 37
Dewey's account of Darwin's intellectual legacy was specifically concerned with life forms and the rationalist underpinnings of teleology. In a 1909 Popular Science essay entitled "Darwin's Influence upon Philosophy," Dewey historicized the significance of biology to philosophy and ethics. For Dewey, nature itself, with its tendency to generate like forms "distant in space and remote in time," implanted and cultivated notions of "type" in the minds of the Greeks and the scholastics: "the conception of eidos, species, the fixed form and final cause, was the central principle of knowledge as well as of nature." 38 Perceptions of orderly biological design supported an Aristotelian faith in intelligent systems of classification; and modern thought, Dewey cautioned, still glints with a garden variety of reason.
We dispose all too easily of the efforts of the schoolmen to interpret nature and mind in terms of real essences, hidden forms and occult faculties...by laughing at the famous gentleman who accounted for the fact that opium put people to sleep on the ground that it had a dormitive faculty. But the doctrine, held in our own day, that knowledge of the plant that yields the poppy consists in referring the particularities of an individual to a type, to a universal form...[is] a survival of precisely the same logic. ("DIP," 92-93)
By replacing creationist notions of fixed species with natural selection, The Origin of Species "cut strait under" the lingering Ptolemaic legacy of the scholastics, supplying radical proof that human experience and hence the instruments of inference themselves are also in flux ("DIP," 92, 95). Like James, Dewey reflected the tenor of the decade by locating the future of philosophy in evolution and genetics. In Dewey's view, the life sciences, entrenched before Darwin in universalizing notions of species, had been a drag on Copernican revolution.
The impact of the new scientific method upon life, mind, and politics, had been arrested...because between these ideal or moral interests and the inorganic world there intervened the kingdom of plants and animals. The gates of the garden of life were barred to the new ideas while only through this garden was there access to mind and politics. The influence of Darwin upon philosophy resides in his having freed the new logic for application to mind and morals by conquering the phenomena of life. When he said of species what Galileo had said of the earth, e pur se muove, he emancipated once and for all genetic and experimental ideas as an organon of asking questions and looking for explanations in philosophy. ("DIP," 93)
James's and Dewey's grafting of "genetic theory" and "experimental ideas" onto pragmatism, in 1906 and 1909 respectively, is noteworthy considering that the term genetics had not been adapted to modern usage until the biologist William Bateson garnered it for the new science in 1906. 39 Dewey's allusion to "genetic and experimental ideas" suggests that natural selection for him, as for James, was filtered through the fresh discipline of "experimental biology" sweeping Europe and America just after the turn of the century (TE, 15-25).
If Moore's understanding of both the fluidity and contingency of plant and animal species, and hence the fluidity and contingency of racial identity, was philosophically and linguistically mediated by her readings of James and Dewey, her knowledge of the genetic principles that support these qualities was largely post-Darwinian. Moore's reading diary of 1919 ignores many of the bizarre Darwinian accounts of the transmission of acquired mutilations--ranging from cracked cow horns to circumcised foreskins--that James glossed over in The Will To Believe (Darwin, VAP, 466-70; James, WB, 222). But lecture notes from biology courses at Bryn Mawr indicate the poet's familiarity with "pangenesis" and "gemules," baroque components of the somatic "blending" theory of heredity that Darwin elaborated from antiquity in Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication. 40 Eight years after the 1859 publication of The Origin of Species, Darwin was challenged by colleagues to explain how single mutations might survive the swamping that awaited their mixture with the mass of population. 41 At this time, Gregor Mendel's statistical study of hybrid inheritance, though published in 1865, was still awaiting wide readership. A Moravian monk isolated from Europe's scientific circles, Mendel spent two years crossing and recrossing the offspring of twenty-two varieties of garden peas. 42 Tracking the disappearance and reemergence of isolated traits--greenness, yellowness, wrinkles, roundness--he concluded that physiological characteristics were not actually fused in sexual reproduction, but that they were in fact particulate, preserved intact and passed on as discrete entities, in dominant or recessive forms, to subsequent generations. Because Darwin lacked such a handy defense as Mendel's against the swamping challenge to natural selection, he reverted to a Lamarckian notion of the inheritance of acquired traits: environment, he would argue in Variation, played a direct and persistent role in producing variations in species.
The neo-Lamarckian view that life forms were categorically determined by ancestral environments was used to support American polygenist conceptions of race like Coolidge's in his Nordic miscegenation tract in Good Housekeeping. Conservative social planners struggled against the conceptual challenges of those Darwinian notions of variational contingency that James and Dewey located in The Origin of Species, and sought instead to preserve the socially stratifying imperatives of environmental determinism. Disparities of wealth and station were justified by the idea that natural stresses strengthened a people's genetic fiber, weeding out failures and programming successes directly into future generations. And for Americans like Coolidge and Madison Grant, the polygenist implications of environmental origins provided modern racial fodder for the red tooth of "fitness." If the inheritance of acquired characteristics fostered social visions that were narrowly programmatic in the eyes of "individualists" like William James in The Will to Believe, contrary hypotheses like August Weismann's 1890 theory of the germ plasm as an inviolate reproductive material threatened even colder extremes of biological determinism. The notion that acquired characteristics might be more or less directly inherited had at least supplied Americans of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with a theoretical basis for melting-pot visions of race-in-formation. In the image of the melting pot, Lamarckianism provided a progressive outlook on what was seen as a necessarily mixed racial American heritage and future: immigrants of various shapes and shades could be both socially and biologically "Americanized," with their material adaptation to the New World leading more or less directly to their genetic assimilation into a single "American race" (REC, 245).
After the turn of the century, American eugenists emerged to adapt current biological and sociological imperatives, as well as the principles of engineering, to this new race-in-formation. Lacking the mediating term Franz Boas would gradually formulate as "culture," Lamarckian eugenists "tended to assume the physical inheritance of...complex mental characteristics" (REC, 251). Habit was embedded and passed forth as instinct (REC, 247). Culture was conveyed in the blood (REC, 253). Yet Weismann's theories of the germ plasm, and the rediscovery in 1900 of Mendel's study of hybrid garden peas, did not precipitate an immediate dismissal of Lamarckianism in American biological sciences. Rather, in the first two decades of the century, biology was caught between extremes of holdover Lamarckian environmentalism and the early biological determinism of geneticists who had yet to map what Hamilton Cravens calls the "contingent" effects of populations and surrounding environmental factors on the process of genetic combination (REC, 253-54; TE, 171). Not only did hereditarian biologists lack the mediating findings of later population geneticists from within their own discipline, they were also resistant, in a growing climate of nativism, to the more sophisticated models of biological and cultural identity that eventually emerged in the twenties and thirties in the form of Boasian cultural anthropology (REC, 299-302). The eugenics movement, which flourished in leading universities during the teens and twenties, sprang from what we recognize now as an improbable hybridization of Lamarckian social thought and hereditarian biological tendencies. But in the pre-Boasian climate of the times, its innate contradictions were not so immediately apparent.
The idea of particulate inheritance held special appeal to early modern scientists who wished to merge biological with social sciences under the technical aegis of engineering. Charles Davenport was sanguine regarding the utilitarian implications of a particulate genetic constitution when he addressed members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1904.
As the qualities and behavior of molecules are determined by their constituent atoms, so the essence of the individuals is determined by its constituent characteristics. And as we may construct new substances at will by making new characteristics of atoms, so we may produce new species at will by making new combinations of characteristics. 43
At the turn of the century, Davenport campaigned to bring to America the statistical approach to nature study developed by British biometricians like Karl Pearson and Sir Frances Galton, Charles Darwin's cousin. Appointed secretary to the Committee on Eugenics of the American Breeder's Association, Davenport encouraged the activities of its members such as popular luminaries like Alexander Graham Bell and Luther Burbank, as well as leading biologists, sociologists, and psychologists--including the mental tester Yerkes--known for their pioneering work in mental inheritance, feeblemindedness, and criminology (HA, 62, 64-65). Among the committees that Davenport oversaw was one on immigration headed by Prescott Hall and Robert DeC. Ward, leaders of the elite and influential Boston-based Immigration Restriction League. Fellow Brahmins, and former Harvard mates of the pedigreed puritan Davenport, Hall and Ward posed the issue of immigration in starkly polygenist terms. They drew from Ripley and from the New York society lawyer Madison Grant in adapting to racial engineering distorted "Mendelian" principles such as the notion that crossbreeding inevitably leads downward toward reversions to more "primitive" ancestral types (REC, 68, 324n). At immigrant stations like Ellis Island, Ward and Hall argued, Americans must choose between preserving a "progressive" and "energetic" Nordic nation peopled by immigrants of "British, German and Scandinavian stock," and creating an "atavistic" composite of "Slav, Latin, and Asiatic races." 44
Moore's own writings in fact show that she managed a deliberate application of the new science to her poet's aesthetics, and it is through a close study of particular notes, essays, and poems that we can more precisely appreciate her understanding and use of eugenics. In poems like 1921's "The Labors of Hercules," for example, Moore spoke out directly against such patrician proponents of Nordic supremacy as Hall, Ward, and Madison Grant, likening the barrenness of elite restrictionists to the emptiness of the truisms that they exploited. It is an effort, Moore begins, "To popularize the mule," teaching it the democratic
principle of accommodation...
to prove to the high priests of caste
that snobbishness is a stupidity,
the best side out, of age-old toadyism...to convince snake-charming controversialists
that it is one thing to change one's mind,
another to eradicate it--that one keeps on knowing
"that the negro is not brutal,
that the Jew is not greedy,
that the Oriental is not immoral,
that the German is not a Hun."
(MM, 53)
Versed in nature, Moore knew that mules were bred by mating donkeys with mares. Engendered at the limits of hybridity, these mixed creatures were as vigorous and powerful as they were sterile. If such an emblem as the mule in "Hercules" interrogates equally the purity and the fertility of "the high priests of caste," it embodies a flaw in the character of nativist appeals to Nordic supremacy. When read in the context of restrictionist debates about race, the excerpted sermon that closes the poem does more than dismiss empty rhetoric and bigotry on principle: it challenges eugenists like Grant, Hall, and Ward by closing with a World War I-era nationalist's slur against German-Americans, "hyphenated" citizens of divided loyalty who had fallen from favor as the first-born tribesmen of the great Nordic race (SL, 197-98). Sowing their future American race with disaffection, the restrictionists are like Moore's mythical bird of statecraft who will go
staggering toward itself and with its bill
attack its own identity, until
foe seems friend and friend seems
foe.
(MM, 35)
The spiteful and contradictory logic of eugenics seems indeed to concentrate those themes of internal divisiveness that color Moore's 1916 address "To State-craft Embalmed." Compiling tables of quantifiable data, the new breeders of nativism engender nothing but diffusely malicious clichés.
If Moore showed a principled disdain for the flagrant racist clichés exploited by many eugenists in the teens and twenties, however, she may still have been drawn to the essentialist premises of the eugenics movement. In a 1925 editorial for The Dial, Moore splashed praise on the horticulturist Luther Burbank, posing him as a modern replacement for Newton in Professor Emeritus Dr. Charles Eliot's pantheon of Western history's great educators.
Has one consciously been...less in debt to Luther Burbank whose witchcraft we are told is merely the suncraft of an observer, than to Sir Isaac Newton? Since, having been made to understand how five hundred kinds of fruit may be produced on one tree, how white blackberries, stoneless plums, spineless cactus, and sweet lemons may be successfully "designed," one cannot but understand somewhat of the water, of the air, and of the sun which contributed to produce these curiosities. 45
Written shortly before Burbank's death in 1926, Moore's paean to the Wizard of Santa Rosa crowns a popularity that ranged widely among modernist writers, from Pound in his essay on "Cavalcanti," to T. S. Eliot in "Burbank with a Baedeker," to Dos Passos in U.S.A. As the pragmatist-naturalist poet who admired the businesslike prose of Charles Darwin, while admiring practical Henry Ford for his "unbusinesslike" "fondness of nature" (1250/1), Moore seems almost to have made an aesthetic study of the vegetable inventions of the celebrated modern breeder. Burbank's crossing of peaches with almonds, of apples with quinces, of potatoes with tomatoes (GTG, 102)--and his christening of hybrids like "Elephant Garlic," "The Paradox Walnut," "The Pearl Prune," "The Blood Plum," and "The Sunberry"--might be considered as sources for the proliferating compound nominal hybrids that distinguish Moore's diction. 46 Praised by fellow botanists as a hands-on hybridizer with an unschooled but judicious eye (GTG, 118-20), Burbank with his suncraft is a demystifying model for the collage writer of lab notes and advertisements who affected to map her own handiwork with quotations and notes. As a "designer" of nature, however, Burbank's practice with plants resounds with topical eugenist premises, politically flavoring his canonization.
Moore's praise of the colorful Burbank in 1925 as a great modern "educator" appeals to the racist foundations of the National Origins Act not only through the metaphorically volatile concept of horticultural "design," but through the celebrated hybridizer's direct involvement with the eugenics movement. A national hero during the early decades of the century, Burbank was sought after by journalists for his views on subjects ranging from diet and meditation to evolution and school reform. The California gardener was an early advocate of Chinese immigrant exclusion, and his only book-length publication was on the subject of eugenics (GTG, 160, 156). Appearing initially in 1906 as a long essay in Century Magazine (then edited by the young poet William Rose Benét, a childhood neighbor and lifelong friend of Moore's), The Training of the Human Plant won praise from temperance advocates like the poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox, who proposed that the government distribute a copy of Burbank's book to every mother in the nation (GTG, 161). The tract began with a chapter on "The Mingling of Races," which contained a demographic breakdown of the 752,864 immigrants who entered the U.S. in 1904. In the face of such a "colossal example of the crossing of species," Burbank proposed to adapt "the principles of plant culture and improvement in a more or less modified form to the human being." 47 An admirer of Darwin's Variation in Animals and Plants under Domestication (GTG, 33) Burbank was at this time an anomaly as a eugenist who believed that "environment is the architect of heredity"; and his prescription for the melting pot buried racist and classist anxieties beneath vague calls for "supervision and selection" and a glowing emphasis on nurturance and educational reform--namely fresh air and sunshine and no school for children under ten. 48
Moore may or may not have had the hybridizer-educator Burbank in mind when she wrote, late in life, of students as "foster plants of scholarship" (LL, 32); but she was clearly tracking his horticultural and sociological innovations in her reading diaries of the early twenties. During the 1922 family trip to Mt. Rainer that led to her long twin poems "Marriage" and "An Octopus," Moore copied passages from an interview with Burbank from the July 16 Seattle Times.
In nature we find varied an & inanimate forms of life many of wh have motion Some of wh in the higher forms we call emotions. Education and environment can never make any appreciable progress in producing a better race of human beings. Perm. results can only be obtained by the selec of the best individuals for continuing the race this selec being continued thru a series of generations
Apparently trying to lighten up the interview, the Times writer then asked Burbank "What do you think of the Climate of S. California."
 Then why does S.C. attract so many people I interposed Because it is better advertised than the N. part of the State. They all flock to the place they're told to go. Less than 15% of our own people do any orig. thinking on any subject. Our army tests showed that. 49
Among the scientific periodicals Moore skimmed during the National Origins fervor was The Journal of Heredity, the leading forum for American eugenists throughout the teens and twenties. Noting articles on the "Inheritance of Mental Traits," "Twinning in Brahma Cattle," and "The Ancestry of Abraham Lincoln," the poet copied passages such as this one on heredity and criminality from a 1924 article on "Behavior and Gland Disease": "In disease as in health, the man of the gutter will behave according to his world and the man of the peaks in keeping with his." 50 Moore's interest in heredity and hereditarians may have been as aesthetic and skeptical as sincerely scientific, but in the context of praise for Burbank, it seems to signal at least a tacit support for eugenics. If Moore partook of the sanguine spirit of racial engineers like Davenport, indirectly celebrating new racialist steerage restrictions with her praise of stoneless plums and sweet lemons, however, she also anticipated flaws intrinsic to the science of human selectivity that Burbank set forth. In the margin of her transcription of the Seattle Times interview with Burbank, Moore queried "(What about recessive traits [indecipherable mark] Elizabeth Tuttle [indecipherable mark] Edward's grandmother)" (1250/3).
Moore's cryptic dialogue with Burbank can be read in two ways. On the one hand, eugenist judges had begun by 1925 to accept "Mendelian recessives" as grounds for the mandatory sterilization of the promiscuous daughters of feebleminded mothers--the same poor and uneducated women already being sterilized by court order in twenty-five states (HA, 138-39, 133-37). Moore's quarrel might then be with the softness of the plant breeder's program of selection. The hybridizer who had called in The Training of the Human Plant for laws "to prohibit in every State in the Union the marriage of the physically, mentally, and morally unfit" (HA, 58) seemed now to be peddling an overly positive program, one which accented "selection of the best" while evading the question of how to weed out the worst. In the context of Moore's pragmatist leanings and poetic practice, however, her own reference to recessive traits seems to constitute a more fundamental criticism of Burbank the eugenist. By using Mendelian terms to challenge the horticulturist's naïve hereditarian approach to social issues, the poet begins to align herself with the more contemporary discoveries of population geneticists.
Thomas Morgan and his Columbia University lab partners bred fruit flies in milk bottles during the late teens and early twenties, establishing that genetic transmission was a far more complex and contingent affair than eugenists like Davenport--and the Seattle Times's Burbank--had conceived it to be (TE, 171). Mendelians had erred first by assigning single corresponding genetic units to discreet somatic features: one gene unit for eye color, one for hairline, another for width of jaw. They assumed that biological reproduction involved a one-on-one matching-up of gene units that resulted in various combinations of dominant and recessive traits. Eugenists then elaborated from this miscast framework a similar correspondence between genetic units and particular character traits, such as laziness and wanderlust (TE, 164, 172: HA, 67-68). 51 The second mistake of the Mendelians--their hereditarian determinism--was related to the first. In order that heredity might be arithmetically cast, the process of genetic combination was abstracted from contaminating local environmental contexts. Morgan's fruit fly populations showed that environmental pressures did indeed play a role in the pairing of chromosomes (TE, 171-72). One of the fundamental contradictions of racist eugenicism was its joining of a Lamarckian polygenist essentialism--which used geography and climate as grounds for racial essences--with a neatly manipulable hereditarian determinism (SL, 152-53; REC, 324n). In her eugenical reference to recessive traits, Moore asks Burbank how trait selection can engineer the many randomly hidden units of genes. Although the question itself reflects a unit conception of genetic material that was already under challenge by Morgan, the poet was implicitly suggesting that the designing of Americans might be a chancier enterprise than the designing of roadsters. Against deterministic selection, Moore invoked the sort of Jamesian fermentation of environment and heredity that population geneticists were recognizing as essential to biological reproduction.
If the National Origins Act lent a political immediacy to Moore's interest in horticultural design and genetics, then the modern American science of racial engineering might be indirectly traced to Moore's writerly aesthetics. Bonnie Costello has noted that a number of Moore's poems treat questions of aesthetic representation through the thematic lenses of biological and artistic reproduc-tion. In Moore's "Nine Nectarines," for example, the genealogical impulses attendant to natural history and art history provide, in their "infinite regress," a formal account of Moore's own multiply-authored quotational poems. 52 Moore's crossing of natural history with mythology and aesthetics in her 1935 poem about a Chinese porcelain painting, however, suggests the role of genetics as a complicating factor in her distinctive modernist practice.
Arranged by two's as peaches are,
at intervals that all may live--
eight and a single one, on twigs that
grew the year before--they look like
a derivative;
although not uncommonly
the opposite is seen--
nine peaches on a nectarine.
Fuzzless through slender crescent leaves
of green or blue or
both, in Chinese style, the four
pairs' half-moon leaf-mosaic turns
out to the sun the sprinkled blush
of puce-American-Beauty pink
applied to bees-wax gray by the
uninquiring brush
of mercantile bookbinding.
Like the peach Yu, the red-
cheeked peach which cannot aid the dead,
but eaten in time prevents death,
the Italian
peach-nut, Persian plum, Ispahan
secluded wall-grown nectarine,
as wild spontaneous fruit was
foundin China first. But was it wild?
Prudent de Candolle would not say.
(MM, 29)
Moore knew from readings of Darwin and the Swiss botanist Alphonse de Candolle that the origins of the peach and the nectarine were a subject of nineteenth-century contest. Among the more tantalizing clues to the origins of hybridized, or specifically crossed, plants like Victorian nectarines were accounts of sudden reversions to aboriginal forms (VAP, 398, 439). Darwin's Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication cites many reports of nectarine trees springing from peach parents, as well as abundant instances of "sports," or mutated nectarine clusters on peach-tree limbs, and occasional "half-and-half" fruits. But seed reversions and bud-variations pointed the other way too, with cases of "nine peaches on a nectarine" providing evidence for each tree as the specific parent of the other (VAP, 361). Through centuries of back-and-forth crossing, the hybridization of nectarines and peaches seemed so thorough that neither fruit could remember where it began. If there was anything to be learned from genetics, it may have been located in the humility of the meticulous de Candolle.
I laid stress, in 1855, on other considerations in support of the theory that the nectarine is derived from the common peach; but Darwin has given such a large number of cases in which a branch of nectarine has unexpectedly appeared on a peach tree, that it is useless to insist any longer upon this point, and I will only add that the nectarine has every appearance of an artificial tree. 53
Mendelian recessives and Darwinian bud-variations are important components of Moore's modernist aesthetic because they illustrate the fundamental instability of life forms in transmission. By naturalizing accidents in generational carriage, the saltations of particulate inheritance enrich the relational aesthetic of modern poetry in the same way that postmodern semiotics give depth to the formalist distinction between substitutional and contiguous tropes. Admired through the gates of Dewey's "garden of life," the blushing contrast between nectarines and peaches grafts its still-life contiguity onto the tree of knowledge itself. The nectarine beside the peach becomes the nectarine behind the peach, displacing the conceptual agency that determines the genesis and transmission of both life and meaning. Within the framework of biological transmission, "substitution" becomes generational "necessity," and positional "contiguity" becomes a variety of transmissive "contingency." The very particulate contingency of modern genetic combination that accounts for such marvelous sports of hybrid reversion as Darwin recorded in Variation is what enables Moore to transfer the laws of genetics to both the particulate nominalist and relational aesthetics of modern imagist and ideogrammatic poetry. Applied to poetry, genetic contingency shakes the semiotic burden of natural generation not only from the primitive index of things in words, but from the structuralist standard of foundational relations upon which poems like the Cantos and Paterson come to rest. Developing her own metonymically strung semantic chains toward the contingency that conditions hybrid production, Moore used an image of nine nectarines on a peach tree as a metaphor for the generative displacement of meaning that distinguishes her poetry for contemporary readers.
When the DNA molecule was finally "solved" in the fifties, its codings revealed a relational complexity far greater than counts of garden peas or even fruit flies had indexed (HA, xi). Scientifically-minded Americans commonly recognized that, notwithstanding new ethical imperatives, nature was so full of surprises, of tics on the order of recessive traits and bud-variations, that eugenists were left finally as helpless in their attempts to fix future races as were Victorian botanists in their efforts to trace the origins of fruit. Early twentieth-century population geneticists who mapped the contingency of chromosome pairing, discovering that its chemical intricacy was then further tensed by environmental pressures, had comprised a sort of modernist vanguard in recognizing that, as a science, eugenics could offer at best a succession of natural and unnatural accidents. "The facts in themselves are curious," wrote Darwin, "concerning evidence on the origin of the nectarine" (VAP, 361).