To establish why Crane needed a gramophone in order to write poetry, the best procedure might be to hunt for something of a paradox: a 78 by one of Crane's favorite innovative, contemporary composers that would nonetheless have been readily obtainable during his lifetime. Such a 78 might permit us to appreciate both what Crane saw in modern music and how it could be adapted for his own, writerly purposes. In the next section of this article, I concentrate on a unique case that fills this bill, Maurice Ravel's popular but somewhat bizarre orchestral work Boléro. I examine both Boléro itself as well as how it would have been altered as Crane "performed" it on his Victrola. We will thereby begin to distinguish what attracted Crane to certain kinds of music as well as how he endeavored to isolate and accentuate those qualities. We will also begin to discern that Crane's madness had a method, that he played selected music in a particular way so as to promote definite poetic ends.
Late in Hart Crane's career, Maurice Ravel's Boléro seems to have become one of his favorite accompaniments for his poetry-writing marathons. 30 Crane believed that it provided him with the raw stuff of inspiration. "At times dear Gorham," he wrote his friend Gorham Munson, "I feel an enormous power in me--that seems almost supernatural. . . . I can say this now with perfect equanimity because I am notoriously drunk and the Victrola is still going with that glorious 'Bolero'" (OM, 92). 31
Boléro has an undeserved reputation for being nothing more than an expression of mounting excitement as one nears the climactic moment of orgasm/death. Crane, one might conjecture, loved Boléro for no better reason than that it conjured up images of lithe toreadors engaged in the kind of life-or-death athletic struggles that he found powerfully erotic. He was, after all, the sort of man who went to boxing matches not because of sport--he considered the game itself often rather "boresome"--but because the spectacle of "sublime machines of human muscle-play" got him "very heated" (OM, 35). Ravel, however, is not a simple composer, and, as I have said, Crane had extensive, intimate knowledge of contemporary European music.
Boléro is a fifteen-minute orchestral piece written in 3/4 time. It consists of eighteen repetitions of an initial theme and countertheme, gradually and steadily increasing in volume from barely audible to deafening. Two measures of percussion interrupt the melody after every second countertheme. Ravel signals the impending conclusion of the piece by suddenly modulating the tonality. The last countertheme segues into a thunderous, dissonant crescendo.
In his classic analysis of Boléro, Claude Lévi-Strauss argues that it attempts to work through a basic opposition between symmetry and asymmetry. The rhythm is ternary, but its melodic structure of theme and countertheme is binary. Lévi-Strauss lays out the intricate, subtle ways in which, over the course of Boléro, both its rhythm and melody endeavor to bridge that gap. There is no need to recapitulate Lévi-Strauss's structural analysis here beyond noting that he successfully demonstrates that every strategy intended to camouflage ternaries as binaries (and vice versa) produces further, often higher-order oppositions between asymmetry and symmetry, which must then, in turn, be overcome. Caught in this sand trap, Boléro cannot progress but only repeat itself, futilely intensifying its efforts with every iteration. Lévi-Strauss argues that the final modulation and crescendo represent a "mythic" solution to the piece's fundamental self-contradictions. That is, instead of "reconciling" the contraries, they are "cast out," like a scapegoat. The silence that follows their abrupt banishment only feels satisfying to an audience, as if the quiet were "consecrated to a task well done," when in reality Boléro is more or less conceding defeat. 32
Lévi-Strauss's account of Boléro depends upon one fundamental assumption: that its audience listen to the piece continuously from beginning to end. Hart Crane, however, would not have been able to listen to Boléro in this manner while writing. A ten-inch 78 played on a Victrola lasts no more than five minutes. When Decca released Boléro, they had to put it onto two separate disks. To simulate a live performance of Ravel's piece, Crane would have to have stood over his Victrola and been poised to flip or switch the 78s as necessary. But we know that he did nothing of the sort. In the heat of composing a poem, he always played "the same record grinding over and over through its five-minute cycles" (V, 253). Crane would, therefore, have listened to one part of Boléro incessantly, most likely the final third, but not necessarily.
Played in this way, Crane's Boléro would have been very different from the harshly linear work that Lévi-Strauss explicates. Instead, Crane's suspended, ever-repeated, partial Boléro would have approached the condition of such 1960s minimalist works as Philip Glass's Music in Fifths and Terry Riley's In C. That is, the original teleology of Boléro would, as in minimalist music, have become degraded, or irrelevant. Like Glass and Riley, in his "performance" of Boléro, Crane aims not for a single, completed musical gesture but a continuous auditory environment. Under these circumstances, Boléro's crescendo would have had much less "mythic" impact than in a concert hall--how could it be otherwise, after three dozen or more repetitions? Crane seems to have sought out, and prolonged indefinitely, the tension, or "oscillation" as Lévi-Strauss puts it, between ternary and binary, asymmetry and symmetry, in Ravel's work. 33
The resulting variant on Boléro was, again like a minimalist work, something of a closed system, or, more grandly, an attempt at instantiating a timeless, utopian space. Within the endless loop of Crane's Boléro, the melody would have remained powerfully expressive and the pronounced martial rhythm viscerally stirring, but they also would have remained untainted by the strong narrative impulse subtending earlier romantic uses of such devices in, say, Tschaikovsky's 1812 Overture or Beethoven's Eroica. The music thereby marks out a "time" that is "timeless" in the sense that "What next?" never becomes an issue. One of the most famous pieces of minimalist music is John Adams's whimsically titled Short Ride in a Fast Machine. Crane, in constructing his Boléro-world, seems to have pined after a Perpetual Ride in a Fast Machine: symmetry and asymmetry forever in dynamic imbalance; the volume downshifting only to return to the same level, again and again; a listener caught up in a perpetual driver's high with no Hegelian synthesis or transformative epiphany possible. A joyride into eternity. 34
This ride would also have required Crane's active, physical involvement. Victrolas were spring-operated. A user had to hand-crank them every once in a while to keep the turntable rotating. According to Gorham Munson, Crane periodically had to "race" to wind his up so as to keep constant the musical accompaniment to his writing marathons (V, 252-3). Crane's Boléro-world was both mechanical and muscle-powered, the product of human and machine labor. Moreover, as I have already pointed out, when not cranking away, Crane would have been sitting at a table, pounding away at a manual typewriter, or going through "loud trial readings" of a line and all its possible variants (V, 253). Poet-with-typewriter and poet-with-gramophone were structural equivalents for Crane. Both brought audible art into being. And those heady sounds, repeated, created the utopian space that sustained the human will and drive required to produce yet more sound--again, we discover a (theoretically) closed system. In his poem "Cutty Sark" Crane writes apocalyptically of a "white machine that sings" (CP, 72). The phrase could be a kenning for typewriter, Victrola, and poet alike.
Before I can go further, I must again concede that Boléro is only one of many 78s Crane played when, to quote Robert Browning, "a palace of music [he] reared." 36 Yet all of Crane's preferred 78s--whether Dietrich-style torch songs or bombastic classical music--seem to have shared one fundamental trait. They exhibit Eros in its most theatrical guises, ranging from aggressive triumph to jaded melancholy. And, as in the case of Boléro, Crane, by playing these emotional roller coasters nonstop, would have stripped the music of implied teleologies, whether narrative, psychological, or otherwise. Crane would have prolonged indefinitely seduction's dramatic tension. At the start of my discussion of Boléro, I set aside the question of Eros because I did not want to broach the subject prematurely. Now, however, we can address that issue with greater sophistication, and we can use it as a launching pad for moving toward a broader understanding of how Crane's verse functions.
Crane's compositional regimen bears all the hallmarks of a libidinal ritual. He insisted that things be just so and that they stay that way. He fantasizes a physical fusion of man and machine that releases a flood of creative energy. An early poem, "Episode of Hands," shows us the erotic charge that this fantasy held for Crane. He retells an incident in his father's candy factory. 37 An unnamed machine injures a worker's hand. Amidst "factory sounds and factory thoughts," "the factory owner's son" takes the worker's hurt hand into his own and studies it before bandaging it. "The gash was bleeding, and a shaft of sun / That glittered in and out among the wheels, / Fell lightly, warmly, down into the wound" (CP, 173). Significantly, the speaker here so identifies with another man's violated flesh that he imagines that he becomes the other person, able to feel the "warmth" of the sunlight in the "gash." Celestial light washes indifferent across machine and men, transring them, sanctifying their erotic communion, removing them from time and space.
Crane's later poem, "Cape Hatteras," dispenses with the autobiographical frame of "Episode of Hands" but makes much the same statement.
[F]ast in whirling armatures,
As bright as frogs' eyes, giggling in the girth
Of steely gizzards--axle-bound, confined
In coiled precision, bunched in mutual glee
The bearings glint,--O murmurless and shined
In oilrinsed circles of blind ecstasy!
[CP, 79]
Crane projects bestial, blind, raw Eros onto machinery in a factory. This libidinal energy ("glee") is both constrained ("confined") and permitted, frictionless ("oilrinsed"), to expend itself with abandon ("whirl"). The male bodies left (nominally) integral in "Episode of Hands" here dissolve, like Osiris, into partial objects that pursue their circumscribed yet blissful course. In both these poems, note, Crane's symbol for this mechanical-eternal jouissance is the turning wheel ("wheels," "whirl," "axle," "oilrinsed circles"). I would argue that these symbols thematize the very real turning wheel, the Victrola turntable, that preexists them and that as a material precondition for their existence as poetry can even be said to bring them into being. Poems like "Episode of Hands" and "Cape Hatteras" are, forgive the pun, records of a utopian, Dionysian-Bacchic state that Crane induces through a precise blend of repetitious music, alcohol, frenzied physical activity, and noisy machinery. 38
Inserting machinery into his scene of desire by insisting upon a mechanized variant of the poet's divinest madness, Crane clearly participates in what Caroline Jones, in The Machine in the Studio, calls "the technological sublime." 39 Whereas Edmund Burke's classic definition of the sublime emphasizes encounters with the natural world, for many twentieth-century artists, Jones argues, "Machines, not nature . . . provide the terrible forces to be encountered, engulfed by, and transcended in the studio" (MS, 203-4). Yes, "in the studio"--Jones has in mind not poets but postwar visual artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Smithson, and Andy Warhol, who grapple with how to integrate machines, the mechanical, and the mechanistic into their artistic processes. As Jones sees it, that wrestling match puts the artist's very humanity at risk. I would argue that Crane's writing ritual depended upon the creation of a similar arena, a space of a Jacob-and-the-angel erotic combat between the human and the non- or superhuman. 40
Jones credits the "technological sublime" to an implicit analogy between an artist's work space and industrial production. The artist encounters, then battles or submits to, the titanic, impersonal forces propelling the march of capitalism. In essence, Jones is extending Fredric Jameson's argument that "euphoria" results when a subject "consumes" a (false, ideological) image of the capitalist market as a totality, omnipresent and omnipotent. 41 Jones builds on Jameson by investigating some of the practical, artistic consequences of that "euphoria" or feeling of sublimity. As "Episode of Hands" and the factory passage from "Cape Hatteras" have demonstrated, Crane, like Jones's Warhol and Rauschenberg, finds "euphoria" in contemplating the loss of self as mechanical processes supplant, or rend, the integrity of the individual. While living in Akron--an industrial boomtown in 1919, famous as the birthplace of the rubber tire--Crane told an interviewer, "living as we do in an age of the most violent commercialism the world has ever known, the artist cannot remain aloof from the welters without losing the essential, imminent vitality of his vision." 42 Capitalism, for Crane, is orphic. In its "violence," its "welters," one beholds raw power. In the factory, not the sanctuary, one undergoes a theophany: "Power's script,--wound, bobbin-bound, refined-- / Is stropped to the slap of belts on booming spools, spurred / Into the bulging bouillon, harnessed jelly of the stars" (CP, 79).
Caroline Jones criticizes Andy Warhol for too readily identifying his artistic procedures with the logic of an assembly line. 43 One could make a similar statement about Crane. In 1918 Crane worked at a munitions plant in Cleveland. His job was tightening bolts on machine parts. He "watched a seemingly endless procession of objects pass before him on a conveyer belt" (V, 113). His writing utopia would later reproduce the essentials of this wartime labor: repetition, mechanization, timelessness, circularity, the production of interchangeable parts. One could validly claim that Crane shares the industrial capitalist's dream of production by rote, ad infinitum. Moreover, his individual phrases are like parts manufactured in one place--Boléro-land--and then shipped elsewhere--Sobriety City--for assembly into functioning wholes. Crane's reliance on the "technological sublime" in his poetry and his proclivity for references to factories and machines seem to prere Warhol's compromises with the capitalist market.
But Crane enters his "writing factory" for artistic, not economic, reasons. Unlike Warhol, he would never confuse Business and Art. 44 The sublime in its technological guise remains for him "the highest order of aesthetic experience" (MS, 20, emphasis added). How could it have been otherwise? Crane associated capitalism at its crudest with his father Chester Arthur, the candy magnate who invented Life Savers yet forced his son to work for his keep as a manual laborer or lowly salesclerk. 45 Crane's choice to be a poet was a calculated rejection of his father's world and worldview. He dropped his given name Harold and adopted in its stead his mother's maiden name, Hart. And he quite proudly wrote his mother that he would have to endure poverty and hardship:
I expect I'll always have to drudge for my living, and I'm quite willing to always do it, but I am no more fooling myself that the mental bondage and the spiritual bondage of the more remunerative sorts of work is worth the sacrifices inevitably involved. If I can't continue to create the sort of poetry that is my intensest and deepest component in life--then it all means very little to me, and then I might as well tie myself up to some smug ambition and "success" (the common idol that every Tom Dick and Harry is bowing to everywhere) [OM, 174].
Given the potent confluence of oedipal and economic protests that these gestures imply, it is hardly surprising that Crane's conception of the poet-as-writing-machine is no more than a strategic, partial capitulation to the dehumanizing tendencies of capitalism. By singling out one portion of the capitalist mind-set--the open-ended desire to produce--and utterly rejecting another--the desire to reap profit from production--Crane consciously sets himself against the economic "machinery" of his day. He takes technologies devised by big business for use in the office (the Remington) and for passive entertainment (the Victrola) and perversely employs them toward idiosyncratic, noncapitalist ends. Crane is thereby able to liberate and redeploy the raw, libidinal energy bound up in the nation's collective drive to industrialize, to produce. 46 This redirected Eros is then free to power Crane's incomparably high-voltage verse.
I wish to draw this section to a close with a simple observation. Hart Crane has begun to sound strangely "prepostmodern" as I have explored the ramifications of "his" Boléro. An astute reader is likely to be thinking of a range of intertexts: J. G. Ballard's Crash; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari on psychoanalysis and capitalism; Paul Gilroy on hip hop DJs' manipulations of LPs; Katherine Hayles's How We Became Post-Human; etc. 47 Crane's poetry has never before kept such company. More often than not he has been read as a belated romantic whose closest affinities are with such res as William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Walt Whitman. In the next section of this article, I will undertake a reading of Crane's poem sequence "Voyages" in order to demonstrate the practical consequences that stem from my proposed new approach to his verse as well as to bring out more distinctly the "prepostmodern" side of Crane's poetics.
On 21 April 1924, Hart Crane wrote his friend Waldo Frank to crow. He had fallen in love. His new man, a Danish-American sailor named Emil Opffer.
I have seen the Word made Flesh. I mean nothing less, and I know now that there is such a thing as indestructibility. In the deepest sense, where flesh became transformed through intensity of response to counter-response, where sex was beaten out, where a purity of joy was reached that included tears . . . I have been able to give freedom and life which was acknowledged in the ecstasy of walking hand in hand across the most beautiful bridge of the world, the cables enclosing us and pulling us upward in such a dance as I have never walked and never can walk with another [OM, 186-7].
The prose is echt Crane. He blends mysticism ("Word made Flesh") with sentimentality ("tears"), "ecstasy" with melodrama ("never with another"). He throws out trite phrases ("most beautiful in the world"). He abuses metaphors ("dances I have walked"). He even touches genius: "sex was beaten out"--a resonant phrase, summoning thoughts of drumming, annealing, and pummeling. It is, in other words, an appropriately orphic triad of music, metallurgy, and masochism that complicates the passage's seeming Platonism. Crane speaks of so indulging in "sex" that it becomes something other, its physicality preserved, not abandoned, as one moves "upward" on the Platonic ladder. Crane, naturally, consecrates this (un)holy, clunky, glorious love story by setting it smack in the middle of the Machine, here represented by Washington Roebling's Brooklyn Bridge, whose "cables enclos[e]" the lovers and lift them out of themselves into rapture.
Two months later, in June of 1924, Crane writes the poet Jean Toomer to tell him, too, about Opffer. To give a sense of his "exaltation," Crane includes a draft of a poem that he tentatively christens "Voyages" (OM, 193). He also tries to explain that his poetry is an "effort to describe God." "Only the effort," he hastens to add, "limitless and yet forever incomplete" (OM, 192). In the April letter to Frank, Crane was already happily confusing Opffer and Christ. By June, Crane's gleeful idolatry was producing its own Gospel.
The one poetic "Voyage" that Crane sent Toomer soon grew into a sequence of five. Crane then took an old piece of his, "The Bottom of the Sea Is Cruel" , prefixed it to the others as a kind of proem and declared the set of six lyrics a single work. 48 Crane would later give pride of place to "Voyages" in his first book, White Buildings . It delivers the final, knockout punch, coming after two oft-anthologized works, "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen" and "At Melville's Tomb."
"Voyages" exhibits an eerie blend of the familiar and the strange. There is no doubt after the magnificent volta of the "And yet" that opens "Voyages" II that we are reading love poetry of the most venerable, ornate sort, albeit a somewhat perverse variety.
--And yet this great wink of eternity,
Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,
Samite sheeted and processioned where
Her undinal vast belly moonward bends,
Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love
[CP, 35]
On the one hand, an educated reader immediately recognizes the rolling pentameter, archaic diction, and near-manic use of consonance ("samite sheeted processioned"). These tried-and-true devices announce that "our love" is worthy of the Grand Style. On the other hand, words such as "wrapt," "wink," and "leewardings" fail to yield straightforward sense. "Wrapt inflections"? "Wrapt" as in "wrapped"--if so, by what? "Wrapt" as in "rapt attention"? Or as in "rapture"? In what sense is the ocean a "wink of eternity"? Are we to imagine the waters of the globe as God's closed eye? If so, why does Crane almost immediately proceed to speak instead of the ocean's "vast belly"? "Voyages" II somehow manages to be rhetorically effective, sweeping a reader, giddy, onto glorious terrain, even though (or perhaps because) its semantic meaning remains indeterminate.
Crane's implicit model for his oddly potent rhetoric is the Elizabethan sonnet sequence. Throughout "Voyages," Crane's imagery, like that of Renaissance love poets, is Petrarchan, featuring storms, tropic heat, arctic cold, ships, pirates, and dreams. So, too, is his rhetorical topos, an enamored poet's tone that veers unpredictably between despair and ecstasy as he uses the occasion of his love to express himself in increasingly convoluted res.
O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,
Bequeath us to no earthly shore until
Is answered in the vortex of our grave
The seal's wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.
[CP, 35]
Crane's speaker, like Romeo or any of Shakespeare's other lovelorn lads, feels suspended between bliss ("paradise") and exile ("grave"), left to toss and turn and drift ("vortex," "spindrift").
"Voyages" not only resembles Renaissance verse in its subject matter, it also sounds Elizabethan. Like Shakespeare's Sonnets and Spenser's Amoretti, Crane's "Voyages" delights in aureation, hyperbole, stylization, and syntactical compression, traits all well in evidence in a passage such as: "No stream of greater love advancing now / Than, singing, this mortality alone / Through clay aflow immortally to you" (CP, 37). Here one cannot help but detect distant echoes of resonant Shakespearean lines such as "Oh, if (I say) you look upon this verse / When I (perhaps) compounded am with clay" and
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea
But sad mortality o'ersways their power
. . .
who his spoil [of] beauty can forbid?
O, none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright. 49
Crane's achievement in "Voyages" lies in his having "made new" the Elizabethan legacy. Many modernist writers, of course, shared similar aims, among them Djuna Barnes, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce. What marks Crane, and "Voyages," as unique is Crane's belief that reviving the Renaissance's rhetorical grandeur would serve musical ends. More precisely, he held that poetry, if it wished to equal or surpass the achievements of contemporary composers, would have to find original ways of deploying the heaviest armaments available in the English literary tradition. In one of his letters he speaks of the need to "ransack the vocabularies of Shakespeare, Jonson, Webster (for theirs were the richest)" if he is to be a "modern artist" on the order of "Strauss, Ravel, Scriabine [sic], and Block [sic]" (OM, 137; emphasis in original). "Voyages" is exhibit A of what Crane means by "ransacking." Not only does it echo Renaissance verse, as I have already asserted, but, as Lee Edelman has shown, it borrows pell-mell from Renaissance texts. "Voyages" VI, for instance, shamelessly includes phrases lifted from The Tempest, Richard II, and Milton's Samson Agonistes. 50 Throughout "Voyages," Crane so packs his verse with Elizabethan-esque diction, tone, and phrasing that, in passages such as the following, one seems to be reading a reckless cento of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century verse: "Shall they not stem and close in our own steps / Bright staves of flowers and quills today as I / Must first be lost in fatal tides to tell?" (CP, 37)
Where icy and bright dungeons lift
Of swimmers their lost morning eyes,
And ocean rivers, churning, shift
Green borders under stranger skies
[CP, 39]
Creation's blithe and petalled word
To the lounged goddess when she rose
Conceding dialogue with eyes
That smile unsearchable repose
[CP, 39]
In lines such as these, the stylistic anachronisms come so thick and fast that one is left uncertain whether to categorize these lyrics as homage, parody, or pastiche. Crane seems to have in mind now one text, now another, freely "ransacking" their vocabulary to craft his own idiom.
"Voyages" does not aim to bring its Elizabethan crazy quilt into a finished form. Instead, it delights in its half-intelligibility and its inconsistencies. "Voyages" I, V, and VI appear to describe seaside scenes whereas "Voyages" II-IV seem to describe actions taking place in or under the open sea. The setting for the final two lyrics, however, is too vague, too changeable for a critic confidently to characterize the sequence as a circular narrative of journey out and return. The first lyric, written in 1921, does offer a relatively straightforward Blakean song of experience--it describes innocent children gamboling beside an ocean symbolizing sexuality and death--but the next five "Voyages," all from 1924, are not so easily paraphrased. They recount hermetic anecdotes about a visionary "I" and a sometimes-living, sometimes-dead "you." This pair journeys among, or to, islands across, or within, a "sceptered" goddess-ocean (CP, 35). Along the way, the pair seems to consummate their passion twice ("Voyages" III, IV) as well as quarrel ("Voyages" V). These uncertain actions are submerged beneath a wildly lush, recalcitrant linguistic surface:
All fragrance irrefragably, and claim
Madly meeting logically in this hour
And region that is ours to wreathe again,
Portending eyes and lips and making told
The chancel port and portion of our June
[CP, 37]
From "region" to "wreathe," from "our" to "hour," from "portending" to "port" to "portion," Crane's poetry slides associatively from one aural echo into another. The verse can thus be said to progress "Madly . . . logically," satisfying a reader's intuition, perhaps, but rarely satisfying her or his rage for order.
Mystified by how to speak in generalities about such a disparate, confusing, yet compelling compendium of lyrics, some critics, such as R. W. B. Lewis, have thrown up their hands. Crane, Lewis writes in a Pyrrhic retreat, gives us access to a "poetic utopia," "some boundless domain of splendid un-reason where opposites consort and nameless forces or disembodied pulsations dance out their uninterpretable allegory" (PHC, 151). A few recent critics, like Lee Edelman and Eric Selinger, have persevered, Edelman undertaking a deconstructive analysis and Selinger a Kristevan reading. 51 Indeed, the language of "Voyages" II-VI is so inflated, so quintessentially, so memorably Crane at his best and worst, that the poetry does indeed invite readings that focus on the violence and queerness of its tropes.
I would argue that, however fascinating the results, the recent theoretically informed readings of "Voyages" have erred in presuming that the lyrics follow a linear progression, that is, that they work toward the solution of a philosophical, rhetorical, or generic problem. 52 If, however, Crane deliberately avoids teleology and favors the creation of a timeless, ecstatic state, then "Voyages" VI should not be given greater weight than any of the other five lyrics. Each "Voyage" presents a window onto eternity. The circumstances, intensities, affect, and means of expression might vary, but the ultimate referent remains constant.
The love story everywhere perceptible in "Voyages," like that in John Ashbery's Three Poems or in Roland Barthes's Fragments d'un discours amoureux, has been broken up, rered, and transred in such a way that one cannot say "it begins here" or that "it ends here," let alone who the lovers are. Love is no longer an episode in a biography but an ahistorical state and a way of speaking into which the poet enters at will. He or she utters an "And yet!," as Crane does to begin "Voyages" II, and escapes into a realm of artifice insulated against the sound of time's chariot. In the workaday world Crane did, of course, eventually break with Emil Opffer. That lover's plot played itself out rather predictably, including a final round of betrayals and angry recriminations. 53 In the poem, however, that love, purified of any specifics, persists, untainted by nostalgia or history, rendered as a procession of intensities that one can reexperience with each perusal. Crane treats his romance with Opffer in the same manner that he treated Boléro. He could play selected bits ad infinitum and never fall prey to the deadening incursions of narrative.
The poem as an escape from time is an old idea. "And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand / Praising thy worth, despite [time's] cruel hand," Shakespeare concludes his sixtieth sonnet. 54 Also old is the impulse to purify and elevate a particular love into art by ridding it of any historical specificity. "One form shall rise above the wreck / One name, Ianthe, shall not die," Walter Landor writes in "Past Ruined Ilion," lines of verse whose fame and pathos in no way depend upon concrete details about Ianthe's identity or physical "form." 55 What marks "Voyages" as new is the way Crane writes, which is recognizably the product of his mechanized/eroticized writing regimen. I will demonstrate this fact by looking closely at the grammar and lyrical texture of the most commented-upon of the "Voyages," the third.
"Voyages" III perceptibly breaks down into fourteen discrete units, which, following the precedent of classical oratory, I will call cola. The logical and grammatical connections among Crane's cola vary widely in stability and in coherency. I would divide the lyric according to the following scheme.
Infinite consanguinity it bears--
This tendered theme of you that light
Retrieves from sea plains where the sky
Resigns a breast that every wave enthrones;
While ribboned water lanes I wind
Are laved and scattered with no stroke
Wide from your side, whereto this hour
The sea lifts, also, reliquary hands.

[CP, 36, numbering added]
Other divisions are possible. For instance, one could claim that two and three or five and six ought to be considered indissoluble units; what matters for my purposes is to make visible the process of suturing that Crane has applied to relatively distinct statements treating a common topic. Consider the second and third verse paragraphs. Cola 7 to 13 are punctuated as if they were part of a cohesive sentence, yet this unity is an illusion. Colon 7 is a participial phrase expressing completed action. Colon 8 is a prepositional phrase giving a location. Cola 9 and 10 are parallel noun absolutes. Eleven is a subordinate clause, and twelve, like seven, is a participial phrase. Thirteen is another trailing noun absolute, unless, perhaps, one construes "transmemberment" as the subject of this unwieldy sentence, with an "is" elided. If so, anacoluthon seems to have occurred since colon 7. That is, "admitted" would seem, logically, to require the "I" from colon 4 as its subject, not "transmemberment," in colon 13--although, it must be conceded, one can hardly apply spatial or temporal logic to a neologism like "transmemberment" since we can have only a vague, contextual sense of what it means in the first place. Given these mounting ambiguities, one must conclude that Crane has used punctuation marks such as dashes and commas not to indicate cumulative development either of syntax or argument but rather to substitute visual stitchery for such progress. 56
The many gaps in the poem's syntax coexist with a remarkable degree of
self-sufficiency on the part of the individual cola. Colon 9--"Light
wrestling there incessantly with light"--is a particularly good
example. The phrase is rich in consonance (l's) and assonance (short e's
and i's). The caesura occurs naturally between the second and third feet,
but it also symmetrically divides the line into two three-word units.
The same word, "light," begins and ends the colon, a classic gesture of
completion. Moreover, Crane concisely indicates time ("incessantly"),
place ("there"), agent ("light"), and action ("wrestle"). Colon 9 of
"Voyages" III possesses the inevitability of a hexameter by Racine. Each
of the other cola in the lyric likewise, if not so transparently, conveys
the impression of a self-contained rhetorical gesture, partly through
internal sound-play and partly by establishing enough coordinates (who,
what, when, where, why) that one feels confident projecting a context
within which the fragmentary utterance could belong. Each colon possesses
what R. W. B. Lewis calls Crane's "quality of encompassing finality"
(PHC, 404 n. 16).
Oddly, despite its "bad" grammar and its imperfect suturing of well-turned phrases, "Voyages" III does not feel disjunctive. We have a general sense of a maritime scene (even if the action seems to oscillate between the surface of the sea and the ocean floor). Barely concealed literary subtexts--Milton's "Lycidas" and Ariel's song "Full Fathom Five" from The Tempest--provide some narrative purchase, too. We can guess that "you" are undergoing a sea change, a "transmemberment," through the agency of love and song. We can also conjecture that "I," like Orpheus or Odysseus, have traveled through chthonic portals ("black swollen gates") to witness this moment wondrous and strange. (We won't dwell on the fact that "I" and "you," when last glimpsed in stanza one, seem to have been swimming side by side.) Two formal features of the stanza reinforce these impressions of the setting and dramatic action. First, the constant iambic pentameter works as a catena that cuts across the syntactical ambiguities. 57 Second, the rich sound-play evident in each individual period spills across the sutures dividing them. Colon 9, for example, does not carry on the heavy alliteration of p's in colon 8, but it does seem to echo the stressed short e of "pediment," even as "lithe" reappears in a new guise, as "light." Crane's second, "sober," phase of poetry composition, during which he painstakingly revised and knit together isolated phrases written during his "ecstatic" phase, results in verse that does possess linkages and continuities, but these links are haphazard, partial, nonlinear, and unpredictable, only half-obedient to decorum and logic.
Yvor Winters first noted Crane's uncanny ability to appear to be writing coherent verse when under inspection those verses would dissolve into a sequence of unrelated, nonsensical assertions. Winters labeled this feature of Crane's writing "pseudo-reference." 58 It merits a less pejorative, more precise label that takes into account the grammatical basis for Crane's slipperiness. Much poetry criticism since Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era has explored the fact that the dominant mode of modernist experimentation with syntax is paratactic, that is, investigating the use of "and" or asyndeton to link successive clauses or other linguistic units. 59 By juxtaposing disparate materials without logical or hierarchical connectives, parataxis increases writerly economy, semantic indeterminacy, and textual heterogeneity. Achieving results comparable to collage in the visual arts, the parataxis in works such as the Cantos, Paterson, and The Maximus Poems tends to break down generic distinctions by introducing nonpoetic, even nonliterary, material in a relatively nonprejudicial fashion. Crane's starkly different mode of syntactical experimentation could more properly be called attenuated hypotaxis. His cola in "Voyages" III are not discrete collage-nuggets nor are they items in a catalog strung together by conjunctions. Instead, "Voyages" III is made up of tenuously interconnected clauses (3, 4, 6, 11); participial phrases (5, 7, 12); prepositional phrases ; and noun absolutes (9, 10). Here as elsewhere, most everything in a Crane poem can be construed hypotactically, that is, as a series of grammatical units (cola) possessing some relation of subordination to another element. But Crane also blurs those connections and inhibits the formation of clear, neat, larger units. For example, in "Voyages" III the only two grammatically complete sentences (as opposed to faux-sentences indicated by punctuation) are cola 1 and 14, which serve primarily as bookends for the disorienting grammar-play between. Crane's verse explores the wide-open poetic terrain between complete disjunction and crystalline order.
The strangely centrifugal, disorderly syntax in "Voyages" was largely unprecedented when White Buildings was first published. To such contemporaries as Yvor Winters, Crane understandably appeared error-prone and given to thoughtless gush. 60 Experimental poetry since 1970, however, has proved Crane prescient. Among the many writers who have employed Crane-like attenuated hypotaxis are Robert Creeley, Larry Eigner, Lyn Hejinian, Tom Raworth, and Rosmarie Waldrop. Perhaps the poet whose anomalous syntax most resembles Crane's is John Ashbery. Ashbery habitually writes sentences that, like Crane's, refuse to add up linearly even as they convey the impression of "concatenation": 61
The headlines and economy
Would refresh for a moment as you look back over the heap
Of rusted box-springs with water under them, and then,
Like sliding up to a door or a peephole a tremendous advantage
Would burst like a bubble. Toys as solemn and knotted as books
Assert themselves first, leading down through a delicate landscape
Of reminders to be better next time to a damp place on my hip,
And this would spell out a warm business letter urging us
All to return to our senses. 62
Although the verse texture here is somewhat smoother than Crane's--as one might expect of a poet writing in the age of videotape and word processors--Ashbery, in this extract from "A Wave," has employed a process of suturing noticeably similar to Crane's. 63 The "as" between cola 1 and 2 creates a link that violates the sequence of tenses ("you look" does not agree with "Would refresh"). Cola 3 and 4 contain contradictory adverbial similes ("Like sliding up" and "like a bubble") modifying the same verb ("bursts"). Colon 6 is an ambiguous participle, perhaps a dangling modifier of "Toys," perhaps a modifier of "books." Colon 7 contains a pronomial subject, "this," with no clear antecedent. Seven also switches to "us / All," after colon 2 had addressed "you," and colon 6 had mentioned "my hip." The cumulative effect of these connected-yet-disjunct phrases is readerly disorientation. Can I, you, or we all find stability in the swiftly altering landscape? Or do we accept flux itself as the grounds of "our" (non)identity?
The poet-critic Charles Bernstein has provided a name for the general composition strategy evident in Crane and Ashbery: "dysraphism," the Frankensteinian stitching together of disparate "embryonic" elements in order to see if a viable poem develops. 64 Dysraphic poets are dissatisfied with the limitations imposed by the rigors of collage. They do not wish to constrain their artistic activities to selecting, categorizing, and arranging found texts. They permit themselves to invent, borrow, rework, and suture whatever materials they wish, however they desire. They delight in asymmetry, non sequiturs, and shifts in tone. They are less interested in global features of a poem than in its local ones: the way specific statements connect (or fail to), the way certain series of sounds hit the ear, the way one feels rough and smooth textures as lines and phrases segue one into the other. Witnessing the procession of words, rent or whole, conveys much of the work's "meaning." Referentiality is secondary to the spectacle of what T. S. Eliot, writing about A. C. Swinburne, once called the spectacle of "language, uprooted."
The world of Swinburne does not depend upon some other world which it simulates; it has the necessary completeness and self-sufficiency for justification and permanence. . . . [T]he object has ceased to exist, because the meaning is merely the hallucination of meaning, because language, uprooted, has adapted itself to an independent life of atmospheric nourishment. . . . Only a man of genius could dwell so exclusively and consistently among words as Swinburne. 65
Eliot rightly downplays Swinburne's agency, an insight that applies equally to the poets whom I have been discussing. "Language" and "words," not the writers in question, possess "an independent life" within a "self-sufficient world." These poets merely "dwell" in this "hallucinatory" linguistic utopia. Poetry, for Swinburne's dysraphic descendants, opens out into an "independent," that is, autonomous, realm that the poet, like a reader, inhabits.
Ashbery refers to this exploratory venture into the world of words by using phrases like "just walking around," "skating," and, above all else, "flow." 66 He implies that he, and the reader, must be ready to set aside predetermined goals in order to perceive the actuality and value of the verse as it ebbs and flows, courses and floods, in accordance with rhythms and laws that far exceed the compass of one person's reason or imagination. Crane, too, speaks of the deliberate cession of control that must precede the creation of poetry, and, like Ashbery, he uses a marine metaphor: "One must be drenched in words, literally soaked with them to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment. When they come . . . they come as things in themselves; it is a matter of felicitous juggling!; and no amount of will or emotion can help the thing a bit" (OM, 72). Immersed in the currents of language as in the sea, the poet is ready to cede "will" and let "words come" and shape themselves "into the proper pattern." About "Voyages," Crane would later write, "the sea has thrown itself upon me and been answered" (OM, 187). These poets' persistent urge is to escape from the autonomous self into the free play of language. They drown so as to undergo "the silken skilled transmemberment of song."
The result is a synecdochal poetry. Its forms and verses are broken, dismembered, unraveling, incomplete. We are to read each poem as a maimed piece of an absent, ungraspable whole. Crane would call that whole God. Ashbery, like most postmodern writers, is more circumspect in naming this totality. He has used many words, each tested, then discarded. Among his favorites have been "weather" and "diagram." 67 Regardless, in the variegated, uneven texture of a poem's phrase-suturing, in what Ashbery calls its "architecture of desire," a reader senses the dynamic gaps, leaps, and twists in grammar that lead not into the mind of a poet but outward, into possibility, into language. 68 "Language has built towers and bridges," Hart Crane writes, "but itself inevitably is as fluid as always" (CPSL, 223). The "gates," "pillars," and "pediments" that form in and from the sea in "Voyages" III are like Crane's verses, artifice brought forth from the "fluid," indefinable reaches of the non-, in-, and superhuman potentiality of the word.
I began by stating that, as a consequence of the pioneering scholarship of the 1990s, scholars of poetry would have to be much more careful about discussing the aural dimension of a writer's work. My analysis of Crane permits us to see why this is the case. In his otherwise brilliant piece "Hart Crane and Poetry," for instance, Allen Grossman makes the seemingly reasonable assumption that although Crane's content and diction are insistently up-to-date, his rhetoric and form are patently "antimodernist," indeed, "not fundamentally different from those of Keats, Patmore, and Swinburne." 69 Grossman is surely correct that, at first glance, Crane's form does appear rather conservative for the 1920s. Instead of vers libre, he writes poetry with predictable accentual-syllabic meter, usually iambic tetrameter or pentameter. When not writing blank verse, he turns out orderly stanzas, often complete with end rhymes. One can sit down with a Crane poem and scan it just as one would a poem by Alexander Pope or Christopher Marlowe.
As we have seen, however, simple prosodic analysis cannot begin to account for the role that sound plays in Crane's poetics nor can it be relied upon to judge the "modernity" of his poetic form. Crane's basic aural unit is not so much the foot or line as it is what I have been calling a "colon," an individually composed, lapidary phrase. Regular meter becomes a tool for mechanically stitching together disparate cola, a centripetal force to counter the centrifugal force of the fractured syntax. The result is, as Crane once put it, a "long-scattered score / Of broken intervals" (CP, 160). When held up against the writers that Grossman cites--John Keats, Coventry Patmore, Algernon Charles Swinburne--Crane's "broken" verse does appear qualitatively different. It often reads as if Keats's odes or Swinburne's paeans to the Lady of Pain had been excerpted randomly, pared down, and strung together with little regard to organic wholes or integral gestures. Which is, of course, how Crane would have played Richard Wagner, César Franck, and his other nineteenth-century favorites on his Victrola: the choicest excerpts strung together or repeated at whim.
True, Crane's literary aspirations were somewhat retardaire in comparison with the goals of such other American modernists as Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams. Crane's quest to reveal God in verse, for instance, deserves to be read in the context of the longue durée of the lyric poem where one can compare him to William Blake, Emily Dickinson, and Henry Vaughan, instead of juxtaposing him with his more skeptical contemporaries. Crane's faith that repetitious sound could lead one into mystic and physical transport is positively shamanic, with many analogues in traditional oral poetries practiced around the globe. The Victrola nonetheless inflected these enduring themes in such a way that Crane's verse is indelibly a product of a particular era, post-Edison but pre-LP. The Victrola therefore marked every aspect of Crane's poetry as "modern": how he wrote, what he wrote, and why he wrote. Crane's form is "modernist" insofar as it represents an innovative transformation of older poetic models to accord with 1920s realities.
I would like to close with a thought experiment: How might "Voyages" differ if Crane had had access to a CD player and digitally remastered works by his preferred composers? Would pushing buttons instead of turning a Victrola's crank have changed his attitude toward the materiality of poetry? Would being able to repeat entire pieces of classical music have persuaded him to think differently about narrative teleology? Alternatively, what if Crane had had access to music more in line with his tenuously sustained Boléro-utopia, perhaps 1990s industrial and house music with their ambient textural overlays, driving rhythms, and complete disregard for melodic progression? I pose these questions because, as I implied above by pairing "Voyages" with John Ashbery's "A Wave," Crane's strategies and style remain important touchstones for evaluating contemporary writing. Many of the last few decades' most impressive long poems--among them A. R. Ammons's Sphere, John Ashbery's Flow Chart, Amiri Baraka's Wise Why's Y's, and Susan Howe's Articulation of Sound Forms in Time--resemble Crane's The Bridge in their epic ambition to transre American history. Such digital-age efforts at poeticizing the United States deserve to be thought through, as I have "Voyages," as historically specific responses to their contemporary soundscape. Poets, after all, listen to the world around them. Their verse records not only what they hear but how they hear it. The job of the critic is to unpack the interdependency of that "what" and "how" in the name of achieving a more accurate account of the poetry, its genesis, and its significance.
Brian Reed is a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University writing a dissertation with the working title "After His Lights: Hart Crane and Onwards." His most recent article, "Ezra Pound's Utopia of the Eye," was published in the journal Paideuma.
1. John Unterecker, Voyager: A Life of Hart Crane (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1969), 253; hereafter abbreviated V.
2. See e.g. Allen Grossman, "Hart Crane and Poetry: A Consideration of Crane's Intense Poetics with Reference to 'The Return,'" in The Long Schoolroom: Lessons in the Bitter Logic of the Poetic Principle (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 102; and Michael Sharp, "Theme and Free Variation: The Scoring of Hart Crane's The Bridge," Arizona Quarterly 37 (fall 1981): 199; hereafter abbreviated "TFV."
3. For a few well-told recollections of Crane's boisterousness, see Malcolm Cowley, Exile's Return: A Narrative of Ideas (New York: Norton, 1934), 191-2, 278, and 290.
4. See the entry for 12 July 1929 in Harry Crosby, Shadows of the Sun: The Diaries (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow, 1977), 262 and compare 236-40 and 260-2.
5. For R. W. B. Lewis's strictures against permitting Crane's suicide to bias readings of his poetry, see his The Poetry of Hart Crane: A Critical Study (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), 12; hereafter abbreviated PHC. The two best, recent monographs on Crane, Langdon Hammer, Hart Crane and Allen Tate: Janus-Faced Modernism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993); and Thomas Yingling, Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text: New Thresholds, New Anatomies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), can be characterized as book-length justifications of their own biographically informed readings of Crane's poetry. Hammer situates Crane's futile efforts to make modern poetry a paying job within a Bourdieuian sociological frame; Yingling approaches Crane within the context of the then-nascent discipline of queer studies. Hammer characterizes Crane's vatic, recondite style as a product of the poet's sense of pursuing an otherworldly vocation; Yingling excavates a hidden stratum of homosexual content beneath the extravagant, obscure surface of Crane's writing. By daring to introduce biographical material, both studies have advanced the study of Crane's poetry immeasurably, which, as Hammer comments, had until the 1990s consisted largely of explication upon explication with little or no sense of cumulative development toward a complete account of Crane's project.
6. See especially Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde, ed. Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992); Marjorie Perloff, Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Garrett Stewart, Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); and Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990); originally published as Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 (München: Fink, 1985).
7. See the essays collected in Sound States: Innovative Poetries and Acoustical Technologies, ed. Adalaide Morris (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); and Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, ed. Charles Bernstein (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
8. Hart Crane, O My Land, My Friends: The Selected Letters, ed. Langdon Hammer and Brom Weber (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1997), 137; hereafter abbreviated OM.
9. Hart Crane, Complete Poems (New York: Liveright, 1986), 72; hereafter abbreviated CP.
10. See e.g. James Connor, "RADIO free JOYCE," in Sound States, 17-31; Adalaide Morris, "Sound Technologies and the Modernist Epic," in Sound States, 32-55; Daniel Tiffany, Radio Corpse: Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995); and Allen Weiss, Phantasmic Radio (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995). For an informative, invaluable general history of the phonograph that pays special attention to its effects on the literature of the twentieth century, see the "gramophone" third of Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999). For a fascinating theoretical treatment of the gramophone's significance in literary history, see Charles Grivel, "The Phonograph's Horned Mouth," in Wireless Imagination, 31-61. For another case study of a single author's interaction with the phonograph, see Douglas Kahn, "Death in the Light of the Phonograph: Raymond Roussel's Locus Solus," in Wireless Imagination, 69-103.
11. Columbia Records introduced the LP in 1948. Although limited television broadcasting began in the United States in 1939, not until 1946, when wartime limitations on receivers were lifted, did TV become a fixture in the American home.
12. Quoted but not cited in V, 404.
13. See V, 252.
14. See Sherman Paul, Hart's Bridge (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 249; and PHC, 347, n. 7; see also Susan Brown, Robber Rocks: Letters and Memories of Hart Crane, 1923-31 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1969), 110-11.
15. See Kenneth Rexroth, An Autobiographical Novel (New York: New Directions, 1991), 332.
16. Francis De Witt, lyricist, and Robert Hood Bowers, composer, "The Moon Shines on the Moonshine," vocals by Bert Williams, Columbia A-2849, recorded 1 December 1919. Rereleased as track one, side one of Follies, Scandals, and Other Diversions: From Ziegfeld to the Schuberts, New World Records, NW215, 1977. I have taken the lyrics from Follies's liner notes, modified slightly to reflect Williams's departures from De Witt's words during performance.
17. See Rexroth, Autobiographical Novel, 332.
18. Hart Crane, Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose, ed. Brom Weber (New York: Anchor, 1966), 235; hereafter abbreviated CPSL. See Lee Edelman, Transmemberment of Song: Hart Crane's Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987), 8-22; hereafter abbreviated TS. For very early but still highly perceptive commentary on this same problem, see Max Eastman, The Literary Mind: Its Place in an Age of Science (New York: Scribner, 1931), 93-7.
19. See TS, 63 for the significance of the color white in Crane's work.
20. See V, 140, 628, 547.
21. See V, 363 and 628.
22. See V, 388.
23. Quoted but not cited in V, 649.
24. See V, 628 and 663.
25. See e.g. David Hayman, "Reading Joyce's Notebooks?! Finnegans Wake from Within," in Finnegans Wake: Fifty Years, ed. Geert Lernout (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990), 7-22; and Claude Jacquet, "In the Beginning Is the Woid: James Joyce and Genetic Criticism," in Finnegans Wake: Fifty Years, 23-35.
26. See OM, 137.
27. See Samuel Delany, "Atlantis Race . . . Some Notes on Hart Crane," in Longer Views: Extended Essays (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 187 and "TFV," passim.
28. See OM 51, 60, 80, and 154; see also "TFV," 197-9 and V, 208 and 226.
29. For Crane's statements about jazz, see OM 88 and CPSL 250. See also the second part of "The Marriage of Faustus and Helen" (CP, 29-30). For Crane's friendship with Varèse while living in France, see OM 395, 401, 406, 410.
30. See V, 388 and 594; see also OM 113 and 157 for Crane's general praise of Ravel.
31. Crane wrote this letter in 1922. Ravel's Boléro is from 1928. (Crane is most likely referring to a 78 with a band performing a traditional bolero, a Spanish dance tune in 3/4 time.) I would justify my use of Crane's quotation despite this anachronism because of its aptness (I believe, given his enthusiasm for Ravel's Boléro, that he would not protest) and because my analysis of "Crane's Boléro" is intended to typify his relation to all recorded music.
32. My translation. Claude Lévi-Strauss, "Boléro de Maurice Ravel," L'Homme 11 (April-June 1971): 13-14.
33. Lévi-Strauss, "Boléro," 11.
34. My thanks to the UCLA musicologist Robert Fink for helping me hash out my ideas regarding Crane, Boléro, and American minimalist music.
35. My thanks to Dr. Kornelia Freitag of the Universität Potsdam for her incisive commentary on an earlier version of this section's argument.
36. Robert Browning, "Abt Vogler," Complete Works (New York: Fred DeFau, 1910), 15:70.
37. For the biographical basis of "Episode of Hands," see OM 38 and 40; see also V, 167-8.
38. Compare Tim Dean, "Hart Crane's Poetics of Privacy," American Literary History 8 (spring 1996): 88-9, for the argument that Crane's poetry records the experience of sublimity without specifying an identity for the one undergoing the experience.
39. Caroline Jones, The Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), passim; hereafter abbreviated MS. Jones did not coin the term "technological sublime," of course. It has had wide currency in discussions of the relationship between technology and postmodern literature and art. As her title indicates, she is ultimately borrowing from Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).
40. One bit of support for this equation between these artists' "studios" and Crane's working environment: in the early 1960s Andy Warhol hit upon a painting regimen reminiscent of Crane's Victrola-sessions. "I had this routine of painting with rock and roll blasting the same song, a 45 rpm, over and over all day long--songs like . . . 'I Saw Linda Yesterday' by Dickie Lee. The music blasting cleared my head out and left me working on instinct alone" (Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol '60s [New York: Harper and Row, 1980], 7).
41. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991): 32-3, 276.
42. Hart Crane, quoted in Alice Chamberlain, "Millionaire's Son Is Clerk in an Akron Drug Store," Akron Sunday Times, 21 December 1919, quoted in V, 156.
43. See MS, 204 ff.
44. For Warhol's deliberate confusion of "Business" and "Art," see MS, 202-3.
45. See V, 34 and 156.
46. In thinking about the "energy" coursing through America's industrial heartland in these years, contemplate the fact that Akron, in the year before Crane moved there, had increased industrial output by twenty-five percent. Crane's Ohio years coincide with one of the biggest industrial expansions in world history--the kind of regional transformation that would have made Soviet planners in the 1930s giddy to contemplate; see V, 150.
47. Crane, significantly, anticipates by six decades the DJ revolt of the 1980s and 1990s that Paul Gilroy analyzes in The Black Atlantic. Like a hip hop DJ, Crane takes "the basic units of commercial consumption in which music is fast frozen," and, through "supplementary creative input," "transres" them, reasserting individual aesthetic agency in the age of mechanical reproduction (Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993], 105).
48. See OM, 66 for the 1921 first draft of "The Bottom of the Sea Cruel." For the poem's subsequent textual history, see Edward Brunner, Splendid Failure: Hart Crane and the Making of The Bridge (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 48-50.
49. "Sonnet 71," The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 1856; and "Sonnet 65," 1855, brackets in original.
50. See, respectively, TS, 165, 170, and 174.
51. See TS, Edelman, 126-78, and Eric Selinger, "When I'm Calling You: Reading, Romance, and Rhetoric in and around Hart Crane's 'Voyages'," Arizona Quarterly 47 (winter 1991): 85-118.
52. See e.g. TS, 178: "'Voyages' thus ends with his reduction of pathos to the synchronic workings of re, but that reduction intends his poetic survival through a strategy alert to the diachronic dimension of any ral practice." See, too, Selinger, "When I'm Calling You," 86, for his summary of the "drama" and "plot" of "Voyages," that, as he sees it, culminates in a turn away from addressing a particularized beloved ("you," the ideal reader) toward a more general romance with "poetry itself," "the imaged Word."
53. See Delany, "Atlantis Rose," 182-4.
54. "Sonnet 60," Riverside Shakespeare, 1854.
55. Walter Landor, "Past Ruined Ilion," in The Portable Romantic Poets, ed. W. H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson (New York: Viking Penguin, 1978), 239.
56. See Hammer, Janus-Faced Modernism, 182, for more commentary on Crane's punctuation practice. Crane's punctuation in his mature poetry bears obvious resemblances to that of one of his favorite writers, Emily Dickinson. Nevertheless, writing well before the famous 1955 Thomas Johnson edition of Dickinson's poems, Crane would have known nothing about Dickinson's characteristic dash.
57. See Hammer, Janus-Faced Modernism, 153-4.
58. For Winters on Crane's "pseudo-referentiality," see "The Experimental School in American Poetry," in In Defense of Reason (Chicago: Swallow, 1947), 30-74. "Pseudo-reference" is the fourth type of "defect" in experimental poetry that Yvor Winters outlines in this essay.
59. For several exemplary uses of "parataxis" in the explication of modernist and postmodernist literature, see David Hayman, "James Joyce, Paratactician," Contemporary Literature 26 (summer 1985): 155-70; N. Katherine Hayles, "Postmodern Parataxis: Embodied Texts, Weightless Information," American Literary History 2 (fall 1990): 394-421; Bob Perelman, "Parataxis and Narrative: The New Sentence in Theory and Practice," American Literature 65 (June 1993): 313-24; and Peter Quartermain, "Parataxis in Basil Bunting and Louis Zukofsky," Sharp Study and Long Toil: Basil Bunting Special Issue, ed. Richard Caddell (Durham: Durham University Library, Basil Bunting Poetry Centre, 1995), 54-70.
60. The paramount exception would have been Algernon Charles Swinburne, whose notoriously loose and wayward syntax commits many solecisms, especially anacoluthon. For an analysis of Swinburne's "difficult grammar," see Leslie Brisman, "Swinburne's Semiotics," Georgia Review 31 (fall 1977): 584, 595. For modernist condemnation of Swinburne's grammatical vagaries, see T. S. Eliot, Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920; New York: Barnes and Noble, 1928), 148-9; and William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930; New York: New Directions, 1966), 163-6. Swinburne is probably Crane's inspiration; he was Crane's favorite poet during adolescence, and Crane reread Swinburne's entire Complete Poetical Works in 1919. See V, 33 and 137.
61. For an analysis of Ashbery's attenuated but unbroken syntax, see Jody Norton, "'Whispers Out of Time': The Syntax of Being in the Poetry of John Ashbery," Twentieth Century Literature 41 (fall 1995): 281-305.
62. John Ashbery, "A Wave," Selected Poems (New York: Penguin, 1985), 326. Numbering added.
63. See Jameson, Postmodernism, 35 ff., for his argument that computers and video have encouraged a brand of art utterly distinct from the Futurist and modernist artworks that fetishize machines with visible working parts (automobiles, turbines, airplanes, etc.). For a comparison between Crane's rough and Ashbery's smooth textures, see Selinger, "When I'm Calling You," 112.
64. For Bernstein's definition of "dysraphism" by way of contrasting it to collage, juxtaposition, montage, organic form, and parataxis, see his Content's Dream: Essays 1975-1984 (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1986), 358-9. See also the poem titled "Dysraphism" in his The Sophist (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1987), 44-50.
65. Eliot, Sacred Wood, 149-50.
66. Ashbery, Selected Poems, 306, 71, and idem, Flow Chart (New York: Knopf, 1992), passim.
67. For "weather," see e.g. Ashbery, Selected Poems, 66, 221; idem, Flow Chart, 147, 169, 175, 181, 203, 209, and 212. For "diagram," see idem, Selected Poems, 68; idem, As We Know (New York: Viking, 1979), 5; and idem, Flow Chart, 136.
68. Ashbery, "Clepsydra," Selected Poems, 68.
69. Grossman, "Hart Crane and Poetry," 96.
What is modernism? To me, there are two chief features. First, a tendency to extremes, a testing of the limits of aesthetic construction--if nineteenth-century art often seeks a safe center where the artist and the audience can be comfortable together, modernist art often seeks the freakish peripheries of the artistic experience, regions of discomfort and confrontation. Jean Cocteau liked to say that tact in audacity was knowing how far to go too far; but much modernist art consists of tactless aggression, aggressive overload of the sense organs, aggressive transgression of taboos, aggressive density of event, aggressive technicality, aggressive monotony, aggressive matter-of-factness, even (in the case of Satie) aggressive reticence. 1 Second, a certain sense of dwelling inside paradox, since aesthetic extremes tend to converge: when T. S. Eliot, in 1921, first heard Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, he wrote that the music seemed to "transform the rhythm of the steppes into the scream of the motor-horn, the rattle of machinery, the grind of wheels, the beating of iron and steel, the roar of the underground railway, and the other barbaric noises of modern life." 2 In other words, the most up-to-date factory noises were audible within an evocation of pagan Russia: the australopithecine and the man with the jackhammer inhabit exactly the same acoustic space, make the same sort of cry. Twentieth-century music is full of convergences of opposites: the line between excessively expressive and excessively sachlich music can be thin; it is even true that music generated by purely random procedures can sound similar to music generated by the most rigorous precompositional system. The aged Stravinsky complained that "What I cannot follow are the manic-depressive fluctuations from total control to no control, from the serialization of all elements to chance." 3 And if the distinction between chaos and cosmos is hard to make out, what hope is there for keeping other artistic polarities separate?
According to these notions of modernism, the ideal modernist composer is Adrian Leverkühn, the fictitious composer whose music is audible only within Thomas Mann's novel Doktor Faustus . In chapter 21 the narrator explains:
The always-dominant element in him was a will to go to extremes of expression, together with the intellectual passion for harsh order, the linearity of the old music of Netherlands. In other words: in his work, heat and cold held sway alongside each other, and sometimes, in moments of his greatest genius, they forced themselves into each other, the espressivo seized the strict counterpoint, the objective blushed with feeling. 4
Leverkühn's music is impatient with all that is finite and temporal, always rushing off toward the far reaches of noise and silence, an apocalypse where heaven and hell are constructed out of identical musical materials. Extremity and the convergence of extremes have no finer example.
By the standards of Leverkühn, it would seem that an agreeable composer such as Kurt Weill, careless of posterity, eager to give pleasure, even familiar pleasure, to a wide audience, has no business among the modernists. In fact, it would seem that Thomas Mann himself has no business among the modernists: Mann's novels were accepted by the Book of the Month Club, and he wrote books that argue more strongly for basic bourgeois values (one of the mottos of his story "Das Gesetz" is that you should wash your hands before eating) than for the values of ferocious and disdainful aesthetes. Mann and Weill both found Stalin a less attractive leader than Franklin Delano Roosevelt (praised in Mann's Joseph, der Ernährer and Weill's The Ballad of Magna Carta).
But I think that both Mann and Weill were not only modernists, but central res in the development of modernism. Both red out that within the radical modernists' strenuous repudiation of nineteenth-century affability and good-naturedness there lurked danger: an art contemptuous of Dickens and Max Bruch might disable through its sheer fury of rejection of familiar pleasure. To avoid this, Mann and Weill worked out (independently of one another, of course) a new kind of irony, which seems to me a triumph of Modernist art.
Mann complained that people considered him a frigid, thin-lipped sort of ironist, whereas in fact he felt that the proper response to his comic scenes was warm belly-laughter. 5 But it is surely an astonishingly sophisticated sort of irony, this irony that inhabits a threshold space between derision and warmth. I said a moment ago that the convergence of extremes was a characteristic of modernism; and so the proper irony for the modernist movement is an irony pushed so far that it converges with straightforward discourse--an irony that is ironic about its own ironicalness.
The concept of irony, not as a stray re of speech but as a continuous mode of discourse, comes from Greek comedy: the eíron, or understater, was a character who said less than he knew; his opposite was the alazón, the over-stater, who continually boasted of his glorious deeds. The alazón was typically a soldier, whereas the eíron was a cunning slave--and irony was originally a slave's sort of discourse, in which the speaker had to conceal his true meaning because he was at everyone's mercy. But what is socially a position of weakness is artistically a position of power: to understate is to overload with meaning. The boaster speaks empty words, words that mean less than he says; the ironist speaks words that mean more than he says. In every age where semantic concentration has been an important virtue in art--Horace's Rome, Swift's England, the whole modernist period in Europe--irony has flourished.
To show how advanced an ironist Weill could be, I will compare his practice with that of the official arch-modernist Schoenberg. In the song "Gemeinheit" in Pierrot Lunaire , Schoenberg offers a brilliant caricature of the expressionist composer: Pierrot drills a hole in the skull of Cassander, fills it with tobacco, and smokes this human pipe--a pipe that fumes away with a tiny piccolo cry. This is a self-parody, in that the huge orchestral resources of shrieking that Schoenberg had developed in Erwartung have dwindled to a puppet's little peep. For another example of Schoenberg as ironist I turn to a letter that Schoenberg wrote to Mann on February 17, 1947, offering him an extract from the Encyclopedia Americana of 1988 (!), stating that the twelve-tone system had been invented by Thomas Mann, who tolerated its appropriation by the thievish composer Arnold Schoenberg. 6 Schoenberg was vexed by Leverkühn's expropriation of dodecaphy, and wanted credit--this explains why every copy of the novel ends with a patient, grudging little note explaining Schoenberg's property rights. In these examples, Schoenberg shows his real gifts as a traditional ironist: self-depreciation turns itself inside out into an oblique self-praise.
Weill sometimes made use of this traditional irony. For example, in Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny , the ninth number begins with a piano playing a sentimental turn-of-the-century tune, The Maiden's Prayer--Jakob comments, "Das ist die ewige Kunst" (That's immortal art!). This gives the audience a pleasurable thrill of sarcasm: we might say that the only immortal art is the art that makes fun of art. If Weill had gone further down this road, he might have come to the paralysis of Mann's Leverkühn, who despairs of art itself: "Why does almost everything have to seem to me like its own parody? Why does it have to appear to me that almost all, no, all the means and customs of art were today only fit for parody?" 7 Pierrot Lunaire also seems to be headed in this direction--there are a good number of relations between the real Schoenberg and the fictitious Leverkühn. But elsewhere in Weill's work we find a subtler irony, both more insidious and more humane.
For example, the "Zuhälter-Ballade" ("Ballad of the Pimp") in Die Dreigroschenoper is a magician's hat with a seemingly endless supply of false bottoms. Weill and Brecht seemed to have conceived the operations of its irony in rather different terms. Brecht felt glee at the thought of the audience of The Threepenny Opera swooning over a romantic duet: "The tenderest and most intimate love-song in the play [the "Zuhälter-Ballade"] described the everlasting, indestructible affection between a pimp and his best girl. Not without feeling, the lovers celebrated in song their little home, the brothel." 8 This is an effect difficult to achieve with either poetry or music alone: it requires a deliberate misapplication of (sentimental) music to (low-life) text. The proper response to the "Zuhälter-Ballade" is not to remain detached and derisive, as the text might suggest; it is not to gush with warm sticky feelings for pimp and whore, as the music might suggest; it is first to gush, then to dislike oneself for beings such a gull or ninny--to feel, and then to criticize one's feeling. The bourgeoisie should learn the inadequacy of its own Pavlovian responses to the theater: to salivate identically over reminiscences of starry-eyed young love in a brothel and in a well-chaperoned middle class parlor, might suggest a certain skepticism concerning the value of saliva. The interior tension between text and music generated an intriguing sort of ironic music theater.
Weill used language fairly similar to Brecht's in describing the effect of this number: he wrote in 1928 to his publisher that "the appeal [of the "Zuhälter-Ballade"] lies precisely in the fact that a somewhat risque text . . . is composed in a tender, pleasant manner." 9 But Weill seems a good deal more comfortable with the tenderness than Brecht. Perhaps Weill was content to equivocate; he allows the song to dwell in a sort of limbo between an ironic (that is, Brechtian) artifact of revolution, and a regular Schlager, hit tune. Brecht was uneasy about the popularity of the opera with the bourgeoisie: what does a revolutionary do when the tyrant himself keeps cheerfully singing, Down, down, down with tyranny? But Weill evidently enjoyed providing a combination of pointed pleasure and pointless pleasure. Brecht denounced those artists who provided delight as a middle-class commodity for whoring after lies; Weill tried his hand as something more difficult, namely whoring after truths.
Weill achieved this effect in the "Zuhälter-Ballade" by providing music that simultaneously pleases and finds ways of undoing or dismissing that pleasure. Its Latin-American rhythms place it in a fairly large class in Weill's canon--the class of tango and semi-tangoid tunes that preen themselves in their own facetiousness, in their inadequacy of response to the dramatic situation. Weill's tangos usually pertain to some idyll of abundance and sexual languor, luxe, calme, et volupté; in other words, tangos are appropriate for some place where you are not. Tangos are at once delusory and edifying, a species of music that whispers in one ear about a faraway land of delight while whispering in the other ear that you can't get there, or had better not get there. In Der Lindeberghflug , a tangoish rhythm accompanies the song of "Sleep", who tells the exhausted aviator that the night is over, and it's time to relax his vigil and crash into the sea; in Happy End , the "Matrosen-Tango" conjures up first a sailors' Schlaraffenland of endless whisky, fine cigars, and cheap movies, then the sinking of the ship and the drowning of all hands--the tango dispels its own untruths; in Marie Galante , the lyric that Fernay devised for Weill's orchestral tango ("Youkali") erects a self-consciously flimsy paradise, a tiny island at the end of the world, where a fairy will take you for a guided tour of the country where all your desires are gratified. A tango is, for Weill, a kind of music that dreams while mocking its dreaminess, while insisting on the tinselly-meretricious quality of its own catchiness. This is how Weill tries to tell the truth: by writing music that lies, but that confesses, at least subliminally, its lying character.
But the possibility is never quite lost, that there might inhere a deeper truth in the dream of luxury and ease than in the sordor of our normal lives; Weill, unlike, Brecht, assigns no particular privilege to discomfort and foulness, or even to skepticism. Weill is too comprehensive a modernist to discount the romantic force of wishing.  We can laugh and weep, or we can hate ourselves for being the dupes of artistic illusion: Weill leaves open both a sentimental response and an ironic one, and therefore provides a kind of heuristic theater, in which the audience is free to confront an intellectual challenge, or to lose itself in escapist dreams, as it sees fit. Weill seems instinctively to subvert Brecht's carefully contrived didacticism, by providing a curiously unsettled music drama, in which irony can bite the spectator who wishes to be bitten, or in which irony can de-ironize itself, turn against itself, like a snake that swallows its own tail.
I'd like to discuss one other way in which Weill shows a strikingly modernist spirit. In the world of nineteenth-century opera, there was an official term, abuse of the minor, used to describe the practice of writing too much sustained music in the minor mode--this explains, for example, why the witches in Verdi's Macbeth sing a good deal of cheerful-sounding music. In the twentieth century, the issue is greatly broadened: not abuse of the minor, but abuse of the artistic medium; and in the domain of modernism, abuse of the medium becomes, strangely enough, a species of excellence. When Duchamp takes a factory-made urinal, titles it "Fountain," and signs it "R. Mutt," the medium of sculpture is abused, but also made problematic and intriguing; when Brecht clams that drama shouldn't be drama, but instead epic, the medium of the theater is similarly abused and stimulated. In the old days, one could either read a book or watch a drama--the two media were quite distinct. But suddenly, in the domain of Brechtian theater, watching a drama turned into an event that was a kind of reading--the stage is littered with texts of all sorts, chapter headings, billboards, moralistic banners, paraded around or dropped from the flies, as if a play were simply a book with live illustrations.
Weill, of course, cooperated with Brecht's vision of a text-theater in many ways, especially in Die sieben Todsünden (The Seven Mortal Sins), a piece of surrealist theater in which artistic media are deformed and flogged in all sorts of ways; but I want to emphasize one particular direction in which Weill abused his artistic medium, by constructing a sort of music designed to be read. This is one of the most remarkable sorts of abuse to which the medium of music could possibly be subjected: it's questionable that music has any semantic content whatsoever--to imagine a legible music seems almost completely preposterous. We read with our eyes, we hear with our ears--everything conspires to deny to music any hope to transform itself into a visible text.
And yet, I think that in Der Jasager (The Yes-Sayer, 1930)--which seems to me his most controlled, sustained, and imaginative experiment in writing music-theater--Weill achieved just that. Weill thought that the ultimate resource of music-drama, the basic element of the art of the composer, was the gestus, the musical gesture that defined an attitude, a contortion of the body, a significant shape. In Der Jasager Weill achieved a number of extremely potent gestus, but gestus that are so remote and cold that they seem more like written text than like speech. It is an opera constructed of musical hieroglyphs.
The plot of Der Jasager was nicely summarized by Weill:
The main character in it is a boy. That already gave me the idea to let this play be performed by students. That content, briefly, is: the boy would like to go with the teacher on a journey, in order to fetch medicine from the city for his sick mother. The travel is dangerous; on that account, the mother doesn't want to let the boy go. Also the teacher advises against it. The boy goes, however, in order to help his mother. On the way, when they've come to the most dangerous place, he becomes weak and therefore endangers the whole band of travelers. They put to him the decision: should they turn back or should they follow the old rite [Brauch], which commands that the sick must be thrown down into the valley? The boy decides for the valley-hurling. "He has said Yes," sings the chorus. Some of the text is motivated differently by Brecht, compared to what is offered in the original Japanese text. . . . we've considered that students should also learn something from a didactic play [Lehrstück]. For that reason, we've brought in the sentence about acquiescence [Einverstündnis], namely: "The important thing to learn is acquiescence." Students should learn that. They should know that a community to which one is joined demands that one actually bears the consequences. The boy goes the way of the community to the end, when he says Yes to the valley-hurling. 10
Though Brecht wrote an alternate text with a different ending, Der Neinsager (The No-Sayer), the whole musical style of Der Jasager forecloses all paths except the path of saying yes. Far from being sensitive to the psychic torment of a boy faced with an unbearable decision, Weill composed the most unpsychological music of his life, music written exclusively from the point of view of the community, not the individual. There is no fork in Der Jasager's road: it is a study in inexorability, in a forced simplicity that precludes alternate behavior of any sort. It is Weill's supreme work of gestus, in that the motor rhythms, the inflexible melodic shapes, fix the domain of doing and feeling so precisely that the characters are mere puppets driven, so to speak, by the mechanical tracker action of the music. The Ja-hieroglyph in the music is deeply incised, unmistakable; it can't mean Nein, for it has no ambiguity whatsoever.
This work is spare on every level. The photographs of early performances show children in ordinary school-costume, as if it were a perfectly normal thing for uncooperative children to be thrown of Bavarian Alps--I wonder whether the commonplace dress might not have heightened the eeriness of the ritual sacrifice, as in Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery." Furthermore, the stage set was as Spartan as possible:
It can be played in the school auditorium. In front, on the platform, is the stage. The chorus sits on or in front of the platform. In the middle of the platform a circle is drawn; in the middle of the circle is a door (the mother's room). In the second act the door is taken away, off to one side of the circle there's set up a platform with a staircase, which represents the mountain. You see, simplicity is the principle of this school opera. Also in the musical part. The orchestral and vocal parts are performed by students. 11
A play, any play, requires a series of entrances and exits, and a plot, any plot, entails some difficulty that must be overcome. In this sense, the bare essentials of theater are a door, and a mountain. Samuel Beckett's stage settings--a pair of garbage cans, a tree in various states of blossom, an ash heap--are Zefirellian extravagances compared to this economical sort of drama. But Beckett's plays, like Der Jasager, are investigations of nakedness, théâtre pur, the kind of drama that is left when everything non-dramatic has been rigorously pared away.
Weill's musical methods can be profitably studied in the eighth of the ten numbers of the score, near the beginning of the second act. Here the expedition reaches a way-station on the mountain climb, and decides to rest; the boy announces that he feels unwell; the other children tell the teacher, who says that he's probably just exhausted from climbing; but everyone knows that the path above the hut follows a ledge, too narrow for carrying anyone, and it is possible that the sick boy will have to be flung down the cliff-side. This number is pieced together from a handful of pattern-units, of which the most important is that of the opening two bars: the notes D-F-D, followed by a chord with G in the bass and D and E in the treble--that is, a sketch of D minor, followed by a 6/5 chord on E, a kind of Neapolitan ( 1). In the following two-bar sequences, the first bar keeps steadily tromping its D-F-D, but this re terminates in other chords: A 7 , then E7; after this, the re of the first bar opens outward to D-A-D, and still wider to B-A-B. The re keeps straining towards cadence, but never achieves such gratification in a meaningful way; and finally it returns to exactly the same form it took in the first two bars. This pattern-unit is, I believe, a representation of a determined laborious ascent, an icon of trudge. It has a certain melodic and harmonic flexibility, but flexibility within narrow limits; Weill has constructed its changes not to illustrate a particular harmonic direction, but simply to illustrate a kind of pushing and pulling within the re itself, a kind of interior tension. The re dilates itself without developing, then contracts to its original shape: monotony is evaded without compromising the purity and isolation of the gesture.
This is what gestic music looks like when freed from all non-gestic elements. At the beginning of the piece, the resolute re (scale degrees in the minor) doesn't extricate itself from the rest of the music: it is the music. What exactly is the gestus here, besides the physical motion of making your way over difficult terrain, taking three steps forward (), then planting your right foot on a stone that gives way, flattens beneath your weight ()? Perhaps the re itself contains a clue to its own meaning. In Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice --the great reform opera, itself a "prototype of opera"--the chorus of the Furies blocks Orpheus's way through Hades, and attempts to terrify him with the darkness, the mists, the howling of Cerebus (2). This chorus, in C Minor, begins with a bar in which the chorus, in unison, sings the notes ; then, moving to the dominant, G major, their first note in the second bar is D--yielding a striking re. Although Gluck's harmony is more conventional than Weill's, the Furies' re and Weill's re bear several strong points of relation: a near-identical melodic shape in 3/4 tempo, a hell-waltz.
In the infernal scene of Orfeo, Gluck discovered an important--perhaps the most importan--way of creating a musical form for tragedy. For Gluck, and arguably for Sophocles and Euripides as well, tragedy is ultimately a matter of fists beating against walls: mankind struggling with and crying against the limits of the human condition. Gluck's scene in hell offers an extremely powerful musical representation of both the wall and the cry, as Orpheus pleads, with the simplest, most elegant pathos, against the barrier of the iron-hearted Furies--until at last they weep, the gate swings open, and Orpheus is allowed to proceed. Gluck's discovery that a tragedy could be conceived as a huge ritornello, in which a savage and implacable refrain was interrupted by the miseries of a solo voice, has had incalculable consequences in subsequent opera. It is easy to find wall-vs.-plaint oppositions everywhere, in Leonora's "Pace, pace", in Verdi's La forza del destino , and the end of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex , in the fishwife's role in Dessau's Die Verurteilung des Lukullus .
The re in Der Jasager seems a spare sketch of a musical wall. Its gestus isn't simply walking, but also the necessity to walk, or else to be thrown down the side of the mountain. This re is the musical equivalent both of the impulse that pushes the expedition forward, and of the old rite that demands that those unable to proceed must be killed. The harmonic frustration keeps dilating, without resolving: it thrusts the boy forward onto the path too narrow for him to walk. If there is a subliminal allusion here to Gluck, it is perfectly appropriate, for the boy's teacher, the boy's classmates, are for him, even if they have the best will in the world, Furies.
But in the Gluckian tragic structure every wall must be balanced by a plaint. The plaint in Der Jasager is the controlling pattern-unit of the first part of the tenth number ( 3). Over incessant repetitions of this re, the teacher gives to the boy a formal and explicit reading of the law: one who gets sick on a mountain journey must be thrown into the valley; his companions must ask him if he wants them to abandon the journey and return home, on his account; and he must answer, "You shall not return." And the boy does indeed cry out, "You shall not return." The two-bar musical re underneath most of this lecture and response consists of two chordal suspensions that (in the case of the first appearance) might be understood as a kind of frustrated i-V half-cadence from A minor to E: in the first bar, a chord of the notes (reading from bottom up) A, D, and E, a 4-3 suspension over A--but for an instant the D dips down to C, producing a glimpse at exactly the sort of clear, root-position triad that this re is never going to rest upon. The second bar consists of a static chord of the very widely spaced notes E, B, and A--a complicated version of yet another 4-3 suspension, this time over E. It would be easy to make this chord cadence solidly on E, but that is exactly what Weill didn't do; instead the re keeps repeating itself, with various spread-out harmonies in the second bar. I speak of suspensions, but harmony suspended in such a manner is clearly never going to fall: the sonority is cool, spare, detached, a set of pure acoustic objects generated from fifths. The re is not an expression of pain but a hieroglyph of pain. Here is an isolated bit of naked expressivity--a succession of 4-3 suspensions that not only don't cadence, but that mean the absence of cadence, a state of permanent unhappy irresolution.
I think of this double-suspension re as a freeze-dried lamentation. A lamentation is, by nature, expansive: overwhelming wretchedness wishes to expatiate on itself. But this is a clipped, truncated lamentation, a lamentation with little blood in it. The more the re is repeated, the less pathetic it becomes: all semantics depend on systems of differentiation, and in the absence of a context any re, no matter how potently charged, will become drained, a kind of fossil of meaning, or a pickled embryo presented coolly with forceps. (This is a potential danger with all musical hieroglyphs: it is impossible for any acoustic object to retain a steady significance, for the mere act of repetition tends to alter or remove the context that provided the meaning in the first place--the hope for a reliable dictionary of music-res can never be fulfilled.) The double-suspension re in Der Jasager is less a lamentation than a kind of semaphore for a lamentation that isn't taking place; a stand-in for an uncomplained complaint.
The boy is not so self-indulgent as to protest his fate; so the music indicates what he might have said, but didn't. If musical tragedy tends to comprise a wall and a plaint, this strange re might be conceived as both wall and pliant in one: suitable both for the teacher's quotation of the law, and for the boy's consent to it. It is the ideal hieroglyph of acquiescence: quietly implacable and coldly sad. To listen to the music is to read about suffering; someone else's suffering, not our own.
In Weill's American musical plays, we sometimes find similarly chilled res, musical ghosts of res that might have once been expressive. For example, the central character in Lady in the Dark (1941, with lyrics by Ira Gershwin) is Liza Elliott, a magazine editor who tells her analyst her fears of personal inadequacy; in a dream scene, set in a circus, she justifies her indecisiveness by singing "The Saga of Jenny," concerning a cheerful, self-indulgent woman who creates havoc by making quick decisions:
Jenny made her mind up at twenty-two
To get herself a husband was the thing to do.
She got herself all dolled up in her satins and furs
And she got herself a husband but he wasn't hers.
Poor Jenny, bright as a penny!
The choral refrain, "Poor Jenny, bright as a penny," is sung to a re of mock lamentation--the term "poor" is obviously inappropriate for this brassy dame, but Weill's music is full of stylized sighs, organized around harmonic scrunches (produced by the simple means of stressing the seventh in dominant-seventh chords). One of the most remarkable features of Weill's whole career is the quality of musical irony in his later works, the way in which his ear re-mapped the stock res of American popular music as elements of a sophisticated European semantics. The eighteenth-century satirist Jonathan Swift sometimes used a rhetorical re that corresponds to irony in the same way that irony corresponds to normal speech: that is, he would say exactly what he meant, but in such a way that the reader would suspect that he meant something completely different--for instance, when he recommended that the court should make virtuous conduct a matter of good manners, so that courtiers would behave honestly under the same pressure of etiquette that compelled them to use the right fork at table. Weill, too, developed a manner of expressing what he believed in a way so literal that it's hard to take him seriously. I believe that "Poor Jenny" is, finally, less a mock lamentation than a mock mock lamentation, an expression of Weill's sense of the emptiness of the life of a rich, amoral hedonist such as Jenny. This Jenny might be conceived as Pirate Jenny's great-granddaughter, a far more successful pirate, triumphantly rapacious. "The Saga of Jenny" like "Seeräuber-Jenny" but in a far lighter manner, exposes the desolation at the heart of her wishing. But this simple meaning is so feathered with a fringe of ironic possibilities that Weill evaded all responsibility for it.
Weill died in 1950, and the music-philosopher Theodor Adorno, perhaps ashamed because he had once defended Weill's music, wrote a venomous obituary:
Weill considered himself a kind of Offenbach of his century, and with respect to speed of social-aesthetic reaction and to sketchiness, the analogy is not unreasonable. But the model is not to be repeated. The horror of reality has become too overwhelming for a parody to reach up to it. . . . Indeed he had something of the genius of the great milliner. The capacity was given him to find the proper melodies for the year's display, and this completely transitory thing may last. 12
Clothes are relevant to Weill: The Threepenny Opera, for example, is a story about clothes, in that Peachum is the beggars' main haberdasher, and Lucy wears a false belly to feign pregnancy; so perhaps Adorno was in a sense right in conceiving Weill as a musical Chanel or Balenciaga. But I think of Weill as a composer who was able to put on any clothes--ranging from Protestant chorale to Jewish melisma to Euro--tango to Schoenbergian atonality to Ricahrd Rodgers' popcorn--precisely because he was so confident that he had centered his art on the fundamentals of expression: on legible music-res. He was not a fake, but a serious composer adept at wearing any sort of frivolous musical drag. Perhaps the simplicity of Der Jasager is as much an artifice as any of his other styles, but I'm tempted to see it as the closest approximation of Weill in sich, Weill without his dazzling polystylisms, Weill examining the basic tool-kit of his art: Der Jasager is music expression performed with flint axe and blade of horn, not much like such gorgeous, glossy devices as The Threepenny Opera and Lady in the Dark. And yet, even when Weill pretended to be Offenbach, or worse, his music relies on the old semantics as stated and refined by Monteverdi and other great res. The sometimes fashionable cut of Weill's clothes masks the extraordinary historical force of his language--as responsive to the whole tradition of Western music as to the language of Stravinsky or of Adorno's beloved Schoenberg. Weill, like Joyce in Ulysses, made his art a total art, by appropriating every resource that history provided: behind any of Weill's stage pieces, opening out onto everything from the The Play of Daniel to Rodgers' Carousel. To learn what is the common property of all music theater, listen to Weill.
In chapter 21 of Mann's Dr. Faustus--so profoundly informed by the aesthetics of Adorno--the composer-hero opines:
The work of art! It's deceit. It's the sort of thing the bourgeois would like to see still existing. It opposes truth, opposes seriousness. Only the very short thing, the highly consistent musical instant, is valid and serious. . . . Today semblance and play [Schein und Spiel] have the conscience of art against them. Art wants to stop being semblance and play, it wants to become knowledge [Erkenntnis]. . . . how will art live as knowledge? I remembered what he had written . . . about the expansion of the kingdom of the banal. 13
Many versions of Weill's life are told from this Faustian point of view: Weill sold out fame, for money, through relentless expansion of the kingdom of the banal. But Weill faced the same dilemma that Schoenberg and Webern and Mann's Leverkühn faced: after one had concentrated one's art to the limits of sobriety, without development or fancifulness of any sort, what did one do next? That didactic masterpiece, Der Jasager, shows a musical art that has stopped being pretense and play, and has aspired to become knowledge. But the world cannot subsist on professorial lessons alone; and it is a testament to Weill's richness of imagination that he could use every resource of musical art, from Bach to the most meretricious chanson, to convey his strangely urgent critiques of expression. Leverkühn, of course, really did sell his soul to the devil; but Weill did something far more modern, far more radical: he sold his soul to Broadway.
Daniel Albright teaches English (especially modernist) at the University of Rochester and musicology at the Eastman School of Music. He is especially interested in tracing patterns of affiliation and difference in the comparative arts, and in relating science to literature.
1. Jean Cocteau, Le Coq et l'arlequin--Notes autour de la musique. (Paris: Éditions de la Sirène, 1918), 18. "Le tact dans l'audace, c'est de savoir jusqu'où on peut aller trop loin."
2. T. S. Eliot,"London Letter," The Dial (September 1921).
3. Igor Stravinsky and Robert Croft, Themes and Conclusions. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 33.
4. Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus: Das Leben des deuschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn erzählt von einem Freunde (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1973), 173.
5. Eberhardt Hilscher, Thomas Mann, Leben und Werke. (Berlin: Volk und Wissen, 1966), 194. After reading Hans Eichner's review of Der Erkwählte, Mann complained: "ich muss mich ganz und gar verschrieben haben, wenn auch nicht dieses Buch mein Grundverhältnis zum Sein und zum Leben ausdrückte: Sympathie.   Das ist kein nihilistiches Lachen, dass ich bringe, kein Hohngelächter. . . . Nehmen Sie das Ding als was es ist: ein ganz lustiges und nicht gedankenloses Experiment. Es hat viele Menschen für ein Paar Stunden glücklich gemacht. Das ist auch etwas. . . ."
6. Thomas Mann, The Letters of Thomas Mann, selected and translated from the German by Richard and Clara Winston. (London: Secker & Warburg, 1970) vol 2, 546.
7. Mann, Doktor Faustus, 135.
8. Bertolt Brecht, Gesammelte Weke (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1967) vol 15, 474.
9. Kurt Weill, cited by Kim Kowalke, The Opera Quarterly 6.3 (Spring 1989): 30.
10. Kurt Weill, Ausgewählte Schriften ed, David Drew (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1975), 68.
11. Ibid., 68--69.
12. Frankfurter Rundschein, 15 April 1950. For a fine discussion of this obituary, see David Drew's article in A New Orpheus, ed. Kim Kowalke (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).
13. Mann, Doktor Faustus, 181.
For modernism, the legacy of Enlightenment modernity was both necessary
and annihilating, like Virginia Woolf's Angel in the House:
without her, there would have been no Woolf and yet with her,
there almost was no Woolf--so strict was the Angel's discipline of
self. Just so, modernism was continually caught in a deconstructive
dilemma. It aimed to break the disciplines of Enlightenment ideology
on which it simultaneously depended, including, I will argue, a racial
narratology. Among its other paradoxical acts, modernist fiction deflated
the dream of transcendent objectivity while realizing the strangely
complementary dream of a subjectivity so pervious and sensitive that it
absorbs whole worlds in single moments. This tricky relationship to
Enlightenment sensibility finds a parallel in modernism's relationship
to Enlightenment history: while modernism's critique of depth, "real"
history, and dimensionality as coherent conditions with a "good"
telos moved it toward an aesthetic of flattening and fragmentation,
that aesthetic entailed nonetheless a curving back, an engagement in the
history it critiqued--even a desire for that history. The collage
"M" in the title of this journal captures exactly this ambivalence:
a double orientation toward the rounded and the flat, history's curve
and contingency's crisscross, the weight of tradition and the flight of
transgression. Modernism wants both terms--the life-giving angel
and the
murdered angel, so to speak. And race, exactly because of its commerce
with the angels of English narrative and history, shapes modernist
fiction's very practice.
For in the modern West at least, race and narrative are joined at the root, creating the stem of history that would uphold the nation-state (to borrow William Wordsworth's trope), imaged implicitly as the angelic white flower of sensibility. 1 Gertrude Stein understood this entanglement of race and narrative even as she used it to shock and attract her white readership by in effect shouting racial epithets in her stories. In the process, however, like other modernists Stein was teasing apart, as if it were a knotted rootball, the problem of race. As John Whittier-Fergusen has recently argued in these pages, the relation between Stein's "politics" and her aesthetics is too often oversimplified, given how embedded it is in a long and winding cultural history. 2 Stein's work can serve to reveal the surprising ways that, indeed, modernism flowers perversely in the soil of modernity due to the mineral powers of race.
My argument highlights the origin of Western racial narrative not in imperial practices or travel narratives but rather in English revolutionary history. To start here gives insight into the hidden hybridity of racial discourses, their joining of revolutionary and imperial impulses. In the wake of England's revolutionary period in the latter half of the seventeenth century, historical, sentimental, and "realistic" narrative gave shape to crucial self-fashioning "root" myths for "Britain" and, in turn, "America." Stein's fiction, in particular The Making of Americans and Three Lives, insistently reiterates the tropes of sentiment, virtue, race, and reproduction that infuse these racial myths and nurture subjectivity in the West--allowing her at once to water and wilt the flower of modernity.
What is race, after all? Race is a narrative concept. Whether or not it becomes the basis for social hierarchy or gets conred in binary oppositions, "race" is at base the idea that characteristics are passed from one generation to the next through time; it is the claim that behavior in the present and future is predictable because it is based on characteristics inherited from ancestors who lived in the past. Races or species may evolve, as scientists have argued for a century and a half, but to say so only reinforces the diachronic principle on which race depends. Yet within both narrative and the notions of race as they have developed in the West there lies a sharp tension, or paradox, between pastness and futureness, history and progress, reproduction and production--a tension which Stein and other modernists fully exploit.
Some of Edward Said's early work on the novel throws light on this tension. In Beginnings, Said argues that, with the eighteenth-century rise of the novel in England, narrative in the West may be characterized by its fictionalization of origins or "beginnings." In other times and cultures, Said explains, narrative is most often a retelling of authorized or familiar stories, serving to reinstate cultural referents even as it reconres them; but, with the rise of the novel and the idea of individuality, Western narrative obsessively sought to tell new stories of unknown individuals, to make a question and an "original" plot of the protagonist's beginnings. In the process the novel recreated the story of culture--a point that Nancy Armstrong and other critics of the novel have more recently elaborated. 3
Yet in his early essay "On Repetition," Said also recognizes a necessary tension in Western narratives, which he identifies as a tension between production and reproduction. He first of all compares the conservative, stabilizing function of repetition in cultural forms (such as in laws, rituals, and myths) to the similarly conservative role of marriage and biological reproduction. Reproduction, like ritualization, reflects the will to repeat, to create a new generation that will carry on the forms and customs of the old. He furthermore suggests, without developing the idea, that many laws and rituals operate to reproduce the norms of heterosexual reproduction and contain its members' anarchic, nonrepetitive impulses toward "anti-social" individuality or non-reproductive sexuality. Said argues that modern re-writers of Western narratives of culture, such as Vico and Marx, resist this investment in repetition and yet remain caught in a tension between production and reproduction, for even while they champion the virtues of production and argue for social transformation they fall back, as Said sees it, on metaphors of biological reproduction to imagine these innovations into being.
I suggest that we can more precisely historicize Said's claims, both about the English plot of origins and about the tension between reproduction and innovation, when we consider this plot in relation to the emergent racial and gender mythologies of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The rise of the English-language novel, with its stories of self-generated beginnings, coincides importantly with the codification of a new plot of origins for English culture, a racialized plot in which sexuality and marriage are the necessary instruments of both progress and reproduction. The conventional stories of a family's progress, a reformed foundling, or a virtuous servant or merchant-class woman who marries a nobleman, all support the ideological transition from a racialized critique of Stuart monarchy and the "noble" class, to a new racial imperialism legitimated by the idea of a democratically "noble" English sensibility. While they are shaped by plots of new beginnings and novel alliances--in other words, of the production of new social arrangements--these stories also remain invested in and dependent on the trope of reproduction, of the perpetuation and stabilization of these social arrangements through reproduction, which is in fact an implicitly racialized reproduction. To establish this point, I'll refer to arguments I have made elsewhere about race narratives in early modern England, specifically pre-imperial narratives involving the Anglo-Saxon "race," which extend the work of a number of intellectual and cultural historians. 4
As early as the Elizabethan period, with the founding of the Society of Antiquaries, scholars began developing the notion that pre-Norman codes and customs formed the true "common-law" basis for English institutions. Yet it was in seventeenth-century revolutionary England that such ideas took root most powerfully. Dissident groups invoked a rhetoric of the "Norman Yoke" to defend the claims of the "native" Anglo-Saxons against the Norman monarchy. In challenging the powers of the papacy and the throne, lawyers, craftsmen, and religious reformers alike built on the growing scholarship in "Saxonism," that is, in pre-Norman, Saxon language, laws, relics, and customs. As is well-known, Edward Coke supported his influential "common law" interpretation of English government and property rights with evidence from the Archainomia, a recently available compendium of Anglo-Saxon laws. 5 His agenda was less radical by far than that of the famous Leveller pamphleteer and religious radical Gerard Winstanley, but they both mounted arguments that would have been inconceivable without the new material about pre-Norman feudal law among the Anglo-Saxons. Pamphleteers among the Leveller and Digger movements expanded these materials into a counter-myth of English history. Winstanley argued in his "Law of Freedom" letter to Oliver Cromwell that "When the Norman power had conquered our forefathers, he took the free use of our English ground from them" and furthermore that "all Kings from his time to Charles, were successors of that conquest, and all laws were made to confirm that conquest" (22, 23). 6 No doubt this myth of Norman against Englishman gave special resonance to Sir Henry Holcroft's 1653 translation of Procupius' History of the Warres of the Emperour Justinian, with its proclamation that "No government . . . be conferr'd upon strangers in blood/but such only have the place, to whose race it did belong" . 7 As historian Trevor Colbourn puts it, such views made it possible to argue that in England "[l]iberty did not have to be created; it only needed to be restored" . 8 History proved, in other words, that "liberty" was the natural state of the English nation, a state that was now being recovered and reproduced.
This reconception of English identity as Gothic-Saxon and infused with an impulse to liberty was gradually codified in a spate of eighteenth-century histories of England by writers from David Hume to Catharine Macaulay. It also shaped a range of linguistic and aesthetic projects, including Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, in the Preface of which he proclaims that "The whole fabric and scheme of the English language is Gothick or Teutonick," and then argues that it has unfortunately been "deviating towards a Gallick structure and phraseology, from which it ought to be our endeavor to recall it." 9 Such accounts of the English language set the stage for the founding of an English literary tradition (on which foundation it would expand to become a British tradition that claimed the literature of Scotland and Ireland). 10
Thus the move toward innovation and resistance to the reigning powers entailed a narrative of recuperation, specifically of a kin-distinct lineage characterized by its native virtue and its impulse toward liberty. This is the generating tension that catalyzes the West's romance with race all the way into the twentieth century: it gives cultures traditional authority for historical change--including, ultimately and ironically, imperialistic extensions of power that reinstate new hierarchies of race in colonial locales from Ireland to America, from India to Australia to Africa. Racialized accounts of history are able thus to propel revolution and imperialism. Race at once revolutionizes "national" history and naturalizes "manifest" destiny.
This double function of the racial idea unfolds most ironically in the American Revolution. As Trevor Colbourn, Reginald Horsman, and others have shown, the notion that "Saxons" had a special sensibility and love of liberty was enthusiastically imported to the colonies by the radical Whig interpreters of English history, including Thomas Jefferson who imagined the American experiment in self-government as potentially true to the early Anglo-Saxon legacy that King George and Parliament had betrayed. Jefferson explicitly invoked libertarian Saxon "sentiment" as the compelling impulse of the revolution and named the supposedly Saxon model of self-governance by a federation of small landowners as a prototype for the new American experiment.  And, as they accused the moderate English Whigs of doing, these radical American Whigs were simultaneously reconsolidating hierarchies of power, for they considered their Saxon will to liberty as the character trait that distinguished them from others, specifically Africans, and justified their power over these others. 11 This is the typical racial turn, by which humble nature re-emerges from oppression to become a noble culture that deserves to rule others. Modern Western ideologies of race arise as narratives of revolution claiming recuperation which, exactly because of the double allegiance to pastness and futureness, natural hierarchies and cultural transformation, lend themselves to an apparently innocent chauvinism--or, as we move into the realm of culture, a nostalgic experimentalism: in other words, a past-seeking modernism.
Thus the paradox at the heart of racialism is also the paradox at the heart of modernism and modernity: its investment in the past is its ticket to the future. The regular reappearance of "romantic" or "essentialist" or "folk" racial myths among revolutionary groups emerges in this light as a phenomenon that re-plays the conflict of interests propelling modernity. Whether in race, gender, or class myths, whether in rationalist thought or technology, modernity creates a naturalized "given" to justify acts of innovative making--and re-hierarchizing. Specifically, race lends a principle of narrativity by which the ancient culminates in the modern: modernists from Mina Loy and William Carlos Williams to Woolf, Faulkner, Joyce, and Stein apprehended, reworked, inflated, deflated and in any case unavoidably engaged with this racial narratology. Accordingly does Stein adopt the idea of "bottom nature" as catalyst for a radical reconception of "character." Modernists, like modernity, often depend on a myth of racial history to transcend history.
In this light, we can glimpse new ways in which the novel operates as a magnetic power. Beginning in the eighteenth century, it gathers together the dispersed and incoherent impulses of change-through-tradition and resolves them into psychologized narratives, as Nancy Armstrong has noted in terms of class and gender struggles. But I am emphasizing that the novel's often epic narratives of sensibility also implicitly form the inscape of a new epic version of history in their minute fashioning of modern English character, fictional and lived. This is not only a making-innocent of what is political, as Armstrong rightly points out, but it is also a politics of innocence achieved through narration--through narration of a phoenix-like rising out of the past which cleanses the self for a new orientation toward the future. Herein do the lives of non-aristocratic and common characters, so integral to the novel's plot of origins, take on interest and unfold as naturally "noble"--a word originally aligned with aristocratic "noble-blooded" races but appropriated by writers portraying the middling classes to connote a humble and exquisitely other-sensitive sensibility. Such is the appeal of Robinson Crusoe, whose honest yet apparently crude sensibility finds cultivation on the island through a private, recognizably Protestant relationship with God, and then is ultimately secularized into his Englishman's practice of industry and generosity in business. The eighteenth and nineteenth century foundling plot epitomized in Tom Jones--in which the disenfranchised, kinless orphan proves to be the salt of the earth, vibrant in sensibility, and at the same time having a hidden or usurped noble heritage--provides a virtual allegory of the mythical fall and rise of the "Saxons." Such novels tell the story of the innocent's return to power as if it were a story of sentimental transformation: the history of a nation written as the recuperation of a righteous self--a latter day pilgrim's progress.
The racialization in these narratives is sometimes quiet--embedded for instance in references to Mr. Allworthy's Gothic-styled estate with its native landscaping--and sometimes more structurally supported--as in the fact that Crusoe's evolution toward a man of sensibility finds prompting in his encounter with "Friday." It is against the background of "savage" Friday that Crusoe's reflective and civilized identity comes into relief (although unstably); but it is also through his supposed acts of generosity and open-mindedness (as rendered by Defoe) towards Friday that Crusoe comes into his own as an English type. Again here we see race's doubleness in play, in that a character's ability to embrace a "friend" across racial boundaries comes to signify the nature of his superior racial identity.
The chain of influences linking Samuel Richardson and his intimate friend and doctor George Cheyne to that proto-theorist of sensibility, Isaac Newton, gives a small hint of this early confluence of racial currents of thought and the novel of sensibility. As G.J. Barker-Benfield has shown, Newton's work influenced Cheyne's theories of sensibility, which in turn informed Richardson's vision of character. 12 In his Principia (1687, though not translated from Latin until the 1720's) and especially Optics (1717-1718, 2nd edition), Newton pioneered study of the ways our "little sensoriums" are manifestations of God's "boundless uniform Sensorium" via a "most subtle spirit" highly attuned to "Vibrations" transmitted along the "solid Fibres" of the optic and auditory "nerves." Yet even for Newton this conception differentiated Western Protestant culture from other cultures: Newton contrasts the divinely sensitive self to that of "the Heathen" whose panoply of "false Gods" "blinded" him to these subtle internal extensions of God. Newton thus quietly initiates a yoking of sensibility and ethnocentrism that strengthens with each passing decade. Yet meanwhile, under Newton's influence, Cheyne develops the idea of the "Sentient Principle" of the self whose nerves are like "Keys which, being struck on or touch'd, convey the Sound and Harmony to this Sentient Principle, or Musician"; and these notions find full epic fictional expression in Richardson's Clarissa, whose title character exquisitely embodies them. In fact I would argue that the epic stature of Clarissa in the imaginations of Richardson and his readers derives from her embodiment of an ideal type of English womanhood, one whose natural, sentient nobility both precedes and transcends her class nobility. The ethos of sentimentality is thus an incipient racial ethos and the novel's stories of sensibility are, I argue, emergent racial stories even when they don't say so, even sometimes involuntarily because of their inculcation in a deep stream of racialized historical consciousness. 13
If this is true, the English-language modernists' flattening-out or endless folding-over of the plots of "sensibility" and their experiments with the everyday, psychological realism that had characterized the novel has everything to do with their simultaneous explorations of sexual, racial, class, and colonial identities. Earlier authors had, of course, challenged sentimentality and novelistic forms in a variety of ways, but a critical mass of authors interested in overt experiments with these forms emerges in the early twentieth century, perhaps because of the forces of historical change that were bringing ideologies of race, gender, sexuality, and class to a crisis point. As Degrotte Eby has shown in his book The Road to Armageddon: The Martial Spirit in English Popular Literature, 1870-1914, the potential for, or even inevitability of, a "war of the races" increasingly haunted the imaginations of English citizens. 14 And this state of things apparently came to haunt the imaginations of young turn-of the century novelists. In the case of Joyce, for example, the epic narratives of race at first attracted and then repulsed and outraged but always permeated his imagination. 15 Although intricate intersubjective plots or bizarrely repetitive texts might seem far removed from the West's colonialist history and racial imaginary, the evidence above indicates that modernists writers' experiments are compelled by the very cultural myths, histories, and above all the narrative logic that had brought England and other Western countries to this critical point of a sexual, colonial, class, and in particular, racial stand-off.
Gertrude Stein is among the authors most engaged with this problematic of race, sex, identity, and narrative. Her early preoccupation with German and perhaps Jewish immigrant res and other racialized characters indicates both her suppressed autobiographical involvement in the question of sensibility and her awareness of the racial structure of Anglo-American plots. And while Stein rarely foregrounded her German-Jewish identity, one may nonetheless understand her experimental writing as impelled by a desire to unfix the imperatives of all such culturally narrated identities--an idea that in effect she herself theorized in identifying herself with the "Oriental" infiltration and disruption of western habits, as Shawn Alfrey has suggested. 16 Maria Damon and Charles Bernstein have furthermore pointed out that, in an era when racial identities were so rigidly prescribed, such an impulse would seem almost unavoidable, and preferable to embracing any identity locked into western categories of Jew or German or white. 17
Meanwhile, however, the seductive stabilization of identity that race offers enthralled Stein as it did so many others in this period. Stein rushed to fix and essentialize some identities in the process of, and almost as if it were a necessary means to, dissolving and dislocating others--in this sense repeating the double finesse typical of racial rhetoric in the modern West. While Stein is arguably one of the most radical innovators in early twentieth century literature, her work at the same time contains some of the most openly racist descriptions of characters. Especially since Sonia Saldivar-Hull's important essay critiquing white feminists' blindness to Stein's racism, critics interested in discussing the radicalism of Stein's experiments have struggled to reconcile these two aspects of her fiction, sometimes feeling forced to choose between appreciation and condemnation of this text or that. 18
But to praise some of Stein's work and deem some of it racist only obscures the ways race is more inherent to her fiction and to Western narrative as a whole in the ways I have been sketching. As recent work on modernism corroborates, the modernists' racializing of language, characters, and plots is of a piece with, rather than an unfortunate diversion from, their literary innovations. And within this complicated project, the racist effects, if not intentions, of Stein's and others' characterizations of blacks continue to perpetuate white discursive and bodily violence against blacks. In this light I would like to take Sonia Saldivar-Hull's call to critics to acknowledge this fact as a call also to understand it: not in order to deny the problem but in order to move into it, as a step toward moving ourselves historically through it.
Throughout her career, Stein was preoccupied with the drama of generational repetition and transgression as it got recast within western narratives of progress. Stein enters an inherently racialized Anglo-Saxon narrative tradition, in which economic progress, humble "feminine" sensibility, and honest virtue are the compelling tropes, and, in The Making of Americans, she reveals this tradition's simultaneous counter-investment in conservative hierarchy and patriarchal authority. More specifically, Making exposes the way this contradiction trips up those later immigrants--including the narrator of this novel--who aim to assimilate into this culture through their own narratives of progress and goodness. Finally, the novel unveils the part that "men" and "women" and the "virtuous" relations between them play in the reproduction of this faulty progress narrative, including by its foregrounding of a weeping heroine-narrator, betrayed and undone by her own belief in the "bottom natures" of her characters. This tragic epic of a "family's progress" stands as a kind of grotesque modernist companion to Richardson's Clarissa.
Reading Three Lives in the context of Stein's project in Making, as I will do in the final section of this essay, does not lessen the stories' racist effects but it points, first of all, toward a relationship between sexuality and race in those three stories that goes well beyond using minority characters as vehicles for writing about "deviant" desire--the typical view of this relationship. 19 In turn, it clarifies modernism's entanglement in modernity's racial and sexual narratives.
Stein signals her awareness of the narrative tension between repetition and progress, or pastness and futureness, immediately in the title and the opening anecdote of The Making of Americans, Being a History of a Family's Progress, her 925-page revision of an early thirty-five page story by the same name (between which two versions she wrote Three Lives). Here is the beginning of a history of progress.
Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. "Stop!" cried the groaning man at last, "Stop! I did not drag my own father beyond this tree." It is hard living down the tempers we are born with. (Making, 1)