Mass screenings for tuberculosis and silicosis in the 1930s demonstrated that the "radiant authority" of new medical visual technologies was contingent on possession of the technology of surveillance. Cartwright's assertion that subjects recognize themselves in terms of their positions within "a social body" that is itself composed through a selectively imaging "visual apparatus" suggests that identity is profoundly conditioned by institutionalized rituals of seeing and being seen (SB, 146). In the 1930s, acts of mechanical unveiling, of peeling back layers that conceal the fitness of the core, displaced the surface of the body as an open delineator of identity, and replaced it with an encrypted interior that was seldom deciphered in the presence of the subject who surrendered it. The texts inscribed on the scrolls generated by mass radiography, like the increasingly remote texts deciphered by modern poet-scholars in their scramble for cultural authority, became the site of an escalating gendered and racial struggle for the possession of the "subject," one that Rukeyser understood to be literally waged upon and within the invisible bodies of the Great Depression's "negative phenomena," the "many people" who "just didn't seem to be . . . about." 54 By constructing a tale in which modern women restore eyes to a constituency that drifts outside of the frame of surveillance, Rukeyser sought to demonstrate that, placed in the wrong hands, medical visual technology, like modernist esoterism, could serve to expose the ideological nature of its construction and use. The gaze of the modern medical camera, however, was too easily adapted to the essentializing aims of a poet who anticipated a class-based release from the veil of "false consciousness." Written out of Rukeyser's brilliant exposure of corporate and state mechanisms of erasure are the less-than-superficial racial dimensions of Gauley tunnel.
David Kadlec teaches English at Georgetown University. He is working on a study of technology and identity in American poetry of the 1920s and 1930s.
My thanks to Leona Fisher and Jen Frank.
1. When the collapse of the national economy weakened the coal-mining industry, "clean" and "renewable" water resources came to be known as "white coal."
2. See the House Subcommittee of the Committee on Labor, An Investigation Relating to Health Conditions of Workers Employed in the Construction and Maintenance of Public Utilities: Hearings before a Subcommittee of the House Committee on Labor on H. J. Res 449, 74th Cong., 2d sess., 1936, 3; hereafter abbreviated HC.
3. See Martin Cherniack, The Hawk's Nest Incident: America's Worst Industrial Disaster (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 44-46; hereafter abbreviated HN.
4. "Steel nippers" aided the drillers, who typically worked in five-hour shifts at the "head," which was the deepest part of the tunnel shaft, or "bore." As unskilled laborers, both drillers and nippers would double between shifts as "muckers," scooping the loosened silica rubble into electric rail cars.
5. In his 1986 epidemiological study of the Hawk's Nest incident, Martin Cherniack, a former physician and researcher at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, places the total number of deaths from acute silicosis at 764. Cherniack estimates that 581 of these men were African American (HN, 89-170, 104).
6. Testifying in 1936 before the house subcommittee appointed to investigate the Hawk's Nest disaster, Dr. Emory Hayhurst, an expert in industrial lung diseases, defined silicosis as follows:
Silicosis is a disease which results from silica dust in the air being inhaled into the lungs, where it sets up a gradual scar tissue formation . . . in spots, or nodules . . . and those gradually increase in size until they block the drainage from the lungs, and eventually they block the blood supply, and then they block the air passageways. While this is going on the person suffers certain symptoms, such as increasing shortness of breath, and can't take a deep breath. He gets pains through his chest, and he notices that he can't work as vigorously as before. He is very apt to develop tuberculosis, much more susceptible as a result of this silica in his lungs [HC, 85-86].
In "The Book of the Dead," Rukeyser appears to have drawn from Hayhurst's definition in fashioning her own account of the "blockage" of laws designed to curb industrial poisoning.
7. See Jessie Fauset, "The Gift of Laughter," in The New Negro, ed. Alaine Locke (1925; New York: Atheneum, 1992), 164.
8. See John Wheelwright, review of U. S. 1, by Muriel Rukeyser, Partisan Review 4 (March 1938): 55. Wheelwright's criticism of Rukeyser is discussed in Walter Kalaidjian, American Culture Between the Wars: Revisionary Modernism and Postmodern Critique (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 164; hereafter abbreviated AC.
9. Cary Nelson portrays the 1930s as a time of broad artistic and political alliances. Placing the poetry of this decade within a larger Left modernist tradition in which "the poetry of the feminist movement coexists with the poetry of the unemployed . . . and the poetry of black pride," Nelson rues the more "fractured" appeals of identity politics in the late twentieth century (Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945 [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989], 234-35; hereafter abbreviated RR). Michael Denning offers a similar but more historically nuanced account of the Popular Front as a "coalitional" social and artistic movement that began to crumble in the mid-1940s under the pressure of "postmodern" "racial realignments" and especially "gender realignments" (Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century [New York: Verso, 1996], 37, 29, 34, and 34, respectively; hereafter abbreviated CF). Identifying the young Rukeyser as a "Popular Front feminist," Walter Kalaidjian reads "The Book of the Dead" as a poem that exposes, in one progressive sweep, the history of "gender, race, and class oppression" alike (AC, 168).
10. In the final stanzas of "The Book of the Dead," Rukeyser suggested that the social poet should endeavor not only to "widen the lens and see," but also "to photograph and to extend the voice" (Muriel Rukeyser, U. S. 1 [New York: Covici/Friede, 1938], 71; hereafter abbreviated US). In the appended note, she declared that "[p]oetry can extend the document" (US, 146).
11. Hartley Howe, "You Have Seen Their Pictures," Survey Graphic 29 (April 1940): 238. Beginning in 1937, American public health agencies sent vans equipped with X-ray machines into areas identified as sources of TB infection. At this time, chest X-rays were also made a part of routine hospital admissions procedures. Mass tuberculosis screenings were instituted in England a few years later, in 1941, among civilians in public air-raid shelters. See Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine's Visual Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 152; hereafter abbreviated SB. See also F. B. Smith, The Retreat of Tuberculosis, 1850-1950 (London: Croom Helm, 1988), 237; and James Guimond, American Photography and the American Dream (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 136-37.
12. FSA photographs were used to garner public support for farm relief funds. These funds were seldom distributed fairly. In states like Mississippi, for example, low-income white farmers received standard rehabilitation loans at up to seven times the rate of blacks (Nicholas Natanson, The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography [Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992], 52; hereafter abbreviated BI). Although the white photographers hired by the agency did produce more or less proportionate numbers of portraits of African Americans in the rural South, the FSA's inability to distribute relief across the southern "color line" was reflected in the racial composition of public FSA displays (BI, 69-71). "The agency's first traveling exhibit of 1936," writes Natanson, "hailing the march from rural slums to 'new frontiers of farm independence,'left black frontiers all but invisible, with only one black image among the exhibit's forty" (BI, 217). FSA photos of black subjects were also missing from the federally sponsored images that appeared in newspapers (BI, 226).
13. During the 1930s, the liberal Roosevelt Administration willingly traded on race in its attempts to forge coalitions with radical political movements. Speaking as a prominent white "racial progressive," for example, FSA chief Will Alexander urged students at Howard University to become "more class conscious and less race conscious" (BI, 50, 54). In so doing, he implied that the Roosevelt Administration was aiming to eradicate racism by attacking it at its economic foundations. The failure of Alexander's own agency to distribute photos of black subjects, however, was hardly an instance of racial sacrifice on behalf of revolutionary political change. The directives that the head of the FSA's Historical Section sent to his traveling photographers indicate that class consciousness was no more an aim of the agency than was racial awareness. "[P]ut quite a little effort in getting us good land pictures," wrote Roy Stryker to the photographer Walker Evans, "showing the erosion, sub-marginal areas, cut-over land. These should be taken whenever possible, showing the relationship of the land to the cultural decay" (quoted in Walker Evans, Walker Evans at Work [New York: Harper and Row, 1982], 118-19). See also Guimond, American Photography and the American Dream, 117. In linking poverty to environmental factors like erosion and clear-cuts, Stryker encouraged his photographers to depict economic crisis as a temporary aberration in a natural capitalistic order. In the pictures that he called for, reform-based recovery would be as imminent as new spring growth.
14. Gauley Bridge had been christened "the village of walking skeletons" by the radical editor Frank Palmer, who directed reportage on the tunnel disaster in the Detroit-based People's Press in 1935 (HN, 75, 81-82). Resembling the London commuters who had shuffled through the opening passages of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land , "so many" "undone" by "death," the more literally wasted res that Palmer invoked had become marxist harbingers by the time of such polemical poetic plaints as Edwin Rolfe's "Asbestos" (T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts, ed. Valerie Eliot [New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1971], 9; hereafter abbreviated WL). In Rolfe's 1933 industrial elegy, a disease-stricken asbestos worker sinks into his corporeal deathbed, where "the posts are made of bone, spring of nerves, / the mattress bleeding flesh" (Edwin Rolfe, "Asbestos," in To My Contemporaries [New York: Dynamo Press, 1936], 10; hereafter abbreviated "A"). "[D]ead / workers" such as Rolfe's "are dead before they cease to be" ("A," 10) not because they trade their passions, as do Eliot's disembodied masses, for numbing comforts that "[p]icked [their] bones in whispers" (WL, 69), but because their industrial deaths are so terrible and slow. Rukeyser owes something to both portrayals of mass-cultural and working-class malaise. She trades on images of surviving tunnel workers who "linger" (US, 25) in a netherworld that is at once social and somatic. "I wake up choking," states a worker who is denied compensation, "and my wife / rolls me over on my left side" (US, 24). Neither waking nor sleeping, as in Eliot, "neither / [l]iving nor dead" (WL, 7), he resembles the many corpses who lie uncounted and undiagnosed in silica-laden mass graves (US, 43). By highlighting the anonymity of both living and dead victims of Hawk's Nest Tunnel, Rukeyser displays the etiology of acute silicosis as a metaphor not only for the excesses of capitalist exploitation, but also for the more passive social pathologies that facilitated such excesses in the American workplace. Before the passage of the 1935 Social Security Act, and the later passage of comprehensive worker's compensation laws, the industrial sources of their diseases were no more visible to stricken workers than were their languishing families visible to the government and the public at large. Here, the walking skeletons in Rukeyser's poem work to reconcile the corporeal losses elegized in poems like "Asbestos" with the crises of mass identity depicted in Eliot's modern elegy.
15. Harry L. Hopkins, foreword to U. S. One: Maine to Florida, compiled and written by the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (New York: Modern Age Books, 1938), iii.
16. Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner write that, during the depression, legislative calls for workmen's compensation for silicosis victims were attacked from both ends of the political spectrum. The "idiosyncratic" course of silicosis was difficult to document precisely (Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner, "The Illusion of Medical Certainty: Silicosis and the Politics of Industrial Disability, 1930-1960," in Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History, ed. Charles E. Rosenberg and Janet Golden [Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992], 197-98; hereafter abbreviated "IMC"). Anticipating mass filings by previously exposed workers, insurance companies quadrupled their coverage rates and forced industries to adopt preemptive screening procedures. Labor was thus forced "to choose between health and jobs" ("IMC," 198). Faced with mass layoffs in such sectors as the foundry industry, labor federations sometimes sided with industrialists in support of jobs. In "The Book of the Dead," Rukeyser documents the failure of these legislative efforts in an ambiguously titled section called "The Bill":
Words on a monument.
Capitoline thunder. It cannot be enough.
The origin of storms is not in clouds,
our lightning strikes when the earth rises.
[US, 65]
This image of lightning discharged from the masses may well be a social poet's response to the godly thunder that rumbles, in the form of onomatopoetic Sanskrit words, throughout the latter portions of The Waste Land:
Then spoke the thunder
DA
Datta . . .
DA
Dayadhvam . . .
DA
Damyata . . .
[WL, 87, 89].
As an award-winning young poet, Rukeyser had met with Eliot in England shortly before beginning her poetic exposé of the Gauley tunnel disaster.
17. Lisa Cartwright notes that X-ray technology began to serve an array of medicojuridical screening functions in the latter part of that decade. Beginning in 1937, X-rays became the predominant means of monitoring and managing those sectors of the population deemed responsible for public health threats like tuberculosis (SB, 147-52).
18. Calling for a national conference on America's silicosis epidemic in 1936, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins publicized the plight of the 100,000 workers believed to be suffering from the long-term effects of silicosis. The Department of Labor estimated that another 500,000 workers had been exposed to dangerous levels of silica dust (HN, 109-10). Rukeyser inflated Perkins's estimates: "There are today one million potential victims. / 500,000 Americans have silicosis now. / These are the proportions of a war" (US, 60). After the national silicosis scares of the mid-1930s, industries began to use X-rays in the screening of silicotic miners and foundry workers ("IMC," 196, 197-98).
19. Shortly after publishing "The Book of the Dead," Rukeyser wrote of the "important and widened picture" afforded by FSA photographs (Muriel Rukeyser, "We Aren't Sure . . . We're Wondering," New Masses [26 April 1938]: 26). She praised in particular those pictures she had seen exhibited in New York in 1937, and again in 1938, in Archibald MacLeish's photo-and-verse essay, The Land of the Free:
Here are collected Walker Evans' brilliant view of Bethlehem, Pa., its darkened chimneys and poles and pillars crossed out by the white granite cemetery in front of you; . . . the frightened sad girl with the wrenched jaw, against the raw wood wall and under the smooth infants playing at the Madonna's lap (Ben Shahn); the farmer sitting at the black door of his dugout under the easy curve of a hill ruined by drought (Arthur Rothstein); . . . [and] many excellent photographs by Dorothea Lange . . . [Rukeyser, "We Aren't Sure," 26-27].
Natanson notes that the racial slant of the MacLeish book had not been detected by its contemporary white reviewers: "When measured against demographic realities, 'our' faces in Land of the Free were disproportionately rural, disproportionately native-born American, and disproportionately white" (BI, 206-7). I thank Jen Frank for drawing my attention to both Rukeyser's review and to Natanson's book.
20. Kalaidjian links the "camera-glass" in the above-quoted passage to another camera reference in the poem's opening lines: "[V]iewing on groundglass an inverted image" (US, 10) a visiting photographer presents a false first glimpse of West Virginia, a vista yielded to incoming tourists: "resorts, the chalk hotel. / Pillars and fairway" (US, 9-10). While the glass in both passages implicates the conventional camera in the deadly excavation of silica, Kalaidjian traces the photographer's mechanically inverted vision to one of Karl Marx's early metaphors: "If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process" (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, ed. C. J. Arthur [New York: International Publishers, 1989], 47). See also AC, 166-68. Kalaidjian suggests that Rukeyser finally surpasses the early materialist Marx, however. She does so by mobilizing "heteroglossic" collage methods toward, not a class-based recovery of "historical 'life-process,'" but a richer discursive recovery of the "history of gender, race, and class oppression" that lies hidden beneath Gauley Bridge (AC, 170, 168, and 168, respectively). By invoking a broad-based alliance among, not only the workers, but also the women and the African Americans who are suppressed by the very conventional ideological equipment that distorts Gauley Bridge, the poet sets right the image on the ground glass, while at the same time critiquing the narrowly conceived materialism that facilitates its simple inversion. I think that Kalaidjian is wrong when he claims that "The Book of the Dead" uncovers the "history of . . . race . . . oppression," but I agree with his reading of the poem's conventional camera as a vexed instrument that both produces and cures "false consciousness" (AC, 168, 288-89 n. 17). Kalaidjian's conception of Rukeyser's camera as a double-edged pharmakon is based on W. J. T. Mitchell's reading of Marx's metaphor of the camera obscura; see his Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 178.
21. Kalaidjian cites a 1935 survey that states that forty-one percent of federally funded artists were women (AC, 177). See also Karal Ann Marling, "American Art and the American Woman," in Seven American Women: The Depression Decade, ed. Karal Ann Marling and Helen A. Harrison (Poughkeepsie, N. Y.: Vassar College Art Gallery, 1976), 7-16.
22. William Carlos Williams, "Muriel Rukeyser's 'US1,'" The New Republic, 9 March 1938, 141. hereafter abbreviated "MR." Rukeyser was twenty-five when U. S. 1 was published. She had won national acclaim for her first book, Theory of Flight, at the age of twenty-two.
23. While medical court testimony was certainly a distinguishing feature of "The Book of the Dead," Rukeyser drew on other "documentary" materials that Williams did not refer to in his review (US, 147). Passages like the following were based on the poet's own transcripts of conversations with, and letters written by, survivors of the tunnel disaster:
Dear Sir, my name is Mearl Blankenship.
I have Worked for the rhinehart & Dennis Co
Many days & many nights
. . . . . . . . .
I helped nip steel for the drills
& helped lay the track in the tunnel
& done lots of drilling near the mouth of the tunnell
. . . . . . . . .
J C Dunbar said that I was the very picture of health
when I went to Work at that tunnel.
I have lost eighteen lbs on that Rheinhart ground
and expecting to loose my life
[US, 24-25]
As a leading proletariat writer of the 1930s, Williams was familiar with the Soviet Proletcult genre of "worker-correspondent" poetry; and he would have certainly noted this related source stratum of Rukeyser's poem. By suggesting that Rukeyser's skills as a poet are better measured through her rendering of doctors' than through workers' words, Williams implies that medical discourse is more remote from the poet than is the language of miners. Williams seems to suggest that gender, as opposed to class, is a divide that doctors and poets should labor to uphold. For accounts of Mike Gold's promotion and production of "worker-correspondent" poetry in the New Masses and The Daily Worker, see RR, 104-6, and CF, 203-4. For an account of Williams's familiarity with proletarian portraiture, see CF, 211-14.
24. Rukeyser appears to have based this portion of "The Book of the Dead" on Dr. Emory Hayhurst's 1936 Congressional testimony. Hayhurst's "reading" of a tunnel worker's chest X-rays is extensive and detailed:
Question. . . . I wish you would exhibit that picture to the jury and point out to the jury, if you can, evidences in that picture of silicosis in the lungs of Raymond Johnson. . . .
Answer. I am informed this was the X-ray picture that was taken last April, and I would point out to you here the fact that these are the ribs; this is the region of the breast bone; this is the heart shadow; the heart being more or less solid, filled with blood, makes the wide white shadows you see. The breast bone itself comes down only about that wide. In here, of course, are the swallowing tube, or esophagus, and the windpipe, which comes down to about this level. We note that those parts are in this central dark shadow, and then the windpipe divides up and its divisions go out into the lungs. These are the spaces between the lungs.
Question. Between the ribs?
Answer. Between the ribs. These are the collar bones. This is the diaphragm or muscle separating the chest from the abdomen. You will notice that we are looking at this man from the rear, so that his heart is on the left side. The diaphragm is higher over here which is his right side, because the liver is under there, a large organ that is held rather high, and lifts it up. The diaphragm top is lower over at this point. You notice there is a pretty clear area between the box of the chest and the diaphragm clear down into the corners. Now, this lung, for our purposes in diagnosing silicosis, shows a beginning mottling in all of these areas. It looks, as some say, like a snowstorm had struck the fellow's lungs. They are fine in this stage, ten months ago, but they are all about alike, that side and this side, top and bottom. That is first stage silicosis in this period in the case. [HC, 96]
Rukeyser does not supply the identity of the sufferer whose voice is retrieved through, or, more aptly, salvaged from, the physician's courtroom interpretation of the X-ray sequence, but her words in this passage are drawn from a portion of George Robison's congressional testimony:
Mr. GRISWOLD. How long have you had the wheeze?
Mr. ROBISON. I have been having it now ever since the last of 1933.
Mr. GRISWOLD. Is it growing worse or better or does it remain the same?
Mr. ROBISON. It is growing worse every day. At times at nights I have to get up so that I can catch my breath. If I remained flat on my back I believe I would die [HC, 73].
25. William Stott identifies a perception among middle-class Americans in the 1930s that economic "depressions" were invisible because they consisted "of things not happening, of business that was not being done" (William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America [1973; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986], 67-68; hereafter abbreviated DE). Stott quotes Frederick Lewis Allen, who wrote that the crisis of the early 1930s "was . . . nearly invisible to the casual eye (and to the camera, for that matter). To be sure, the streets were less crowded with trucks than they had been, many shops stood vacant, . . . and chimneys which should have been smoking were not doing so. But these were all negative phenomena. There just didn't seem to be many people about." (Frederick Louis Allen and Agnes Rogers, I Remember Distinctly: A Family Album of the American People, 1918-1941 [New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947], 126; quoted in DE, 67).
26. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, "The Image of Objectivity," Representations 40 (fall 1992): 106.
27. Ibid., 111, 112.
28. See Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry (1982; New York: BasicBooks, 1992), 137.
29. During the first decades of the twentieth century, reactionary modern poets shared a conviction that words had grown debased over time. This belief contributed to imagistic efforts to replace the poetic "symbol" with the "natural object"; and it led to other more elaborate efforts to stabilize language. In The Waste Land and The Cantos, for example, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound each retreated into flights of imaginary philology, tracing archaic and often exotic words to foundational sources. In so doing, they endeavored to combat the Western tendency toward abstraction that had caused modern words to become self-referential (for Eliot, modern religious rituals, too, had been lifted away from their vital sources). In The Waste Land, Eliot delineated a series of overly abstract Christian principles--"give," "sympathize," "control"--and tried to restore them to Sanskrit terms that were onomatopoetically linked to rejuvenating natural processes. The root word "DA," he suggested, had been distilled from the rumbling of thunder itself, which continued to echo through variant forms such as "Datta" (give); "Dayadhvam" (sympathize); and "Damyata" (control). See Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 109-10. Pound believed that modern linguistic and economic systems had estranged people from the very generative transactions that astute readers could find preserved in ancient Chinese ideogrammatic compounds.
30. Dora Marsden, "The Art of the Future," The New Freewoman, 1 November 1913, 181. As the editor of The New Freewoman, a 1913 London journal that provided a venue for Pound's early writings, Dora Marsden posed a formative challenge to the poet whom she hired to edit the journal's literary pages. In a published response to Pound's treatise on "The Serious Artist," Marsden asserted that scientific seeing, or "unprejudiced observation," had rendered poetry hazy and ineffectual. Daniel Tiffany provides a fascinating account of Pound's era as an age of positivism in Radio Corpse: Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 21. See also Bruce Clark, Dora Marsden and Early Modernism: Gender, Individualism, Science (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 109-11.
31. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 8, ed. E. W. Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903-1904), 65. John Irwin writes of the Emersonian "anaglyph" as an outgrowth of nineteenth-century archaeological discoveries; see his American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 9-11, 30-31.
32. Between 1913 and 1914, Pound fashioned Imagist poets as agents who offered organic correctives to the "mechanis[tic]" excesses of Fabian socialist authors and the new sociologists whose studies the Fabians admired and made use of (Ezra Pound [Bastien von Helmholtz, pseud.], "Suffragettes," The Egoist, 1 July 1914, 255). Imagists combated abstraction by adhering not to the generalized principles of social scientists, but to the strict observation utilized by physicists and biologists. Imagist poems were of "permanent" value to society because they provided a better index of local conditions than did the "universalizing" contributions of the very "theorists" alongside whom poets seemed outmoded (Ezra Pound, "The Serious Artist," The New Freewoman, 15 October 1913, 163). The latter trafficked in "chicane" and "catchwords" (Pound, "Suffragettes," 255).
33. Rukeyser was tagged the "Poster Girl" of proletariat literature by William Phillips and Philip Rahv in "Grandeur and Misery of a Poster Girl," Partisan Review 10 (September-October 1943): 471. While X-ray images per se were not commonly associated with the emancipatory enlightenment of the proletariat, new technologies that facilitated seeing were fashioned as politically revolutionary not only by Russian photographers and filmmakers in the 1920s, but also by American poets affiliated with the so-called Dynamo group in the mid-1930s. These Russian and American artists both drew from Vladimir Lenin in associating technological development, and electrification particularly, with social transformation. Addressing the Eighth Congress of Soviets in 1920, for example, Lenin declared that Russia's recalcitrant peasantry had long dwelled in ideological darkness, and that it could be coaxed from this darkness only if the party worked to "convert every electric power station . . . into a stronghold of enlightenment" (Vladimir Lenin, "Communism and Electrification," in The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C. Tucker [New York: W. W. Norton, 1975], 495). See also Margarita Tupitsyn, The Soviet Photograph, 1924-1937 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 11-15, 177 n. 15. In poems like "Dnieprostroy" , American Dynamo poets like Sol Funaroff echoed Lenin's call for technoenlightenment by celebrating "suns of photo-electric eyes" and the "new love" that "burns with tigris eyes / Billions of kilowatt hours" (AC, 155). See also Estelle Gershgoren Novak, "The Dynamo School of Poets," Contemporary Literature 21, no. 4 : 526-39. Franklin Roosevelt established his own vigorous rural electrification programs in the mid-1930s, but opponents of these more consumerist initiatives criticized them as pages taken from "the Russian primer" (William E. Leuchtenburg, The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy [New York: Columbia University Press: 1995], 295. See also David Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 308-9, 329-31.
34. For an account of the charges of esoterism leveled against Rukeyser, see Louise Kertesz, The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 96-97.
35. See Stephen Quirke, Ancient Egyptian Religion (New York: Dover Publications, 1992), 152.
36. See Nancy Thomas, "American Institutional Fieldwork in Egypt, 1899-1960," in The American Discovery of Ancient Egypt, ed. Nancy Thomas (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1996), 60-64. In the same volume, see also "Catalogue of the Exhibition," 178-79; hereafter abbreviated "CE."
37. See The Book of the Dead: The Hieroglyphic Transcript and Translation into English of the Papyrus of Ani, ed. Wallace Budge (1895; New York: Gramercy Books, 1995), 440; hereafter abbreviated BD. See also James E. Harris and Kent R. Weeks, X-Raying the Pharaohs (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973), 49, 171.
38. John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 9. Writing of the early institutional functions of photographic images, Tagg describes the Roosevelt administration as a "paternalistic" instrument of "corporatist reform," one that "mobilis[ed] documentary practices across a whole series of agencies" not only in order to "assemble propaganda for its policies" but also to "[deploy] a rhetoric with . . . claims to retrieve the status of Truth in discourse, a status threatened by crisis but whose renegotiation was essential if social relations of meaning were to be sustained and national and social identities resecured, while demand for reform was contained within the limits of monopoly capitalist relations" (8-9). Honoring a more comfortable divide between the medium and the message, Nicholas Natanson suggests that Roosevelt's political objectives were less intrinsically bound to the documentary modes that his administration exploited: "The implicit conservatism, the implicit paternalism of New Deal policy-making (creative reform seen as coming from the government, not from grass roots activists) found its way into aspects of FSA image-making" (BI, 83).
39. Women including the New York social worker and journalist Philippa Allen, U. S. Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, and Rukeyser herself played prominent roles not only in the exposure of the Gauley tunnel disaster, but also in subsequent calls for the containment of a national silicosis epidemic. See US, 13-15, 60; "IMC," 199-200; and HN, 71, 85. In their respective journalistic and poetic exposés of the Hawk's Nest Tunnel incident, Allen and Rukeyser both portrayed the West Virginia mother Emma Jones as the heroic catalyst for the more than five hundred lawsuits that survivors leveled against Rinehart and Dennis and the New Kanawha Power Company. Jones would eventually tell her story to a national radio audience. See Philippa Allen [Bernard Allen, pseud.], "Two Thousand Dying on a Job," New Masses, 15 January 1935, 18-19. See also HC, 6; US, 27-30; and HN, 71. The lawsuits instigated by Mrs. Jones's findings culminated in settlements ranging from $1600 to $30 per casualty. See US, 29, 45; and HN, 22-23, 67.
40. Archaeologists sponsored by the Metropolitan Museum had discovered this heart scarab on the mummy of a woman named Hatnofer. According to archaeological notes published in conjunction with the exhibition of this scarab in New York in 1937, Hatnofer had been buried in the mortuary temple of Hatshepsut because her daughter had served as an official in the court of the female pharaoh for whom the temple had been built. See "CE," 179; and Ambrose G. Lansing and William C. Hayes, "The Museum's Excavations at Thebes," BMMA [Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art] 32 (January 1937): 20. For an account of Hatshepsut's significance as one of the New Kingdom's two matriarchs, see Quirke, Ancient Egyptian Religion, 36. The Metropolitan Museum's 1912-36 excavation of the temple of Hatshepsut is discussed in David O'Connor, "The American Archaeological Focus on Ancient Palaces and Temples of the New Kingdom," in The American Discovery of Ancient Egypt, ed. Thomas, 81-84. Although Rukeyser does not trade on its racial significance in her poem, ancient Egypt had long been viewed by African Americans as the black African seat of Western civilization; see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 59-60, 207-9. During the first decades of the twentieth century, a rash of spectacular archaeological discoveries had rekindled debates regarding the racial makeup of the ancient Egyptians. In his own analysis of the published photographs of newly excavated icons, for example, W. E. B. Du Bois included Queen Hatshepsut among the New Dynasty rulers who possessed "Negroid face[s]" (W. E. B. Du Bois, JWJ MSS 8, box 2, folder 52, W. E. B. Du Bois Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.). A retired black worker spoke of Egypt as a black hearth in a 1939 Federal Writers' Project collection of oral interviews entitled These Are Our Lives: "The reason [whites] don't want to give the 'Gyptians credit is cause they's niggers" (DE, 205). In splicing Mrs. Jones's testimony to a prayer lifted from a matriarchal heart scarab stone, however, Rukeyser's "Book" values Egypt more as a gendered than a racialized source.
41. Testifying before the house subcommittee, Emma Jones recalled "beg[ging] money" to pay a hospital to take "X-ray pictures" of her dying children's lungs (HC, 38). Together with the diseased lungs themselves, which she had asked doctors to extract after her sons had died, these X-rays provided some of the first hard evidence that Gauley Bridge tunnel workers were suffering from industrial poisoning. In "The Book of the Dead," the West Virginia mother's stark testimonial is only loosely based on Emma Jones's recorded congressional testimony. It bears a stronger resemblance to Philippa Allen's earlier prose account of the West Virginia mother in her New Masses exposé on the Gauley tunnel disaster. (Allen later read from this account in her own congressional testimony.) In Rukeyser's poem, the grieving mother's words are taken directly from Allen's third-person account, with the first-person pronoun used in place of the woman's name. See Allen, "Two Thousand Dying on a Job," 19; and HC, 6.
42. Wallace Budge's 1895 translation of the Papyrus of Turin contains the following account of Isis's curative powers: "Isis came with her words of power, and in her mouth was the breath of life.
43. See Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 98, 110.
44. Ibid., 89, 94, and 104.
45. Promotional films distributed by public health officials between 1938 and 1950 identified "the home" as the center of both contagion and containment, portraying women as both sanitizing agents and as the primary carriers of the TB virus. In making a healthy and glamorous spectacle of chest X-rays, these films endeavored to enlist women not only as homemakers who would check the spread of TB at its domestic source, but also as dutiful patients who would submit to screenings and ultimately to sanatorium confinement (SB, 148-49). In a small number of these promotional films, TB had specific racial as well as gendered affinities. Most TB screening films featured tubercular white women; but a few, including Let My People Live , and Another to Conquer , featured working-class African American women, and Navajo women, respectively, as the primary carriers of TB (SB, 149-50, 187 n. 17). By trading on the widespread belief that Native Americans and African Americans possessed either constitutions or cultural practices that left them vulnerable to TB, these promotional materials merged the disease's gendered markers with markers of class, race, and ethnicity. In medical films and literature of the late 1930s, the female cadaver that graced anatomist paintings was revived in a range of living subjects whose potential to contaminate was discovered first upon and then under their skins.
46. See George Stocking, Race, Evolution, and Culture: Essays in the History of Anthropology (New York: The Free Press, 1968), 245.
47. See Mark H. Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1984), 150.
48. The then-vice president's advice to homemakers on the subject of racial mixing is discussed in John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1955), 318.
49. During the early 1920s, advocates of immigration restrictions invoked apocalyptic scenarios derived from the writings of Lothrop Stoddard, a racialist associate of Madison Grant. Stoddard wrote of the imminent destruction of the white race by "teeming" darker races that would gradually out-breed them. Worldwide, "whites" would soon be supplanted by the "colored" races that they had ostensibly come to colonize. And on American shores, whites of "Nordic," or northern European ancestry, were now being genetically swamped by "Alpines" and "Mediterraneans," inferior "subspecies" of whites who were immigrating from eastern and southern European countries. See Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920), 298, 309. Walter Benn Michaels argues provocatively that, while Stoddard's white supremacist views are rehearsed, sometimes earnestly, sometimes mockingly, in such canonical modern literary texts as The Great Gatsby, Stoddard's real significance to modern literature lies less in his flagrantly racist writings than in his eventual call for Americans to identify themselves as a body unto themselves. In 1924, immigration quotas had been implemented to stabilize the makeup of America's white population, and it was only after the passage of the so-called National Origins Act that the author of Re-Forging America began to foreground the criterion of racial difference over that of racial inferiority or superiority. For Michaels, the "nativist pluralism" of the late 1920s, the belief that Americans should put aside universalizing racial standards in favor of the more locally derived standard of Americanness itself, was inseparable from the linguistic identitarian concerns rehearsed by modern artists who were preoccupied with the materiality of their mediums. "[N]ativism and modernism," Michaels argues, came to be powerfully united "as efforts to work out the meaning of the commitment to identity--linguistic, national, cultural, racial--that . . . is common to both." (Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press: 1995], 2-3; see also 14-15, 23) Nativist pluralism, however, appears to have been engendered through a modulation of the category of "race" itself. Insofar as modern Americans were inclined to trade racial for cultural awareness, they did so not only because immigration quotas made it safe to do so, but because meaningful racial differences had already been strategically displaced into the more manageable confines of a struggle between "subspecies" of whites (145 n. 22).
50. See Stocking, Race, Evolution, and Culture, 58-61.
51. Sheila Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History (New York: BasicBooks, 1994), 183-84, 191-92.
52. Ibid., 247-48.
53. See Leuchtenburg, The FDR Years, 130-31.
54. Allen and Rogers, I Remember Distinctly, 126; quoted in DE, 67.
.
My title has a prescriptive ring that I want to complicate immediately, though not entirely to disavow. Rather than offer you "How to Read How to Write" as an injunction alone or as a minimal act of predication, claiming that the "how" of my talk will be exhaustive or even particularly compelling as a way of reading Gertrude Stein's How to Write, allow me to construe the expression "How to Read How to Write" appositionally, as if the two parallel, infinitive expressions "how to read" and "how to write" were separated by one of those "servile" commas that Stein so mistrusts. 1 The apposition permits a desperately interrogative tone to emerge--"How to read? How to write?"--quite at odds with the forthright sense of Stein's title and of my own today, if rather more faithful to most readers' experience of Stein's work of the period.
I say "most readers," but I am interested first in Stein herself. The accounts of her past work that she provides between 1928 and 1936 or so are indeed divided internally between prescriptive and interrogative stances, between forms of ex-pression asserting that this is "how to write," and forms of ex-pression much more cautiously asking how, after all, one can write. There are compelling reasons for giving this hesitation a primarily psychological explanation. These are years in which Stein is resolutely crafting a public persona and seeking to consolidate a reputation that seems always in danger of being obscured by much lesser talents. Stein notoriously accomplishes this complex project of self-legitimation socially by greatly changing her circle of acquaintances, and intellectually and professionally by reading and discussing her work openly, hence by normatizing her reception, by giving it certain visible rules, by a process one could call self-commodification--certainly a way of establishing herself and of fixing the value of her writing, but also, and as she saw clearly, a way of foreclosing the subtle pleasures of an unruled reception. 2 What could be more natural than that her work of the time should express a certain hesitancy?
But it would be a mistake when approaching this self-commodification to ignore either Stein's specific conceptual projects of the time, or their broader discursive context. The relation these bear to each other, and to the affective considerations I've just mentioned, remains complex--appositional as well as predicative, the "concept" following from the "psychology," and both from the "discursive context," but each also apposed to the others. "Apposition" and "predication" may seem cavalier in this context, but note that Stein herself provides strong grounds for applying broadly the rather restricted grammatical terminology with which I opened. With How to Write Stein begins to address specifically the relation between paragraphs and sentences--roughly aligned, as she describes it, with the affective difference between the emotional and the nonemotional, between the natural and the nonnatural. That alignment of grammatical and linguistic terms with affective and organic states is enough to suggest briefly that the question or injunction "how to write" concerns also a disposition toward experience: how to write how to live. Allow me then to underscore four aspects of the imbrication of the grammatical and the autobiographical projects in the years surrounding How to Write's publication. In the first place, Stein's reflections at this time upon the passage between the form of the sentence and the form of the paragraph cannot be dissociated from the project of self-legitimation she carried out in and through those very texts. The discursive models available to her for construing the passage from "sentence" to "paragraph" had also to serve to construe the process of self-legitimation, and vice-versa--or else be set aside. In the second place, the "legitimacy" derived from these two projects would necessarily be formally tied to the question of the normative status of the example (of Stein's work). When Stein answers the question "how does one write?" by example, her work serves both as a singularity (that is, an instance whose authority is drawn from Stein's exceptionality) and as an instance of a broader concept (the question or injunction bears upon a general dilemma, of which Stein is an instance among many--exemplary precisely in not being singular). In the third place, and relatedly, notice that the project of self-legitimation has an irreducibly temporal dimension: earlier works are narratively characterized as leading to the one in which they are being discussed--The Making of Americans and "Melanctha" leading gradually to "The Gradual Making of the Making of Americans," to "Poetry and Grammar" and to How to Write, and so on--and that story is inflected with an eye to what interest may accrue to the narrator from its outcome. In that sense, the narrative of the emergence or the arrival--a word whose importance for Stein I hope to make clearer below--of an instance of subjectivity is radically perfective, "completely completing," as Stein says elsewhere, just as any injunctive or any pedagogical project is radically infinitive: "how I wrote," "how I write," "how I will write" underlie the more general question of how to write. So too does the relation between the sentence and the paragraph have an irreducibly temporal dimension, though the exact nature of that relation is not yet established, and may not finally be easy to square with more conventional narratives of legitimation. In the fourth place, and if one grants that the perfective shape of Stein's self-commodification can indeed arrive at any sort of infinitive, general case, if one grants the elision of the singular, authorizing instance with the general condition, then Stein's reading of Stein can function as a determining example for subsequent efforts to read Stein--and hence the question (or is it a description?) of "how to write" bears also and perhaps primarily upon how we write about Stein today.
I say "if," because although there is no reason in principle to concede these propositions, especially as they might only derive from the particular anxieties of the historical Gertrude Stein, neither can they be dismissed or even classified as merely particular anxieties to be apposed to the conceptualization of writing in high modernism, or to the problem of the value-form in the language of economics between the wars. The knot of fantasy that Stein's grammar of self-commodification ties for us bears crucially upon the historical constitution of the passage from particularity to generality in descriptive discourses, of the passage from events as such to their grammar or their morphology, of the passage from instance to example or (commodity) value (the value that one ascribes to a body of work). It bears, in short, on how after Stein we learn to read and write the story of the value of a thing--a life, for example, or a name. How does commodity-value accrue to a name? According to what rules and necessities? To what grammar? To what time? What follows here is a brief sketch of the knot of fantasy that How to Write ties from these questions, and which Stein seeks to teach us how to cut as we read How to Write.
1. This is a general way to tell this story. In order to pass from sentence to paragraph, and in order to establish the value of her work, Stein crosses the languages of economics and of psychoanalysis with a reflection upon the philosophical problem of naming that has much in common with the roughly contemporaneous projects of Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. In particular, Stein draws upon and complicates a model of structural reserve common to those languages and to the dominant formulations of the problem of naming in the first quarter of this century. By "structural reserve" I mean two things, and I mean them in two ways. In the first place, I mean the conceptual practice in classical, Ricardian economics of indexing commodity value against a "mystical" constant. This constant determines the nature of commodity exchange, and is itself nonexchangeable (no other constant will do in its place) and not susceptible to accidental changes of value. This indexing constant does not have to exist visibly or concretely; it can be understood as a metacommodity held in reserve abstractly, perfectively producible in the last instance, whose "intrinsic value" is entirely secondary to its functional value as a standard. The debate in England and the United States in the years between 1928 and 1939 about the return to the gold standard for currency, and the first desubstantializations of the index-category of labor in Fredrick Taylor and Isaac Rubin, were in fact the more restricted case of the broader anxiety about the stability of commodity values that followed the vast inflation of the late Weimar and the economic disasters of the late 1920s. The concurrent aesthetico-political debate over the legacies of early modernism cannot be separated from these broader crises in the conceptualization of the value-form.
By "structural reserve" I mean also the determining, resistant opacity of concepts of the unconscious, or of the unconscious tout court, in the languages of psychoanalysis following the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams. I hardly need to review the analogy between indexing constants in commodity exchange on one hand, and on the other the construction that classical psychoanalysis puts upon the originary structuring of libidinal economies (whether according to a theory of types or according to one of drives); the analogy is already very much a part of the dominant languages of psychoanalysis and of economics at the time that Stein begins How to Write, and the peculiar futures of the term "fetish" attest to its endurance. The unconscious is indeed the most influential model of the "reserve" of this century; the explanatory primacy granted in Freud's writing through Moses and Monotheism to the universality of the Oedipus complex is perhaps the most notorious instance of the fetishization of a libidinal object-choice as a constant; finally, Freud's comments on the coprophilic ground of the gift and consequently of economies of value have by 1928 become an uncomfortable pendant to classical economic theory in some circles. One does not have to search long to discover this structure of "reserve" at work in William James's prescient definition of the "nucleus of the 'me,'" which is "always the bodily existence felt to be present at the time." 3 Alongside and determining of any appropriative act of recollection or cognition, this "bodily existence felt to be present at the time" exists as feeling and never as thought; that is, it is never present to consciousness except imperfectly, and its present is the rational hypothesis of that imperfection, kept as a notional and regulative moment for consciousness but temporally excluded from the horizon of consciousness.
From this general account, bear in mind both the notion of a structural reserve--that determining excess of the (economic or psychic) structure with respect to individuals (or to individual acts) within that structure--and the complex reliance on temporality that the economic and the psychoanalytic model of the reserve share. (The reserve, whether the content of the "unconscious," the "drive," or the index-commodity, has no "present" and no "presence," except as an unbounded field of ruled effects--of transactions, substitutions, investments, and counterinvestments of value and of sense: a grammatical field, in brief--either of the constant that remains to be disclosed in the last instance, or of a primal repression.)
And again, I mean this story in two ways. In the first place, as a description of the discourses available to Stein in constructing a commodity-image of herself, and in making the conceptual passage from sentence to paragraph. But I also mean it as a description of the constitutive elements of that fantasy we call "Stein" today. For note that the detour through the reserve in commodity-value indexing and in psychoanalysis has not taken us far from the question of Stein's exemplarity. Stein's readings of How to Write can be examples only if they bear a relation to a general concept to which other readings, our own included, can be related, or against which they can be indexed. The authority of Stein's singularity--the pendant ground of her commodity-value--derives from the foreclosure of that concept, its displacement from the arena of exchange and capitalization into that of the uneconomizable, primal represession. What is the paradoxical nature of this "reserve" of exemplary value in Stein?
2. Here is another account of that story. Let me tell you the unhelpful punchline first, then fill in the events that lead to it. Grammar is the "reserve" of value in Stein, exceeding but enabling her work's self-commodification as well as the emergence of "emotion" in her writing. The concluding lines of Stein's "More Grammar for a Sentence" make clear what How to Write obscures: that the passage between sentence and paragraph concerns the relation between the grammar of expressions and the claims of ontology.
What is a sentence. A paragraph is not a sentence exactly not many more. There have not been sentence whether they say. A sentence always returns if they are happy. A sentence always returns if they were happy. A sentence is a sentence. This may be but it is not with arrive. Arrival. A Rival Sentence. Will Dan come and meet me. If he is meeting there. Think of a sentence. They will part. A sentence can not exist if it does not come back no not if it does not come back. A paragraph finishes.
This is it. 4
In these lines the definition of identity as repetition--the coming-back of the sentence, its meeting-itself-again-as-itself, the re-cognition of the sentence--is made to contrast with the "arrival" and "finishing" of the paragraph. And yet the paragraph is made up of sentences: at some point, and through some means, apposed sentences--which, being identical to themselves, finally express nothing other than that identity itself: "A sentence is a sentence"--these apposed sentences seem to arrive at the paragraph, to be perfected in it. Note the different possible models Stein provides and rejects for this process of perfecting. In the first place, an enumeration--if a paragraph is not a single sentence, neither is it "many more" sentences "exactly," as this "many more" would not in principle be closed, finished. A paragraph must, it seems, finish; what "exactly" that "finishing" consists of is not yet clear, but it cannot simply mean either that a paragraph exhausts the number of sentences or that it completes a series of (numerically) related sentences. In the second place, a relation of part to whole--a sentence is not a part of a paragraph, if by "part" one merely means that an additive principle is "added" to the sentences so as to yield the paragraph. In the third place, a subsumptive relation between sentences and "[r]ival" sentences that merely "arrive," that merely "come and meet" the sentence as a repetition that is also a rivalry. "[I]f they are happy," such rival sentences do indeed "meet" the sentence, arrive at it, and become its contradictory repetitions. But Stein forecloses this route immediately when she shifts tenses to the past or to the subjunctive: "[I]f they were happy," she writes--and how does one decide whether the statement is a descriptive, historical account or a counterfactual one? Because "happiness" has no present indicative tense, such meetings end unhappily, Stein suggests: "They will part"; no amount of rivalry, no persistence of the conflict or the negation will ever manage to produce the finished and finishing paragraph from the unhappiness of the sentence.
One recognizes in these three discarded strategies the intricately related philosophical positions of Humean skepticism, Coleridgean transcendentalism, and a Hegelian procedure of negation. Stein's solution in "More Grammar for a Sentence," as in How to Write, is quite different. When she writes that "a paragraph finishes" she takes advantage of the double aspect of the term "finishes," functioning both as a defining attribute of the paragraph itself (a paragraph is that substance or that substantive that comes to an end) and as a transitive verb (a paragraph ends or finishes something). This transitive aspect is itself unfinished in Stein's formulation (what is it that the paragraph "finishes"?), and for that reason it never "meets" the first sentence when it arrives ("a paragraph [is that which] finishes"), and never "arrives" as "a rival": the object of the predication falls outside of the act, and because one cannot decide grammatically which aspect of these sentences is primary, the paragraph never itself "returns"; it is never identical to itself in the way that "a sentence is a sentence." The paradox remains acute, until one realizes that the sentence "a paragraph finishes" must also be a paragraph, but that this "must be" does not designate any traditional form of identity, or necessity. The copulas in the statement "A sentence is a sentence" and in "the sentence 'A paragraph finishes' is a paragraph" do not in fact "meet" as one, but neither are they "rivals."
Say instead that Stein is laying stress upon the term "arrive." "A sentence is a sentence," Stein writes. "This may be but it is not with arrive. Arrival. A Rival Sentence." By "not with arrive" she must mean something that precedes the construction of "arrival" as the arrival of a "Rival Sentence" or of a substance, what could be called a prepredicative and presubstantial event: an aspect or a predisposition of the grammar that stresses the verb precisely in the infinitive form "to arrive," the form that, like the paragraph, unfinishes the present. Where does "arrive" arrive from, before its inevitable substantialization? The tense gives us an indication: "This may be but it is not": "arrive" may be, that is, it may "arrive" in the future and from the future, in the double sense that it is permitted (only) to arrive from or in the future, but also in the conditional sense that it may or may not arrive. How can the reserve of grammar be both prepredicative and presubstantial, and imagined conditionally as arriving from and in the future? Do not forget that the question is also ontological, that something else is substantialized here: that which is met or will be met, in the insistent narrative of meeting that is both grammatical and descriptive, is nothing less than "me" and "my" excitement or emotion. "Grammar" is the mystical reserve-form governing and adding value to the story of how "me" arrives on the scene between sentence and paragraph, from what that passage holds back, as both the precondition and the future of an act of writing.
3. There is another story told in How to Write in which "me" never quite arrives and is never quite met. The account of this failed meeting no longer concerns grammar alone, the grammar of a field of effects, or the grammar of self-legitimation, and it crops up just where Stein disjoins "narrative" from "grammar." "I am a grammarian," Stein writes in the short section of How to Write called "A Grammarian"--and then she proceeds to parse that proposition, to decline it into "I am a grammarian in place," "I do not hesitate but I rearrange prepositions," "I believe in duplicates," "A grammarian is so," "I think of the differences there are," and a number of other statements. 5 She also provides a set of short propositions about grammar itself: "The essence of grammar is that it is freed of following" (HW, 106), "Grammar does not play a part" (HW, 108), "Grammar little by little is not a thing" (HW, 108), and so on. Set aside the particulars of these propositions, and questions crop up pertaining to the temporal and causative relation between "I" and its grammatical articulation: what is the relation between the two sets of definitions or pseudodefinitions of grammar? Does grammar provide the means by which "I" becomes one or another thing--a grammarian, for example? Does the subject of "I am" precede its grammatical articulation? Which pre-poses the other? At the center of the section Stein seems to provide one answer, in the shape of an identity: "The subject is grammar" (HW, 106), she writes--apparently broadening the initial statement so as to render "I am a grammarian" as "I is grammar," and so as to make all questions of the relation between the two terms a (moot) matter of definition alone. Apposed, neither poses nor defines the other. And yet this assertion of identity between subject and grammar is manifestly inadequate to the complexity of Stein's position, even if one takes into account the secondary senses of "subject" as "grammatical subject" and as "subject matter." What this specular or repetitive structure lacks is briefly, unsystematically hinted at: "On the edge of grammar is why they make things" (HW, 109), "Forget grammar and think about potatoes" (HW, 109), and "Now think of the difference of repeat and duplicate" (HW, 110). This "edge" of grammar, this "forgetting" of grammar, and this "difference" of "repeat and duplicate" form the beginning of a thought about the ways in which grammar may not quite "meet" or "arrive at" itself, and about the "why" of "making," about the "thinking" that attends this nonidentity to itself of grammar. What does grammar--the reserve of a writing understood to "make" things like "emotion," "paragraphs," and incidentally "me"--itself hold in "reserve"?
Difficulties with Stein's argument immediately surface. In what way does the nonidentity to itself of grammar "make" anything, without falling into the "snare of language"--the expression comes from On the Genealogy of Morals--that makes all "making" into the predicate of a necessary agent? 6 Does this nonidentity then serve as something akin (again) to that notional, mystified "neutral agent" kept in reserve "behind" all "doing," in Nietzsche's marvelous words? 7 If the infinitive "to repeat" is a temporal, phenomenal category, "duplicate" in its substantive form is not--and this difference can then be thought according to grammatical categories (tense, case). And yet the grammaticization of their difference, of their "edge," is again clearly inadequate to Stein's argument, as it merely repeats the naive, predicative construction of "subject" and "grammar" that this section of How to Write brings into question. With these questions left polemically unanswered, "A Grammarian" closes, and at this point one is inclined to understand this section's last sentences as an acknowledgment of failure, the graceful balancing of "it" and "you" as stylistic rather than conceptual: "It stops because you stop. Think of that. You stop because you have made other arrangements" (HW, 111).
Here is the next chapter of Stein's story. Consider these lines from the opening of "Poetry and Grammar":
I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagraming sentences. I suppose other things may be more exciting to others when they are at school but to me undoubtedly when I was at school the really completely exciting thing was diagraming sentences and that has been to me ever since the one thing that has been completely exciting and completely completing. I like the feeling the everlasting feeling of sentences as they diagram themselves. In that way one is completely possessing something and incidentally one's self. ["PG," 210-11]
Much diagraming of these sentences could indeed be done, though it is not clear that one could thereby ever touch the extraordinary, mysterious use of "excitement" to refer to so mechanical a project. Note the conclusion: the "incidental" possession of "one's self"--the "arrival" and substantialization of "me" that we saw in "More Grammar for a Sentence"--derives from the "everlasting feeling of sentences as they diagram themselves." Stein's remark should not be overlooked as a commonplace either of modernist aesthetics, subordinating the subject to a primary cultural material that defines its attributes and extension, or of a Jamesian critique of transcendental psychology. The paragraph shifts one's sense of the "I" of which it seems so firmly possessed throughout, the concrete autobiographical "I", Gertrude Stein's "I." It first allows us to grasp in familiar, resolutely phenomenological terms the child's experience of diagraming sentences, and then requires that this possession be understood as the infantile precursor of what is still enjoyed. The self becomes incidental to the process, its contingent effect--and the "feeling of sentences as they diagram themselves" poses the agency and the emotion of the moment where they least belong--in the self-diagraming of the sentence. "Diagraming sentences" turns out not to be a case of what "I" do, but itself the subject and object of a "doing" of which "I" am the incidental product.
It's important to understand Stein's use of the term "incidentally." The self is possessed incidentally to the self-diagraming of the sentence and to the "feeling of sentences" in both subjective and objective senses. The scopic pleasure of witnessing, rather than the active pleasure of doing the parsing, incidentally produces a pleasure from which the possession of the self arrives. By "incidentally" Stein must mean, precisely, agrammatically, that the possession of the self arrives outside a regulated or economized field of effects. This scene from "Poetry and Grammar" allows the name--any name, and "Gertrude Stein" in particular--to forget its infinitive case, and this forgetting "incidentally" poses two specific selves for us and for Stein to possess: the persona of the schoolgirl whose enjoyment of the "diagraming of sentences" links her substantially rather than appositionally to the persona of the speaker, the adult Gertrude Stein; and the persona of the author of How to Write, linked substantially to the Stein who in "Poetry and Grammar" establishes the value of, then takes up, "diagrams," and clarifies her earlier theses. The restricted question of the imbrication of grammar and autobiography, self-legitimation or self-commodification, turns not only upon the abstract question of grammar's incidental or fundamental connection to the possession of the self, but also upon the role that the "diagraming of sentences" plays in producing a self for Stein to possess, a self that can be possessed as a thing is possessed--in a word, and as she has just told us, a named self. The excitement of and capitalization upon names and naming is for Stein no longer a matter of grammar, sentences, paragraphs, or prose, but of poetry.
Stein writes that prosaic nouns are given or called out once to name the object, after which they stay the same. To read and write poetry is, however, to attend to a second call, a sort of echo: poetry dwells on the noun, returns to the love of naming. "You can love a name," Stein writes in "Poetry and Grammar," "and if you love a name then saying that name any number of times only makes you love it more. . . . And so that is poetry really loving the name of anything and that is not prose" ("PG," 231-32). The story that Stein tells in "Poetry and Grammar" has an ascetic shape comparable to the brief Bildungsroman that attends the child's "diagraming of sentences." First, one classically, prosaically, calls the object by name--one nominalizes it. Then one calls that name insistently in the place of the thing named, on the model of a fetish-love. Finally, one feels so strongly about the thing named that one produces the thing and the name no longer as stand-ins for each other, but as separate expressions whose connection is not based on any "inner balance" but on qualities intrinsic to both the name and the thing in itself. This position is at least superficially a vulgar Kantian, or perhaps more properly a roughly Wittgensteinian, position. Take, for instance, the question of the noun, the act of naming, that first "call" or "calling." Stein seems to be moving toward an argument that the noun can be dispensed with as a definition for the object; in place of such a definition, and as the language of "love" and "feeling" suggests, she would be proposing something like a calling or an indication, or perhaps that every "calling" of an object or a concept by name apposes to the active verb an infinitive inflection to the "call." Wittgenstein refers to this as an ostensive function--an act of definition by means of an implicit, and implicitly public, act of ostension: "This is it," as Stein puts it in closing "More Grammar for a Sentence." 8 The name accordingly does not "stand in" for a concrete object, but rather it ostensively indicates--"This"--a fuzzily bordered concept--"it"--whose correspondence to the object is part of the language game (whose rules are pragmatic, that is, they are not held formulated in reserve, but are always at play in a process of testing). Such games hold only three things in reserve: a procedure for checking and an injunction to do so (this is not the same thing as verifying, since one is checking on the communicative value of propositions, not on their agreement with an established real), the criterion of communication as the horizon for any language use, and a regulative disposition toward a future in which the rules of the language game could be seen or glanced over.
Call this ascetic narrative a movement toward poetry, lodged at the "edge" between grammar and its temporal extension in narrative. This movement toward the ostensive structure of poetic naming in turn provokes another crisis. The economic and psychological burden of the lectures, and of "Poetry and Grammar" in particular, is the production and commodification of a name--"Stein"--as necessary rather than contingent, as nonincidental to the diagraming of (Stein's previous) sentences. The commodity-value of the early Stein must stand indexed to a form held in reserve throughout her work--as the excitement of witnessing sentences diagram themselves becomes intrinsic to the substantial identity of the child and the older writer. Again Hume comes to mind. How to Write must be read in "Poetry and Grammar" from the vantage of the prosaic relation between sentence and paragraph. "Poetry and Grammar" thus completes the earlier work rather than being simply apposed to it. This "completely completing" of the old in the new (to return to the language of "Poetry and Grammar"), though, requires that the strong notion of the incidental possession of the self--what in the Treatise of Human Nature Hume discusses as the solution to the vulgar "confounding" of the ideas of identity and of diversity in judgments concerning natural objects--be banished from the present and placed forever in a "reserve" that has no present, to which no name can be given, and that cannot work necessarily to give a name, to dwell lovingly upon one, or to value, with the terrible poetic force of the fetish, a name already given. 9 For the conceptual burden of both How to Write and of "Poetry and Grammar" is to show the necessity of the incidental appearance of "me," to show that the "incidental" arrival of the self is an event of naming that keeps working lovingly after the name is given, that is, that the arrival of the self is a perpetually repeated event of poetic naming, the contingent form of the permanent refetishization of the noun with respect to the substance that it organizes.
This reserved form no longer works in the way "grammar" does for Stein; neither can it be called "poetry" in any simple sense. Not, of course, that Stein's definition is finally so simple. The notion of poetry that Stein advances in "Poetry and Grammar" extends the act of naming into a series of repeated occurrences or events: the call or the name endlessly--infinitively--changes the (value of the) thing, and that "effect" of the name on the thing named names the temporality of their relation. Infinitively, but also incidentally: poetry's "love" of the name affects the thing named contingently rather than necessarily, "meeting" or "arriving" at it to find it elsewhere again. The contradiction is now stark. From the point of view of the self, of "me," poetic temporality has the shape of a narrative, the narrative of a common experience of pleasure or pain on which the substantial identity of the self can be posed as a thing to be possessed and enjoyed, whether in retrospect or in the determining image of a "completely completing" future. But from the point of view of the name that supports the fiction or the narrative of the self, this temporality is not associated with narrative but with repetition or with Stein's word "duplicate" in both the substantive and the verbal sense, with the paradoxically repeated, contingent event of the call of the name. Or, to return to Stein's terms, the self produces as an attribute of the self the narrative of its origination and "completing," but this narrative is contingently, "incidentally," related to the production and possession of the self. In the unbounded pleasure of the sentence that diagrams itself, the self is incidentally named and possessed repeatedly without thereby "meeting" or "arriving at" itself.
Let me conclude by giving you an example that may help to clarify why it is so disruptive to make of poetry's love of the name anything like the reserve-form or the index-commodity with which to gauge the self's possession. In "Arthur a Grammar," among the most baffling sections of How to Write, Stein interrupts her consideration of grammar with these words: "Narrative is it for one. Narrative conceived and developed really only filling and so not connected with for grammar." (HW, 70) The pleasures one can derive from such diagraming are not slight. They include the comforting sense that "for one," that is, for the sort of self that one can name and possess and that the enjoyment of "grammar" is supposed to produce contingently, narrative is it, that "one" need not go past narrative, itself "not connected with for grammar." This is a far more familiar account than the impersonal story of incidental production in "More Grammar for a Sentence" or in "Poetry and Grammar": "narrative" here seems the royal way to arrive at "me" or "one." Not all of this diagraming is pleasurable, however, or at any rate one should recognize that the pleasures and excitements of this sentence are wrought with propositions whose perplexities derive from the distinction between the sentence's grammar and its "incidental" naming of a subject and a self. For the complex core of the first sentence--"Narrative is it for one"--turns not upon the fuzziness of the concepts ostensibly indicated by "it" or "one," but on the grammatical indistinguishability between a principle of substitution ("it" for "one" or "narrative" for "it") and a principle of elimination organizing the relation between those concepts--"Narrative is it for one" in the sense in which one says, "That's it for you, buddy." "It" for "one" then replaces an impersonal for a (nominally) personal pronoun, though one already torn between singularity ("one") and generality ("one" as in "anyone" or "everybody," as the title to Stein's 1936 Everybody's Autobiography already suggests); Stein thereby tells the characteristically modernist story of the becoming-thing or becoming-"it" of "one," a story about the subject's alienation familiar in the years before World War II from the languages of political economy (Lukács and other Left Hegelians) and psychoanalysis. Surely she registers too some anxiety in this decade of self-promotion about her own desire to change her status as a cultural commodity, some anxiety about becoming a mere "it" in the literary market, after having belonged as "one." Anxiety: for in contrast to the contemporaneous treatments of economic and political alienation, Stein's "it"--"narrative," if that's it--spells the end of a model of the self as "one," but without substituting in its place any other pronoun, noun, or subject (class or revolutionary consciousness, aesthetic panhistoricism à la Pound, or even the shattered Freudian "subject"). Narrative conceived in this sense, conceived with an irreducible "reserve" of something like grammaticality, is indeed "it" for "one." Narrative is a principle of impersonal repetition at the heart of every singularity, of every instance of autobiography, of narrative construction, of self-legitimation. Stein, who discovers well before Lacan and Zizek that the object is a fetish of the name, itself the fetish-form of the primal infinitive "to name," poses the object "me"--herself, but also her notional readers, consumers of the commodity-form "Gertrude Stein"--in the regressive narrative of the refusal of (the arrival of) poetry, a narrative that allows the name to substantialize and hence forget its infinitive case, a narrative that could neither read nor write a sentence like "Narrative is it for one," a narrative, finally, that can neither read nor write How to Write. The burden this poses for us is triply heavy. Not only are we readers of Stein deprived of every normative example, and of every comfort, for learning how to read and how to value How to Write; not only are we denied the pleasures of the "incidental" posing and "possession of self" that might derive from grammatical or diagrammatical criticism of "Stein"; but we can no longer rest assured that the "Stein" we think we read is "one," or even that another "Stein" remains mystically elsewhere, in reserve, always before one as she lies before us, an unspoken and unnarratable "it" for every "one" who seeks to learn how to read (and) how to write.
Jacques Lezra, Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is author of Unspeakable Subjects: The Genealogy of the Event in Early Modern Europe and editor of Depositions: Althusser, Balibar, Macherey, and the Labor of Reading . His translation of Paul de Man's Blindness and Insight won the 1992 PEN Club of Puerto Rico Prize for critical editions.
I'd like to express my gratitude to my copanelists Steven Meyer, Linda Voris, and Charles Altieri, as well as the panel's chair, Marjorie Perloff, for their generous and astute comments on the paper. Thanks also to Lynn Keller for shepherding the panel from its proposed to its actual form.
1. Gertrude Stein, "Poetry and Grammar," in Lectures in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 219; hereafter abbreviated "PG."
2. The matter of Stein's self-promotion has received some attention, generally biographical. Susan Schultz lucidly discusses Stein's "long career of self-advertisement" in her "Gertrude Stein's Self-Advertisement," Raritan 12 (fall 1992): 86. Alan R. Knight stresses the functions--economic, epistemological--of the manifesto in Stein's career; see his "Masterpieces, Manifestoes, and the Business of Living: Gertrude Stein Lecturing," in Gertrude Stein and the Making of Literature, ed. Shirley Neuman and Ira B. Nadel (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 150-67.
3. William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (New York: Dover, 1950), 401. I have no argument with Lisa Ruddick's suggestion that the early Stein's engagement with James gives way to one with Freud. I believe, though, that Stein's "serial acts of self-definition" (as Ruddick characterizes "Melanctha," The Making of Americans, G. M. P., and Tender Buttons) do not stop, but are indeed rendered more urgent and probing in the careful embedding of economic and philosophical language in the later works; see her Reading Gertrude Stein (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 1, 92-136.
4. Gertrude Stein, "More Grammar for a Sentence," in The Yale Gertrude Stein, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 257.
5. Gertrude Stein, How to Write (New York: Dover, 1975), 107, 109, 110, 110, and 110, respectively; hereafter abbreviated HW.
6. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 178.
7. "No such agent exists; there is no 'being' behind the doing, acting, becoming; the 'doer' has simply been added to the deed by the imagination--the doing is everything." (Ibid., 178-79)
8. Wittgenstein's discussion of ostension, beginning in proposition 6 and especially in propositions 27 to 34 of the Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1968), has had far-reaching consequences, particularly in Anglo-American philosophy. I am particularly indebted to Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982).
9. I'm thinking here of Hume's of "the idea of necessary connexion," which is important to the later Wittgenstein as well (David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, vol. 1, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978], iii, 165-72).
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Randall Jarrell (1914-65), American poet, critic, and teacher, was a refractory heir of high modernism. His genealogy is clearly traceable to T. S. Eliot via John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, but if he was an apt pupil he was also a wayward disciple, both in his criticism and in his poetry. Though his reviews of fellow poets inspired fear and respect--so fierce and devastating were his witty dismissals, so incisive his praise--his poetry has often been dismissed as sentimental. Bristling with ambition and competitiveness, he nonetheless preferred to more prestigious appointments his position at a small southern woman's college. He suffered fools badly and impatiently but was legendary for his kindness as a teacher of the unsophisticated. His longtime colleague Peter Taylor described his "irrepressible" laughter as "cruel and/or gleeful," a combination that typified his personality and was sometimes bewildering to his intimates. 1
Reviewing his career, one is reminded of the climactic lines of his poem "A Girl in a Library": "and yet--and yet." 2 These apparent contradictions result in part from Jarrell's testy and self-conscious resistance to pigeonholing. As he wrote the war poems that established his reputation with Little Friend, Little Friend and Losses , he sighed to his first wife Mackie in a letter that in the next war he would seek "an executive position with the Campfire Girls." 3 He provocatively declared to the conscientiously masculine Allen Tate that he himself had a "semifeminine mind." 4 Elizabeth Bishop described him, forgivingly, as "difficult, touchy" (RJ, 20).
Behind these stubborn idiosyncrasies lie Jarrell's quarrels with the categories that constituted American modernism between 1932, when he enrolled as a student at Vanderbilt, and 1965, the year of his death. His aesthetic values were shaped by, but also consciously contrary to, the increasingly professionalized form of literary criticism (usually labelled "New Criticism") that came to dominate university teaching during those years. He developed and sharpened that aesthetic for nearly twenty years in a classroom populated exclusively by women, a point that has been noted but never sufficiently studied. 5 If John Guillory is right in asserting that "the social space of literary culture is necessarily institutional," then attention to the particulars of where, how, and to whom modernist poetry was taught ought to constitute a significant chapter in literary history. 6 By considering the sources of Jarrell's contrariness and by analyzing his investment in his students, I seek to complicate that history. My analysis of his career, viewed in the context of high-modernist influence on criticism, poetry, and education in the 1940s and 1950s, furnishes a necessary reminder that neither modernism nor New Criticism--nor indeed the academy itself--is a monolithic institution.
The classroom matters to modernism. 7 The American strain of modernist poetry and criticism was, from its earliest phases, aware of and to a crucial degree dependent upon the schools. 8 Pace Ezra Pound's gleeful announcement to Harriet Monroe that T. S. Eliot had "actually trained himself and modernised himself on his own," the evidence is not weighted toward autodidacticism. 9 Instead, one may see the imprint of the intellectual ivy league everywhere, not only in allusions to the curriculum (philology, Dante, cultural anthropology, and so on) but also in the expectation that poetry, to be serious, must have intellectual heft. The ideal reader of the modernist poem must bring the fruits of higher education to the poems, or be willing to do the homework necessary to take those fruits away from the poem. Either way, the reader is exchanging what Guillory and others have called cultural capital. Over time, this demanding dimension of modernist poetry has become linked to the name of T. S. Eliot, who has provided a serviceable icon/straw man either for celebrating what Richard Poirier has called the famous "difficulties" of modernism or for unmasking those difficulties as covert intellectual fascism. 10 And of course Eliot has been widely mythologized as the father-re responsible for New Criticism, which dominated American classrooms throughout the years under analysis here. As literary historians investigate the legacies of modernism, then, colleges and universities will be necessary objects of that analysis.
The story of Eliot's association with New Criticism and its ascendancy in the American academy is one of the sturdiest narratives of modernist scholarship. The plot includes Jarrell's own entry into the academy. In its most schematic form, a crucial chapter of that narrative goes as follows: In 1937 John Crowe Ransom proposes to Allen Tate that "the professors are in an awful dither trying to reform themselves and there's a big stroke possible for a small group that knows what it wants in giving them ideas and definitions and showing the way." 11 In 1938 Ransom moves from Vanderbilt to Kenyon, founds the Kenyon Review, becomes director of the Kenyon School of English. Two of Ransom's former students, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, publish Understanding Poetry in 1938, and Brooks publishes Modern Poetry and the Tradition in 1939. By this series of events, a new kind of "university-based criticism" is, as Gerald Graff expresses it, "disseminat[ed]." 12 Despite some initial resistance among more traditional scholars (philologists, literary historians and biographers, and the like), the methods of the so-called New Criticism achieve wide acceptance and the professors cease to be uncertain about their methods and mission.
Even in much less condensed versions of this history, certain elements remain consistent: the project was tied to schools from its inception; it aimed to garner respect for the reading and writing of poetry, rescuing both from their reputations as pursuits for dithering professors and society ladies; it sought to protect literary criticism from charges of subjectivity by replacing appreciation with analysis; the leading textbook of the era led to a codified teaching method that strongly favored text over context; and--finally (as Graff's verb implies)--not only the leaders of the project but most of the influential students were male. Jarrell studied at both Vanderbilt and Kenyon during the seminal years (1932-39), published his earliest work in magazines edited by either Ransom or Brooks and Warren, and received his first academic appointment at the University of Texas on the strength of Ransom's, Tate's, and Warren's recommendations; thus his early career intersects at key points with this tale of the modernist tribe.
Recent scholarship has taken this narrative seriously by questioning and attempting to revise it. Terry Eagleton and Harold Bloom, for instance, see modernism's influence in the universities, particularly influence of the Eliotic variety, as a pernicious strain of authoritarian cultural ideology. 13 The linking of modernist poetry with formalist criticism becomes in this view elitist and repressive, an instance of the predictable practices of a self-referring and self-promoting privileged class. In another kind of critique, feminist scholars have devoted their energies to exploring and complicating the phallocentrism of the received narrative: recovering the erased female contributors to the modernist project, analyzing the misogynistic rhetoric of its manifestos, examining the gender preferences of its aesthetic values. 14 Both kinds of critical approaches have enriched and usefully complicated the portrait of what modernism was.
Paradoxically, however, the vigorous rewriting of modernist literary history has had the effect of reifying the old narrative. And, as revisionists chip away at the monument of high modernism, some important features are defaced. The result is a kind of amnesia about dimensions of modernism not defined by male-dominated, high-culture axiology, particularly when the re under consideration is male. Michael Levenson argues that "modernism was individualist before it was anti-individualist, anti-traditional before it was traditional, inclined to anarchism before it was inclined to authoritarianism," and there is ample evidence that these insurgent energies never entirely disappear, despite the reactionary elements that evolve out of revolutionary beginnings. 15 The oppositional forces within modernism are particularly apparent when we study books like Shari Benstock's Women of the Left Bank. 16 But such subversion, innovation, and excitement tend in current criticism to be attributed to the women of modernism, not the men, and certainly not to the southern sons of Ransom and Tate.
Clearly, Jarrell doesn't belong on the Left Bank. He neither drank nor smoked, felt uncomfortable at parties, and was something of a homebody, attached to his wife and his cat. Like other poets of his generation, he struggled with mental illness, but compared to the more operatic Robert Lowell, for example, his troubles were for the most part undramatic. 17 However, if Jarrell seems misplaced as a bohemian, neither does he fit comfortably into the discourses of tradition, authoritarianism, and conservatism so often used to describe his teachers. His politics were marxist, not Agrarian. His poems are often talky and inconclusive rather than dense and tightly organized. Indeed his poetic practice veers so sharply away from the complex, paradoxical, densely allusive, and highly finished aesthetic favored by textbook New Criticism as to suggest an explanation for his status as a minor poet. John Berryman complimented his "neglect" of theory about either poetry or criticism at a time when a systematic critical vocabulary was becoming established in both journals and classrooms (RJ, 13). 18 And finally, as a teacher, he chose to spend his time with Greensboro women, not Princeton men. These less than predictable choices, I suggest, are conscious choices, made with full recognition of both their symbolic value and their likely effect on his reputation. His conception of theory and literary criticism, his attitude toward his students, and his conscientious unpredictability are intertwined because all of them are responses to what he perceived as the professionalization of poetry. Literary and academic culture were increasingly inseparable spheres in the period from 1935 to 1960; for Jarrell, they were an unholy alliance that brought corporate practices into the study and the classroom. He aligned himself instead with those unbusinesslike values--sentimentality, femininity, gentility--that modernism had sought to jettison. 19
A key word for understanding Jarrell's choices is "sentimentality." The New York Times review of Jarrell's last book of poetry, The Lost World , accused the poems of flatness, passivity, tear-jerking, dismissing the poems as "indulgent and sentimental Mama-ism." 20 The cruel tone of such responses was devastating to Jarrell, but the message cannot have been entirely new to him. Mentors and peers had complained in letters that somehow his poems lacked backbone, and critics had been concerned about the "voice" of his poems since the 1948 volume Losses. In reviewing it, W. S. Graham complained that the poems were "loose and casual" and that Jarrell was a sucker for the "pseudo-profound." 21 Himself a regular reviewer of poetry, Jarrell knew the literary climate, knew what was likely to be admired, and yet he repeatedly turned to the rather unpromising subject matters of childhood, fairy tales, and sad women--in short, to subjects associated with naive or sentimental storytelling.
The tendency of the sentimental to occasion queasiness may be measured in the entry for "sentimentality" in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.  22 Among the possible causes are "self-pity," "the absence of mature emotional self-control," and an "uncritical romantic sensibility," which looks upon "dogs, children, old women, and the deprived" not only as "objects of pity" but as "objects of reverence and even envy." Dogs don't often re in Jarrell's poetic world, but the other characters do. He cannot have been unaware of the riskiness of his subject matter.
The disgusted tone of the Princeton Encyclopedia entry registers the degree to which sentimentality is understood to violate the decorum of serious poetry. Reading on, one finds the adjectives "popular," "low," "subjective." By implication good poetry would be none of these things. Most importantly, the entry continues, emotion or pathos must be "adequately registered in the specific means of poetry and thus transformed from emotion into art." The emotion must have "located its poetic correlatives." Some of these dicta seem sensible and persuasive, of course; bad poetry is often marked by free-floating abstractions and vaguely realized emotion. One scarcely need read between the lines, however, to see how much this definition of sentimentality is shaped by assumptions articulated by Eliot in The Sacred Wood and then given institutional life by textbooks like Understanding Poetry: the "objective correlative," and the "impersonal" theory of poetry are strongly implied. All of these formulations--those of the encyclopedist, of Eliot, of Brooks and Warren--work to keep the personal, the emotional, at bay or under control.
The aesthetics of antisentimentality, according to Suzanne Clark in Sentimental Modernism, exhibit a "gendered logic." 23 "The story of desire for American critics has had an Oedipal shape--the subject gets over his imaginary attachments in order to take his place in culture as a man." (SM, 8) By this logic, he must grow out of the tropes, tones, and subjects of "Mama-ism": the comforts of genteel domesticity, reassuring routines of dailiness, physical and emotional softness, unearned sympathy, accessibility or transparency of meaning, overt attempts to persuade, acknowledgment of audience, abundant verbiage, and (often) conventional choices of either form or subject. It is the province of what Patricia Parker has dubbed "literary fat ladies." 24 By contrast, he must adopt other postures and attachments: urbanity, anomie, irony, self-consciousness, asepsis, evidence of rigorous intellect, toughness, the line that declares its hard edge. By such shorthand, the tough-minded modernist maintains a knowing distance from weepy females, and, by implication, from the popular, the easy, and the base. He favors a correspondingly obdurate style. Modernist poetry is to be more rebarbative than genteel verse, more demanding than linear narratives, more stimulating to the mind than those lyrics and tales that appeal to the foolish heart. And in staking out those generic and stylistic territories, the unsentimental modernist establishes himself as quite different not only from his immediate, genteel precursors, but also from the generation once removed, the romantic poets. Statements like Pound's 1913 Imagist manifesto, by strongly favoring the hard, the clean, and the spare, make the break from the emotional excesses of romanticism seem irrevocable. 25 Such declarations privilege certain genres and tones for the expression of a modern sensibility and make it appear that the innovations of modernism eclipse the achievements of the poetic past.
Early and late in his career, Jarrell was publicly skeptical about this cutting of the apron strings. By 1942, just three years after receiving his master's degree from Kenyon, Jarrell confidently challenged the commonplace that modernism was a genuine break with the past. The thesis of his essay "The End of the Line" is bold and direct: "Modernist poetry--the poetry of Pound, Eliot, Crane, Tate, Stevens, Cummings, MacLeish, et cetera--appears to be and is generally considered to be a violent break with romanticism; it is actually, I believe, an extension of romanticism, an end product in which most of the tendencies of romanticism have been carried to their limits." 26 The essay has the quality of the enfant terrible that Ransom observed even in his earliest dealings with Jarrell. The voice of the precocious child who is only pointing out for informational purposes what is entirely clear to him--that the emperor has no clothes--would remain an important keynote of Jarrell's prose. But the essay also manifests his desire to praise what he believes is great. "[E]ulogy," Lowell wrote, "was the glory of Randall's criticism" (RJ, 104). Jarrell concludes the essay with a list of names: Wordsworth, Blake, Heine, Baudelaire, Corbière, Hardy, Yeats, Rilke. A "'classical' prejudice . . . that these poets were somehow deceived and misguided," he remarks, "seems every year more grotesque." (K, 83) He will not be a recruit to the antiromantic program of modernism, especially not if by signing on he has to relinquish his approval of those poets. There is something more than mere contrariness in this studied difference from the mainstream; Jarrell is endorsing a more inclusive and more complex standard of judgment than that permitted by the "'classical' prejudices" of modernism.
Twenty years later, in the essay "Fifty Years of American Poetry," Jarrell would repeat this rhetorical strategy and produce a similar effect. Speaking at the National Poetry Festival in Washington, D. C., on 22 October 1962, before the most distinguished American poets and critics of the day, he assumes the voice of the future in evaluating Eliot, "the most famous and influential of American poets":
Won't the future say to us in helpless astonishment: "But did you actually believe that all those things about objective correlatives, classicism, the tradition, applied to his poetry? Surely you must have seen that he was one of the most subjective and daemonic poets who ever lived, the victim and helpless beneficiary of his own inexorable compulsions, obsessions? . . . But for you, of course, after the first few years, his poetry existed undersea, thousands of feet below that deluge of exegesis, explication, source listing, scholarship, and criticism that overwhelmed it." 27
It is of course not the Future who speaks here, but the prescient Jarrell, who refuses to admire "the right poet" for the "wrong reasons," preferring the suffering, compulsive, and subjective man to the symbol of the critical industry. 28 He rejects the New Critical Eliot, rejects the impersonal bard channeling the "mind of Europe"--those dimensions that then made Eliot seem unassailable--and pictures instead a poet who is fallible, troubled, and driven--those dimensions that now make Eliot seem to some indefensible. 29
What links these two essays is Jarrell's stance of being attentive to poets and poems rather than to dominant theoretical templates for poets and poems. Here, his New Critical allegiances are evident: the poem is its own excuse for being and contains within itself all necessary explanations. Even his view of Eliot derives not from external biographical material but from intensive readings of the poems. Informed by, but not limited to, Freudian vocabulary, his psychological portrait of Eliot is grounded in the dense annotations observable in his copy of The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950 ( 1). Next to the "yellow smoke" passage of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," for instance, he has written "the wild bad alley Tomcat that does all the things well-brought up Persian kitten would, could never do--but he too ends in nothing." 30 Words are underlined, repetitions noted, puns observed, sounds of words connected. Why, given such tenets of poetic autotelism and such practices of microscopic inspection, should he need to defend poems from critics?
The answer, like the question, is based in the hegemony of New Criticism. The most sustained explanation Jarrell offers is in the essay "The Age of Criticism," first published in Partisan Review in 1952. In it, he declared that criticism had become "astonishingly graceless, joyless, humorless . . . self-important, cliché-ridden, prestige-obsessed, [and] almost-autonomous." 31 Again, as in the 1942 essay, he notes the patronizing dismissal of Wordsworth--"poor Wordsworth I almost wrote"--and associates the dismissal of Wordsworth with condescension toward his friend, a novelist who was not a professional literary critic.
But the critics could not help being conscious of the differences between themselves, and Wordsworth, and my friend: they knew how poems . . . are put together, and Wordsworth and my friend didn't, but had just put them together.  What do you know about bacon?" [PA, 74] 32
Jarrell perceived that what had begun as a critical movement to make poetry autonomous had evolved into a movement in which criticism had made itself autonomous; he detected the inevitable moment at which a profession becomes as propelled by its forms, conventions, and hierarchies as by its reason for being.
Jarrell delivered "The Age of Criticism" as a lecture while participating in the Indiana School of Letters (founded by Ransom) in the summer of 1952. Some of the audience reacted, Jarrell reported in June 1952 to Mary von Schrader, "as if, to a bunch of junior executives, I'd questioned Free Enterprise" (L, 358). The letter dramatizes his outsider status. "All in all I had rather a sense of how lonely you are when you come out on the side of life and risk-taking and thinking works of art are live and mysterious and unaccountable; on the side of everything that can't be institutionalized and handled and graded by Experts. Most academic highbrow people really do go along with the critical abstract categorizing mind." (L, 359) 33 Jarrell had in 1939 [Begin Page 9] unapologetically explained to Allen Tate that he couldn't "put any real faith in abstractions or systems" (L, 19). It was his "really unsystematic" mind that he labelled "semifeminine" (L, 19; Jarrell's emphasis).
Taken together, the essays of 1942, 1952, and 1962 show a remarkable consistency in Jarrell's opinion of the appropriate relationship between the poem and the critic. Repeatedly he is drawn to discourses of capitalism or "free enterprise," competition, careerism, territoriality, and bureaucracy to decry the ways in which the act of reading poems has been, as it were, taylorized, made efficient and productive. The criticism business, for Jarrell, exudes the arrogance of power. Leslie Fiedler, who spoke the day after Jarrell that summer in Indiana and who was in sympathy with him on that occasion, later wrote that for Jarrell "an essential function of the critic is to free the loving reader from all orthodoxies as well as all methodologies" (RJ, 66). This notion of value-free, disinterested reading may, in the wake of post-structuralist criticism, seem hopelessly benighted. To take this view, however, is to tell a very clever pig he knows nothing about bacon. In other words, Jarrell's lecture and Fiedler's evaluation of his critical stance must be considered in the context of the orthodoxies and methodologies they worked within and against. For Jarrell especially, the agenda was to find a way to put romance, mystery, and sentiment (the stereotypes of a feminized sensibility) back into the mix of critical values. Jarrell's stance, Fiedler perceived, is that of a courageous, rescuing prince in a fairy tale; his princess, the loving reader, possesses that feminized sensibility. "Rescue" and "love" are very nearly embarrassing terms to use in describing the work of literary criticism. 34 This embarrassment, as Suzanne Clark points out, is tied to conceptions of maturity and gender: "Becoming an intellectual in America is sort of like being inducted into the army . . . and learning not to be a sissy." (SM, 12)
Randall Jarrell knew the code of the intellectual army. His academic posts, his fellowships and grants, his appointment at the Library of Congress, his prizes--all are the benefits of increasingly well organized professions. His competitiveness impelled him to seek those rewards and want others. Nevertheless, Jarrell insisted that this culture be accessible to amateurs, indeed that their disinterested and marginal status in the culture of reading gave them a particular authenticity. And, in his teaching career especially, he questioned whether the characteristics denigrated as "sissy" ought to be so cavalierly dismissed. To be a sissy is to "sit out" the contest, and Jarrell preferred that reading not be a contest. Describing his generosity to his students and herself, Eleanor Ross Taylor writes, "We were likely to do nothing for him in return, as people not on committees, not writing recommendations, not mentioning things to powerful people, not promoting, arranging, appearing. He battled for the survival of such people" (RJ, 237). It is precisely the absence of power that drew Jarrell to these women. To the problem of "The Obscurity of the Poet" , he offered no solution, believing there was none. High modernism's program to make poetry matter by making it new was a failed dream, and Jarrell agreed with Auden that "poetry makes nothing happen." 35 "There is nothing to do different from what we already do: if poets write poems and readers read them, each as best they can--if they try to live not as soldiers or voters or intellectuals or economic men, but as human beings--they are doing all that can be done." (PA, 21) To actors in the powerful institutional spheres of politics, education, and economics, Jarrell opposes human beings, presumably defined as somehow outside those spheres. Traditionally, and certainly at the time that Jarrell wrote those words, the person outside those spheres was female.
Jarrell came to what was known as the Woman's College of the University of North Carolina in 1947, on the recommendation of Peter Taylor, who was to be his colleague, and with a letter of support from Ransom. 36 In the background of his appointment stands Tate, who taught at the college before he moved to Princeton in 1939. Jarrell had had previous teaching experience: instructor of English and Director of Tennis at Kenyon, then instructor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. After military service, he acted as literary editor of The Nation while teaching at Sarah Lawrence, an experience that helped to shape his satiric novel Pictures from an Institution. His teaching career is typical of the time in its cobbling together of jobs (a poet who must write criticism and teach to make a living); it also signals one way in which the literary and academic establishments had become partners.
The institution at which Jarrell taught from 1947 until his death in 1965 was, in his own wry description to Lowell in 1947, "pastoral" (L, 177). In the late 1940s and 1950s, it enrolled two thousand to twenty-five hundred women, three-fourths of whom were North Carolinians, a substantial percentage of them from small rural towns. Some were the daughters of wealthy planters, but others were children of small-town newspaper editors, orphans on scholarship, and children of sharecroppers, again on scholarship. 37 It was not a finishing school, nor was it experimental in the way of Sarah Lawrence. Like many another woman's college, it was founded as a "normal" school with the primary purpose of training teachers. By the 1940s, however, students came with other aims as well, some to spend a couple of years preparing to go to other schools, some to study the "Home Ec." and "Phys. Ed." that Jarrell ridicules in "A Girl in a Library" (CP, 17), and some--the group that would most engage Jarrell's attentions--to avail themselves of the college's growing reputation as a school for serious study of the arts, creative writing, and literature. For nearly twenty years of his teaching career, Jarrell was in daily contact with a kind of student who, however bright, stood outside the corridors of intellectual power. Thus his work as a teacher helps one to focus on an overlooked group of legatees in the transmission of cultural capital. The ideal audience imagined by the influential male modernists did not include small-town southern "bobbysoxers." And yet this was the audience to which Jarrell dedicated himself. His pedagogic commitment is of a piece with his edgy relationship to the critical mainstream.
Robert Lowell's affectionate and perceptive description of Jarrell as a teacher is worth quoting at some length:
He once said, "If I were a rich man, I would pay money for the privilege of being able to teach." Probably there was no better teacher of literature in the country, and yet he was curiously unworldly about it, and welcomed teaching . . . in the shade or heat of his little-known Southern college for girls. . . . There his own community gave him a compact, tangible, personal reverence that was incomparably more substantial and poignant than the empty, numerical long-distance blaze of national publicity. He grieved over the coarseness, unkindness, and corruption of our society. . . . He said bitterly and lightheartedly that "the gods who had taken away the poet's audience had given him students." Yet he gloried in being a teacher, never apologized for it, and related it to his most serious criticism [RJ, 105].
Jarrell made the remark about paying to teach on more than one occasion (L, 435, 453). Because this is the sort of thing teachers say on a good day, when teaching feels like more than a job, it is a comment easy to dismiss. But Lowell's vocabulary coheres with the rhetoric of Jarrell's critical essays, echoing their defense of the unaccountable. Jarrell's attachment to the students in his classroom signals "curiously unworldly" allegiances. The world to which Lowell and Jarrell respond is one that expects seriousness to be linked to money, publicity, coarseness, and unkindness, one that denigrates the personal and the reverential as poignant, even sentimental. That Jarrell expected this position to be attacked as sentimental is evident in a 1959 essay, "Poets, Critics, and Readers." He offers as a counterproposition a diagnosis by Hugo von Hoffmannsthal: "Each epoch has its own sentimentality . . . its specific way of overemphasizing strata of emotion. The sentimentality of the present is egotistic and unloving; it exaggerates not the feeling of love but that of the self" (K, 310). This self-regard, Jarrell argues, made the critic the competitor of the poet and his criticism a means to a self-promoting end. At the conclusion of the essay, he recalls an interview with a critic in which the critic admits to reading Kipling's Kim for pleasure every year. "[F]or a moment I had left the gray, dutiful world of the professional critic, and was back in the sunlight and shadow, the unconsidered joys, the unreasoned sorrows, of ordinary readers and writers, amateurishly reading and writing 'at whim'" (K, 317). The "contemplative and sympathetic hours of our reading" are an alternative to "the active, greedy, and powerful hours of our lives" (K, 318). Jarrell's professional critic has become the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, that icon of the 1950s rat-race. 38 The space he carved out at Greensboro was "pastoral" in this way, as well; in his estimation, it was the green-world alternative to the self-aggrandizing, product-driven occupation that had become literary criticism.
The green world has its annoyances, too, of course, and Jarrell acknowledged these with his usual piquancy. Shortly after his arrival in 1947, he wrote to Hannah Arendt, "I have several good students in modern poetry and writing[;] . . . the first day one of them, to my great amazement, turned in a faithful imitation of Robert Lowell. But the only thing to do with the freshmen here is to write a ballet with a Chorus of Peasant Girls for them" (L, 180). The Carolina drawl grated on him; in 1949, he described himself to Margaret Marshall as "knee-deep in violets and whine-y Southern girls" (L, 219). Over time, however, the caustic remarks diminish, giving way to frequent assertions of his devotion to the women at Greensboro. He wrote to Robert Penn Warren in 1962 that, after his two years as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress, his return to his classes "made me want never to be without them again" (L, 461).
The components of this dedication are a complex mixture of the personal and professional, and not all of the elements are flattering to Jarrell. He was by many accounts narcissistic, mirror-obsessed, and proud of his mind; friends and colleagues grant those characteristics even when they wish to be sympathetic to Jarrell. The role of adored teacher, inspiring the reverence to which Lowell refers in his description, is powerfully attractive to such a personality, and its potency was probably complicated as well by student "crushes" and erotic energy, heady boosts for any ego. 39 Jarrell's competitiveness is also a factor: at Greensboro he was the teacher to study with, the poet to know, the famous man. This adulation undoubtedly compensated for other ways in which he might have felt slighted by the literary establishment. One may suspect him, accordingly, of preening himself on his role as master and of dominating his students with his superior mind. In fact, however, the oral histories I have assembled in interviewing colleagues and former students and the memoirs of students I have read emphatically contradict that possibility, a point to which I will return. I do not want to move too quickly past the question of domination, however, precisely because the record of opinion Jarrell left in his criticism is so frequently concerned with the exercise of intellectual power.
Jarrell's poetic treatment of this subject is invariably ambivalent and entangled in complicated ways with gender. Langdon Hammer, in a persuasive reading of "A Girl in a Library," suggests that the poem's tenderness may be a veiled assertion of male superiority: "her passive cooperation with his vision, her lack, even, of dreams; and his decision to address her, which allows him to occupy the position of the master (even--or especially?--a gentle one), begins to look like a way of preserving male authority by making it appear benevolent." "What would the girl say," Hammer asks, "if she woke up?" 40 In one sense, this is an unanswerable question. What would the Solitary Reaper say to Wordsworth? It is, however, a question that provokes the imagination in reminding us of the ways that the verbally gifted dominate the silent in colleges everywhere. The poem invites us to notice gender, of course. The male speaker is both revolted by and drawn to the sleeping girl's stolidity; she is condescendingly portrayed as close to nature (thus base in her aspirations), while he is bodiless. The male is an intellectual, the library his workplace; she is an interloper there. But because the poem's texture relies upon literary and other forms of high-art allusion, "A Girl in a Library" should also be read as a meditation on the roles of teacher and student and on the sleeping girl's curriculum, particularly the limiting practicality of it. Her subjects--Home Ec. and Phys. Ed.--are the "narrow stream" that confine her (CP, 16). His subjects--opera, Russian poetry, the stuff of dreams and fiction--are the romantic visions that remove him from the things of this world. What good does it do the man who is awake to know the things he does? And if he values them, must the sleeping student? The speaker's tone is uncertain, though his own commitments are clear. For all his satiric wit, the speaker is a decidedly unauthoritative authority re, who admits that the world ("the world contracts around you" [CP, 15]) has made a student "good enough for it" (CP, 17). The bookish speaker asserts that "the soul" that "neither cooks / Nor referees" (CP, 16) is superior to the "calm slow factuality" (CP, 17) of this contracted world; yet he also allows that the "inconceivable enchantment" (CP, 17) he values so highly is of little consequence to it. "each poem guaranteed," as he puts it in "A Conversation with the Devil," "a lie or permanently irrelevant" (CP, 29). Furthermore, his fictions depend upon the facts she embodies; the consolations and pleasures of her life, on the other hand, are "innocent" (CP, 17) of his fictions. "A Girl in a Library" is, in this sense, a poem about a teacher whose student does not want what he has to offer. What matters is not only that she is a girl, though gender-focused readings help us to understand the effects of that representation, but that she is a girl whose world has taught her to seek intellectual sustenance in Home Ec. and Phys. Ed.
In "The Taste of the Age," first published in 1958, seven years after "A Girl in a Library," Jarrell returned to the subject of home economics. He discovers in conversation with an eighth-grade student that she does not know who Charlemagne was.
The little girl who didn't know who Charlemagne was had been taught, I found, to conduct a meeting, to nominate, and to second nominations; she had been taught . . . the right sort of story to tell an eighteen-months-old baby; and she had learned in her Domestic Science class to bake a date pudding, to make a dirndl skirt. . . . She was being given an education suitable for the world she was to use it in; my quarrel was not so much with her education as with her world [K, 300-301, 303].
The world that Jarrell deplores on her behalf is the same one that absorbs the sleeping girl in a library, the same that causes the woman in his poem "Next Day" to move in a trancelike state down the supermarket aisles, that makes the hallucinating speaker of "Seele im Raum" feel she must choose between "sense" and "truth" (CP, 39). In this world, to return to the terms Jarrell uses in "The Obscurity of the Poet," women are voters (able to second a nomination) and economic entities (able to shop and do domestic work), but something less than human beings. "Marriage with the Corn King was the only game in town," Mary Jarrell said in a recent interview about Jarrell's teaching. "Randall thought they were better than that." 41
Imagery of entrapment and confinement is countered in Jarrell's portraits of women by imagery of animals and wilderness. The observer thinks of a trapped animal as he watches the girl in the library: "Many a beast has gnawn a leg off and got free / . . . The trap has closed about you and you sleep" (CP, 16). The image of the eland, real to the woman in "Seele im Raum" and imaginary to her family, shifts by the poem's end to the German elend (wretched), registering her inescapable domestication. "The Woman at the Washington Zoo" says to the "bars of my own body, open, open! / The world goes by my cage and never sees me" (CP, 215). The troubled but liberating dream that concludes "The Night before the Night before Christmas" takes place in fields where "There is not one thing that knows / It is almost Christmas" (CP, 50). Evocations of wildness are often poignant in these poems because they are imaginings only, a strongly felt but ineffectual protest against the various cages in which the women find themselves: the bars of their own mortal and aging bodies and the compartments of their social personae. Stanley Kunitz's essay "Out of the Cage" summarizes the centrality of this topic: "All the voices in all of Jarrell's poems are crying, 'Change me!'. . . In the mythic imagination metamorphosis is the great theme underlying all others. To the individual psyche it is the way out of the cage. 'Self-transformation,' said Rilke, whom Jarrell revered and translated, 'is precisely what life is'" (RJ, 99-100). For Jarrell, uncaged wildness is an assertion of that vitality.
Jarrell also employs the metaphor of wildness in describing his function as critic and teacher. The enfant terrible is an enfant sauvage. After lunching at Princeton in 1952, Jarrell lamented R. P. Blackmur's having become part of the "whole literary-academic . . . world." "Believe me," he wrote to Mary, "I'm glad I'm marrying a wild tribe and am not institutionalized myself." (L, 338) His self-positioning outside this institution allied him with the amateur reader he imagined as ideal. These readers, described in "The Age of Criticism," are "almost as wild a species as writers" (PA, 80). Critics, on the other hand, "are so domesticated as to seem institutions"; they remind him of "the Wall standing between Pyramus and Thisbe" (PA, 80). Beneath the cleverness of this image, which evokes the cloddish stupidity of the domesticated critic and makes lovers of the reader and her book, Jarrell expresses serious disapproval of the divisions and obstacles he consistently associates with the academization of reading. Wildness, for Jarrell, resists the psychic, social, bureaucratic compartments that make lives small.
That there could be bigger lives--and that the study of literature might include the possibility of self-transformation--is a repeated theme in the comments of Jarrell's students. "It is difficult," wrote Bertha Harris Wyland (class of 1959),
to describe the effect, as it was then, on someone like myself who came from a small town of regular church-going, Saturday night picture shows, and Saturday Evening Post habits. It was like being suddenly snatched off the assembly line, taken apart, reassembled. Most of us were first or second-generation college students. . . . We walked into the place inviting it to reassemble us; we demanded to be lighted up. 42
"Teaching was his essence, his core," Heather Ross Miller (class of 1961) believes. "Randall cared more about our silly stories and poems than we did ourselves. It was his special talent, his gift--and those of us in the writing workshops felt baptized in some exuberant mixture of fire and spirit and mineral water." 43 Student testimonials to beloved teachers tend, by their nature, to be hagiographic, but as Jarrell's biographer William Pritchard also found, there is remarkable consistency in what they praise. The memoirs of Jarrell's students reiterate the metaphors of electricity, explosion, change. His colleague Robert Watson describes the students of that period as "skyrockets waiting to go off." 44
This sense of nascent vitality may be one of the reasons Jarrell compared the college at Greensboro to a fairy tale, a genre to which Jarrell was drawn throughout his career. "Gee, I'm glad to get back here," he said to Robert Watson in 1953 after two years away. "This college is like Sleeping Beauty." (RJ, 258) Perhaps Jarrell referred only to the general sleepiness and small-town atmosphere, perhaps to the restfulness of being out of the more competitive atmosphere of Princeton. But Fiedler's characterization of Jarrell as wanting to "free the loving reader" comes irresistibly to mind. And since sleep in this tale acts as a form of captivity, the allusion recalls the captives and enclosed res of Jarrell's poetry. That he should see himself as come to liberate these res from their sleep may betray the arrogance of which he accused American literary criticism. "I think that he felt he was in a prince capacity," Mary Jarrell laughed when I questioned her on this point. But she was quick to add that the students "were not puppets on a string. They were being guided and encouraged. . . . Leadership is one thing, leading by the nose another." 45
Jarrell acted on two principles that make accusations of intellectual domination seem oversimplified. First, he knew that education was not a panacea. As much as the girl in "The Night before the Night before Christmas" may want to believe that the world could be saved by study of Marx and Engels, the poem's conclusion makes plain the inescapability of loss and injustice. "There is something deep / Under her will, against her will, / That keeps murmuring to her, 'It's so'" (CP, 47). Second, he knew that the fairy-tale princess could become, as in "Cinderella," "A sullen wife and a reluctant mother" (CP, 217). Unhappy endings were just as likely as happy ones, and magic kisses might in any case be refused. In "Hope," he revises the story of Sleeping Beauty.
. . . It was the old story