Introduction
p. 9-16
Texte intégral
1Questioning “Modernism and Unreadability” jointly means exploring Modernism from the perspective of one of its most obvious though rarely mentioned effects. The premise underlying the articles in this volume is that Modernism weaves together the pleasure of the text and the unreadable, a term we understand to designate all that which falls from the process of signification, the literal residuum whose proliferation both threatens the integrity of the message and confronts the reader with that element of undecipherability at the core of his/her own desire.
2Modernism is approached here through the lens of various texts known to be particularly resistant to interpretation—“borderline” texts which fall de facto under the category of the unreadable, and which, to follow Barthes’ formulation, need to be “unravelled”1 rather than decoded. For a number of reasons and following various modalities and individual procedures which are delineated and analyzed in the following pages, those texts, now part of the literary canon, raise problems of deciphering as well as comprehension which defer and displace the question of interpretation. From Virginia Woolf to Gertrude Stein, from James Joyce to T.S. Eliot, from Samuel Beckett to Djuna Barnes, canonical modernist works foil reading, articulation, and commentary. Elucidating and deconstructing the paradoxical connection between the canonical status of these major modernist texts and their unreadability is one of the objectives the essays in this collection hope to achieve.
3The question of the relationship between Modernism and unreadability is far from anecdotal or secondary: on the contrary, Barthes’s observation that “writing constantly posits meaning, but always in order to cause it to evaporate” offers an apt description of the tension at the core of modernist unreadability, where the letter itself turns out to be the precipitate left over from this process of evaporation. In this sense, the letter is to be understood both as generating its own specific form of entropy and, conversely, as that which precipitates critical reading at the precise juncture where meaning falters. Modernist unreadability, therefore, is not so much the opposite of pre-modernist readability as its other. Nor is it a simple by-product of excessive aestheticism: it characterizes and stems from heterogeneous poetics which set meaning into crisis, and bears the signature of a literary movement whose very unity is problematic. Admittedly, texts bordering unreadability are found throughout various literary traditions (which is why this volume includes a contribution on Robert Browning). Yet by its sheer intensity, modernist unreadability appears as a unique historical moment in the literature of the English-speaking world, thus inevitably contributing to the construction of the Modernist master narrative by underwriting a polemical notion of literary history as a succession of breaks manifested by the emergence of radically new paradigms. As such, Modernist unreadability questions literariness from the angle of literalness and challenges literature—both as a practice and as a historical institution—to account for itself, to justify its procedures and its tacitly or implicitly held beliefs, to deconstruct the very meaning of writing and reading.
4What of the failure of signification and meaning that Modernist writings repeatedly stage? The question of meaning, of signification and its other, lurks beneath the obstacles that frustrate reading. Faced with a wall of literalness, with a deluge of referential data, readers are thwarted, thrown off balance in their alleged “natural” competence. The complex procedures whereby reading is thus thwarted are analyzed in the following pages, where we witness language itself being put to the test as it is alternately Babelized (in Zukofsky’s and Oppen’s poetry), disfigured (as is the case with Joyce, Stevens and Howe) or exhausted (most spectacularly in Beckett’s prose writings). The nature of the transgressions in which these Modernist texts originate needs to be examined: what exactly do they forsake? What liberties do they allow themselves to take? There is not just one version of unreadability: its manifestations are multiple and unique. In particular, it needs to be distinguished from obscurity, enigmaticity, even hermeticism. The contributions gathered in this volume address these questions by examining how such literary productions confront writing itself with a dimension of impossibility, i.e., how unreadability impacts writability via the specific forms of boredom and jouissance it generates.
5We begin this volume with an essay by Bonnie Costello which sets the terms of an American Modernist poetics of the unreadable as those may be inferred from the works of Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore. In all three poets unreadability is a practice connected with a perception of the heterogeneity of American space and its resistance to any kind of overarching perspective. The visual technique of collage provides a useful template for writing strategies which, by privileging the metonymic juxtaposition of discrete elements over their inclusion within a unitary paradigm, weave a network of correspondences between America’s “centrifugal diversity” and the discontinuities of poetic speech itself. Such discontinuities reverberate in T.S. Eliot’s modernist polyphonies. Analyzing Eliot’s oblique take on unreadability, Amélie Ducroux points out that he disregarded unreadability as “uninteresting,” even though he commonly referred to it in his theoretical writings. As Ducroux argues, unreadablity is not an intrinsic but a relational quality resulting from the interaction between text and reader. The Waste Land, however, poses obvious questions of readability: Eliot’s poem oscillates between unreadability and hyperreadability. Since an excess of referential information might trap and eventually lose the reader, Ducroux, after questioning the mechanisms resulting in unreadability, suggests a new mode of reading.
6Although both poets are seemingly situated on opposite sides of the Pound-Stevens canonical divide, Eliot’s notion of hyperreadability turns out to partially overlap George Oppen’s own dream of intelligibility. In her study Christine Savinel shows how the question of unreadability in George Oppen’s poetry may be approached within the purview of Edward Said’s conception of lateness as a formal characteristic. Faced with the double elusiveness of the world and of meaning, Oppen builds his poetry on the hope of intelligibility and on the dream of a language of the “unheard of” born of the tension between poetic forms, registers, and syntax—a poetic idiom in which the readable is constantly dreaming of its silent and unreadable counterpart, and unlikeness may be found lodged in the gap between two seemingly identical signifiers. In her analysis of Oppen’s poetic misprision of the word “solecism” Savinel indicates how, through the felix culpa of faulty etymology, the unattainability of total meaning becomes the condition for the very possibility of meaning. As Oppen inscribes such formal characteristics of lateness as fragmentariness and incompleteness into words themselves, poetic speech is made to share in the fundamentally discontinuous modality of survival that defines Oppen’s own perception of his place in History. The eschatological dimension of unreadability is another aspect of George Oppen’s poetry that Xavier Kalck’s article brings into focus. Oppen conflates absolute readability and absolute impenetrability in his quest for an Adamic language in which the distinction between world and word is cancelled. Oppen’s poetry is born at the junction between two forms of silence: the silence of the inexpressible, defined as everything which falls outside the poet’s direct experience, and the silence of the poem qua reified linguistic material. It is in this borderline space which Oppen would have coincide with the locus from which the divine voice of the whirlwind answers, that the true poetic statement may resonate. Oppen thus tangentially aspires to a purely self-referential language of the unsayable where the illiteracy of the “unread child” becomes indistinguishable from its seeming opposite of absolute poetic literacy.
7As some of the contributions discussed thus far amply show, “unreadability” is a dialectical term always presupposing some kind of interplay with its other. This is made particular clear in Antoine Cazé’s discussion of visuality and legibility in the work of H.D. Following Benjamin’s analysis of the sign/mark dialectic at work in the language of painting, Cazé demonstrates how H.D.’s imagist poetics goes well beyond the Poundian ideal of objective clarity. H.D.’s images appear instead as dynamic compromise formations at the juncture between seeing and writing which is also the locus princeps of psychoanalytical interpretation. H.D.’s images, however, are not reducible to symptoms that might lend themselves to eventual elucidation. As they “un-read” the poetic subject, they open up a specifically modernist critical space of Benjaminian “nameability,” i.e., of endlessly deferred readability.
8The unreadability of Zukofsky’s “A”-9, likewise, is a process of the tension between the poem’s seeming unity and the heterogeneous poetic gestures it harbors. The poem’s potentially endless succession of extratextual references, its elusive syntax and jarring interplay of poetic and argumentative form—all point to the ineffectuality of a reading mode geared towards the revelation of some unitary meaning. Unlike Xavier Kalck’s Oppen, Vincent Bucher’s Zukofsky thus does not view poetic language as a means to “offer a mystical knowledge of things.” Instead, Zukofsky’s version of illegibility aims to assert the preeminence of the poetic gesture over illusions of completeness and depth. This is made evident in Zukofsky’s treatment of Cavalcanti and his rejection of the Poundian archeology of the source to the benefit of a notion of meaning as simultaneously unreadable and irrecoverable. With the onset of World War II, however, a major transition can be traced in the second half of “A”-9, where the previously central notion of the timeliness of writing yields to an acknowledgement of its ethical dimension and of the need for poetry to engage with time-bound particulars—which may paradoxically preserve it from obsolescence.
9The duality inherent in Oppen’s poetics, oscillating between formal open-endedness and historical finiteness is reflected in the tensions which are already perceptible in the works of Robert Browning. As Jean-Charles Perquin suggests, Robert Browning’s Sordello turned out to be unreadable for his contemporaries and a major source of inspiration for the modernist generation to come. Ezra Pound deemed the poem to be the work of a man of genius. Written in heroic couplets, a form considered the hallmark of conventional narrative poetry at the time, Sordello posed major difficulties to its public because of its combination of historical context and hermetic references. Consequently, readers were under the impression that “something was missing, that something was hidden from them, and that something prevented them from understanding the poem.” The nearly six thousand line long poem conveys a sense of modernistic unfinished failure, partly because of its omissions and of the poetic voice’s incidental and counter-productive interferences in the narrative.
10As can be seen from the previous contribution, the category of modernist unreadability is not easily contained within the strict historical boundaries of High Modernism. This is the reason why we have chosen to conclude our exploration of modernist poetry and poetics of the unreadable with contributions on two contemporary poets who further investigate and complexify the wreaderly potential of modernist unreadability. Abigail Lang’s contrapuntal reading of Susan Howe and Dominique Fourcade explores the unreadable/ineffable dialectic implicit in Kalck’s analysis of Oppen. Lang shows how stuttering occurs at the level of the syllable as the meeting point between writing and speech, which makes of the syllable the locus where the pull towards an undifferentiated state and the desire to return to “a sea of pure sound” are most perceptible. Stuttering results from Howe’s and Fourcade’s efforts to bridge the gap between signifier and signified, to utter the unspeakable, and from the opposite endeavor to maintain separation and preserve the veil covering the illegible core of language from which only syllabic fragments are to be salvaged. The syllable thus points towards the mystical edge of language while maintaining it at a distance. Hence the role of the glottis as the interface of murmur and speech where Howe’s and Fourcade’s missed Orphic encounter with the ineffable is played out.
11Finally unreadability is envisaged in Christophe Lamiot Enos’s essay as a necessary if not inescapable aspect of the reading process. Reflecting on a book of poems by the American contemporary poet Laynie Browne, Lamiot Enos questions the book form with respect to modernism and suggests that modern poetry and unreadability have a privileged relationship. Unreadability, which does derive from the difficulty of truth as such but is enacted in the poem, results from what Lamiot Enos designates as its deliberate mysteriousness. The modernist text happens to be mysterious in so far as its meaning is constantly deferred and displaced, disseminated and not fully present to itself. Unreadability as read by Lamiot Enos in Original Presence is inseparable from “a moment in the writing” and the reading process.
12We begin the section of this volume dedicated to modernist prose with Mathieu Duplay’s essay on David Markson and Malcolm Lowry, which demonstrates that since illegibility has no intrinsic property and is always contextual, minimal legibility persists even in those meaningless marks left in the sand by the protagonist of Markson’s novel. Universal legibility thus defines the paranoid “truth of the human condition,” the madness central to the act of reading itself, which only the body’s limited resources ultimately bring to a halt. Yet to the extent that it strips reading of causality and promotes an entirely private, non-hermeneutical practice of intertextuality, Markson’s poetics paradoxically appears founded on unreadability. This “poetics of non-reading” may be traced to Lowry’s Under the Volcano, where poeticity is born of the novel’s silences.
13In her study of Dos Passos’ USA, in order to define the precise nature of the unreadable, Alice Béja questions the articulation between modernism and the description of reality and remarks that the clear-cut distinction commonly made between naturalism and modernism cannot apply there. Unreadability—inseparable in the trilogy from the multiplicity of points of view—and the diverse narrative techniques is used as a critical device to undermine the stereotypes which frame our preconceptions. As Béja demonstrates, unreadability happens to be that of the stereotype and not that of the narrative itself.
14In Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood the unreadable is troped into a set of marginal characters who challenge early twentieth-century notions of belonging build around rigid definitions of national, sexual, class, racial and gender identities. As Michael Schmidt explains, lack of identity in Barnes’s novel creates “new forms of social attachment.” Likewise, Barnes’s style holds interpretive strategies in check, thereby urging a reexamination of the dominant discourse on identity and of the hegemonic social logics that ultimately translated into the “national myths of fascism and Nazism.” A similar logic is at work in the way gender roles and generic boundaries are challenged in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, thereby further destabilizing the readable/unreadable polarity. As Chantal Delourme demonstrates, Woolf’s playful handling of the conventions of biographical writing as the epitome of over-readability overturns the reader’s assumptions regarding mimesis and teleology by reconfiguring narrative time through an interplay of the actual and the virtual. The new reading contract described by Marie-Dominique Garnier is implicit in Delourme’s analysis of un-reading as that which allows art and/or experience to interpenetrate “though life as a continuous process of creation.” The correlative of this poetics is the figure of the androgyny whose sexual indeterminacy undermines the readability of sexual difference and only testifies to the “persistence of being,” i.e., the creative force of “living as art” that cuts across sexual difference without completely negating it.
15In Woolf’s writings, generic and genetic unreadability are mutually dependent phenomena. Reading through different genetic editions and successive drafts of Woolf’s early novels, Monica Latham analyzes Woolf’s writing technique and re-writing processes and compares the editing options regarding the treatment of signs and space and their consequences in terms of modes of reading. She specifically concentrates on an edition of Melymbrosia and compares it with the final version of The Voyage Out. In the stages of the writing process of Melymbrosia, Woolf tried her hand at elaborating a narrative strategy meant to convey a frail state of mind while she opted for a more explicit way of telling in The Voyage Out. The unreadable questions the capacity of the reader to make sense of the different versions of a given text.
16The genetic approach applied to Virginia Woolf’s modernist prose thus proves ultimately self-cancelling. Indeed, the very specificity of modernist unreadability lies in the frontal challenge it poses to notions of originariness, and in the strategies it deploys to thwart critical gestures aiming at a restorative archeology of meaning. This is why Marie-Dominique Garnier, in her article, explores Modernism’s impact on the act of reading as a Derridean process of “de-reading,” and the poetics of the limitrophe this process generates—a poetics born in the interstice between the readable and the unreadable, where the French adjective “illisible” functions as a “generative term” stripped of the lack it commonly denotes and the phoneme “il” is made to stand for the “thinning boundary... between text and reader” that defines Modernism’s transformation of the reading process. As Garnier shows, Modernist mean-ing can be de-read as a process of mediation that defines a new reading contract in which sense and nonsense, sound and sense converge on a plateau, as do reader and writer in the Joycean genesis of the wreader.
17As it turns out, this new reading contract was very much at the heart at Joyce’s project from its inception onwards. In her examination of the contribution of little review editors to the reading of Joyce’s “Work in Progress” from 1927 to 1938. Anne Reynes-Delobel shows how transition readers were invited not to focus on the unreadability of Joyce’s prose, but to concentrate on what makes it pleasurable to the senses, i.e. its oral/aural and visual qualities. Unlike most critics and readers who notoriously complained about the difficulty of the work, in what became in 1929 the so-called “Revolution of the Word” manifesto, transition editors supported Joyce in his “disintegration of grammar, the abolition of the ‘tyranny’ of narrative logic and temporal succession, the prevalence of expression over communication.” Joyce himself took an active part in the little magazine, contributing texts and incorporating documents. Reynes suggests that his conception of it went far beyond the mere circulation of texts and ideas: Joyce used transition as “a production and marketing tool targeted at a certain type of audience,” which proved a remarkable avant-gardist strategy.
18Instead of being a hindrance, illegibility thus becomes the driving force behind modernist writing, even when it seemingly reaches a point of near-exhaustion in what Beckett will come to understand as the game of writing in Malone Dies. Rather than expressing absurdity and ontological nothingness, as has been often stated about his work, Beckett’s strategy is one of cutting away at all metaphysics. The exhaustion of language manifested in Beckett’s text can be read as rhetorical processes or linguistic mechanisms. As Noura Wedell demonstrates, “the process of failing as the mechanics of writing progresses through negation, aporia, contradiction, and paradox.” Albeit irreconcilable, Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett’s writings have a lot in common with respect to unreadability. In his “German letter” written in German in 1937 and published posthumously, Beckett defines what Vincent Broqua sees as his “poetics of unreadability,” mentions Gertrude Stein’s name and acknowledges his proximity to her so-called “logographs.” Broqua separately concentrates on two texts, one by Stein ( “A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson”) and one by Beckett ( “Ping”), shows that Beckett’s text reads as a morphologic and semantic exemplification of his definition of the Steinian holographs and Beckett’s own “literature of the unword” and finally analyzes two different although resonant paradigms of repetition in writing.
Notes de bas de page
1 Barthes Roland. Le Bruissement de la langue. Essais critiques IV, Paris: Seuil, 1984, 68.
Auteurs
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Isabelle Alfandary
Isabelle Alfandary is Professor of American Literature at the Paris-Est University, France, where she teaches American poetry and critical theory. A specialist of American modernism, she is the author of numerous articles on American poetry and of a book on E.E. Cummings (E.E. Cummings. La minuscule lyrique, Belin, 2002). Her latest book on American modernism (Le risque de la lettre: lectures de la poésie moderniste) will be published in 2011 by E.N.S. Éditions.
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Axel Nesme
Axel Nesme is Professor of American Literature at the University of Lyon. He has published work on Theodore Roethke, Ted Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wallace Stevens. He is the editor of Elizabeth Bishop: The Complete Poems— “And looked our infant sights away” (Ellipses, 2002) and the co-editor of Elizabeth Bishop (Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2007). He has just completed a book on the poetry of mourning, to be published by Honoré Champion.
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