from Where No Meaning Is: Robert Gluck's Jack the Modernist and the Expulsion of Desire
by Rob Halpern
Together
with transgression and abjection, “scandal” offers a critical key to
understanding New Narrative’s emergence in the early 1980s as something more than just a gay reaction to Bay
Area Language Poetry’s investment in form and technique, more than just a queer
counter to the New Sentence, and not only something more but something entirely other, something organic to a specific
set of social constraints. As thematized and formalized in Bob’s work, and in
New Narrative more generally, scandal presents a formal problem as it challenges and pressures, strains and
undermines the limits of articulable emotion bound to particular bodies in
social space. As a formal problem, scandal is aroused when one’s writing
attempts to go where meaning has been banished. I’m thinking here of that line
from Jack the Modernist where Bob
writes, as if creating a categorical imperative : “Go where no meaning is to
create meaning.” Scandal arouses and pressures the accessibility of its own
content, while posing a problem of propriety and property, of social codes and
sanctioned subjects: in short scandal provokes the whole problem of proper
selfhood and the false division between the personal and the impersonal: in
other words, scandal formalizes a problem of politics.
First
I want to consider two of New Narrative’s 19th century antecedents:
Rimbaud and Lautréamont both of whom may have delivered the first of many
deaths blows to so-called ‘personal poetry.’ Whether true or not, I like this
idea because of the contradictions it arouses; for with every radical gesture
toward depersonalization, Rimbaud’s and Lautréamont’s writing becomes evermore personal, not less—strangely raw and confected, visceral and artificial, intimate and constructed. “Personal poetry has had its moment of
juggling with the relative and contorting with the contingent … let us take up
again the indestructible thread of impersonal poetry,” writes Lautréamont. While condemning the pretensions of
self-expression and the fallacies of the ‘merely subjective,’ this fledgling
avant-garde registered the violent convergence of the ‘individual’ with the
market-driven civil society that was its protected life sphere. And Rimbaud pursued a related line of attack
in his emphases on non-identity, “objective poetry” and the social forces that
alienate language and body, work and worker. Rimbaud’s critique of subjective
poetry can’t be separated from the high stakes of subjectivity itself. Unlike
the bourgeois novel that was its antithesis, A Season in Hell began the excruciating process of demystifying the
divisions of public and private upon which the reproduction of the social order
still depends. Rimbaud’s and Lautréamont’s subversion of ‘personal poetry’ thus
became, both gesturally and technically, a social praxis inseparable from the performance of its personal stakes.
One
may not immediately link Rimbaud and Lautréamont to the work of Robert Glück,
associating these early poets of disjunction and détournement, collage and plagiarism, with someone like Kathy Acker
instead. But this convergence of the
personal and the impersonal in Acker, as in Sade and Bataille, underscores the
stakes of Glück’s entire project, the stakes of the most personal of
depersonalizations, while helping to inform the importance of “scandal” for New
Narrative more generally. In other words, de-subjectivization becomes
inseparable from the work’s radical subjectivity.
[…]
Throughout
Bob’s work, the body in orgasm provides both an allegorization and a
literalization of this formal problem. For example, in Jack the Modernist:
The purely physical
deepened, or rather became more incisive, more pressing, relegating any
previous terms as though I were a body torn into existence. I, my identity, was
more and more a part of my body so I/it cried out with each released breath,
not to express myself but as a by-product of physical absorption. But the
spasms that were not me overtook and became me along with a sense of dread. I
felt like a tooth being pulled. I covered my eyes and laughed once with excitement
and dismay; I yielded to the gathering fullness with shame as though I pissed
thinking everyone can see me, and
glanced down with confusion at my sperm. (54-5)
And
again a little later in Jack:
Getting fucked and
masturbated produces an orgasm that can be read in two ways, like the painting
of a Victorian woman with her sensual hair piled up who gazes into the mirror
of her vanity table. Then the same lights and darks reveal a different set of contours:
her head becomes one eye, the reflection of her face another eye and her mirror
becomes the dome of a grinning skull/woman/skull/woman/skull—I wanted my orgasm
to fall between those images. That's not
really a place. I know. The pious Victorian names his visual pun ‘Vanity.’
I rename it ‘Identity.’ (55)
There
is nothing gratuitous about Bob’s attempt to write into sexuality’s
“unspeakable”—this is not writing sex for the sake of writing sex—nor is it
therapeutic or merely an exercise in creating expressive content: it is rather
a conscientious social practice to bring
into language something that has been banished from it—or something that had
never been there to begin with. To
maintain the boundary between the speakable and the unspeakable is to police
the social order, to reproduce the structure of illicit zones. To go where
language cannot go, to speak about that which it is not possible to speak, is
to struggle against the limits of cultural visibility and against the violent
norms of social intelligibility.
[…]
For
Bob, narrative becomes a vehicle that transports the narrating body in social
space precisely around this occlusion of experience, this fault in common sense
that organizes what is and what is not sayable, a metaphorical vehicle that
always risks the intelligibility of its tenor. This is related to the structure
of market-driven pornography, which as a genre reinforces the social divisions
between the visible and the invisible, the licit and the illicit. New Narrative
pushes off the conventions of porn, not
to reproduce the generic codes which police these divisions, but rather to
negotiate, scramble, pressure, and reorganize the divisions themselves. This is
why porn is important: not as an endless provider of sexual content, but as a
formal means to arouse new subjectivities around the dislocated faults between
the perceptible and imperceptible, feeling and its representation.
As
Foucault would have it in his 1963 essay on Bataille called “Preface to
Transgression”: “Transgression carries the limit right to the limit of being;
transgression forces the limit to face the fact of its imminent disappearance,
to find itself in what it excludes (perhaps to be more exact, to recognize itself
for the first time) to experience its positive truth in its downward
fall.” And the limit here—at once
personal and impersonal—recalls the present, which Bob refers to as “the one
thing that has yet to be put into words,” where one must go to create meaning.
The limit that scandal troubles is the frame of intelligibility, which only
becomes visible at the moment it is exceeded, when something that the limit
excludes becomes suddenly visible and perceptible in that proverbial flash of
lightening that illuminates not only this or that transgressive content as it
migrates from nothingness to being, but the whole fucking structure that
determines what is and what is not at any particular moment in
historical time.
This
has its analog in the way the self becomes perceptible as a structure of
feeling wherein the absolute distance lives within the most proximate
closeness. This is not a metaphysical structure but a social ontology: a
struggle over what is perceptible as social being. And this may be Robert Glück’s
most intimate concern.
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