The Calamity Form

On Poetry and Social Life

Anahid Nersessian

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780226701318
  9780226701288
• eBook ISBN:
  9780226701455
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Romanticism coincided with two major historical developments: the Industrial Revolution, and with it, a turning point in our relationship to the earth, its inhabitants, and its climate. Drawing on Marxism and philosophy of science, The Calamity Form shines new light on Romantic poetry, identifying a number of rhetorical tropes used by writers to underscore their very failure to make sense of our move to industrialization.
 
Anahid Nersessian explores works by Friedrich Hölderlin, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and others to argue that as the human and ecological costs of industry became clear, Romantic poetry adopted formal strategies—among them parataxis, the setting of elements side by side in a manner suggestive of postindustrial dissonance, and apostrophe, here an address to an absent or vanishing natural environment—as it tried and failed to narrate the calamities of capitalism. These tropes reflect how Romantic authors took their bewilderment and turned it into a poetics: a theory of writing, reading, and understanding poetry as an eminently critical act. Throughout, Nersessian pushes back against recent attempts to see literature as a source of information on par with historical or scientific data, arguing instead for an irreducibility of poetic knowledge. Revealing the ways in which these Romantic works are of their time but not about it, The Calamity Form ultimately exposes the nature of poetry's relationship to capital—and capital's ability to hide how it works.

1

Parataxis; or, Modern Gardens

Now there, said he, pointing his finger, I make a comma, and there, pointing to another spot where a more decided turn is proper, I make a colon: at another part (where an interruption is desirable to break the view) a parenthesis—now a full stop, and then I begin another subject.

HANNAH MORE, journal entry for December 1782

Hic Rhodus, hic saltus. . . . Hier ist die Rose, hier tanze!

[Here is Rhodes, here the leap. . . . Here is the Rose, dance here!]

G. W. F. HEGEL, Preface to Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 1821

Parataxis, like history, is one damn thing after another. “Somewhere, some there, disorder out, entangled in language.” It is a figure of insubordination with no respect for dependency or the logic of causes. “I was reading several books at once, usually three. If faster, then more.” You expect syntax to explain things to you, to say how one thing follows upon or comes out of the thing that came before it, to build a thought upward as the sentence moves onward. A paratactical sentence, however, tells no stories and makes no arguments. “The typewriter at night was classical.” The size of things stops mattering: no sequence, no rank. This makes it hard to divine the expository purchase of the words sitting side by side. What comes first; what is more basic, primal, effective, or co-efficient; which event sets off the others; which others could not have happened without it? “As the storm approached it was as if the blue slowly evaporated from the sky, leaving the sky merely a pale shadow of itself.” Where in a parataxis should we stand to see the whole picture? “Why isn’t the reflection in the mirror flat, since the mirror itself is flat.”1

This chapter takes parataxis as a variation on what John Dixon Hunt calls garden syntax, the winding, seemingly hodgepodge arrangement of discrete particulars in a designated space. Like the paratactical sentence, the garden’s syntax is neither casual nor conjunctive. Every element has been chosen and thoughtfully arranged, and yet none obviously follows from, is attendant upon, or is regulated by any other: what goes on in a garden is, as Marvell’s Mower puts it, uncertain and adulterate, strange and unauthorized. If there is some significance to be retrieved from the insistent procession of one thing after another, it lies in the formal technique of disjunction itself. Over the course of the eighteenth century, modern poetry learned from modern gardens habits of looking and thinking trained on the experience of the present as a regime of juxtaposition, the leftovers from the demise of a more integrated social order. In the midst of economic stratification and imperial metastasis, writing paratactically becomes a means of exploring both this mosaic condition and poetry’s inadequacy to it. It becomes, that is, an expression of life uprooted and transposed, a dark inverse of the garden as “heaven’s centre, Nature’s lap,/And Paradise’s only map.”2

Not all the poems I discuss here are about gardens, but they are all by gardenists, Dixon Hunt’s word for writers who adapt the garden’s form and phenomenology to their own purposes. For them, the garden is the flip side of an everyday chaos felt as perceptual derangement or lapse. Capability Brown, the grammatical gardener in my first epigraph, punctuates his landscapes with breaks and cutoffs, not joints. Alexander Pope, writing about his day traipsing through the backyard of Sherborne, drifts through “sudden Rises, Falls, and Turns of Ground” of which “tis very hard to give an exact idea”; a hill leads to a grove followed by an arbor, after which erupts “a natural Cascade . . . from whence you lose your eyes upon the glimmering of the Waters under the wood, and your ears in the constant dashing of the waves.”3 As “an increasingly prominent and crucial feature of the century’s aesthetic patterns,” the garden sets the standard for cognitive as well as syntactical incohesion.4 Often pitched as the antithesis of the turmoil of the world outside its walls, it is nonetheless the proving ground of an emergent set of compositional techniques, a dialect of fracture that will come to be called Romantic.

The analogy between gardens and parataxis is useful in making headway from the gardens of Marvell and his Mower to William Cowper’s late eighteenth-century greenhouse to Derek Jarman’s late Romantic pots of “sempervivums . . . with the nuclear power station as a backdrop.”5 We might play at framing this sequence in terms similar to those offered by Joshua Clover, who identifies riot, strike, and riot prime as forms of class struggle corresponding to different phases in capital’s development. Without mapping the early modern hortus conclusus, the greenhouse, and the nuclear garden onto the historical forms of mercantile, industrial, and finance capitalism, I would nonetheless like to experiment with asking how a gardenist poetics confronts the collective immiseration erupting just within its sightline and yet never (or so it would seem) in full view.

To be specific, I’m interested in the capricious nonalignment between poetic thinking and social critique that parataxis brings to the fore. My claim is that by understanding parataxis as a trope of disruption—specifically, of orthodox modes of explanation, where events follow sequentially from the events that precede them—we may begin to see its simple besideness or underexplained contiguity as a proposition, an attempt to make a plan for “mediat[ing] between is and ought.”6 This would be in keeping with the well-known account of parataxis given by Theodor Adorno, who claims it as an invocation and working-through of dialectics, by which Adorno means the assertion that concepts coproduce with the forms of physical things.

Because it rejects the linear norms of discursive thought, parataxis is able to effect a “constitutive dissociation” within language such that language can “evade the logical hierarchy of a subordinating syntax.”7 In suspending hierarchy at the level of the sentence, parataxis—or so Adorno has it—figures the possibility of its real-life abolition. More to the point, it renders the transcendence of what Marx describes as the historical contradiction between essence (what it is possible for a human being to be) and existence (what a human being is forced to be) on the page, with ought and is brought suddenly, enigmatically together. This is a tall order and, for Adorno, nothing less than the task of poetry. What we are looking for in parataxis is “the qualitative leap that in responding to fate leads out of it,” for the momentum of a poetics capable of projecting thought and language beyond their own historical limitations (“P,” 113).

You could call this a Pindaric leap, the saltus dithyrambus that moves from one topic to another in response to some higher logic. The term Pindaric leap alludes to two things: to the fact that the Greek poet Pindar was known for his parataxes, which is to say his rocketing from clause to clause without the use of grammatical connectives, and to a line in one of his poems that reads like a compressed ars poetica in defense of that method. “Dig a long pit for my jump from here,” he writes in the fifth of his Nemean odes; “I have a light spring in my knees.” Pindar has just been saying a few words in praise of Pytheas, the young victor of the athletic games at Nemea, when suddenly he decides he’s got something else on his mind, namely “wealth or strength of hands or iron-clad war.” It’s a sudden shift in focus and a long way to go: he’ll have to jump.8

Why does the jump, the Pindaric leap, require a pit? In Nemean 5, the pit measures the distance between where the poet stands and where he wants to end up. It appears as a promise of success and as a threat of failure: imagine falling into the trench meant to gauge the magnitude of your achievement. It’s the same threat faced by William Cowper when he, like Pindar, sets his mind to speak of wealth, war, and power. In his highly paratactic poem The Task, power means not the “strength of hands” but their products—it means, in a word, commodities. To sing the sofa, as Cowper says he will, comes to demand a terrifying leap of its own, a replication of the commodity’s salto mortale that can only end either in apocalyptic fantasies or in the airless retreat of the greenhouse.

Cowper is my primary case study here, although the chapter touches, first, on the Pindaric experiments of Friedrich Hölderlin and eighteenth-century parataxis more broadly. Following that discussion, I turn to pulling parataxes out of Cowper’s Task and showing, simply, how they work—how they upend the expository procedures of epic and push toward a turbulent view of a dissociated present. In this poem, the comforts of suburbia are tucked inside a larger frame of planetary suffering, and as Cowper shuttles between detailed scenes of domestic happiness and the murkier, grimier panoramas of world history, it becomes harder to say what is central to The Task and what peripheral to it. Is this a poem about the quiet life or about its toxicity? Do its experimental energies inhere in its cheeky, chatty blank verse or in its sprawl, its distension of the line across well-organized entropy?

Cowper’s parataxis accommodates all these investments while refusing to present itself as a triumph of world-making or realist inclusivity: Paradise Lost or Middlemarch his poem is not. Compelled to make both plain and poetic the saturation of consciousness by what Cowper would call trade, The Task takes linearity off the table to sketch moods of unstructured anguish that cannot be gotten past, not even by Pindaric leap or escalation. Similar in this regard are the syntactical experiments of Derek Jarman, the filmmaker, diarist, and poet for whom the antagonisms of the present literally concretize in the nuclear power plant whose shadow looms over his Dungeness garden, a parataxis made possible only by a “capitalism . . . on its last legs” (MN, 234). In the wild collision of images that propels both these gardenists’ work, various forms of life appear at once far-flung and brutally consolidated. Their poetry, in particular, beats out a crucible of apprehension in two senses of the word: it coughs up unities where none could previously be recognized, and it is exceptionally nervous, anxious and indefinite and unquiet.

To some degree, what The Task longs for is a bird’s-eye view of the present, an Archimedean vantage on capital’s global structure. The awkward and abrupt shifts between topics, between tones, and between lyric and epic registers that make The Task such difficult reading express the pathos of this longing, and how it feels to receive the agony of others as news we cannot grasp but cannot help absorb. For Cowper, the capacity to take in pain on the edges of his own existence is precisely what the greenhouse, with its exotic plants and illusion of sanctuary, tests. Inside this most artificial of gardens, there is a retreat from the call to understand everything, to find meaning in it all. And yet it is also here that the possibility of an unexpected convergence between private consciousness, social totality, and moral judgment startles into view, whatever good it does Cowper, his poem, or us.

Two centuries later, Jarman uses his garden as an extension of his filmmaking and its pop-punk ethos—a middle finger to the nuclear power plant that “hiccoughs” fewer than two miles from his home, and to the erratic weather patterns that alternately nurture and spoil his flowers from one day to the next (MN, 302). The garden is an act of persistence and grieving, for the countryside, for the seasons, for an unthinkable number of friends lost, along with Jarman’s own eyesight, to the AIDS epidemic. The asyndetonic list of prescription drugs that ends Modern Nature, a collection of his journal entries from 1989–90, plainly echoes the catalogs of flowers strung beside accounts of gallery openings, fundraisers, visits and phone calls and frustrations with his film The Garden. Each inventory marks an effort to render the concatenation of crises we now tend to herd under the awkward aegis of neoliberalism: crises of health, of energy, of the planet, and what Jarman would unapologetically call culture. From his vantage point at “the end of the globe,” in a house fittingly named Prospect Cottage, Jarman follows Cowper in offering a locodescription of capital as a poison in the bodies of living things. It’s a project that is upfront about its informal reworking of Romantic genres “almost 200 years,” as Jarman says, “since Dorothy Wordsworth wrote her journal in Alfoxden” (MN, 68).

Jarman’s work is highly digressive, in a way that can sometimes approach an accidental parody of art-house sensibilities. In what follows, I’ll argue that his paratactical drifts are, in fact, polemical; more specifically, that they rehearse the supersession or overriding of evidence by insistence. In this, they imagine a pose like that of Cindy Patton’s agnostic militancy, an impassioned indifference regarding the causal logic of harm. For Jarman, the power plant on the front lawn is literally, figuratively, and politically adjacent to the man dying of AIDS inside the house when the weather in England in November is already much too hot. Someone is responsible, or something: Thatcher, capital, the cops. It’s not all one, but it is beside the point. Parataxis is the figure matching this pose because it simply does not care how things happen; it cares merely that they are happening and about the obligation that they be stopped.

What does wild mint have to do with AZT? What do canaries have to do with “Ritafer, Pyroxidine, Methamine, Folinic Acid, Triludan, Sulphadiazine, Carbamazepine” (MN, 313)? The linkages are inconvenient and also inexplicable. They emerge from Jarman’s own position of depleted vitality, his anger a deathbed charge to no one in particular. This perhaps undermines its effectiveness, and it is an interesting feature of parataxis that the expansive, hyperbolically omniscient poetics it enables tends to insist upon the extreme isolation of the poet, who stands amid a world of things but not among them. We shouldn’t forget that the pathos of being unable to understand the present in a serious way, to discern it as a consequence of the past and not just a prophecy of the apocalyptic future, is also the despair of the bourgeois subject. Cowper represents its early fortunes, Jarman its latter-day. This is not a complaint but an observation about the performance of social self-discovery that their work represents. That performance is not really born of the consciousness of class. It is born, instead, of a desire to translate an economic bearing into an emotional one.

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In Adorno’s “Parataxis: Zur späten Lyrik Hölderlins,” parataxis is defined in opposition to “the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• 1: Parataxis; or, Modern Gardens
• 2: Wordsworth’s Obscurity
• 3: Keats and Catachresis
• 4: Apostrophe: Clouds
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index