Infidel Poetics

Riddles, Nightlife, Substance

Daniel Tiffany

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780226803111
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

Poetry has long been regarded as the least accessible of literary genres. But how much does the obscurity that confounds readers of a poem differ from, say, the slang that seduces listeners of hip-hop? Infidel Poetics examines not only the shared incomprensibilities of poetry and slang, but poetry's genetic relation to the spectacle of underground culture.Charting connections between vernacular poetry, lyric obscurity, and types of social relations—networks of darkened streets in preindustrial cities, the historical underworld of taverns and clubs, the subcultures of the avant-garde—Daniel Tiffany shows that obscurity in poetry has functioned for hundreds of years as a medium of alternative societies. For example, he discovers in the submerged tradition of canting poetry and its eccentric genres—thieves' carols, drinking songs, beggars' chants—a genealogy of modern nightlife, but also a visible underworld of social and verbal substance, a demimonde for sale.Ranging from Anglo-Saxon riddles to Emily Dickinson, from the icy logos of Parmenides to the monadology of Leibniz, from Mother Goose to Mallarmé, Infidel Poetics offers an exhilarating account of the subversive power of obscurity in word, substance, and deed.

ONE

The Spectacle of Obscurity

Hark! hark! the dogs do bark,

The Beggars are coming to town.

Some in rags & some in jags,

And some in velvet gowns.

MOTHER GOOSE RHYME

When one of the warriors in The Iliad finds himself in mortal danger on the battlefield, a god will sometimes rescue him by making him invisible. Homer describes these disappearances by saying that the god “hides” (κάλύπτω) the warrior in “thick mist” (ὴέρι πολλῇ) or “darkness” (νυκτὶ).¹ The German critic and philosopher G. E. Lessing identifies these tropes as examples of the special effects of which poetry alone—in contrast to painting—is capable: “concealment by cloud or night is, for the poet, nothing more than a poetic expression for rendering a thing invisible.”² Further, he explains, “it was not because a cloud appeared in the place of the abducted body, but because we think of that which is wrapped in mist as being invisible” (69). Hence, the reader comprehends the effects of the verbal emblem of darkness. Lessing, for this reason, declares, “the cloud is a true hieroglyphic” (68): the dark mist becomes an index of disappearance. Since the substances—air and obscurity—enveloping the endangered mortal in the trope of disappearance may be understood as figures for the meteoric phenomenon of the poem itself—for the rhapsodic “air” and its rhetorical darkness—one must conclude that the obscurity of poetry in general is likewise a “hieroglyphic,” a substance, to be deciphered (not for its content, but for its expressive and pragmatic effects). Further, the device of the Homeric mist, a luxurious accessory of the gods, offers a thesis concerning the task of poetic obscurity, an image of its aesthetic function: obscurity is a way of making things disappear with words. At the same time, disappearance becomes a legible, material event through the verbal craft of obscurity. Indeed, crafting obscurity in a poem perfects the palpable art of disappearance.

Every secret, however deep or dark, produces what Eve Sedgwick, for example, in her study of the homosexual closet, calls “privacy effects,” a revelation of “unknowing as unknowing, not as a vacuum or as the blank it can pretend to be but as a weighty and occupied and consequential epistemological space.”³ Thus, the figurative absence characterizing secrecy, privacy, or obscurity presents itself as a spectacle to be consumed, deciphered, judged: “ ‘Closetedness’ itself is a performance,” she contends, “initiated as such by the speech act of a silence—not a particular silence, but a silence that accrues particularity by fits and starts” (3). The “clear but confused perception” attributed by Leibniz to monadic substance may be regarded as a metaphysical analogue for the clear signature of the unknowable, for the spectacle of obscurity, for the transitivity of the sublime. Every phenomenon characterized by secrecy, privacy, or obscurity makes an appearance in the world and can therefore be comprehended by the unmistakable features of its putative absence.

Surveying what she calls “topologies of privacy,” Sedgwick (like Simmel) analyzes “the projective potency of the open secret” (145) principally as a formal structure. Thus, because the secrecy of the closet, which Sedgwick describes as a “riddle,” can be reduced to a purely formal operation, she understands that “the establishment of the spectacle of the homosexual closet as a presiding guarantor of rhetorical community…extends vastly beyond the ostensible question of the homosexual” (250). That is to say, the dialectic of “privacy effects” pertains to a variety of communities structured along the axes of secrecy/ disclosure, obscurity/ transparency, privacy/ publicity. Any type of hermetic phenomenon thus produces an array of privacy effects.

Poetry, by analogy, may be said to produce certain obscurity effects. One could also contend that these “obscurity effects” betray a model of expression mirroring the inexplicit relations among individuals forming a secret society—a world apart from the world—but also the occult relations between discontinuous worlds. The anonymity and anarchic relations of such communities would help to explain Simmel’s contention that “secrecy is thus, so to speak, a transitional structure between being and not being”—between identity and namelessness, order and anarchy.⁴

Strictly speaking, however, the “obscurity effects” generated by poetry must be distinguished from obscurity, per se, a verbal “substance” defined by a lack of understanding, communication, and external relations. Though not unrelated to the phenomenon of obscurity effects, the problem of lyric hermeticism requires more careful consideration of the solipsistic nature of verbal substance, as a precondition of lyric sociability. A model of negative sociability, a lyric monadology distinct from the obscurity effects—the verbal fetishism—generated by the poetic enigma, therefore arises from the conditions of lyric discontinuity and solipsism. For the nature of metaphysical substance presumes, by analogy, an absence of sensory relations between “being-in-language” and the physical world, between substance and phenomenon, Being and “not being” (to invoke Simmel’s hypothesis about secrecy).

The hypothesis of obscurity effects nevertheless raises the question of whether secrecy, privacy, or obscurity is possible in any rigorous, or authentic, sense. Accordingly, the permeability of the secret must be assessed directly in relation to lyric poetry, especially as it pertains to the riddle, which openly stages the problematic of obscurity. One must bear in mind the riddle’s double origin in antiquity as oracular utterance and as a congenial form of wit. For the puzzling words of the oracle, which neither hide nor reveal, are at once genial and congenial. The riddle reminds us of the abysmal nature of words by displaying its obscurity, by turning secrecy into an event and making a spectacle of incomprehension. Indeed, what is remarkable about the structure of the riddle—about any closed structure—is its inherent openness, its presupposition of exposure, its apocalyptic nature. The privacy of the closet, as Sedgwick reminds us, is only its most obvious—and misleading—feature; its permeability and expressiveness remain concealed, unacknowledged. The common secret, never more than an open secret, nevertheless maintains the illusion of absolute secrecy.

In the Vernacular

Lyric obscurity, like any commodity, is a volatile substance. Historically, the cultivation of literacy, inconceivable without the binding measures of poetry, spells out the affinities of grammar, glamour, and grimoire, yet grade-school teachers do not ordinarily give writing assignments with the prescription “Be obscure!” (Diderot’s notorious exhortation to poets—perhaps the earliest programmatic call for obscurity in poetry).⁵ Nursery rhymes are cherished at once for their pedagogical value and their nonsensical charm, while modern poetry—catching up with Diderot’s advice—is simply condemned for its obscurity. These fluctuations in the prestige and the allure, not to mention the usefulness, of obscurity help to sustain the perceived gulf between the ode and the nursery rhyme, between literary and vernacular poetries.

Lyric obscurity may also serve, however, as a medium linking vernacular poetry to its literary counterpart. Stéphane Mallarmé, for example, whose verse represents a kind of gold standard, one might say, of lyric obscurity, toiled as a young writer in one of poetry’s frivolous underworlds, the topsy-turvy realm of Mother Goose, converting 141 English nursery rhymes into veritable prose poems.⁶ One would want to mention that Mallarmé was sampling Mother Goose at about the same time he first began translating the verse of Edgar Allan Poe, but it is more important to stress that he produced these nursery rhymes for his day job as an English teacher, as grammatical exercises for a classroom of chattering ten-year-olds. Mallarmé discovered in the verbal prosthetics of the classroom, comprising mnemonic phrases, philological jargon, and antiquarian kitsch, a sort of glamour akin to the netherworld of his own poetry.

Indeed, one of Mallarmé’s songs from the nursery discloses the contagious effect of the rhyme’s illogic on the translator. Mallarmé adopted the practice of presenting the English song followed by his prose rendering of it in French (which I translate below):

Hey! diddle, diddle,

The cat and the fiddle,

The cow jumped over the moon;

The little dog laughed

To see such sport

While the dish ran after the spoon.

What a strange scene! Look at the cat with his violin—and that’s not all: there’s the moon, and a cow jumping right over it! I act like the little dog, laughing hard to see such foolishness. And then it seemed to me, as I contemplated this spectacle, that my ideas ran away with themselves, one after another, just as—in the words of the song—the dish runs after the spoon. Hey! diddle, diddle.⁷

Mallarmé alters the original verse considerably, identifying the speaker of the poem with the laughing dog, while acknowledging that the “spectacle” of illogic he is witnessing replicates itself in his head, in the realm of ideas. We might also regard the strange scene (curieux tableau) he contemplates as the verbal “spectacle” of the nursery rhyme itself, so that the poet finds reproduced in his head a spectacle of obscurity made of words. Mallarmé does indeed repeat the nonsensical invocation, “Hey! diddle, diddle” at the end of his prose poem (which does not occur in the English verse), suggesting that the poet has adopted the magical phrase for his own purposes, intending perhaps to reprise the “spectacle” of the nursery rhyme.

Mallarmé’s transactions in lyric obscurity—between the illogic of Mother Goose and his own, evolving Symbolist doctrine—demonstrate a particular orientation between literary verse and vernacular poetry, which may be deduced from the etymology of the term itself. The Latin root, vernaculus, of the English word “vernacular” means “pertaining to slaves,” yet the Latin term verna designates more precisely a domestic, or house, slave.⁸ Thus, the speaker of vernacular language occupies an ambiguous position that is at once within the master’s house—or the “house of poetry,” to refashion a concept of Heidegger’s—and fundamentally alien to the dwelling of the dominant tradition.⁹ One could argue, with Hugo Friedrich, that modern poetry (of the literary sort) develops a programmatic rationale for obscurity consistent with a genealogy of literary precedents; yet Mallarmé’s dalliance with Mother Goose suggests that vernacular poetry as well, with its diverse repertoire of masking techniques and deliberate obfuscation, might be viewed as an inscrutable model, or catalyst, for certain kinds of obscurity commonly associated with literary modernity.¹⁰ More boldly, as the etymology of the term suggests, one should perhaps regard the vernacular (to paraphrase Hermann Broch’s definition of “kitsch”) as a foreign body lodged in the system of literary poetry.¹¹

Anon

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term “obscurity” refers not only to “lack of perspicuity in language, uncertainty of meaning,” in a verbal sense, but to certain modes of social identity. In reference to social being, the term “obscure” means “of persons, their station, descent, etc.: Not illustrious or noted; unknown to fame; humble, lowly, mean.” This definition suggests that being enveloped by obscurity in a social sense—a kind of social death, one might say—resembles the act of erasure, the partial disappearance, produced by verbal obscurity. Indeed, the general “uncertainty of meaning” associated with verbal obscurity may well be derived originally, not from certain kinds of texts, but from the speech habits of commoners or marginal social classes—viewed from the vantage point of the dominant, or literate, social class. Thus, the general notion of literary obscurity would be contingent on a social misunderstanding of the material and historical features of demotic speech: dialect, jargon, pidgin, slang. The principle of lyric obscurity, in the abstract, would therefore always refer obliquely to the impression made on the uninitiated listener by the siren song of the vernacular. From this perspective, the atavistic trait of lyric obscurity would be traceable to a dark repertoire of infidel forms: riddles, thieves’ carols, beggars’ chants.

The social definition of “obscurity” yields other nuances pertaining to a verbal and social underworld of lyric obscurity. Persons of “obscure” origin who are “humble, lowly, or mean” are at the same time “not illustrious or noted; unknown to fame.” That is to say, in the eyes of the dominant, literate class, the “obscure” strata of society are—or should be—inconspicuous, all but invisible. “Obscure” in this sense is therefore essentially a synonym for “anonymous,” a form of identity with a direct bearing on the sources of vernacular literature and—more specifically, as it pertains to poetry—on the historical construction of authorship and publication.

For lyric poems have historically been published, from the poetry miscellanies of the early seventeenth century until the late nineteenth century, under the nameless signature of “Anon.”¹² While the practice of anonymous publication was common with prose texts as well, it began earlier, lasted longer, and was generally more prevalent with poetry. Most poetry in literary history has indeed been published anonymously or under a pseudonym, and the adjective “anonymous” (abbreviated to Anon) was used solely in relation to nameless, or unnamed, authors until the appearance of the noun “anonymity” in the middle of the nineteenth century. Thus, the formulations of modern subjectivity and social identity associated with the term “anonymity” are inescapably linked to the curious signature of “Anon,” a kind of accessory to poetry for centuries, marking the ambiguous act of publication. “Anonymity,” like “obscurity,” is therefore a mode of social identity directly linked to lyric poetry: a form of social obscurity modeled on the uncertain and epiphanic appearance of poetic language. Furthermore, just as lyric obscurity is a verbal property alternately prized and shunned in various contexts, so anonymity is, as Virginia Woolf observes, a kind of “possession” used strategically by authors for centuries to diverse effect.¹³

Kryptonite

While lyric obscurity may owe its general disposition to the vernacular parlance of various social underworlds, the history of the term’s usage reveals that it gains broader significance by its lexical and figurative correlation with the epistemological status of metaphysical substance. Philosophy’s rendering of the inscrutable substance of Being thus provides a coherent and distinctive component of the greater spectacle of obscurity. Turning to metaphysics to help define the substance of lyric obscurity—an extravagant idea, on the face of it—would seem only to exacerbate...