Infrathin

An Experiment in Micropoetics

Marjorie Perloff

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780226712772
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

Esteemed literary critic Marjorie Perloff reconsiders the nature of the poetic, examining its visual, grammatical, and sound components. The "infrathin" was Marcel Duchamp's playful name for the most minute shade of difference: that between the report of a gunshot and the appearance of the bullet hole, or between two objects in a series made from the same mold. "Eat" is not the same thing as "ate." The poetic, Marjorie Perloff suggests, can best be understood as the language of infrathin. For in poetry, whether in verse or prose, words and phrases that are seemingly unrelated in ordinary discourse are realigned by means of sound, visual layout, etymology, grammar, and construction so as to "make it new."In her revisionist "micropoetics, " Perloff draws primarily on major modernist poets from Stein and Yeats to Beckett, suggesting that the usual emphasis on what this or that poem is "about, " does not do justice to its infrathin possibilities. From Goethe's eight-line "Wanderer's Night Song" to Eliot's Four Quartets, to the minimalist lyric of Rae Armantrout, Infrathin is designed to challenge our current habits of reading and to answer the central question: what is it that makes poetry poetry?

1

“A Rose Is a Rose Is a Rrose Sélavy”

Stein, Duchamp, and the “Illegible” Portrait

In 1935, as Gertrude Stein recalls it, Picasso was suffering from what we might call painter’s block.1 Finding himself at an impasse in his personal life, for two years he stopped painting altogether, taking up writing instead. “He commenced to write poems,” Stein remarks, “but this writing was never his writing. After all the egoism of a painter is not at all the egoism of a writer, there is nothing to say about it, it is not. No” (Picasso, 67). And in Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), Stein recalls telling the great painter, who was perhaps her closest friend:

Your poetry . . . is more offensive than just bad poetry I do not know why it is but it just is, somebody who can really do something very well when he does something else which he cannot do and in which he cannot live it is particularly repellent, now you I said to him, you never read a book in your life that was not written by a friend and then not then and you never had any feelings about any words, words annoy you more than they do anything else so how can you write you know better. . . . all right go on doing it but don’t go on trying to make me tell you it is poetry.2

Stein’s almost visceral reaction here was prompted, not just, as is often assumed, by Picasso’s invasion of her territory or by her surprisingly traditional insistence on the separation of the arts. The deeper reason—and we tend to forget this when we discuss the relationship of the two—is that Picasso had never so much as pretended to read Stein’s writing. For him, Gertrude was a wonderful patron and copain—he loved coming to her salon and gossiping with her on a daily basis—but her writing, especially given that it was in English, a language he couldn’t, after all, read, was hardly within his discourse radius. Not surprisingly, when he did take on “poetry” in the mid-1930s, his models were the then prominent French surrealists, beginning with his good friend André Breton. Here, for example, is the opening of a typical Picasso prose poem from 1935, as translated from the Spanish by Jerome Rothenberg:

I mean a dish a cup a nest a knife a tree a frying pan a nasty spill while strolling on the sharp edge of a cornice breaking up into a thousand pieces screaming like a madwoman and lying down to sleep stark naked legs spread wide over the odor from a knife that just beheaded the wine froth and nothing bleeds from it except for lips like butterflies and asks you for no handouts for a visit to the bulls with a cicada like a feather in the wind3

The passage is characteristically Surrealist in its mysterious juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated images—“a tree a frying pan,” a “cornice . . . screaming like a madwoman”—its emphasis on violence—“stark naked legs spread wide over the odor from a knife”—and its collocation of fanciful metaphor and simple syntax. A passionate advocate of Picasso’s early Cubism, which she adapted for literary purposes in such works as Tender Buttons (1912), Stein could hardly have approved of the painter’s Surrealist poetic mode, with its elaborate metaphors, so antithetical to her own constructions built on the repetition, with variation, of abstract nouns and indeterminate pronouns, articles, and prepositions.4 “The surrealists,” Stein remarks dismissively in her discussion of Picasso’s painting of the early 1930s, “still see things as everyone sees them, they complicate them in a different way but the vision is that of everyone else, in short the complication is the complication of the twentieth century but the vision is that of the nineteenth century” (Picasso, 65).

This critique of surrealism, whether just or unjust, is echoed by another of Stein’s contemporaries. In describing his Box of 1913–14 (the Green Box) to Pierre Cabanne, Marcel Duchamp explains that the assemblage of miscellaneous notes placed inside the box was designed as an art object “not to be ‘looked at’ in the aesthetic sense of the word,” but as a conduit for the removal of what we might call the retinal contract that had dominated painting from Courbet to the present:

Before, painting had other functions: it could be religious, philosophical, moral. If I had the chance to take an antiretinal attitude, it unfortunately hasn’t changed much; our whole century is completely retinal, except for the Surrealists, who tried to go outside it somewhat. And still, they didn’t go so far! In spite of the fact that [André] Breton says he believes in judging from a Surrealist point of view, deep down he’s still really interested in painting in the retinal sense. It’s absolutely ridiculous. It must change.5

Duchamp’s critique of the retinal has its counterpart in Stein’s writing, but the two artists have rarely been linked. For all the critical studies devoted to the relationship of Stein and the Cubists or to Stein’s self-declared debt to Cézanne, what has been curiously ignored is the reverse situation: the influence, if any, of Stein’s verbal composition on the visual artwork of the French contemporaries she lived among. And here Duchamp, whose move to New York in 1915 necessitated the acquisition of English, even as Stein’s expatriation to Paris a decade earlier meant that her “art discourse” (especially with the Spanish painters Picasso and Gris) was to be conducted in French, is the pivotal figure.

The two first met, according to the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in Paris in 1913:

It was not long after this [the winter of 1913] that Mabel Dodge went to America and it was the winter of the armory show which was the first time the general public had a chance to see any of these pictures. It was there that Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending the Staircase was shown.

It was about this time that Picabia and Gertrude Stein met. I remember going to dinner at the Picabias’ and a pleasant dinner it was, Gabrielle Picabia full of life and gaiety, Picabia dark and lively, and Marcel Duchamp looking like a young Norman crusader.

I was always perfectly able to understand the enthusiasm that Marcel Duchamp aroused in New York when he went there in the early years of the war. His brother had just died from the effect of his wounds, his other brother was still at the front and he himself was inapt for military service. He was very depressed and he went to America. Everyone loved him. So much so that it was a joke in Paris when any American arrived in Paris the first thing he said was, and how is Marcel.6

“The young Duchamp,” she wrote a few days later to Mabel Dodge, “looks like a young Englishman and talks very urgently about the fourth dimension.”7 We know that Stein at this time was keenly interested in questions relating to mathematics and so this was a compliment.8

Indeed, Stein’s account in Alice B. Toklas is unusually flattering and without her usual malice—quite unlike, say, her references to Matisse or Pound or Hemingway. The “young Norman crusader”: Duchamp was the son of a notary in the little Normandy town of Blainville, a fact Stein refers to with amusement in Everybody’s Autobiography, where she remarks how many artists—Cocteau, Bernard Faÿ, Dali—were the sons of notaries (26). Duchamp was handsome and charming. And in 1917, Stein was made aware of the brouhaha over Fountain (by a letter from her friend Carl Van Vechten):

This porcelain tribute was bought cold in some plumber shop (where it awaited the call to join some bath room trinity) and sent in. . . . When it was rejected [by the Salon of Independents], Marcel Duchamp at once resigned from the board. Stieglitz is exhibiting the object at “291.” And has made some wonderful photographs of it. The photographs make it look like anything from a Madonna to a Buddha. [See figures 1.1, 1.2]9

1.1 | Marcel Duchamp, Fountain (1917/1964). © Association Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris/Artists Rights Society, New York 2020. Third version, replicated under the direction of the artist in 1964 by the Galerie Schwarz, Milan. Glazed ceramic, 63 × 48 × 35 cm. Photograph: © CNAC/MNAM/Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, New York. Photography: Philippe Migeat/Christian Bahier.

1.2 | Alfred Stieglitz, Fountain by R. Mutt, in The Blind Man (No. 2) (May 1917). Published by Beatrice Wood in collaboration with Marcel Duchamp and Henri-Pierre Roché, edited by Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray. Periodical paper covers, 11 × 8 in. The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950 (1950-134-1053). Photograph: The Philadelphia Museum of Art/Art Resource, New York.

Did Fountain and related Readymades influence Stein’s writing? Yes and no. Her compositions resemble Duchamp’s “objects” in their wholesale rejection of the mimetic contract—a rejection that, to my mind, goes well beyond Cubist distortion and dislocation of what are, after all, still recognizable objects and bodies.10 In this sense, Duchamp’s dismissal of the “retinal” is also hers. Such prose poems as “A Substance in a Cushion” and “A Box” in Tender Buttons, for example, can be related to Duchamp’s Green Box and the later boîtes en valise in their emphasis on what cannot be seen or inferred from the outside. More important, as different as their artistic productions were—Stein, after all, did not use “readymade” or found text—they drew on each other’s work in striking ways—ways that have largely been ignored.

The key text here is Geography and Plays, published in 1922. After the war, when Duchamp, having returned to Paris, called on Stein with their mutual friend Henri-Pierre Roché (the writer who had introduced Gertrude and her brother, Leo, to Picasso and was the subject of a 1909 portrait),11 the discussion was evidently about Stein’s desire to publish a c...