Deafening Modernism

Embodied Language and Visual Poetics in American Literature

Rebecca Sanchez

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781479847501
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Deafening Modernism tells the story of modernism from the perspective of Deaf critical insight. Working to develop a critical Deaf theory independent of identity-based discourse, Rebecca Sanchez excavates the intersections between Deaf and modernist studies. She traces the ways that Deaf culture, history, linguistics, and literature provide a vital and largely untapped resource for understanding the history of American language politics and the impact that history has had on modernist aesthetic production. Discussing Deaf and disability studies in these unexpected contexts highlights the contributions the field can make to broader discussions of the intersections between images, bodies, and text. Drawing on a range of methodological approaches, including literary analysis and history, linguistics, ethics, and queer, cultural, and film studies, Sanchez sheds new light on texts by T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Charlie Chaplin, and many others. By approaching modernism through the perspective of Deaf and disability studies, Deafening Modernism reconceptualizes deafness as a critical modality enabling us to freshly engage topics we thought we knew.

1. Impersonality: Tradition and the Inescapable Body

A song, a spirit, a white star that moves across the heavens to mark the end of a world epoch or a presage to some coming glory. Yet she is embodied terribly a human being, a woman, a personality as the most impersonal become when they confront their fellow beings.

—H.D., Notes on Thought and Vision

In Notes on Thought and Vision, H.D. describes the Greek poet Sapho in terms that signal some of the preeminent tensions between impersonality, personality, and the embodied subject that emerge in both modernist writing and the scholarly tradition that has developed to analyze it. The writer here is specifically, terribly, embodied, but the boundaries of that body are porous, enabling her to be simultaneously “a song, a spirit, a white star”—an aesthetic creation, a source of inspiration, and an element of the environment. In the moment in which she encounters the other, however, impersonality transforms into personality, an embodied subjectivity, even as something of that impersonality lingers in the unexpected syntax of the description’s final line and the pronoun’s insistence on generality rather than specificity; “they” rather than “she.” The poet is presented as impersonal—diffuse, porous, interpenetrated by the world around her—but simultaneously “a human being, a woman, a personality.”1

The intriguingly ambiguous status of the body in H.D.’s description of poetic impersonality highlights the challenge that corporeality poses to the more canonical versions from which it is largely excluded and highlights the body’s status as a potentially mediating force between the two, not merely a synonym of “personality” but an epistemic structure that illuminates both. Its frequent elision from the discourse represents a doubly missed opportunity, one that appears all the more striking given the hyperexposure of authorial bodies in the early twentieth century in the form of lecture tours, poetry readings, and an increasingly market-driven literary culture. Our narratives of modernism have been trapped between this highly personal celebrity and an apparently disembodied impersonality, the only resolution achieved by positing the latter as an elitist reaction against the former in a recapitulation of a high/low-brow binary that modernist scholarship has spent recent decades deconstructing.2

This is a critical impasse in which formulations of poetic relationality derived from ASL literature—where authorial personality and impersonality are structurally bound to the literal body of the artist—prove instructive. The model of embodied impersonality that I develop based on the work of the ASL poets Peter Cook, Kenny Lerner, and Debbie Rennie is also helpful in reevaluating heretofore marginalized modernist works that have been written off as out of step with the dominant models of poetic experimentation. By linking one such set of texts—Sherwood Anderson’s A New Testament and Mid-American Chants—to elements of ASL literature, this chapter recovers their experimental value and engages them as a springboard for the production of alternative and embodied modes of poetic ethics.

Depersonalization

From its most influential theorization in T. S. Eliot’s 1921 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” the modernist doctrine of impersonality has proven something of a problem, both in the deconstructive, productively challenging sense and as a foundational ambiguity in need of clarification. Both impersonality and its doppelgänger personality attempt to communicate something about the interaction between writers and texts; as Eliot puts it, “this Impersonal theory of poetry is the relation of the poem to its author.”3 The essay’s structure emphasizes the centrality of this relationship; the first half addresses Eliot’s exploration of the ways that tradition should be incorporated into verse through an understanding “not of the pastness of the past but of its presence,” while the second more specifically focuses on the status of the writer.4

According to Eliot, it is by recognizing this presentness of the past that the writer becomes capable of producing quality verse. The artist, that is, expresses not his or her own emotions of an event—the difference between art and the event is always absolute—nor Wordsworth’s emotions “reflected in tranquility,” but rather this complex interaction with tradition.5 As Eliot explains, “impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality. . . . [The poet has] not a ‘personality’ to express but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality.”6

This sense of one’s literary output deriving not from oneself but from external sources was far from novel. As Homer’s invocation at the beginning of The Odyssey—“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy”—famously illustrates, the ancient Greeks believed in the power of entities external to writers who would speak through them in order to produce great works of art.7 Similarly, ancient Romans approached genius as something one was temporarily inhabited by rather than as a stable category of identity.8 In The Poetics of Impersonality, Maud Ellmann points out that this understanding of the poetic muse also characterized much of the romantic verse that Eliot specifically tried to distance himself from, especially as it reemerged in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discussions of automatic writing, in which spiritual guidance was said to assist writers who appeared to be unconscious.9

Despite these well-established precursors, impersonality was seized on as a distinctly modernist phenomenon, said to emerge from the alienating conditions of modern life. It is outlined in Eliot’s “Tradition” in terms of the relation between writer and text; similar to the penetrative nature of the muses of geniuses, the impersonal writer became a medium, though one distinguished through the disembodied nature of the history that spoke through him or her. For Eliot, this set of relations allowed poetry to function as “an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality,” an escape that necessitated “a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”10 Of course, as Eliot cheekily notes in his conclusion, one must “have personality to want to escape from it.”11 In this apparently flippant remark, Eliot points up one of the most productive paradoxes in the essay. Personality must simultaneously be present and absent; a unified authorial conscious must exert control over the materials (to ensure that tradition is dealt with in the manner Eliot deems appropriate) at the same time that it is destroyed. The relation between text and author that Eliot defines as impersonal is itself predicated on personality even as, in the words of Sharon Cameron, “representations of impersonality suspend, eclipse, and even destroy the idea of the person as such, who is not treated as a social, political, or individual entity.”12 In ways that parallel H.D.’s description of Sapho more closely than may be initially apparent, within Eliot’s argument is a foundational ambiguity about the relationship between the personal and the impersonal that is mirrored in his decision to publish a work calling for self-extinction in a magazine titled the Egoist.13

As a result of this ambiguity, the meaning of “impersonality” has never been as clear as might be expected given the significant role the concept played in the artistic output of the period. Ellmann questions whether impersonality “mean[s] decorum, reticence, and self-restraint? Does it imply concealment or extinction of the self? Or does it mean the poet should transcend his time and place, aspiring to universal vision?”14 In addition to Eliot’s own ambiguity, the notion of personality was further complicated through a series of diverse incarnations, including Ezra Pound’s masks and personae, Gertrude Stein’s impersonal autobiographies The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and Everybody’s Autobiography, and W. B. Yeats’s automatic script, all of which are often described under the same heading.15 The slippage in definitions between these ideas and the fact that many of the questions Ellmann poses could be asked of Eliot’s notion of impersonality or personality suggests a deconstruction that leads Ellmann to conclude, “the terms ‘impersonal’ and ‘personal’ have probably outlived their usefulness.”16

And yet it is in part because of the complex interplay between personality and impersonality that the latter has remained a productive touchstone for interrogating the links between modernist authority and authorship. According to Rochelle Rives, Eliot

allows us to see more clearly how impersonality might both decenter and build authority. On the one hand, . . . modernist impersonality supports distanced and strange intimacies, wherein subjects and objects demonstrate their attachment to each other while preserving specific boundaries. . . . Authority, on the other hand, can be seen as an overt structure of invasion, a spatial situation that impersonality can also sustain, occurring precisely through the forms of interior “access” that enable impersonal connection.17

If personality and impersonality are not mutually exclusive, then neither are their implications for political engagement. Indeed, it is precisely because of the ways impersonality can be both mapped onto authoritarian notions of hermeneutic control and simultaneously open to radical fragmentation that it has remained a dominant part of the discourse, particularly in a post- (or post-post-) structuralist landscape that celebrates such problematics. Impersonality is at its most critically valuable precisely where it dismantles rather than “preserv[es] specific boundaries,” boundaries between modes of discourse as well as corporeal subjects.

These tensions have also enabled impersonality to inform later twentieth-century theories, especially those positing the death of the author and the movement away from discussing individual authors and toward author functions. Both formulations push the corporeal subject even further from the aesthetic work in ways that have been critiqued as disregarding the significance of writers as subjects in the world.18 In “The Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes justifies this separation by arguing that authors exert tyrannical control over the meanings of their works. The death of the author, he writes, enables the dismantling of “the Author’s empire”: “Once the Author is gone, the claim to ‘decipher’ a text becomes quite useless. To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final significance, to close the writing.”19 It is on the grounds of a similar relation between authors and authority that Michel Foucault describes the question of authorial identity or dis-identity as “one of the fundamental ethical principles of contemporary writing.”20 Authorial presence need not limit interpretive freedom in these ways. The status of the author’s relationship to the text (and, through it, to the audience) does, however, have ethical implications that more explicit analysis of embodiment calls into focus.

Celebrity Personality

One of the consequences of Eliotic impersonality and the tradition that followed in its wake was a turning away from associations between corporeal writing subjects and authors. Eliot’s prominence within the academy and the significance of these formulations in particular to the development of New Criticism—an approach to literary analysis that privileged the text itself as arbiter of meaning, rather than authorial, historical, or cultural context—contributed to the ascendance of impersonality as a specifically anticorporeal project. As I indicated earlier, part of the narrative of impersonality’s popularity situates it as a response against developments in early twentieth-century media culture that were more clearly aligned with bodily discourse.

For a long time, authorial personhood was separated off from accounts of impersonality, which was located firmly in the “high” modernist camp of the culture wars. As the high/low divide has receded, however, the widespread relevance of bodies—and, specifically, of writers as embodied subjects—has reemerged as a site of critical attention. This interest is evidenced in the recent explosion of scholarly works on modernist celebrity culture. Loren Glass’s Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the United States, 1880–1980 (2004), Aaron Jaffe’s Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity (2005), Faye Hammill’s Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between the Wars (2010), Jonathan Goldman’s Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity (2011), Melissa Bradshaw’s Amy Lowell: Diva Poet (2011), and Karen Leick’s Gertrude Stein and the Making of an American Celebrity (2009) all attest to the difficulty of (and waning investment in) separating the bodies of early twentieth-century writers from their works.

As these studies demonstrate, fascination with the relation between bodies, texts, and culture was always a part of early twentieth-century discourse when the bodies of writers were, if anything, overexposed as developments in new media technology contributed to unprecedented levels of and possibilities for visibility. An explosion in print markets meant that writers had the ability to reach ever-expanding (and increasingly literate) audiences and that readers often came to books with prior knowledge of the individuals who wrote them. Standardized news stories, as well as the development of printing methods that enabled speed and the reproduction of visual images, increased newspaper and magazine sales, meaning that more and more Americans had access to the same stories. Both magazines and books also became less expensive to produce. Along with a rapid rise in national literacy rates, this increased production contributed to the emergence of a mass pulp-fiction market that engaged in an ongoing dialogue with the cultivated specialty markets of the supposed literary elites.

Despite resistance from some quarters, the rise of what Timothy Galow terms a “national celebrity culture” also impacted the ways writers interacted with readers.21 One indicator of the extent to which audiences were increasingly fascinated with not only the works but the lives of authors can be found in the number of authorial autobiographies, which increased by 400 percent between 1880 and 1920.22 The circulation of this information meant that the experience of reading literary texts was increasingly being shaped by what readers knew (or thought they knew) about authorial subjects. Both in response to and against this trend (as an attempt to keep the focus on their ideas), authors set off on lecture and reading tours that were hugely popular.23 As Melissa Bradshaw explains, the early twentieth century was “a vibrant moment in A...