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INVENTIONS
OF THE UNKNOWN FREEDOM
TO BREATHE: MODERN PROSE POEMS FROM BAUDELAIRE TO PINTER, edited by
Geoffrey Godbert, 130pp, £11.95, Stride
The anthology itself, a companion volume to Stride’s A Curious
Architecture (1996), is preceded by an introduction discussing continuities
and links between key prose poets and their precursors. These include
nineteenth century Romantic exponents of ‘poetic prose’ such as Hugo
and De Quincey and the Romantic-Symbolist tradition of Nerval, Poe,
Baudelaire and their successors. There is also consideration of more
recent, twentieth century American writers such as E. E. Cummings
and Jack Kerouac. The anthology itself consists of over eighty individual
pieces, selected from the works of thirty authors. The texts are organised
in chronological order, from Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit
of 1842 (written circa 1830) to Harold Pinter’s Various Voices of
1998. We are thus presented with the historical development of the
modern prose poem from its earliest beginnings to the present day.
Of the thirty authors included, eleven represent French literature
from Betrand to Char via Max Jacob and Michaux. There are eight Americans,
including Whitman, Djuna Barnes, Cummings and Gertrude Stein. We have
three representatives of Russian literature (Turgenev, Bely and Solzhenitzyn)
and two Irish (Synge and James Joyce). The remainder of the collection
comprise two English writers and a loose group of what might be termed,
for the sake of convenience, ‘other Europeans’: Rilke, self-styled
‘Futurist Aeropoet’ F. T. Marinetti, George Seferis and Tristan Tzara.
It is perhaps indicative of a cultural question arising from, or posed
by, this anthology that only Virginia Woolf and Harold Pinter represent
English literature. Judging by this geographical distribution we are
lead to the conclusion that the prose poem (however defined) is essentially
a French and American phenomenon, with – in this collection – the
French outnumbering the Americans by eleven to eight.
Geoffrey Godbert’s ‘Introduction’ provides an outline sketch
of developmental factors and various theoretical issues. He begins
by reviewing some dictionary definitions and highlighting the distinction
between ‘poetical prose’ and the ‘prose poem’. For example P. Mansell
Jones in Modern French Poetry argues that ‘the distance between poetical
prose and the prose poem is one of degree rather than kind…’, whereas
The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms differentiates between
the prose poem proper as a ‘self-contained work usually similar to
a lyric’, and the intermittent occurrence of ‘poetic prose’ passages
in longer prose works. He then moves on to discuss the origins of
the prose poem, restating the familiar link between Baudelaire’s Le
Spleen de Paris and Bertrand’s Romantic, pictorial prose-ballads (‘little
ballads in prose’ as Sainte-Beuve described them at the time). Godbert
follows Mansell Jones in pointing to the ‘impassioned prose’ of Thomas
De Quincey, with its charged close-textured musicality, as an immediate
forerunner. Subsequent developments are discussed with reference to
Max Jacob’s critical comments on some of his predecessors in the French
tradition, including Lautreamont, Rimbaud and Mallarme.
Outside the nineteenth century French lineage, some passing
attention is paid to Edgar Allan Poe, whose
Historically, the modern prose poem as a distinct form, or
genre, emerged in the mid-nineteenth century as part of the transition
from Late Romanticism to Post-Romantic early Modernism. This was the
same process of cultural change that produced Impressionism in painting
and vers libre in poetry, culminating in Abstract Art, Dada, and a
progressive deconstruction of the continuous prose narrative as fictive
discourse. The transformation of prose fiction paralleled and overlapped
with the evolutionary development of prose poetry throughout the period
covered by Freedom the Breathe – roughly from 1830 to 1964. Thus,
Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves (1931) has been described (by Stephen
Spender) as a prose poem.
Derived from obscure, multi-factorial origins in the prose
translations of foreign poetry, ‘Biblical’ prose, and verse-to-prose
transmutations of pre-existing lyrics, the form was pioneered by Aloysius
Bertrand (1807-1841), Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883), Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
and Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867). Although Baudelaire was the youngest
of this group, it is generally acknowledged that his collection of
fifty pieces, Le Spleen de Paris (Petits Poemes en Prose) is the most
distinguished example of early Post-Romantic prose poetry.
Written in the late 1850s ands early 1860s, Le Spleen de Paris
predated both Turgenev and Whitman, whose collections did not appear
until the 1880s, and, to a great extent, defines the ‘modern’ prose
poem as we now know it. It is a point of literary history that Baudelaire
had published at least two ‘prose poems’ before this, transcriptions
of pre-existing verses. Furthermore he did not apply any method devised
by Aloysius Bertrand for Gaspard de la Nuit. As can be seen from the
examples included in this anthology, Bertrand tried to create a formal
prose-paragraph, strophic stanza structure for his cycle, but in fact
abandoned the method in the midst of composition. Baudelaire made
no attempt to use this technique. In a letter dated 1852 the critic
Jules A. Barbey d’Aurevilly referred to prose poems as ‘intermediate
creations’, in emulation of prose translations. The more ‘experimental’
avant-garde possibilities of the form was further developed by Arthur
Rimbaud, in his Illuminations and Une Saison en Enfer (both represented
here) in the 1870s.
The Introduction to Freedom to Breathe draws attention to the
continuing difficulty in defining the ‘prose poem’ as such. This is
because of two factors. Firstly the loose use of the term in different
contexts, for example, in his introduction to the 1908 Everyman edition
of Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination Padriac Colum stated that
‘‘Ligeia’ is less a tale than a prose poem; it is a reverie, a meditation…’.
This raises the issue of the difference between the ‘tale’ as a form
of narrative (or a certain kind of tale, as distinct from the short
story) and the prose poem.
Colum, following the French critic Ferdinand Brunetiere (1849-1906),
categorised the ‘tale’ as a marginal narrative dealing with exceptional
phenomena. Like the closely allied ‘intermediate’ form of the prose
poem, of which it is one of the literary progenitors, the ‘tale’ may
well exclude the exposition of mundane facts or other social detail.
Tales should only deal with ‘things that happen on the margin’, or
‘out of the border of existence’, they can be ‘reveries’, experienced
at the further reaches of sanity or on the frontiers of the unconscious.
The indeterminate and self-contradictory nature of the short prose
poem, as a modern literary form (including the requirements of brevity
and compression) reflects retrospectively back to the enigmatic world
of the ‘tale of mystery’ and ‘atmosphere’. The primeval world of parables
and fables connects with Modernism via Poe’s The Poetic Principle
(1850, translated into French by Baudelaire), a statement of method
that disparaged didacticism and demanded brevity as the one of the
chief criteria of pure poetry.
Further, in stricter usage it is possible to usefully distinguish
between two sub-forms or variations on the prose poem as a literary
category. It is possible to speak of the ‘short prose poem’, in the
manner of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, and the ‘extended prose poem’, in
the manner (perhaps) of Lautreamont’s Maldoror, or a later work like
Breton and Soupault’s Magnetic Fields (1919). It might seem that the
extended prose poem blurs the boundary between the self-contained,
lyrical poetic ‘piece’ and the closely related idea of ‘poetical prose’
or even the ‘lyrical novel’. In the Post-Modern era prose poems and
extended prose poems also arise from the hybridisation of factual
(or pseudo-factual) prose narratives and poetry. This, one of the
most recent developments in the genre, can be seen in the work of
J.L. Borges, or Lud Heat (1974-1975) by Iain Sinclair, an elaborate,
composite text combining quasi-documentary prose passages, open field
strophic lyrics and the occasional carmen figuratum in one extended
work.
This blurring of boundaries is further complicated by the widespread
practice of organising prose poems into cycles, sets or sequences
exemplified by Rimbaud’s Illuminations, Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de
Paris and Betrand’s Gaspard. There are numerous later examples of
prose poetry conforming to this overall pattern of sequential clustering
or structuring, for instance: Proust’s Regrets, Reveries and Changing
Skies (1896), Kandinsky’s Sounds (1910-1912), the Fantastic Prayers
(1916) of Richard Huelsenbeck, Samuel Beckett’s Texts For Nothing
(1945-1950) and the three sequences grouped under the title Eagle
or Sun? (1949-1950) by Octavio Paz. The brevity of individual prose
poems often needs to be offset by the overall, cumulative effect of
such sequential or cyclic meta-structures.
Closer analysis of classificatory possibilities illustrates
a further source of confusion, namely the existence of numerous micro-forms
and idiosyncratic sub-categorisations within the genre. One might
mention the following intriguing sub-variants on the idea of the prose
poem: the ‘verse-into-prose transposition’, the ‘reverie’, the ‘meditation’,
the ‘mood piece’, the ‘sketch’, the ‘vignette’ and others – all of
some interest – for instance the ‘poetical (or lyrical) essay’, the
parable, the fable and the much-maligned ‘purple passage’.
Another level of confusion arises from the tendency of many
individual authors to coin their own personal jargon terms. These
would include ‘dream fugue’ (Thomas De Quincey),‘epiphanies’ (James
Joyce), ‘routines’ (William Burroughs), ‘poems in the rough’ (Paul
Valery), ‘condensed prose’ (E. E. Cummings), ‘residua’, ‘fizzles’
or foirades (Samuel Beckett), siloquies (Alfred Jarry), and the use
of the term ‘fragment’ by various authors, including Jorge Luis Borges.
If one adheres to the idea that a ‘prose poem’ is primarily
a short, self-contained piece in an evocative, lyrical, rhapsodic
style then a number of works usually categorised as ‘short stories’
or ‘tales’ can be included within the genre. An interesting offshoot
of these developments in the nineteenth century was the furtherance
of the form within popular modes such as Gothic and Fantasy. Like
the highbrow, avant-garde, poem in prose, the popular form can be
traced back to the ‘tales’ of Edgar Allan Poe. Although Poe himself
used the term as sub-title for his poetic, cosmological essay ‘Eureka’,
the popular version of the prose poem (or ‘mood piece’) can actually
be traced to some of his other short prose narratives such as ‘Shadow
– A Parable’, ‘Silence – A Fable’, or ‘The Island of the Fay’. Later
exponents of this kind of atmospheric prose-poem-cum-tale include
W. B. Yeats (The Celtic Twilight), Kafka (Description of Struggle
and Other Stories) and Lord Dunsany, whose Gods of Pegana (1905) inspired
the more fantastical, poetic micro-narratives of H. P. Lovecraft and
Clark Ashton Smith during the period 1919-1939. Significantly, Lovecraft’s
‘Hypnos’ (1922) incorporates a quote from Baudelaire as an epigraph. An
extract from The Waves (1931) by Virginia Woolf is included in this
anthology, presumably as an example of English modernist lyrical fiction:
as mentioned earlier, it is noticeable that, if the Irish are excluded
from the discussion, British – one should say English – authors are
noticeable by their absence. Nevertheless, The Waves exemplifies the
tangential relationship between extended narrative prose fiction and
prose poetry.
It is easy to agree with Mansell Jones that, in the modern
era, there is a theoretical spectrum of literary experimentation and
the prose poem and the extended prose fiction narrative (including
its mutations) occupy different points of reference on the same spectrum
of possibility. This is apparent from Virginia Woolf’s own comments,
as recorded in her critical essay ‘Modern Fiction’ (circa 1919) and
other notes, where she observed that her objective was to get away
from ‘facts’, to produce work that was ‘free yet concentrated; prose
yet poetry…’. Woolf was partly influenced by Henry James, whose later
novels – for example The Golden Bowl (1905) – also provide instances
of extended ‘poetic prose’ narrative, in her reaction against the
‘materialist’ approach of contemporary mainstream Edwardian novelists
like Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy.
Virginia Woolf’s alternative to the plodding, orthodox ‘and-then-and-then’
linearity of conventional fiction was her own style of concentrated
prose. She developed a form of Post-Aesthetic ‘Impressionist’ lyricism
by which the writer sought to capture the ‘myriad impressions’, trivial,
fantastic, evanescent ‘or engraved with the sharpness of steel’ that,
to her perception, surrounded her life like a ‘luminous halo, a semi
transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness
to the end…’. Her psychophysical aesthetic theory tended to focus
on ‘the moment’ that emerges from the phenomenon of ‘atoms shaping
themselves’, on the intensity of present experience; on the necessity
of creating a two-way membrane between the inner and the outer worlds.
One is reminded, reading Woolf’s rhapsodic descriptions of
her literary objectives that her mode of Modernism is in fact an extension
of Romanticism in its most rarefied and attenuated form, of the primal
urge to extend the frontiers of expression. It
was Novalis who said in 1798: ‘to
romanticise is nothing other than an exponential heightening…’ This
theme, or imperative, of ‘exponential heightening’ is intrinsic to
early twentieth century Modernist writing practice, from Joyce and
his ‘epiphanies’ to the syntactical distortions and compressions of
E. E. Cummings and the Surrealists’ cult of Convulsive Beauty. It
is common to both the pure poetry of Mallarme and Paul Valery and
the Aesthetic texts of Walter Pater which had such an influence on
the ‘Nineties ‘tragic generation’ of poets, including Oscar Wilde
and W.B Yeats. It is the origination of a progressive deconstruction
of the novel that culminated in such works as Burrough’s Interzone
fictional ‘language mosaics’ (1953-1958) or earlier, in E. E. Cummings’
A Book Without a Title (1929-1930) and other of his prose experiments,
some examples of which are included here. In 1944 Cyril Connolly observed
‘Flaubert, Henry James, Proust, Joyce and Virginia Woolf have finished
off the novel. Now all will have to be re-invented as from the beginning.’ One of the earliest advocates of the prose
poem was the novelist J-K Huysmans who wrote in Against Nature (1884): ‘Of
all literary forms, the prose poem was the one which Des Esseintes
preferred. In the hands of an alchemist of genius, it should, he believed,
contain within its small compass…the power of the novel, while eliminating
its tedious analyses and superfluous descriptions…conceived thus,
and thus condensed into one or two pages, the novel would become a
communion of thought between a magical writer and an ideal reader,
a spiritual collaboration of a handful of superior beings scattered
through the universe…’ Huysmans
describes an imaginary anthology of prose poetry in his hero’s library. The
contents comprised some works included in Freedom to Breathe, specifically
the Mallarme pieces ‘Le Demon de l’analogie’ and ‘Pauvre Enfant pale’.
Other items in this ideal collection are selections from Betrand’s
Gaspard (‘that strange Aloysius Bertrand who transposed Leonardo da
Vinci’s methods to prose…’), Vox Populi, a short story by Villiers
de l’Isle Adam, and extracts from the Livre de Jade by Judith Gautier.
There are five other pieces by Mallarme hailed as ‘among the masterpieces
of prose poems’. Mallarme’s elliptical pieces set the pattern for
most subsequent ‘pure’ prose poetry until the period of High Modernism
in the nineteen twenties. But Huysmans’ selection also highlights
the overlap between the prose poem proper and the fictional narrative,
be it ‘short story’ or ‘tale’.
The guiding principle behind the aesthetic philosophy of Against
Nature was the Poesque requirement for an ‘aura of strangeness’ –
a ‘decadent’ use of language ‘hinting at depths of the soul which
no words could satisfy…’. The ecriture artiste of the Aesthetes and
Decadents disclosed a ‘disturbing ambivalence’, and ‘complex deliquescences
of language’. For Huysmans the prime exponents of this bizarre linguistic
adventure were the Brothers Goncourt and Gustave Flaubert, the Flaubert
of Salammbo (1862) and The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874), those
verbal equivalents to the encrusted paintings of Gustave Moreau. The
modern quasi-myth of a ‘deliquescence of language’ is simultaneously
a continuing manifestation of the ‘exponential heightening’ described
by Novalis and one of the early phases of the Modern/Post-Modern literary
enterprise.
It is apparent that the ambiguous and marginal status of prose
poetry provided one of the key focal points for an early fusion, on
the theoretical plane at least, of extended fictional prose narrative
with the techniques of lyric poetry. The emergence of vers libre was
to make the distinction between ‘prose’ and ‘verse’ even more elusive
and indefinite by the end of the nineteenth century. This is demonstrated
by some of the American examples in the present anthology, for example
Elizabeth Smart’s ‘By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept’,
Agee’s ‘
It was Rimbaud who said ‘Inventions of the unknown require
new forms.’ And it was Rimbaud who, with his cycle of forty-two short
prose poems Les Illuminations (c.1873-1874) extended the possibilities
sketched out by Baudelaire in his letter to Arsene Houssaye. Of all
the examples in Freedom to Breathe the work of Rimbaud has probably
been the most influential. Les Illuminations was a turning point,
a transitional work, a radical shift away from the last vestiges of
poetic formalism (many of these texts can be shown to incorporate
techniques of vers libre) to an organicist spontaneity dependent upon
nothing but the cumulative effect of vivid, often obscure, images.
The imagery of Les Illuminations is a direct outcome of the application
of the formula of ‘systematic sensory derangement’ as outlined in
the letter quoted by Geoffrey Godbert in his Introduction; transpositions
of real-life scenes subjected to radical aestheticisation; zutiste
anarchism applied to the rarefied world of literature. As Rimbaud’s
biographer Graham Robb explains: ‘when the depiction exactly matched
the appearance, reality itself was surreal.’ It is thought that many
of the urban scenes used in Les Illuminations derive from Rimbaud’s
stay in On
the thematic plane Rimbaud’s poetry embodied an obsessive fixation
with issues of identity and liberation – sub-themes of revolt, mad
love, mystical rebirth and disillusion – that continued to exert a
fascination well into the twentieth century. The pieces included here
(‘Flowers’, ‘Being Beauteous’, ‘Mystic’ and ‘Morning of Drunkenness’)
all derive from the semi-mystical aspect of Rimbaud’s work and do
not give an idea of the diversity of Les Illuminations. Rimbaud’s
influence, together with that of Antonin Artaud, permeated Pop Culture
and can be found at work in such recent texts as The Lords: Notes
on Vision (1971) by Jim Morrison, and Patti Smith’s 1978 hybrid volume
of extended prose poetry sequences and Beat style free verse,
The examples from Rimbaud included here illustrate two opposing
tendencies within the prose poetry genre. Firstly, a tendency toward
extreme compression and minimalist condensation (the ‘short prose
poem’ as defined by Baudelaire and continued by Mallarme) and, secondly,
a counter-tendency towards more fragmented and, perhaps, more complex,
longer textual forms (versions of what might be called the ‘extended
prose poem’ and its hybrid offspring).
The latter tendency can be traced to Rimbaud’s Une Saison en
Enfer (A Season in Hell) a sequence of eight proto-expressionistic
psychic testimonies, preceded by an introductory preface. The section
‘Ravings II: Alchemy of the Word’, a small part of which is
included here, has served as an emblematic touchstone of radical poetic
practice, a step on the path towards both Surrealism and poetic abstraction. The
true inheritors of Rimbaud’s innovations were the Dadaists and the
Surrealists, and, partly resulting from Surrealist influence in the
Rimbaud’s ‘verbal alchemy’, the idea of a new ‘poetic language
accessible, some day to all the senses’, a poetry of ‘instinctive
rhythms’, of vowel-colours and of rules for the ‘form and movement’
of consonants, prefigured the ultra-Modernist New Art aesthetic of
the early twentieth century. This was the period of the Simultaneists
and Cubo-Futurists manifest in the poetry of Apollinaire, Reverdy,
Max Jacob and Blaise Cendrars. Interpreted by many as continuing a
form of ‘impressionism’, experimental poets from this era are represented
here by Marinetti, E. E. Cummings, Gertrude Stein, Perse, Fargue and
Max Jacob. One of the classic texts of this phase of literary history
is Stein’s Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms (1911).
Stein’s work in general, and Tender Buttons in particular,
has been hailed in recent times as a precursor of ‘language-centred
poetry’, although this appropriation has also been criticised as a
misreading of Stein’s intentions.
Her portrait piece ‘Picasso’, an attempt to render in prose
the effect of the Cubist space-time continuum using the technique
of accumulating ‘repetition-with-variation’, also dates from this
time, but shows a different technique from the ‘still life’ prose
poems of Tender Buttons.
In his essay ‘The New Art’ (1915) E. E. Cummings said of Gertrude
Stein ‘Her art is the logic of literary sound painting carried to
its extreme.’ It is intriguing to see how, writing so close to the
New York Armory Show of 1913 (that great point of transition in American
Modernism) Cummings’ main point of reference was Marcel Duchamp’s
painting ‘Nude Descending Staircase’. He explained that Stein’s method
of ‘subordinating the meaning of words to the beauty of words themselves’
takes ‘impressionism’ to its logical conclusion. ‘Impressionist tendencies
are reduced to absurdity’, he said, ‘Here we see traces of realism,
similar to those which made the ‘Nude Descending Staircase’ so baffling…’
In contrast, Gertrude Stein herself defined her technique as
‘looking at anything until something that was not the name of that
thing but was in a way that actual thing would come to be written…’.
Her use of language in relation to her actual ‘subject’ was so subordinated
to private perceptions of metaphorical similarity as to be rendered
inscrutable. The loss of conventional syntactical rules and the perceived
esoteric idiosyncrasy of the analogical modus operandi in Stein’s
work (and other poetry of the period) created an overall effect of
‘contextual deficiency’, an effect that has come for many to signify
the very essence of Modernism. The gulf between the normative artistic
mainstream and the radical avant-garde suddenly became very apparent;
the general readership became increasingly dissociated from both the
practice and consumption of ‘modern poetry’. A problem, if problem
it is, that is still with us.
There is a fundamental interrelationship between historical
literary movements or cultural tendencies and aesthetic forms. Poets
and artists often traverse different movements and theoretical affiliations,
exploring diverse forms and genres, either sequentially (the diachronic)
or simultaneously (the synchronic), in a dynamic process that is acted
upon, and acts upon, the prevailing cultural ‘era’ or weltenschauung.
In this context the artist evolves his or her own individual path
of progression. The
‘prose poets’ of this anthology are a representative cross-section
(with some omissions) that charts the continuing paradigmatic mutation
of modern prose poetry; its emergence from late Romanticism and Gothic
(Poe, Bertrand, Baudelaire) and its revitalisation in the Ultra-Modernist
Cubo-Futurist Simultaneism of the early twentieth century (Marinetti,
Cummings, Stein). It has been a cumulative experience of rejection
as well as innovation. Rejection of conventional narrative modes and
traditional poetic forms, or rejection of previously understood normative
social roles. For example, Baudelaire not only celebrated the ‘heroism
of modern life’ in his prose poems (the new urban order of the modern
city, both magical and sordid) but was also among the first to recognise
the de-classed, disestablished position of the modern poet, the Post-Romantic
retreat from a public role.
The consequent abandonment of the classical Aristotlean mode
of cultural high seriousness embodied in epic and tragedy is one of
the key factors in the emergence of ‘intermediate’ literary forms
such as the prose poem. In Le Spleen de Paris and Les Fleurs du Mal
it is the estranged, the unacknowledged and the rejected, the uncanny
shadow-side of desire, that provides the foundational basis for ‘modernity’
and, after the 1870s (after Rimbaud, after Impressionism), for Modernism
itself. Poetic prose is the ideal medium for the expressing our new,
emerging universe of indeterminacy, dimly foreshadowed in the 1850s.
Even though this anthology takes its title
from a piece by near contemporary Alexander Solzhenitsyn, his prose
poems seem uninspired, even banal and sentimental, compared to earlier
work by the Ultra-Modernists, or the Russian Symbolist Andrei Bely.
In Bely’s work as a whole can be detected many strands of modernist
innovation and radical change, not only in prose poems such as ‘The
Dramatic Symphony – Part One’, included here, but also in his ‘Cubist’
novel Petersberg (1913) and in his prescient theories of language.
Immersed in Russian neo-gnostic, messianic ‘occultism’ and the Anthroposphical
doctrines of Rudolf Steiner, Bely based his poetic practice on a language-centred
theoretical system, both an anticipation of recent linguistic philosophies
and a resurgence of primeval, animistic conceptions of the mythical
‘word’ and the symbolic power of names.’
‘Language’, he wrote, ‘is the most powerful instrument of creation…if
words did not exist, the world would not exist either…’.
In these and other statements from a lecture given in 1909,
Bely shows how late twentieth century tendencies towards a language-centred
epistemology are rooted in ancient conceptions of the world, perhaps
the most primeval conceptions of the word-world. Literary Post-Modernism
is an intensification of, and an extension of, Post-Romantic Modernism,
even if cloaked in the jargon of Speech Act Theory. The
period of High Modernism lasted until approximately the mid nineteen
twenties when it was superseded by Surrealism which developed out
of the Dada anti-art movement in the years immediately following the
First World War. In this anthology there are three authors who can
be said to have worked, for a time at least, within the Dada-Surrealist
orbit – Tristan Tzara (one of the founders of original Zurich Dada),
Rene Char and the celebrated co-founder of the negritude black consciousness
movement, Aime Cesaire. Cesaire’s revolutionary, Surrealist, anti-colonialism
is apparent in the extract from his long prose poem ‘Return to My
Native Land’ (1939) included here. Andre Breton met Cesaire in his
native Martinique in 1941 and claimed that this extended poetical
text was ‘nothing less than the greatest lyrical monument of our times’.
‘Return to my Native Land’ is without doubt an uncompromising statement
and displays a creative dynamism absent from many of the other later
prose poems gathered in this volume, with the exception of the piece
called ‘Njinski’ by George Sefiris.
Notwithstanding apparently diversionary counter-tendencies,
such as the retrograde, traditionalist Classicism of, say, Hulme and
Eliot, the evolution of poetic practice in the modern cultural era
has charted a continuous path from Romanticism via Naturalism, Symbolism,
Expressionism and High Modernism to the current ‘Post-Modern’ epoch.
This, our present context – a continuation of previous tendencies,
not any kind of rupture with past practice – finds some, but not all,
of its immediate origins in the post-war era. For instance: Burroughs
and the Beats; ‘late modernists’ such as Beckett; marginal fantasists;
the inheritors of Dada & Surrealism; the films of Jean-Luc Godard
and others. But this more recent phase of literary experimentation
is largely under-represented in Freedom to Breathe.
From the developmental point of view, however, the most ‘recent’
work in this volume must be Jack Kerouac’s ‘Old Angel Midnight’ (1959-1964)
an extended prose poem in 67 sections. By ‘recent’ is meant the most
‘up-to-date’ in terms of the evolution of modern poetic consciousness.
The final examples in the collection, short self-contained prose pieces
by Harold Pinter are undistinguished works of little significance
in the development of the form. On the other hand Kerouac’s distinctive
Spontaneous Prose’ style – his ‘scatological build up of words’ –
exemplified by the first sections of ‘Old Angel Midnight’ represent
a new element in the genre of poetic prose.
A celebration of the ‘word free/Zen Lunacy’ Beat Movement mindset,
‘Old Angel Midnight’ was conceived as ‘a lifelong work in multilingual
sound…’ a deliberate exercise in unrestrained free association, a
work without end or narrative direction. In his brief theoretical
manifesto ‘Essentials of Spontaneous Prose’ Kerouac explained how
he wrote in accordance with the Laws of Deep Form, ‘swimming in a
sea of English with no discipline other that rhythms of rhetorical
exhalation and expostulated statement’. His mystical Zen Lunacy is
presented as form of ulra-realism, a streetwise universe of sound-colour
disclosed by ‘unique revelation of the mind faithfully notating its
own processes’. A kind of internalised neo-impressionism of inner
space, a forerunner of ‘hippie’ style mysticism and of the Psychedelic
Underground, Kerouac’s work inherited the principle of the
Surrealist ‘disinterested play of thought’ which, in the First
Manifesto (1924), is given a pedigree that included the ‘supernatural
reverie’ of Gerard de Nerval, a key originator of poetical prose.
The logorrhoea of Beat word-flow required the removal of all
‘literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition’, much in the same
way as the Dadaists and the Surrealists advocated negation of all
aesthetic preoccupations. ‘Old Angel Midnight’, insofar as it arises
from an attempt ‘to sketch the flow that already exists intact in
the mind’, is therefore, representative of a line of poetic development
still committed to transcribing the lyrical ‘inner voice(s)’ of the
author – Zen mysticism notwithstanding.
This is in contrast to, say, the impersonality of Stein’s Cubist
Tender Buttons experiment, but remains consistent with the ‘mystical’
tendencies inherent in the Modernism of Virginia Woolf or Joyce’s
‘epiphanies’. It might be observed that Kerouac’s Zen Lunacy points
to the fact that beneath the crisis of language typical of so much
Modernist lyrical writing from Baudelaire onwards, there is, (as is
also present in Baudelaire’s poetry), an omnipresent, progressive
‘spiritual crisis’ derived from wider cultural changes. This ‘paradigm
shift’ from a vestigial, religious worldview to a more modern, secular
society was not just the product of scientific advance, but, in the
arts, of Romantic Irony intensified to the point of cultural implosion,
to the point of aesthetic and existential nausea. The most significant
omission from this collection is, therefore, Samuel Beckett.
In 1971 the French critic Anne Fabre-Luce, reviewing Beckett’s
short prose text ‘The Lost Ones’, provided one of the most precise
explanations or definitions of the pure short prose poem. She wrote ‘Against
the ‘say more’ of all literature he [Beckett] opposes a systematic
‘say less’ which manages to summarise and contain all the other ‘proliferating’
forms of literary discourse’. She described ‘The
Lost Ones’ as ‘a ballet of phantoms whose end must remain uncertain’
presenting the reader with ‘the last possible stages of what is ‘human’’.
Thus, it is unfortunate that the final stage of the modern short prose
poem is not included here, for in Beckett’s work many have seen a
terminal phase of particular kind of poetic literature. It was one
of the chief gurus of Post-Modernism, Ihab Hassan, who, around 1968
and in the context of a debate arising from Beckett’s collection of
‘nouvelles’ and residua, No’s Knife (1967), coined the phrase ‘literature
of silence’ to denote this ne plus ultra of literary minimalism. According
to some Beckett’s compressed, poetic prose represented a form of ‘anti-literature’,
aspiring only to silence in response to the encroaching ‘end-game’
of Modernity. For Hassan, Beckett’s work seemed to show how
‘language has become a void…words can only demonstrate their emptiness.’
To have included Beckett and renamed the collection with the
subtitle: ‘From Baudelaire to Beckett’ would have been ideal.
It seems that the presence of work by Stein and Kerouac in
Freedom to Breathe marks a kind of bifurcation in the developmental
trajectory mapped out for us by the chronological arrangement of the
anthology. The texts by the Surrealists and by Mallarme and Rimbaud
exemplify tendencies that have intermingled with the evolutionary
process of this strange form called the ‘prose poem’. Reading this
collection one can see how the work of Andrei Bely and some of the
American contributors (Cummings and others) betrays an incipient fascination
for surface texture that prefigures the more ‘language centred’ poetic
practice that emerged in the latter decades of the twentieth century.
Why a bifurcation? Why a parting of the ways?
It is possible to find in some works of Stein the origins of
a mode of literary language based on the negation of the self and
the suppression of the authorial ‘lyric ego’. From such a starting
point develops a poetry of all-encompassing self-reflexivity, a fascination
with the lexical medium and its pure materiality disconnected from
The World, even dissociated from consciousness itself. Following Stein’s
example it was possible to devise an aesthetic of ego-decentralisation,
even ego-denial: poems without speakers, works conceived in terms
of fragmentation and opacity, the very embodiment of cultural alienation.
It is also obvious that, in Kerouac, we see an extension of
the ‘spiritual crisis’ of High Modernism, a continuation of the quest
for a ‘saving paradigm’, substituting Zen Lunacy for the Frazerian
ritualism or ‘mythical method’ of Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ (1922).
In fact works like ‘Old Angel Midnight’ and ‘The Waste Land’ are,
in their very different ways, both symptoms of cultural counter-phobia.
They are products of dissociation and anxiety in the face of a progressively
disclosed nihilistic state, ‘the primitive hostility of the world’
identified by Albert Camus, or ‘the immense panorama of futility and
anarchy’, as Eliot once described modern history. It is the unfolding
of this modern history from the first decades of the nineteenth century
onwards that provides the implicit framework for this anthology, it
is the connecting thread that links Baudelaire, Turgenev and Mallarme
with Cummings, Stein and Kerouac.
In certain respects the lyrical, ‘pure’ prose poem was a fin
de siecle phenomenon. In the years between 1880 and 1914 writers such
as Wilde, Jarry, Proust, Trakl and others all worked in the medium
of the prose poem or ‘poetic prose’.
This anthology would have been even more comprehensive if,
for instance, some of Wilde’s Poems in Prose (1894) had been included,
or indeed an extract from his play text Salome (1894). The entire
field of poetical language in dramatic form remains unexplored here,
although this might be considered too inclusive an approach. On the
other hand Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874), while written
in theatrical format, remains a basic inspiration for much fin-de-siecle
exoticism and non-naturalistic, lyrical prose.
For Barbey d’Aurevilly, writing in 1852, prose poems were ‘intermediate
creations’, and, if the term ‘prose poem’ is used in a loose sense,
one can see that the form is often a hybrid. This hybrid occupies
an indeterminate literary space somewhere between vers libre; the
subversive Gothic ‘tale’ of mystery and fantasy (Poe, Betrand); the
lyrical essay or ‘meditation’ (Rilke); the ‘extended prose poem’ (Rimbaud’s
‘A Season in Hell’, Kerouac’s ‘Old Angel Midnight’) and novelistic
‘poetic prose’ (‘The Waves’). Freedom to Breathe gives a good overview
of many of these formal variations, yet, inevitably, perhaps, there
is a sense of incompleteness; one can always highlight crucial omissions
in any such venture. So far as the twentieth century is concerned
it would have been helpful to include other post-war writers apart
from Kerouac and Pinter, such as Beckett and Sinclair, or some contributors
from a non-European background – Octavio Paz, for example – or Jorge
Luis Borges.
Nevertheless, together with the companion volume A Curious
Architecture, this compendium, edited for Stride by Geoffrey Godbert,
presents a wide-ranging overview of an under-represented and, indeed,
difficult aspect of modern poetry. Space has precluded detailed analysis
of the over eighty examples gathered between the covers of Freedom
to Breathe, but, to use Rimbaud’s phrase, it is true that ‘inventions
of the unknown require new forms’ and many of these new forms are
well represented here.
© 2002 A.C. Evans Freedom
to Breathe is available for £11.95, post free, from |