Critical Survey

The linguistic turn is as old as poetry itself. What Seamus Heaney calls the ‘suggestive etymology of the word “verse”’ (Preoccupations, 1980), has been frequently remarked. Derived from the Latin ‘versus’, a turning, it refers, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, to the turning at the end of each poetic line. The unintentional ambiguities of this last phrase indicate that poetry also represents a different kind of turning, which carries to extremes a process implicit in the slippery duplicity of all language. Pun, paronomasia, metaphor and metonymy, double entendre, the linguistic turning of one thing into another, effect in poetry, as in everyday discourse, a perpetual translation of experience. Etymologically, indeed, the Greek ‘metaphor’ is virtually a synonym of the Latin-derived ‘translation’, a carrying over or across of meanings from one place to another. Such a transfigurative or redemptive function, the conversion of events into the abstract medium of language, creating a new and possibly renewed version of things, has been ascribed to poetry ever since the Renaissance Neoplatonists sought to rescue it from the odium Plato bestowed on it, expelling it from his Republic as a lying discourse, a dangerous corrupter of the truth. Renaissance literary criticism is full of play on the trope of a language that, in Sir Philip Sidney’s famous words, converting and contraverting Plato, substitutes ‘a golden world’ for ‘nature’s world of brass’.

Jean Baudrillard’s essay, ‘Simulacra and Simulations’, speaks of the postmodern condition as one in which the only ‘reality’ is a virtual one, constituted in the interminable play of signifiers which saturate our experience. Today, he argues, Simulation is no longer … of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: the hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory … it is the map that engenders the territory. … It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are … our own. The desert of the real itself.

The new British sentence because I am arguing against the provocative opening of Ron Silliman’s 1979 essay ‘The New Sentence’, where he writes: ‘I am going to make an argument, that there is such a thing as a new sentence and that it occurs thus far more or less exclusively in the prose of the Bay Area’.1 San Francisco is the site, and the activity justified is the American prose poem since the 1970s. For Silliman, neither the French prose poem, nor the Surrealist variant of it, are true new sentences. The American new sentence has no horizons beyond itself, and cannot in consequence be explicated according to any ‘“higher order” of meaning’ (92) such as narrative and character. It has, he says, evolved ‘in something less than a decade, throughout an entire poetic community’ (93). I do not disbelieve in the New American Sentence. Indeed, I believe in it passionately, not least because it offers a model through which something related but distinct can be discovered in British writing.

The critique of foundations has been a dominant concern of contemporary philosophy and theory in the last decades. One might trace this interest back to Friedrich Nietzsche’s radical questioning of knowledge and truth. It has produced its most elaborate results in the works of deconstructionist thinkers, among whom one might list Gilles Deleuze. His, admittedly very dense and at least at first glance opaque, excursion on foundations cited above even invokes the term ‘soil’ as an attempt to distinguish grounds and foundations as ultimately metaphysical constructions from their material and empirical bases with whom they interact to form human experience and history.

An ontological need persisted in the writing of Ted Hughes, and continues in critical responses to it. This has manifested itself in various forms: Leonard Scijay detects a ‘mystical consciousness of the oneness of Creation’; in his recent book The Laughter of Foxes: A Study of Ted Hughes, Keith Sagar eulogises the ‘inner being’ of the poet. Although different, these descriptions share a vague appreciation of Hughesian ‘Being’ (or ‘Existenz’): Scijay has located it more specifically in Eastern metaphysics, Zen, and the Japanese concept of satori (the ‘totalistic unity with the infinite’). Critics have mostly agreed that Hughes does not adhere to an existentialist rewriting of Existenz, but they have not always responded generously to the various depictions of Being: Eric Homberger detects the Nazi conception of Rausch in the poet’s ‘fascistic exaltation of violence for its own sake’. More recently, critics more sympathetic to Hughes have attempted to locate Existenz elsewhere. Dwight Eddins recognises der Wille in the ‘universal force-field’ confronted in the poetry; Joanny Moulin uncovers the moments in which the narrators experience the imprint of the Lacanian ‘real’ in empirical reality. All these different critical perspectives have provided valuable insights into Hughes’s writing: it cannot be denied that the vigour of his work arises partly from its engagement with metaphysics of presence. Perhaps what could be added to this body of criticism is a critique of ontology itself. The possibility remains that a requirement persists in Hughes’s poetry to locate a form of Being that has been invented in order to find it. In Negative Dialectics Theodor Adorno describes such an ontological need as a manifestation of ‘peephole metaphysics’.

What this essay offers is not a definitive way to read a McGuckian poem, as not only is this an unfeasible task but it would compromise McGuckian’s deliberate refusal of a single voiced, univocal reading. Rather, what this essay provides is a consideration of McGuckian’s application of metaphor and metonymy in relation to the work of Roman Jakobson and Jacques Lacan, which takes into account the indeterminacy and displacement of meaning that is a predominant feature of her work. Roman Jakobson’s study ‘Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances’ led to the formulation of the metaphoric and metonymic axis of language, a formulation which significantly influenced Lacan, for like Lacan, Jakobson’s focus rests ‘not on the object of reference, but on the relations of the signifying elements in the sign itself ’. A brief overview of Jakobson’s study is thus both valuable in relation to McGuckian’s poetry and provides the foundation from which a movement into a Lacanian reading becomes possible.

In 1989 Tom Raworth commented on the focus of his poetry: ‘At the back there is always the hope that there are other people … other minds, who will recognise something that they thought was to one side or not real. I hope that my poems will show them that it is real, that it does exist.’ This article will tease out the implications of this attitude, in terms of Raworth’s poems, but also in terms of a wider poetics of an alternative British poetry. Raworth was part of the growth of an experimental British poetry during the 1960s, and he joins company with Roy Fisher, Lee Harwood, Bob Cobbing and JH Prynne as an important figure in what Eric Mottram called The British Poetry Revival. Raworth’s early poems followed the dictum of Charles Olson’s projectivism that ‘ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION’, without reflection, qualification or discrimination, although Raworth’s effects were often comic and surreal. The presentation of sharp detail and rapid re-location of point of view created indeterminate lyrics and fictions. Throughout the decade improvisatory intuition was pitched against a supposedly reductive intellection.

According to Judith Butler, gender, although seemingly essential and fixed, is a series of corporeal acts and gestures which iterate or repeat cultural norms. She argues, in fact, that it is the very citationality of gender that makes it appear natural, inherent and internal. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s ‘Signature, Event, Context’, an article which argues that the performative speech act is not a singular act but instead ‘a reiteration of a norm or set of norms’, Butler therefore poses the notion of gender as ‘performative’. She is always quick to point out that this does not mean gender is performance, in the sense of being a conscious and optional act. In an Althusserian vein, Butler instead sees the subject as compelled and interpellated into subjectivity through the compulsory imitation and continual citation of gender. Drag, according to Butler, reveals this performativity by its parodic play on gender roles, and she argues that drag can serve a ‘subversive function’

While literature may possibly be, as Derrida claims, ‘the institution which allows one to say everything’, school most certainly is not. As an institution, it is bound up with the political system of a society and inevitably subjected to educational policy. Literature, however, is taught at school, and, as some would claim, institutionalised and canonised thereby. School education, of course, is also a topic within autobiographical poetry that conjures up the days at school or university as part of a reconstructed growth of a poet’s mind. In an unprecendented opening of the school system, the post-war period following the Education Act in 1944 witnessed the introduction of scholarships for marginalised social groups in Britain and campaigns for institutions of higher education in the colonies. Many of the now well-established and internationally renowned poets in English went to school then. Perhaps surprisingly, their class-room poems are not so much about great opportunities and hard-won laurels as about the pressures on, and depressions of, those recently welcomed to a system that distributes social and cultural power. In concentrating on two well-known poems that were both published in the 1970s, Tony Harrison’s ‘Them & [uz]’ and Seamus Heaney’s ‘The Ministry of Fear’, I want to trace the entanglement of poetry and school education from the 1950s, the period reconstructed in the poems, until today. Although critical of the British educational system and its attitude to poetry, these poems are now taught at school. A consideration of the performative dimension of these poems will yield the criteria with which to describe their classroom career.

Contributors