Poetry and Repetition: Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

LITERARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL THEORY Edited by William E.Cain Professor of English, Wellesley College A ROUTLEDGE SERIES

LITERARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL THEORY

WILLIAM E.CAIN, General Editor LABOR PAINS Emerson, Hawthorne, and Alcott on Work and the Woman Question Carolyn R.Maibor NARRATIVE IN THE PROFESSIONAL AGE Transatlantic Readings of Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Jennifer Cognard-Black FICTIONAL FEMINISM How American Bestsellers Affect the Movement for Women’s Equality Kim A.Loudermilk THE COLONIZER ABROAD Island Representations in American Prose from Melville to London Christopher McBride THE METANARRATIVE OF SUSPICION IN LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICA Sandra Baringer PROTEST AND THE BODY IN MELVILLE, Dos PASSOS, AND HURSTON Tom McGlamery THE ARCHITECTURE OF ADDRESS The Monument and Public Speech In American Poetry Jake Adam York THE SLAVE IN THE SWAMP Disrupting the Plantation Narrative William Tynes Cowan

READING THE TEXT THAT ISN’T THERE Paranoia in the Nineteenth-Century American Novel Mike Davis RACIAL BLASPHEMIES Religious Irreverence and Race in American Literature Michael L.Cobb ETHICAL DIVERSIONS The Post-Holocaust Narratives of Pynchon, Abish, DeLillo, and Spiegelman Katalin Orbán POSTMODERN COUNTERNARRATIVES Irony and Audience in the Novels of Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Charles Johnson, and Tim O’Brien Christopher Donovan THE END OF THE MIND The Edge of the Intelligible in Hardy, Stevens, Larkin, Plath, and Glück DeSales Harrison AUTHORING THE SELF Self-Representation, Authorship, and the Print Market in British Poetry from Pope through Wordsworth Scott Hess NARRATIVE MUTATIONS Discourses of Heredity and Caribbean Literature Rudyard J.Alcocer BETWEEN PROFITS AND PRIMITIVISM Shaping White Middle-Class Masculinity in the United States 1880–1917 Athena Devlin POETRY AND REPETITION Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery Krystyna Mazur

POETRY AND REPETITION WALT WHITMAN, WALLACE STEVENS, JOHN ASHBERY

Krystyna Mazur

Routledge New York & London

Published in 2005 by Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016 Published in Great Britain by Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN © 2005 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.” ISBN 0-203-50654-5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-60651-5 (Adobe e-Reader Format) International Standard Book Number-10: 0-415-97057-1 (Print Edition) (Hardcover) International Standard Book Number-13: 978-0-415-97057-0 (Print Edition) (Hardcover) No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data Catalog record is available from the Library of Congress

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For Ewa and Maciek

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction

ChapterOne Forms of Repetition Chapter Two “Thinking with AND”: Whitman’s Repetitions and the Thought of the Multiple ChapterThree “The Motion of Thought and its Restless Iteration”: Wallace Stevens and the Turns of Repetition Chapter Four “The Unfamiliar Stereotype”: Repetition in the Poetry of John Ashbery

viii x

1 31 61 89

Notes

128

Works Cited

145

Index

150

Acknowledgments

This book began as a dissertation I wrote as a doctoral student at Cornell University almost ten years ago. Since then, the focus of my work has shifted toward more contextual readings of poetry, and even if my interest in the formal, structural qualities of poetry remains, I would have not revisited this project had it not been for the encouragement and support of a number of friends and colleagues. Among them I would particularly want to thank Tomasz Basiuk and Kazimiera Szczuka who have been my most inspiring intellectual companions in the years since this dissertation was completed. For its completion I owe a debt to my teachers at Cornell University, especially to Debra Fried who has shaped my thinking on poetry and poetics and whose brilliance as a scholar is truly exceptional. I am grateful to the other members of my committee, Joel Porte and Roger Gilbert, for their infinite patience and good faith. I owe a great deal to my dearest friends and colleagues from Cornell, Polly Gannon and Zofia Burr, whose companionship, emotional as well as intellectual, has always been very important to me. Polly Gannon’s helpful and sympathetic reading of a draft of the dissertation as well as her encouragement at the critical moment were essential. Zofia Burr’s thorough, attentive readings of numerous drafts helped the dissertation take shape. Her practical advice was invaluable and the encouragement I received from her throughout this project meant more than I can express. My thanks and apologies to my family. To Maria Arcisz, who could always be depended on for unfailing support. To Ewa Slezkin, who was there from the start and shared the enthusiasm for American poetry. To Maciek Tyburski, whose advice to chill out came at all the right moments. They gracefully accepted the burden of competition for my time and attention. This book is for them. I thank my editors at Routlege: Paul Johnson and Mark Andrew Henderson, who started the project with me, and Max Novick who helped me complete it. Above all, I thank Professor Stephen Tapscott without whom this book would not be published. His assistance throughout the process, his willingness to take off my hands the most tedious and most time consuming practical matters related to the publication, and his willingness to read through the drafts and give me sustained encouragement were very generous. The following copyright holders are gratefully acknowledged for permission to use the following materials: • Poems by Walt Whitman, from Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose, copyright (c) 1982 by the Library of America. Reprinted by permission.

• Poems by Wallace Stevens, from Collected Poems, copyright (c) 1954 by the Alfred A.Knopf Pub. Co. Reprinted by permission. • Selections from Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror by John Ashbery, copyright (c) 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975 by John Ashbery. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. • Selections from As We Know by John Ashbery. Copyright (c) by John Ashbery. Selections from Hotel Lautréamont by John Ashbery. Copyright (c) 1992 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Georges Bourchardt, Inc., for the author. • UK and Commonwealth rights to materials by John Ashbery: by Carcanet Press, Manchester, publishers of Selected Poems of John Ashbery, copyright (c) 1998. Reprinted by kind permission. • Sections of Chapter IV have been published earlier in Poetry and the Sense of Panic. Critical Essays on Elizabeth Bishop and John Ashbery, edited by Lionel Kelly, Rodopi, Amsterdam-Altlanta, GA, 2000. Reprinted by permission.

Introduction

Repetitions structure our attention to what we read. The recurrence of images, words, concepts, figures creates a rhythm—temporal and spatial—which underlies reassuring moments of recognition: we make sense of the text by leaps of repetition, through repetition as leaps of sense. Not the only way, but one of the more important ways of relating various semantic and formal elements, repetition anchors our interpretations. The standard, or most conventional, dictionary definitions of repetition presuppose an independent existence of an original. That original is coupled—via repetition—with a duplicate or a replica which reproduces it more or less faithfully.1 Along these lines, an article in The Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms defines repetition as “the basic unifying device in all poetry”; it helps to organize, ornament, associate, and emphasize elements in a poem. According to the Handbook, repetition of similar endings in rhyme “binds lines together”; the repetition of words, and the repetition of phrases, lends unity and/or emphasis. Much more rarely, repetition performs functions other than unifying. And so, allusion—a special case of repetition—may have a diffusive, rather than unifying effect, often seeming to be “an extraneous, if graceful, decoration.” Assonance may also have a “decorative or supplemental function.” Repetition of a phrase may “emphasize a development or change by means of the contrast in the words following the identical phrases.” A line, when repeated, may acquire “altered and enriched significance.” A line may occasionally be repeated for closure. Still, given all these other possibilities, the Handbook insists that repetitions primary function is to unify a poetic text and its other, less stabilizing functions, are “extraneous,” an exception to the rule.2 And yet, repetitions disappoint: even the recurrence of the same words in the same order and at identical intervals enacted by refrains never produces the same effect twice; with varying degrees of skill poems will force us to read their refrains differently each time. Edgar Allan Poe’s “nevermore” is a particularly sturdy demonstration of the infinite capacity of a repeated word to produce new meanings. Even if unintentional and empty, an essentially meaningless array of parroted sounds, the word is capable of endless permutations. As we engage with the text’s repetitions, our ultimate discovery, then, may be that of difference rather than sameness. Led by the instinct to retrieve form and structure promised by the text’s regularities, we are reassured to discover repeated elements and rewarded, so to speak, for the discovery, by the pattern (set up by repetition) immediately opening up because of the very failure (or refusal) to repeat. As Gertrude Stein has put it, “there is no repetition,” and yet it is by “saying over and over again, the same thing, over and over,” that she makes her portraits. The apparent incompatibility of the effects

repetition may produce causes friction: at once stabilizing and unsettling, structuring and unhinging, repetition forces us to recognize parallels, but at the same time exposes the difference within the elements it brings together. What is more, repetition of words and figures, or larger syntactic, figurative and other structures arrests the flow of language (of logic, of continuing thought, of narration) and effects a pause. J.Hillis Miller points out in Fiction and Repetition that, since repetition counters the text’s linear development, it tends to “inhibit the too easy determination of a meaning based on the linear sequence.”3 A source of rupture in a text or story (and also in literary history), repetition problematizes notions of progress and development Repetition both invites and questions the ordering of the repeated elements, questions the laws of causality. Both J.Hillis Miller and Jonathan Culler observe that a repetitive series always calls for an ordering: confronted with repetition we feel compelled to arrange its elements into a logical or temporal sequence. As we do that, however, as we try to construct a linear account of the formation of a repetitive series, the elements in the series resist chronological order. “Originals” and “repetitions” tend do exchange positions: “[l]ate and early reverse and then reverse again, and this makes problematic the order of primary and secondary which is at stake in this or any other repetitive series” (Miller, FR, 14). As Jonathan Culler points out, “[t]he interpreter’s temptation, in such situation, is to master the effects of repetition by casting them into a story, determining origins and causes, and giving it dramatic, significant coloring…to focus and control repetition…,” to domesticate repetition that may otherwise seem “indefinite, rhetorical, uncanny, gratuitous.” We are tempted to search for the original term and yet, “repetition resists our attempts to find a (psychological) cause, an original”; it both “solicits us” and resists solution.4 This temporal instability makes it impossible to determine the origin in a repetitive series. In Steven Connor’s formulation, “Repetition aspires to the condition of an invisible membrane which encloses the original, without impending access to it… But even this…self-effacing servitude displaces the authority of the original,” so that ultimately, “origin is secondary to, or an epiphenomenon of the repetition, is, in fact always missing.”5 If repetition counters the logic of linear progression, undoes narrative links and, by being prone to reversals, violates temporal linearity by making ends function as beginnings, by having copies produce their originals, its effects may obviously be anything but unifying. That is why the effect produced by the juxtaposition of repetition and linear progression seems much more pronounced in prose. Poetry, by virtue of lineation, already counters linear development, counters syntactical continuity and even if it employs elements of narrative, those too are subject to the disrupting effects of the line break. Arguably, repetition parallels and enhances those qualities which make poetry distinct from prose. The essential (though obviously not the only) difference between the discourse of poetry and prose is poetic lineation. Poetry is prose broken into lines, or as Charles Hartman persuasively argues in his study of free verse, in poetry “endings make meanings”; the line breaks effect a pause, producing a counterpoint with syntax.6 By further breaking up what has already been broken (into line units) repetition privileges juxtaposition over continuity. It is no accident that, as Deborah Tannen emphasizes, repetition has been called an essentially poetic aspect of language, because the discontinuity it produces parallels the effects produced by the poetic line.7

When a poem repeats a phrase or word it simultaneously poses the question: how is it possible that a word or (an apparently unique) phrase can be thus lifted and grafted in a new context? What does it mean for a linguistic structure to thus float, unattached? What is the status of the repeated phrase (this mobility does seem to imply a phrase repeated has a life of its own and it could probably be grafted and re-grafted an infinite number of times)? A way to visualize this independence is to imagine a text, a poem, with the repeated element highlighted every time it appears: not only do the repetitions create a pronounced pattern of their own (which may or may not overlap or be synchronized with other patterns established by the poem), but also each time the cluster recurs as the highlighted element, it has to be perceived as something other than the logical extension of the words which precede it; it becomes estranged from its immediate context, creating a gap in the progression of the evolving thought, and it requires to be read anew, reinterpreted in the new context. Since the distinction between repetition-as-sameness and repetition-as-difference is difficult to sustain, a number of other paradigms have been devised to systematize its unruly effects. One of them is the traditional division of the literary uses of form into “classicist” and “romantic,” which has the former adopt the traditional literary norms and conventions and the later abandon those in search for organic form. This paradigm allows us to read repetition as either “conventional” (dictated by the poetic norms and conventions) or “natural” (an extension of the poem’s content), either “traditional” or “organic.” Barbara Johnson offers a persuasive discussion of that binary. In her essay on the implications of divergent models of repetition to the definitions of poetic language, she notices the recurrence in such definitions of the very distinction between the notions of the “natural” and “mechanical.”8 Johnson’s examples are from Poe and Wordsworth, who propose apparently incompatible models of poetic creativity. Wordsworth’s model is based on the “natural” repetition or “emotion recollected in tranquillity”; by insisting on the naturalness of genuine repetition, “Wordsworth attempts to prevent the poetic figure from losing its natural passion, from repeating itself as an empty mechanical device of style” (Johnson, 99). Poe, on the other hand, creates a model which depends on the very mechanical repetitions calculated with mechanical precision. “Spontaneous overflow versus calculation, emotion versus rigid consequence, feelings versus the letters of the alphabet: a first comparison would lead us too see Wordsworth’s poetry as granting primacy to the signified while Poe’s grants primacy to the signifier” (Johnson, 91). And yet, as Johnson demonstrates, “the poetry of pure signifier is just as impossible to maintain as the poetry of the pure signified” (Johnson, 99). Wordsworth’s formula necessarily involves “a blind mechanical repetition of the lost language”; Poe’s reveals that repetition “engenders its own compulsion to sense” (Johnson, 99). The two forms of repetition are shown to call up each other in an inextricable relation, what is more, “the natural and the mechanical, the true and the false, become utterly indistinguishable.” J.Hillis Miller also comments on the co-presence of the two forms of repetition suggesting that the two are always intertwined, so that “each form of repetition inevitably calls up the other as its shadow companion. You cannot have one without the other, though each subverts the other. The difference between one text and another from this point of view is in the varying modes of the intertwining” (Miller, FR, 16); when “[e]ach form of repetition calls up the other, by an inevitable compulsion,” says Miller, “[t]he second is not the negation or opposite of

the first, but its ‘counterpart,’ in a strange relation whereby the second is the subversive ghost of the first, always already present within it as a possibility which hollows it out” (Miller, FR, 9). The question, then, may be not which type is it, but what manifestations the two forms of repetition take in a given text: which one is the text’s explicit argument and which its subversive ghost. The confusion between the “two types,” as Johnson observes, is not so much an error as the condition of poetic language itself: What Wordsworth’s essay shows is that talking about poetry, involves one in an urgent and impossible search for that distinction, for a recipe for a reliable blindness. This is not an inability to get it right, but rather the acting out of an insight into the nature of poetry and the poetic process. For what, indeed, is the problem in any modern theory of poetic language, if not the problem of articulating authenticity with conventionality, originality and continuity, freshness with what is recognizably “fit” to be called poetic? (Johnson, 95) Thus far, I have been discussing repetitions occurring within texts. In a study of repetition, a distinction is usually made between repetitions within and repetitions between texts by different authors. Traditionally, these two types of repetition have been studied within very different, if not entirely divorced, frames of reference. What I call here the repetition between different authors has been properly the domain of the studies devoted to genealogy and influence which attempt to situate poets in relation to each other within the literary cannon, to think of “individual talent” in relation to a “tradition.” What I call repetition within a text, or within the whole body of texts by a single author, has been addressed in structural, rather than historic, temporal terms. My attempt here is to see whether it may be useful to bridge this gap in methodology and rhetoric or at least see whether there are grounds on which the two phenomena are comparable, as well as different. Is the repetition of one’s own text comparable—in terms of structure and significance—to the repetition of the text which is not of one’s own authorship? What is the difference between Whitman quoting the Bible and Whitman quoting himself? Is Ashbery’s quoting from a comic book the same as Ashbery quoting Ashbery? The effort to work out those differences may be a productive way of addressing the broader questions of the category of “authorship,” precisely because to engage in repetition is to problematize the notion of a stable, centered identity of the speaker and to question the speaker’s authority over the text. In addition to informing (and problematizing) our reading of specific texts, repetition plays a significant part in the larger narratives we construct, such as our literary histories. Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence makes a crucial contribution to the study of literary genealogies by recognizing the necessary misreading (or “misprision”) which occurs when poets allude to each other.9 Yet my aim is not—in fact it works against— tracing a genealogy. In my readings, I attempt to place texts in relation of reciprocity or contiguity to each other, rather than that of hierarchy or continuity. None will be read as primary texts, because repetition undermines this kind of originary authority. Such paratactic approach to reading may be an effective alternative to reading which relies on

notions of origin, linearity, progress, precedence and canonicity, at the same time that it allows each of the texts to function within its own context. In an introduction to a book of essays on John Ashbery, Susan Schultz outlines the book’s project as aiming at situating Ashbery in the context of modern American poetry, rather than reading his work as part of a major American poetic tradition. Schultz argues that the most vocal proponents of the genealogical reading of Ashbery are Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler: “Both Bloom and Helen Vendler vaunt Ashbery not so much for himself but as the revisionist of a larger tradition; he is the latest link in a chain that includes Whitman and Stevens.”10 Bloom’s and Vendler’s readings (clearly very different from each other), are model interpretations suggesting a way to read the three poets together, exceptional precisely for what they have taught us about Ashbery’s (and, even more so, Stevens’s) attitude toward the poetic tradition, and groundbreaking in drawing the map of literary allusion. The reason I resist the “genealogical” model is because I want to avoid narrativizing the effects of repetition (though, as Culler has pointed out, that is never entirely possible, as our “temptation” is always to “focus” and “control” repetition (Culler, 264)). Narratives of influence are effective precisely because they tame the “extraneous” uncanny effects of repetition, they domesticate repetition’s “subversive ghosts.” Their advantage is their neatness and their conclusiveness. Their disadvantage (particularly in reference to my topic) is their drive toward precedence, hierarchy and linearity. While they enrich the readings of individual poets, they also depend on considerable areas of blindness.11 My reading, then, focuses on elements of intertextuality, rather than influence. What is more, it is concerned more with relationships between elements (including thematic elements) within a poem, than the poem’s paraphrasable “content.” The two are obviously inseparable, but my emphasis is always on the processes repetition puts in motion. A focus on structure will necessarily emphasize the relations of contiguity set up by poetic patterns, and move along what Jakobson defined as the horizontal axis of language. The larger frame of the book, as it begins with “theories” of repetition and moves to the discussion of poets is itself intended as a type of paratactic structure. I discuss selected theoretical or philosophical approaches to repetition to use them as a way of mapping out a territory and raising questions rather than as a way of defining applicable theories.12 I begin by addressing the work of three philosophers who define repetition as difference—Søren Kierkegaard, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze— to identify the vocabulary which tends to recur in discussions of repetition, to create a dictionary or a topographical outline of the problem. These introductory remarks are meant to provide a context for my discussion of poems in the following chapters, but they are by no means an exhaustive review of the literature on the subject. The fact that I do not extract a coherent set of principles from theoretical texts (to then apply them to the poems) seems justified also by the fact that the theorists I discuss define and use repetition in ways which prevent their arguments from becoming systematic and closed and that they resist reducing their work to an applicable system. Kierkegaard’s Repetition is multilayered and polyphonic in a way which not merely complicates it but ultimately prevents Kierkegaard from formulating a satisfactory definition of repetition; the text remains indeterminate and ambiguous and does not resolve its contradictions. Deleuze’s argument rests on the belief in an essential

difference between any system held a priori (any set of principles one may hold prior to encountering an object) and the empirical a posteriori (the encounter with the object itself). To “apply” any reading method (including Deleuze’s), Deleuze argues, is to necessarily modify it. Derrida’s essay is an attempt to point to difference which has been repressed by traditional philosophy, by releasing the power of writing to generate meanings (where meaning is revealed each time anew, rather than being already there as a structure to be recovered). Deleuze’s, Kierkegaard’s, and Derrida’s work with the concept of repetition is closely related to their attempts to breach the gap between philosophy and other modes of discourse. By adopting for their writing such elements as are traditionally associated with poetry, narrative, or drama they invite a reading of their texts as other than philosophical and in this way undermine the “structure of domination” which philosophy has become, or is when confined to the realm of philosophy only. Deleuze’s reliance on recurrent metaphor and emblem, his analysis of non-philosophical writing which is as rigorous as his attention to philosophical argumentation are some of the ways in which he practices what he calls the “becoming-other” of philosophy. Kierkegaard parallels this move in his practice of pseudonymous authorship and speaking with many voices. His Repetition is anything but a traditional philosophical treatise. Highly metaphorical and mediated, it combines elements of narrative, essay and poetry, undermining its own authority as a model-making philosophical argument. As has been often noted, Derrida similarly moves away from traditional philosophical discursive strategies. Neither are Emerson’s “Circles” and “Experience,” the two essays I refer to in relation to my topic, strictly philosophical, while Gertrude Stein comments on repetition very much as a literary critic or historian would. While it is not my aim here to suggest that these generic fluctuations are the function of the subject of repetition only, I will show that the subject does yield itself to writing which is highly self-reflexive and tends to question the grounds of its own unfolding. The second, third and fourth chapters of my dissertation attend to the function of repetition in the work of Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery, respectively. All three poets extensively employ and comment on the effects of repetition, yet represent three distinct poetics, considerably removed from one another in stylistic and historical terms. The repetitive signatures of each of the poets I discuss indeed prove to be very different: from Whitman’s characteristic syntactical parallelism and incantatory repetition, through Stevens’s recurrence of image and metaphor in tightly shaped patterns, to Ashbery’s long free-verse poem repetitions and his experiments with the “mechanical” repetitions of the codified structures of language and the highly conventional poetic forms. In the second chapter, I argue that repetition in Whitman’s hands is a particularly powerful tool for affirming the all-embracing and a-categorical nature of his Utopian vision. Since it privileges coordination over subordination, it allows Whitman to render a world which is anti-hierarchical and de-centered. In Whitman’s work, repetition is present on several levels. Possibly the most breathtaking of his experiments is that which shapes his oeuvre as a whole. By tirelessly revising Leaves of Grass, Whitman produced successive versions of the same book. Taking Whitman’s repeated returns to the same text as grounds for mapping out his poetic career, I argue against reading the revisions as a progression which can be

represented in linear terms. As an alternative I propose to examine Whitman’s position as a reader of his own work. I compare it to Whitman’s position as a reader of others and suggest there are grounds on which such re-circulation of another writer’s text is comparable to repetitions within Whitman’s own poems and within Leaves of Grass as a whole. I also suggest that our metaphors for “origins” (when we speak of Whitman in the broader context of literary history) may be at odds with the way Whitman figures the notion of “origin” in his poems, where repetitions subvert the notion of a single, retraceable source of a poem or person. The most widely discussed of Whitman’s repetitions are probably those of syntactical structures, syntactic parallelism often recognized as the grounds for his prosody. I suggest that while syntactic parallelism undoubtedly plays an essential structuring role in Whitman’s verse, it cannot be posited as a unifying device. Similarly, the characteristic recurrence of metaphor in Whitman’s poems—another type of repetition—does not yield unified figures. Since Whitman’s repetitions appear to reveal difference, as well as similarity, by repeating an element he may structure the poem, but at the same time repetition necessarily undoes the unity of the element repeated. Rather than produce a static state of equivalence, repetitions represent movement and initiate a dynamic process, so crucial to Whitman’s poetry. What is more, they become Whitman’s tool for representing plurality: repetition allows Whitman to designate a multiplicity without subjecting it to categories. The plurality also invades the voice of the poem, which becomes polyphonic through the repeated movement of becoming. Whitman’s catalogues—his signature form—are an example of a structure grounded in repetition, which allows Whitman to fully express his concern with the a-categorical and a-systematic difference. Repetition also becomes one of Whitman’s means for staging a dialogue with his readers. In the third chapter I discuss Wallace Stevens. In Stevens’s early poems, especially the tightly crafted, perfectly balanced poems of Harmonium, repetitions play an important structuring role. As they create patterns of symmetrical doublings, they contribute to the poem’s regularity. Repetition often serves as a mechanism for discerning minimal shifts in the poems’ landscape: in Stevens’s hands repetition works as a precision tool for testing the world’s patterns, for shaping the poems and inquiring whether the poems can in fact represent the world as it is. The frequently addressed Stevensian dilemma of the tension between reality and imagination is mapped onto his repetitions: the poems question their own (desired) status as an ideal repetition or copy of the world they are describing. Thus the question of the origin of repetition (or any other pattern the poems employ) becomes crucial to the reading of the poem (here we may talk about a distinction between “natural” and “linguistic” repetitions). What seems most characteristic in Stevens’s use of repetition is the combination of repetition and (re) turn which creates a type of circular structure. In his work, repetition and return define the movement of representation and are shown to be a necessary element of thinking: identified with articulation, richness and change, the dynamic of repetition is shown to counter stasis, limitation and death. Yet the circular movement contributes also to the erasure of origins: by making ends overlap with beginnings, Stevens substantially complicates the unfolding of his symmetrical patterns. As a matter of fact, these patterns become progressively less symmetrical in Stevens’s later poems, where repetition rarely signifies doubling but, rather, initiates an infinite motion forward, with no end and no beginning. Arguably, this shift in Stevens’s poetry

away from the harmonies of his earlier work is not a clean break but also a type of return. For Stevens moves toward his theater of repetition by re-engaging his old themes and figures. In that sense, his life’s work also relies on repetition and/as return. My fourth chapter discusses the poems of John Ashbery. The most striking use Ashbery finds for repetition is as a means of recycling of “used” materials, be it wellworn phrases, popular images, clichés or conventional poetic forms, so that what was worn out as to become meaningless, becomes meaningful in new ways. The breathless succession of what may seem only distant associations, the digressions which only branch out to more digressions, the juxtaposition of elements that seem to have nothing in common constitute what Ashbery calls a “derailed argument”: an illustration of opacity in a shifting landscape. I will argue that repetition plays a crucial role in derailing the argument of Ashbery’s poems. At the same time, it prevents the poems from becoming closed, finished structures. Chapter four focuses primarily on the analysis of two poems by John Ashbery which engage two very distinct models of poetic repetition: the long, meditative “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” and a pantoum, “Hotel Lautréamont.” In the former, repetition is present as a recurrence of motif, pattern and figuration; in the later, exact repetition of whole lines is dictated by the poetic convention which calls for mechanical iteration. In “Self-Portrait” repetitions seem to be generated by the poem’s thematic concerns; in “Hotel Lautréamont” repetition itself seems to generate the poem. In both cases, however, repetition is a principle of change and performs the task of making the familiar unfamiliar again, of revitalizing calcified structures. Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait” is, on a certain level, a poem about repetition. Yet despite the poem’s apparently symmetrical structure, to try to map out the poem’s progress is to find oneself caught in a series of mirrorings which are very unstable, in which originals and copies tend to exchange positions (so that repetition becomes the source of what it attempts to duplicate) and which demonstrate that an act of mirroring always involves change. An attempt to define the sources and effects of such repetitive slippage is one of the poem’s concerns. While repetitions in “Self-Portrait,” however disruptive, may be read as a way of organizing the poetic materials—at least that is the fiction any long, meditative poem will work with—in “Hotel Lautréamont,” a pantoum, repetitions are manifestly present as the structure which exists prior to the poem: a type of formal limitation. The poet’s task is, in this case, to devise lines which could be readable in two different contexts: an attempt to wrest meaning from a particularly rigid structure. Thus, in a poem dictated by convention, “meaning” will emerge as if despite the repetitions. Such experiment, while potentially a proof of the poet’s virtuosity, necessarily raises the question concerning the poem’s origins. Children play a game of repeating the same word over and over, many, many times, until it sounds totally absurd: it gives them a scare and a thrill, as when standing at the foot of a very tall tower one quickly looks up to get the effect of a spinning head, weak knees and loss of firm grounding. In the word game, the scare comes from the loss of referrentiality; the thrill from the discovery of a new word, which sounds so strange as to almost feel foreign. Repetition in the work of the three poets I discuss here can have equally unpredictable effects (and this book tries to account only for a few, most characteristic of those), which is hardly surprising considering the paradoxes of repetition, whose significance often rests precisely on its failure. Often motivated by a

desire for continuity, for recovery from loss, for presence repetition fails: to say over and over (for example, to repeat the name of the beloved, over and over) does not bring us any closer, but rather removes us from the object of desire. Instead of conjuring up the desired presence language draws attention to its own (unusual, redundant) structure, draws attention to the speakers act of address (and to repetition itself). Soon, the repeated words begin to sound more like words of mourning than a call for presence: there is a very thin line between repetition of a love poem and a repetition of an elegy. Once love turns to loss, repetition has a deadening effect. But as we continue repeating, we begin to discover the strangeness of our own words. Repetition makes them sound foreign or like the words of a stranger. We begin to hear in our own words echoes of some other presence, something not our own, something not of our making. That moment is a moment of compensation for the loss. Paradoxically, it is the loss of control over our own language which comes to our rescue, at the very moment when we begin to fear that our own language is all we have, that our own stale repetitions fail to recover anything beyond our own desire. It is reassuring to hear our voice resonate with other voices at the moment when what we dread the most is the solipsism of our language, the prison of our subjectivity. In the work of all three poets I discuss, repetition seems to be related to the project of transcending such limitations of a singular perspective.

Chapter One Forms of Repetition Pius Servien rightly distinguished two languages: the language of science, dominated by the symbol of equality, in which each term may be replaced by others; and lyrical language, in which each term is irreplaceable and can only be repeated. —Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

IN SEARCH FOR REPETITION: KIERKEGAARD Søren Kierkegaard’s Repetition begins with a tale of love, whose protagonist, the “young man,” desires, but fails to unite with, his beloved.1 The story moves the narrator, who is also the young man’s confidant, to speculate on the nature of fulfillment and loss and subsequently to undertake an experiment the aim of which is to determine whether a repetition in the form of a concrete realization of an abstract desire is possible at all. The young man has failed to pass the test of repetition: failed to translate his ideal love into the reality of a relationship. The young man’s failure, explains the narrator, is due to his inability to repeat the ideal as the actual. Genuine repetition would unite the young man with his beloved and allow for an expression of his affection in an actuality of a relationship. Instead of marrying his beloved, however, the young man only talks about his love, engaging in mere verbal repetitiveness. The ideal repetition never materializes and repetitions of the wrong kind proliferate in place of the ideal. Interestingly, the young man’s favorite means of expressing his love is a quotation from another man’s poem: “Just as lovers frequently resort to the poet’s words to let the sweet distress of love break forth in blissful joy, so also did he.” The young man’s recitation of “the verse from Poul Möller” is the first hint of repetition gone wrong:

Then, to my easy chair, Comes a dream from my youth. To my easy chair. A heartfelt longing comes over me for you, Thou sun of women. (Kierkegaard, R, 136) The young man’s recitations resemble the dream of the poem’s speaker. Just as the speaker’s “easy chair” of old age is haunted by a dream from his youth—a dream of a woman, long absent (expressed by a poem which relies on verbal repetition), so does the

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young man repeat the poem as an expression of his longing for an absent lover. The young man repeats more than just the poem’s words: the repetition of the poem anticipates the failure of the young man’s love. The poem’s “melancholy” comes from longing embedded in past experience; the love it speaks about is confined to memory and will never be fulfilled. Such, too, is the young man’s love: a love of a haunting dream, feeding on its own compulsive repetitions which never materialize into a real presence of the beloved, repetitions which, in fact (as the narrator will demonstrate), prevent the young man’s affections from ever materializing. The young man’s repetitions are fruitless as they seem entirely divorced from their subject: “If the girl dies tomorrow, it will make no essential difference, he will throw himself down again, his eyes will fill with tears again, he will repeat the poet’s words again” (Kierkegaard, R, 136). The young man is caught in a state of “melancholy longing in which he not so much drew near to the beloved as withdrew from her” (Kierkegaard, R, 137). The girl is as good as dead; the young man’s affection feeds on itself and forgets its object.2 The expression the young man’s love takes is indirect and mediated, as he repeats the words of another (addressed to someone else in a different context). He repeats “again and again,” consumed with pain and unable to stop repeating himself; repetition engenders more repetitions initiating an endless chain of mechanical iteration in which the initial impulse disappears, in fact is shown never to have served as the originary term. Even when the young man himself becomes a poet, his beloved is no more present or real to him than when he quoted another’s words. The type of “poetic creativity” he represents to the narrator (narcissistic, entirely contained to the realm of the self, divorced from its object and feeding on the past experience) does not make present but annihilates its subject: A poetic creativity awakened in him on a scale I had never believed possible. Now I easily grasped the whole situation. The young girl was not his beloved: she was the occasion that awakened the poetic in him.… She had meant much to him; she had made him a poet—and precisely thereby had signed her own death sentence. (Kierkegaard, R, 138) The young man’s poetic repetitions are thus “safe” for he does not risk engaging a living (poetic) subject; he “has nothing to lose”; his recollections effectively shield him from the risks of concrete experience. Indeed, as Repetition seems to argue, the young man’s poetry annihilates its subject. In order really to repeat, the young man would have “to be creative in a stricter sense” (Kierkegaard, R, 138). The young man’s “poetic creativity” feeds on its subject, in effect annihilating the girl, and also metaphorically killing the young man himself: had he confessed to the girl, “she would become his grieving widow who lived only in the memory of him and their relationship” (Kierkegaard, R, 138). As the young man fails at his repetition, the narrator, Constantin Constantius, decides to try the test himself. Making himself the new subject of the experiment, he travels to Berlin, where he has been before, in order to discover whether a repetition of that first trip is possible. This test too, fails. Constantin discovers he is unable to repeat a previous experience without changing its meaning. He is either able to repeat mechanically—then the repetition is exact but, apparently, meaningless; or to repeat with an entirely new

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significance to the event. Comically bitter, he adopts the “stagehorn” as his emblem (for it never makes the same sound twice) and plans to be reconciled to the vision of life as a river. (Ironically, in failing to repeat Constantin accidentally enacts a repetition of his first test of repetition: he repeats the young man’s failure to repeat. What is more, it is by repeating that he discovers the failure of repetition: “I had discovered that there simply is no repetition and had verified it by having it repeated in every possible way” (Kierkegaard, R, 171).) The young man’s love remains a “poetic” love never translated into the actuality of a relationship; Berlin remains for Constantin an idealized image of pleasure, which cannot be recovered. Both experiments fail as in neither case does repetition take the desired form of living, doing. Repetitions of the wrong kind multiply, while the true repetition seems always deferred. The second part of Repetition, titled “Repetition,” instead of offering the hoped for resolution to the problem, takes the test (and the text) out of the narrator’s hands. In part two, the character of “the young man,” who has thus far been the protagonist of Constantin’s story (or, rather, the guinea pig in Constantin’s psychological experiment) emancipates himself, so to speak, acquiring a voice of his own, and begins writing letters to Constantin, thus falling neatly outside the scope of any potential “authorship” we may have established. In the letters, this newly liberated first-person speaker (earlier referred to as the generic “young man”) subjects Constantin to a shattering critique, which ridicules Constantin’s intentions, methods and motivation, accuses him of manipulation and, consequently, completely robs him of all credibility as well as all authority which belongs to him as the author of a philosophical treatise. It is no accident that this strange structure has been adopted for the purposes of a text on repetition. Neither linear development, nor solid origin or determinable authorship would suffice for Kierkegaard’s purposes, because his repetition falls precisely outside those categories. Repetition is a dynamic process, rather than a closed structure of symmetrical doubles; it makes what it repeats and produces the “author” in the process. Inherently anti-linear and anti-hierarchical, repetition results in writing which denies authority to the writer. Such “writing without authority” is essentially “unfinished.” As Ronald Schleifer and Robert Markley observe: Instead of the authority of “continuity”—the authority of a logical, linear discourse that compels assent—Kierkegaard’s reading offers the “counteraction” to itself, what Yeats calls the “counter-truth” to its own “truth.” That is, to write “without authority” is to devise a discourse which doesn’t promise “truth” like a kernel to be discovered at the center: fruitfully and fecundly there, given and authorized by the author. Rather, it is a discourse that calls attention, that presents a crisis, that opens the reader (again) to the drama of possibility.3 Interestingly, it is by taking recourse to literary means—strategies other than those belonging to philosophical discourse proper—that Kierkegaard’s text produces a critique of its own premises: by having a fictional narrative echo the terms set up by the philosophical treatise it escapes both these categories and creates precisely the type of space in which the a-categorical, a-logical, asystematic may function.4

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One of the most spectacular inquiries into the nature of repetition as well as one of the most influential, Kierkegaard’s essay has repeatedly proven to be a text with a power to generate conflicting interpretations. At the same time, its infinite resourcefulness in producing ever new examples of what may count as “repetition” is possibly one of the most powerful demonstrations that no single definition of repetition will account for the effects the form is capable of generating. The precursor of Derrida and Deleuze—the contemporary authorities on repetition—Kierkegaard has undertaken the project of going beyond, or outside, philosophy proper because systematic discourse of traditional philosophy does not offer satisfying means of accounting for a concept which is that unstable.

REPETITION AS DIFFERENCE: DERRIDA The more perfect the repetition (as in the case of twins or mass produced objects), the less a rationalist philosopher is able to tell where the difference lies. This is why phenomena of repetition furnish a privileged approach to the most authentic understanding of difference; they afford examples of incontestable, while apparently inconceivable, difference. Repetition should therefore cease to be defined as the return of the same through the reiteration of the identical; on the contrary, it is the production (in both senses of the word: to bring into existence, to show) of difference.5 In modern philosophical tradition, Søren Kierkegaard’s opposition between “repetition” and “recollection” serves as the model demarcation of two types of repetition. According to Kierkegaard, “recollection” is based on the recovery of a prior presence and produces a faithful duplicate of the original; “repetition” entails difference. “Recollection” is the backward movement of memory, which ideally reproduces the past; “repetition” is a movement forward, which creates as it repeats. In Kierkegaard’s analysis, the difference between recollection and repetition marks the shift from ancient to modern philosophy: [R]epetition is a crucial expression for what “recollection” was to the Greeks. Just as they taught that all knowing is a recollecting, modern philosophy will teach that all life is a repetition.… Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backward, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward. (Kierkegaard, R, 131) In Kierkegaard’s reading, the Greek model posits all knowledge as repetition because knowledge relies on rediscovering the original truth. Platonic “recollection” requires the temporal succession of presence-loss-recovery where, ideally, the first and last terms should be identical. It is based on the backward movement of memory and constitutes the recovery of a presence which has always already been there to be recovered: “[r]ecollection has the great advantage that it begins with the loss; the reason it is safe and secure is that it has nothing to lose” (Kierkegaard, R, 136). Recollection is the work

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of memory, a repetition from memory; standing “at the end instead of at the beginning” (Kierkegaard, R, 137), it looks backwards to the past. Modern repetition, on the other hand, is a movement forward which forges a new presence. It is not an act of absolute creation, argues Kierkegaard, for “that which is repeated has been—otherwise it could not be repeated—but the very fact that it has been makes the repetition into something new” (Kierkegaard, R, 149). It is a dynamic process (rather than a static state of equivalence) and always involves risk. Consequently, repetition proper, as defined by Kierkegaard, is a creation as well as a repetition, or a repetition with a difference. As Kierkegaard is well aware, the juxtaposition of the two types of repetition is an uneasy one and, indeed, his text problematizes the dichotomy. Still, the opposition has proven useful as the testing ground of repetition, as a means for organizing terminology and creating a provisional map of the terrain affected by repetition. Kierkegaard’s analysis makes it clear that a discussion of repetition has to include a consideration of its finite and infinite aspects; a recognition of the ways in which it may effect stasis, or, conversely, its tendency toward movement; a recognition of the paradoxical coexistence—within the category of repetition—of the past and the future; and a consideration of the relationship of repetition to the logic of linearity and the accidents of contingency. Modern philosophers, following Kierkegaard, tend to privilege repetition-as-difference over repetition-as-sameness, that is, tend to privilege “repetition” over “recollection.” Repetition in the sense of doing or saying again is impossible or, at best, unproductive. One does not repeat a word by saying it twice, not only because of the change in context, but also because the word uttered twice will be precisely that: a word which has an additional function of repeating another word. In John Caputo’s formulation, To repeat is to produce and to alter, to make and to make anew. Repetition is a principle of irrepressible creativity and novelty; it would be impossible to repeat without making and without altering what is already made. Even to repeat “exactly the same thing” is to repeat it in a new context which gives it a new sense. (Caputo, 142) By placing difference at the core of repetition, modern philosophy insists that repetition is a dynamic process, capable of generating movement and change. Defined as difference, repetition is contrasted with other forms of iteration (or, as Kierkegaard would have it, forms of “recollection”), such as, for example, mechanical repetition, but also repetition involved in memory and habit. Alterity and creativity are thus the key concepts in the modern definitions of repetition, among which two of the most influential are those proposed by Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. In “Signature Event Context,” Derrida points out that repeatability (or “iterability”) is the essential condition of writing.6 All writing, to be defined as such, has to be able to function in the total absence of the sender and beyond the death of the addressee: all writing has to be iterable. The term “iterability,” used by Derrida, is akin to Kierkegaard’s “repetition” in that it posits repetition as difference. As Derrida observes, “iter” means “again” and probably comes from the Sanskrit “itara”—other. Thus the

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word “iterable” contains the notions of both repeatability and difference, relating repetition to alterity.7 When examining the implications of absence which lies at the core of writing—the absence of sender and/to receiver—Derrida defines this absence as a radical break, rather than, as traditional philosophy would have it, a “progressive extenuation of presence” (Derrida, SEC, 5). When the writer/sender is absent from his writing and writing continues to produce effects independently, writing must be considered independent of the writer’s present intentions. The iterability of writing makes it readable independently of both the context of its production and the intention of its author. This relation between iterability and (the loss of) authorial intention takes us back to the relation between repetition and authority set up by Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard has already alerted us to this consequence of repetition: by having repetition undermine the authority of the writer, he has shown how repetition leads to the questioning of the origin of the written text. Both qualities are thematized in Kierkegaard’s text in the relation of Constantin and the young man: the authority of both speakers is relativized because their priority in relation to each other is questioned. As they read each other it becomes impossible to determine who is the “author” and who the “subject” of the story, who is the writer and who is the protagonist, and ultimately, where the story originates. This break, argues Derrida, the force of rupture with the “original” context (“with the collectivity of presences organizing the moment of its inscription” (Derrida, SEC, 9)), which detaches writing from both context and intention, is the structure of all writing. Because the written sign is iterable, it remains readable even when the moment of its inscription is irrevocably lost. The sign can be detached from its contextual chain and still function as a sign, a condition Derrida calls “espacement”: “the possibility of disengagement and citational graft which belongs to the structure of every mark, spoken or written, and which constitutes every mark in writing before and outside of every horizon of semio-linguistic communication” (Derrida, SEC, 12).8 A certain unity or self-identity of the sign/mark is required to allow its repeatability (“that which is repeated has been, otherwise it could not be repeated” (Kierkegaard, R, 149)). Yet it is, paradoxically, by virtue of the sign’s iterability that its unity is achieved. It is by (the possibility of) being repeated that the past presence can be established: by being repeated in the absence of referent, in the absence of a determinate signified, in the absence of intention of signification as well as intention of present communication: Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written (in the current sense of this opposition), in a small or large unit, can be cited, put between quotation marks; in so doing it can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable. This does not imply that the mark is valid outside of a context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center or absolute anchorage [ancrage]. This citationality, this duplication or duplicity, this iterability of the mark is neither an accident nor an anomaly, it is that (normal/abnormal) without which a mark could not even have a function called “normal.” What would a mark be that could not be cited? Or one whose origins would not get lost along the way? (Derrida, SEC, 12)

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Derrida’s examination of iterability (as the structure of writing) and its consequences, provides a model of a repetitive structure (of writing) in which repetition is inseparably related to the problem of authorship, authority, intention and interpretation. It is precisely this detachability of words, the possibility of grafting them in a new context and the subsequent difference produced by the very act of their reinscription, that is crucial to the discussion of repetition and will be my focus in the analysis of poems. Obviously, poetic repetitions are an iterability of a different type than, for example, the performative utterances Derrida examines in “Signature, Event, Context.” Yet, as Derrida observes, the “relative specificity” or “relative purity” of performatives, …does not emerge in opposition to citationality or iterability, but in opposition to other kinds of iteration within a general iterability which constitutes a violation of the allegedly rigorous purity of every event of discourse or every speech act. Rather than oppose citation or iteration to the noniteration of an event, one ought to construct a differential typology of forms of iteration, assuming that such project is tenable and can result in an exhaustive program, a question I hold in abeyance here. (Derrida, SEC, 18) “A differential typology of forms of iteration,” a type of a dictionary of forms of repetition, is clearly not a “tenable project,” considering the very nature of iterability which is capable of generating an infinite number of possibilities. Neither is it my project here to suggest ways of categorizing the forms of repetition. What I do examine below is a specific type of iteration—repetition which functions in a poetic text—but which belongs to “the general iterability,” to use Derrida’s formulation, that is the structure of all writing. In that way, repetition in poetry, among other effects it produces, lays bare the underlying structure of writing, highlighting the fact that writing is essentially iterable, that signs can be detached from their context and grafted into new contextual chains.

THE ACCIDENTS OF REPETITION In addition to defining repetition in relation to difference, Derrida and Kierkegaard share an interest in a particularly elusive quality of repetition, namely, its relation to the accidental. What may appear merely repetitions sideeffect acquires quite a prominent position in the work of both philosophers. The most unsettling in Kierkegaard’s Repetition are those instances of repetition which are not even acknowledged as such (or, at best, disposed of as irrelevant, or as repetition of the “wrong” kind). Given, however, the difficulty in achieving the repetition of the “right” kind and the omnipresence of the unwanted, accidental repetitions, those accidental repetitions become as pronounced for the reader of the text as the “true” repetition the author searches for. In fact, in a text composed primarily of digressions, these side-remarks, in themselves “accidental” offshoots of the text’s main theme, demonstrate most successfully how “the accidental” may be the source of meaning. Kierkegaard defines this effect as “accidental concretion,” suggesting the unpremeditated

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or “accidental” and also specific, “concrete”—as opposed to “abstract”—nature of the phenomenon. One of these digressions concerns the fine arts and constitutes a critique of mimetic representation. Constantin observes that, since the painter cannot execute an abstraction, in order to produce a painting representative of a given subject, say, in order to paint “a rural area in general,” “the whole thing is achieved by contrast, namely, by accidental concretion.” The painter achieves the desired effect by making his representation nonrepresentative, by having it rely on the accidental, unpremeditated choice of elements.9 This phenomenon is likened to the naive art of children: “In the days of childhood, we had such enormous categories that they now almost make us dizzy, we clipped out of a piece of paper a man and a woman who were man and woman in general in a more rigorous sense that Adam and Eve were” (Kierkegaard, R, 158). In this striking metaphor, successful representation is shown to rely not on representativeness or on generalized pre-conceived concepts that feed into the execution of the art object, nor can it be said to function as a symbol, but, rather, it is a matter of accidental choice. Meaning is the function of/originates with the materials at hand, rather than being the condition of the ideal taking on empirical expression. The phenomenon of “accidental concretion” (what in other terms we could call a synecdoche based on metonymy) operates in other types of representation; Kierkegaard’s second digression shows it replacing one of the philosopher’s tools, “classification”: A wit has said that mankind can be divided into officers, servant girls and chimney sweeps. In my opinion, this remark is not only witty but also profound, and it would take great speculative talent to make a better classification. If a classification does not ideally exhaust its object, the accidental is preferable in every way, because it sets the imagination in motion. (Kierkegaard, R, 162) An arbitrary selection of elements is preferred because it does not exhaust the subject of representation, is not finished and has to be “completed” (by the reader). An essentially open structure, it comes into being/meaning through interpretation. Successful classification, on the other hand, would have to be exhaustive; it would rely on the presupposition that it is possible to take into account the whole of the issue under consideration and then contain its elements within objective categories. Classification makes a claim to be universally applicable and presupposes an essentially coherent world which lends itself to such an account.10 (We are given a clue here that the definition of repetition the text seeks will not take the form of “classification,” will not be a logical, exhaustive and objective unfolding of the “whole” of the problem. More likely, the aim of Kierkegaard’s “argument” will be to “set the imagination in motion.”) Classification, and the categories it imposes, entails a subjection of difference. According to Foucault: The most tenacious subjection of difference is undoubtedly that maintained by categories. By showing the number of different ways in which being can express itself, by specifying its forms of attribution, by imposing in a certain way the distribution of existing things, categories create a condition where being maintains its undifferentiated repose at its

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highest level. Categories organize the play of affirmations and negations, establish the legitimacy of resemblances within representation, and guarantee the objectivity and operation of concepts. They supress the anarchy of difference, divide differences into zones, delimit their rights, and prescribe their task of specification with respect to individual beings. On one side, they can be understood as the a priori forms of knowledge, but, on the other, they appear as an archaic morality, the ancient decalogue that the identical imposed upon difference. Difference can only be liberated through the invention of an acategorical thought.11 Kierkegaard’s third digression and another example of the workings of accident is drawn from the world of theater, and more specifically, farce: In farce…the minor characters have their effect through that abstract category ‘in general’ and achieve it through accidental concretion. In this way, one gets no further than actuality. Nor should one, but the spectator is comically reconciled to watching this accidental concretion make a claim to be the ideal. (Kierkegaard, R, 163) Constantin defends farce, the “lowest” of all theater arts, for the qualities of immediacy and simplicity which make it appealing to the crowd. At the same time he ridicules the attempts of the sophisticated part of the audience to translate the effects of farce into “intellectual” terms, to mediate or categorize them. The power of farce lies precisely in its unmediated, improvisational, accidental nature: the boldness with which it claims the peculiarities of the stage setting or actors’ appearance represent the “general,” the “courage” of its actors to perform without a pre-written text. The “meaning” of farce is almost entirely a matter of accident. Or, again: meaning is to be sought in the materials at hand which are not a representation of an abstract idea but work as a way of “setting imagination in motion.”12 A similar relationship between the notion of “accident” and the concept of repetition surfaces in Derrida’s critique of Austin’s philosophical strategies: Austin’s procedure is rather remarkable and typical of that philosophical tradition with which he would like to have so few ties. It consists in recognizing that the possibility of the negative (in this case, of infelicities) is in fact a structural possibility, that failure is an essential risk of the operation under consideration; then, in a move which is almost immediately simultaneous, in the name of a kind of ideal regulation, it excludes that risk as accidental, exterior, one which teaches us nothing about the linguistic phenomenon being considered. (Derrida, SEC, 15; italics mine) Even more interesting is the presence of the notion of repetition in Derrida’s discussion of the “accidental” (or whatever is “exterior” to theory proper). In his critique of Austin’s theory, Derrida observes that Austin wants to create a structure which would exclude the unavoidable “endless alteration of essence and accident”; by refraining from proposing a

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“general doctrine” and thus by excluding that which is accidental, Austin excludes “precisely the possibility for every performative utterance (and a priori every other utterance) to be ‘quoted.’” Austin “insists on the fact that this possibility remains abnormal, parasitic…[a situation] that we should strenuously distance ourselves from and ignore” (Derrida, SEC, 16). To exclude the “accidental” means, then, to exclude the possibility of iterability. As Derrida points out, among Austin’s exclusions is the poetic use of utterance. In Austin’s words, “a performative utterance will for example, be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage, or introduced in a poem” (quoted in Derrida, SEC, 16). By making its way into a poem an utterance is believed to acquire quotation marks and thus become “void.” “Language in such circumstances,” Austin continues, “is in special ways—intelligibly—used not seriously [Derrida’s emphasis], but in many ways parasitic upon its normal use” (Derrida, SEC, 16).The possibility of citationality is rejected in the same gesture with the poetic uses of language, both being perceived as “not serious” and “parasitic.” Kierkegaard plays the devil’s advocate when he suggests that the accidental repetitions are not what he seeks, or “teach us nothing.” That those very accidents are, ultimately, one of the most if not the most important lesson of the first part of Repetition is already suggested by the very fact that they are the only kind of repetition available (at least in the first part of Kierkegaard’s essay). Derrida’s parallel argument highlights the subtlety of Kierkegaard’s move: while keeping those accidents of repetition at the margin, so to speak, or “outside” any serious consideration, Kierkegaard at the same time uses them to fill the gap made by the absence of “serious” repetition. Once again, the un-serious, the ironic, the subversive takes precedence over the seriousness of philosophical discourse proper; the margin moves to the center in a gesture which anticipates Derrida’s deconstructive method.

REPETITION AND DIFFERENCE: DELEUZE Gilles Deleuze, possibly the most influential contemporary philosopher of repetition, defines it as “difference without a concept.”13 According to Deleuze, repetition reveals difference so that difference can no longer be contained by a single conceptual whole. In his critique of traditional philosophy, Deleuze points to the failure of traditional metaphysics to think difference and repetition in themselves, rather than as a function of identity. For the traditional philosopher difference always leads back to identity, argues Deleuze, while repetition is no more than a type of redundancy, since it is perceived as identical with what is being repeated. The task of radical modern philosophers is, then, to think difference and repetition in affirmative terms. In Deleuze’s philosophical project, repetition becomes the mechanism which releases and authenticates difference; it allows for non-mediated difference which cannot be subsumed under the category of the Same. As Michel Foucault observes in his review of Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, Deleuze’s philosophy successfully resists mastering difference: What if [thought] conceived of difference differentially, instead of searching out the common elements underlying difference? Then

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difference would disappear as a general feature that leads to the generality of the concept, and it would become—a different thought, the thought of difference—a pure event. As for repetition, it would cease to function as the dreary succession of the identical, and would become displaced difference. (Foucault, 182) Deleuzian repetition resists the laws of narrative progression. Deleuze, like Kierkegaard, highlights that quality of repetition which makes it difficult to determine which is the “original” term and which “merely” its repetition or “copy.” Indeed, argues Deleuze, repetition tends to reverse originals and copies; repetition “interiorizes and thereby reverses itself”(Deleuze, DR, 1).14 The obvious parallels between Deleuze’s and Kierkegaard’s conceptions of repetition are acknowledged in Difference and Repetition where much space is devoted to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Both philosophers, argues Deleuze, “make something new of repetition itself” (Deleuze, DR, 6). As Deleuze, they “oppose repetition to the laws of nature and to the moral law” (Deleuze, DR, 6) as well as to “the generalities of habit” and to “the particularities of memory” (Deleuze, DR, 7). Deleuze reads Kierkegaard as the “reversal” of Platonism: Let us consider the two formulas: “only that which resembles differs” and “only differences can resemble each other.” These are two distinct readings of the world: one invites us to think difference from the standpoint of a previous similitude or identity; whereas the other invites us to think similitude and even identity as the product of deep disparity. The first reading precisely defines the world of copies or representations; it posits the world as icon. The second, contrary to the first, defines the world of simulacra; it posits the world itself as phantasm.… So to “reverse Platonism” means to make the simulacra rise and to affirm their rights among icons and copies. The problem no longer has to do with the distinction Essence-Appearance or Model-Copy.15 According to Deleuze, the “Platonic wish to exorcise the simulacra is what entails the subjection of difference.” (Deleuze, LS, 265) In discussing the above passage from Logic of Sense, J.Hillis Miller (Miller, FR, 5–6) points out that Platonic repetition depends on a third thing: a principle of identity which precedes it; it is based on the presupposition of a “solid archetypal model,” grounded in a preestablished similitude or identity: the “assumption of such a world gives rise to the notion of a metaphoric expression based on genuine participative similarity or even identity…” Miller discusses such examples of repetition which necessarily need theological grounding: “the creation, the soul, the work of art—all…have the same shape, the same movement, and the same relation to a generative center.”16 In Nietzscheian repetition, Miller continues, similitude or identity achieved by repetition is the product of an original disparity. In a world of difference, repetition is “dreamlike,” “opaque”; it is not logical and cannot be logically defined. “If the similarity is not logical or wakeful, but opaque, dreamlike, it cannot be defined logically, but only exemplified. The example will then only present again the opacity” (Miller, FR, 9). This “ghastly,” “ungrounded” repetition is the echoing of two dissimilar things which, in the gap of that difference,

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create a third thing. “It is neither in the first nor in the second nor in some ground which precedes both, but in between, in the empty space which the opaque similarity crosses” (Miller, FR, 9). Obviously, the quoted opposition between “the Platonic” and “the Kierkegaardian” is as uneasy as the very notion of “Kierkegaardian repetition”—too complex and protean a term to lend itself to a straightforward definition. Deleuze recognizes, indeed, that “to overturn Platonism” may well mean to seek Plato’s own “subversive ghosts”: We would do well to recall to what extent the Greek soul in general, and Platonism in particular, loathed the eternal return in its latent signification. Nietzsche was right when he treated the eternal return as his own vertiginous idea, an idea nourished only by the esoteric Dionysian sources, ignored or repressed by Platonism. To be sure, Nietzsche a few times made statements that remained at the level of the manifest content: the eternal return as the Same which brings about the return of the Similar. But how can one not see the disproportion between this flat, natural truth, which does not go beyond a generalized order of the seasons, and Zarathustra’s emotion? Furthermore, the manifest statement exists only to be refuted by Zarathustra. (Deleuze, LS, 264) Platonism represses the chaotic. Nietzsche, on the other hand, affirms chaos in his idea of “eternal return.” But as “modern readers” read Plato, they recognize in his writing the presence of the repressed, the chaos pressing on the Platonic order. Similarly, as Deleuze shows in his reading of Nietzsche, we have to acknowledge those gestures in Nietzsche— no matter how unconvincing—toward the “flat, natural truth which does not go beyond a generalized order of the seasons.” Foucault comments: What philosophy has not tried to overturn Platonism? If we defined philosophy at the limit as any attempt, regardless of its source, to reverse Platonism, then philosophy begins with Aristotle; or better yet, it begins with Plato himself, with the conclusion of the Sophist where it is impossible to distinguish Socrates from the crafty imitators.… To reverse Platonism with Deleuze is to displace oneself insidiously within it, to descend a notch, to descend to its smallest gestures—discrete, but moral—which serve to exclude the simulacrum. (Foucault, 166, 168) Thus the “two types” of repetition (or two ways of reading repetition) coexist and surface with an emphasis depending on the critical temper of the day. Interestingly, the contemporary context of postmodern culture may again shift our sympathies toward “the exclusion of the simulacrum.” As Steven Connor says, As Deleuze, Derrida and others have argued, we continue to depend upon an opposition between things which are felt to be immediate, original and ‘real’ on the one hand, and the representations of those things, which we conceive of as secondary, derived and therefore ‘false’ on the other. Repetition plays a crucial role in sustaining our sense of the real, since

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repetition is always, as Deleuze argues, tied to the conception of a return of the Same, and the threat posed by repetition and replication to the authority of original and universal ideas is only ever a temporary threat, which customarily reverts to the service of origins.17 Obviously, Deleuze wants repetition to function beyond the return of the Same. Connor’s emphasis here is, however, very telling: In the light of the fantastic proliferation of processes for the replication of products, texts and information, many cultural theorists, from Walter Benjamin to Jean Baudrillard, have seen a diminution in the authority of the ideas of originality (…). At the same time, it is possible to see how the proliferation of reproductions actually intensifies the desire for origin, even if that origin is increasingly sensed as an erotic lack rather than a tangible and satisfying presence. (Connor, PC, 151) When there is no return to the “real,” when the origin is missing, the desire to make sense of the infinite replication may inspire to construct a new notion of the “real.” For Deleuze, the emphasis is on difference, transgression, creativity: these terms are crucial to Deleuzian repetition. They make it a dynamic process, opposing repetition to the static state of equivalence. Indeed, Deleuze argues that movement as such belongs to repetition. “Movement” or “getting out” or “flight” or “deterritorialization” is, for Deleuze, the prerequisite of thinking which needs to transcend its own codification and always try to become something else/new. “Nomadism, the war-machine, becomings, nuptials against nature, capture and thefts, interregnums, minor languages or stammering of language”: the Deleuzian dictionary is rich in terminology which defines movement out of codification. And it is repetition, as the essence of movement, that allows the flight. In Deleuze’s formulation, “movement, the essence and the interiority of movement, is not of position, not mediation, but repetition” (Deleuze, DR, 10). For Kierkegaard and Deleuze movement is more than simply a distinguishing mark of “true” repetition. They go as far as to suggest a state of equivalence between the two terms. As John Caputo points out, Kierkegaard’s question “is movement possible?” may be read as the question “is repetition possible?” If recollection is an attempt to arrest movement, to still the flux, repetition is a way of constructing meaning within the flux, taking time and change as one of its elements: Recollection is an intelligible and frank attempt to undo the movement of time and becoming because it understands the sharp difference between eternity and time, logic and existence, being and becoming. Kierkegaard thought there really were only two ways to address the question of movement: either to affirm it, with the category of repetition, or to negate it, with the category of recollection. Either way one makes sense of the flux.… Without either recollection or repetition there is nothing but the flux, nothing but a meaningless turmoil. Recollection stills the turmoil; repetition finds a way to maintain ones head in the midst of it. (Caputo, 16–7)

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“Modern philosophy makes no movement; as a rule it makes only a commotion…” (Kierkegaard, R, 186) complains Kierkegaard, the Danish “commotion” being a play on Hegel’s dialectic of contradiction and mediation (Kerkegaard, R, translators note 18, 370). Modern philosophy is of no help in respect to repetition. Constantin ridicules the Hegelian dialectics of position, negation and mediation as an easy “1, 2, 3” (Kierkegaard, R, 226). In Deleuze’s terms, Hegel does not go beyond false movement, that is, “the abstract, logical movement of ‘mediation.’” Hegelian movement of contradiction fails, argues Deleuze, as it always contains difference within a larger totality: Hegelian contradiction appears to push difference to the limit, but this path is a dead end which brings it back to identity, making identity the sufficient condition for difference to exist and be thought.… The intoxications and the giddinesses are feigned, the obscure is already clarified from the outset. Nothing shows this more clearly than the insipid monocentricity of the circles in the Hegelian dialectic. (Deleuze, DR, 263)18 Monocentric circles have, then, to be replaced by a decentered (or polycentric) discourse, monologue has to be replaced by dialog, a static, dialectical form has to give way to genuine movement. Most importantly, Deleuze distinguishes the repetition of distinct instants (and the difference between them) from the repetition within the singular (and the internal difference). It is a difference within, rather than the difference between: such as the difference revealed within a re-grafted sign. “[R]epetition on the level of external conduct echoes, for its own part, a more secret vibration which animates it, a more profound, internal repetition within the singular,” argues Deleuze (Deleuze, DR, 1). Entities are not identical with themselves and it is repetition that reveals that internal difference. Repetition reveals, to use Emily Dickinson’s words, “the internal difference where the meanings are.” Deleuze’s example is Raymond Roussel, one of the “great repeaters of literature, able to lift the pathological power of language to a higher artistic level”: Roussel takes ambiguous words or homonyms and fills the entire distance between their meanings with a story presented twice and with objects themselves doubled. He thereby overcomes homonymity on its own ground and inscribes the maximum difference within repetition, where this is the space opened up at the heart of a word. (Deleuze, DR, 22) Consequently, repetition subverts the notion of self-identity; it reveals the internal chasm, a force of rupture within objects. Since a thing repeated is never the same thing, there can be no single definition to embrace it or concept to contain it. Repetition, to go back to Kierkegaard, both provides grounding (for “that which is repeated has been—otherwise it could not be repeated”) and reveals the non-identity of the object and its repetition (for “the very fact that it has been makes the repetition into something new”). Ultimately, it reveals the non-identity of the object within itself.

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“WRITING WITHOUT AUTHORITY”: REPETITION AS MOVEMENT OUT OF CODIFICATION Arguably, there are contexts in which the rhetorical power of repetition is used as a stabilizing effect. Such is the case with law: all legal formulations (as well as the ten commandments or any codified law) derive their power from their repeatability— otherwise they could not function as law. Any codified system (for example, the literary cannon) comes into being through repeated use or reference.19 That is why Derrida suggests a distinction between “the rabbinical” and “the poetic” repetitions. Roland Barthes makes this distinction clear in his description of two distinct uses of language: the institutionalized language of power which serves the perpetuation of the system on the one hand, and the creative, poetic or “erotic” language which makes new: every old language is immediately compromised, and every language becomes old once it is repeated. Now, encratic language (the language produced and spread under the protection of power) is statutorily a language of repetition; all official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology. Confronting it, the New is bliss (Freud: “In the adult, novelty always constitutes the condition for orgasm”). Whence the present configuration of ferees: on the one hand, a mass banalization (linked to the repetition of language)…and on the other, a (marginal, eccentric) impulse toward the new—a desperate impulse that can reach the point of destroying discourse: an attempt to reproduce in historical terms the bliss repressed beneath the stereotype.…20 “Anything rather than the rule,” says Barthes; anything rather than “generality, stereotype, ideolect: the consistent language.” Consequently, Barthes opposes repetitionas-stereotype to creative repetition: repetition which is “erotic,” which is excessive and extravagant to the point of being destructive; repetition which makes new. Any systematic language may tend toward its own codification. Be it the language of power (addressed by Barthes), the language of science (in Bakhtin’s analysis) or philosophy itself. Vincent Descombes comments: The major works of philosophy serve the cause of order, appointing places, arranging things by rank and displaying a predilection for distributing properties among supposita and attributes among subjects. In order to set up a hierarchy, they invoke a hypothetical First Principle: that the rank of each is a function of the distance separating it from this principle. Thus every philosophy, in its own way, posits the precedence of the One over the Many. Rare are the philosophies that dispense attributes in an anarchic fashion (in the absence of any a hypothetical arche)—a distribution which Deleuze calls ‘nomadic’…(Descombes, 153)

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History of philosophy has a tendency to codify thought, argues Deleuze, it is “the agent of power.” Philosophy is “shot through with the project of becoming the official language of a Pure State” (Deleuze and Parnet, 22). Consequently, Deleuze oversteps the limits of philosophical discourse proper moving philosophy in the direction of literature and engaging other kinds of discourse, aiming at what he calls “a philosophy-becoming which has nothing to do with the history of philosophy and which happens through those whom the history of philosophy does not manage to classify” (Deleuze and Parnet, 2). This “becoming-other” of philosophy parallels the quality of the work of Kierkegaard and Derrida, which has earned them the name of the most “literary” of philosophers. As is true of Kierkegaard and Derrida, Deleuzian writing between genres is closely knit with questioning the position of the author of writing. Deleuze is determined to find means for what he calls “stopping being an author.” His work with Felix Guattari and Claire Parnet—experiments in writing “a deux”—are extraordinary demonstrations of writing released from a single signature, suspended between authors and thus belonging to neither or to both and consequently not traceable to a single authorial presence. Deleuze’s philosophy, which aspires to be pluralistic, a-systematic or even anarchic, defines repetition in opposition to traditional hierarchies and codified systems.21 For Deleuze, as well as for Kierkegaard, repetition is the marker of creativity. The “more profound, more artistic reality” of Deleuzian repetition, echoes what Kierkegaard requires of “true repetition” when he demands that his young man be “creative in a stricter sense.” “By nature a transgression or exception, repetition always reveals a singularity opposed to the particulars subsumed under laws, a universal opposed to the generalities which give rise to laws,” argues Deleuze (DR, 5).

REPETITION AND MEMORY As must be clear from the examples quoted above, it is not only the language of power or encratic language and philosophical or political systems that tend to codify thought. Indeed, we all have our own codifying mechanisms, our personal codifying machines, which rely on repetition. Such is the power of socialization, such is the work of memory and the nature of habit. While placing difference at the core of repetition, modern philosophy opposes repetition to memory and habit. As Deleuze observes, for Kierkegaard and Nietzsche repetition is “the double condemnation of habit and memory.…[Repetition is the thought of the future: it is opposed to both the ancient category of reminiscence and the modern category of habitus. It is in repetition and by repetition that Forgetting becomes a positive power…” (Deleuze, DR, 7). The second part of Kierkegaard’s Repetition (titled “Repetition”), which follows Constantin’s misguided experiment, begins in the safety of “habit.” After the failure of his experiment, which convinced him of the absence of meaningful repetition, Constantin feels a sickly desire for mechanical order: Everything unable to move stood in its appointed place, and everything that moved went its calculated course: my clock, my servant, and I, myself, who with measured pace walked up and down the floor. Although

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I had convinced myself that there is no repetition, it nevertheless is always certain and true that by being inflexible and so by dulling one’s powers of observation a person can achieve a sameness that has a far more anesthetic power than the most whimsical amusements…(Kierkegaard, R, 179) “This is the hour of lead” for Constantin Constantius, the time when any movement (so vital to a meaningful repetition) is no more than mechanical iteration. As in Emily Dickinson’s poem, where “the feet mechanical, go round,” this moment, when all movement is as mechanical as the clocks “measured pace,” is figured as progressive freezing toward a complete stasis, as a sameness effected by inflexibility and the dulling of senses. This kind of mechanical repetition is death in life (“remembered if outlived”); like the numbing repetitions in Tennyson’s “Lotos Eaters” or Prufrock’s anesthetizing refrain, the mechanical return of the same is both soothing and deadly. Such, too, were the repeated recitations of Kierkegaard’s young man. The repetition of memory and the repetition of habit are both opposed in Kierkegaard’s essay to the lifebringing repetition; as the return of the same they have the tendency to solidify, petrify their objects. Any activity they permit is dull and meaningless. The relationship between repetition and memory serves as grounds for the Freudian definition of repetition compulsion.22 In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” Freud describes a child’s game of “Fort-da” (“gone” and “back”) in which the child repeatedly throws away and retrieves a toy. Freud interprets the game as a reenactment or repetition of the unpleasant experience of the mother’s departure. As he observes, the child derives pleasure from repeating the unpleasant moment of “mommy gone” because the game allows the child to master the unpleasant moment and take revenge: now it is the child that throws away (and has the power to retrieve); now the child is in power to do something unpleasant to someone else.23 In psychoanalysis, repetition compulsion is defined as an unconscious reenactment of a traumatic experience. In order to cure the patient the therapist provokes an emotionally charged repetition of the repressed experience. Such “theatrical and dramatic operation” (the use of both terms is quite revealing here: the theater of repetition, or genuine repetition in action is the cure for the mechanical, involuntary iterations) of healing repetition takes the form of transference, whereby the repressed unconscious breaks through in the form of repetition played out in the sphere of transference of the patient’s relation to the therapist. Thus Freudian repetition has the familiar double meaning: it is a symptom of an illness (as a compulsion to repeat), but it may also be the cure (as transferrential repetition). The move from one to the other is defined as the move from unconscious reenactment to conscious remembering.24 In commenting on Freud’s notion of repetition compulsion (and the opposition between “memory” and “remembrance,” where “memory” is the passive knowledge which compels one to enact or repeat the past in an unconscious, compulsive manner, and remembrance is “the working through of memory,” or Aristotelian “recognition”), Deleuze illustrates the process by the patterns of classic tragedy: “the hero repeats precisely because he is separated from an essential, infinite knowledge”: This knowledge is in him, it is immersed in him and acts in him, but acts as something hidden, like blocked representation.… In general the

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practical problem consists in this: this unknown knowledge must be represented as bathing the whole scene, impregnating the elements of the play and comprising in itself all the powers of mind and nature, but at the same time the hero cannot represent it to himself—on the contrary, he must enact it, play it and repeat it until the acute moment Aristotle called “recognition.” At this point, repetition and representation confront one another and merge, without, however, confusing the two levels, the one reflecting itself in and being sustained by the other, the knowledge as it is represented on stage and as repeated by the actor then being recognized as the same. (Deleuze, DR, 15) In the case of Freudian repression, “that which repeats does so only by dint of not ‘comprehending,’ not remembering, not knowing or not being conscious” (Deleuze, DR, 16). According to Deleuze, this is repetition defined “by default.” In his critique of Freud, Deleuze rejects the presupposition of an originary “hidden” meaning which, according to Freud, gives rise to the repetitive enactments. For Deleuze’s there is no originary term; the masks Freud’s patients put on as they conceal their “real” selves are, Deleuze argues, as real as what is said to lie “beyond” them. “Ultimately, it is a question of repetition and disguises, argues Deleuze. “Do the disguises found in the work of dreams or symptoms…rediscover while attenuating a bare, brute repetition (repetition of the Same)?”: The disguises and the variations, the masks or costumes, do not come “over and above”: they are, on the contrary, the internal genetic elements of repetition itself, its integral and constituent parts. This path would have been able to lead the analysis of the unconscious towards a veritable theatre.… Repetition is truly that which disguises itself in constituting itself, that which constitutes itself only by disguising itself. It is not underneath the masks, but is formed from one mask to another.… The masks do not hide anything except other masks. There is no first term which is repeated.… There is therefore nothing repeated which may be isolated or abstracted from the repetition in which it was formed, but in which it is also hidden. There is no bare repetition which may be abstracted or inferred from the disguise itself. The same thing is both disguising and disguised. (Deleuze, DR, 16–17)25 This type of repetition informs the performative definitions of identity, for example, Judith Butler’s, who argues identities are constituted through repeated acts of performance.26

THE THEATER OF REPETITION: REPETITION AND POLYPHONY Kierkegaard’s “theater” engages multiple voices (within Repetition, as well as more broadly, by means of his pseudonymous authorship), stages a polyphony, works with

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multiple points of view and with various forms of self-reflexivity. As his commentators observe, “To write without authority either makes the author disappear or answers author with author in a dialectic of Various hands.’ Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writing chooses the dialectic” (Schleifer and Markley, 10–1). In Deleuze’s words, Kierkegaard manages in his philosophy to create a “veritable theater,” to “put metaphysics in action, in motion”: We find here a thinker who lives the problem of masks, who experiences the inner emptiness of masks and seeks to fill it, to complete it, albeit with the “absolutely different”—that is, by putting into it all the difference between the finite and the infinite, thereby creating the idea of a theatre of humor and of faith. (Deleuze, DR, 8–9) Dramatic writing is by its nature multi-voiced. Free from such constraints as are imposed on writing by the conditions of narration or lyric voice it allows what is not immediately available to prose and poetry, namely, a genuine polyphony. Kierkegaard longs for the dialogue theater affords: There is probably no young person with any imagination who has not at some time been enthralled by the magic of the theater and wished to be swept along into that artificial actuality in order like a double to see and hear himself and to split himself up into every possible variation of himself, and nevertheless in such a way that every variation is still himself. (Kierkegaard, R, 154) A desire to “be swept along into” the world of the theater, a desire to be an actor, adopting ever new roles (very much as Kierkegaard adopts his pseudonyms) is a desire to be a speaker and a listener at the same time or, a desire to contain, in one’s own writing, the kind of multiplicity that drama allows. At the same time, the phenomenon of speaking with many voices destabilizes the relationship between the author and his text as it makes the speaking voice decentered.27 Speaking with many voices is central to Kierkegaard’s project. “Let everyone form his own judgment with respect to what is said here about repetition,” Kierkegaard suggests in Repetitition, “let him also form his own judgment about my saying it here in this manner, since I, following Hamann’s example”—and here Constantin repeats another writer’s formulation, quoting after Hamann, in German—“express myself in various tongues and speak the language of sophists, of puns, of Cretans and Arabians, of whites and Moors and Creoles, and babble a confusion of criticism, mythology, rebus, and axioms, and argue now in a human way and now in an extraordinary way” (Kierkegaard, R, 149). By orchestrating a polyphony, Kierkegaard makes use of what Bakhtin calls a dramatic confrontation of points-of-view, rather than a controlled opposition of ideas: “The text lives only in contact with another text (context).… We emphasize, that this contact is a dialogic contact between texts (utterances) and not a mechanical contact of ‘oppositions’ which is possible only within a single text…” (Bakhtin, 162). Deleuze characteristically extends the idea of multilingualism to suggest a multiplicity within a single voice, describing it as “being like a foreigner in one’s own language”:

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We must be bilingual even in a single language, we must have a minor language inside our own language, we must create a minor use of our own language. Multilingualism is not merely the property of several systems each of which would be homogenous in itself: it is primarily the line of flight or of variation which affects each system by stopping it from being homogenous.… Great literature is written in a sort of foreign language.… That is the definition of style. (Deleuze and Parnet, 4–5) To be a foreigner in one’s own language is to subvert the homogeneity of that language, to disturb its movement into codification. It is to propose a “truth” and to simultaneously counteract that truth. That is where Barthes finds “bliss.” Kierkegaard literally enacts this move out of a codified perspective of his text into its “counteraction” with the introduction of the voice of the “young man.”28 Ironically, in the eyes of the young man, the unrelenting presence of Constantin solidifies into a “position.”29 No longer present as a dynamic person(ality), Constantin becomes a static “character”: “a monologic, finished off, generalized category that is given and determined.”30 What the young man hears is the language of unity rather than that of “so many combinations”: Is it not, in fact, a kind of mental disorder to have subjugated to such a degree every passion, every emotion, every mood under the cold regimentation of reflection! Is it not mental disorder to be normal in this way—pure idea, not a human being like the rest of us, flexible and yielding, lost and being lost! (Kierkegaard, R, 189) The young man’s critique of Constantin’s method is, as a matter of fact, a critique of system (and an inflexible, fixed system at that). As Deleuze, Derrida and Kierkegaard warn, every writer is likely to fall in that trap—by naming, by writing up, by organizing the writer “codifies” thought. To escape that trap, they devise strategies of selfsubversion. Such is the function of Kierkegaard’s figure of the young man. Such is the effect of the multi-voiced nature of the dramatic art. Such, I will argue, may be the function of repetition in poems.

REPETITION AND INTERNAL DIFFERENCE While dialogue constructs a difference between (two voices, two perspectives, two authors), an internal difference (within a single perspective, a single voice) is revealed by that voice repeating itself. If difference is internal, in order to demonstrate it, “[a] dynamic space must be defined from the point of view of an observer tied to that space, not from an external position” (Deleuze, DR, 26). A particularly sharp formulation of the internal difference effected by repetition is proposed by Gertrude Stein in her “Portraits and Repetition.”31 Describing the method she used to produce her notoriously repetitive portraits Stein begins by rejecting repetition defined as identity. In fact, she claims, paradoxically, that her portraits never employ repetition. For Stein, repetition sensu stricte (if possible at all) is mediated and based on memory and as such obstructs a

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faithful representation of reality. In “Portraits” the term she prefers to use to define what she calls “repetition in human expression” is “insistence”: expressing any thing there can be no repetition because the essence of that expression is insistence, and if you insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis (Stein, PR, 167)32 Stein’s essay argues for a “difference between repetition and emphasis.” One of her examples comes from fiction, and more specifically, detective stories, of which all “have the same theme,” and yet there is no way to tell the same story twice, for expression will always require a new form. Everything is the same except for the composition, the form, which changes from one instance to another, making repetition impossible. Change inherent in repetition is what “makes life” and is necessary for any story-telling to be alive. The essence of repetition is not the repetition of the same (“recollection,” identity) but, as Stein defines it, “insistence,” that is, difference present each time a thing is repeated (e.g. a story). A dynamic frame is essential to Stein’s definition of repetition and it grounds her distinction between the static repetition of memory and the dynamic repetition in expression (emphasis or insistence). Since for Stein movement is the essence of life, personality and art (“moving is existing”), in order to make her portraits it is necessary for her to represent movement inside her subjects, to “find out what is moving inside them that makes them them.” (Stein, PR, 183) Also in “The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans” Stein defines movement as an expression of personality; in describing the process that led her to write The Making of Americans, Stein recalls: I then began again to think about the bottom nature in people, I began to get enormously interested in hearing how everybody said the same thing over and over again with infinite variations but over and over again until finally if you listened with great intensity you could hear it rise and fall and tell all that there was inside them, not so much by the actual words they said or the thoughts they had but the movement of their thoughts and words endlessly the same and endlessly different.33 “Endlessly the same and endlessly different”: this is Stein’s definition of repetition (or repetition-as-insistence); movement in repetition makes meanings. By way of clarifying the above observation, Stein quotes from The Making of Americans: Many things then come out in the repeating that make a history of each one for any one who always listens to them. Many things come out of each one and as one listens to them listens to all the repeating in them, always this comes to be clear about them, the history of them of the bottom nature in them, the nature or natures mixed up in them to make the whole of them in anyway it mixes up in them. (Stein, GMMA, 243)

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Repetition is here essentially defined as movement; it is movement that happens between the repeated instants (which otherwise may seem identical). In Stein’s words, to become aware that “everything is moving” is “the first conscious feeling of necessary repetition.” When we become conscious that the stars we see are moving worlds, that various civilizations inevitably repeat and yet change what they repeat, when we realize that “the inevitable repetition in human expression” is “not repetition but insistence,” we discover that repetition is movement, change. Movement is easiest to perceive and represent in relation, observes Stein (like a moving train which does not seem to move unless it moves against something else); in and of themselves things seem static. If, however, movement is “lively enough,”34 then it may be represented in and of itself, and that is what Stein tries to do in her portraits: to show movement inside.35 Not a movement between, but a movement within: that is also Deleuze’s definition of internal repetition. “A motor goes inside of an automobile and the car goes” (Stein, PR, 166), says Stein: to see movement embedded in what is apparently in itself static is to be aware of repetition. Such, too, are Stein’s own repetitions: a series of identical statements which imperceptibly shift in meaning even if they look the same, even if they look like the repetition of the same. The change they introduce is imperceptible, not pronounced (“gradual” as Stein says in “The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans”): “I built them little by little each time I said it it changed just a little.…” For Stein, movement happens imperceptibly. This is Deleuze’s “movement that happens behind the thinker’s back.” Deleuze’s metaphors are indeed strikingly similar: “repetition on the level of external conduct echoes, for its own part, a more secret vibration which animates it, a more profound, internal repetition within the singular” (Deleuze, DR, 1). In both Stein’s and Deleuze’s formulations, one is embedded in and informs the other. “As I say a motor goes inside and the car goes on, but my business my ultimate business as an artist was not with where the car goes as it goes but with the movement inside that is the essence of its going.” (Stein, PR, 195) Since memory enforces a closure on the remembered thing, making it a thing of the past, a finished thing, Stein prefers to call her work “the making of the portraits” rather than “description,” a preference manifest also in the proliferation of the gerund forms in her writing, forms which denote continual, uninterrupted activity. (Narrative is based on remembering, says Stein: it is a “soothing” fiction, not things as they are (existing)). As Randa Dubnick observes, “Stein and Picasso share a desire to represent the integrity of the fleeting individual moment of perception before consolidation by memory into a conceptual whole.”36 The result is a fruitful contradiction or a paradox: “Without memory, contradictions aren’t resolved, because they are neither noticed nor remembered. The result is paradox or self-contradiction” (Dubnick, 90). What is more, memory enforces a new perspective on the object, confusing two times: the past and the present. The realization that “living being actually existing did not have in it any element of remembering” leads Stein to the conclusion that the world “is a world of difference and in it there is essentially no remembering;” the task of the portrait maker is, therefore, “to say it with a difference” (Stein, PR, 183). Stein’s “repetition-as-insistence” is essentially “repetition as difference.” Related to the construction of a “continual present” (akin to Kierkegaardian “interesse”) is Stein’s rejection of resemblance as a tool in portrait-making.

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Any one does of course by any little thing by any little way by any little expression, any one does of course resemble some one, and any one can notice this thing notice this resemblance and in so doing they have to remember some one and this is a different thing from listening and talking. In other words, the making of a portrait of any one is as they are existing and as they are existing has nothing to do with remembering any one or anything. (Stein, PR, 175) A successful portrait avoids producing a type by being grounded in the perspective of the person portrayed at the instant he or she is being portrayed.37 To suggest in a portrait that a person resembles someone else is to introduce into the portrait an element not present to the portrayed person: I had to find out inside every one what it was in them that was intrinsically exciting and I had to find out not by what they said not by what they did not by how much or how little they resembled any other one but I had to find it out by the intensity of movement that there was inside in any one of them. (Stein, PR, 183) Stein’s method is to capture each instant of perception separately, without making reference to anything or anybody outside the portrait. She moves by parataxis, so to speak, so that each of the elements introduced is complete in and of itself, never subordinated. Here, Stein comes close to what Deleuze likes to call “thinking with AND”: a way of thinking which avoids subordination and allows the thought of the multiple. It allows to perceive the “multiplicity which constantly inhabits each thing” (Deleuze and Parnet, 57). One moment, succeeded by the next, but not compared to any other, not subsumed under a category.

REPETITION AND POINT OF VIEW: CUBISM AND MISE-ENABYME One may really indeed say that that is the essence of genius, of being most intensely alive, that is being one who is at the same time talking and listening. It is really that that makes one a genius. And it is necessary if you are to be really and truly alive it is necessary to be at once talking and listening, doing both things, not as if they were one thing, not as if they were two things, but doing them, well, if you like, like the motor going inside and the car moving, they are part of the same thing. (Stein, PR, 170)

“[L]ike the motor going inside and the car moving”: a metaphor used again links two aspects crucial to Stein’s portrait-making; both “movement” and the simultaneous “talking and listening” are aspects of the dynamic frame of her repetition-as-insistence.

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Before turning to Stein’s discussion of “talking and listening” it may be useful to pause here in order to examine the passage quoted above as an example of repetition which structures Stein’s text itself. Characteristically, throughout her essay, Stein illustrates her points about the absence of identical repetition by constructing a highly repetitive text, in which the exactly repeated words, phrases, and sentences gradually shift in meaning. In the case of the passage quoted above, in addition to the emphatic repetitions of words and constructions and the repetition of an image which links this discussion to the earlier discussion of movement, there are repetitions conspicuously present in the form of uneasy clusters of repeated words such as “that that” and “like, like.” This type of (apparently redundant) repetition seems indeed a marker of Stein’s style which insists on jarring juxtapositions; for it is not only the unorthodox use of punctuation that makes the Stein sentence so difficult to follow, but also the lack of transition between elements one would not expect to be coupled. The repetitions of “that that” and “like, like” could easily be avoided (we expect writers to avoid them, and they usually do) by substituting a synonym or an equivalent phrase for one of the repeated elements. But Stein insists on repeating; the unusual clusters that result mark the difference in repetition particularly sharply, as we are forced to observe that one “that” is unequal to another “that” and one “like” may be very unlike another. Stein’s sentences are most difficult at their most simple and unadorned, precisely because that is when Stein’s text offers the “counteraction to itself.” “Listening was talking and talking was listening” (Stein, PR, 175). To talk is to produce (speech), to be the speaking agent, to be the “sender” of a message, to be the source (of meaning), the author (of a text). To listen is to receive, to be the (passive) audience, to be the reader (of a message), the interpreter. Stein collapses the two functions so that, in an ideal situation, one is both the speaker and the listener. As one speaks one also interprets; as one listens, one also produces. The radical dualism of the two positions undone, the “passive” receiver is given the power of an agent, a producer of the message. The speaker, on the other hand, is given the interpretive power of a listener (becomes the other who listens). In that way Stein wants to bridge the gap Kierkegaard dramatized in Repetition: the gap between the narrator and the young man, the gap between the subject and the object. For Stein, simultaneous talking and listening is the prerequisite for the making of a portrait. It allows the portrait to unify two perspectives, that of the object and that of the subject which perceives: “to make one portrait of some one and not two” (Stein, PR, 176). It allows the portrait to simultaneously represent the outside and the inside: what the person portrayed looks like to the external observer and what the person perceives; or, what “they are themselves inside them” and “what they do.” (“If they are themselves inside them what are they and what has it to do with what they do” (Stein, PR, 171) is then the question the portrait maker has to confront: what is the relation between the outside or what they are “doing” and what they are (“inside”).) This doubling of perspectives is one reason why Stein’s work is commonly compared to visual representation practiced by the cubists. A parallel with the cubists, who in their portraits simultaneously combine a number of perspectives at once, will highlight that in Stein’s method of listening and talking at once which produces the effect of simultaneity. (Kierkegaard created two portraits. The cubists combine two (and more) in one). As Randa Dubnick observes, the cubists “maintained the multiplicity of viewpoints that

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results from [the] repeated moments of looking, without reconciling or consolidating them into a single, stable point of view” (Dubnick, 21). And indeed, Stein’s “listening and talking at once” refuses the consolidation and becomes her version of “writing without authority”—writing which avoids imposing a single, regulating perspective onto its subject. The method employed by the cubists and Stein’s writing which works with “repetitive, overlapping sentences,” are both recognized to emphasize metonymy and the relation of contiguity: The repetitive, overlapping bits and pieces of minimal visual information presented in Braque and Picasso’s work, as well as in Stein’s repetitive, overlapping sentences come from rendering isolated spurts of perception, and from the presentation of parts rather than the whole, a fact that Roman Jakobson recognized when he characterized cubism as emphasizing the horizontal axis of language, the operation of contiguity/combination. In that, cubism presents a series of synecdoches, it is based on metonymy (Dubnick, 22) As Stein herself puts it, she writes her portraits “in the successive moments of… realizing them…like the cinema picture made up of succession and each moment having its own emphasis that is its own difference…” (Stein, PR, 198). Film, thanks to movement, makes a continuous picture and not a series of pictures in succession. Stein wants her portraits to achieve a similar effect of simultaneity, the effect of a continual present; to make a single portrait she needs to erase resemblance and memory, the way film does. Bruce Kawin comments on this, drawing on Stein’s discussion of film in order to clarify her definition of repetition: In comparing the slight differentiation between the successive frames of a motion picture to the differences among her statements and observations—asserting that the differences keep both images moving, just as they constitute the life of the subject—Gertrude Stein…clarifies her definition of repetition. A motion picture in which every frame was identical would not move. The near-repetition of similar frames, when properly projected, communicates life. If you take a yard of film out of the can and just look at it, you cannot see the movement although you might possibly infer it; the frames look identical.… Like each frame of a film, each Steinian statement fills the readers ideal attention, excluding (by baffling) memory, until the object of her attention is insisted into complex and coherent existence…38 To return to Stein’s metaphor: “Like the motor moving inside and the car moving,” invisible, yet puts the car in motion. Another parallel from the visual arts, equally adequate (though not immediately related to Stein in the way that, say, the work of Picasso and Braque are), is the pictorial effect of mise-en-abyme. The effect of the Cubist multiplication of perspectives in portraiture and the device of mise-en-abyme, both of which rely on a complex form of

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repetition, both violate the unity of perspective. Arguably, while the Cubist painter desires to transcend the limits of single perspective the device of mise-en-abyme allows the artist to add a perspective of himself/herself to that produced by himself/herself. Thus while the effect is radically different, both techniques are motivated by the desire to multiply points of view in order to prevent the consolidation of the image. In fact, from Stein’s description of the final phase of her portrait-making one may gather that the effect she aimed at is akin to that of mise-en-abyme. For the method of a series of statements in succession gives way to a circular pattern: All the looking was there the talking and listening was there but instead of giving what I was realizing at any and every moment of them and of me until I was empty of them I made them contained within the thing I wrote that was them. The thing itself folded itself up inside itself like you might fold a thing up to be another thing which is that thing inside in that thing. (Stein, PR, 199–200) The device of mise-en-abyme is the most explicit manifestation of the quality of selfreflexivity in repetition. This particular form of repetition demonstrates especially sharply the effect I have discussed above of the characteristic reversal of origin and copy as well as illuminates the relation of repetition to the construction of the self. On the simplest level mise-en-abyme puts a replica of a text’s subject within the text itself. Originally a heraldic device which put a second representation of the original shield within the shield itself, mise-enabyme is a kind of miniature duplicate of an image contained within the image itself. In his study of the form, Lucien Dällenbach traces the notion of miseenabyme to André Gide’s first use of the term, defining it as “any aspect enclosed within a work that shows a similarity with the work that contains it.”39 The effect of the device, as it is originally defined by Gide is to “bring out the meaning and the form of the work” in a miniature reflection. In Gide’s pictorial examples, the image of the mirror serves to bring out that which is concealed from the painting’s central perspective—the backs of the painted figures, what the figures perceive, or the painter himself—often in a distorted form (such as in reflections produced by convex mirrors). Thus the pictorial mirrors “only partially reflect” (Dällenbach, 11) the space of the painting (or what’s beyond it) and often are a source of distortion. Dällenbach argues that these mirrors fail to achieve the effect of mise-en-abyme in Gide’s original sense of the term as they fail to reflect what is the explicit subject of the painting and, in fact, bring in elements which are not part of the painted scene. What apparently is at stake in Gide’s original concept of mise-en-abyme is a quality of self-reflexivity. For Gide, the reciprocal relationship between the book and its author, “the way in which the writer constructs the writing, and vice versa,” the way the text mirrors its author and the author mirrors the text are the realm of mise-en-abyme (“It is this reciprocity that I wanted to indicate—not one’s relationship with other people, but with oneself,” says Gide (Dällenbach, 29), The difficulty Dällenbach has in fitting the examples quoted above into Gide’s paradigm seems to be related to their failure to contain the reciprocity to the self of the author or the subject of the text. Self-reflexivity, in Gide’s definition, should contain the mirroring to the realm of the self.

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In Dällenbach’s analysis, the concept of mise-en-abyme has come to signify at least three different phenomena: “simple reflection, represented by the shield within the shield”; “infinite reflection” such as can be represented by infinite parallel mirrors; and “paradoxical reflection” such as that of an endless spiral (a Möbius strip, a selfperpetuating model). The definition of mise-en-abyme based on Gide’s original concept can only take the form of “work within the work,” or “alternate narrators,” or “narrative reflecting on the narrator.” As Dällenbach observes, however, some of Gide’s later works themselves exceed the scope of this narrow definition. Dällenbach’s analysis of one of these texts (a text which gives the same name to both the embedded and the embedding narrative, thus erasing the differentiating context which could allow us to distinguish between its alternate narrators: a move we have seen in Kierkegaard’s Repetition) brings him to conclude that the effects produced are precisely those Gide would earlier designate as “failed” mise-en-abyme: Continually hesitating between interior and exterior, it takes us into a realm where eccentric and concentric circles intersect and where the mirror of the painters recurs, with all it symbolizes: the integration of the different into the same, the oscillation between within and without. (Dällenbach, 29) Still another of Gide’s later works supplants the image of the “shield within the shield” with the image of the mirror, thus working counter to the original definition of mise-enabyme which insisted on keeping the two separate. Here again the result will be such as to complicate the separation between the embedded and embedding work: the two novels…will of necessity slide into one another, interchange, blur their distinctions, mix up their authors and translate us into an ambivalent area where the principle of identity is continually abused. In other words the spy-mirror has less the role of integrating an “external” reality into the novel than of abolishing the opposition between the within and without, or rather achieving a sort of oscillation between them. (Dällenbach, 31–2) What is more, the novel under consideration insists on a discontinuity between its two layers of narration; its two narrators perform very different functions in that one performs the task (writes a novel) the other only “plans, discusses, but is careful not to” perform (write).40 If, then, on the one hand everything posits a relationship of identity between them, everything on the other hand also dissuades us from being certain of their correspondence, since the author dissociates himself from his counterpart. (Dällenbach, 32–3) Ultimately, Dällenbach demonstrates that the three different forms of miseen-abyme can all coexist in a single text. Still, the distinction is not only valid but useful, as the three figures can produce very different effects.

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More interesting than the “correctness” of the definition of mise-enabyme, may be the precision with which Dällenbach marks the very difference between the device’s different manifestations. For there is an essential difference between the effect that can be represented by the image of the “shield within the shield” and the effect represented by a mirror or a series of mirrors; the former will point to an identity of the subject with its inner duplication; the later will introduce a difference into the scheme by dissociating the embedding narrative (or image, or narrator) from that which is embedded in it. Dällenbachs findings are particularly valuable to a study of repetition not only because mise-en-abyme is a form of repetition. The precision with which he argues that a single device, while remaining the same device can produce effects that are not only varied but often contradictory and, what is more, that the device can produce several effects in a single text is invaluable in the light of my discussion of the effects repetition produces in the work of the three poets I discuss below. It is also very instructive to observe the grounds on which Dällenbach chooses to define the term. He recognizes that in constructing his definition he has to rely on three very different “sources” which take the form of three different modes of argumentation. To begin with, there is the definition proposed by Gide (what we confront on this level is something like “the poetics” of a practitioner). Then there are the practical manifestations of the device in the work of Gide and others which do not always coincide with Gide’s original term (here, we are dealing with literary texts, which employ the device in conjunction with a number of other devices). Finally, there are the works of the “early commentators” and other critics who studied the device (with different degrees of precision) which have come to construct something like the history of the term, a reservoir of critical ideas on the subject. Dällenbachs analysis is based on the recognition that each of these three different contexts is likely to produce a very different version of the device he analyzes.41

REPETITION AND ORIGINS If repetition violates the laws of narrative progression, arrests linear development, connects the past to the present and programs the future, what kind of “history” will it allow? The logic of repetition is clearly incompatible with the logic of causality. Repetition necessarily complicates narratives, including the grand narratives, the narratives which construct history. Be it national, political or literary history, the stories they make tend to follow natural progression, obey the logic of causality and adhere to the temporal frame which aligns events progressively, so that they lead up to logical conclusions. Edward Said’s essay “On Repetition” is an illuminating discussion of repetition in relation to the conceptualization of history. As he describes it, “repetition is an optic employed (or employable) to discuss, portray, analyze the continuity, the perpetuity, and the recurrency of human history.”42 At the same time his essay questions the reliability of repetition as the very “optic” used to define the historical process: “does repetition enhance or degrade a fact?… Naturally or not, filiatively or affiliatively, is the question” (Said, 158).

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Said’s essay is grounded in a critique of Vico’s The New Science where repetition (in the form of a meaningful pattern created by the mind against the chaos of human instinctive actions) is the source of meaning and the source of human history. According to Vico, the mind makes “certain that human history continues by repeating itself according to a certain fixed course of events”; repetition circumvents “the predicament of infinite variety and infinite senselessness” (Said, 137). The frame of repetition is necessary for human beings to represent themselves to themselves and others. Repetition also allows the scholar to retrieve (“re-find”: retrovare) history. “For Vico, then, whether as the beginning of sense, as representation, as archeological reconstruction, repetition is a principle of economy giving facts their historical factuality, and reality its existential sense” (Said, 139). Since Vico’s repetition is a pattern responsible for making human history, in his model repetition “enhances” the fact, indeed makes it meaningful. In this model repetition is “genealogical”: Vico defines it in terms of filiation, such as that between parents and their offspring (and thus constructs a linear narrative). Said offsets this model of “enhancing” and “filiative” repetition with a model of repetition which is “affiliative.” In the conceptualization of human history the “affiliative” model emphasizes forces at work in human history other than the purely genealogical ones, forces which counter the generative continuity. Affiliations join people together “in a non-genealogical, non-procreative but social unity” (Said, 146): social proximity is thus substituted for the linearity of parentage (contiguity substitutes for continuity). “Genealogical filiation” and “social affiliation” stand in an antithetical relation to each other. Said refers here to Marx’s discussion of repetition which denies parentage; Marx describes repetition as usurpation or parody; such repetition goes against nature, even as it pretends to be “natural.” “Marx’s account of repetition shows nature being brought down from the level of natural fact to the level of counterfeit imitation” (Said, 157). As Said points out, Marx’s text is at the same time the demonstration of such function of repetition: “Marx’s method is to repeat in order to produce difference, not to validate [facts] but to give facts by emending their apparent direction” (Said, 156). Marx’s is an example of an “affiliative repetition”: “It portends a methodological revolution whereby…the facts of nature are dissolved and then reassembled polemically…perhaps more to illustrate human power to transform than to confirm nature” (Said, 158). As Said points out, the “genealogical” model of repetition (popular among Vico’s contemporaries writing on natural history) is still very much in use today. Harold Bloom’s “plot for literary history” is Said’s example of a historical model in which “this problematic of repetition and originality is treated—also genealogically—as the problem of influence between a paternal strong precursor and a filial latecomer” (Said, 144): My interest is in maintaining that for literary theory, for Vico’s gentile history, for natural history up to and including Darwin, it is natural to conceive the passing of time as repeating the very reproductive, and repetitive course by which man engenders and re-engenders himself, or his offspring.…[S]urvival thus appears to be the survival of the best reproducers, the best repeaters. The family metaphor of filial engenderment when it is extended by Vico throughout the whole of human activity is called poetic; for men are men, he says, because they

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are makers, and what before everything else they make is themselves. Making is repeating; repeating is knowing because making. This is a genealogy of knowledge and of human presence. (Said, 145) Said is not isolated in his critique of Harold Bloom, whose Anxiety of Influence works with a linear model in which “good repeaters” produce a pattern of filiation. Paul de Man similarly argues that Bloom’s return to “psychologism” reduces literature “to a lowly comical gesture, since no poet can conquer the Muse that has not already betrayed him with his precursor.… By founding literature in a literal, genetic priority Bloom becomes the prisoner of a linear scheme.”43 And yet, Bloom’s text may yield insights which are incompatible with the “linear model” it is usually seen to represent (even if it takes de Man’s reading to make those insights explicit). As de Man observes, Behind the arbitrariness of the psychological plot…the book deals with something else.… Underneath, the book deals with the difficulty or, rather, the impossibility of reading and, by inference, with the indeterminacy of literary meaning. If we are willing to set aside the trappings of psychology, Bloom’s essay has much to say on the encounter between latecomer and precursor as a displaced version of the paradigmatic encounter between reader and text, (de Man, 273). By “thus translating back from a subject-centered vocabulary of intent and desire to a more linguistic terminology,” de Man’s essay makes the point that, If…the term “influence” is itself a metaphor that dramatizes a linguistic structure into a diachronic narrative, then it follows that Bloom’s categories of misreading not only operate between authors, but also between the various texts of a single author or, within a given text, between the different parts, down to each particular chapter, paragraph, sentence, and, finally, down to the interplay between literal and figurative meaning within a single word or grammatical sign. Whether this form of semantic tension can still on this level be called “influence” is far from certain, though it remains a suggestive line of thought, (de Man, 276) Arguably, a broader term which could embrace the notion of “influence,” with all its implications, and still legitimately figure it within a text of a single author is repetition. The concept of repetition defined as a dynamic interaction of two texts (a dialogue which results in polyphony)—be it texts by the same or different authors—could create the space for the construction of literary history which would counteract the purely filiative model. Our need for coherence and linearity would be offset with an acknowledgement of contiguity and affiliation. The following chapters address the the function of repetition in the work of three American poets and speculate about the relation between their use of this form and their conceptions of poetic language.

Chapter Two “Thinking with AND”: Whitman’s Repetitions and the Thought of the Multiple

“Do I contradict myself? Very well then… I contradict myself; I am large… I contain multitudes.” —Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

The precursor of modern American poetry, Whitman stands at the point of origin; he is a poet without predecessors, Leaves of Grass the archetypal American poem.1 In a particularly emphatic formulation of this perspective, Denis Donoghue claims: It is disingenuous to maintain that the words “Walt Whitman” mean the collected works of a certain poet as the words “T.S.Eliot” mean the collected works of a certain poet. Walt Whitman is a myth as T.S.Eliot is not: that is whatever Eliot means is to be found, definitively secreted, in the poems themselves, but the meaning of Whitman sprawls far beyond his lines.2 The “meaning of Whitman” indeed tends to “sprawl.” Not the least because “sprawl” or excess lies at the core of Whitman’s conception of meaning, but also due to the peculiar history of Leaves of Grass, the book which engendered the name, Walt Whitman. And while it is highly problematic whether Eliot can be contained and reduced to “a meaning,” Whitman’s work provides a particularly powerful critique of the ways meanings are generated, a critique which suggests a proliferation instead of closure and infinite possibility in place of finite interpretation. Whitman himself is one of the early sources of the myth of the “good gray poet.” Having written, helped print, distribute and market his own book, he also wrote responses to it and guided its first interpreters in their line-by-line explications. While such extraordinary control over a poetic project may in fact imply an awareness of how little control one has over one’s own writing, nevertheless, Whitman’s own readings became part of the body of criticism of his own work and contributed to the making of the myth.

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At the same time, however, it could be argued that the poems of Leaves of Grass offer a critique of the very grounds on which such myths are based. Indeed, every time Whitman retells his favorite story of the beginning, the very notion of a beginning or origin becomes more problematic. Arguably, the poems provide a critique of the very model of a literary presence Whitman’s poetic persona stood for as well as a critique of the model of literary history inspired by the myth of the good gray poet. As Paul A.Bové argues in his Destructive Poetics, the New Critical tradition of reading Whitman’s poetry as entirely divorced from the past has blinded his readers to an important aspect of his poetry: R.W.B.Lewis’s treatment of Whitman in The American Adam is probably the paradigm of all Modernist interpretations of Whitman. The fundamental “mystification” of Lewis’s misreading lies in his assumption of the possibility of absolute novelty, of freedom from the past tradition, of a human potential for absolute beginnings at any time. Lewis’s misreading emerges from his disguised New Critical presupposition that language magically can free itself and its user from the immediate historical past either to return to some ahistorical scene which actually transcends time—Eliade’s illo tempore—or simply to begin again, free of historical consequences.3 “Lewis’s misreading” rests, then, on the belief that language can either enact an “eternal return” or free itself from repetition. To enact an “eternal return,” language would have to possess a pure or original version. As Mircea Eliade shows, such a belief in the possibility of repeating an ideal past entailed, in archaic societies, a faith in the power of repetition to valorize human existence and all human acts. An act became meaningful only if it repeated the act performed ab origine by the gods, heroes or ancestors.4 Such reading of Whitman has tempted a number of his readers. Most recently, Wai Chee Dimock uses the Chomskyan model of language to read Whitman, a positing “deep structure” is as origin of innumerable permutations.5 The notion of an ideal or essential form of language is akin to the generative linguists’ concept of the “deep structure.” Gilles Deleuze offers a persuasive critique of that linguistic model which is based on the hierarchical pattern of roots, trunk and branches and which rests on an underlying homogeneity: “Since everybody knows that language is a heterogeneous, variable reality, what is the meaning of the linguists’ insistence on carving out a homogenous system in order to make scientific study possible?…[T]he scien-tific model taking language as an object of study is one with the political model by which language is homogenized, centralized, standardized, becoming a language of power, a major or dominant language.”6 “To begin again, free of historical consequences,” language would have to free itself from repetition, to overcome its essential iterability and find an anchorage at some “center.” Yet, as Derrida points out, Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written (in the current sense of this opposition), in a small or large unit, can be cited, put between quotation marks; in so doing it can break with every given

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context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable. This does not imply that the mark is valid outside of a context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center or absolute anchorage [ancrage]. (Derrida, SEC, 12.) The notion of freedom from the immediate historical past or the possibility of a beginning which does not repeat are both questioned by Whitman. Whitman’s own preoccupation with the subject of beginnings and the notion of origin is grounded in the notion of repetition. (As Mutlu Konuk Blasing puts it, at the beginning of her discussion of Whitman, “Walt Whitman begins by promising to begin again.”7) Indeed, to a degree unparalleled by any other American poet, Whitman’s whole oeuvre is based on repetition: a continual reworking of the same book. Most importantly, repetition is central to Whitman’s poetics as the structural principle of his work; even in poems addressing origins and growth:

There was a child went forth every day, And the first object he looked upon and received with wonder or pity or love or dread, that object he became, And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day..or for many years or stretching cycles of years. The early lilacs became part of this child, And grass, and white and red morningglories, and white red clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird, And the March-born lambs, and the sow’s pink-faint litter, And the mare’s foal, and the cow’s calf, and the noisy brood in the barnyard or by the mire of the pond-side..and the fish suspending themselves so curiously below there..and the beautiful curious liquid..and the water-plants with their graceful flat heads.. all became part of him.8 After these opening lines of Whitman’s much-quoted poem of the beginnings a list follows, one of Whitman’s many catalogues, so irreducible in their variety that they can hardly be accounted for in a systematic manner. In “There Was a Child Went Forth,” an early poem from the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, the diversity of the items on the list records the child’s emerging perception. “The field-sprouts of April and May became part of him” continues the poem, “And the apple trees…And the schoolmistress …His own parents…”; the parallel syntactical structures substitute for the linear narrative of development: the child grows by repeatedly enacting the movement of becoming. Even such elements as may have logically constituted the beginning—such as the mother and the father—are but an element of the long list. There seems to be no guiding principle to the growth process of the poem-child, no end to it and, for that matter, no beginning, for

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the ordering of the lines-events, as well as the choice of the “objects” the child encounters in the successive lines seem entirely arbitrary and accidental.9 In Repetition Kierkegaard addresses the unpredictable and uncontrollable nature of human growth. When Constantin posits the question “Who would wish to be a tablet upon which time writes every instant a new inscription?” only at first is that a rhetorical question. Having experimented with “meaningful” repetition and failed, Constantius soon recognizes that the only way to grasp repetition is to acknowledge the accidental. The intrusions of the accidental disrupt the linear progression of Kierkegaard’s text very much as the accidents of repetition shape Whitman’s child/poem. The term Kierkegaard devises to account for that effect is “accidental concretion.” In his critique of Austin’s theory of language, Derrida identifies Austin’s exclusion of the accidental (uncanny, gratuitous, repetitive) with the exclusion of the poetic. Both philosophers, Derrida and Kierkegard, offer a critique of the philosophical discourse proper which wants to isolate “essence” from “accident” in a closed structure arrived at via the linear progression of a logical argument. By moving repetition to the center, by affirming the accidental, Whitman also moves these “parasitic,” “abnormal” or poetic uses of language to the center. Indeed, Whitman’s child appears to grow by accidental concretion.10 Whitman’s poem is an enumeration which does not assign priority to any of the elements it lists. Bracketed by a strikingly laconic introduction and an equally laconic conclusion, it reduces to a minimum the commentary on the mass of elements it presents to the reader. Whitman’s list is not a series of examples used to carry the burden of proof; it is irreducible to “proof.” In the accidental encounters which are the child’s repetitive acts of becoming, the poem-child stubbornly confuses categories. Whitman’s repetitive poetic structure does not discriminate among the elements it carries (does not isolate “essence” from “accident”). His catalogue which serves as a vehicle for the presentation of the various aspects of the growth of a child, brilliantly evokes the child’s own inability to organize the world it encounters into logical categories.11 Or, rather, it celebrates the child’s ability to think outside categories, “to think difference,” as Foucault puts it, to hold “a different thought, the thought of difference,” when difference becomes “a pure event” and when repetition “cease(s) to function as the dreary succession of the identical and…become(s) displaced difference” (Foucault, 182). Repetition makes it possible for the poem to present the objects of the child’s perception (the lilacs, the furniture), side by side with the other perceivingsubjects (father, mother, the friendly boys), and perception itself (the wholesome odor), and emotion generated by the perception (the swelling heart) and even the self-reflexive awareness of the act of becoming (the curious whether and how). Insisting on the irreducible diversity of the elements it carries, the poem refuses to provide an ordering by way of commentary, refuses to translate the multiplicity it offers into more general terms. Since the poem does not progress but repeatedly takes us through the same movement, and since it does not qualify the elements it lists, the reader may be tempted to organize those elements into patterns and “cast” the poem’s repetitions into a story (Culler, 264). We may, for example, try to map out the poem’s movement by determining the boundary between the poem’s “self” and its “other.” Are the objects of the poem objectively present to the child or are the child’s perceptions merely self-spun illusions? Is the world radically other (the March-born lambs) or is it merely an extension of the child’s mind

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(like the doubts of nighttime)? Yet we find our “story” of the poem’s repetitions insufficient, as it becomes inscribed in the poem itself: the child’s doubt “Whether that which appears so is so…or is it all flashes and specks” has its place in the poem as but another element of the list. One of the most resilient stories told about the philosophy of Whitman’s repetitions is the story of the natural cycle: the repeating movement of life, death, and re-birth. But Whitman’s repetitions will not allow to be thus naturalized. In Mutlu Konuk Blasing’s formulation, “The generative process in Whitman consists not of the natural cycle of death and rebirth, which poetry by analogy invokes to naturalize its metaphors, but of the recycling of nature and poetic texts, of leaves of grass and Leaves of Grass” (Blasing, 121). Whatever method we choose to contain the poem’s excess (including reading the poem as the function of its repetitions), will already have been part of the poems unruly universe. Characteristically, we are made very aware of our position as readers of repetition in performing our own—in this case double—repetition: we perform a repetition (in our act of reading), at the same time as our reading becomes (inscribed in the poem as) but one of the poems repetitions. Reading comes to be represented by way of the process of becoming the poem describes, as it shares the same objects, follows the same path. Like the child, whose identity emerges when it encounters the objects in the world, our identity as readers, the poem argues, emerges in the context of our encounter with the poem’s objects. As readers we could be like the child: deprived of the tools to reduce the diversity of those objects into a unified understanding, confronting the indeterminate boundaries between what is ours and what is the poem’s. Like the child, we are vulnerable to the accidents of repetition the poem has set in motion.12 The closing lines bring the poem to the reader, to the reader’s “now,” or to a shared present, the shared moment where the poem’s (and the reader’s) repetitions intersect:

These became part of that child who went forth every day, and who now goes and will always go forth every day, And these become of him or her that peruses them now. “These” of the first line are the objects of the child’s becoming. “These” of the second line are also the (“same”) objects as others peruse them, as well as those objects as they are re-presented, listed in the poem for the reader’s perusal. The lines collapse the two references, so that the pronoun comes to stand for the repetition of the object in its poetic re-presentation. Similarly, he or she that peruses “them” may either be the poem’s reader or belong to the world of the child (poem) and happen to encounter the same objects on his or her path. The ambiguity of the pronouns in these concluding lines is the poem’s ultimate repetition which holds together—without assigning priority to either—the “child’s,” the poem’s, and the reader’s “objects.” Such repetition points to the irreducible difference which inhabits the objects of representation. If in “There Was a Child Went Forth” there is no sense of linear time and the child’s itinerary, as he “goes forth every day,” is determined merely by chance encounters with an irreducibly chaotic world, the only constant in the child’s world seem to be the repetitive acts of becoming, or repetition itself. These accidents of repetition, however, do

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not tame the excess or order the chaos but only recurrently point to difference. The beginning of a child-poet-poem-reader-reading is not a single traceable moment but a variety of dispersed moments which cannot be classified, systematized, paraphrased. The beginning is new at every moment. With Whitman’s departure from meter, it is rhythm, dictated by syntactic parallelism, that provides the grounds of his prosody. Repetition—most notably repetition of syntactical structures—is responsible for the specific rhythm of Whitman’s lines.13 As Harvey Gross observes, “the most important single device in Whitman’s prosody is syntactical parallelism” such as anaphora or enumeration, where the parallel structures involve grammatical and logical ellipses, as in incomplete sentences, lines not related to each other: Whitman’s syntax exerts no intellectual control; it functions nearly exclusively as prosody creating and organizing rhythmic structure. Whitman has no narrative talent: to tell a story requires the traditional close syntax and its conscious ordering of human experience into intelligible relationships.14 Implicit in Gross’s claim that Whitman does not know how to tell a story or control syntax may be a much larger claim, namely, that underlying Whitman’s violations of the linearity of narrative and his violation of syntax is the very refusal to allow the logic of linearity to shape his materials, a refusal to construe hierarchical relations. Repetition (of words, images, metaphors, as well as syntactical patterns) creates a structure which elides logical links, undermines linearity, reverses causes and effects, makes the beginnings function as ends and vice versa. James Perrin Warren similarly grounds Whitman’s poetics in repetition: The repetition of formal features…creates free-verse rhythm, even though these formal features are not necessarily the same as those of the metrical tradition. In Whitman’s case, reiterative devices—anaphora, epanalepsis, and repetition of terminal words or phrases—contribute to the rhythm of parallelism, and the most distinctive feature of this rhythmic build-up of lines is the catalogue.15 Warren goes on to analyze the regularities exhibited by Whitman’s catalogues and suggests a fascinating interdependence between the form of the repeated element and the semantic context of the repetition. He argues persuasively that lists of phrases usually serve as the vehicle for the speculations on the self of the speaker, while lists of clauses structure speculations on the world at large. His analysis usefully points to the relationship between form and semantic content or, more specifically, to the ways in which “the syntactic rhythm of Whitman’s poetry creates a semantic rhythm.” Warren’s analysis does not help, however, to isolate those functions of repetition which are proper to poetic language. And yet, Whitman’s “catalogue rhetoric” is read precisely as the constructive element of Whitman’s poetics. This may seem paradoxical considering that catalogues create an impression of anarchy, if not redundancy and these are effects rarely associated with properly “poetic” practice.16

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To be sure, a whole generation of readers has charged Whitman with the lack of control over his poetic materials. Most famously, William Carlos Williams criticized Whitman for his inability to contain his poetic project within reasonable bounds. “For in your search for freedom—which is desirable—you must stop somewhere, but where exactly shall you stop? Whitman could not say,”17 says Williams. Indeed, the catalogue, which is the most extreme form Whitman’s repetitions take, does seem pure excess. The lines offered for closure at the bottom of those extended lists—often a page or several pages long—are but a poor excuse for an ending. “… I mind them or the resonance of them.… I come again and again”; “… And such as it is to be of these more or less I am”; “… All these I feel or am”; “… These become mine and me every one…”: these are all the poems offer to sum up, conclude or make use of the elements listed. Yet clearly these lines neither sum up nor conclude, nor do they put to any specific use the infinite variety the catalogues produce. The catalogues do not serve as a series of examples used to support an idea, lead to conclusions, reinforce a point. As they cannot be reduced to a single statement, they insist on being read on their own and in their entirety. Commenting on the tendency among a number of Whitman critics to organize or tame Whitman’s excesses, David Reynolds observes: “There have been nearly twenty different descriptions of a “structure” of “Song of Myself,” most of them centered on the development of the private self, but these varying, sometimes contradictory explanations are Procrustean efforts to impose order on a poem whose free form is one of its main rhetorical points.”18 In trying to rescue Whitman’s poems from the charge of formlessness, Lawrence Buell suggests, for example, that the catalogue rhetoric has only “an appearance of anarchy,” only “creates an impression” of redundancy, and only “seems” to always “move[] parallel,” never “move[] forward” (Buell, 166, italics mine). Buell’s reading relies on the concept of “unity-in-diversity”: That is the dominant impulse behind Transcendentalist catalogue rhetoric: the sense of the underlying identity of all things in the universe as manifestations of the divine plenitude. The catalogue, in short, is the most natural literary form for expressing the Transcendentalists’ most characteristic sense of universal order. (Buell, 169) Buell grounds difference in an underlying unity. Both similarity and conflict between particular elements of a list are read as an expression of variety in a world of “underlying identity.” Consequently, Buell’s readings of specific instances of enumeration in Leaves of Grass search for the unifying elements, at the expense of diversity.19 Readers of Whitman’s catalogues thus propose two apparently irreconcilable readings of the form. It is the critics of Whitman and his disorderliness that are in fact less likely to overlook, indeed will emphasize, those elements in his poems which subvert the effect of unity and cohesion. A disagreement between Lawrence Buell and Charles Feidelson on the issue of enumeration is a striking example of this paradox. Contesting Feidelson’s charge against Emerson’s use of the catalogue, Buell argues: “Charles Feidelson…cautions that to see the universe as a ‘spontaneous dance of self-determining and autonomous symbols’ leads to literary anarchy.’” Buell questions this position and produces a defense of Whitman’s catalogues, arguing that a “good catalogue…is unified

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as well as diverse.” Two readers with similar critical background, who share the same aesthetic model—both embrace the ideal of textual unity, both observe that enumeration cannot be easily contained, relying as it does on “exuberance, profusion, endlessness, surprise” (Buell, 170)—arrive at disparate readings (which serve the same critical paradigm). While Feidelson makes their critical model exclude Whitman’s writing (which becomes “unreadable” from this model’s vantage point), Buell tries to recover Whitman’s writing for that model, by consciously underreading those elements which the model refuses to embrace. In that, paradoxically, the critic who criticizes tells us more than the one who praises. At the same time, Buell is obviously right to emphasize the organizing effect of Whitman’s repetitions and enumerations. The power of this effect is peculiar to poetic repetition only, for in prose, repetitions are more easily subsumed by the text’s linearity and by the continuity of narrative or argument. Yet to “organize,” does not necessarily mean to “unify.” Buell’s defense of the unity of Whitman’s catalogues rests on the decision to “connect” the disparate elements that make up the catalogue. It seems, however, that the very indeterminacy of the connectives used to hold a catalogue together structurally is precisely the marker of the catalogue’s ambiguity. To reconstruct a linear story or regroup a catalogue into clusters of meaning is to counter its structural paratactic principle. Such reconstruction is, in fact, not always possible, as when the missing link between, two images or lines, could be “and” as well as “but” or “but rather”: the two can supplement, negate, or qualify each other. Even the most common Whitmanian anaphoric “and” seems to have so many functions, that it can hardly be always suggesting a designation of likeness or “more of the same” (what is commonly called a synthetic parallel). Compare, for example: I celebrate myself And what I assume you shall assume… to: And I know that the hand of God is the elderhand of my own, And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my own… to: The smallest sprout shows there is really no death And if ever there was it led forward life… to: Deep in the ground and sea And where it is neither ground nor sea.… Only in the first of those couplets the conjunction “and” marks a linear progression of thought, with the second line becoming a logical extension of the first. “Therefore” could substitute for this “and” (obviously the substitution would entirely change the tone of

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these lines, taking away what this “and” achieves: the effect of simplicity, informality and unpretentiousness of the intimate address to the reader). In the second couplet, “and” carries such strong Biblical overtones, that the lines bring to mind the rhythm of prayer or incantation and rhetorically point to faith in the words uttered, signaling their unquestionable power and something close to dogmatic certainty. In the third couplet the “and” which connects the two lines has, by contrast, a colloquial ring to it. What the second line offers only syntactically complements the first; in logical terms the second line describes an exception or deals with a counter argument. The fourth example introduces an “and” at its most perverse. Instead of ushering a line which amplifies or complements the statement made in the first, this “and” introduces a negation. Its value is to shock: safely positioned among the elements of “the ground and sea,” the readers are literally deprived of firm grounding when the “and” leads them into the unknown of “where it is neither ground nor sea”; this “and,” instead of providing closure, throws us into the uncertainty of an abstraction. To structure is not necessarily to unify. A paratactic structure may entail neither completion nor coherence. In Gilles Deleuze’s words, a “thinking with AND,” …is not the thought of an aesthete, as when one says “one more,” “one more woman.” And it is not a dialectical thought, as when one says “one gives two, which will give three.” The multiple is no longer an adjective which is still subordinate to the One which divides or the Being which encompasses it. It has become a noun, a multiplicity which constantly inhabits each thing. (Deleuze and Parnet, 57) Constantin Boundas, Deleuze’s American editor, describes Deleuze’s “theory of inclusive disjunction”—“a triumph of the conjunction AND (ét) over the predicative IS (est)”20—as paratactic discourse. Parataxis does not predetermine connections between the elements it employs and thus precludes ordering and subordination. Parataxis levels its elements so that none are given precedence. Parataxis is anti-linear. Deleuze’s philosophical method relies on the “art of the AND” (figured also as a “stammering of language” or a “minoritarian use of language”) to move beyond the philosophy of first principles, beyond the philosophy of subordination which sees all processes as an expression of an abstraction, which sees all difference as an expression of an underlying unity. The “art of the AND,” to use Michel Foucault’s words, breaks down “the ancient decalogue which identical imposed upon difference” (Foucault, 186). Whitman’s catalogues are his way of “thinking with AND.” This “AND” does not subordinate “the concrete richness of the sensible” to a first principle; it does not subordinate the processes it presents to an abstraction. The multiplicity of its objects is not reducible to an ordering: one cannot say of them “one more” precisely because they are not of the same order. Neither will it allow a resolution of its excess into simple dualisms: its terms do not lend themselves to the binary symmetry of dialectical logic. Whitman’s large-scale experiment with sweeping commentary, grounded in the form of repetition, his attempt to make Leaves of Grass multiperspectival and all-embracing, may be usefully compared to Gertude Stein’s notoriously repetitive portraits. Whitman also seems to want to arrive at “every kind of a history of every one” (GMMA, 246). Whitman’s and Stein’s “histories” (both “personal” and large-scale histories of American

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character) show striking parallels. Both Stein and Whitman produce their stories by accretion, by patient collection of detail. For both, the desire to produce an exhaustive account, an account which would give a name to, and thus justify an irreducible variety, materializes in the form of repetition. As Joseph M.Conte observes, “Stein distinguishes between summation and accumulation. Summation involves a final tally, a resolution, whereas an open-ended process of accumulation—in which one thing follows upon another—is syntagmatic. Stein’s own accumulation…is itself a product of the syntagmatic imagination, contextually disjunct yet contiguous, expanding to the allinclusive ‘anybody.’”21 Stein’s description of her method of producing “histories” itself makes use of the very method: Sometime then there must be a history of every one who ever was or is or will be living. As one sees every one in their living, in their loving, sitting, eating, drinking, sleeping walking, working, thinking, laughing, as any one sees all of them from their beginning to their ending, sees them when they are little babies or children or young grown men and women or growing older men and women or old men and women then one knows it in them that sometime there will be a history of all of them, that sometime all of them will have the last touch of being, a history of them can give to them, sometime then there will be a history of each one, of all the kinds of them, of all the ways any one can know them, of all the ways each one is inside her or inside him, of all the ways anything of them comes out from them. Sometime then there will be a history of every one and so then every one will have in them the last touch of being a history of any one can give to them. (GMMA, 246) This passage from Stein demonstrates a striking affinity to Whitman’s diction and syntax, and the writing method described here echoes many of Whitman’s own pronouncements on the subject. The characteristic list of gerunds is relentless, if not compulsive; the driving desire to name everything, but name without totalizing or, to keep on naming until everything is named: these are also Whitman’s forms and Whitman’s concerns. For Whitman seeks to exhaust all possibilities of naming, an end one can never reach but can be continually moving towards. Whitman and Stein work on two types of portraits: personal and largescale national portraits of “America.” There is a continuity between the two types of projects as both aim at the reproduction of a variety or multiplicity (within and without) and it is by accretion that they approximate the representation of the irreducible.22 Whitman’s “personal” portraits are really a self-portrait and yet he shares Stein’s concern for the diversity of perspectives which lends the portrait a dynamic quality (what Stein likes to call “movement”). Steinian description requires a perception from within as well as a gaze from without. It is both listening and talking that Stein aspires to: a combination of empathy and distance. Such, too, is Whitman’s gaze: “in and out of the game,” inside and out, watching and identifying with the perceived. A successful portrait, for both Whitman and Stein, requires an endless repetition of this double act. It would be fascinating to explore that convergence, but it is more important here to consider the

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difference between the two writers, for that difference may isolate for us those features of Whitman’s repetitions which are determined specifically by his poetics. Rewritten in Whitmanian lines, Stein’s passage would not stand out if inserted into a Whitman poem:

As one sees every one in their living, in their loving, sitting, eating, drinking, sleeping walking, working, thinking, laughing, As any one sees all of them from their beginning to their ending, sees them when they are little babies or children or young grown men and women or growing older men and women or old men and women Then one knows it in them that sometime there will be a history of all of them, And that sometime all of them will have the last touch of being, a history of them can give to them, Sometime then there will be a history of each one, Of all the kinds of them, Of all the ways any one can know them, Of all the ways each one is inside her or inside him, Of all the ways anything of them comes out from them. Sometime then there will be a history of every one and so then every one will have in them the last touch of being a history of any one can give to them. One of the effects created by inserting line breaks into Stein’s “prose” passage is the effect of clarity: the experiment in breaking Stein into lines at syntactical junctures has deprived her passage of some of its density, making it easier to follow (admittedly, the heavy ambiguity in the “last line” of this Stein-Whitman merger produces a difficulty uncharacteristic of Whitman whose ambiguity usually resides elsewhere).23 Another effect produced by the line-break experiment is that the passage has acquired a more pronounced (if syncopated) rhythm (which coincides with syntactic repetitions). By isolating syntactic units as poetic lines (which is the way Whitman’s prosody works) we reinforced the effect of juxtaposition (or, to use Charles Hartman’s term, “counterpoint”). Whitman’s line break seems, then, to parallel and reinforce the effects of repetition both writers rely on so heavily in making their “portraits.” Stein’s commentary on portraits and repetition can be used to highlight yet another important aspect of Whitman’s use of the form. Throughout her highly repetitive text, Stein insists that what she employs is not “repetition,” or that repetition—even of identical linguistic structures—always involves difference. Stein uses the metaphor of the cinematic to make her point: the frames on a film strip may seem identical and yet they produce a moving picture. In the same way her repetitions, even if they seem identical, always shift a little and produce a dynamic portrait of the subject she is describing. Like

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film, her use of repetition allows her to achieve movement in a type of continual present, without the intrusion of resemblance or memory. In Whitman’s case similarly, it may be argued, it is repetition that allows him to represent a dynamic world of difference. Repetition for Whitman, as for Stein, allows the writer to make difference manifest. Critics have indeed suggested the comparison between Whitman’s catalogues and film montage, suggesting that the catalogue dynamic is comparable to the quick substitution of the film frames. That, finally, may be one of the most apt metaphors for the type of repetition which governs Whitman’s lists. The non-hierarchical, multiperspectival poetics developed by Whitman, which works with a series of related clauses, with the links ambiguous or absent, may be usefully defined as essentially paratactic. An illuminating commentary on parataxis is offered by Bob Perelman in his reading of the language poets’ use of the form.24 In a passing remark on Whitman’s parataxis Perelman actually denies Whitman the ability to use the full force of the paratactic effect. From our contemporary perspective, argues Perelman, Whitman’s experiment may seem less than revolutionary: The parataxis of Whitman’s catalogs that seemed bizzare and discontinuous to most of his contemporary readers is much more likely to denote, for this century’s readers, connection and a totalizing embrace of society. (Perelman, 77) Having come from the era before poets experimented with the fragment, Whitman’s paratactic structures may seem today no less than “totalizing,” even if in his own literaryhistorical context, Whitman’s repetitions stand out for their effect of radical discontinuity; indeed, the fact that the structure of his verse is based on repetition, distinguishes him from his predecessors and his contemporaries alike.25 Perelman finds a successful use of parataxis in the work of Ron Silliman. Commenting in 1993 on the current work of the language poets, Perelman defends them against the charge of “depthlesness” waged by Fredric Jameson. In his critique of the paratactic structures of the language poets Fredric Jameson claims: “when ‘the relationship [of signifiers to each other] breaks down, when the links of the signifying chain snap, then we have schizophrenia in the form of a rubble of distinct and unrelated signifiers.’”26 Perelman counters Jameson’s reading: “Contrary to Jameson’s analysis of the new sentence, this writing seems to me self-critical, ambitiously contextualized, and narrative in a number of ways.” Both critics focus their analysis on the characteristically paratactic structure of the new sentence devised by the language poets. Yet what for Jameson is hopeless fragmentation, Perelman reads as an attempt to re-construct linearity and narrative. Historically speaking, argues Perelman, the new sentence is an earned return to continuity: “Writing in fragments might have kept one from being contaminated by the larger narratives of power, but to write in sentences was to use a publicly legible unit” (Perelman, 315).27 “New sentences imply continuity and discontinuity simultaneously,” maintains Perelman and, analyzing one of Silliman’s juxtapositions, comments: In the following juxtaposition—“Fountains of the financial district. She was a unit in space, she was a damaged child”—clearly we have switched

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subjects between sentences.… But we don’t focus on the girl: she is one facet of a complex situation; she is not singled out for novelistic treatment. There is a dimension of tact involved: she’s not made a representative symbol of the wrongs done to children, but she’s not given the brushoff either. The degree of attention Silliman accords her can be read as analogous to the way one recognizes individuals in a crowd (and perceptions in a crowded urban setting), giving each a finite but focused moment of attention. This can be favorably compared to the generalized responses of Eliot and Wordsworth to London. (…) Silliman’s sentence is not a fully formed narrative; but it is, in an adjectival sense, narrative. (Perelman, 67) Compare Silliman’s juxtaposition (“Fountains of the financial district. She was a unit in space, she was a damaged child”), with one of Whitman’s: “The pedlar sweats with his pack on his back—the purchaser higgles about the odd cent,/ The camera and plate are prepared, the lady must sit for her daguerreotype.…” The sense of harmony these two lines achieve due to their syntactic parallelism (and a subsequent suggestion of comparable semantic content) distinguishes them from Silliman’s juxtaposition (where the common context—social and economic—has to be inferred without being hinted at). Otherwise, Perelman’s comments are very applicable to Whitman’s lines: the characters/objects of Whitman’s lines are facets of a larger situation (the complexity of which is suggested by the very form of the catalogue: necessarily incomplete and never finished the way, say, a representative classification would be). None of the objects/persons that inhabit these lines are made to represent: the attention a catalogue line fosters is finite but focused. (And Whitman’s catalogue sentences are narrative, without forming full narratives.) Even in the case of lines which are more extensively qualified than the ones quoted above, the result is not narrative but an effect of a lingering gaze in a crowd:

The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck, The crowd laugh at her blackguard oaths, the men jeer and wink to each other (Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer you,) The President holds a cabinet council, he is surrounded by the great secretaries… In this case the lingering gaze is re-marked as that of a sympathetic onlooker and acquires a moral dimension which makes the juxtaposition the line leads to even more surprising. The parallel or at least the relation between the prostitute and the president is indicated most strongly by the alliteration. Silliman’s “finite and focused” moments of attention can be favorably compared to Wordsworth’s and Eliot’s responses to the city, says Perelman. Indeed, the difference between Wordsworth and Silliman, as well as Wordsworth and Whitman, may well be

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defined by the level of generality. Silliman’s and Whitman’s objects may be emblematic, but they are not to be generalized. The secret of their parataxis lies in the relations between the juxtaposed units, rather than in any submerged layers of meaning carried by those units. The objects of Whitman’s catalogues are not made to represent anything but themselves; they are clear markers of the “here and now” discovered via the repeated acts of attention. The situation is, predictably, different when it comes to Whitman’s metaphors. For unlike Silliman, Whitman organizes his poem also around recurrent figuration. Indeed, it could be argued that it is the recurrence of metaphors and their constant recontextualizing that makes for their structuring function. Whitman’s metaphors have often been read as providing his poems with unity and closure. Edwin Fussell is one of the critics who argue that “Whitman’s major metaphors are not local…, but overall, generative metaphors that constitute whole poems or poetries” (Fussell, 49, italics mine). In line with this argument, Fussell proposes that Whitman’s poems were generated from single “simple trail(s) of idea(s) that would form, ordain and establish the poem.” The “constitutive metaphor,” then, has a function of both generating and shaping whole poems: “the greatest of Whitman’s poems are unified by a single overriding metaphor, often dialectic, stated or implied by the title or by the poem as a whole, or by both, to which the particular elements of the poem ideally conform.” (Fussell, 52, italics mine) Reading Whitman’s figuration is a unifying device, Fussell simultaneously marginalizes such phenomena as enumeration or catalogue which his scheme makes entirely redundant. The implications of this argument extend beyond their applicability to single poems. Fussell conceives of the whole project of Leaves of Grass, in its many editions, as an essentially unified project, reading the book as “a perpetuallyexpanding constituting metaphor.” To “corroborate” this reading, Fussell quotes Whitman’s “late” observation that he has “probably had the advantage in constructing from a central and unitary principle since the first.” At once a beginning (there “since the first”), a controlling structure (“overriding” all else) and the aim of the unified project, metaphor, in Fussell’s reading becomes the means of control. Whitman’s choice of his “major” metaphors, however, is at odds with this explication of the origins of his book. It is, after all, grass, not a tree that gives the title to Whitman’s work. A celebrated passage from “Song of Myself” is a strikingly self-reflexive commentary on this, the book’s title metaphor:

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child?… I do not know what it is any more than he. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. Or I guess it must be the handkerchief of the Lord, A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped, Bearing the owners name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?

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Or I guess the grass is itself a child…the produced babe of the vegetation. Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic, And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, Growing among black folks as among white, Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same. (PP, 31) All readers of this passage observe the essential difficulty of its “central metaphor” which, on closer scrutiny, discloses a variety of, not always compatible, “meanings.”28 Whitman’s passage constructs a figure which successfully evades paraphrase. Some readers attempt to work with refigurations broad enough to suggest the “allinclusiveness” of the grass metaphor. The most obvious choice, suggested by Whitman’s pun on the leaves of grass as leaves of his book is that of the book itself. An alternative is Whitman himself, or the “personality” which “binds” his book. Whitman’s grass has also been read as life, the cycle of life, the principle of creativity. It has been pointed out that it symbolizes American democracy. More abstractly, its function has been determined as that of the dominant symbol which joins all of the poem’s dualisms. There are also readings which emphasize the self-reflexive nature of the metaphor. Robert Duncan, for example, suggests that the grass, is the very language, embodying as it does the perennial human spirit and experience, in which the book we are reading is created; it is the green blades of words that we call Poetry because the pulse of that sea of grass enlivens them, common as grass, and having the mystery of the ultimately real, a living word, as Whitman most wanted his poetry to have.29 In fact, the question “what is the grass,” which the readers insist on answering, has already been “taken” by the poem itself.30 What is more, Whitman’s speaker in this passage explicitly claims not to have the answer to the question (and thus the poem relinquishes the kind of control attributed to it by Fussell); to search the poem for clues seems a futile exercise or, at best, an exercise likely to yield an excess of answers, all equally valid (even if occasionally contradictory). The grass passage is one of the most striking demonstrations that Whitman’s invitations to the reader are not merely empty rhetoric. “All I mark as my own, you shall offset it with your own”: the passage genuinely succeeds in being what each of us, readers, needs it to be. Somewhat predictably, I need it to tell me more about the poem and its structure. Obligingly, the grass passage provides one of the most explicit commentaries in Leaves of Grass on the nature and function of (its own) metaphor. A somewhat self-ironic commentary on the poet’s own tools, the passage not only discourages a reading which would suggest the centrality of the metaphor, but heavily relies on repetition—arbitrary and discontinuous—as a way of structuring. Beginning by answering the question with a question, the speaker then repeatedly undertakes attempts

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at a definition, none of which seem satisfactory or sufficient in themselves. First, the grass is (like) a poem; maybe it is (like) this poem: it takes page leaves for its own unfolding, and in it the poet is revealed. Then the grass may be (a poem) waiting to be read, (a poem of) somebody else’s design—a “remembrancer” of its maker, revealing to us its author whom we recognize at the same time as we “re-mark” it as our own. “Whose” then is the grass metaphor, the grass poem? Indeed the authorship is questionable here, as is the meaning of grass. Or, rather, the authors and meanings multiply, both hiding and revealing themselves (and each other) in the corners of the poem’s language. (So that even the parallel made here—the grass as metaphor, the grass as poem—is exposed as arbitrary.) The grass undergoes a further metamorphosis when it is shown to be “uniform”—the metaphor of the same. The grass is the same (metaphor) everywhere, “sprouting alike” in all places. Yet its meaning cannot be localized—it is a “hieroglyphic,” it resists definition. With each repeated attempt to read it, it becomes something else. The speaker’s answer to the child is, then, a non-answer or a series of disclaimers; an acknowledgement of the irreducibility of the poem’s own materials. At the same time the passage successfully destabilizes the poem’s “central” emblem by making it contingent upon other elements and thus, in essence, problematizes its “centrality.” Deleuze borrows his metaphors from Whitman: It is never the beginning or the end which are interesting; the beginning and the end are points. What is interesting is the middle.… The French think in terms of trees too much: the tree of knowledge, points of aborescence, the alpha and omega, the roots and the pinnacle. Trees are the opposite of grass. Not only does grass grow in the middle of things, but it grows itself through the middle. This is the English or American problem. Grass has its line of flight, and does not take root. We have grass in the head, not a tree: what thinking signifies is what the brain is, a “particular nervous system” of grass. (Deleuze and Parnet, 39) Deleuze’s critique of French philosophy (and his hyperbolic recognition of the “Superiority of Anglo-American Literature” (Deleuze and Parnet, 36–77)), rests on the distinction between the metaphorical notion of “root” and that of “grass.” The French, according to Deleuze, tend to be sedentary in their thinking and if their thought allows for movement, it is the logical, one-directional movement of linear progression. American literature, on the other hand, signifies a dispersed, multi-directional dynamic. Less interested in roots, linear growth, and genealogy, American character is “nomadic.” Instead of engaging “unities,” it is the “thought of the multiple.” Unlike rationalist philosophers, who begin with an abstraction to then look for its empirical embodiment, Deleuze-the empiricist wants to begin by “analyzing the states of things, in such a way that non-preexistent concepts can be extracted from them. States of things are neither unities, nor totalities, but multiplicities,” he explains; and, “every multiciplicity grows from the middle, like the blade of grass or the rhisome.” To grow from the middle, to oppose the “rhisome” to “the unity of the tree and its binary logic,”31 is to propose a way of thinking which is anti-hierarchical, a-categorical, engaged in a project to “free difference.” In Michel Foucault’s words:

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The freeing of difference requires thought without contradiction, without dialectics, without negation; thought that accepts divergence; affirmative thought whose instrument is disjunction; thought of the multiple—of the nomadic and dispersed multiplicity that is not limited or confined by the constraints of similarity; thought that does not conform to a pedagogical model (the fakery of prepared answers), but that attacks insoluble problems—that is, a thought that addresses a multiplicity of exceptional points, which are displaced as we distinguish their conditions and which insist and subsist in the play of repetitions. (Foucault, 185) Such, it seems, is the structural function of Whitman’s grass metaphor: a metaphor which embraces what may be seen contradictory, a metaphor of divergence, a metaphor of pure affirmation. In the proliferation of blades, or leaves, the metaphor of grass suggests a multiplicity without a center—”a nomadic and dispersed multiplicity” which does not conform to a(ny) model but represents the principle of unlimited creativity. Finally, as the grass passage demonstrates, it is a metaphor which is realized in the play of repetitions. On another important level, the grass passage relies on the form of address (also very characteristic to Whitman’s work). The “child” (one of the poem’s “characters”) engages in a dialogue with the poem’s speaker (a risky move, resembling that of the nameless “young man” questioning Constantin Constantius, when the narrator is confronted by his own protagonist). Thus, the voice of the poem is also conditioned (in this case we could even say the speaker’s authority is undermined) by its subjects or, to use the poem’s terms, by the voices it adopts (for example, the voice of the child).32 Emerson’s poet shares the silent path of things and speaks for them; the authority to speak comes, paradoxically, form the surrender, as well as from being his subject’s extension, a “transcendency.”33 For Whitman, a speaking voice is never singular:

Through me many long dumb voices, Voices of the interminable generations of slaves, Voices of prostitutes and of deformed persons, Voices of the diseased and despairing, and of thieves and dwarfs, Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion, And of the threads that connect the stars—(PP, 50) In Deleuze’s words, “The utterance is the product of an assemblage—which is always collective, which brings into play within us and outside us populations, multiplicities, territories, becomings, affects, events.” (Deleuze and Parnet, 51, italics mine); “within us”: because to speak is to voice the play (of differences) of the many elements which produce the utterance; “outside us”: because an utterance constitutes its referent as a relation between those elements. The process of giving a voice to another, a recurrent (often thematized) move in Leaves of Grass, considered crucial to Whitman’s poetic project, has been variously interpreted as all-inclusiveness (the ability of the “self” to “contain” multiple roles, to embrace multiplicity/contradiction (R.H.Pearce) or as the loss of the self in the

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multiplicity of projections, and thus a locus of crisis (Richard Chase). In the tradition of Whitman criticism, readers coming to terms with the phenomenon of “continual becoming” tended to argue for one or the other of these two, apparently incompatible positions. That debate seems to have reached a certain deadlock as both of these interpretations can find legitimate evidence to support their claims. Indeed, Whitman’s speaker—who is “in and out of the game”—seems to be himself experimenting with both positions (very much like Kierkegaard’s Constantin who mediates between observing and sharing the fate of the young man). At the same time, however, he presents an alternative to this dualism in figuring a dynamic process of becoming which does not privilege any of its elements: both the subject and the object change in an “a-parallel” becoming. The process of giving a voice to another transforms the speaker as well as the object. According to Deleuze, whether the speaker’s relation to his subject is a distanced objectification or an identification, we are dealing with a “speaking for, in the place of the object”; in both cases, the object is translated into the speaker’s terms, “reduce[d] to [his] state.” Instead, one may imagine the speakers relation to his subject as neither an objectification nor an identification, as when the act of speaking in relation to one’s subject is a dialogue, a way of “assembling something between.” “All the subtle sympathies of the soul without number, from the bitterest hatred to the most passionate love,’” quotes Deleuze from Lawrence’s reading of Whitman; and adds: “This is assembling, being in the middle, on the line of encounter between an internal world and the external world.” (Deleuze and Parnet, 52) “The writer invents assemblages starting from assemblages which have invented him…,” says Deleuze (51–52). Leaves of Grass draws attention to this process of inventing its author, the Walt Whitman of the lines:

Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, Disorderly fleshy and sensual…eating drinking and breeding, No sentimentalist…no stander above men and women or apart from them…no more modest than immodest. (PP, 150) 34 This is the first time the name “Walt Whitman” is mentioned in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman’s name does not appear on the cover, or the title page, only (and probably only by necessity) in the small copyright note (as “Walter W.”). When the name is finally disclosed, it is in the course of the book’s unfolding: as if the book contained the author; as if the book created the author; as if the author was part of the book’s universe. What we see on the front page, instead of the name, is a picture of Whitman. That could be interpreted as emphasizing the physical presence of the author, but also as suggesting an “anonymous” presence, unnamed an thus “emblematic” in a way Whitman’s other characters (such as the “child”) are emblematic.35 The writer grows out of his book, Whitman seems to argue; Leaves of Grass is an “assemblage” which created Whitman. Whitman’s speaker is framed by the book in ways similar to the way Kierkegaard’s Constantin is framed by his own story. What is more, neither of the writers’ names appear on the cover of their books (Kierkegaard’s text was published pseudonymously, under the name “Constantin Constantius”). Both texts problematize the authority of their

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speakers and question the whole concept of a (single) “author” of an utterance. In both, this move is closely related to their speakers repeatedly adopting a multiplicity of voices. For Whitman these are the many “voices” listed or indiscriminately embraced in Leaves of Grass, as well as the many personae Whitman adopts in relation to his project: that of a writer, publisher and reviewer of his work. Kierkegaard’s “pseudonymous authorship” has a similar function. Within Repetition, Constantin Constantius—already a fictional construct, very much like Whitman’s “Walt Whitman” from Leaves of Grass—speaks in the voices of a philosopher, poet and storyteller (or, to use “his” words “babble[s] a confusion of criticism, mythology, rebus, and axioms”), none of which personae or modes of speaking take precedence over the others, none of which usurp a position of authority in relation to the reader. Possibly most striking is Whitman’s performance as the reader of his own texts. Unlike poets who write successive volumes of poems (which may then be placed together in a “collected works”), Whitman worked on a single book. The thin volume containing a long poem “Leaves of Grass,” which appeared in 1855, became the grounds for future revisions, with the “crowning” 1892, so-called “deathbed” edition concluding the lifelong project. In the process, the poems of the “original,” 1855 edition, became dispersed, added to, rewritten. None of the “original” poems remained unchanged. What we now have, then, is a multiplicity of versions of the book of Leaves of Grass, the choice between which has been the focus of an on-going critical debate. “A Song for Occupations” is one of the poems which appeared in the first, 1855, Leaves of Grass. Its final, 1881, revision, appeared in the “deathbed” edition of 1892. In the 1855 version the poem is not titled and works as an integral part of the long poem “Leaves of Grass,” following the section which would later become “Song of Myself.” By the time of the last, 1892, edition, that arrangement changes altogether. The poem now has a title, “A Song for Occupations,” and is placed among other “Songs”: “Song of Joys,” “Song of the Answerer,” etc., in Calamus (“Song of Myself” in 1892 becomes the last of the Inscriptions). A closer comparison of the two versions of the poem, which in their “text” vary only in their opening lines, is a fascinating example of repetition within a single writer’s body of work. An example of a poem re-read by its own writer, in its different versions “A Song for Occupations” marks the difference reading makes. In the arrangement of the 1855, first edition of Leaves of Grass, the last three lines of (the future) “Song of Myself” are separated from (what will become) “A Song for Occupations” only by the graphic sign of the leaves—

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you ***

Come closer to me, Push close my lovers and take the best I possess, Yield closer and closer and give me the best you possess

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What would later become “Song of Myself” ends (or does it?) with an address, bringing the reader and the speaker of the poem together in the future present. This open invitation, without a period at the end yields into a continuation in the following section of (the future) “A Song for Occupations.” “Come closer to me” picks up where the last lines of “Song of Myself” leave off: within this transition (marked only by the sign of the leaves), the terms are the same, those of an invitation. A mode of address these lines adopt is crucial to the way the speaker situates himself in relation to the reader in the earliest edition of Leaves of Grass. “All I mark as my own, you shall offset it with your own,” says Whitman in “Song of Myself”: the poem’s reader figures prominently throughout Whitman’s poem and reading is seen as constitutive of the poem’s text. For Whitman’s address to fulfil its function, the poem has to be made twice—as the poet’s own and then the reader’s own. For writing to function, it must be iterable. What is written can be repeated, but by the same token, it will become different:

All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it; Did you think it was in the white or gray stone? Or the lines of the arches and cornices? All music is what awakens from you when you are reminded by the instruments…(PP, 94) A relinquishment of the writer’s authority over his text, a move familiar from Kierkegaard’s Repetition, is intimately related to this awareness of reading-as-repetition. “Let everyone form his own judgement with respect to what is said here about repetition; let him also form his own judgement about my saying it here in this manner”: Constantin Constantius invites the readers to forge their own conclusions and pass their judgment on the writer and his argument. Both texts, Kierkegaard’s and Whitman’s, are defined by the conscious subversion of the writer’s authority. Both invite the reader to (re)produce the story they tell in a repetition which will necessarily differ from the original. Where does this difference come from? To answer this question, both writers engage in a similar type of experiment: an experiment meant to trace the route of their text’s passage—from writer to reader—and to distil the difference this passage makes. Kierkegaard constructs an alternative, antagonistic voice—the persona of the young man—as a vehicle for the re-reading and re-writing of the first part of Repetition “authored” by Constantius. Whitman re-reads and rewrites his own text. Whitman’s revisions measure the distance between the author and the ideal reader. In revising his own poems, Whitman supplies his own text with a reader, in a move which can be read as dialogical, rather than progressive. The address to the reader, which opens the 1855 version of the future “A Song of Occupations,” quoted above, initiates a series of questions concerning such “commerce” between writer and reader. The process of reading is figured as a sexual act and fuelled by the desire for union. Yet this desire for the act of writing and the act of reading to become one, is frustrated precisely because of the nature of written language.

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This is unfinished business with me…how is it with you? I was chilled with the cold types and cylinder and wet paper between us. I pass so poorly with paper and types… I must pass with the contact of bodies and souls. (PP, 89) Considering the implications of the position of the speaker in this version of the poem, as well as the poem’s context (set up by its proximity to the 1855 “Song of Myself”), the voice of the poem indeed is unfinished, in more than one way; not least because it needs the reader to “fetch” it, to “offset” its meanings with his or her own. The theme of reading is never finished in the poems of this edition, repetitively claiming that reading is an integral part of a poem. Paradoxically, it is the words on the page—“the cold types and cylinder and wet paper”—that come “between” the speaker and the reader. What obstructs the “contact of bodies and souls” is writing itself. (Writing, as Derrida says, is always marked by absence. And it is this absence, of which the physical trappings of writing—paper and types—are signs and reminders, that the poem so passionately protests.) That is where the call for closeness finds its urgency. “Failing to fetch me keep encouraged”; and again: “Missing me one place search another”—reading is a repeated enactment of the failure to be one with, to possess, the poem. Reading is a failure of repetition and a starting over; reading misses and undertakes its search again—the “meaning” of the poem emerges in this process of repetition. If reading always forges a new text, do the writer and reader ever meet? That seems to be the recurrent question of the 1855 poem. To put it in the poem’s words: “will the whole come back then?” As if in answer to this question, thirty-seven years later Whitman publishes a poem which is the effect of a re-reading of the 1855 “version” discussed above. For the 1892 poem, now called “A Song for Occupations,” can be read as Whitman placing himself in the position of the reader he addressed in 1855 and thus closing the circle, completing the act of communication. Does the whole come back then? Certainly the new poem, the 1892 “A Song for Occupations,” is “whole” in ways in which its prototype remains “unfinished.” By 1892, “A Song for Occupations” no longer follows “Song of Myself.” It is separated from the preceding “Song of the RedwoodTree” by a title, a numbered section and a repetition of the title in its first line, which further reinforces its function as the beginning of a new poem. Here is how it appears on the page: A SONG FOR OCCUPATIONS I

A song for occupations!

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In the labor of engines and trades and the labor of fields I find the developments, And find the eternal meanings. (PP, 355) The diction and tone of this opening differ greatly from the poem’s 1855 version. What used to be an address inviting exchange is now a pronouncement. This version of the poem’s beginning no longer invites. It responds. Whitman has been variously criticized and praised for his revisions. For some critics the first, 1855, edition of Leaves of Grass remains unparalleled, the later editions having lost much of the speculative, open-ended quality of his “original” effort. Others see the later, more fully developed editions as evidence of Whitman’s growing artistic and intellectual maturity. But probably all of Whitman’s readers would agree that the later, revised poems are, for better or worse, more polished, organized and complete than the first version of Leaves of Grass.36 That effect is, possibly, due to the very act of rereading, as well as the shift toward a more public persona or voice.37 Whitman’s revisions, the later versions of the work he published in 1855, are Whitman’s “Songs of the Answerer,” to use one of his 1892 titles. They answer as a reader would to a written text as well as make new. A passage where the 1855 and 1892 versions of the poem repeat each other verbatim may serve as an example of this displacement. The place where the two texts meet is where we can see most clearly how they diverge:

Were all educations practical and ornamental well displayed out of me, what would it amount to? Were I as the head teacher or charitable proprietor or wise statesman, what would it amount to? Were I to you as the boss employing and paying you, would that satisfy you? The learned and virtuous and benevolent, and the usual terms; A man like me, and never the usual terms. Neither a servant nor a master am I, I take no sooner a large price than a small price.… I will have my own whoever enjoys me, I will be even with you, and you shall be even with me. If you are a workman or workwoman I stand as nigh as the nighest in the same shop, If you bestow gifts on your brother or dearest friend, I demand as good as your brother or dearest friend,

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If your lover or husband or wife is welcome by day or night, I must be personally as welcome; If you become degraded or ill, then I will become so for your sake; If you remember your foolish and outlawed deeds, do you think I cannot remember my foolish and outlawed deeds? If you carouse at the table I say I will carouse at the opposite side of the table; If you meet some stranger in the street and love him or her, do I not often meet strangers on the street and love them? If you see a good deal remarkable in me I see just as much remarkable in you. (PP, 89–90 and 355–356) Let us consider what readings this passage may yield in the context of the first, 1855 version of the poem. Having begun in the mode of address and established itself as a text which will rely on exchange, the poem now tests other alternatives. The series of three questions at the start of the passage quoted can, however, hardly be read as anything but rhetorical questions. All categories defining character (virtuous, benevolent, learned), position or situation in life (servant, master, boss, employee, powerful, weak, healthy or sick, etc.) are the target of criticism here. Kierkegaard targets professions and positions of power in strikingly similar terms: The person who wills repetition is mature in earnestness. This is my private opinion, and this also means that it is not the earnestness of life to sit on the sofa and grind ones teeth—and to be somebody, for example, a councilor—or to walk the streets sedately—and to be somebody, for example, His Reverence—any more than it is the earnestness of life to be the riding master. In my opinion, all such things are but jests, and sometimes rather poor ones at that. (Kierkegaard, R, 133) To “will repetition” (in a process akin to Whitman’s continual becoming) and to embrace difference is to engage in a process: a dynamic process which involves risk. Terms denoting position and status, on the other hand, are by their very nature sedentary, as they describe a state (of being) rather than a process (of becoming). Such terms (which characteristically imply either power or powerlessness of the subject they define) are all equally confining. The roles they assign to the subject are as limiting as proper names are limiting.38 The codified languages of established professions, Whitman suggests, are predictable, repeatable; they are “the usual terms.” To be elusive, to be searched for, to abandon “the usual terms” is to adopt a language of difference. “You will hardly know who I am or what I mean”: the closing of “Song of Myself” is resonant here. As Deleuze and Parnet put it, The utterance is the product of an assemblage—which is always collective, which brings into play within us and outside us populations,

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multiplicities, territories, becomings, affects, events.… The writer invents assemblages starting from assemblages which invented him, he makes one multiplicity pass into another. (Deleuze and Parnet, 51–2) In Whitman’s poem, the shifting nature of the speaker’s persona is projected onto the poem’s reader and implies the potential for a multiplicity of readings (of the self and the poem):

We consider the Bibles and religions divine… I do not say they are not divine, I say they have grown out of you and may grow out of you still, It is not they who give the life…it is you who give the life; Leaves are not more shed from the trees or trees from the earth than they are shed out of you. (PP, 93) Whitman’s leaves, the leaves of grass and the metaphorical leaves of which books are made are turned over to the addressee of the poem. Whitman’s poem, in this version, is an attempt to resist categorical limitations, so that, to use Deleuze’s terms, Being can become not a unity that guides and distributes difference, but that which is repetitively expressed as difference. The language of his poem, which consists mostly of catalogues, irreducible in the variety of references they make, points to an irreducible variety of perspectives on, or “readings” of, the world it presents. In the context of the poem’s concern with the ways in which meanings are generated, or repetitively “assembled,” between the writer and reader, that variety points to the potential multiplicity of “versions” or languages in which the poem may speak. This refusal to homogenize or centralize is the poem’s way of resisting its own codification.39 The 1892 version of Whitman’s poem quite obviously will not permit a similar reading. The “same” passage in 1892 creates a dramatically different context for the questions it poses. The forceful statement and elevated tone of the opening lines of this version, as well as the suggestion that what begins is a poem of praise, a celebration, are carried over to the series of questions. In the new context of “A Song for Occupations,” “educations” are juxtaposed with work. “Educations” are somewhat unfavorably contrasted with “the labor of engines and trades and the labor of fields.” “Educations” are now at best what paves the way for an “occupation.” The problematic nature of the “occupations”—of a “head teacher,” of “proprietor,” “statesman” and “boss”—now has to do more clearly with the problem of power, rather than, more obliquely, or metaphorically, with the resistance against a definition of one’s identity. Now the “you” of the extended lists is no longer the intimate “you” of 1855. Having opened with the exclamatory “Workmen and Workwomen!” the poem abandons the realm of intimacy and with it abandons the mode of address for that of an invocation. The terms it employs become more the terms of public debate, and its examples express

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public concerns. Ultimately, this version of the poem seems to celebrate a diversity of “occupations” within the context of the nation, at the expense of the earlier emphasis on the celebration of individual diversity which exists prior to and despite any specific occupation.40 Setting aside the debate on whether there is an authoritative text from which Whitman’s readers should draw their quotations (Whitman himself has “authorized” the last, 1892 edition), I would like to suggest, that we may benefit from reading the successive versions of Whitman’s book as repetitions of each other, rather than choosing one as the authoritative text and reading others as failed drafts. Since our reading is also a form of repetition—not unlike Whitman’s reading of his own poem which produced the 1892 version of “A Song for Occupations”—reading a poem in the context of its other versions may be one way of resisting closure in our own interpretations. Obviously, Whitman was a reader of more than his own texts and it may be useful here to consider his practices as a reader of others. Whitman’s most immediate and most readily acknowledged literary inspiration is Emerson. While there is no space here to comment fully on his relation to Emerson, it may be interesting to look at a specific example of a relatively direct repetition or allusion in Whitman’s text to an Emersonian figure.41 In “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” Whitman has the following passage:

The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day, The simple, compact, well-join’d scheme, myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme, The similitudes of the past and those of the future, The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, on the walk in the street and the passage over the river, The current rushing so swiftly and swimming with me far away, The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them, The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others. Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to shore, Others will watch the run of the flood tide, Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east, Others will see the islands large and small; Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high, A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them, Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring in of the flood tide, the falling-

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back to the sea of the ebb-tide. (PP, 308) Here Whitman traces a familiar abstract pattern of overlapping repetitions. An argument laid out in a series of parallel statements (“The impalpable sustenance…, The simple…scheme…, The similitudes of the past…, The glories strung like beads…, The current…, The others…, The certainty of others…” and: “Others will…, Others will…, Others will…, Fifty years hence…others…, A hundred years hence…others…, Will.…”) does not progress but works by repetitive accretion. Instead of “getting to the point” Whitman produces a multitude of points, instead of reaching “the heart of the matter” the passage tries to keep up with the swiftly rushing current, registering a series of sensations, or perceptions, none of which weighs more than the others. Indeed, the passage hinges on a series of fleeting sensations. These “glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings” are an extraordinary metaphor for the succession of sensations: sensory perceptions, instead of producing a unified image, do not add up to a whole but, rather are “strung like beads.” The refusal to totalize produces a characteristic sting of parallels (syntactic as well as conceptual) for which the string of beads is the most apt figure. To register sensation (one of Whitman’s preoccupations: to present an unmediated version of one’s encounter with reality) one has to produce a repetitive series, rather than a solidified image. Whitman’s string of beads is an echo of a metaphor from Emerson’s “Experience”: “Life is a train of moods, like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus” (Emerson, 248). In “Experience” Emerson refigures his own metaphor of the circle from a new, more skeptical stance. Most thoroughly discussed in his earlier “Circles,” the figure of the circle is usually employed by Emerson as a means of grounding: the couple of the eye and “the horizon which it forms” works as a stable paradigm, relating human and natural circles, and situating human beings at the center of the world of their perceptions (Emerson, 179). The natural cycle provides a reassuring sense of order. But in “Experience,” the figure of the circle signifies loss. It is no longer a “circular power returning to itself,” no longer an image for the centrality of human position. “Men seem to have learned from the horizon the art of perpetual retreating and reference”(Emerson, 246): in “Experience” the horizon recedes out of grasp as if no longer part of the eye’s domain. The powers of the eye/I have shrunk; the all powerful “transparent eyeball” is now shrouded with sleep, exposed to an impenetrable darkness “as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree” (Emerson, 245). This figurative shift is a crucial move in an essay which deals with a sense of loss of a center within a horizon of stable reference. Infected with repetition, the figure of the circle implies a loss of centrality; “focus” in this new context comes to signify mediation or limitation, rather than sharpness of vision. Circles, earlier “the highest emblem in the cipher of the world” (Emerson, 179), are now reduced to “beads,” strung in succession, unlike the infinitely expandable circles of the earlier essay. Circle and repetition strung together form an indefinite series, “a series of which we do not know the extremes and believe it has none” (Emerson, 245). Succession and repetition substitute for circular closure. Beads, re-figured as “lens,” become a container, likely to distort perception, rather than testify “that every action

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admits of being outdone” as “around every circle another can be drawn.” As we pass through the distorting lenses of successive experiences, we cannot but read our perceptions as variations in repetition or, at best, an uneasy progression. In his re-reading, or redefining, of the figure of the circle, Emerson suggests that circularity is never a return, never “a circular power returning to itself.” Interestingly, Whitman recovers Emerson’s diminished circles for the affirmative mode. “The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings” suggest a celebration of the richness of sensory perceptions, rather than skepticism. Without recovering Emerson’s centered circle, Whitman makes new by recovering Emerson’s “diminished” metaphor from a new perspective. The metaphor of the “string” on which beads are hung is, of course, Whitman’s ferry. A vehicle for allusion, Whitman’s ferry carries Emerson’s metaphor into a new context. Indeed, the pattern which combines repetition and continuity informs the entire passage from “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” The overlapping of the synchronic and diachronic perspectives (“the simple …scheme” reproduced by “the past and the future”), the overlapping of the historical and structural relations (“The others that are to follow me” and “the ties between me and them”) combine circularity and repetition. “Others” will repeat the movement figured by Whitman’s ferry (very much as Whitman repeats Emerson), and at the same time “others” provide the “impalpable sustenance” of the “I” as much as the immediate structural context out of which this “I” emerges (“all things and all hours of the day”). The pattern informing the passage is like Whitman’s relation to Emerson, and, one may argue, his other “sources”: a way of repeating and refiguring which sustains and makes new at the same time. Whitman’s book is a critique of the originary moment, at the same time that it repeatedly turns to the subject of “fresh beginnings.” This apparent contradiction in terms is replayed (often in a less self-conscious manner) in Whitman criticism which points to two alternative “beginnings,” or two alternative stories about Whitman’s language. One is the story of the “barbaric yawp,” or Whitman’s rejection of all literary models42; the other is the story of the “copious books man,”43 or Whitman the erudite. Versions of the former—Whitman-the “natural,” writing outside traditional literary conventions—have been largely preferred by Whitman’s readers (and explicitly encouraged by Whitman himself). The contradiction surfaces in William Carlos Williams’s commentary on Whitman’s poetic idiom, indeed, is so striking, that I will not try to resolve it (in an attempt to establish Williams’s “version” of Whitman) but will address it only insofar as it highlights the issues characteristic of the larger Whitman debate: There is a very moving picture of Whitman facing the breakers coming in on the Jersey shore, when he heard the onomatopoeic waves talk to him direct in a Shakespearian language which might have been Lear himself talking to the storm. But it was not what it seemed; it was a new language, an unnamed language which Whitman could not identify or control. (Williams, 150) Williams begins by brilliantly mocking the idea of Whitman’s poetry as “Nature’s transcription” immune to poetic convention. Then, however, as if putting aside his own critique, he speaks of the language Whitman adopts (and cannot master) as: new,

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unnamed, unidentified, uncontrolled. Williams’s comments on poetic language make problematic the status of language itself. First, language is figured as a parody of “nature’s language”: at its most faithful, a poetic imitation of Nature is the language of onomatopoeia, that is, language at its most conventional. Then, quite logically, the passage addresses the mediated language of literature with its attending conventions: the language of literature as it is voiced by another poet and, even more specifically, as it is voiced by one of that poet’s characters. Finally, however, Williams seems to regress back to the natural, constructing a fiction of a language which is neither a language of nature, nor the language of literature: as yet unappropriated, “new,” “unnamed.” This language seems to extend beyond Whitman’s grasp, beyond his control, even as it is his own. Natural or conventional, new or old is the dichotomy here. “For what, indeed, is the problem in any modern theory of poetic language, if not the problem of articulating authenticity with conventionality, originality and continuity, freshness with what is recognizably “fit” to be called poetic?” (Johnson, 95)44. Whitman’s poetry explores this paradox. The structure and function of his repetitions make “originality” and “continuity” inseparable. By arresting linear movement, repetition effects a pause which may be felt as a new beginning; by necessarily going back to what it repeats and thus exposing the difference within the repeated element, it denies a single, unified, past moment of origin. Origins are made by repetitions. And each end is a new beginning. In the closing lines of “There Was a Child Went Forth” repetition “programs the future.” It is a characteristic move for Whitman to thus turn an ending into a new beginning, a move most famously present in the closing lines of “Song of Myself”:

I depart as air.… I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, I effuse my flesh in eddies and drift it in lacy jags. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you (PP, 88) This is Whitman’s song for the parting, at once one of the most moving, inspiring passages in Leaves of Grass, and one of the most troubling repetitions Leaves of Grass confronts. An extraordinary address to the reader, it figures a presence after death (a literary presence, a presence in language, and a presence in physical nature), reassuring the readers that they may look for the speaker in the leaves of grass and in Leaves of

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Grass,. The power of the affirmative in this passage has been earned through the radical reworking of the model of writers authority, a relinquishment of authorial control and a positing of the poem as an effect of the reader’s repetitions. On a certain level, the passage is quite conventional in its epitaphic purport, claming agency from beyond the grave and inviting communication. The poem ends by figuring the poet’s death, and we are made to realize that the two necessarily go together, that the absence of the poet is the condition of our reading. Our reading is proof of the death of the author. The repetition that reading performs simultaneously annihilates and brings to life, as it creates the only space where the “author” can be present. The continuing presence of the text beyond the death of the author exposes as illusory a number of conventions related to writing and authorship (in which the significance, if not legibility, of the text depends on the conscious presence of its author), such as the illusion of authorial control or at least of the writer’s authority over the text and the notion that the writer is the source of the text, the text being but a clue which can lead us back to the source, the notion that the author precedes the text. If the poem’s speaker ever claims to have possessed the “truths” secreted in the text, it is only to invite the reader to “offset” them with his or her own. The persona of “Walt Whitman” is not the “author” but more a “child” of the poem, made by the poem. The “I” of the poem, is entirely subsumed by the book. The book is conceived as a site which produces “Walt Whitman”: and he will remain there “as variously as possible,” to use Frank O’Hara’s words, 46 to be “fetched” by his readers. Whitman’s writer is a “scriptor” rather than “Author,” to borrow the distinction from Barthes: The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child. In complete contrast, the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the ennunciation and every text is eternally written here and now. The fact is (or, it follows) that writing can no longer designate an operation of recording, notation, representation, ‘depiction’ (as the Classics would say); rather, it designates exactly what linguists, referring to Oxford philosophy, call a performative, a rare verbal form…something like the I declare of kings or the I sing of the very ancient poets. (Barthes, IMT, 146) Bringing this back to the American context, most Native American peoples held precisely such a conception of verbal art: where the singer was chosen by the song, where nothing like a cult of individual genius developed, where the communal aspects of songs, legends, and rituals were stressed over the individual, and verbal art was literally performative. The fact that we are so used to the readings of Whitman as a solipsistic poet and fail to see how the poem deconstructs the myth which has accrued around Whitman as an “author” (admittedly, with his active help) testifies to how deeply rooted our readings are in the western, mythical construct of the author which we have come to take for the transhistorical norm.

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A reading of Whitman which stresses the constructed, performative conception of the writer over the conception which privileges “Author” over text is not necessarily an imposition of a twentieth-century perspective on Whitman 45 but, just possibly, a recovery of that in his text which precedes the modern critical conception of the “Author.” The Whitman myth is testimony to how persistently we have tried to locate and define the “author” of Leaves of Grass. Yet, as Barthes reminds, To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the author…beneath the work: when the Author has been found, the text is “explained”—victory to the critic. Hence there is no surprise that, historically, the reign of the Author has also been that of the Critic. (Barthes, IMT, 147) A Whitman from before the rein of the “Critic” may reveal (or conceal) himself as a scriptor, born with his book. Leaves of Grass reveals/conceals itself as an elusive poem, engaged in an idealistic, Utopian resistance against categorizations, names, finite definitions. The tool employed by the poem in this struggle against codification is repetition. The poem’s structure, which relies on parataxis and coordination, allows the repeated to take precedence over the linear, so that beginnings function as endings and endings yield to ever new beginnings. Instead of absolute origins or the return to the source, the poem offers a play of repetitions: uncontrolled, arbitrary, accidental; these essentially poetic features of language take precedence over (narrative) linearity as well as over the controlled, premeditated and willed logic (of rationalist argument). Be it in metaphors which resist closure as they realize themselves in the play of repetitions; or in catalogues, which make the poem’s vision anti-hierarchical and irreducible, the poem opens out to a multiplicity of meanings. What ultimately makes Whitman’s poem, however, are the anticipated meanings produced by its readers. The poem is an address and an invitation; it is an announcement of the “birth of the reader.”

Chapter Three “The Motion of Thought and its Restless Iteration”: Wallace Stevens and the Turns of Repetition

That which is always beginning because it is part Of that which is always beginning, over and over —Wallace Stevens, “St. Armorer’s Church from the Outside”

A number of critics have argued against reading Steven’s poetry as progressing from a simple beginning to a more complex and fuller end. In discussing his late poems, Steven Shaviro argues: “The logic of Stevens’s poetry is repetitive and accretive, not dialectical or progressive.”1 Paul Bové quotes and develops Joseph Riddel’s critique of Helen Vendler’s On Extended Wings, where Riddel argues that “there is no more a consummated arrival in later Stevens than there was a meaningful departure in the earlier”: Bové demonstrates ways in which the Romanitc notions of progress, upheld by a number of New Critics, when applied to the course of Stevens’s poetry as well as to particular poems, create a paradigm with substantial areas of blindness (Bové, 183–5). Indeed, Stevens’s characteristic life-long preoccupation with certain patterns of thought, the recurrence of words, concepts and structures in his poetry, in effect produces a body of work which constantly gestures backward, as his poems engage in rethinking and refiguring the earlier work. While one can certainly trace a development in his poetry, that development is importantly built on recurrence; Stevens’s oeuvre grows by accretion and refiguration. By thus returning, or at least gesturing backward, by constantly redefining their terms, the poems achieve what Gertrude Stein describes as the “gradual difference” enacted by continual repeating: saying the same thing over and over produces a result which is “endlessly the same and endlessly different” (Stein, GMMA, 243). While Whitman’s work as a poet is an endless repetition and reshaping of the same book, Stevens’s may be fruitfully read in relation to the repetitions on the level of concept and vocabulary. Accretion and refiguration (rather than linear development), often define the dynamic of Stevens’s individual poems as well. On the simplest level, repetition is one of Stevens’s most characteristic formal tools. There are very few poems of his that do not repeat, either words, figures or syntactic and other structures. Many of Stevens’s

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poems depend on a repetition of a pattern (e.g. “Six Significant Landscapes”)—be it a stylistic pattern or a pattern of thought—as if testing it for its capacity to hold different contents. In some (as in “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”), repetition becomes a tool for discerning minimal shifts, like a very precise sensor of changing meanings. In Stevens’s first book of poems, harmony is often shown to be based on, and is represented by the means of, repetition. In “Earthly Anecdote,” the opening poem of the book, the predictability and regularity of the repeated complex of interrelated movements is the key to the story the poem tells. Movement—disruption—swerve: that is the pattern the poem describes repeatedly until the firecat—the poem’s wind-up mechanism—goes to sleep, and the poem can rest. As in any effective bedtime story, in “Earthly Anecdote” closure is achieved when the animal-protagonist falls asleep, and the story-poem-voice (as well as the story’s addressee) settles down with it. Conventional patterns responsible for poetic (and storytelling and therapeutic) harmonies are strikingly similar to natural harmonies in depending on the alternation of repeated movement and rest. In Stevens’s early poems, the desire for successful repetition can be read as a desire for a transparent language: the poetic (repetition) successfully repeating/reproducing the natural (repetitions) is the condition of successful representation. Consequently, the question concerning the origin of repetition will be crucial to the reader of Stevens’s poems and the poems themselves often pose that question: is repetition a pattern discovered in reality, which the poems merely duplicate in a mimetic attempt to reconstruct the real, or is it produced by the poem, as the linguistic structure of representation? “Anecdote of Men by the Thousand” (CP, 51–2), addresses this dichotomy. The poem opens with a generalization: “The soul, he said, is composed/Of the external world.” The following “examples” precisely repeat the pattern set up in this opening definition:

There are men of the East, he said, Who are the east. There are men of a province Who are that province. There are men of a valley Who are that valley. Chameleon-like, identity changes with the context: that is one of the possible paraphrases, yet it is clearly not identity formation that the poem is interested in. As a matter of fact, any paraphrase will be no more than that: one of the many possible concrete manifestations of “meaning” the poem’s abstract pattern can generate. Once the pattern has been set up, it can produce an infinite number of “meanings,” in that we can substitute the words “province” and “valley” with “climate” or “school,” and the poem will still “mean” the same; so it is the pattern itself, rather than any of its manifestations, that seems to be at stake. One of the questions the poem implicitly asks is whether the poem can represent reality. The poem’s syntactic parallels are its own, linguistic, manner of producing a pattern which can have a number of manifestations. We are dealing then, with three sets

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of parallels: parallels in reality, parallels in language and—this is what the poem seems to be wishing for—a parallel between language and reality. A realization of that third set of parallels would mean successful representation in language. And indeed:

There are men whose words Are as natural sounds Of their places… A claim is being made for the possibility of a natural language, an organic language which grows out of what it is trying to describe: if the structures of language have their source in reality itself, language can successfully represent the real. Obviously, were we to follow up on the poem’s logic, we would end up producing a somewhat circular argument which would by no means answer the question about the origin of repetition. But the poem does not trace a full circle. It arrests the play of parallels and repetitions at the point when man and world, where man and word and world, “are one.” Not all of Stevens’s poems tend toward such neat symmetries. “Domination of Black,” another early poem from Harmonium (1923), also attempts a vision unified by repetition, but at the same time, subverts this very attempt by complicating the relation between language and the reality it describes. The poem opens by testing the power of repetition to provide an ordering to the world within and without the space of the utterance:

At night, by the fire, The colors of the bushes And of the fallen leaves, Repeating themselves, Turned in the room, Like the leaves themselves Turning in the wind. Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks Came striding. And I remembered the cry of the peacocks. The colors of their tails Were like the leaves themselves Turning in the wind, In the twilight wind. They swept over the room, Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks Down to the ground.

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I heard them cry—the peacocks. Was it a cry against the twilight Or against the leaves themselves Turning in the wind, Turning as the flames Turned in the fire, Turning as the tails of the peacocks Turned in the loud fire, Loud as the hemlocks Full of the cry of the peacocks? Or was it a cry against the hemlocks? Out of the window, I saw how the planets gathered Like the leaves themselves Turning in the wind. I saw how the night came, Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks I felt afraid. And I remembered the cry of the peacocks. (CP 8–9) “Domination of Black” begins on a nostalgic note, as a remembering—the daytime colors of autumn scenery are conjured up at night, by the fire—it begins with a backward movement of “recollection”: a recovery by repetition. The poem posits a series of parallels: the colors of the bushes are like the colors of the fallen leaves and that likeness is defined as repetition: “The colors of the bushes/And of the fallen leaves/Repeating themselves.” Another parallel or likeness, also expressed via repetition, is implied between the color of the fire and the color of the leaves/bushes: that is what allows the daytime colors to be conjured up/repeated inside, at night: the objects present (in the room) conjure up the presence of those absent (from the room, from the present). Likenesses allow the poem to speak (of) that which is absent: looking at the fire is like looking at the bushes, because they are the same color and they perform the same kind of motion, that is: they repeat themselves. This opening sequence, however, is quickly subverted as the poem complicates its own pattern of analogies. The proliferation of likenesses makes it progressively harder to locate the place where the repetition originated: the room or the outside: the poem, or the reality it claims to represent. Invited to trace the multiple parallels, one is caught in a circular motion—the colors of the hemlocks resemble the leaves, which resemble the fire, which resembles the leaves—always returning to the starting point. Thus, as in Kierkegaardian repetition proper, the act of repeating becomes an act of forging the

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present: not a passive recovery or “recollection,” but a movement forward which reverses the points of origination: the past is borne out of the present.2 Abandoning its own initial impulse to recollect, the poem undermines the possibility of a recovery of a pre-existent order by making it impossible to determine the origin of a resemblance: object and emblem, thing and image, become exchangeable (the fire is the emblem of leaves, the leaves are the emblem of fire). Meaning is shown to emerge as a result of this movement of repetition and its turns: the poem plays with both kinds of repetition, “Greek recollection” present side by side with Kierkegaardian “repetition,” one necessary for and subverting the other. By thus putting repetition in motion, the poem turns its colors, both encouraging and frustrating the reader’s attempts to control it with a single story. Thus far, I have isolated a set of repetitions which the poem claims to be grounded in the reality it seeks to represent. In other words, the poem claims to be an act of discovery of a pattern in reality—a pattern which has always already been there. Yet, at the same time, the poem foregrounds this very function of representation by drawing attention to its own repetitions. The opening lines of the poem (until the turning point of “Yes: but”) not only describe repetitions (of leaves, bushes and fire), but also enact some of their own (the repetition of a syntactical pattern in “of the bushes” and “of the fallen leaves” and the repetition of a phrase in “turned in the room” and “turning in the wind”). The opening of the poem thus presents us with repetitions of two very different orders. The analogies which are the subject of the first few lines of the poem claim a discovery of a natural, innate resemblance: the colors of the fire resemble the colors of the autumn leaves; the colors of the fire turn in the room like the leaves turning in the wind. Repetitions of syntactical patterns are of a different order: they belong to the realm of language. They upset the poems claims (about the recollection of a pre-existent presence) by drawing attention to the poem’s language and away from the reality it claims to represent. That shift is fully realized in the first stanza’s final triplet:

Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks Came striding. And I remembered the cry of the peacocks. This is a dramatic shift: the “yes: but” alerts us to a modification of the established pattern, very much as if we were being prepared for a disclaimer or a qualification of an argument we have learned to accept. Even more dramatic is the shift in rhythm: the long four-beat line, followed by the ominous falling cadence of the two-beat “came striding” upsets the established pattern of shorter, regular lines, arresting the movement of successive repetitions. The heavy hemlocks upset the established pattern of parallels (also because they are of a different color, dark) and the cry of the peacocks introduces sound—disruptive of the color economy. What is even more disruptive about these two lines, however, is another kind of repetition they introduce—the purely linguistic or poetic repetition of “hemlocks” and “peacocks.” The two are like each other because they rhyme; the pattern they introduce is generated exclusively by a poetic convention and therefore highly “unnatural.” The poem not only describes how repetition, or resemblance, makes possible the presence of the

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outside objects within the room, but also suggests a similar parallel between the (repetitive) world of the poem and the (repetitive) world beyond the poem. A claim is being made (by analogy) about the capacity of the poem to make present that which does not belong to the realm of language. The poem warns that, despite its initial faith in the recovery of a lost presence, poetic representation, figured as repetition, constructs, rather than reconstructs, the “reality” it describes. The poem tests its “natural” repetitions against “linguistic” repetitions positing those two types as, respectively, a discovery of a pre-existing presence (the leaves have always already been the color of the fire) and a forging of a new order (it is the poem that produces the likeness of “hemlocks” and “peacocks”). The “hemlocks”/“peacocks” repetition belongs to the realm of language and is ungrounded in (and producing) the reality it seeks, producing an order which unsettles the—apparently independent— “natural” order of resemblances. Again, the poem will not allow us to determine which kind of ordering takes precedence: the “natural” or the “linguistic.” And this ambiguity raises questions about the status of writing as repetition. Is writing’s repetition an act of recovery or an act of forging a reality of its own? Does the poem’s language, a system of signs, point to an identity independent of its own significations? In The Necessary Angel, Stevens observes: “Poetry is almost incredibly one of the effects of analogy.… There is always an analogy between nature and the imagination, and possibly poetry is merely the strange rhetoric of that parallel.”3 Stevens defines “analogy” as “resemblance between parallels,” that is, the kind of repetition “Earthly Anecdote” and “Domination of Black” employ and comment on. Interestingly, in the relationship of analogy, two elements “inter-act” (NA, 109), one influencing the other. Consequently, poetic representation, which is an effect of analogy, repetition or likeness, is also a rhetoric of interaction. “Domination of Black” can be read as such “strange rhetoric” of the interaction between the elements of repetition. The poem both tries to “recover” the reality it presents, and creates a reality of its own, witnessing the tension between these two tendencies. As far as it comments on the very process of poetry writing, the poem describes it as a process that involves an interaction between language and its object, neither of which can be left unchanged. In the second stanza of “Domination of Black,” the unsettling (“linguistic”) repetition of “hemlocks” and “peacocks” is, in turn, absorbed into the system of (“natural”) repetitions the poem has set up. As if finding a way to attach words back to their objects, the poem discovers a relationship between these objects other than the purely linguistic, a relation which naturalizes their coupling, justifying it on grounds other than the linguistic: the peacocks’ tails turn out to be the color of the leaves, the hemlocks—loud as the fire. This circular movement, repeatedly enacted by the poem, creates a miniature pattern of its own: the process of representation through repetition involves necessary (re)turns. Stevens’s early poems both posit and question the status of representation as repetition: they play with the possibility of recovery through repetition, only to undermine it by discovering that repetition forges a reality of its own. “Domination of Black” seems to find a way out of this bind by literally putting a spin on the binary. Another early poem from Harmonium, “The Place of the Solitaires,” suggests that the circular movement powered by repetition and return is the movement of the thinking mind itself:

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Let the place of the solitaires Be a place of perpetual undulation. Whether it be in mid-sea On the dark, green water-wheel, Or on the beaches, There must be no cessation Of motion, or of the noise of motion, The renewal of noise And manifold continuation; And, most, of the motion of thought And its restless iteration, In the place of the solitaires, Which is to be a place of perpetual undulation. (CP, 60) In a letter to Hi Simons, Stevens says of “The Place of the Solitaires”: it “is a poem actually in motion: in motion with the activity of thought in silence.”4 The solitary mind playing its solitary games turns upon itself in a wave-like unfolding and coming back. Repetition and return are seen as positive, indeed necessary, elements of thinking. Associated with motion, noise, and richness, the movement of repetition counters stasis, the poverty of oneness, and silence. “The Place of the Solitaires” testifies to the effectiveness of repetition by enacting its own poetic turns and repetitions. The only concrete images in the otherwise rather abstract poem—the water-wheel of the mid-sea and the beaches visited by the waves— set up the combination of repetition and return as the poem’s dominant pattern. The poem then repeats, in different forms, the wish that repetition would not cease: the place of the solitaires is to be a place of “perpetual undulation,” of “no cessation,” of “renewal” and “continuation,” of “iteration” and, again, “perpetual undulation.” In repeating, almost verbatim, the first couplet as its final couplet the poem performs its own circular return. This move undoes the finality of the poem’s ending, as well as makes the opening of the poem, as we return to it via the repetition, seem like a continuation, rather than a beginning; again, as in “Domination of Black,” the poem erases its origins. Finally, by repeating the same syntactical pattern in the series of prepositional (“of”) phrases, the poem performs its own “manifold continuation.” The complex pattern created by these repetitions is a source of an irresolvable ambiguity which complicates the reading of the emphasized, key couplet, “And, most, of the motion of thought/And its restless iteration,” which could be a continuation of any number of beginnings. We could read it as a modification of the poem’s first couplet:

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Let the place of the solitaires Be a place of… …the motion of thought and/or: There must be no cessation Of… …the motion of thought and/or: …the noise of… …the motion of thought At least five such syntactical combinations are possible. “The motion of thought,” with its returns and repetitions, is here a function of syntax. The poem describes the working of an isolated mind—the dynamic of thought—but may as well refer to the processes which shape writing. “The renewal of noise/And manifold continuation” seems an apt description of how books of poems are made. Stevens’s poetry in particular seems to fit that description, with its insistence on recurrence, intertextual allusion and repetition. The poem may also be commenting on its own game of returns or manifold continuations. The poem’s meaning, necessarily ambiguous, emerges as the poem’s (re)turns of repetition. Syntax is this poem’s firecat, the thought’s “manifold continuation” identical with “syntactic ambiguity.” In employing and commenting on repetition, both “Domination of Black” and “The Place of the Solitaires” involve the notion of circular return. “Domination of Black” creates a pattern which, by nature of its circularity, precludes the possibility of tracing the origin of a repetition. The poem follows a circular movement which allows the “subversive” elements to be re-absorbed into the poem’s patternings. “The Place of the Solitaires” enacts a similar circularity. In both poems, syntactical returns result in ambiguity. The turning involved in repetition is shown in both poems to reverse the points of origination, so that ends may be read as beginnings, emblems as prior to their objects. Stevens’s poetic strategy is used, in both cases, to subvert the (conventional) linearity of language and narrative. What is more, because of their ceaseless returns, the poems’ repetitions become more than a simple doubling: rather than create simple symmetries they initiate an infinite motion forward which has no end as it had no beginning. In a later poem, “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” Stevens again takes up the subject of circular return, this time addressing the notion of “issue and return” directly in relation to poetry:

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Poetry is the subject of the poem From this the poem issues and To this returns. Between the two, Between issue and return, there is An absence in reality, Things as they are. Or so we say. But are these separate? Is it An absence for the poem, which acquires Its true appearances there, sun’s green, Cloud’s red, earth feeling, sky that thinks? From these it takes. Perhaps it gives, In the universal intercourse. (CP, 176–177) If poems initiate and end in self-referentiality, the question is how to define what intervenes “between the issue and return”; as the poem moves forward and back to itself (in the act of naming), what is the status of the intervening “absence in reality”? By suggesting this (empty) point of reference both calls for the poem’s “true appearances there” and, in return, finds its place in the poem, Stevens defines the give and take of poetry by turning again to the rhetoric of “inter-action.” “The Blue Guitar” replays the pattern of repetition and return in which the return is always infused with the difference of the intervening route. In the poems discussed, the dynamic of “inter-action” is contingent upon the repetitions the poems perform and/or address. Obviously, it is possible to venture metaphorical paraphrases of each of these poems. Thus, for example, in “Domination of Black,” the “room” may be read as representing the poets mind, and the outside of the leaves and bushes as representing the reality the poet confronts: the movement of the mind parallels that of the world around it thus making the world present to/in the mind. Or, one could argue that the colors in the room are like elements of language used to describe (or repeat) the things of the world. A number of such figurative paraphrases are possible. Yet, despite—or precisely because of—the multiplicity of such available interpretations, the poem seems to insist that its movement be kept abstract. As Charles Hartman points out (after listing numerous figurative paraphrases critics have arrived at in relation to a single poem by Stevens), “the vagueness and multiplicity of these interpretations (rather than any definite inaccuracy; they answer rightly the wrong question) suggest that we will not locate the poems meaning by identifying nouns piecemeal” (Hartman, 82). Both “Valley Candle”—Hartman’s primary example, persuasively analyzed with an eye for its structural patterns—and the poems I discuss

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above, seem to at once invite and disable our attempts to paraphrase. Possibly, the poems’ “subjects” could be filtered out of what these paraphrases have in common: in the case of “Domination of Black” that common denominator may be the way of seeing “insides” and “outsides” as pattern and its reflection (a repetition of a repetition or, to use Stevens’s term, analogy). Harold Bloom’s reading of “The Domination of Black” can provide an interesting contrast to the method proposed by Hartman.5 Bloom promises to read the poem as a “tropological pattern”—a combination of trope and pattern—and proceeds to tell a spectacular tale of the poem’s metaphors, allowing them to be played out also in a broader literary context. Thus Stevens’s “peacocks,” via Yeats, are shown to signify “the end of an era,” the poem is said to allude to Shelleyan multicolored leaves and becomes Stevens’s “little dejection ode.” In Bloom’s reading, Stevens’s metaphors serve as tools to sound the depths of literary tradition and as markers of poetic lineage. To have them serve that function, however, Bloom has to sacrifice the “pattern” component of the “tropological pattern”: the “original” figures, as employed by Yeats, Coleridge or Shelley are the signs of continuity, recognizable in their “original” version even as they are transported into Stevens’s poem, as if unchanged by their new context, unchanged by repetition.6 Tropological reading tends toward “Greek recollection”: the more it can affirm repetition’s capacity to fully recover, to faithfully re-present, the more successful it is, for in order to be able to rely on metaphorical paraphrase as its major tool, it has to stabilize the effect of repetition. Charles Hartman’s reading, on the other hand, focuses primarily on structural patterns. It is not the figurative language of “Valley Candle,” he argues, but the poem’s “massive repetition,” that “hold[s] the key to the [poem’s] cipher.” The poem systematically discourages the reader’s attempts to assign figurative significance to its objects; the lines “play out their gesture of repetition almost abstractly.” And what is more, this gesture, instead of unifying, “calls attention to the single significant variation between the two halves” of the poem. Hartman argues that the juxtaposition at the core of “Valley Candle” “does not express meaning directly,” and “gives us not the concluded meaning of the poem but a way of reading it,” gives us a “model to follow, a process to imitate.” “As with many Stevens’s poems, the whole piece might be prefaced by ‘For instance,’” says Hartman. “What matters, is a particular gesture of thought, which might take any materials for its embodiment—a jar in Tennessee, for instance, or the eye of the blackbird among mountains.” While less spectacular and less thickly fleshed out than Bloom’s, Hartman’s analysis admits and allows the possibility of a variety of readings within his general interpretive frame (Hartman, 84–86). Stevens’s characteristic tendency to substitute different objects within the same general, repeatable pattern (as in “Anecdote of Men by the Thousand,” quoted above) indeed suggests that these objects serve as examples rather than emblems, and that the poem aims at reproducing a process of which these objects are possible manifestations. In a letter to L.W Payne, Stevens says of “The Domination of Black”: “I am sorry that a poem of this sort has to contain any ideas at all… A mind that examines such a poem for its prose contents gets absolutely nothing from it.” In the same letter, Stevens comments on other poems in Harmonium suggesting that the poems are indeed difficult to paraphrase. He expresses a reluctance to paraphrase or “convert” the poems into a “piece

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of logic.” After having tried to explicate the poems he was asked about, he concludes: “It is shocking to have to say this sort of thing” (Letters, 250–2). Obviously, an attempt to trace and describe the dynamic of a poem’s structural relations is bound to produce a paraphrase or narrative of its own kind and, arguably, to reduce poems to underlying patterns entails a reductiveness of its own. Yet the workings of repetition (and poetic structure in general) are inseparable from the workings of metaphor (and poetic figuration in general), critically useful as such separation may seem.7 Indeed, Stevens’s poems under discussion problematize that very opposition. To return to the opening of “Domination of Black”:

At night, by the fire, The colors of the bushes And of the fallen leaves, Repeating themselves, Turned in the room, Like the leaves themselves Turning in the wind. These lines address yet another repetition: that between “color” and the object itself. The color of an object is what makes it visible. To color, means to cast an object in a vivid form, like that of figurative language. Here, repetition is what allows color to stand for the object itself. If we perform a syntactical reduction, “The colors…of the fallen leaves…turned in the room…like the leaves themselves.” Repetition is shown to be intimately related to metaphor, indeed, it is a metaphor-making mechanism. Another passage from “The Man with the Blue Guitar” employs repetition to generate metaphor:

What is there in life except one’s ideas, Good air, good friend, what is there in life? Is it ideas that I believe? Good air, my only friend, believe, Believe would be a brother full Of love, believe would be a friend, Friendlier than my only friend, Good air. Poor pale, poor pale guitar…(CP, 175–6) The ambiguity of the opening couplet rests on the impossibility of determining whether it names three objects (a concept, natural element and a person): “ideas,” “good air” and

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“good friend” or addresses a “good friend” (and/or “good air”) to tell about the one good thing in life: one’s ideas. The second couplet seems to ask for a clarification of that ambiguity: “Is it ideas that I believe?” Far from clarifying, what follows seems more like a parrot-like echo of the terms the poem called our attention to: “Good air, my only friend, believe …” The repetitions level our terms, so that it becomes impossible to determine who is the one to “believe” and what is the object of that belief. And indeed, “believe would be a brother full/Of love, believe would be a friend”: at the expense of grammatical awkwardness the poem preserves the verb “believe,” repeating it intact and confirming the (metaphorical) equivalence between the terms “good air, my only friend, believe.” Repetition allows the poem to suggest a metaphorical equivalence between terms without conflating them: the terms are not made part of one overriding idea, but preserve their independence and relation. In breaking down the opposition between repetition and metaphor, Stevens’s poem shows that metaphor is not a static state of equivalence; that a trope involves a turning; and that repetition may function as a figurative device. The relation between structure and figuration is demonstrable also in the patterning of Stevens’s repetitions as they engage in refiguring some of his central tropes. The metaphor of natural recurrence, so prominent in Stevens’s poetry, is one of the figures which undergo continual permutations. As a representation of harmony and order, the pattern of natural cycle often serves as a mainstay against confusion in a world otherwise deprived of order and meaning. In a letter to Sister Bernetta Quinn, Stevens says: It does me more good than I can tell you to have your Holiday Greetings. These, somehow or other, take me back to a much simpler world of home which, while it is gone for good, is still a good deal more permanent than the present world can ever be. Nowadays we are all out on a limb. Part of your letter is part of the season of the year and the season of the year is part of the world that has disappeared. (Letters, 807) The notion of natural, seasonal order and seasonal return seems particularly reassuring in the face of the disappearance of the “old world,” or old order. It suggests a type of innocent simplicity and, even more importantly, carries a promise of permanence. Yet, as Stevens’s letter subtly makes clear, the traditional notion of “the season” is no longer a viable metaphor but, rather, a nostalgic remainder of a world that has disappeared. While the concept of the natural cycle is always a prominent figure in Steven’s poetry, its function shifts in his later poems. Thus, for example, “The Woman That Had More Babies than That” (a poem written roughly at the time of the “Man with the Blue Guitar”) echoes the vocabulary and concerns of “The Place of the Solitaires,” but the sea’s “waterwheel” is here reduced to the “merely revolving wheel”8—a type of dead metaphor— which ceases to be meaningful as it ceases to signify change:

An acrobat on the border of the sea Observed the waves, the rising and the swell And the first line spreading up the beach; again, The rising and the swell, the preparation

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And the first line foaming over the sand; again, The rising and the swell, the first lines glitter, Like a dancers skirt, flung around and settling down. This was repeated day by day. The waves Were mechanical, muscular. They never changed, They never stopped, a repetition repeated Continually—There is a woman has had More babies than that. The merely revolving wheel Returns and returns, along the dry, salt shore. There is a mother whose children need more than that. She is not the mother of landscapes but of those Who question the repetition on the shore, Listening to the whole sea for a sound Of more or less, ascetically sated By amical tones. The acrobat observed The universal machine. There he perceived The need for a thesis, a music constant to move.9 “The waves were mechanical”: this paradoxical epithet (which strikingly collapses the terms so often used to distinguish two types of repetition: “the natural” and “the artificial”) condemns natural repetition precisely because it fails to change: the waves “never changed/They never stopped, a repetition repeated/Continually.” The redundancy of the “repetition repeated,” the tediousness of the endless return of the same is echoed here by the poem’s own relentless repetitions as it describes the movement of the waves on the beach. The figure of natural repetition fails to satisfy as it fails to signify change. Significance has to be sought elsewhere: the “acrobat” performing his balancing act in the liminal space at the border of the sea observes the sea’s boundary marked by the waves sprawling up the beach and witnesses an external manifestation of the working of the “universal machine.” When this external “repetition on the shore” fails to be significant, the acrobat turns elsewhere for the true repetition, “listening to the whole sea for a sound.” This move, from repetition between discrete instants toward the repetition within a single instant is a discovery of a crucial new mode of signifying difference and change. As Deleuze suggests, “[P]erhaps this repetition on the level of external conduct echoes, for its own part, a more secret vibration which animates it, a more profound, internal repetition within the singular” (Deleuze, DR, 1). The second part of “The Woman That Had More Babies than That” turns to such “internal” repetition: a “secret” repetition within (a single voice), rather than repetition between (sounds):

Berceuse, transatlantic. The children are men, old men, Who, when they think and speak of the central man,

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Of the humming of the central man, the whole sound Of the sea, the central humming of the sea, Are old men breathed on by a maternal voice, Children and old men and philosophers, Bald heads with their mothers voice still in their ears. The self is a cloister full of remembered sounds And of sounds so far forgotten, like her voice, That they return unrecognized. The self Detects the sound of a voice that doubles its own, In the images of desire, the forms that speak, The ideas that come to it with a sense of speech. (OP, 105) The discontinuity between the poem’s two parts is quite striking. What seems to hold them together are echoes of imagery, rather than immediate thematic continuity. Thus “berceuse, transatlantic” seems a refiguration of the sound of the “whole sea,” the music of the sea; the children become men refigure the babies become children of the poem’s first part; “the central man” is linked by a series of refigurations to “the whole sea.” At the same time, the poem’s second part seeks a new solution to the dilemma posed in the first. The blockage figured by the meaningless, mechanical repetitions of the waves in the first part of the poem seems to trigger a new type of repetition. In the second part, it takes the form of the Deleuzian “internal repetition within the singular” and manifests itself as a doubling of voices; or, rather, a multiplicity within a single voice: the recognition in one’s own voice of that which is not one’s own. “The self is a cloister full of remembered sounds/And of sounds so far forgotten…/That they return unrecognized”: the “internal” repetition exposes the plurality within the singular. The self is a multiplicity of internalized voices, voices which are and are not one’s own: both remembered—so that they may be repeated—and forgotten—so that, repeated, they seem new. The concepts of memory and forgetting are intimately related to this form of repetition. In Deleuze’s formulation, “[i]t is in repetition and by repetition that Forgetting becomes a positive power.” (Deleuze, DR, 7) Unlike the waves that “never changed” and “never stopped” enacting a return of the same, the second form of repetition depends on change: “the sounds return unrecognized,” that is, return in a new form. And it is language—“the forms that speak,” “the sense of speech”—which carries the presence of others, that is also the carrier of change. Stevens’s definition of language as a type of collective utterance—rather than controlled by a single speaker, language always bears traces of the presence of others— echoes Whitman’s desire for a similar plurality embedded in the poem’s “I.” Only Whitman’s “through me many dumb voices” is a mode of becoming, a repetition which enacts a movement forward, a repetition motivated by desire, even if also riddled by the voices of the dead. Stevens’ repetition recovers the multiplicity in apparent singularity and thus is a backward movement of recovery, as well as a movement forward. Stevens’s repetition here seems inseparable from memory, even if motivated by desire.

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The discovery of a multiplicity within singularity obviously radically unsettles any project which rests on a logic of unity, such as the binary logic, and gives way to an unsettling fluidity. “Sombre Figuration” (the last section of “Owl’s Clover”) registers another type of split or multiplicity which inhabits the self:

We have grown weary of the man that thinks. He thinks and it is not true. The man below Imagines and it is true, as if he thought By imagining, anti-logician, quick With a logic of transforming certitudes.… He was born within us as a second self, A self of parents who have never died, Whose lives return, simply, upon our lips, Their words and ours; in what we see, their hues Without a season, unstinted in livery, And ours, of rigid measure, a miser’s paint; And most in what we hear, sound brushed away, A mumbling at the elbow, turgid tunes, As of insects or cloud-stricken birds, away And away, dialogues between incognitos. (OP 96–7) The distrust of rationality expressed in these lines has to do with the limitations of logical reasoning: rational thought cannot bear contradiction and negation. “To think by imagining,” on the other hand, is to release thought from binary logic, from the bind of falsity and truth, from referentiality, and to move forward, to create. Transformation and plurality replace unity and certitude. That is why the parents of “the man below” never die, unlike, we may infer, the parents of “the man that thinks.” Since logic demands unity and certainty, not multiplicity and ambiguity, the rationalist cannot hold the thought of difference unless it leads back to unity. The new (thought) denies the old: its raison d’être is to erase its other and to destroy its origin. The deductive, logical mind could not contain what the imaginative mind can: the difference within, which manifests itself in other voices within our voice.10 “The man below” (later in the poem we learn he “lives in a fluid, not solid rock”; elsewhere he is “the fluid subman”) is the evasive anti-rationalist whose presence within us can only be discerned indirectly as it determines those of our perceptions which are unavailable to our rational self. We also hear him in our language. If the “dialogues between incognitos,” Stevens’s version of the collective unconscious, may only be overheard, the repetition, which evades thinking or logic and which allows for the return of the other (of “the parents,” of origins, of others’ voices) is enacted in language: language testifies to the multiplicity of presences behind a single voice. “Owl’s Clover” links the discovery of a voice which doubles our own to an entirely new way of perceiving and speaking. The “man thinking,” the sterile rationalist, the logician who

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lives on solid rock gives way to the fluid “subman,” the anti-logician who thinks by imagining and sings “rhapsodies of change” (OP 96), and whose appearance has been argued to mark the shift in Stevens’s poetry toward a more disjunct, less “harmonious” poetic.11 In terms of my analysis, the qualities attributed to Steven’s later poetry (which, however, as I have tried to show, are also visible in his earlier work) may be usefully considered Stevens’s version of “writing without authority,” whereby the writer (reacting, as Stevens does, against reading his poems as “a piece of logic”) insists on the provisional and unfinished nature of his work.12 Kierkegaard’s “speaking in various tongues” frees writing from the controlling authority of the writer; so does “Sombre Figuration” free the multiplicity embedded in a voice. This “anti-logician, quick/With the logic of transforming certitudes,” seems capable, like Kierkegaard, of proposing a “‘counter-truth’ to [his] own ‘truth.’” Instead of “the authority of a logical, linear discourse,” he is capable of producing writing which is “both self-assertion and selfabandonment,” writing which is “nonauthoritative” by virtue of being “doubled.” The presence of the “fluid” persona and the disharmonious, disjunct poetic in Stevens’s later work is, however, accompanied by a return to the earlier themes and patterns. Stevens’s later poems may in fact be read as themselves a fruitful echo, rather than a radical departure from his earlier work. “Of Modern Poetry” (a poem roughly contemporaneous with “Owl’s Clover”) describes precisely such a shift in sensibility which calls for a new means of expression and yet phrases that call in familiar terms: OF MODERN POETRY

The poem of the mind in the act of finding What will suffice. It has not always had To find: the scene was set; it repeated what Was in the script. Then the theater was changed To something else. Its past was a souvenir. It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place. It has to face the men of the time and to meet The women of the time. It has to think about war And it has to find what will suffice. It has To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and With meditation, speak words that in the ear, In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat, Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound Of which an invisible audience listens, Not to the play, but to itself, expressed In an emotion as of two people, as of two

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Emotions becoming one. The actor is A metaphysician in the dark, twanging An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend, Beyond which it has no will to rise. It must Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman Combing. The poem of the act of the mind. (CP, 239–40) Often quoted as Stevens’s poetic manifesto, “Of Modern Poetry” describes poetry in search of new forms. “The act of finding”—poetry as process—takes the place of the reproduction of ready conventions, when the poem “repeated what was in the script”; the new poem is a diminished thing: looking for “what will suffice” replaces, by implication, “saying all” or finding “the truth.” In this definition of poetry, repetition of what was already in the script, of what was prewritten, of what has been there all along—that is, repetition as recollection—gives way to repetition as a forging of a new presence. Poetry is repetition, but repetition which makes new rather than recovers. As in Kierkegaard’s opposition between repetition and recollection, movement is the key term here: while recollection arrests movement and stills the flux, repetition is grounded in movement and change. This dynamic aspect of repetition is prominent in Stevens’s “Of Modern Poetry”: the stasis of the set scene, the pre-written script, and the ready stage, have to give way to the drama of invention and risk. As Stevens observes in a letter to Delmore Schwartz, “It is neither possible nor desirable to cut loose from the past.” (Letters, 651). Indeed, “The future must bear within it every past.”(Letters, 373) Therefore, even as old entities crumble, the new poem is not an act of absolute creation:

It has To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and With meditation, speak words that in the ear, In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat, Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound Of which an invisible audience listens, Not to the play, but to itself, expressed In an emotion as of two people, as of two Emotions becoming one.

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Having witnessed the change of setting, having constructed a new stage (that is, having forged a new context for itself) the poem repeats, exactly, that which it wants to hear. In John Caputo’s formulation, “[B]y virtue of repetition the individual is able to press forward, not toward a sheer novelty which is wholly discontinuous with the past, but into the being which he himself is.”13 The metaphor of the “insatiable actor” expresses the paradox of such repetition forward: an actor is one who repeats the script; an “insatiable” actor is one for whom that repetition is a form of desire, and thus directed toward the future, a movement forward. As Steven Shaviro observes: “the process of imagination in Stevens’s poetry does not so much imitatively recreate as actively desire” (222); “the transformative force of desire can be described as a repetition without identity and as a flowing that has no goal” (Shaviro, 222). “Authors are actors, books are theaters,” says Stevens in “Adagia” (OP, 184). Metaphors of the theater (and acting, staging, impersonating) often accompany discussions of creative repetition, precisely because they point to the constituted, provisional nature of creation, contingent upon the changing context. For Deleuze, the metaphor of the theater best defines genuine movement: Kierkegaard and Nietzsche “put metaphysics in action, in motion” by creating in their philosophy a “veritable theatre”; as opposed to Hegel who merely “represents concepts,” Kierkegaard and Nietzsche “dramatize ideas” (Deleuze, 8).14 Theatre serves to represent movement also in Stevens’s “Of Modern Poetry”: the poem put on stage, the poet is not a director in charge of the script, but himself an actor; vulnerable to the contingencies of the moment, present to the audience and to whom the audience is present, his “lines” are as much a recitation of the script as their dramatic enactment vis a’ vis the audience. Each performance is necessarily different, each will need to “find,” each will need to “face” “the men and the women of the time.” Each performance is deeply rooted in its context; each “repetition” will introduce difference: poetry is a theater of repetition. Analyzing Stevens’ possible inspirations and his comments related to “Of Modern Poetry,” James Longenbach observes: “it would appear that Stevens means that poetry does not give us the world and its inhabitants as such but gives us their ‘aspects’—and gives those aspects to the very men and women whose aspects they are.”15 Thus, despite being fragmentary, poetic presentation may, indirectly, give voice to its own audience. This scenario, where the “audience listens/Not to the play, but to itself,” echoes Gertrude Stein’s model from her discussion of repetition, where she collapses the function of the speaker and the audience (of “talking” and “listening”). As has been pointed out earlier, by undoing the opposition between the two roles Stein claims to produce portraits which combine both these perspectives and overcome some of the limitations inscribed in representation. In Stevens’s poem, similarly, the speaker’s performance succeeds in voicing the perspective of its audience. The metaphor of the theater occurs again in “Repetitions of a Young Captain” (CP, 306–10) from Transport to Summer (1947, a book which follows Parts of a World). The poem seems to be rehearsing the story we already know from “Of Modern Poetry”: “[a] tempest cracked on the theater” exposing its ruin to “the external world”; “the spectacle of a new reality” replaced the reality of the old theater. And yet, the old theater destroyed, its forms inadequate or dead, “the people sat in the theater, in the ruin,/As if nothing

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happened.” Where “Of Modern Poetry” calls for the invention of a new language, new forms, “Repetitions” observes the failure on the part of “the people” to recognize change. As is the case with a number of Stevens’s poems (notably “Domination of Black”), the story of “Repetitions” begins as a remembering. Only here, memory seems to float unattached, its objects hard to locate in space and time:

It had been real. It was something overseas That I remembered, something that I remembered Overseas, that stood still in the external world. With the ambiguity produced by the off-repetition we lose track of both the captain and the theater. Is the captain at home remembering the theater’s ruin which he has seen overseas or does he merely remember having remembered (the theater) when he himself was overseas? We find it difficult to situate the theater and the captain in either spatial or temporal terms. “Repetitions of a Young Captain” seem to relativize the frame of reference so that, ultimately, it becomes impossible to distinguish “what is real in the world” from “what may be,” from the “glistening reference to what is real.” (CP, 309) Just as the Deleuzian philosophy of genuine movement is a “veritable theater,” the dynamic frame of Stevens’s theater of repetition produces movement and change. Stevens’s “actor/Is a metaphysician,” whose mind, instead of containing the theatre of change, is wholly contained by it:

The actor is A metaphysician in the dark, twanging An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly Containing the mind, below which is cannot descend, Beyond which it has no will to rise. The mind does not master the moment, but gropes “in the dark,” its revelations taking the form of “sudden rightnesses”: not a logical progression, but rather a surprise of an unexpected revelation or what J.Hillis Miller calls a “momentary crystallization…of thought. “(Miller, in Miller and Pearce, 147) Rather than reproduce an already existing truth the mind is open to the risk of discovery. “Life’s nonsense pierces us with a strange relation,” Stevens will say in the later “Notes Toward the Supreme Fiction,” acknowledging the accidental nature of such discoveries which are “not balances/That we achieve but balances that happen” (CP, 383 and 386). As in Kierkegaardian “accidental concretion,” where meaning is contingent upon the immediate context, in “Of Modern Poetry” a poem is shown to be inseparable from its context. It grows “from the middle” (Deleuze and Parnet, 37). It “may/Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman/ Combing”: growing out of accidental encounters, the poem is both limited and empowered by its own actuality.

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Paul Bové observes that in its tendency to universalize, the tradition of New Criticism ignored that aspect of Stevens’s poetry; “Ironic criticism…in its desire for infinitude and godlike hovering tries to deny what Kierkegaard calls ‘actuality’ and Heidegger ‘existence…’” (Bové, 185). Much of recent Stevens criticism has taken up precisely that point and situated his poems in a specific context, be it the larger historical, political, social context of his time, or more particularly, for example, in the context of the legal profession. James Longenbach, in his illuminating book-length study of Stevens, makes an argument for reading the poet “in the context of American political and intellectual history,” whereby Stevens “emerges not only as a poet aware of events taking place around him but as a poet whose work was often inspired by them.” (Longenbach, v) Consequently, Longenbach reads “Of Modern Poetry” as a war-time poem (written in 1940, the poem appeared in Parts of a World where the war is indeed a recurrent motif), and its “theater” as “the theater of war.” (Longenbach, 214) The reading lends new, powerful direction to the poem, by giving it the particularity of a specific time and place. At the same time, as Stevens recognizes, paradoxically, writing about “reality” or “fact” invariably fails to reproduce that reality. In a “statement on the poetry of war,” Stevens observes: The immense poetry of war and the poetry of a work of the imagination are two different things.… It has been easy to say in recent times that everything tends to become real, or, rather, that everything moves in the direction of reality, that is to say, in the direction of fact. We leave fact and come back to it, come back to what we wanted fact to be, not to what it was, not to what it has too often remained.17 We construct facts even as we “know” them, the poet seems to argue. Indeed, the ever fluctuating mind described in Stevens’s poems, the mind always in motion, always moving away and then returning back to its objects, could never keep a “fact” intact. (“The poem of the mind in the act of finding”… “The poem of the act of the mind”: Stevens’s “Of Modern Poetry” begins and ends in the mind.) The concrete actuality of a poem may then reside not in the fact sought after but in an accidental, momentary configuration, a “sudden rightness.” As the paper dolls and the peculiarities of farce (Kierkegaard’s examples of “accidental concretion”) manifest the accidental, unpremeditated, improvisational nature of representation, so is the meaning of a poem unpremeditated and accidental and yet inseparable from concrete actuality. As “Of Modern Poetry,” and “Repetitions of a Young Captain,” “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” begins by situating itself on a constructed stage: “this invented world.”

From this the poem springs: that we live in a place That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves… We are the mimics. (CP, 383) It is again a theater of movement Stevens constructs: a “Theater of Trope,” “in which swans/Were seraphs, were saints, were changing essences.” This theater of continual

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permutations is change itself: “Notes” delineate a “universe of inconstancy.” In the everchanging landscape, the poem makes space for itself “[i]n the uncertain light of single, certain truth,/Equal in living changingness to the light/In which I meet you, in which we sit at rest,/For a moment…” To make sense of the flux one can either arrest it or affirm it (hence the Kierkegaardian distinction between recollection and repetition). Stevens’s poem does present us with a whole cast of characters who want to still the flux, to arrest change. Like the statue of General Du Puy, “immobile,” “nervless” and permanent in “a permanence, so rigid/That it made the General a bit absurd,” these characters signify either absurd fixity or a meaningless repetition of the same. At the same time, the wish to arrest change is a perfectly legitimate desire for permanence. As one of the later poems suggests, the wish to still the motion of the mind and the world it perceives is as urgent as the desire to make this world meaningful. In “This Solitude of the Cataracts” (CP, 424–5) the mind is the Heraklitean river:

He never felt twice the same about the flecked river, Which kept flowing and never the same way twice, flowing… “Never twice the same” and “never the same twice”: the repetition implies that it may be possible to gain a foothold in this continually changing scene. And yet, the element which makes the mind like the river is movement itself. There is nothing permanent except change. Not surprisingly,

He wanted to feel the same way over and over. He wanted the river to go on flowing the same way, To keep on flowing. He wanted to walk beside it, Under the buttonwoods, beneath a moon nailed fast. To arrest the flux would mean to give permanence to the world and to one’s ideas about that world: to arrive at a “permanent realization,” to be “released from destruction.” And yet, as the poem makes more than clear, that very wish to still the flux is a death wish:

He wanted his heart to stop beating and his mind to rest… To be a bronze man breathing under archaic lapis, Without the oscillations of planetary pass-pass, Breathing his bronzen breath at the azury centre of time.18

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The act of writing itself presents the danger of producing “a moon nailed fast,” of fixing objects in a state of permanence. “The sun/Must bear no name” for to name is to obscure (as in: “she hid them under simple names”). To name is to fix. In the late “auroras of Autumn,” Stevens comes across such a stale attempt to signify, a failed human attempt to create meaningful structures, made the more insufficient and insignificant for being lodged in the overwhelming context of unmasterable auroras. Thomas Gardner comments on this passage: Briefly, the second canto turns from the auroras to a deserted cabin on the beach in order to think about the way we mark or make visible our existence. Stevens works this out by means of the cabins whiteness. Its color seems established “by a custom or according to/An ancestral theme.” “[A] little dried,” the white flowers against the wall seem “a kind of mark/ Reminding or trying to remind, of a white/That was different, something else last year/Or before, not the white of an aging afternoon” (CP 412). The cabins whiteness, then, seems a deliberate exercise in making and marking:

Here, being visible is being white, Is being of the solid of white, the accomplishment Of an extremist in an exercise…(CP 412) But the cabin, we are reminded, is deserted. We hear this in the ellipsis above where Stevens seems to give up his claim as soon as he makes it, in his acknowledgment that the whiteness might be only the result of the “infinite course” of erosion and in the double-clutched phrasing of “reminding [or] trying to remind (italics added). Just at this point the poem opens up…(Gardner 203) The process described by Gardner is not unlike the process enacted in the “Domination of Black” where linguistic signification was re-absorbed by the natural within the poem’s movement of repetitions. In Gardner’s reading of the “Auroras” the white cabin passage is mentioned only briefly, to be subsumed in the description of the larger movement of the poem which evolves around the relinquishment of the dream of transparent language. Gardner’s essay (“Bishop and Ashbery: Two Ways Out of Stevens”), comments on Stevens’s own way out of the particularly Stevensian deadlock caused by the recognition of the crisis of representation. On the basis of Stevens’ “Auroras of Autumn,” Gardner shows the working of the poet’s “skeptical awareness”: in a “quite deliberate” move, Stevens “acknowledge[s] the limits of the poet’s language when confronted with a moving world rendering its [the language’s] ideas of mastery or apportioning fragile, windswept things” (202). The double move, of “desiring, and then saying farewell to the idea of an achieved, transparent purpose,” “brings the poem to a striking moment.”

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The flowers against the cabin wall, a little dried, and thus themselves probably already “off white,” next to the weathered white of the cabin, are a reminder of the cabins (their own) original whiteness, the original purpose. The cabins color, exposed by the flowers, is a pathetic reminder of its former attempt to “make and mark.” This failure of repetition is visible most clearly in aged representations. The freshness of a newly discovered/posited significance carried a promise of repetition (representation); with time, that promise fades—no longer “reminding” but “trying to remind”—the link between repetition and the repeated becomes more tenuous, less convincing, because less new, less strange. Repetition becomes exposed as merely a (dated) convention. Stevens’s “Notes” insistently return to the question of how to go beyond the “granite monotony” of “a single text”: how to escape codified names, how to name without naming, or, how to name and preserve it abstract.19 One way to go beyond the fixity of a “single text” the poem offers is to engage voices other that one’s own. The poem points to the relation between the poet’s language and the common language:

The poem goes from the poet’s gibberish to The gibberish of the vulgate and back again. (CP, 396) Earlier in the poem, the poet’s language was shown to move from the purity of “the early candor,” to the power of “the late plural” and back again, a route where both the “beginning” and “end” were shown to lack origin: “an immaculate beginning” and “an immaculate end.” (CP, 382) This pattern was already present in the passage from the “Man with the Blue Guitar,” quoted above, where the poem acquired its “true appearances” “between the issue and return,” and where both these points were infused with the difference of the intervening route. Thus the pattern of the transition from “the poet’s gibberish to/The gibberish of the vulgate and back again” is mapped onto its earlier representations.20 Here, the poem acquires its actuality, its particularity, its “true appearances” when it touches the vulgate. When the poet speaks,

It is the gibberish of the vulgate that he seeks. He tries by a peculiar speech to speak The peculiar potency of the general, To compound the imagination’s Latin with The lingua franca and jocundissima. (CP, 397) The high purity of “the imagination’s Latin” is amplified by “the peculiar potency of the general,” the power of the low registers, when the poet seeks “the vulgate,” seeks “the lingua franca and jocundissima” in his own speech. The poet’s language thus transcends the limit of a “single text” (single register) and frees itself from the “granite monotony” by engaging other voices. Indeed, language seems to possess the power to renew its own calcified structures.

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In St. Armorer’s church, from a late Stevens poem—another monumental symbolic structure, a perfect enclosure, “a great success,” a fixity, crumbling now with old age— change is similarly introduced from “inside.” “A sumac grows/On the altar, growing toward the lights, inside”: in St. Armorer’s life explodes the calcified structure from within. The church is a sign, a figure for life—paradoxically life itself undoes the sign, testifying to “the presence of the intelligible/In that which is created as its symbol.”21 In “Notes,” Stevens very explicitly combines the fruitless or lifeless repetition of the same, with the meaningful repetition which affirms change within the world of flux and process:

A thing final in itself and, therefore, good: One of the vast repetitions final in Themselves and, therefore, good, the going round, And round and round, the merely going round, Until the merely going round is a final good, The way wine comes at a table in a wood. And we enjoy like men, the way a leaf Above the table spins its constant spin, So that we look at it with pleasure, look At it spinning its eccentric measure. Perhaps, The man-hero is not the exceptional monster, But he that of repetition is most master. (CP, 405–6) Stevens’s pleasure rhymes with measure: an eccentric measure. Stevens’s pentameterlike triplets are such “eccentric” measure, which does not construct symmetries, but moves in a spiral, generates a spin. Unlike a movement in a circle, which comes back to its point of origination, a spiral never repeats the same path. Instead of “returning,” instead of succumbing to “death in memory’s dream,” Stevens’s poem calls for a continual beginning, calls for “beginning not resuming.” The eccentric measure of the spinning leaf is like that of a spinning earth (thus “the fat girl terrestial” of the following canto (CP, 406)). As in “Domination of Black,” where the pattern of the turning leaves is repeated in the pattern of the planets, here too the spin is mapped onto a grand universal scale. The poem partakes of this pattern; and since repetitions performed by a spinning leaf are vertiginous, not an exact doubling, to “enjoy” such repetition is to “stay with the flux,” to take pleasure in the movement of repetition, to enjoy change. In one of his comments on “Notes,” Stevens says: “the essence of poetry is change and the essence of change is that it gives pleasure” (Letters, 430). Indeed, throughout Stevens’s “Notes” change is related to pleasure. In Roland Barthes’s formulation: “the New is bliss”22 Barthes expands on Freud’s commentary on the interrelation of change and pleasure by mapping it onto language and suggesting that the impulse toward the new

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also counters the tendency of language to codify, to become stereotype. The new counters the banalization of language due to mindless or mechanical repetitions and those performed by the language of official institutions: “a (marginal, eccentric) impulse toward the new—a desperate impulse that can reach the point of destroying discourse: an attempt to reproduce in historical terms the bliss repressed beneath the stereotype” (Barthes, 40–1). The notion of “destruction” as employed here may be a useful way of reading Stevens’s definition of “poetry as a destructive force”: poetic language is necessarily “destructive” as it needs to work against the received linguistic habits.22 Through its “eccentric measure” the eccentric impulse toward the new, “The poem refreshes life” by recovering the pleasure repressed beneath “compromised” language. In Steven Shaviro’s words, “‘the poem refreshes life,’ by returning to and repeating differently ‘the freshness of transformation [that] is/The freshness of a world.’” The poet refreshes life, finally, by endlessly refiguring his own formulations, by testing his own “truths.” Paul Bové finds here the common ground for his reading of Stevens and Kierkegaard: Stevens’s problem is analogous to Kierkegaard’s. How, when language has been usurped by the ironists and positivists, by the reifers and coercers, can an artist hope to use language without being himself mastered by that language and the interpretations embedded within it? How to repeat and not simply replicate? (Bové, 189) Bové argues that, for Stevens, poetry has to be “a destructive force” if it wants to “redeem the truth of fiction” which is “lost in the now solidified linguistic assertions about what in the past originally dis-closed itself”: Although he knows from the beginning that there is nothing at the “center” and consequently that all is “fiction.”…[Stevens] marshals one metaphor, belief, interpretation after another in tests of value of received and acquired “truths.” He does this in order to destroy their hardened existence, to discard what is now useless and obscuring, and to release what had long ago disclosed itself and become the origin of the particular myth or metaphor. (Bové, 187) That seems to be the locus of one of Stevens’s most powerful fictions, the concept of “the first idea”: a fictional place, where thought is as yet untarnished, unspoiled by use. “If you take the varnish and dirt of generations off a picture, you see it in its first idea. If you think about the world without its varnish and dirt, you are a thinker of the first idea,” explains Stevens in a letter to Henry Church (Letters, 426–7). As with any of Stevens’s fictions, however, this one also does not remain untested. In one of Steven’s last poems, the notion of the “first idea” is refigured as “The Plain Sense of Things”:

After the leaves have fallen, we return To the plain sense of things. It is as if

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We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir. (CP, 502) The image of original purity has been replaced by a lack, an inertia of the imagination. The plain sense of things now resides in a place where the leaves have fallen, and thus is defined as a removal of the creative excess, the undoing of creation. “[T]his blank cold, this sadness without cause” are, paradoxically, placed at the “end of the imagination,” as if the only way to “return” was to move forward by removing all that has been created. The poem appeared in The Rock (1954), the last volume of Stevens’s poetry. Next to poems like “The Old Man Asleep,” “Vacancy in the Park” and “Long Sluggish Lines,” and their preoccupation with dying, loss and old age, the poem’s tone acquires the qualities of a “backward glance” and a self-evaluation. After the leaves have fallen, in the bareness of winter, one comes to the “end of the imagination.” How does one continue to write in that bare place? “Inanimate in an inert savoir,” how does one even begin writing, with the knowledge that what one writes will merely amount to more writing, more leaves. There is no going back to an “original purity,” for that is recognized as another construct, another thing imagined. So what does Stevens tell us when he gets to the plain sense of things? His poem mourns the failure of a type of repetition: “A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition/In a repetitiousness of men and flies.” What failed (again) was the grand effort of the imagination. We come again across a withered structure which, like the white cabin from “Auroras of Autumn” and St. Armorer’s church, badly shows its age: “the great structure has become a minor house”; all pretense of life and significance gone, “The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.” And yet this “blank cold,” this lack, this “absence of the imagination had/Itself to be imagined”: by closing the loop, by engaging in a type of miseen-abyme, the poem opens up. Yet the work of imagination will not offer fresh creation, but, like a repetition forward it will bring “inevitable knowledge, / Required as a necessity requires.” Stevens revisits his own structures also in the remarks on his work he makes in his letters. Characteristically, his comments do not clarify, but rather emphasize the ambiguity of his key terms. About “Notes” he says to Henry Church: “Of course, in the long run poetry would be the supreme fiction” (Letters 430); and to Simons, “I ought to say that I have not defined a supreme fiction. A man as familiar with my work as you are will be justified in thinking that I mean poetry. I don’t want to say that I don’t mean poetry; I don’t know what I mean” (Letters 435). And later, also to Simons: “I think I said in my last letter to you that the Supreme Fiction is not poetry, but I also said that I don’t know what it is going to be. Let us think about it and not say that our abstraction is this, that or the other” (Letters 438). What Stevens insists on in his evasiveness is a preservation of a degree of ambiguity in relation to his subject. The use of the word “abstraction” here (another “key” term in Stevens’s poem)—as something better left undefined or open to speculation—is very telling. “It must be abstract” seems to mean precisely what Stevens insists on in his comments on supreme fiction—it must be left undefined; it must not be a solid concept; it should not become a system. “It is only when you try to systematize the poems in the NOTES that you conclude that it is not the statement of a philosophic theory. A philosopher is never at rest unless he

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is systematizing: constructing a theory” says Stevens, insisting on the fragmentary and tentative character on his supreme fictions (Letters 430). Like Whitman, and the antiphilosophical philosophers of my introduction, instead of producing “linear discourse that compels assent” Stevens prefers to work with “a multiplicity of points”: “The notes are a miscellany in which it would be difficult to collect a theory latent in them” (Letters, 430– 1). “It is true that the articulations between the poems are not the articulations one would expect to find between paragraphs and chapters of a work of philosophy,” says Stevens in the same letter (Letters, 431); Stevens’s formulations are inherently anti-linear; they adopt eccentric measures in distrust of logical progression; they are sometimes unpredictable, even contradictory, apparently incongruous, and always difficult. The movement of recontextualization problematizes the poems’ own formulations, as the poet experiments with them on constantly shifting grounds. “I very soon found out that, if I stuck close to a development, I should lose all of the qualities that I really wanted to get into the thing, and I was likely to produce something that did not come off in any sense, not even as poetry” (Letters, 431). In “Notes,” the discontinuity of thought and the unstable figuration testify to the poem’s power to “self-destruct,” a power of renewal, “the renewal of noise.” Stevens’s scattered observations related to “Notes,” suggest the poem works against systematic logic, that it should not be read as “theory,” that it condemns “reason’s clickclack its applied/Enflashings.” The movement in Stevens’ oeuvre is a movement of repetition. The world of Steven’s poems is one in which “being is not only the sign but also as the redeployment of the signifying chain…, the sign of its eternal return” (Beehler, 44). And indeed, it is by way of returning to the same patterns that difference constitutes repetition and repetition becomes the marker of difference. Stevens’ poems “refresh life” by endlessly returning to and re-testing their own terms. In Steven’s work repetition serves such disjunct, distant aims as, on the one hand, an establishment of harmony, order, and representation of the world “as it is,” and, on the other, an undermining of the unity of the text, a relinquishment of authorial control over text. And while the poems from Harmonium are undoubtedly driven by a desire for harmony, and the later poems, from The Auroras of Autumn or The Rock are often about relinquishing that desire, Stevens is always conscious of the double potential of repetition, and this double potential always lurks in the poems.

Chapter Four “The Unfamiliar Stereotype”: Repetition in the Poetry of John Ashbery

So I cradle this average violin that knows Only forgotten showtunes, but argues The possibility of free declamation anchored To a dull refrain… —John Ashbery, “Street Musicians”

“We see that there really is nothing left to write about,” says John Ashbery. Rather than demand to “make it new,” Ashbery’s poems often prefer to present themselves as the “late echo” of the poem’s title. The notions of repeating or “recycling” have become crucial for Ashbery’s readers, be it as forms of “belatedness” in Bloom’s theory of poetic influence, or as target of criticism, when his readers complain of the poet repeating himself. An examination of Ashbery’s repetitive strategies reveals, however, that to say (or read) again (in the sense of the discovery of sameness) is something of an oxymoron, and to repeat, oneself or someone else—desirable as it may seem to some, and redundant to others—is in fact never possible. Repetition, Ashbery seems to argue, is never a return of the same, or, as Gertrude Stein has put it in her essay on repetition, there may be “no such thing as repetition” (PR, 166).1 In formal terms, Ashbery’s experiments with repetition range from conventionally determined repetitions, as in the forms of sestinas, canzone’s or pantoums, through the less patterned repetitions of words, phrases, syntactical structures, figures and themes, to such effects as are produced by imperfect rhyme, homonyms or paraphrase. The significance of repetition as it structures our thinking and as it structures a poetic text is sometimes explicitly addressed:

A splattering of trumpets against the very high Pockmarked wall and a forgetting of spiny Palm trees and it is over for us all, Not just us, and yet on the inside it was

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Doomed to happen again, over and over, like a Wave on a beach, that thinks it’s had this Tremendous idea, coming to crash on the beach Like that, and it’s true, it has, yet Others had gone before, and still others will Follow, and far from undermining the spiciness Of this individual act, this knowledge plants A seed of eternal endeavor for fear of Happening just once, and goes on this way, And yet the originality should not deter Out vision from the drain That absorbs, night and day, all our equations, Makes us brittle, emancipated, not men in a word. (AWK, 65–6) In a wave-like movement of turning it’s logic back upon itself the argument here turns on a series of subordinate “and yet” clauses. These lines from Ashbery’s “Litany” argue: repetition deprives an act of its originality (since other acts that are the same will follow); and yet it does not detract from the “spiciness” of an act/idea, and in fact makes it meaningful by absorbing it in an on-going endeavor to fend off the “fear of happening just once” (fear of the end, fear of closure or death); as the significance of each new act (event, idea) gets absorbed in a broader context, repetition diminishes its momentary significance and puts in perspective its self-important claim to uniqueness. In describing a “high” moment, a moment of revelation, which is, at the same time, realized as only one in a succession, these lines attempt to deal with the gap between the two poles of originality (or uniqueness) and, on the other hand, sameness (or repetition). We need to perceive the two at once: “originality” should not lure us away from the awareness of repeatability which, however, should not take away the significance of the individual moment itself. These lines argue that nothing is free from repetition. At the same time, far from depriving an act of usefulness, repetition is what makes it meaningful. It is the awareness that an act (an idea) is unique and repeatable at the same time that gives meaning to the very act (idea).2 Ultimately, the repetitive revelations need to be placed in the context of time, which drains their “originality.” The final lines of the quoted passage are themselves a brilliant repetition in the form of a pun. The play on “not men in a word” (which can be read as “not manly (or human)” but at the same time may suggest a type of epitaphic divorce from voice) both implies the draining context of passing time and enacts a repetition which is the poem’s new moment of spiciness. The circular logic of the passage—and the repetitions it entails—is very characteristic of Ashbery’s poetry (and echoes the dynamic of Stevens’s refigurations): a “high” moment (or a “tremendous idea”) stalls the poems movement and triggers a re-reading of that moment from a new perspective. The new perspective (with its own understanding) then becomes bracketed again, so that the poem’s meaning relies on the movement effected by the repetitive intrusions of new contexts. Further on, “Litany” replays the same theme in an entirely different register:

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But you are leaving: Some months ago I got an offer From Columbia Tape Club, Terre Haute, Ind., where I could buy one Tape and get another free. I accept Ed the deal, paid for one tape and Chose a free one. But since I’ve been Repeatedly billed for my free tape. I’ve written them several times but Can’t straighten it out—would you Try? (AWK, 67–8) An ironic double to the passage quoted above, these lines deflate the earnestness of the earlier variation on the same theme: this time repetition takes the form of getting billed over and over for what one does not get, billed for (as Ashbery says elsewhere) the promise that never materializes. Not unlike the earlier passage, these lines couple a desired repetition (for the double deal) with the undesirable (of the repetitive billing). In both cases, the repetition which exacts a price is a consequence of the desire to repeat. The passage ironically comments on the paralysis effected by repetition: “writing several times” in an attempt to “straighten things out” is doomed to fail: clearly another letter to Columbia Tape Club is not likely to stop bills from coming or yield anything new, such as a new tape. The repetitive billing, the phenomenon of a computer error, is a mechanical repetition in a mechanism gone wrong. Writing over and over is merely an echo of the error, a perpetuation of the mechanical repetition. Such going in circles (bill—letter—bill—letter, a parody of failed communication) is anything but a “straightening out.” Writing and its linearity—to which we turn in an attempt to arrest the mechanism of repetition—only proves to be feeding into it. The fact we are doomed to be “repeating the same things over and over” may save us, however, from missing the point of what we are saying: LATE ECHO

Alone with our madness and favorite flower We see that there really is nothing left to write about. Or, rather, it is necessary to write about the same old things In the same way, repeating the same things over and over For love to continue and be gradually different. Beehives and ants have to be reexamined eternally And the color of the day put in

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Hundreds of times and varied from summer to winter For it to get slowed down to the pace of an authentic Saraband and huddle there, alive and resting. Only then can the chronic inattention Of our lives drape itself around us, conciliatory And with one eye on those long tan plush shadows That speak so deeply into our unprepared knowledge Of ourselves, the talking engines of our day. The poem suggests a knowledge by repetition which is gradual and, like the title “late echo,” somewhat belated. Repetition is a cure for our “chronic inattention.” It is the repetition of the same—“over and over again, with infinite variations but over and over again” “endlessly the same and endlessly different” (Stein, GMMA, 243)—that allows for “love to continue and be gradually different.”3 Uncharacteristically uniform in its slow pace and range of metaphor, the poem adopts the stately rhythm of the saraband (the saraband music being a slowed-down version of an original, livelier dance), its three stanzas themselves an echo of the saraband’s triple time. The exhausted resources of a singular perspective would apparently call for immediate action, immediate change. But it is imperceptible change, change resulting from tedious, minute repetitions—such as performed by bees and ants—and the repetitive reexamination of those, that figures the gradual difference repetition makes. The slowing down allows the poem to reach “the pace of an authentic/Saraband”—the place where it becomes “authentic,” or real, itself. The two poems I examine below—Ashbery’s long, meditative “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,”4 and the pantoum “Hotel Lautréamont”5—engage two very distinct models of poetic repetition. In the former, repetition is present as a recurrence of motif, pattern, and figuration, and in the later, exact repetition of whole lines is dictated by convention which calls for a type of mechanical iteration. In the former repetitions seem to be generated by the poem’s thematic concerns (and could be defined as an example of organic form), in the later repetition itself seems to generate the poem (in what is sometimes called a “procedural” form).6 In both cases, however, repetition is a principle of change. In both poems repetition performs the task of making the familiar unfamiliar again, of revitalizing calcified structures. In “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” repetition informs Ashbery’s speculations on the nature of self-representation. Repetition is here not only one of the poems structural principles, but also, in different forms, one of its topics (to the extent that it is possible to speculate about a “topic” in Ashbery’s poetry at all). Within this frame, formal repetitions seem to be contingent upon the poem’s themes. The poem claims to be about the making of a self-portrait like that of the painter Parmigianino’s: the poem’s manifest subject is, then, the repetition of another artist’s model. This reproduction will, of course, involve a transition into a new medium (from that of the painter’s to that of the poet’s), as well as a new “sitter,” a new subject for the portrait. One may ask, then, what is left there to be repeated. But the poem insists that the two self-portraits echo each other in a number of

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ways. These echoes between the poem and the painting are shown to have been informed by another set of repetitions (figured in this poem as mirrorings) which are the basis for the art of self-portraiture. A self-portrait itself works with a series of repetitions which are necessary if one is to reproduce one’s own image. The poem thus works with a layer upon layer of repetitions, and a number of questions it raises (about the nature of representation, about the possibility of self-defini-tion) are paraphrasable as questions about repetition in one form or another. What goes into the production of an artistic copy? What is the relationship between the copy and its original model? How faithful can a copy be? What control does the artist have over his/her copy and what are the copymaking materials and tools? If—as “Litany” argues—repetition produces a tension between originality and continuity, if it threatens to drain our acts of meaning and our words of our presence, how does one delineate its movement? How does one articulate, to use Barbara Johnson’s formulation, “authenticity with conventionality, originality and continuity, freshness with what is recognizably ‘fit’ to be called poetic?” Apparently easy to map out in its symmetrical doublings (the painting/the poem, the poet/the painter), Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” constantly slips out of our control, precisely because it relies so heavily on repetition which, as the poem demonstrates, always entails difference, always modifies the image (the painter’s, the poet’s) that it represents. The echoes and mirrorings which function on so many levels in this poem tend to produce friction rather than a simple symmetry and result in a number of possible, often conflicting, readings. What is more, in the intricate maze of crossreferencing and parallel none of the repetitions the poem describes (or enacts) can be situated as central or prior to others, so that it is often impossible to tell an “original” from its “repetition.” In “Self-Portrait” repetition becomes a way of telling a number of stories at once. The narrative of the encounter with Parmigianino’s painting, as well as the related argument on the nature of self-representation, are two threads in the poem responsible for the drive toward some kind of linear development. At the same time, however, the amazingly rich repertoire of echoes, parallels, mirrorings, complicates this linear pattern. The crossreferencing these repetitions enact makes the poem’s argument so multilayered that it ultimately evades summary or paraphrase. As I will show, repetition encourages a retracing of steps also for the reader, so that our experience of the poem is never quite linear, but always involves a going back as we move forward. What is more, the crucial boundary between the poem’s two ways of speaking—the self-reflexive and the descriptive (and, ultimately, the boundary between the poem and the painting)—becomes very unstable. Repetitions allow the poem to relate this inextricability of representation and reflection (or repetition and commentary) to the problems of the painting’s and the poem’s positions as “original” and “copy,” putting in question the usefulness of these categories. Thus the poem performs the characteristic conflation of a definition of repetition and its enactment and comments on the effects of that conflation. As readers, we duplicate or repeat the poem’s act of reading the portrait in our own reading of the poem. (In this way, while reading the poem we construct our own “selfportrait,” the poem becomes our mirror.) Addressed in the poem, sometimes even positioned within it, we are very much aware of our act of “reading.” The dialogue with the poem our reading engages us in is already mapped out and critiqued by the poem

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itself in the form of the poem’s “reading” of the painting. As I will demonstrate, the poem argues that these couplings of “reader” and “text” (poem and painting, a reading of Ashbery and Ashbery’s poem) are never merely binary couplings. In each couple, more than two forces are at work. A mirror always reflects more than our own face. A repetition involves more than a pair of elements. One may be tempted to read the two self-portraits the poem addresses as the poem’s “central” or structuring repetition. Already the poem’s opening lines, however, complicate this paradigm by leaving indeterminate the authorship of the title’s selfportrait. The poem’s first sentence or, rather, what a grammarian may call a “sentence fragment,” conspicuously misses an agent. Ashbery’s poem announces itself as: SELF-POTRAIT IN A CONVEX MIRROR

As Parmigianino did it…(SP, 68) The poem mediates between the two functions of reproducing Parmigianino’s selfportrait in poetic form and constructing its own; in this double (or multiple) task of reproducing the self and the other the distinction between the two becomes blurred. The initial impulse to “describe” Parmigianino’s painting in itself proves to require more than a production of a faithful poetic copy:

the right hand Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer And swerving easily away, as though to protect What it advertises. A few leaded panes, old beams, Fur, pleated muslin, a coral ring run together In a movement supporting the face, which swims Toward and away like the hand Except that it is in repose. It is what is Sequestered. (SP, 68) The striking effect of Parmigianino’s protruding hand in the paintings foreground— disproportionately large and immediately usurping the viewer’s attention—is repeated by (or translated into) the enjambment of the poems first line, where “the right hand” similarly stands out, claiming our attention. The hand dominates the painting by taking up much of its space; the poem’s “hand” dominates its first lines as a powerful agent which governs most of its verbs. The resonant “r’s” of the “Fur, pleated muslin, a coral ring run together” add force to the assonance of the “ring run” couple, with its suggestive emphasis on roundness, and echo the roundness of the painting and its elements. Apparently the poem aims to produce an accurate poetic duplicate of Parmigianino’s “original.” These lines suggest, however, that the process of translation from visual to verbal, from painting to poem, would call for a very complicated definition of mimesis.

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To begin with, the static elements of Parmigianino’s self-portrait—the hand, the head, the background—when reproduced in the poem, seem to be put in motion. In the poem, the hand not only dominates the painting but seems to shift as it “swerves” to protect the face. The face itself “swims/Toward and away.” The poem too “swims”—over the enjambment—“toward and away,” reproducing the motion of the eye which perceives the painting. Since it is the viewer’s eye guided by the painting, moving from object to object, “toward and away” from the face, and to the hand—that puts the painting’s images in motion, the story the poem tells is not (and cannot) be the story of the painting only but also, and at the same time, the story of its perception. As such, even the purely descriptive comes to acquire the qualities of the self-reflexive: a commentary on another’s art can, paradoxically, lend materials for a self-portrait. The relationship of doubling the poem establishes between the two self-portraits is, then, a very strange kind of repetition in which the two elements (the repetition and the repeated) are interlocked, so that one always calls up the other. Reminiscent of Escher’s drawing hand, the self-portrait the poem presents is at once a means of containing and modeled by what it contains: at once bracketing and contingent upon Parmigianino’s model.7 The series of repetitions which make Parmigianino’s self-portrait present in/to the poem produce an infinitely complicated pattern. For the path Parmigianino’s image has to travel in order to make its way into the poem is by no means one-directional and involves a series of copies:

Vasari says, “Francesco one day set himself To take his own portrait, looking at himself for that purpose In a convex mirror, such as is used by barbers… He accordingly caused a ball of wood to be made By a turner, and having divided it in half and Brought it to the size of the mirror, he set himself With great art to copy all that he saw in the glass,” Chiefly his reflection, of which the portrait Is the reflection once removed. (SP, 68) In order to find its way into the poem, Parmigianino’s face has to be repeated in the mirror and “swim” back to the “ball of wood” (via Parmigianino’s eyes) making the portrait itself already more than “once removed” from its “original”; the subsequent journey of the image, motivated by the poet’s gaze, involves still another series of copies. And, as I will show, each of these transitions from image to copy involves a significant distortion; every time the image travels it becomes subject to unexpected invasions; each of the repetitions involves difference. (So that, despite the physical presence of the portrait, its reality is, essentially, an abstraction. Depending on which link in the chain of repetitions we decide to explore, the image of Parmigianino’s face will prove to be something different.) The quotation marks Ashbery’s poem resorts to as it tries to document the history of the portrait suggest that the poem’s knowledge of the painting’s history has to be second-

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hand (once or more than once removed). The quotation marks—a type of bracketing—are also an apt typographical image for the mechanism of self-portraiture: translated into verbal terms that mechanism could be illustrated as a proliferation of quotation marks: Parmigianino’s face is already “Parmigianino’s face” when reflected in the mirror, and becomes “‘Parmigianino’s face’” when painted on the ball of wood, and so on. The number of quotation marks the image acquires before it reaches us (via the painting, via Vasari, via Ashbery’s poem) is uncountable. To use quotation marks is to claim to cite word for word, to repeat exactly. But it is also to suggest a doubling of voices: what were once somebody else’s words are now also mine, and thus necessarily different. As the poem demonstrates, slippages have to occur in the course of quoting (in the course of mirroring or repeating), “as in a game where a whispered phrase passed around the room/Ends up as something completely different” (SP, 80). These slippages are the marker of the difference repetition makes; and as “the principle that makes works of art so unlike/what the artist intended” (SP, 80), they are crucial to Ashbery’s definition of the creative process. The “self-portrait” the poem presents is, then, apparently, a type of side-effect, an accidental result of addressing another’s art. In the context of Ashbery’s “accidental concretion” (Kierkegaard, R, 163), Parmigianino’s own task may seem simpler and more premeditated as he purposefully “set himself /With great art to copy all that he saw in the glass” (SP, 68). As the poem demonstrates, however, the reproduction of this image is shown to involve more than one copy where each of the copies carries with it its own distortion. Already Parmigianino’s gaze in the mirror is selective. According to Vasari, when the painter begun his work, he “‘…set himself/with great art to copy all that he saw in the glass’”: the stillness of the model all “set” for the portrait, as well as the care to copy “all” suggest a certain innocent faith in the possibility of “mirror reflection,” the possibility of mimetic representation. As the poem moves out of the Vasari quote we learn, however, that what Parmigianino copied was “Chiefly his reflection…” (what happens here is the same type of ironic re-contextualizing we have seen in “Litany”). As if to demonstrate the validity of this, somewhat cruelly ironic, twist the poem gives to Vasari’s words (it is also the innocence of Vasari’s “reading” of Parmigianino’s intentions—marked by the inverted commas—that comes under the poem’s scrutiny), the poem plays with a series of copies of Parmigianino’s face, all of which are anything but a “mirror reflection”:

The glass chose to reflect only what he saw Which was enough for his purpose: his image Glazed, embalmed, projected at a 180-degree angle. (SP, 68) The comical reversal of agency plays a joke here on the power of our gaze to blind us to all that we cannot (or prefer not to) see (I discuss this paradox below as it reappears later in the poem in the image of the “gibbous” sphere). The tools of the artist (the painter, the poet) indeed seem to have a mind of their own in Ashbery’s poems. Another painter, from Ashbery’s early sestina by the same title, is mocked for refusing to acknowledge his tools in an idealistic and failed attempt to produce an unmediated portrait of the sea:

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Sitting between the sea and the buildings He enjoyed painting the sea’s portrait. But just as children imagine a prayer Is merely silence, he expected his subject To rush up the sand, and, seizing a brush, Plaster its own portrait on the canvas.8 The form of the sestina Ashbery has chosen for this poem reminds that prayer is not merely silence, but words, calcified in a conventional repeatable pattern. Ashbery’s sestina calls attention to its own tools in the repetition of the six end-words. The envoy which is a conglomerate of what has been repeated over and over in the poem, mercifully annihilates the painter:

They tossed him, the portrait, from the tallest of the buildings; And the sea devoured the canvas and the brush As though his subject had decided to remain a prayer. (ST, 21) Ironically, it is the envoy—a poetic tour de force and the most glaringly “mediated” of the poem’s lines—that fulfills the painter’s desire to eliminate the distance between himself, his painting and his subject. Parmigianino uses the mirror as a tool which is to guarantee the success of his “copy.” But the mirror reflects more than he may perceive from his (singular and thus limited) perspective. An unreliable tool, the mirror is itself a source of distortion:

The surface Of the mirror being convex, the distance increases Significantly; that is enough to make the point That the soul is a captive…(SP, 68) “Enough to make the point”: the distance is significant enough to make meaningful the separation of the object from its reflection; this distancing and the meaning it carries is, Ashbery seems to argue, inherent in any act of self-representation.9 “You/Really have to sequester yourself to see/How far you have come,” says Ashbery in “Litany” (AWK, 65). To see oneself, one must be removed from oneself, one must become the other reflected in the mirror. The mirror is a source of a peculiar estrangement: the “I” becomes a “you.” The art of self-portraiture is possibly the most dramatic demonstration of the fact that one can know oneself only as the other. In Deleuze’s words, “Psychology regards it as established that the self cannot contemplate itself. This, however, is not the question. The question is whether or not the self itself is a contemplation, whether it is not in itself a contemplation, and whether we can learn, form

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behaviour and form ourselves other than through contemplation” (Deleuze, DR, 73–4). Deleuze’s answer, not surprisingly, is: We are contemplations…. We do not contemplate ourselves, but we exist only in contemplating—that is to say in contracting that from which we come…. There is a beautitude associated with [this] passive synthesis, and we are all Narcissus in virtue of the pleasure (auto-satisfaction) we experience in contemplating, even though we contemplate things quite apart from ourselves. We are always Actaeon by virtue of what we contemplate, even though we are Narcissus in relation to the pleasure we take from it…. We must always first contemplate something else—the water, or Diana, or the woods—in order to be filled with an image of ourselves. (DR, 74–5) Ashbery’s logic is strikingly similar: a contemplation of another’s art lends materials for a self-portrait. The contemplation of the self, in turn, will yield elements other than the self:

This otherness, this “Not-being-us” is all there is to look at In the mirror…(SP, 81) The notion of a “mirror reflection” fails to signify exact repetition. The poem’s “accumulating mirror,” rather than guarantee a faithful copy, tends to shuttle the image through a series of distortions. This very lack of control over our copy, the “surprise and the novelty” of the discovery that the “end result” is never what we planned (a discovery that “[a] ship/Flying unknown colors has entered the harbor” (SP, 81)) become the grounds for the formulation of the speaker’s own poetics. Repetition defined as difference is repetition of a creative kind: rather than reproduce the same, it constructs a new presence. Another gaze in the mirror—in the first poem of the same book—triggers a similar reversal of agency:

A look of glass stops you And you walk on shaken: was I the perceived? Did they notice me, this time, as I am, Or is it postponed again? (“As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat,” SP, 3) “A look of glass”—somebody’s cold, absent minded gaze, or one’s own mirror reflection—is here very explicitly the source of blockage. The lines arrest what the preceding stanza has put in motion, stall the fulfillment of a “promise” the poem has been

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preparing us for. Whether “a look of glass” belongs to a mirror personified or a person with glassy eyes, it plays with the paradox inherent in the name of the object, “the looking glass”: a glass that looks as we look into it. “Was I the perceived?”: the passive construction adds another ambiguity to the exchange: not only the perceiving subject (the self? the mirror? “they”?) but also the identity of the perceived is questioned. As “[y]ou walk on shaken” the surprise of the moment seems to spring from the recognition of oneself in the mirror, the self estranged when one most expects it to be identical, or one with oneself. “Did they notice me, this time, as I am,/Or is it postponed again”: what is at stake here is the recognition of our presence (by ourselves and others), a confirmation that we exist. In its last metamorphosis the mirror in “Self-Portrait” is no longer a noun:

We have seen the city; it is the gibbous Mirrored eye of an insect. (SP, 82–3) With a characteristic shift in scale the poem returns here to the image of a mirrored sphere familiar from Parmigianino’s painting. Here, it is a gibbous sphere (“gibbous”: as may be said of the moon or a planet of which only a part is visible: more than a half, but not all). Gibbous: such as the part of the moon we can see, or rather, such as (the part of) the sunlight we can see illuminating the moon’s surface: more than a half yet not all. It is what we cannot see (the sun) that creates the gibbous image of the moon; and it is not all of the moon that we see, only the part that reflects the sun; not all (of the sun) gets reflected because we (the earth) are in the way—that is, we do not see what we ourselves hide from view. In a reversal of the move of ironic undercutting we know from “Litany,” the poem ends with what seems a blown up model of Parmigianino’s initial set up.10 The gibbous sphere of the city is like a reflected eye of an insect, thus not only a perceived object, but also a source of perception of its own. Such was also the double of Parmigianino’s eye: the perceiving agent as well as the object of perception in Parmigianino’s double role as painter and model at once.11 With this reciprocity, the image reaches astounding complexity, to account for which one would need to perform the impossible task of mapping out all of the circular, spherical imagery it resonates with. (I will later attend to this effect produced by echoed imagery to suggest that the echoes, as may be expected, refuse to align themselves in symmetrical doublings.) Thus Parmigianino’s attempt to produce a faithful “copy” of the self defeats itself already in the very process of his copying his own mirror reflection. The act of copying involves change; the “accumulating mirror” (SP, 73) is always shuttling the image through distortions. Mirror-repetition is the discovery of difference. It is onto all the accumulated definitions of the mirror that Ashbery chooses to project the poems own self-portrait. The poem presents its poetics as if by implication. We are told that the poet’s tools are like the tools of the painter:

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The words are only speculation (From the Latin speculum, mirror): They seek and cannot find the meaning of the music. (SP, 69) In these celebrated lines, the poem at once formulates a powerful critique of mimesis and provides one of the more explicit links between the two self-portraits, the painter’s and the poet’s. If mirroring is no more than speculation, the painter and the poet can only approximate the “originals” in their copies. Well-versed in the mirror mechanics we may infer that language, as a mirror, will necessarily involve distance, will reflect its objects in oblique and unpredictable ways, will bring into the representation elements other than those the artist planned. Words, or “the way of telling,” “somehow intrude, twisting the end result/Into a caricature of itself” (SP, 80). Language works like Parmigianino’s mirror: the only guarantee for the faithfulness of the artist’s copy is also a source of distortion.12 Ashbery’s critique of the notion of self-portraiture demonstrates the instability of the border between the self and the other, between the model and the model’s background (in both spatial and historical senses of the word). The awareness of that very instability shapes the poem’s two self-portraits as both a threat and a source of surprise. The artist, says Ashbery, has only illusory control over his work:

Often he finds He has omitted the thing he started out to say In the first place. Seduced by flowers, Explicit pleasures, he blames himself (though Secretly satisfied with the result), imagining He had a say in the matter and exercised An option of which he was hardly conscious, Unaware that necessity circumvents such resolutions So as to create something new For itself, that there is no other way, That the history of creation proceeds according to Stringent laws, and that things Do get done this way, but never the things We set out to accomplish and wanted so desperately To see come into being. Parmigianino Must have realized this as he worked at his Life-obstructing task. (SP, 80)

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It is this awareness, apparently, the awareness that what aspires to be a self-portrait will necessarily involve that which is not part of the self, which provokes the ambiguous double gesture of Parmigianino’s portrait, a gesture which the poem presents as a paradoxical “shield of an invitation.” The painter’s hand which copies the reflected image dominates the portrait, as if performing a possessive gesture of shielding the face (or the soul of the painting) to preserve it inviolate, immobile and “intact.” The face “is what is/Sequestered.” In his desire to shield, Parmigianino creates an image as impenetrable as the ball of wood he paints it on. By capturing the face in a static image, the painting freezes it, keeping the soul “a captive.” In thus creating “life englobed” the painter attempts to “perfect and rule out the extreaneous,” to “protect” the face from the intrusions of the other, ensuring its perfect impenetrability—from within and without—in the “bubble chamber” of the painting. Throughout “Self-Portrait” we are reminded that the desire to protect, to embalm, to keep intact (to keep alive), always accompanies our self-awareness and lies at the core of the very task of self-portraiture and, possibly, at the core of all representation. “City Afternoon,” another poem from the same book, comments on the effects of stasis imposed upon a living image. The emphasis here is on its protective quality:

A veil of haze protect this Long-ago afternoon forgotten by everybody In this photograph, most of them now Sucked screaming through old age and death. (SP, 61) The silence and stillness of the photograph arrest time, fending off change, figured here as a violent process and, ultimately, death. Only the photograph—at once frozen, still, and a guarantee of continuity—remembers what everybody (including its very models) has forgotten: remembers the moment, remembers the models themselves, now dead. The “fleeting” “stain” of the photograph “commemorates” its models, “that threesome/Waiting for the light to change” (SP 61): “seized” in a photographic image, the “threesome” are shown at a moment which is already escaping: to wait for the light to change is to wait for the photograph to be taken as well as, ironically, to wait for the opportunity to “pass” (in both senses of the word). Art creates a type of artificial “present.” Not surprisingly, Parmigianino desires for his portrait to exist in a space which freezes the present and locks out change: the eyes,

proclaim That everything is surface. The surface is what’s there And nothing can exist except what’s there. (SP, 70) And yet, the painting confesses to the fragility of its meaning: the soul,

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must stay, Posing in its place. It must move As little as possible. (SP, 69) As the poem reads the painting and engages in the repetitive play with its images it argues that the painting itself betrays an uneasiness with this impulse to control,

…to fence in and shore up the face, On which the effort of this condition reads Like a pinpoint of a smile, a spark Or star one is not sure of having seen As darkness resumes. (SP, 69–70) The impulse of the hand “thrust at the viewer” may well be an impulse “to get out of the globe,” rather than “the reflex to hide something,” the gesture may be motivated by a paradoxical combination of a desire to shield and a desire to transcend the limits it imposes. The hand’s gesture is always a double gesture, both “swerving” and “protecting,” a “shield of a greeting.” “The locking into place is ‘death itself,’” warns the poem, and proceeds to re-orbit another’s metaphor by unlocking it in a new context: “[a]s Berg said of a phrase in Mahler’s Ninth” (SP, 76). The circular images the poem uses to describe the face as it is captured on the painting always verge of the claustrophobic or even deadly. “Big enough to wreck the sphere,” like a “dozing whale on a sea bottom,” Parmigianino’s protective hand is a potential threat to the face—an unsuspecting “self-important ship on the surface.” Closure is a “life obstructing task.”13 As the poem engages in a critique of Parmigianino’s solipsistic model, it argues that such model may not only be undesirable, but impossible:

Whose curved hand controls, Francesco, the turning seasons and the thoughts That peel off and fly away at breathless speeds Like the last stubborn leaves ripped From wet branches? (SP, 71) The work of recontextualizing does not stop there. As I have pointed out, in the transitions from painting to poem, from painter to poet, from visual to verbal, original and copy continually reverse positions (for the reader of the poem, for example, the painting, or the painter’s idea of “Parmigianino” originates in the poem). In the process, the image of the face changes hands: it is no longer the painter’s but the poet’s hand that

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“controls” it. The poem’s text also exists as a result of such changing hands (most of which cannot be listed in the poem itself). What also seems to salvage Parmigianino’s painting from the dangers of the painter’s desire to control manifest in the shielding gesture of the hand may be, paradoxically, the gesture itself. Even if it “cannot know it knew” the hand embraces change inherent in the life of the portrait:

Actually The skin of the bubble chamber’s as tough as Reptile eggs; everything gets “programmed” there In due course: more keeps getting included Without adding to the sum…(SP, 72) The harder and more impenetrable the painting’s enclosure, the more likely it is to succeed in shielding and protecting the life it carries. “A peculiar slant/Of memory…intrudes on the dreaming model” and, as the poem argues,

What should be the vacuum of a dream Becomes continually replete as the source of dreams Is being tapped so that this one dream May wax, flourish like a cabbage rose, Defying sumptuary laws, leaving us To awake and try to begin living in what Has now become a slum. (SP, 73) Our thinking is not under our control. Memory, dreams, the spontaneous or independent life of the mind, intrudes upon our thinking, disrupting it, making it disorderly and messy. But since this failure at mind control also counts as a blessing, the poem reabsorbs it as “another life”:

Why be unhappy with this arrangement, since Dreams prolong us as they are absorbed? Something like living occurs, a movement Out of the dream into its codification. (SP, 73) What Parmigianino’s possessive gesture fails to arrest is the change inherent in the image he tries to contain (that failure to contain allows the paradoxical comment about the painting “that it not we are the change”). What he fails to shield his self-portrait from is the self: with its ever-present capacity to be “prolonged.” As one receives these “dreams and inspirations on an unassigned frequency,” as one becomes absorbed by memories,

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those “irregular clumps of crystals,” the residues of the other imperceptibly and uncontrollably invade what is sequestered. Despite our desire to erase all that we do not or cannot see from our perspective,

Our landscape Is alive with filiations, shuttlings; Business is carried on by look, gesture, Hearsay. It is another life to the city, The backing of the looking glass of the Unidentified but precisely sketched studio. It wants To siphon out the life of the studio, deflate Its mapped space to enactments, island it. (SP, 75) The painting is imbued with forms of life other than its authors (whether they are “experienced or not” by the author himself), which makes the self-portrait into a portrait of the city where it was painted, exhibited, or even thought about. At the same time that very background or context is a potential threat to the life of the portrait (thus Parmigianino’s shielding gesture). The context Ashbery’s poem chooses for the painting—the context of both the conditions of the painting’s creation and the conditions of its reception—inhabits the painting itself. (By the same token, any reading of the poem, including this one, will invent new, foreign contexts for Parmigianino’s and Ashbery’s self-portraits thus giving them a new “life” unexperienced by either of the artists and yet always already “programmed” by their art.) “Stressing the power of the other to claim us”14 the poem argues that, since the image exists only insofar as it can be perceived, it only exists as it is modified by the other; the successive “moments of attention” (Parmigianino’s, Ashbery’s, to name a few…there is also Pierre and “the public/…pushing through the museum now so as to/Be out by closing time,” SP, 79), the repeated encounters with Parmigianino’s image are a new life to his painting.15 As it orchestrates the complex interaction between its many repetitions, as it engages in echoing itself and others, as it tries to determine the nature and scope of these repetitions—the unexpected possibilities they open, as well as the limitations they impose—the poem demonstrates that the mechanism it has put in motion is larger than itself, that both the effects the repetitions produce and what goes into making them extends well beyond the poem itself. By addressing that mechanism the poem is in fact trying to internalize that broader context, admitting, however, that it, too, fails to tell all of its own story that, in the end, “it is what is outside” the poem “that matters”:

Each person Has one big theory to explain the universe But it doesn’t tell the whole story And in the end it is what is outside him That matters, to him and especially to us

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Who have been given no help whatever In decoding our own man-size quotient and must rely On second-hand knowledge. (SP, 81–2) “Whose curved hand controls,/The turning seasons,” the poem asks the painter and the question of authorial control is recurrently restated and implicitly always present in the poem. In admitting its own failure to control the process it has put in motion, the poem defines itself as open-ended at both ends; both the poem’s materials and the effects of their combination lie beyond the scope of the poem’s language. By positing the inevitability and unpredictability of these external “injections” into the englobed life of a self-portrait, the poem not only critiques Parmigianino’s solipsistic model, but also proposes an alternative model of self-representation: via the “injected urgencies” of the other. “Your argument, Francesco, /Had begun to grow stale…” claims the poem, at the same time recognizing:

…but look, now, and listen: It may be that another life is stocked there In recesses no one knew of…(SP, 76) By addressing the painter in these intimate terms the poem once again puts the painter’s images in motion, once again invades what has been sequestered and gives life to an argument which has grown stale. “Look now and listen”: the advice seems to point to something that is already there and requires the painter’s attention to come alive. (Interestingly, the variety of words the poem comes up with to represent the kind of stasis Parmigianino produces in his embalmed image already ever so slightly shifts its meaning. Parmigianino’s attempt at keeping his image “still” is already undermined by the infinite resourcefulness of the poem when it comes to paraphrasing that condition.) The dialogue the poem orchestrates affects more than just the painting. The surprise at the unexpected, the sudden discovery of a new life stocked away in the painting, despite the painters desire to shield and control his meanings, are absorbed by the poem:

… We have surprised him At work, but no, he has surprised us As he works. (SP, 74) Like “the young man” from Kierkegaard’s experiment with repetition, Parmigianino, the protagonist of Ashbery’s story, acquires powers which surprise the author of the story in which the protagonist is embedded; it has the power to reflect back on the author, potentially even—as was the case with “the young man”—to undermine the author’s claims. As the poem invades the space of the painting, the life of the painting invades the space of the poem in turn. This move saves the poem from merely objectifying and thus imposing its own closure upon the perceived object as well as reverses the process of

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accretion so that now that process works both ways. Our reception of Ashbery’s poem echoes the poem’s reading of the painting in that we, the readers, are made vulnerable to the poem’s own surprises. The poem’s discontinuities, ambiguities, repetitions, the circling back upon itself are a source of unexpected associations which make us continually redefine our position in relation to the text. As many readers have observed, the poem seems to change at each reading. On a small scale, such surprise may take the form of a subtle, swift shift of perspective which catches us off-guard. For example, as the poem begins—with an extended, emotionally heightened commentary on the painting—“we” (here: the poem’s speaker, the readers) are positioned outside the painting, as the spectators. “[I]t is life englobed,” says the poem about Parmigianino’s work; but then,

One would like to stick one’s hand Out of the globe, but it’s dimension, What carries it, will not allow it. (SP, 69; italics mine) Accustomed to the perspective of spectator one would logically expect a wish “to stick one’s hand into the globe” (as if to express a clichéd “I wish I could step into this painting”). The poem, however, makes us switch places with the sitter-painter; carried by the enjambed line into the surprising reversal we fall into the globe. The striking effect of these lines produces more than just empathy for the painter imprisoned by his own painting. As the spectators become the spectacle we are deprived of our objectifying gaze, of our power to control the painter’s images. It is “us” now (the speaker, the reader) that may be observed. And indeed, what follows is a passage of self-commentary:

I feel the carousel starting slowly And going faster and faster: desk, papers, books, Photographs of friends, the window and the trees Merging in one neutral band that surrounds Me on all sides, everywhere I look. (SP, 71) It is very telling that this vertiginous moment of self-commentary resorts to the circular imagery which the poem has associated with Parmigianino’s painting. The speaker seems indeed locked into Parmigianino’s ball and likely to share Parmigianino’s desire to impose order and coherence on the surrounding chaos. In recognizing its own role as a model, the poem discovers its own solipsistic tendency: “Me on all sides, everywhere I look.” “[T]he portraits will to endure,” as we are told later, “hints at/Our own, which we were hoping to keep hidden” (SP, 79). The painter’s desire to “embalm” and preserve intact the image of the self repeats and thus reveals the poem’s own impulse to sequester. The poem’s critique of Parmigianino’s project is a self-critique. The quality of irony here, so characteristic of Ashbery’s writing, is such that it both undermines and recognizes the necessity of what it ironizes.16

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The surprising substitution of “out of” for “into,” quoted above, resonates with the “inside”—“outside” thematic which recurs throughout the poem. The making of a selfportrait engages one in a paradoxical task of being both the observer and the observed, both the artist and the model. Any self-portrait is thus likely to be both a “shield” and a “greeting.” The painter in his role of a model is likely to testify to his vulnerability in a shielding gesture, a gesture which may also serve as an attempt to enforce closure, to order and contain the vertiginous chaos of the perceiving self. The painter in his role of an artist will be driven by a desire to pry open, to penetrate under the surface, to represent what is hidden from an immediate gaze. Both these tendencies will be manifest in a single move, represented by the same stroke of the brush. The poem makes the conflicting impulse known to the reader by allowing the enjambed lines to carry us from the outside to the inside, and thus forcing us to recognize the conflicting perspectives which inform the painting, the poem and our own reading. Another kind of surprise Ashbery’s poem has in store for us is the substitution of an “I” for a “you” (or vice versa). The effects are very similar to those achieved by the reversal of positions vis a vis Parmigianino’s painting, only this time, it is the boundary between the poems speaker and its reader that is being transgressed. By means of this confusion of pronouns the poem engages us in a peculiar dialogue. Ashbery comments on his notorious conflation of pronouns: The personal pronouns in my work very often seem to be like variables in an equation. “You” can be myself or it can be another person, someone whom I’m addressing, and so can “he” and “she” for that matter and “we.”…it doesn’t really matter very much,…we are somehow all aspects of a consciousness giving rise to the poem and the fact of addressing someone, myself or someone else, is what’s the important thing at that particular moment rather than the particular person involved.17 The essence of such a moment of conflation or ambiguity is, then, dialogue itself, or the recognition of “the collective voice” which inhabits and “gives rise” to the poem.18 The comment “Self-Portrait” makes in relation to Parmigianino’s painting may well define its own poetics, as “a metaphor meant to include us.” When we fall into the painting again, the poem exploits this move in all of its dramatic implications. The painting is so careful “in rendering/The velleities of the rounded reflecting surface,”

…that you could be fooled for a moment Before you realize the reflection Isn’t yours. You feel then like one of those Hoffman characters who have been deprived Of a reflection, except that the whole of me Is seen to be supplanted by the strict Otherness of the painter in his Other room. (SP, 74)

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This moment of supplanting the self of the speaker (or any observer of the painting, or any reader of Ashbery’s poem) with the self of the painter seems like the ultimate consequence of the painter’s desire to produce “life englobed.” It is a moment of blockage, when our reading of the painting, instead of being a reading—instead of engaging in a dialogue with the painter’s images—becomes merely a projection of our selves. In its solipsism, this encounter mimics the gesture of Parmigianino’s hand “thrust at the viewer,” parallels (or even is triggered by) his refusal to engage his audience, and at the same time, paradoxically, erases the painter’s presence altogether. Parmigianino’s portrait apparently works with a Platonic model of repetition where “[t]he validity of a mimetic copy is established by its truth of correspondence to what it copies” (Miller, FR, 6). And yet, Parmigianino’s uneasiness with his own acts of “sequestration,” as well as the poem’s explicitly defined and implicitly present “intrusions” into the world of the painting, demonstrate that Parmigianino’s model is very much a working fiction for the painter, a model to which he clings but at the same time is aware of its status as a “necessary fiction.” Far from undermining the validity of Parmigianino’s shielding gesture, the poem argues that this gesture manifests the very desire to shield the world of the painting from the vertiginous chaos of the context in which it resides. By addressing the painter in a voice that knows it comes from that very vertigo of one of the painting’s contexts, the poem unlocks the “new life” of the painting that has been dormant, yet always present there “in the recesses no one knew of.”19 The relationship the poem sets up between the two self-portraits can be described as a case of mise-en-abyme. In simplest terms, mise-en-abyme places a copy of the image within the image itself (originaly the term denoted a heraldic image contained within a shield). As Lucien Dällenbach points out, however, the structure of mise-en-abyme can be responsible for a variety of effects. Drawing on Lucien Dällenbach’s delineation of the term, one may argue that the device of mise-en-abyme in Ashbery’s poem seamlessly combines all of the three figures that can be its manifestation. The poem is at once a “simple duplication”: a self-portrait “[a]s Parmigianino did it,” an “aporetic duplication”: it is impossible to tell which of the two self-portraits is the embedding and which the embedded work, and an “infinite duplication”: the process of mirroring it has put in motion can be defined as infinite regress. As Dällenbach observes, each of those figures is likely to produce very different effects and can be the locus of different readings. By engaging the device in all of its forms simultaneously, Ashbery’s poem not only highlights the ambiguity of the mirror reflection, but also refuses to give priority to any of its manifestations. Retracing my steps, I will now go back to Dällenbach’s critique of the pictorial miseen-abyme which, as he argues, fails to fulfill the requirements set up in Gide’s original definition of the term: …the optical illusion sought in all these pictures, which is their main attraction, lies in bringing into the painting items which (fictively) are outside it: the reflexions provided in the mirrors complete the picture and function primarily as a medium for interchange. At the frontier between interior and exterior they are a way of taking two-dimensionality to its limits. It is therefore not surprising that these pictorial examples were not able to retain Gide’s interest in any lasting way. The role they fulfill—

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making the external intrude upon the internal—was merely a rather flawed approximation of the structure Gide had in mind. (Dällenbach, 12; italics mine) My interest here lies in what falls outside Gide’s definition. As Ashbery’s poem argues about its reflections, their character is precisely that of “flawed approximation.” The mirrorings of Ashbery’s poem are not central in the way that the heraldic image is duplicated at “the heart of the shield.” Neither are they faithful duplicates of the whole which contains them. Their function is, precisely, to introduce items which lie outside of the poem’s focus. They reflect that which lies at the peripheries of the poem and their role is, very much, to be “a medium of interchange,” “making the external intrude upon the internal.” Their reflection indeed is, as Dällenbach says, “problematic” (Dällenbach, 12), for they problematize the very nature of mirror reflection. As I have shown in my earlier comments on The Mirror in the Text, Dällenbach begins by demonstrating the “failure” of the painters’ mise-en-abyme in relation to the original concept, to then modify the concept itself. The shape of his argument thus echoes the effects of the device he discusses in that the term is allowed to undergo successive transformations within the critic’s own writing in such a way that all of them are given expression in the critical text. Ashbery’s critique of Parmigianino’s project is very much like Dällenbach’s critique of Gide’s original definition. Parmigianino’s self-portrait apparently fulfills the requirements of Gide’s original definition. Gide’s aim, according to Dällenbach, is to create such conditions for his own art which would allow him most directly to be “his own interlocutor,” to exclude “the (de)formative personality of the other.” Gide’s art approximates the purely introspective by creating characters in the author’s own image and, what is more, characters who perform the very activities the writer performs when creating them (Dällenbach, 16). And while such “narcissistic doubling” (Dällenbach, 16) is the target also of Ashbery’s critique, his poem simultaneously shows it to be a necessary component of self-representation. What the poem aims at is the multilayered effect produced by the simultaneous presence of the conflicting manifestations of the same form (in this case, mise-en-abyme). The difference between Dällenbach’s and Ashbery’s critique of the concept lies, then, mainly in this effect of simultaneity which in Dällenbach’s text unavoidably has to spread out into the successive reformulations of the term. What I have chosen to address, for the sake of simplifying, as the poem’s “argument” does not, obviously follow linear development as it tends to rely on a recurrence of theme and image. This other set of repetitions significantly complicates our reception of the poem. Its “argument” not only circles back upon itself, but undergoes a series of redefinitions, just as the images of spheres and circles—at first figured as the imposition of control—undergo their successive transformations. Such a re-reading or redefining of an image or idea is always triggered by the mechanism of repetition: moments of sequestration or control (and the images of circles, spheres they are visualized by) are always accompanied by an impulse to repeat.20 The repetitions not only put images in motion, by providing them with ever new contexts, but also subvert the poem’s drive toward linear presentation. The oval of the face, the sphere of the head are our starting point in the poem and will suffice here as an example of the kinds of transformations an image may undergo as it is repeated in the poem.21

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Objects in Parmigianino’s painting (including the coral ring), copied onto the ball of wood (made by a turner), are run together in a circular motion which is duplicated in turn by the circular effect produced by the hand. The spherical imagery and movement are then refigured as the “soul” in its “nest” of the eyes. As these images (captured as “life englobed”) unfold, by the time we read the poem’s warning: “Francesco, your hand is big enough to wreck the sphere, “the sphere can be anything: the ball the turner made, the life of the face the hand shores up, or meaning itself. Repetitions condition our reading of the poem’s images: they prompt us to reread/recover the earlier contexts in which the image appeared (our understanding of the poem is, then, a result of accretion); they make us repetitively relinquish the sense of control over the poem’s meanings. Repetitions—not unlike Stevens’ refigurations—also do the work of metaphor, or simile. By recognizing, for example, that the head’s spherical shape is repeated in the shape of the ball of wood made by the turner, the poem suggests a toughening which will occur in the process of making the portrait, and which will set the mobile features of a living face into an impenetrable surface, “tough as reptile eggs.” Similarly, for example, by suggesting—via the parallel imagery—that “words” are like “eyes,” the poem implies that words are a way of seeing and, more indirectly, that words too may be the soul’s nest.22 The repetition of the same image in a variety of contexts suggests a multiplicity of possible readings of the image, without suggesting its universal applicability. Even when another metamorphosis inflates the sphere so that it fits the universal scale, the moment is only but one of the many of the poem’s repetitions and we know that “still others will follow.” Staging the sphere in the context of the infinite, the poem blows the image out of proportions to abruptly reduce it in a characteristic shift in scale. The result is truly vertiginous:

The whole is stable within Instability, a globe like ours, resting On a pedestal of vacuum, a ping-pong ball Secure on its jet of water. (SP, 70) The image rests on a dramatic contrast in a structure not unlike that of a Metaphysical conceit: the earth spinning like a ping-pong ball puts in proportion our claims to importance in a gently mocking manner. As is the case in the closing lines of the poem, when the sphere, in its final “gibbous” shape, takes its place in the order of the universe (however relative that order is and momentary—very much of our own making), here, too, the spectacular shift of perspective from the minute to the universal, which is then diminished in turn, seems to abstract the image from any of its particular representations.23 For a moment again we seem to be given “a model” which the poem claims to be generally applicable, “a process to follow.” Ashbery’s are also momentary fictions which always carry with them the echoes of the poem’s warning: we know, as they unfold, that they will not be allowed to “lock into place.” The poem’s large scale movement, in itself circular, duplicates the emblem whose repetitions inform each of the poem’s sections. The poem’s ending apparently returns to

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the beginning in addressing the details of the painting (the poem begins with the description of the controlling hand and ends when “the hand holds no chalk”), but this return, like all the others, is by no means a return to the same. The movement of repetition is recurrently thematized in this highly self-reflexive text which comments on its own moments of attention to and disengagement from the painting. The poem’s movement “toward and away,” like that of the face on the painting is the driving force of the poem, as well as one of the poem’s subjects:

The balloon pops, the attention Turns dully away. Clouds In the puddle stir up into sawtoothed fragments. I think of the friends Who came to see me, of what yesterday Was like. (SP, 70–1) The moment when “the balloon pops” and the speaker’s “attention” turns away from its subject punctures and deflates the spherical image that guided the reader’s attention to the poem. The power of mirroring is also shattered as the “clouds/In the puddle stir up into sawtoothed fragments” and the (speaker’s and reader’s) attention shifts to other concerns, generated by a new context: different engagements in a different time. In such moments of loss—loss of attention to the poems themes or control over the poem’s images—the reader, as well as the poem’s speaker, are forced to relinquish their power to contain meanings in neat, self-contained, impenetrable spherical structures, to hold meaning intact or “englobed.” By inhabiting the painting’s present “we are always escaping from” (in the process of forgetting) “[a]nd falling back to” (in discovering it as the other) the poem repeatedly deflates its circular imagery. After the over-inflated, over-familiar bubble bursts, the escape is always followed by a “falling back to,” but the re-encounter with the forgotten images gives them an entirely new context and thus shifts their significance:

As I start to forget it It presents its stereotype again But it is an unfamiliar stereotype, the face Riding at anchor, issued from hazards, soon To accost others, “rather angel than man” (Vasari). Perhaps an angel looks like everything We have forgotten, I mean forgotten Things that don’t seem familiar when We meet them again, lost beyond telling Which were our once. (SP, 73–4)

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Forgetting or loss, the failure to hold a meaning intact, englobed, makes objects or words meaningful again. Whether it be due to the “injected urgencies” of the other, the intrusions of other contexts, other objects or words, or the simple fading of attention, the words we once possessed slip out of our control. The coming back to our “stereotypes” already makes them “unfamiliar,” that is, meaningful again.24 The making of the “unfamiliar stereotype” is one of Ashbery’s most characteristic preoccupations and possibly the most remarkable use he makes of repetition. The recycling of the cliché, of the metaphor which has become dead as it became all too familiar, of the word which has lost its meaning through our appropriation are empowered by repetition. Revitalizing dead metaphors Ashbery stays with them just long enough to give them a new context, but never so long as to allow them to lock into place: thus the characteristic breathless succession of disparate images, clashing observations, unlikely combinations of words in his poems which impart “a sense of novelty and amazement” to the reader. The stereotype is the word repeated without any magic, any enthusiasm, as though it were natural, as though by some miracle this recurring word were adequate on each occassion for different reasons, as though to imitate could no longer be sensed as an imitation: an unconstrained word that claims consistency and is unaware of its own insistence. Nietzsche has observed that “truth” is only the solidification of old metaphors. So in this regard the stereotype is the present path of “truth,” the palpable feature which shifts the invented ornament to the cannonical, constraining form of the signified. (It would be good to imagine a new linguistic science that would no longer study the origin of words, or etymology, or even their diffusion, or lexicology, but the progress of their solidification, their densification throughout historical discourse; this science would doubtless be subversive, manifesting much more than the historical origin of truth: its rhetorical, languaging nature.) (Barthes, PT, 42–3) Ashbery’s poem is just such a tracing of the process of solidification and densification (or “calcification,” to use the poem’s own term) of metaphor described by Barthes. Not quite a science (as that would make for a new code), the poem is more subversive than science as it simultaneously performs a repetition which is “magic,” a repetition which desolidifies, opens the stereotype again to new meanings. As the poem engages in this process, it puts the quotation marks around any and all the “truths” it discovers, thus demonstrating their “rhetorical, languaging nature.” The form of the long poem seems particularly conducive to this task. It allows the readers space to establish themselves in the poem, to learn the poem’s vocabulary and, at the same time, to read the poem with different levels of attention. The poem does indeed “program” a variety of readings which will not yield to “critical prose.” (And indeed, what I have done in my own reading was, at best—to borrow Foucault’s words—a reconstruction of “one of several possible models” the text offers). As Ashbery observes, the writer, too, has an opportunity to become estranged from, and then come back to, his work in the process of writing a long poem:

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…I like the idea of writing something that takes a great deal of time because your mind changes while you are doing it and the reader isn’t aware at what point you left off and put it aside for two months and then came back; there aren’t any seams. The long poem seems to gain a kind of richness from being written by not different poets, but a poet who is different each time. (Koethe, 184–5) In this interview with Ashbery, John Koethe describes “Self-Portrait” as “philosophically more continuous than some of [Ashbery’s other] poems, in the sense of carrying an argument through to the end.” In response Ashbery observes that the poem’s “continuity is actually very specious…. I think it has fooled a lot of people. I think if it were examined closely, it would be found to be just as ‘incoherent’ as my more notorious long poems,” says Ashbery, and the poem’s “argument” (apparently followed through to the end) indeed seems more like a mock argument as it defeats itself in the course of its own making. To argue something “to the end” would mean to produce another “life englobed,” to sequester the meaning in a calcified form. And the poem carefully avoids that trap. By constantly shuttling back and forth between itself and the painting, by engaging in mirrorings which produce multiple copies, by engaging in the endless recycling of its own images and notions it never allows its argument to rest, but constantly redefines its most central tenets. As the poem looks to the painting for the “surprise and novelty” of its solutions, the reader has to confront the poem’s own surprises. And like the poem, we come to discover our lost possessions in a new shape so that they are no longer ours. Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” suggests that making a self-portrait is, paradoxically, a collective enterprise. What we use for making a self-portrait (be it paint or language—with the attendant conventions) bring into the—apparently solipsistic—act of self-perception a long history of use.

But it is certain that What is beautiful seems so only in relation to a specific Life, experienced or not, channeled into some form Steeped in the nostalgia of a collective past. (SP, 77) “Self-Portrait” is Ashbery’s “Song of Myself,” one may argue, though the “I” of the poem can be located often only on the poem’s peripheries. Like Whitman’s poem, “SelfPortrait” repeatedly claims that the way toward self-definition necessarily leads through others. The voice of the poem, in both cases, is a collective voice, a voice extending beyond a single speaker. Yet what in Whitman’s poem takes the form of becoming or acquiring ever new roles, in Ashbery’s work seems to function as a recognition of a polyphony inhabiting words themselves, “already programmed,” as if the voice in his poems was already inhabited by others, as if saying was repeating. Stevens also reaches this point where “The self is a cloister full of remembered sounds/And of sounds so far forgotten…/That they return unrecognized.” In all three poets the perception of the voice of their poems exceeds that of a single speaker.

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In Discovering Ourselves in Whitman, Thomas Gardner says, Like Roethke and Duncan, Ashbery finds what Duncan calls the “central drive” of “Song of Myself”—“the tension between speaking oneself and the utter commonality of the language that must be the medium of that self”—to be a richly generative frustration…. For Ashbery…making use of what Duncan calls that “larger language where minds and spirits awaken sympathies in me, a commune of members in which myself seem everywhere translated” produces not that dimensionless unity, but a fictional ensemble in which we become aware of the existence of the whole.” A difference between Ashbery and these other writers—although the logical outgrowth of the tradition—is that for him, this “larger language,” these “resonances of the totality,” have already been internalized and absorbed.”25 The relationship Gardner sets up between the four poets via their shared conceptions of the “utter commonalty of language” is a very poignant way of highlighting an important strain in the American poetic tradition. At the same time, “the awareness of the existence of the whole” or “totality” is what, I would argue, Ashbery’s poems often put in question, rather than embrace. There is tension in a voice as polyphonic as Ashbery’s, tension which will not resolve into a “totality.” “Self-Portrait” tends to highlight rather than attempt to resolve its conflicts. Its voice is “steeped in the nostalgia for a collective past” and thus considerably removed (in tone as well as time) from the recognition of a whole. In the context of “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” Ashbery’s experiments with the highly crafted and tightly organized poetic forms may seem like the work of a different poet and certainly place themselves at the opposite end of the spectrum of poetic repetitions. Unlike the repetitions in “Self-Portrait,” those enacted by sestinas, villanelles and pan to urns are generated by the requirements of form. In all sestinas the repeated words fall into a predictable pattern; all villanelles repeat their lines in predetermined order; all pantoums feed lines into the same pre-existing tight grid. Just as sound repetitions in a sonnet are produced by a conventional rhyme scheme, so the pattern of repetitions of words or lines may exist prior to the poem itself. The making of such poems is, on the simplest level, a matter of feeding words into a ready pattern (a “paintby-numbers poem,” as Ashbery says of his “Instruction Manual”). Defined as an experiment with repetitions of the “mechanical” kind, such a poem will necessarily raise questions about the origins of a poetic persona, the conditions of poetic voice and poetic creativity in relation to poetic tradition.26 “Hotel Lautréamont” will serve as my example of Ashbery’s experiments with tightly organized, highly repetitive poetic forms. Repetitions engendered by such forms may seem to have nothing in common with Whitman’s syntactic parallels and word repetitions or Stevens’s and Ashbery’s own recurrent use of words, metaphors, images or larger sequences in a long free-verse poem. “Hotel Lautréamont” is a pantoum: a poem in which every line is matched or doubled in a predictable, predetermined pattern. In a pantoum entire lines are repeated at regular intervals, with the exception of the last stanza which ties into the poem’s beginning by tying up the loose ends of the yet unrepeated

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lines of the first stanza. There is nothing in the poem that is not repeated, nothing can escape the tightness of its form; the return to the poems beginning via the poem’s ending not only completes the task of giving every line an identical twin, but also creates a perfect circle; or a “hoop,” to borrow Ashbery’s image from the poem, for the form of the pantoum put in motion traces the spirograph-like line of a hula-hoop, where each spin covers a part of the old circle and traces a new one, until the trace returns to the place it originated from. An epitome of poetic artifice and conventionality, a pantoum seems to impose rigid order on the materials fed into its mold.27 At the same time, since it is constructed exclusively of repetitions, the form of a pantoum allows repetition’s “supreme ambiguity” to thoroughly subvert the closure it tries to enforce.28 As Wallace Stevens would say, “a violent order is disorder.” Since each line of the poem has to be readable in two different immediate contexts, each line is already inhabited by difference. And the work of differentiation does not stop there as each of the lines which provide the immediate two contexts for the line we are considering is also conditioned by their own reappearance; they too are doubled. What we witness as we try to unsuccessfully anchor the reading of the poem in some stable element is a case of infinite regress: none of the meanings are stable, and the more we retrace our steps in search of some basic (and then complicated) truth, the more the proliferating meanings elude our grasp. While in the case of “Hotel Lautréamont” it seems almost impossible to say what the poem is “about,” it is possible to discern certain recurrent thematic clusters. I will attend here to those of the poem’s “themes” which seem directly related to its structural pattern. Taking Ashbery’s suggestion, I will use one of the poem’s own metaphors—the “hotel” of its title—as a way into the poem. In response to the interviewer’s question about the title Hotel Lautréamont, Ashbery says, there is something very attractive about a hotel because it has got so many rooms, and so many different kinds of people all doing different things…. I wrote the poem “Hotel Lautréamont” because I found a photograph of Lautréamont He seemed to be in a hotel room, and of course he lived in small hotels during his brief career…And then I thought of the four sections of four stanzas each as being like four floors of a hotel, like the boxes behind the desk where the keys are hung.29 The attractiveness of “hotels” (both literal and figurative) seems to be that of a structure (architectural, poetic) which can simultaneously contain different “rooms.” The structure itself is permanent, its elements identical and symmetrically aligned, yet it may be inhabited by different presences, different voices. A“hotel” poem is, then, a structured way of letting rooms to different voices. The image of the key boxes complicates matters considerably as it introduces an element of mise-en-abyme into the simple symmetrical pattern: the grid of the key boxes is contained by and reproduces the structure of the hotel, but at the same time contains the “keys” to each of the hotel rooms, so that access to the whole structure leads through the box, and, consequently, through each of the hotel rooms (or voices). Thus a pattern (of the hotel) which could produce a sense of structural closure is undone from within. (Ashbery’s hotel metaphor is, of course, a perfect definition of a pantoum.)

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In the same commentary Ashbery suggests that Joseph Cornell’s “boxes called hotels” have been a parallel inspiration: “the fact that his [Cornell’s] collage, which I chose for the book jacket seemed to be looking out of a window—or into a window, you can’t tell which—had a hotel-like feel” (Herd, 36). In a hotel room you don’t feel “at home”: you’re not in possession of the room (or voice) you inhabit; you don’t feel “inside” even as you are looking outside from its window. Cornell’s collage has a chilling quality: in place of an interior warmth/light, we are given the image of snow falling in the dark; this estrangement, a sense of not knowing whether one is inside or outside, defines precisely the instability we witness as readers of a pantoum: repeatedly, we feel to be in possession of meanings which then stubbornly escape us. The inside/outside dynamic is thematized in the poem which speculates about enclosures and escape, about being “indoors” and “trying to leave.” Interestingly, the poem places those concerns in relation to a speculation on the conditions of literary creativity. Ashbery’s sestinas, sonnets, and pantoums engage his poetic in a dialogue with forms rooted in a long tradition—a tradition which “history long ago began”—and thus resonating with overlapping poetic voices. “Hotel Lautréamont” not only alludes to the tradition of experiments with the form of a pantoum, but also, paradoxically, alludes to a nineteenth-century French author of a long prose poem. A detailed analysis of this resonant coupling goes well beyond the scope of my subject of poetic repetition (and may well be a false path to follow, considering Ashbery’s often whimsical employment of quote and allusion). I will not, therefore, address the parallel between the two poets (“Hotel Lautréamont” is, after all, a fictional “place,” as is the pseudonym “Lautréamont”; Ashbery does not quote from Lautréamont’s work but, rather, constructs his poem out of what may well be contemporary journal or newspaper snippets). I will, however, attend to the unlikely juxtaposition between the name “Lautréamont” and the form of the pantoum used as a mode of allusion, insofar as it highlights the problematic of repetition in relation to poetic structure, construction of poetic voice and definitions of poetic persona. My reading of the place of “Lautréamont” in Ashbery’s Hotel Lautréamont and the poem of the same title, will read “Lautréamont” as a figure which has been constructed for the sake of literary history. (As I will show, the poem immediately alerts us to the constructed character of that history, at the same time as it allows Ashbery to do his own work of a literary historian in a much more subtle manner.) “Comte Lautréamont” is the literary pseudonym of the late- nineteenth-century French poet Isidore Ducasse. “The Songs of Maldoror,” his single long prose poem, variously praised and criticized for the violence of its subject matter and equally violent manipulations of poetic form, relies on abrupt and often shocking juxtapositions which deprive it of any sense of continuity or even coherence. Lautréamont’s readers describe the principle of his work as the “principle of endless change.”30 Gaston Bachelard observes: “With Lautréamont comes a participation in a discontinuity of acts, in the expressive joy of the moment of decision. But these instances remain unpremeditated; they are savored in their isolation. They are lived out in rapid and uneven succession…. Ducasse’s poetry is an accelerating cinema from which the indispensable intermediate forms are deliberately eliminated.”32 Any order that exists in the poem which has earned Ducasse the label of a “protosurrealist” is a violent and unpredictable one. “Lautréamont does not point out similarities; he creates them against reason, he imposes them on us. He gives us an image which violates the most essential requirements of the traditional simile:

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resemblance” (Nesselroth, 30). The work relies, then, on unsettling the reader’s expectations through a violation of literary conventions, as well as the violation of the laws of logic. At the same time, it does “create similarities” even if they cannot be reasonably accounted for, creates a logic of its own, even if it is highly unconventional. Works like Lautréamont’s, says Bachelard, “must be accepted in their attempt to break up” (Bachelard, 55). Ducasse’s poem which apparently entirely disregards poetic convention (both on the stylistic and thematic levels) has thus been read as an extreme example of poetic “formlessness” where no attempt at closure or connection holds the text together. The poetic choices in a poem so disjunct and chaotic are recognized as highly subjective and thus arbitrary and in effect inaccessible. The relationship Ashbery’s “Hotel Lautréamont” sets up with its predecessor is thus from the outset a paradoxical one. “Lautréamont” and “pantoum” are not likely to find their way into a single entry of a poetic dictionary, yet Ashbery’s poem suggests some striking parallels between the violence of chaos untamed by poetic convention and the violence of a rigid pattern of poetic convention itself, parallels between the violence of order and the violence of disorder. The rigid order of a pantoum (what “Self-Portrait” calls “the chaos” of Parmigianino’s mirror) puts such a strain on language that, paradoxically, it may yield meanings which verge on the unintelligible. Hotel Lautréamont

1/ Research has shown that ballads were produced by all society working as a team. They didn’t just happen. There was no guesswork. The people, then, knew what they wanted and how to get it. We see the results in works as diverse as “Windsor Forest” and “The Wife of Usher’s Well.” Working as a team, they didn’t just happen. There was no guesswork. The horns of elfland swing past, and in a few seconds We see the results in works as diverse as “Windsor Forest” and “The Wife of Usher’s Well,” or, on a more modern note, in the finale of Sibelius violin concerto. The horns of elfland swing past, and in a few seconds The world, as we know it, sinks into dementia, proving narrative passe, or in the finale of Sibelius violin concerto.

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Not to worry, many hands are making work light again. The world, as we know it, sinks into dementia, proving narrative passe. In any case the ruling was long overdue. Not to worry, many hands are making work light again. so we stay indoors. The quest was only another adventure. (HL, 14) Unlike the model of “lyric subjectivity” (“an enchantment of self with self”), ballads are a collective enterprise. Since they are the result of a group effort, they have nothing arbitrary about them; designed as if according to a plan (“the people…knew what they wanted”) the ballads are a predictable outcome (“they didn’t just happen”). “The results” of this reliable enterprise are manifest in “Windsor Forest” and “The Wife of Usher’s Well.” This seems to be the argument of the first stanza of “Hotel Lautréamont.” As soon, however, as we enter the poem’s second stanza and are confronted with the first repetitions, this initial sense of control over the poem’s “meanings” (demonstrable in our ability to awkwardly paraphrase) is lost. The same “results” seem to entirely slip out of (the poet’s, our, the ballad-makers’) control in the second stanza where “[t]he horns of elfland swing past,” and, as if by magic, “in a few seconds” (and not ages of accretion as one would expect) the result is produced in the form of, again, “Windsor Forest” and “The Wife of Usher’s Well.” The same whimsical “horns of elfland,” which the poem invites us to read as an alternative origin of ballads, seem to trigger the disintegration of the world when provided with a new context in the third stanza: “The horns of elfland swing past, and in a few seconds/The world as we know it sinks into dementia.” The conflicting readings of the repeated last line of the first stanza, the line which carries the first stanza’s burden of proof, that is, the two incompatible accounts of how ballads are made, are further complicated by the indeterminacy of the context in which they reappear. To try to arrive at a solid reading of that context, in this case, to try to account for the “horns of elfland” is to encounter more of the same difficulties: more lines which appear in two contexts and whose meaning is, therefore, necessarily indeterminate. The coherence of paraphrase must be lost here. Any attempt to describe “what the poem is about” will merely highlight the absurdity of the poem’s juxtapositions which do not yield to an overriding logic. (What are “the horns of elfland”? Musical horns? Horns of plenty? The context of “the world sinking into dementia” certainly does not help to determine.) The question implicitly raised by this kind of investigation is to what extent a poetic line is a “result” of the line which precedes it. In a pantoum, a poem in which the order of the lines is pre-established according to a conventional pattern, the meanings generated by the repetitions are, to a degree, beyond the poet’s control: “the horns of elfland” appear in those places in the poem which the convention of the pantoum calls for and not as a logical extension of the preceding line; the “results” the poem produces seem to be the product of mechanical repetition as opposed to an expression of a continuing thought. The difficulties I encountered in my reading came from the presupposition that the poem

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will follow a linear progression, that one line will feed into the next, that continuity and development are the grounds on which poetic meaning rests. What the poem insists on, however, is a subversion of linearity. Meanings emerge as the result of repetitive accretion, rather than progression. “Research has shown that ballads were produced by all society”: the poem opens with what could well be one of Ashbery’s “objets trouvé,” a highlighted line in a badly written article or an encyclopedia entry. The clash with the colloquialisms of the second and third lines of the first stanza is somehow compensated for by the closing example which reassures us about the availability of proof for the presented definition: “We see the results in works as diverse as ‘Windsor Forest’ and ‘The Wife of Usher’s Well.’” It is worth noting that the poem’s “argument” about the collective sources of individual creativity originates in a highly ironic context of this opening line—whatever the poem will arrive at, then, has already been bracketed by this initial irony, or “programmed” from the start. In this way, the poem produces its own effect of, to use Deleuze’s term, “deterritorialization,” of decentering its own argument and highlighting its function as one among many. Additionally, the mixed registers of the poem’s opening stanza not only prevent us from locating anything like the poem’s “speaker” in its opening lines, but also, by nature of their grammatical structure, complicate the very issues of origin and authorship they address. “[B]allads were produced by all society”: this wonderfully familiar use of the passive voice combined with the somewhat vague, undefinable agent—“research” (a telling mismatch between the implicit argument of the first stanza and the grammar which carries it)—already questions the availability of the answers to the problem of authorship. Despite the erasure of its speaker and its claim to objective impersonality (that is, despite claiming to excede the limits of a singular perspective) the opening sentence of the poem is certainly not a case of writing “collectively produced.” The collective agent which hides behind “research” is an uneasy echo of the “collectivity” which produced the ballads. The nature of collectivity, which is first presented in the context of a discussion of poetic origin, initially suggests a model preferable to that of lyric subjectivity. The collective creativity of “all society/working as a team” posited as the origin of the ballad is a creativity of a methodical kind: there is no guesswork, no accident, causes are aligned with effects, ballads are made according to a plan. The collective creativity then, however, gives way to “collective euphoria” of the people “besides themselves with rapture” who seem to be responsible for the “troubled times” and “problematic solutions.” Interestingly, “In troubled times one looked to the shaman or priest for comfort and counsel.” We are thus brought to a single referee, a single subjectivity for guidance. The writing of a pantoum is, in a sense, an exercise in constructing a poetic line which can be meaningful in a variety of contexts. As I have observed earlier, each line depends on so many variables that the pantoum-writer’s task is infinitely complicated. Paradoxically, the highly controlled form of precisely recurring repetitions is likely to produce meanings which are absurd or unintelligible. One may expect, then, a pantoum to be conditioned by a tension between an attempt to control and a slipping out of control— and indeed the terms of entrapment and escape surface in the poem in a series of related images:

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2/ In any case the ruling was long overdue. The people were beside themselves with rapture so we stay indoors. The quest was only another adventure and the solution problematic, at any rate far off in the future. The people were beside themselves with rapture yet no one thinks to question the source of so much collective euphoria, and the solution: problematic, at any rate far off in the future. The saxophone wails, the martini glass is drained. Yet no one thinks to question the source of so much collective euphoria. In troubled times one looked to the shaman or priest for comfort and counsel. The saxophone wails, the martini glass is drained, And night like black swansdown settles on the city. In troubled times one looked to the shaman or priest for comfort and counsel Now, only the willing are fated to receive death as a reward, and night like black swansdown settles on the city. If we tried to leave, would being naked help us? 3/ Now, only the willing are fated to receive death as a reward. Children twist hula-hoops, imagining a door to the outside. If we tried to leave, would being naked help us? And what of the older, lighter concerns? What of the river? Children twist hula-hoops, imagining a door to the outside, when all we think of is how much we can carry with us. And what of older, lighter concerns? What of the river? All the behemoths have filed through the maze of time. When all we think of is how much we can carry with us

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Small wonder that those at home sit nervous, by the unlit grate. All the behemoths have filed through the maze of time. It remains for us to come to terms with our commonalty. Small wonder that those at home sit nervous, by the unlit grate. It was their choice, after all, that spurred us to feats of the imagination. It remains for us to come to terms with our commonalty And in so doing deprive time of further hostages. (HL, 14–5) The collective subject the poem adopts—the speaking “we”—chooses the categories of freedom and entrapment as a means of self-representation. The “we” of the poem seem unable to get out: “we stay indoors” (either because there is no need to go out: “Not to worry, many hands are making work light again,” or because one is better off staying in, when “[t]he people are beside themselves with rapture”); then, the motion to get out is itself diminished, trivialized: “the quest was only another adventure.” The speaker(s) of the poem are hindered by what they possess or are possessed by: “If we tried to leave, would being naked help us?” Burdened by the immediate, material or older, immaterial concerns—the heaviness of what can be carried on, as well as the “older, lighter” luggage—they are immobilized, yet impatient to move on. “Small wonder that those at home sit nervous by the unlit grate”: ready to leave, yet unable to, stationary but restless. The condition of the poem’s speaker(s) reproduces the poems own tension between its static symmetries and restless motion. This dynamic, suggested by the thematic and formal aspects of the poem, is nowhere more dramatic than in the imperceptible shifts the meanings undergo as they stubbornly reappear yet always escape the grasp of any given context.

In troubled times one looked to the shaman or priest for comfort and counsel Now, only the willing are fated to receive death as a reward, and night like black swansdown settles on the city. If we tried to leave, would being naked help us? 3/ Now, only the willing are fated to receive death as a reward. Children twist hula-hoops, imagining a door to the outside. If we tried to leave, would being naked help us? And what of the older, lighter concerns? What of the river? (italics mine)

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In the first of these two stanzas, the line I want to focus on is framed in the context of a time when the affairs have been brought to a stalemate and a time when there is no longer a single referee to “look to” for a solution. It is a time when few are likely to turn “to the shaman or priest for comfort and counsel,” as the believers are no longer the chosen ones and only few choose to believe (only those who are willing (to be fated) are willing to die (in reward)). The reversal in “the willing are fated”—was it not the fated (to live an afterlife?) that used to be willing to die (in the time when the shaman and priest were there to counsel?)—may be one of the possible answers to the poem’s question, figuring “death” as a potential (though apparently no longer available) fiction of escape. Coming as it does at the end of the whole section of the poem, the question seems to bring the poem’s own movement into a stalemate. The “rapture” which opens this section considerably subsides as we enter the “troubled times” and as “night…settles on the city.” Crowning the section, the question about the possibility of escape may call for a new beginning. The second of the stanzas quoted above is the opening stanza in the third section of the poem. The repeated question it frames thus acquires a new urgency—we are (again) invited to look for an answer. The new context also supplies a new means of escape, now it is the children who “imagine a door to the outside.” Yet, while the context of children’s games seems very unlike the earlier speculation on death, it is again the choice to imagine (an afterlife/a door to the outside) and a type of naivete that figures as the desired exit. The two “solutions” or apparent answers to the poem’s question repeat each other in an uneasy coupling. At the same time the children lend the hula-hoop image to the poem—the closest approximation of the dynamic of the poem’s circular motion.

Children twist hula-hoops, imagining a door to the outside When all we think of is how much we can carry with us. In our first encounter with the second of these lines, the stress seems to fall on “we” (in contrast to “children”). One is invited to believe that, to be like the children who are still capable of conceiving an “outside,” it would help to forget what one “carries” (it would help to be “naked”). (That is indeed a formidable task for a reader of a pantoum, “when all we think of is how much we can carry with us” from one line to the next; and yet the poem seems to argue: forget the original sense, go on to the next and let us move on with the poem’s flow, despite the burdens of accretion and the proliferating meanings.) The second context in which the line appears, ironically twists that reading so that we are again compelled to recognize the duplicity present in a single line:

When all we think of is how much we can carry with us, Small wonder that those at home sit nervous, by the unlit grate. With the doubling of the line the stress seems to shift to “carry with us” (in contrast to “sit”). The inability to forget what one carries (or the poem’s inability to erase the old

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context) now not so much obstructs the perception of the “outside” (obstructs the poems movement) as it produces tension inside (produces tension within the line as the foreign contexts intrude upon the reading): there is no peace by the unlit grate when all one thinks about is the means of escape (the meaning of the line cannot be self-contained, the closure of any given line will always explode under the pressure of new contexts). The emerging into the open—prepared for in the third and enacted in the fourth section of the poem—suggests, however, that in order to “leave” one needs more than faith or a willingness to imagine. The concluding stanza of the third section prepares for this breakthrough:

Small wonder that those at home sit nervous, by the unlit grate. It was their choice, after all, that spurred us to feats of the imagination. It remains for us to come to terms with our commonalty And in so doing deprive time of further hostages. The recognition that the source of one’s imagination lies outside, that, paradoxically, it is what others have determined (“their choice”) that provides the stimulus (“Spur[s] us to feats of imagination”), prepares for the recognition of “our commonalty.” It is that very recognition that allows the breakthrough, allows to “deprive time of further hostages.”

4/ It was their choice, after all, that spurred us to feats of the imagination. Now, silently as one mounts a stair we emerge into the open and in so doing deprive time of further hostages, to end the standoff that history long ago began. Now, silently as one mounts a stair we emerge into the open but it is shrouded, veiled: we must have made some ghastly error. To end the standoff that history long ago began Must we thrust ever onward, into perversity? But it is shrouded, veiled: we must have made some ghastly error. You mop your forehead with a rose, recommending its thorns. Must we thrust ever onward, into perversity? Only night knows for sure; the secret is safe with her. You mop your forehead with a rose, recommending its thorns. Research has shown that ballads were produced by all society;

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Only night knows for sure; the secret is safe with her: the people, then, knew what they wanted and how to get it. “Now, silently as one mounts a stair we emerge into the open”: the long-awaited movement into the open is silent (“there are no words”?). The poem addresses this blockage by going back to its old question: “To end the standoff that history long ago began/Must we thrust ever onward, into perversity?” As the poem again turns back upon itself for answers its movement indeed is that of a “thrust into perversity”—from the Latin pervertere, to overturn (related to verse). Like Lautréamont’s Song of Maldoror (and not unlike Stevens’s eccentric measures), Ashbery’s poem is perverse in its stubborn refusal to move on, refusal to construct a narrative.32 A poem which relies on perfect symmetry and insists on each line having equal weight can hardly sustain a coherent narrative. The poem refuses to be paraphrased and its selfreferential quality is the only element that tells a sustained story. Again, repetition which, in the case of a pantoum, produces the poem, marks a moment of self-referentiality. Repetition highlights the constructed nature of the poem and at the same time highlights our act of reading by making us reconsider each of the repeated elements. (In my own reading, in which I tried to highlight the more explicit moments of this self-referentiality, I have myself undoubtedly constructed a “story” much more coherent than that the poem is willing to tell. By attempting to construct a definition (of a pantoum) in the form of a narrative and using the poem as “proof,” I am guilty of having joined in the “research” of the poem’s beginning.) The poem’s emerging into the open coincides with the re-emergence of the theme of “commonalty” from section one. In this way the last section circles back to the first not only by providing doubles for the, yet unrepeated, lines of the first stanza in the last stanza, but also by echoing some of the earlier thematic clusters. Making use of the poem’s momentum as it takes us back to the beginning, I will now also return to the poem’s beginning and its mysterious title. As I have suggested, the poetic genre associated with Lautréamont seems to derive its strength (and perversity) from its neglect of formal conventions. Change, discontinuity, ellipsis, juxtaposition are the terms Lautréamont’s readers choose to define his poetic project. Paradoxically, the same terms are applicable to Ashbery’s poem, even though it is highly structured and strictly conventional in its form. In fact, it is precisely the unyielding order of the poem’s repetitions and the tightness of its form that releases the poem’s meanings. There is an element of surprise in Ashbery’s engagement with the rigidity of classical forms, such as pantoums, sestinas or vilanelles, which makes it strangely similar to his early experiments in The Tennis Court Oath, and the surreal experiments with the unconscious mind. The game of “male and female” Pollock played with Lee Krasner, the game of cadavre exquis, the novel Ashbery wrote during a long car drive alternating sentences with James Schuyler34, Kline’s blown-up doodles, Pollock’s semi-accidental splashes of paint: what these experiments have in common is the desire to relinquish control over the creative act in order to arrive at something unplanned (by creating a deux, by exploiting the accidental, etc.) Writers explored the unconscious thought associations through automatic writing. The tight forms similarly allow Ashbery to

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“uncover unexpected things,” “get directly into one’s less conscious mind” (Ashbery, quoted in Conte, 168). In “Hotel Laureamont,” the poem’s concern with “coming into the open” is then a direct reaction to the limits imposed by its genre and contingent upon those very restraints. The pantoum writer’s burdens are the already-made formal “choices” he has to work with, the poet’s limitation the rigidity of form imposed on poetic materials, the closure of a tight structure which has to be undone from within to yield meanings. It is not, however, just the poet’s ingenuity (his “feats of the imagination”), but also the form itself, “[s]teeped in the nostalgia of a collective past” (SP, 77), that puts the poem in motion. The recognition of the “commonalty” is made possible through the recycling of an old form which carries echoes of other voices. The internal repetitions which construct the form itself allow the poem’s voice(s) to be echoed and extended in turn. “Light Turnouts,” a moving invocation which opens Hotel Lautréamont, suggests just this kind of powerful presence of another voice behind, or within the poem’s lines:

Dear ghost, what shelter in the noonday crowd? I’m going to write an hour, then read what someone else has written. You’ve no mansion for this to happen in. But your adventures are like safe houses, your knowing where to stop an adventure of another order, like seizing the weather. We too are embroiled in this scene of happening, and when we say the same phrase together “We used to have one of those,” it matters like a shot in the dark. One of us stays behind. One of us advances on the bridge as on a carpet. Life—it’s marvelous— follows and falls behind. (HL, 4) A beginning of a new book of poems and an elegy, the poem is a moving tribute to a voice that can no longer “say the same phrase together” with you and yet can be heard. “The ghost” of this poem seems to have arrived at his or her “shelter,” unlike the poem’s speaker who is still “embroiled in this scene of happening,” still part of “the noonday crowd.” The awareness of time and activity are like a stay against confusion, a “shelter” at the moment of loss. The daily activities—“it’s marvelous”—go on:

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I’m going to write an hour, then read what someone else has written. Writing and reading happen together, so that we always “hear voices” and voice others as we speak. An intense need to repeat, to hold still seems to inform this poem as it knows that, like “life [that] follows and falls behind,” it needs to allow the separation from the absence it addresses. Speaking for someone is a poor substitute for the presence of another’s voice—it only makes us more painfully aware that what we say for them is ours. Meaning has to hinge on the very distance between the speaker and the addressee; the address staged in Ashbery’s poem depends on that necessary duality. To make sense, “speaking together” (as opposed to speaking in place of someone else) or dialogue (also such as informs allusion and quotation) cannot be a speaking in unison: to try to “speak the same phrase together” would be meaningless or, at best, missing the point. “You’ve no mansion for this to happen in”: echoing Emily Dickinson’s “safe houses,” the poem stages a conversation with its (and our) ghosts. The title poem of this book, “Hotel Lautréamont,” is just such a fictional mansion for (Lautréamont’s and) others’ adventures to happen in. It is a place where we can hear another’s voice. Repetition highlights ambiguities inherent in language itself. Ashbery discusses the nature of such ambiguity in his commentary on Raymond Roussel: Sometimes he would take a phrase containing two words, each of which had a double meaning, and use the least likely meanings as the basis of a story…. Elsewhere he would transform a common phrase, a book title, or a line of poetry into a series of words with similar sounds. A line of Victor Hugo, “Un vase tout rempli du vin de l’espérance” was denatured by Roussel into “sept houx rampe lit Vesper,” which he developed into a tale of Handel using seven bunches of holly tied with different colored ribbons to compose, on a banister, the principal theme of his oratorio Vesper. Just as the mechanical task of finding a rhyme sometimes inspires a poet to write a great line, Roussel’s “rimes de faits” (rhymes for events) helped him to utilize his unconscious mind. Michel Leiris says, “Roussel here rediscovered one of the most ancient and widely used patterns of the human mind: the formation of myths starting from words. That is (as though he had decided to illustrate Max Müller’s s theory that myths were born out of a sort of ‘disease of language’), transposition of what was at first a simple fact of language into dramatic action.” Elsewhere he suggests that these childish devices led Roussel back to a common source of mythology or collective unconscious.34 Language is produced by all society: Ashbery’s commentary on Roussel’s experiments suggests that the power of language to create its own meanings, as well as the ambiguities and surprises it has in store can be traced to the very “collective” nature of linguistic

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creation. Roussel’s mechanical doubling of phrases or sounds, or “the mechanical task of finding a rhyme” are thus a way of exploring these common sources which lay beneath the calcified linguistic structures. The usefulness of such experiments lies in their power to defamiliarize, deterritorialize or “denature” what has been familiar and natural thus making it meaningful again. The “unfamiliar stereotype” repeats the same words but endows them with new meanings. Repetition engenders sense which may otherwise be inaccessible to the speaker. The example Ashbery chooses to demonstrate the generative power of Roussel’s “denatured” phrases is very telling: for Roussel to develop a tale of the origins (of a musician’s work) with sounds borrowed from words (of another writer) is a particularly sharp instance of origins played out by mechanical iteration. In “Hotel Lautréamont,” as in “Self-Portrait,” repetition is both a limitation and a source of surprise. The more exact the repetition, the more powerfully it demonstrates that meanings will not be held intact. As it proves the failure of mimetic representation, repetition is simultaneously celebrated for its power to extend, to make new meanings. The surprising turns repetition takes subvert the logic of linearity and progression, “derail” the poem’s argument in rich and unpredictable ways, so that what gets “achieved” is never, and more than, “what the artist planned.” It is the very failure of repetition to enact the return of the same that makes it meaningful: meanings reside in the difference repetition makes.

Notes

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION 1. Such characterization of repetition underlies also a number of more complex accounts of the structures of language, as in, for example, “The patterning of repetitions and contrasts is no less than a definition of structure itself”: this is a definition of language based on the assumption that repetition is opposed to difference. Hymes (1981) quoted in Deborah Tannen, Talking Voices. Repetition, Dialogue and Imagery in Conversational Discourse, Cambridge University Press, 1989. 2. Stephen F.Fogle, “Repetition, “The Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms, ed. Alex Preminger, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1996, 228–230. 3. J.Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1982, 2. Subsequently quoted as “Miller, FR.” 4. Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 1982, 260–8. 5. Steven Connor, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text, Blackwell Publishers, New York, 1988, 4–5. 6. Charles Hartman, Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1980, 15 and 61–81. 7. Deborah Tannen, Talking Voices. Repetition, Dialogue and Imagery in Conversation al Discourse, Cambridge University Press, 1989. In his commentary on Jacques Derrida (one of the “theorists” of repetition I address below), John Caputo makes the distinction between “poetic” and “rabbinical” repetitions: “poetic” repetition produces; “rabbinical,” preserves. Jacques Derrida develops the distinction between the rabbi and the poet in his commentary on Edmond Jabès, where the former is the guardian of the law, the latter an outlaw, the former wants to preserve the law that the latter questions. (See: Derrida, “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book” in Writing and Difference, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1978, 67.”And that is the only sense of ‘interpretation’ [Derrida] embraces,” Caputo comments, “to interpret is to repeat, and to repeat is to make and remake.” (John Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indainapolis, 1987, 116–117 and 142.) 8. Barbara Johnson, “Strange Fits: Poe and Wordsworth on the Nature of Poetic Language, in A World of Difference, Johns Hopkins UP, 1989, 89–99. 9. It is Harold Bloom who makes the strongest argument for Whitman and Stevens as representing Ashbery’s dual parentage. Positioning Ashbery in the mainstream of the “major American tradition that began in Emerson,” Bloom argues: “[e]ven as his poetic father is Stevens, Ashbery’s largest ancestor is Whitman, and it is the Whitmanian strain in Stevens that found Ashbery.” Harold Bloom, “Introduction,” John Ashbery, Harold Bloom ed, Chelsea House, New York, 1985, 7.

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10. Susan Schultz, “Introduction” to The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry, ed. Susan Schultz, The University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa and London, 1955, 2. 11. Bloom’s criticism of Ashbery’s Tennis Court Oath is an example of the relentlessness with which the “genealogical” model excises all exceptions to the rule it has itself established. 12. B.J.Leggett’s definition and application of the intertextual method of reading demonstrates its advantages. Leggett reads Nietzsche with Stevens not as source study or an exercise in tracing genealogy, but as intertext, acknowledging that both sides of this pairing—Stevens and Nietzsche—cannot be fixed or used consistently and that they become constructed as the effect of the intertextual reading. See: B.J.Leggett, Early Stevens. The Nietzschean Intertext. Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1992.

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 1. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling. Repetition (Kierkegaard’s Writing, 6), edited and translated by Howard V.Hong and Edna H.Hong, Princeton University Press, 1983, 131. (Subsequently quoted as “Kierkegaard, R.”) 2. Were we to adopt modern psychoanalytic terms to Kierkegaard’s venture in “Experimental Psychology,” we could speak here of a veritable compulsion to repeat: below I discuss a failed or destructive mode of repetition described by Freud. 3. Markley, Robert and Schleifer, Ronald, “Editors Introduction” in Kierkegaard and Literature: Irony, Repetition and Criticism. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1984, 13. (Subsequently quoted as “Schleifer and Markley”) 4. A number of repetitions and references to repetition underlie, complicate and often subvert the apparently straightforward commentary: Kierkegaard’s writing is thoroughly infected with the workings of repetition. Repetition rehearses its topic in a variety of discourses, shifting from anecdote to the exposition of a philosophical position, from philosophical tradition to narrative. The objective distance proper to philosophical inquiry often imperceptibly gives way to a strange urgency or even passion, later to become subverted in a surprisingly humorous or ironic stance. This mixing of tone, genre and convention complicates our reading of the text which refuses to be approached with a single reading method and refuses to be placed in a single context. 5. Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1980, 154. (Subsequently quoted as “Descombes.”) 6. Jacques Derrida, “Signature, Event, Context,” Limited Inc, Northwestern UP, Evanston, Illinois, 1988. (Subsequently quoted as “Derrida, SEC.”) 7. Derrida develops this point in “Limited Inc”: “For the structure of iteration (…) implies both identity and difference. Iteration in its “purest” form—and it is always impure—contains in itself the discrepancy of a difference that constitutes it as iteration.” (Jacques Derrida, “Limited Inc,” Glyph 2, 1977, 190.) 8. Kierkegaard performs a “citational graft” in the second part of repetition, where the story of Constantin and the young man changes authorship; in part two, the story “belongs” to the young man and, consequently, acquires an entirely new significance. What is more, by being grafted into another chain, the sign reveals new possibilities. This is what Deleuze calls repetition within the singular, which I discuss below. 9. In Deleuze’s words, “the abstract does not explain, but must itself be explained; and the aim is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced (creativeness)”; and: “[m]ovement always happens behind the thinkers back, or in the moment when he blinks”: the process of arriving at something new cannot be willfully performed, the new thought cannot be arrived at through speculation or questioning of one’s own premises (by “going over the question”). (Gilles Deleuze and

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Claire Parnet, Dialogues, Columbia University Press, New York, 1987, 1. (Subsequently quoted as “Deleuze and Parnet.”) Obviously, such is the function of the very digression I’m addressing here, which produces new meanings not by continuing, but rather by departing from the main line of argument, not by “going over the question” but by digressing from it. 10. B.J.Leggett comments on a similar passage in Nietzsche: “[I]n ‘Philosophy during the Tragic Age of the Greeks,’ Nietzsche adapts it [the anecdote] to philosophical writing: ‘It is possible to shape the picture of a man out of three anecdotes. I endeavor to bring into relief three anecdotes out of every system and abandon the remainder.’ Writing of this passage Gilles Deleuze states, ‘The anecdote is to life what the aphorism is to thought: something to interpret’ ([Nietzsche and Philosophy], 110), and it is this emphasis on interpretation…that makes the anecdote, like the aphorism, the ideal form for texts that proclaim the necessity of interpretation but also render it problematical” (Leggett, 207) 11. Michel Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum,” in Language, Conter-Memory, Practice, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1977, 186. 12. Interestingly, when defining his writing/thinking style, characterized by similar transgressions of genre, Jacques Derrida also refers to farce, suggesting it provides an adequate metaphor for such mixing of generic conventions: “I think that a text like Glas is neither philosophic nor poetic. It circulates between those two genres, trying meanwhile to produce another text which would be of another genre or without a genre. On the other hand, if one insists on defining genres at all costs, one could refer historically to Menippean satire, to “anatomy”…or to something like philosophic parody where all genres—poetry, philosophy, theater, et cetera—are summoned up at once. Thus, if there is a genre, if it is absolutely necessary for there to be a genre in which to place the likes of Glas, then I think it is something like farce or Menippean satire, that is a graft of several genres.” (Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other, University of Nebraska Press, 1988, 140–1) 13. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, Columbia University Press, New York, 1994, 13. (Subsequently quoted as “Deleuze, DR.”) 14. “This is the apparent paradox of festivals: they repeat an ‘unrepeatable.’ They do not add a second and a third time to the first, but carry the first time to the ‘nth’ power. With respect to this power repetition interiorizes and thereby reverses itself “as Péguy says, it is not Federation Day which commemorates or represents the fall of the Bastille, but the fall of the Bastille which celebrates and repeats in advance all the federation days” (Deleuze, DR, 1). 15. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, Columbia UP, New York, 1990, 261–2. (Subsequently quoted as “Deleuze, LS.”) 16. Miller quotes Coleridge’s theory of organic unity (and the notion of repetition or copy it involves) as an example of such a theologically grounded model. Barbara Johnson, whose “Strange Fits” I discuss below, makes a similar case for Wordsworth. This model is most fully examined by Mircea Eliade in The Myth of Eternal Return, Princeton UP, 1971. 17. Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to the Theories of the Contemporary, Blackwell Publishers, Cambridge, 1992, 150–1. (Subsequently quoted as “Connor, PC.”) 18. Bakhtin’s critique of the “monologism of Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology of the Spirit’” may provide an illuminating gloss here. Monologue, Bakhtin argues, is characteristic of the scientific discourse, which speaks in a (single) voice of authority and which addresses inanimate objects, rather than living, changing subjects: “The exact sciences constitute a monologic form of knowledge: the intellect contemplates a thing and expounds upon it. There is only one subject here—cognizing (contemplating) and speaking (expounding). In opposition to the subject there is only a voiceless thing. Any object of knowledge (including man) can be perceived and cognized as a thing. But a subject as such cannot be perceived and studied as a thing, for as a subject it cannot, while remaining a subject, become voiceless, and, consequently, cognition of it can only be dialogic…. The place of philosophy. It begins where precise science ends and a different science begins. It can be

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defined as metalanguage of all sciences (and of all kinds of cognition and consciousness).” (Mikhail Bakhtin, “Methodology for the Human Sciences,” in Speech Genres and Other Esssays, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1986, 161. (Subsequently quoted as “Bakhtin.”)) 19. Obviously, the characteristic proliferation of various modifications and clauses in legal systems is proof that even written law is subject to interpretation and can repeatedly reveal ambiguities caused precisely by its failure to repeat. 20. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, Hill and Wang, New York, 1975, 40–41. One may be tempted here to oppose the “erotic” to the “epitaphic.” Debra Fried describes the deadly power of repetition in epitaphs, finding similar effects in repetitions produced by poetic refrains. (See: Debra Fried, “Repetition, Refrain and Epitaph,” ELH, Summer 1986, 615–632.) 21. In Deleuze’s formulation, repetition is opposed to “generality” and “the law.” Repetition opposes the law (scientific, natural or moral law) as it is impossible for the pure subjects of law—particulars: “[i]t condemns them to change.” “In every respect, repetition is a transgression. It puts law into question, it denounces its nominal or general character in favour of a more profound and more artistic reality” (Deleuze, DR, 2–3). 22. Just as the term “repetition” is hardly a stable category, so obviously the concepts of “memory” and “habit” are not unified terms. Their range of uses is not only not uniform, but often contradictory. In Kierkegaard’s and Deleuze’s use of the term, memory implies a tendency toward stasis and fixity. Freud assigns this function to “remembrance,” while “memory” designates a way of overcoming the passive effects of remembrance. 23. Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” The Freud Reader, edited by Peter Gay, Vintage, London, 1995, 594–625. 24. Freud’s model of repetition compulsion copies, almost exactly, the Kierkegaardiam model of failed repetition: in both, the undesirable (compulsive, mechanical) repetitions proliferate (the “young man” keeps reciting the poem, the child keeps throwing the toy, the widow keeps losing her husbands) in such a way that the original impulse, original motivation disappears (the “love” which triggered the recitation, the trauma which provoked repeated enactments of the loss); the mechanical proliferate in place of the real. In this context, Kierkegaard’s elusive subtitle to Repetition: “an Essay in Experimental Psychology” acquires new significance. 25. Foucault’s formulation of the problem is strikingly similar: “The philosophy of representation—of the original, the first time, resemblance, imitation, faithfulness—is dissolving; and the arrow of the simulacrum released by the Epicureans is headed in our direction”: “this series of liberated simulacrum is activated, or mimes itself, on two privileged stages: that of psychoanalysis, which should eventually be understood as a metaphysical practice since it concerns itself with phantasms; and that of the theater, which is multiplied, polyscenic, simultaneous, broken into separate scenes that refer to each other, and where we encounter, without any trace of representation (copying or imitating), the dance of masks, the cries of bodies, and the gesturing of hands and fingers.” (Foucault, 171– 2) 26. Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Ed. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, David M. Halperin. Routlege, New York, London, 1993. 27. The voice may be perceived as a product of the text’s mechanics, rather than its “author.” To use Schleifer and Markley’s formulation, the author tries “to construct an ironic identity out of the fictions of the actors multiple roles” (Schleifer and Markley, 9). In Kierkegaard’s words, the ironist,” poetically produces himself as well as his environment with the greatest poetical license… Life is for him a drama, and what engrosses him is the ingenious unfolding of this drama. He is himself a spectator even when performing some act. He renders his ego infinite, volatizes it metaphysically and aesthetically.” Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, Harper and Row, New York, 1966, 300–1.

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28. The context of the two authors reading each other and constructing each other for the sake of their reader(s) brackets the only glimpse Repetition allows of the “real” or “meaningful” repetition. It is the young man who claims to have succeeded in performing a repetition. Needless to say, his claim lacks sufficient “authority.” It is almost superfluous for Constantin to remind us (as he does in his concluding remarks) that the young man is, after all, Constantin’s own fictional product. 29. Bakhtin describes the process whereby another’s voice—originally in a dialogic relation with ours—becomes “assimilated: “Others’ words become anonymous and are assimilated (in re-worked form of course); consciousness is monologized. Primary dialogic relations to others’ words are also obliterated—they are, as it were, taken in, absorbed into assimilated others’ words (passing through the stage of “one’s own/others’ words). Creative consciousness, when monologized, is supplemented by anonymous authors. This process of monologization is very important. Then this monologized consciousness enters as one single whole into a new dialogue (with the new external voices of others).” (Bakhtin, 163) 30. Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World, Routlege, London and New York, 1990, 162.

In his commentary on Bakhtin, Michael Holquist observes: “Point of view is often taken to be a merely ‘characterological’ or ‘psychological’ category. In other words, point of view is frequently taken to be a Viewpoint’ whose fixity serves to define a character associated with it. As such it is a static category, and therefore one that dialogism will avoid (dialogism abhors stasis). Bakhtin is thus careful to observe ‘the fundamental distinction between character and person.’” (Holquist, 162) 31. Gertrude Stein, “Portraits and Repetition,” Lectures in America, Beacon Press, 1957, 165– 220. (Subsequently quoted as “Stein, PR.”) 32. “Emphasis” is used here in the sense of “the variable quality” or “slant” or “sense” (as in a “different emphasis”) rather than “stress,” “prominence” or “importance.” Stein’s terminology in “portraits and Repetition” may be somewhat confusing in the context of the other theorists of repetition I quote. Stein stays with the term “repetition” to define what Kierkegaard, Deleuze and others call a failed, destructive or meaningless repetition (at the same time that, as I show later in this chapter, her definition of the effects of this kind of repetition runs parallel to the definitions of those other readers). Consequently, what the other readers call the “true” or “constructive” repetition, Stein defines in “Portraits” as not containing any element of repetition (since for her repetition is no more than a return to the same). Her use of the term “repetition” is somewhat less paradoxical in “The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans” I also address. 33. Gertrude Stein, “The Gradual Making of the Making of Americans,” Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, Vintage, New York, 1962, 243. (Subsequently quoted as “Stein, GMMA.”) The Making of Americans itself is a project concerned with a type of repetition. As Stein describes it, the story of “being an American” she wants to tell is a story of “[t]he old people in a new world, the new people made out of the old…” The question she must therefore pose is how much gets carried from the old to the new: how much does one consciously bear with him or her and how much is just passive memory. 34. This notion of movement “lively enough” may be usefully glossed with Kierkegaard’s and Deleuze’s concept of “real” movement which they oppose to the superficial movement effected by Hegelian mediation.

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35. Stein sees the phenomenon of such “lively” movement as the essential quality of the American character. She often refers to the American ethos of movement, change: “The American thing is the vitality of movement…” (Stein, PR, 173) and, “We…have not lived in remembering, we have living in moving being necessarily so intense that existing is indeed something, is indeed that thing that we are doing.”(Stein, PR, 182) Interestingly, the quality of movement and change is what also fascinates Deleuze in his interpretation of American literary history (cf. Deleuze and Parnet). 36. Randa Dubnick, The Structure of Obscurity: Gertrude Stein, Language and Cubism, University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 1984, 24. 37. To demonstrate internal difference “[a] dynamic space must be defined from the point of view of an observer tied to that space, not from an external position.” (Deleuze, DR, 26) 38. Bruce Kawin, Telling it Again and Again: Repetition in Literature and Film, University Press of Colorado, 1989, 125–6. 39. Lucien Dällenbach, The Mirror in the Text, Polity Press, 1989, 11. (Subsequently quoted as “Dällenbach.”) 40. We can easily discern a Kierkegaardian paradigm here of the narrators double performing the task the narrator only speculates about, a situation where the two “are separated as potential is from action, the two authors separated as theory is from practice.” 41. Dällenbach deals with a term which has been coined by a particular writer at a particular moment in literary history and thus has the advantage of being able to posit something like a beginning or an “original” which has then become modified. (And even if—as Dällenbach is well aware—the device has been employed in literature well before Gide’s “charter,” for example in Hamlet’s “play within a play,” quoted by Gide himself, still, the term itself has a clear “origin.” 42. Edward Said,. Literature of Fact, Columbia University Press, New York, 1976, 148. 43. Paul de Man, “Review of Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of the Contemporary, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1983, 272.

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO 1. James E.Miller Jr. finds in Leaves of Grass the roots of American epic (The American Quest for a Supreme Fiction: Walt Whitman’s Legacy in the Personal Epic, University of Chicago Press, 1979); elsewhere, he observes that “the new American genre, the personal or lyricepic form” is fit “for the new era and the new country” (“Whitman’s Leaves and the American ‘Lyric-Epic,’” in Neil Fraistat ed., Poems in Their Place: The Intertextuality and Order of Poetic Collections, University of North Carolina Press, 1987). Lawrence Buell, for whom Whitman is “the recognized poet of democracy,” sees Whitman’s catalogue rhetoric as “an inherently ‘democratic’ technique” (Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1973, 167). Edwin Fussell equates Whitman’s “constitutive metaphor” with America (Lucifer in Harness: American Meter, Metaphor, and Diction, Princeton University Press, 1973, 49.) 2. Denis Donoghue, Reading America, Alfred A.Knopf, New York, 1987, 68. 3. Paul Bové, Destructive Poetics: Heidegger and Modern American Poetry, Columbia University Press, New York, 1980, 134–5. 4. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of Eternal Return, Princeton UP, 1971. Preface, xiii and pages 4–5. 5. Wai Chee Dimock, “Whitman, Syntax and Political Theory,” in Breaking Bounds. Whitman and American Cultural Studies. Ed. Betsy Erkkila and Jay Grossman, Oxford University Press, New York, 1996, 62–79).

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6. Gilles Deleuze, “Language: Major and Minor,” in The Deleuze Reader, ed. Constantin V.Boundas, Columbia University Press, 1993, 145. Later I return to Deleuze’s concept of “minor” literatures (opposed to the “major” language). 7. Mutlu Konuk Blasing, American Poetry: the Rhetoric of Its Forms, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1987, 119. 8. Walt Whitman, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan, The Library of America, New York, 1982, 138. (Subsequently referred to as “PP.”) Here and in the case of most of the poems I read, I use the first published version of the poem (often from the 1855 edition), unless I explicitly address the changes a poem has undergone as it was revised for a new edition. 9. Buell argues that Whitman’s poem is “built around two quietly elaborated progressions in the imagery. The first lines (lines 4–11 of the 1855 edition) suggest seasonal advance and a corresponding growth of the boy. (…) The second movement (lines 12–30) is an expansion outward in space….” The pattern described by Buell is clearly present, in this and other Whitman’s catalogues, which often suggest a more or less explicit relationship between the elements listed. Buell’s interpretation, however, ultimately aims to prove that an underlying unity and cohesion informs the structure of the catalogues (I address this argument later in this chapter). 10. The definition of identity Whitman proposes here could be defined, in more contemporary terms, as a “performative identity.” Indeed, in his conception of the origin of the self, Whitman seems a precursor to Judith Butler’s critique of essentialism. “The repetition, and the failure to repeat,” says Butler, “produce a string of performances that constitute and contest the coherence of [the] ‘I.’” (“Imitation…,” 311) Similarly for Whitman, the repeated performative acts constitute (and contest) individual identity. 11. Actually Kierkegaard also appeals to the figure of a child, to denote the world of childhood innocence, a world which exists prior to adult categorizations, prior to the recognition of the normative limitations: “In the days of childhood, we had such enormous categories that they now almost make us dizzy, we clipped out of a piece of paper a man and a woman who were man and woman in general in a more rigorous sense than Adam and Eve were.” (Kierkegaard, R, 158) 12. Arguably, the opposite is also true. The child is like us, the readers. The process of its growth is the process of reading, the world is its text. 13. The Bible is the obvious model here; another parallel often mentioned is that of public speaking, oratory. Those are, however, prose models, and as such themselves do not help us define Whitman’s poetics. (See Carol Hollis’ insightful commentary on the uses Whitman finds for oratory and the limitations to and transformations of the form manifest in Leaves of Grass. (C. Carol Hollis, Language and Style in “Leaves of Grass,” Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1983, 1–29.)) 14. Harvey Gross, Sound and Form in Modern Poetry, The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1965, 87. 15. James Perrin Warren, “‘The Free Growth Of Metrical Laws’: Syntactic Parallelism in ‘Song of Myself,’” Style, Vol. 18, No. 1, Winter 1984, 27–42. 16. Warren comments on the function of the line break, but only insofar as it contributes to the rhythmic complexity of Whitman’s lines. He experiments with breaking Whitman’s long lines into shorter units and demonstrates that, as a result, the lines loose much of their dynamic rhythmic quality. An equally useful exercise would have been provided by writing Whitman’s lines out as prose. For Warren’s analysis leaves the question of the poetic unresolved; since syntactic parallelism is also a prose tool, it can hardly be used to isolate the poetic uses of language. 17. William Carlos Williams “An Essay on Leaves of Grass” in Whitman, A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Roy Harvey Pearce, Englewood Cliffs, 1962, 150.

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18. David S.Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1995, 325. 19. Buell himself admits that “for the sake of economy on must stress the second, unifying feature of the catalogue, its total shape, at the expense of image-byimage progressions…” Buell, 173. 20. Constantin Boundas, “Editor’s Introduction,” The Deleuze Reader, Columbia University Press, New York, 1993, 5. 21. Joseph M.Conte, Unending Design. The Forms of Postmodern Poetry, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1991, 98. 22. David Reynolds points out that “Whitman brought attention to the dual functions—private and public—of his “I.” In an 1856 self-review in the Daily Times he noted that his poetry was ‘an assertion of a two-fold individuality for the author: of himself personally, and of himself nationally.’” (Reynolds, 324) 23. In fact, as readers of Stein know, inserting punctuation into (or simply making pauses in reading) her text makes the text infinitely easier to follow. The placing of the punctuation is obviously entirely arbitrary and the meaning of the “punctuated” passage changes once we move the punctuation marks around (or, simply, the meaning of the passage depends on where we decide to pause for breath). Breaking Stein’s text up is an exercise in reducing the ambiguity and a reductive exercise at that. The “meaning” of a Stein sentence can be thought of as a collage of all possible variations created by (the absent) punctuation. 24. Bob Perelman, “Parataxis and Narrative: The New Sentence in Theory and Practice,” The Marginalization of Poetry, Princeton University Press, 1996. 59–79. 25. Were we to compare repetitions in Whitman’s work to those in Browning, or Tennyson—his contemporaries—the difference would be striking. As in traditional ballads, repetitions performed by the Victorian poets are akin to refrain and usually intrude upon a narrative. Yet if such repeated interruptions arrest the flow of the narrative, they do not constitute the structuring principle of the verse. It is the narrative continuity that gives shape to the poem. In Whitman, on the other hand, repetitions are arbitrary, unpredictable, irregular, unlike those of refrain, which forms a predictable pattern (the notion of “variations” only confirms that rule: in Whitman, we could not speak of variations, as there is no rule). And in Whitman, the repetitions are the poem’s organizing structure. Thus, if we consider the historical context, Whitman’s repetitions are indeed revolutionary—both in their form and in their significance. 26. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham: Duke UP, 1991, 26 (quoted in Perelman, op cit.) 27. The Jameson-Perelman debate replays the Feidelson-Buell debate on the same topic. 28. As a matter of fact, the passage confronts two of the poem’s constitutive metaphors: the metaphor of the grass and the familiar metaphor of the child. We may, of course, read “the child” as “innocence,” in the Romantic tradition of Wordsworth and Blake, or as the figure of the poet as a child, but at the same time, it is possible to map this child onto the child from “There was a child went forth every day,” the grass passage becoming something like a close-up of one of the moments in the process of the child’s growth. “The early lilacs became part of this child,/And grass, and white and red morningglories…”: the grass is one of the objects of the child’s becoming at the same time as it is the subject of his question. 29. Quoted in in Edwin Haviland Miller, Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself: A Mosaic of Interpretations, 1989, 101. Miller’s book gives the most thorough account of the various readings of the grass passage up to that date. 30. Or, as Wallace Stevens suggests in “Questions are Remarks,” his variation on Whitman’s grass passage, the child’s question contains the answer: “His question is complete.” (Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems, Vintage Books, New York, 1982,462.) 31. The translators of Dialogues observe that in “Deleuzian pluralism,” “there is no hierarchy of root, trunk and branch, but a multiplicity of interconnected shoots going off in all

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directions.” (Hugh Tomlison and Barbara Habberjam, “Translators Introduction,” Dialogues, xi) 32. Deleuze defines the task of philosophy in similar terms of “becoming-other than itself.” Invading the minds of the sleepers, becoming the mourning widow and at the same time the shroud that envelopes her dead husband (“I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there”)—the speaker’s identity in Whitman’s poem, very much like the child’s, is contingent upon the objects he “becomes.” 33. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London, 1987, 233. 34. “Walt Whitman” from Leaves of Grass is “the friendly and flowing savage”: the “friendliness” makes for a “flowing” persona, an identity in flux; the identity is “savage” because uncontained, contingent upon the moment, contingent upon the elements which constitute it. 35. Interestingly, there is a passage in Leaves of Grass which seems to describe this picture in a passing reference, again reinscribing it into the book’s universe: Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am, Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary, Looks down, is erect, bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest, Looks with its sidecurved head curious what will come next, Both in and outof the game, and watching and wondering at it. PP, 30 Read as a type of “visual analysis” of (Whitman’s own) image, these lines not only play the function of interpretation (thus not “original” but somehow secondary to the “intent” of the author of the picture, secondary Whitman’s own presence as “other”), but become another attempt at tracing a circle around his own representations, contributing to the spiral of selfcommentary. 36. The effects of the revision of “A Song for Occupations” are, one could argue, characteristic of a number, if not all of the poems which first appeared in 1855. The later versions of these poems generally employ much more rigorous punctuation which does away with some of the ambiguity of the originals; they are all titled, divided into sections and organized into books. 37. The 1855 “Song for Occupations,” in tune with the closing lines of “Song of Myself,” deals with the local: the place of the writer, the place of the reader, the place they meet; both 1855 poems (or poem’s sections) are concerned with the particulars of that shared space. Intimacy, closeness are the meeting ground, thus the “yield” and “push,” the implicitly sexual dynamic of the 1855 “Song for Occupations.” In 1892, the poem escapes intimacy altogether and moves into the realm of the plurals, the public realm. It starts as a poem of “engines,” “trades,” “fields,” “developments” and figures a public space. 38. Unless, that is, we decide to read proper names as denoting multilplicities, with Parnet and Deleuze: “The proper name does not designate a subject, but something which happens, at least between two terms which are not subjects, but agents, elements. Proper names are not names of persons, but of peoples and tribes, flora and fauna, military operations or typhoons, collectives, limited companies and production studios.” (Deleuze and Parnet, 51) 39. Whitman’s poem may be looking for a “minor” language, where, “‘Major’ and ‘minor’ do not qualify two different languages but rather two usages or functions of language…the first would be defined precisely by the power [pouvoir] of constants, the second by the power [puissance] of variation.” (Gilles Deleuze, The Deleuze Reader 148, 146) 40. Roger Asselinau suggests that the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass is the one “least organized of any,” showing a disparity between Whitman’s “Preface” (that is, Whitman’s prose) and the poems. In 1855, Asselineau argues, “[t]he poet had not yet completely absorbed the political journalist.” By 1892, arguably, the poetry has “absorbed” the political

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and the journalistic. (Roger Asselineau, The Evolution of Walt Whitman: The Creation of a Personality, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1960, 63.) 41. The story of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is in fact inseparable from Whitman’s relation to Emerson. As has been frequently pointed out, the rhetoric and implications of Whitman’s “Preface” to the first edition of Leaves of Grass, as well as the poems themselves, suggest Whitman filling in the position of the new American poet Emerson sought for and defined in his own work (particularly in “The Poet”). In one of the most famous blunders in American literary history, Whitman then published—without Emerson’s permission—a letter from Emerson greeting the young poet at the beginning of a promising career. Thus using Emerson’s response to the 1855 Leaves for self-promotion, Whitman seemed to be suggesting a type of self-fulfilling prophecy (announcing the advent of the American bard). This move, in addition to promoting his own career, fits into the spiral of reading and interpretation Whitman engages in throughout his poetic life. Considering the “use” he makes of Emerson, we would be justified in reading the first Leaves of Grass as a response to Emerson (Whitman speaking as a reader and giving a poetic interpretation of Emerson’s concepts). 42. “No one will get at my verses who insists upon viewing them as a literary performance, or attempt at such performance, or as aiming toward art or aestheticism” is one of Whitman’s own “stories” which has fuelled readings of this first category. (“A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads,” PP, 656–672) 43. See: Paul Zweig, Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet, Basic Books, New York, 1984, 143. 44. Barbara Johnson’s comment names the difficulty of Whitman’s position. Her article demonstrates that these sets of oppositions cannot be sustained, even if both Poe’s and Wordsworth’s ars poetica rests on the very distinction between the “natural” and “the mechanical.” 45. Note: Jerome Loving, among others, warns: “to attribute…contemporary ideology (either modernism or postmodernism) to Whitman is to remove him from his times” (Jerome Loving, Walt Whitman. The Song of Himself, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1999, 186). Indeed, the concluding passage of “Song of Myself” is by no means a manifestation of 20th century skepticism. 46. “Grace/to be born and live as variously as possible” is a line from Frank O’Hara’s “In Memory of My Feelings,” dedicated to Grace Hartigan, which has been used for an inscription on O’Hara’s grave. 47. As Barthes points out, the myth of the author is “the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the greatest importance to the ‘person’ of the author.” Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image—Music—Text, Hill and Wang, New York, 1978, 143.

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE 1. Steven Shaviro, “That Which Is Always Beginning: Stevens’s Poetry of Affirmation,” PMLA, March 1985, 100:2, 220–233. Similarly, J.Hillis Miller argues that “[a]t the beginning Stevens is as far as he ever goes.” (“Wallace Stevens’s Poetry of Being,” in The Act of the Mind: Essays on the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, eds. Roy Harvey Pearce and J.Hillis Miller, The Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1965, 146.) 2. The concept of memory as defined by Santayana may be a useful gloss here. Stevens’s debt to Santayana has been well noted; here, it will suffice to observe, that in Santayana’s definition, memory is a dynamic process. A “repetition,” rather than “recollection,” memory does not retrieve the past, but rather constructs it. Jerome Griswold points to a convergence

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between Stevens’s work and Santayana’s concept of memory where the remembering mind does not travel (backward) into the past but absorbs the past (which is radically separate) into the present (in a “movement forward,” to use Kierkegaard’s vocabulary). What is more, things remembered (“my souvenirs” as Santayana calls those items from the past) are ultimately a construct; Griswold quotes Santayana:’” When I remember I do not look at my past experience, any more than when I think of a friend’s misfortunes I look at his thoughts. I imagine them; or rather I imagine something of my own manufacture, as if I were writing a novel.’” (Jerome Griswold, “Santayana On Memory and ‘The World as Meditation,’” Wallace Stevens Journal, 3.3/4 (1979):113–16. 3. Wallace Stevens, “The Effects of Analogy,” in The Necessary Angel, Vintage Books, 1951, 117 and 118. (Subsequently quoted as “NA.”) 4. Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens, Alfted A.Knopf, New York, 1972, 463. (I discuss the relation of repetition and movement in more detail below.) 5. Harold Bloom, Wallace Stevens. The Poems of Our Climate. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 375–379. 6. Obviously, misreading, or misprision, to use his own term, plays a crucial role in Bloom’s poetic theory (The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, Oxford University Press, 1973). In the case of “Domination of Black,” the misprision or misreading means a creative employment of a trope, or series of tropes, and is tied up to a source in a binary, where the originary term has to have a correct reading in order to be misread, thus “Sheleyan leaves” are posited as an unambiguous source of reference. Bloom’s reading is enabling, insofar as it broadens the scope of Stevens’s tropes by relating them to Shelley; but it also narrows the scope of signification (including the scope of possible allusion, not to mention intertextuality) by grounding the repetition in an unequivocal originary term and playing it out within a clearly established chronology and hierarchy. 7. The distinction (or even opposition) is a common one. Thus, for example, John Hollander argues that “the matter of poetry is metaphor not pattern,” and that, even if “[s]chemes alienate poetic language from other more frequent modes of discourse, (…) they are not inherently poetical…” John Hollander, Melodious Guile: Fictive Pattern in Poetic Language (Yale UP), 1 and 6. 8. This is Emerson’s circular metaphor from “Experience,” notably expressed also as “a certain uniform tune which the revolving barrel of the music box must play” (Emerson, 290). 9. Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous, Vinatge, New York, 1990, 104–5. (Subsequently quoted as “OR”) 10. Of course the poet who makes it his project to speak the anti-logician, to explore the fluid persona is Whitman. His aim is to speak against rational “certitudes.” Whitman’s Utopian vision is an attack on rationality as much as an attack on the regimes of truth. Stevens work involves experiments with the language of logic, as well as the fluidity of the subman. A number of his poems toy with the method of logical deduction. Here the “other” of the logician is recognized. 11. J.Hills Miller locates Stevens’s “The Man with the Blue Guitar” as the poem which “marks his turning to a new style.” “The finished unity of his early poems,” argues Miller, is in the later poetry “replaced by poems which are open-ended improvisations. Such poems are not a neat enclosure of words forming a complex organic unity. They begin in the middle of a thought, and their ending is arbitrary.” (Miller and Pearce, 147) Michael Beehler demonstrates the ways in which Stevens’s “questioning of signs…becomes more pronounced in the later portion of his poetic career” (Michael Beehler, Stevens, Eliot and the Discourses of Difference, Louisiana University Press, 1987, 41). 12. Thomas Gardner observes how Stevens’s “opennes to forces beyond the poet’s management” is actually the paradoxical benefit of the recognition of the limits of the poet’s language. “Bishop and Ashbery: Two Ways Out of Stevens,” The Wallace Stevens Journal, 19.2 (Fall 1995), 202–5.

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13. Caputo, 12. Repetition which both carries the past with it and creates a new presence is such a pervasive pattern in Stevens’s poetry that one is justified in generalizing from it: “‘The real’ is something ‘invented,’ in Stevens’s peculiar use of the term,” argues Shaviro. “Discovery, invention, and adventure are projective movements that do not create what they find, yet find that which cannot exist without the movement of their projection.” (Shaviro, 223) 14. Deleuze grounds his definition of the two types of repetition on the distinction between Kierkegaard’s repetition, which is a dynamic process, and Hegelian oppositions, which make merely a “commotion,” and eventually lead back to stasis. In “Connoisseur of Chaos” another poem from Parts of a World(1945), Stevens sees “the law of opposites” as fruitless precisely because it arrests motion: “a law of inherent opposites,/Of essential unity, is as pleasant as port.” Not unlike “Of Modern Poetry,” the “Connoisseur of Chaos” calls for a break with the old tradition:

After all the pretty contrast of life and death Proves that these opposite things partake of one, At least that was the theory, when bishops books Resolved the world. We cannot go back to that, (CP, 215) “Resolution” is unavailable, indeed undesirable, as all fixed definitions, fixed signs tend to calcify and crumble. In J.Hillis Miller’s reading, “After the disappearance of the gods the poet finds himself in a place where opposites are simultaneously true. It seems that this situation can be dealt with in poetry only by a succession of wild swings to one extreme or another, giving first one limit of the truth, then the other. To escape such oscillation Stevens must find a way to write poetry which will possess simultaneously both extremes.” Miller describes the movement of Stevens’s poetry (and the movement of thought described by that poetry) as a “rythmic alternation” between the phases of creation and decreation: “This cycle seems to move with a slow and stately turning, like the sequence of the seasons which is so often its image.” In order to escape the impasse of perpetual alternation which always seems to be a step behind what it wants to describe, Stevens speeds up the cycle: “An oscillation fast enough becomes a blur in which opposites are touched simultaneously…” The later poetry of Stevens enacts such movement, becoming “the poetry of flittering metamorphosis.” (Miller and Pearce, 146, 151.) 15. James Longenbach, Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things, Oxford UP, New York, 1991, 215. 16. Among many such readings, particularly interesting are: Alan Firleis’s Wallace Stevens and the Actual World, Princeton UP, 1991; Thomas Grey, The Wallace Stevens Case: Law and the Practice of Poetry, Harvard UP, 1991. Justin Quinn, Gathered Beneath the Storm: Wallace Stevens, Nature and Community, University College Dublin Press, 2003. 17. Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind, Vintage Books, 1972, 206. 18. “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” a poem from the same book (The Auroras of Autumn, 1950) provides a wonderful gloss, speaking of “the man /Of bronze whose mind was made up and who, therefore, died.” (CP, 427) 19. Miller quotes Stevens from the Necessary Angel: ‘“…I am evading a definition. If it is defined it will be fixed and it must not be fixed…. To fix it is to put an end to it’”; Miller comments: “To fix it is to put an end to it, but in poetry it can be caught unfixed. The mobile, flickering poetry of Stevens’s later style, poetry which fears stillness beyond anything…is a revelation of being” (Miller and Pearce, 160).

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20. The development of Stevens’ later poetry (his “late plural”) is visible here in this repetition of the earlier formulation; where earlier the poem moved toward “the absence in reality” to produce its “true appearances,” here—as the repetition suggests—the poem’s movement is confined to language. 21. An interesting gloss may be provided by “Notes” and one of its heroes, St. Jerome:

Jerome begat the tubas and the fire-wind strings, The golden fingers picking dark-blue air: For companies of voices moving there, To find of sound the bleakest ancestor, To find of light a music issuing Whereon it falls in more than sensual mode. (CP, 398) The translator of the Bible into Latin—the maker of the Vulgate—Jerome “seeks” and finds a means of expression which compounds his own language with the voices of the past. In partaking both of the past and the present, in bringing the past into the present, he performs an ideal Kierkegaardian repetition: a music which “issues” into the future yet does not abandon the past, indeed makes the past meaningful again. 22. Or, as Steven Shaviro suggests in his Deleuzian reading of Stevens, “it is not through any mode of negation but through an unlimited power of affirmation that Poetry is a destructive Force. The moments of destruction that are repeated throughout Stevens’s poetry can indeed be read affectively, as evasions or defensive qualifications of the moments of alleged narcissistic exultation that they accompany, even as they can be read cognitively, as the rhetorical limits of the poems’ alleged assertions of presence, authority, closure. But such readings are finally too limiting, too humanistic, remaining within the horizon of the power of the negative, within the totalizing limitations of Western culture that it was Stevens’s fortune and fate to transgress and to exceed.” (Shaviro, 231)

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR 1. “Late Echo,” As We Know, New York, Viking, 1979. Ashbery’s poem is a brilliant echo of Stein’s argument about repetition as the principle of gradual change. 2. Repetition destroys as it creates. As Deleuze formulates it, repetition is “theft and gift”; commenting on repetition figured by Nietzsche as eternal return, Deleuze explains: “it is a vertiginous movement endowed with a force: not the one which causes the return of the Same in general, but one which selects, one which expels as well as creates, destroys as well as produces…” (Deleuze, DR, 8). 3. A later poem, from Hotel Lautréamont, voices a complaint against a “you” (or regrets that the speaker himself) “never had the courage to know nothing and simultaneously/be attentive.” It takes courage to be infinitely attentive and make that an end in itself; it takes courage to resist the closure of “knowledge.” (Fred Moramarco observes that the line carries overtones of Keatsian “negative capability,” where “one is capable of being in uncertainties.” See: Moramarco, “Coming Full Circle. John Ashbery’s Later Poetry,” in The Tribe of John, 38– 59.

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4. Ashbery, John. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Penguin, New York, 1975, 68–83. (Subsequently quoted as “SP”) 5. Ashbery, John. Hotel Lautréamont. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1992, 14–16. (Subsequently quoted as “HL.”) 6. For a discussion of the two types of repetition see Barbara Johnson’s “Strange Fits: Poe and Wordsworth on the Nature of Poetic Language,” where Wordsworth’s fiction of the “natural” repetition of “emotion recollected in tranquility” is juxtaposed with Poe’s model of mechanical iteration. Johnson observes how essential the distinction between the two models is for both poets and demonstrates how difficult it is, at the same time, to sustain that very distinction. (Johnson, 89–99.) J.Hillis Miller makes a similar argument in relation to fiction (FR, 1–21). 7. I will return to this effect in my discussion of the poem as a case of mise-enabyme. 8. John Ashbery, Some Trees, Corinth Books, New York, 1970, 54. (Subsequently quoted as “ST.”) 9. This distance—here figured in terms of space—is also addressed (in this and other of Ashbery’s poems) in relation to time.

Tomorrow is easy, but today is uncharted, Desolate, reluctant as any landscape To yield what are laws of perspective After all only to the painter’s deep Mistrust, a weak instrument though Necessary. (SP, 72) The distancing—cast here in visual and temporal terms, as well as in terms of a distance conditioned by individual subjectivity—is necessary to produce meaning in an otherwise unmarked, empty landscape. The present can be mapped out only from the perspective of the future which will give it a name: “the past.” This distance is necessary for the recognition of the present, just as the mirror is necessary for the recognition of one’s face. Understanding in both cases, has to come from without. 10. Such shifts in scale, very characteristic in Ashbery’s work, not so much make a claim to “universality” (what is true on the level of detail being claimed to be true also on a larger scale), but rather suggest an enlarged duplicate. A useful parallel of this effect may be provided by the working method of Franz Kline, who explored the potential of accident and indeterminacy by producing paintings from blown up (i.e. enlarged with the help of a projector) doodles and scribbles. The working of the unconscious mind was dramatically brought to light and revealed fascinating patterns and regularities; even more surprisingly, Kline’s paintings are almost ascetic in expression (very much unlike Pollock’s excesses, arrived at via a similar procedure: in his early paintings Pollock used his “psychoanalytic” drawings to reach the (Jungian) collective unconscious) and are often said to resemble Chinese caligraphy. 11. What we witness here is the characteristic conflation of roles: the speaker and the listener, the actor and the audience become one (as in Stevens’ audience listening to itself, as in Stein’s portrait-maker who speaks and listens at the same time). Ashbery points to this relation in one of his interviews: “Well, I hear voices… I don’t have any idea of what my own voice is, if indeed I have one, and I’m usually listening rather than talking and what I hear somehow gets written down.” John Koethe, “An Interview with John Ashbery,” SubStance, 37/38, 1983, 184.

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12. In a number of interviews Ashbery comments on this quality of language which communicates in unpredictable, oblique ways, on the “inaccurate ways we present our ideas to other people and yet succeed in doing so despite our sloppiness” (Koethe, 185–6). At the same time this lack of transparency fascinates the poet which is apparent, for example, in his paradoxical praise of Rimbaud: “Only Rimbaud has managed to get beyond the lucidity of the French language, which doesn’t allow you to do much ‘in the shadows’” (Interview by Sue Gangel, San Francisco Review of Books, November 1977). 13. At the same time the poem is driven by the fascination with Parmigianino’s purist project and, as I suggest later, the poem’s critique of the “enchantment of self with self” may be read as a self-critique. 14. Patricia Altenbernd Johnson, “The Speculative Character of Poetry,” CEA Critic, 1986–7, W/S, v.49 (2–4), p.23. 15. In fact there is never a moment which would not admit of the possibility of being “prolonged,” there is no “all” in this poem in which “the ‘all’ tells tersely/Enough how it wasn’t.” 16. Another poem from the same book provides an ironic comment on the very grounds of the critique presented in “Self-Portrait”: “We are fashionably troubled by this new edge of what had seemed finite/Before and now seems infinite though encircled by gradual doubts/Of whatever came over us.” (“Voyage in the Blue,” SP, 26) 17. An interview with John Ashbery, New York Quarterly, 9–12, 1972, 24. 18. In this, Ashbery’s poem parallels “Song of Myself” and its experiments with engaging the reader in an on-going dialogue with the poem’s voice. The ambiguity of Ashbery’s pronouns can be read as his version of address. Both poets point to the dialogical as the necessary condition for the existence of the poem’s voice. 19. If we were to map this poem onto the binary model of repetition it could be read as staging two “readings of the world,” to use Gilles Deleuze’s formulation. (In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze says: “It is a question of two readings of the world in the sense that one asks us to think of difference on the basis of preestablished similitude or identity, while the other invites us on the contrary to think of similitude and even identity as the product of a fundamental disparity…” (Deleuze, LS, 261–2)). 20. “Sequestration” in fact shares a common root with repetition. Sequestration, or seclusion (also “the legal seizure of property for security” and the process which forms a “sequestrum”: a piece of dead bone which has become separated from the surrounding bone) is related to “sequence” (via the Latin “sequi”—to follow)—a repeated series. 21. This could be usefully read as the successive manifestation of Emerson’s metaphor, refigurations of which we have witnessed in Whitman and Stevens. 22. Unlike, say, Emerson’s “Circles” with its argument about the circle as the central figure or an underlying emblem (a stabilizing fiction), Ashbery’s poem constantly reorbits the circular image, never allowing it to rest, never allowing it to assume a central position; it always puts the image to the test of the ever changing contexts; thus the image of the vertigo, such as employed in Emerson’s “Experience.” 23. In that, Ashbery’s use of repetition parallels Stevens’ similar experiments, where the repetitive stagings of the same element in different contexts often involve shifts of scale. See, for example, the image of the eye of the blackbird in “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” where the shift in perspective generates the poem. (Stevens, CP, 92–5) 24. As Deleuze says, “It is in repetition and by repetition that Forgetting becomes a positive power…” DR, 7. 25. Thomas Gardner, Discovering Ourselves in Whitman: The Contemporary American Long Poem University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 1989, 13–14. 26. In their discussions of the “mechanical” and “natural” types of repetition, both Barbara Johnson and Edward Said similarly raise the question of (poetic) origins and generation, filiation, linearity, respectively.

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27. On a certain level, a pantoum is a poem which tells a story about feeding meanings into a pre-existing form, that is, the story of Poe’s “Philosophy of Composition.” And indeed one could easily imagine a pantoum writer’s manual taking the form of Poe’s essay, only in the case of the former the delineation of the scheme of repetitions (rather than the poem’s length) would be the first point on the writer’s agenda. 28. A pantoum is a literal manifestation of Derrida’s claim for the essential iterability of writing. It experiments with writing torn out of its context and arbitrarily recontextualized. Its intention is pure repetition, meant to retrieve the same. Its effect demonstrates that “Iteration in its ‘purest’ form—and it is always impure—contains itself in the discrepancy of a difference that constitutes it as iteration” (Derrida, “Limited Inc,” 190). 29. John Ashbery “In Conversation” with David Herd, P.N. Review, 99, September-October 1996, vol. 21, Number 1, 35. 30. André Breton is the author of the term “mutation perpetuelle” which was subsequently adopted by a number of Lautréamont’s readers. See Peter W. Nesselroth, Lautréamont’s Imagery: A Stylistic Approach, Droz, Geneve, 1969, 20. 31. Gaston Bachelard, Lautréamont, The Pegasus Foundation, Dallas, 1986, 9. 32. At the same time, obviously, some of the snippets the poem is constructed of may well be imagined to have been part of some larger, now irretrievable narrative and the poem constantly refers to narratives. A comment Ashbery made about the art of Joseph Cornell may be a useful gloss here: “Like de Chirico or the French poet and novelist Raymond Roussel with whom he has much in common, Cornell has discovered how to neutralize romanesque content in such a way that it becomes the substance of his art, rather than embelishment: matter and manner fuse to form a new element. Thus we are allowed to keep all stories that art seems to want to cut us from, without giving up the inspiring aestheticism of abstraction.” (John Ashbery, Reported Sightings. Art Chronicles 1957–1987, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1991, 17.) 33. See John Shoptaw, On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery’s Poetry, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1994, 48. 34. John Ashbery, “On Raymond Roussel,” in Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth, University of California Press, 1986, xxiii-xxiv.

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Index

A Ashbery, John: 105–148; repetition, mechanical, 107, 108–109, 133; repetition and authorship, 110–111, 121, 123, 139; repetition and circularity, 106–107, 134; repetition and collectivity (see also r. and polyphony), 110, 121–122, 125, 132–133, 137–139, 141, 143, 145, 147; repetition and difference, 108, 109–110, 113, 115, 117; repetition and movement, 111–112, 129–130; repetition and origin, 110, 120, 139; repetition and proliferation of copies, 112; repetition and self-representation, 109–110, 112, 114–115, 122–123; repetition as citation, 112–113; repetition as mise-en-abyme, 10, 126–128, 135; repetition as recollection, 126; repetition vs. codification (see also r. and closure), 109, 118–120, 124, 130, 141–142 Asselineau, Roger, 160n.40 Austin, John Langshaw, 11–12, 40, 153n.18 B Bachelard, Gaston, 137, 169n.31 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 18, 23, 152n.18, 154nn.29, 30 Barthes, Roland, 17–18, 23, 70–71, 99–100, 131, 153n.20, 161n.47 Baudrillard, Jean, 15 Beehler, Michael, 103, 163n.11 Benjamin, Walter, 15 Bishop, Elizabeth, 97, 163n.12 Blasing, Mutlu Konuk, 39, 42, 157n.7 Bloom Harold, xv–xvi, 35–36, 83–84, 105, 150nn.9, 11, 156n.43, 162nn.5, 6 Bové, Paul, 38, 73, 94, 100, 156n.3 Braque, George, 29, 30 Buell, Lawrence, 44–45, 156n.1, 157n.9, 158n.19, 159n.27 Butler, Judith, 22, 154n.26, 157n.10 C Caputo, John, 6, 16, 91–92, 149n.7, 163n.13

Index

151

Chase, Richard, 57 Chomsky, Noam, 38 Church, Henry, 100, 101 Connor, Steven, xii–xiii, 15, 149n.5, 152n.17 Conte, Joseph M., 48, 145, 158n.21 Cornell, Joseph, 135, 156, 169n.30 Culler, Jonathan, xii, xvi, 41, 149n.4 D Darvin, Charles, 35 Dällenbach, Lucien, 27–33, 126–128, 155n.39, 156n.41 de Man, Paul, 35–36, 156n.43 Deleuze, Gilles: deterritorialization, 15, 139; on Freud’s repetition compulsion, 21; the limits of philosophy, xvii, 18; philosophy and literature, 18–19; “nomadic” multiplicity, 18, 55–56; repetition as difference, xvi–xvii, 1, 12–17, 19; repetition within the singular, 17, 23–24, 26–27, 87–88; theater of repetition, 22, 93 Derrida, Jacques: iterability, 6–8, 11, 39, 168n.28; the limits of philosophy, xvii, philosophy and literature, xvii, repetition and accident, 9–12, 61; repetition as difference, xvi, xvii, 5–8; Descombes, Vincent, 18, 151n.5 Dickinson, Emily, 17, 20, 146 Dimock, Wai Chee, 38, 156n.5, Donoghue, Denis, 37, 156n.2 Dubnick, Randa, 26, 29, 155n.36 Duncan, Robert, 54, 133 E Eliade, Mircea, 38, 152n.16, 156n.4 Eliot, T.S., 20, 37, 51–52, 163n.11 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, xvii, 45, 56, 65–68, 150n.9, 159n.33, 161n.41, 163n.8, 168nn.21, 22 Escher, M.C., 112 F Feidelson, Charles, 45, 159n., 27 Foucault, Michel, 10, 12–15, 41, 47, 56, 131, 151n.11, 153n.25, 169n.34 Freud, Sigmund, 18, 20–21, 99–100, 150n.2, 153nn.22, 23, 24 Fried, Debra, 153n.20 Fussell, Edwin, 52–54, 156n.1 G Gangel, Sue, 167n.12 Gardner, Thomas, 96–97, 133, 163n.12, 168n.25

Index

152

Gide, André, 31–33, 126–127, 156n.41 Grey, Thomas, 164n.16 Griswold, Jerome, 162n.2 Gross, Harvey, 43 Grossman, Jay, 156n.5 H Hartman, Charles, xiii, 49, 82–84, 149n.6 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 16, 92, 152n.18, 155n.32, 163n.14 Heidegger, Martin, 94, 156n.3 Herd, David, 135, 168n.29 Hollander, John, 162n.7 Hollis, C Carol, 157n.13 Holquist, Michael, 154n.30 J Jakobson, Roman, xvi, 29 Jameson, Fredric, 51, 159n.26, 159n.27 Johnson, Barbara, xiv, 69, 109, 150n.7, 174n.16, 161n.44, 166n.6, 168n.26 Johnson, Patricia Altenbernd, 167n.14 K Kawin, Bruce, 30, 155n.38 Kierkegaard, Søren: 13, 17, 100, 123; authorship, 58, 63; philosophy and literature, xvii; repetition and accident, 9–12, 40, 94–95, 113; repetition and polyphony, xvii, 22–24; repetition as difference, xvi, xvii; repetition vs. recollection, 5, 13–14, 77; “writing without authority,” 4, 7, 17–18, 22–24, 60, 90 Kline, Franz, 145, 166n.10 Krasner, Lee, 145 Koethe, John, 132, 167n.11, 167n.12 L Lautreamont, Comte (Isidore Ducasse), 134–137, 144, 146, 169n.30 Lawrence, D.H., 57 Leggett, B.J., 150n.12, 151n.10 Lewis, R.W.B., 38 Longenbach, James, 92, 94, 164n.15 Loving, Jerome, 161n.45 M Marx, Karl, 34–35 Markley, Robert, 4, 22, 150n.3, 154n.27 Miller, Edwin Haviland, 159n.29 Miller, James E. Jr., 156n.1 Miller, J.Hillis, xii, xiv, 13–14, 94, 126, 149n.3, 152n.16, 162n.1, 163n.11, 164n.14 Moramarco, 165n.3,

Index

153

N Nesselroth, Peter W., 136, 169n.30 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 13–14, 19, 92, 131, 150n.12, 151n.10, 165n.2 O O’Hara, Frank, 70, 161n.46 P Parmigianino, 109–128, 137, 167n.13 Parnet, Claire, 18, 19, 23, 27, 47, 55, 57–8, 64, 94, 151n.9, 155n.35, 160n.38 Payne, L.W., 84 Pearce, R.H., 57, 94, 158n.17, 162n.1, 163n.11, 164nn.14, 19 Perelman, Bob, 50–52, 158n.24, 159nn.26, 27 Picasso, Pablo, 26, 29, 30 Poe, Edgar Allan, xi–xii, xiv–xv, 14, 172, 188, Pollock, Jackson, 145, 166 R Repetition: and authorship, xv, 3–4, 7–8, 58, 60, 70–72, 110–111, 121, 123, 139; and circularity, xix, 16, 66–68, 77–79, 106–107, 117, 119, 123–124, 128–129, 130, 134, 142, 144; and collectivity, 88–89, 98, 110, 121–122, 125, 132–133, 137–139, 141, 143, 145, 147; and difference, xii, xvi–xvii, 6, 10, 12, 27, 41, 50, 56, 64, 108–110, 113, 115, 117; and forgetting, 2, 19, 88, 130, 142–143, 168n.24; and genealogy (see also r. and origin), xv, xvi, 34–35, 52–56; and history, 34–36, 37–40; and linearity, 6, 40, 47, 55, 69, 71, 81, 102, 110, 139; and memory, 19–22, 26; and metaphor, xviii, 52–56, 84–85, 86, 119, 125, 128, 130, 131, 134; and mise-en-abyme, 27–33, 126–128, 135; and movement, xvi, xix, 5, 15–16, 25–26, 28, 30, 79–81, 91–92, 95–96, 99, 111–112, 129–130; and narrative, xii, xiii, xvi, 1–4, 13, 41, 43, 110; and origin, xii, xviii, xix, 4, 13, 39–43, 70, 74, 77–79, 81, 101, 110, 120, 139; and parataxis, xvi, 27, 45–47, 50–52, 71, 158n.24; and Platonic “recollection,” 5, 13–16, 25, 77, 83, 91, 126; and polyphony (see also r. and collectivity), 22–24, 56–57; and representation, 74–79; and self-representation, xviii, 109–110, 112, 114–115, 122–123; and/vs. codification, 15–18, 63–64, 71, 97–98, 109, 118–120, 121, 124, 130, 141–142; and/vs. hierarchy, xviii, 4, 18, 39, 40, 43, 50, 56, 71, 159n.31, 162n.6; as a form of allusion, xi, xv, 65–68; internal (within the singular), 17, 23, 24, 26, 27, 87–88; “natural” vs. “linguistic,” 77–79, 97; “natural” vs. “mechanical,” xiv–xv, 68–69, 85–88, 107–109, 133; theater of, 20, 21–24, 90, 92–93, 95 Reynolds, David S. 44, 158nn.18, 22

Index

154

Riddel, Joseph N., 73 Roethke, Theodore, 133 Rousell, Raymond, 17, 147, 169n.32, 169n.34 Q Quinn, Justin, 164n.16 Quinn, Sister Bernetta, 85 S Said, Edward, 34–35, 156n.42, 168n.26 Schleifer, Ronald, 4, 22, 150n.3, 154n.27 Schultz, Susan, xvi, 150n.10 Schuyler, James, 145 Schwartz, Delmore, 91 Shaviro, Steven, 73, 92, 100, 162n.1, 163n.13, 165n.22 Shoptaw, John, 169n.33 Silliman, Ron, 51–52 Simons, Hi, 80, 102 Stein, Gertrude, xii, xvii–xviii, 24–31, 47–50, 73, 92, 106, 108, 155nn.31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 158n.23 Stevens, Wallace: 73–103; 144, 107, 128, 134, 141; repetition, internal, 87–88; repetition, natural vs. linguistic, 77–79, 97; repetition, natural vs. mechanical, 85–88; theater of repetition, 92–93, 95; repetition and analogy, 79; repetition and circularity, 77–79; repetition and codification, 97–98; repetition and collectivity, 88–89, 98; repetition and metaphor, 84–85, 86; repetition and movement, 79–81, 91–92, 95–96, 99; repetition and (desire for) order, 74, 75–79, 88; repetition and origin, 74–75, 77–79, 81, 101; repetition and pattern, 74–75, 77, 83; repetition and representation, 74–79; repetition as destruction, 100 T Tannen, Deborah, xiii, 149n.1, 149n.7 Tennyson, Lord Alfred, 20, 158n.25 V Vasari, Giorgio, 112–113 Vendler, Helen, xvi, 73 Vico, Giambattista, 34–35 W Warren, James Perrin, 43–33, 157n.15, 158n.16 Whitman, Walt: 37–72; 74, 88, 102; and Emerson, 65–68; and Stein, 47–50;

Index

155

repetition and authorship, 58, 60, 70–72; repetition and dialogue, 42–43, 57–58; repetition and history, 37–40; repetition and interpretation, 42; repetition and metaphor, 52–56; repetition and narrative, 41, 43; repetition and origin, xviii, 39–43, 68–69; repetition and parataxis, 45–47, 50–52, 71; repetition and polyphony (see also r. and collectivity), 57–58; repetition as difference, xviii, 41, 50; repetition vs. hierarchy, 39–40, 43, 50, 56, 71; revisions of Leaves of Grass, xviii, 59–65; syntactic parallelism, xviii, 43–44; Williams, William Carlos, 68–69 Williams, William Carlos, 44, 68–69, 158n.17 Wordsworth, William, xiv–xv, 51–52, 150n.8, 152n.16, 159n.28, 161n.44, 166n.6 Y Yeats, William Butler, 4, 83 Z Zweig, Paul, 161n.43