Hi folks: Ben Friedlander recently subscribed to the list but seems to be
experiencing difficulty getting the mailbase to accept his posts: he has
sent me a copy of a reply to the totality thread to forward. --N
Nate & Jane Dorward
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----- Original Message -----
From: "Ben Friedlander" <[log in to unmask]>;
<[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, July 05, 2000 12:37 AM
Subject: Fwd(2): Rejected [non-member submission] Poetics of the Total
Nate:
This message was rejected as coming from a non-member to the list,
though I'm subscribed. I'm not sure what the problem is, or who to
contact. Any suggestion as to what I should do?
Ben F.
***
I'm new to the list and hope it's OK to interject a lengthy comment.
I've been following the discussion of totality with interest, but miss
a more explicit account of what a poetic practice would look like that
took "the totality of relations" as its primary fact. Harold Teichman's
question about Zola and Pynchon (seconded by Peter Riley) suggests that
a writing of totality would have to be encyclopedic. That's a
reasonable assumption, but I'm not at all sure it's correct.
There's an essay by Charles Olson from 1953 (posthumously published)
called "THE AREA, and the DISCIPLINE of, TOTALITY," which posits a
writing as encyclopedic as Zola's or Pynchon's. Here's an excerpt:
My present purpose is to attack estrangement, to
suggest an alternative, to declare another field. I mean,
a distinguishable and definable area of experience which
has to be called totality, I suggest, simply because it
is all of everything there is to know and to feel; and that
to inhabit it and to act from and by it takes a discipline
as describable and as useful as the area itself.
The problem I have with this declaration of "another field" is its
positivism. I don't share Olson's confidence that "everything there is
to know and to feel" can be defined or described. _Indescribability_
would seem to be totality's distinguishing feature. Enlarging the range
of experience that poetry can or should accommodate is one thing;
equating this enlarged domain with "totality" quite another.
For this reason, I find Olson's notion of a "DISCIPLINE" of the total
more useful (poetically speaking) than his call for a total mapping.
(And this is in fact the direction Olson himself moved.) The
encyclopedic poem, if offered as a representation of "everything," can
only be a deluded mimesis (the Zola effect) or a model of awesome
complexity whose accuracy and usefulness are alike unsusceptible of
verification (the Pynchon effect). This is put more harshly than
necessary for the sake of saving words.
All during this discussion I've been thinking by analogy of ecology.
Peter Riley and others too I think have equated totality with world.
There's no reason not to, but I would want to make a distinction
between a writing which takes the world as its subject (Neruda would be
a good example of this), and a writing which takes as its subject the
structure of relations comprising the world (Zukofsky, perhaps). Of
course, Neruda and Zukofsky are both encyclopedic writers, but the
difference between them holds even when we juxtapose Neruda's
_Elemental Odes_ and Zukofsky's _80 Flowers_, lyrical works of more
constrained subject.
To put the distinction analogically, nature writing and ecological
writing are not necessarily the same. Here's Aldo Leopold on the matter:
Modern natural history deals only incidentally with the
identity of plants and animals, and only incidentally
with their habits and behaviors. It deals principally with
their relations with each other, [and] their relations to the
soil and water in which they grow . . .
This seems to me to describe a turn away from representational writing
which is not simply a rejection. But (leaving analogy behind) what does
it really mean (poetically speaking) to deal "only incidentally" with
representation, to focus "principally" on structural relations? Are
there any examples that come to mind? And is it in fact possible to
leave analogy behind when speaking of something as indescribable as the
totality?
Ben F.
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