It probably looks like I'm arguing just one side of this, but it's something
I'm ambivalent about. There are a number of avant-garde writers, like
Bunting and Joyce, whose politics I find admirable, so I'm not trying to
imply Fascism is a necessary part of the deal. But I'm wary of conferring a
politically romanticised outsider status on avante garde writers in general.
Eliot, who you say "certainly wasn't (establishment) to begin with", doesn't
at all fit the picture of the turncoat radical. Within a few years of
publishing The Waste Land, his most radical writing, he's defending Maurras
and L'Action francaise against a Papal excommunication, and that remark from
After Strange Gods (1933) I quoted earlier was written when Eliot was 45
(barely a youth as it now seems to me).
The case of Kipling is complex too. But if we're talking of how "to
many people Kipling's politics at the time would have simply seemed the
expression of the Zeitgeist", the same obviously could have been the view
held by many people of the politics of Pound, Wyndham Lewis and Eliot.
Except the way you put it is likely not the language that would have been
used then. I think there's a tendency to consider the ideology of the past
homogenous. As, for example, when people excuse Eliot's and Pound's
anti-Semitism by saying that it was a general prejudice of the time. It may
have been prevalent but there were many in Britain and elsewhere whose
attitudes to what what was happening in Germany (early 1933 a boycott on
Jewish businesses and Jews were banned from government jobs) were in deep
contrast to Eliot's.
I'm in favour of broadening the definitions of politics. Your reference to
feminism as one of the ways you define yourself is a good example.
Presumably, though, you'd concede that many poets, whose practice you might
regard as far from avante-garde, share that adhesion to feminist politics
just as firmly as you do. Which brings me back to why I'm not convinced,
even though the argument sounds plausible, that poets of the avante garde
are by nature politically more radical than their contemporaries who are of
another literary ilk. To take a slightly weird example, I think there are
reasons to consider Wilfred Owen, whose poems are for the most part formally
conventional, more distant from any Zeitgeist, and more at odds with his
time, than Eliot or Pound.
Jamie
----- Original Message -----
From: "Alison Croggon" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, May 12, 2010 6:35 AM
Subject: Re: "Cambridge Poetry and Political Ambition" by Robert Archambeau
Yes. Too complicated for me at the moment. Frinstance, there are many
poets who think of Eliot as far from avant garde, placing him, as you
do, "at the heart of the establishment". And hindsight creates
different perspectives - Eliot may have been establishment later in
his life, but he certainly wasn't to begin with, and to many people
Kipling's politics at the time would have simply seemed the expression
of the zeitgeist, and therefore not "political" at all. Even if
there's only one Kipling, I'm sure you can think of contemporary
parallels. Etc.
Further, people like Peter Riley most violently reject their work
being characterised as "political", and fair enough. There are writers
on this list much better informed than I am, and better placed to
situate contemporary poetics in current politics. Myself, I have some
sympathy with Musil's plaint that the greatest tyranny for writers is
to be forced to be political. And of course, the argument shifts
depending on what one means by "political". In saying that "avant
garde" writers are political in placing themselves outside the
dominant discourse, I mean something quite broad, that contains but
isn't contained by the conventional definitions. After all, one of the
ways I define myself as political is through my feminism, and despite
appearances to the contrary, that remains a marginalised politics.
This is quite aside anyway from the question of whether, if poetry is
"political", it is effective.
xA
On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 1:10 PM, Jamie McKendrick
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> The argument sounds plausible, but again I have some doubts about this.
> You
> seem to have set up Arnold ("writers like Arnold") as a kind of
> representative surrogate, speaking on behalf of official culture, in
> opposition to 20th century avant-gardists, though it's obviously an
> anachronistic manoeuvre. We'd really have to find an early
> twentieth-century
> establishment figure whose (racist and extreme) politics were
> unscrutinised
> and invisible. Could we chose someone like Kipling (even if there's no-one
> like Kipling)? But Kipling's politics have been endlessly argued over and
> exposed. As well as his poems being championed by the avant-gardist Eliot.
> Pound is certainly a dissenting figure, dissenting from democracy even
> more
> radically than Arnold. When you say that the avant-garde "will always be
> called on its politics" it sounds as though only they, especially and
> unfairly, will be asked to justify their pronouncements or positions.
> I can see how the spurious claim of neutrality or disinterestedness can
> attach itself to those aligned with current power structures, but I don't
> see how Eliot's voice, to take him as an example once again, sounds from
> anywhere but the heart of the establishment, though formally no-one would
> deny his poetry the status of avant-garde.
> Late as it is here, this isn't the most coherent of posts but I think
> you'll at least understand what I mean,
>
> Jamie
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Alison Croggon" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Wednesday, May 12, 2010 2:58 AM
> Subject: Re: "Cambridge Poetry and Political Ambition" by Robert
> Archambeau
>
>
>> my main point was to question whether politics, good
>> or bad, was a distinguishing feature of avant-garde poetry.
>
> I'd say so, almost by definition: if its nature is to define itself
> against a dominant discourse, which is surely one of its major
> characteristics, then avant garde poetry (I kind of shrink using the
> term, but anyway, it's a handle) is inevitably political, and often -
> not always - overtly so. I'm having trouble thinking of exceptions. It
> will always be called on its politics though, because it dissents:
> writers like Arnold seldom are, however racist or extreme their
> politics, because they are presumed to have (and often claim) an
> apolitical or neutral stance, which simply means that their politics
> aligns with current power structures and so is invisible. But you see
> this mechanism all the time in political discourse.
>
> xA
>
> On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 11:43 AM, Jamie McKendrick
> <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>> Yes, you're right. I confess I've barely read more than the odd passage
>> of
>> Arnold's Culture and Anarchy. I'd always hoped he was a closet anarchist.
>>
>> Although there's no point in a contest between various repugnances, you
>> could compare any of a number of Pound's anti-semitic rants with Arnold:
>> "it is a time to Hellenise, and to praise knowing; for we have Hebraised
>> too
>> much, and have over-valued doing. But the habits and discipline received
>> from Hebraism remain for our race an eternal possession; and, as far as
>> humanity is constituted, one must never assign them the second rank
>> to-day,
>> without being prepared to restore them to the first rank tomorrow..."
>> Which doesn't sound that appealing either, but beside Pound speaking into
>> the microphone with all of the Fascist Axis's power at his shoulders,
>> relatively humane.
>> And Eliot as much as Arnold had a culture's power at his shoulders when,
>> an
>> immigrant himself, he presumed to declare:
>> "and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of
>> free-thinking Jews undesirable..."
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au
> Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
> Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com
--
Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com
|
