[In the following excerpt from a study of writer/poet Paul Auster, Finkelstein examines the Objectivists’, and especially Oppen's, importance to Auster's poetics and worldview.]

If Paul Auster's work were concerned only with the past or with the flickering self, it would not have achieved the tensile strength and jagged expressivity that mark it as among the best American writing of the last twenty years. In poetry especially, a concern solely for tradition or solely for the vicissitudes of the ego will severely limit a writer's range of expression. Even when such concerns are simply combined—as in the case of Robert Lowell, for example—one can expect only limited success. “Its past was a souvenir,” Wallace Stevens says in “Of Modern Poetry”; and then, echoing Whitman, “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” (174-175). If such Romantic optimism, such broad extroversion, is less accessible in recent years, it is due to the equally Romantic pull of interiority, which becomes increasingly difficult to resist when the men and women of the time prove to be somewhat more banal than Stevens believed. Given such circumstances, modern lyric interiority risks triviality, as does a poetry devoted only to exteriors.

The objectivists are some of the few poets who manage to avoid this impasse. Scrupulously measuring even minimal encounters of self and world, and dedicated to finding the linguistic strategies necessary to render their measurements into a verse both abstract and sensual, poets such as Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, and George Oppen become increasingly important to a younger generation that values integrity—in thought, in feeling, in craft—above all else. The objectivists share the general modern distrust of tradition, but grow strong through secret affinities to the past (Oppen, author of the paradigmatic “Psalm,” once admitted that Blake was more important to him than was W. C. Williams). These poets, paying such close and thoughtful attention to the present moment, in turn provide the new generation with links to a usable past. As Auster says in “The Decisive Moment,” his essay on Reznikoff, “Each moment, each thing, must be earned, wrested away from the confusion of inert matter by a steadiness of gaze, a purity of perception so intense that the effort, in itself, takes on the value of a religious act” (Art of Hunger 36).

This piece, dated “1974; 1979,” is written during the years when Auster's poetry is most strongly influenced by the objectivists. For Auster, Reznikoff's insistence on the poem as a “testimony” to the individual's perceptions of the world, or Oppen's belief that poetry should be a “test of truth,” does indeed take on the value of a religious act. As the objectivists themselves understood, such a poetic both confirms and supplants an older form of devotional poetry, though as Harold Bloom often points out, it is difficult in this context to make a clear distinction between secular and religious literature.The older religious poem, at least in the Jewish tradition, is predicated on a preexisting text as a manifestation of transcendental presence, however remote. Frequently the poem is in some sense a midrash or commentary. In Wall Writing Auster subverts but still depends on this strategy, given the aura of some previously inscribed source or “prooftext” that hovers around many of the poems. But the devotional quality of the objectivist poem depends on a complete sense of absence, for only then can direct encounters with the material world take on the value previously reserved for encounters with mediating sacred texts. The poet is thus doubly exiled: from the homeland, to be sure, but from what George Steiner calls the homeland of the text as well. “For as long as he remains in the realm of the naked eye,” Auster announces in White Spaces, “he continues to wander” (Disappearances 107).

This “realm of the naked eye” differs from the world of the original objectivists in that it is far more barren and rendered with greater abstraction. Like Auster's In the Country of Last Things, it is a realm in which objects seem to “disappear and never come back” (1). The glinting pieces of broken glass, the twigs and buds growing in urban lots, the sparrows and children hopping about the stoops and alleys—in short, all the reassuring materials of the objectivist lyric, quietly celebrated for their mere being—are gone. In White Spaces, all that is left is “a landscape of random impulse, of knowledge for its own sake—which is today a knowledge that exists, that comes into being beyond any possibility of putting it into words” (Disappearances 103-104). Speaking a language that is almost prior to language, a language of bare consciousness that methodically eschews the enumeration of objects, the poet, invoking the “invisible God of the Hebrews,” states flatly that “It is sometimes necessary not to name the things we are talking about” (105).

Readers familiar with the tenets of objectivism may wonder how a poetry based upon acts of testimony and reportage can become transformed, in Auster's hands, into a poetry made out of “letters from nowhere, from the white space that has opened up in his mind” (106). What are these spaces into which the objective world has disappeared, and more importantly, how could the same impetus behind objectivism lead to such resolute unmaking? In fact, it is a logical progression. Objectivism, as these poets themselves came to understand it, is primarily concerned not with objects per se, but with a language of objectification derived dialectically from an honest apprehension of a subjective response to the world. The term that the objectivists so often privilege in discussing their work is sincerity, and it is sincerity as the force behind the poet's reportage that also operates in Auster's work. If a white space opens in the poet's mind, if he is continually faced with “the supreme indifference of simply being wherever we happen to be” (104), he must keep faith with himself by finding a discourse that will objectify even so subjective a state of experience. Furthermore, while Auster admires, perhaps even envies the objectivists' ability to give themselves (though not without a struggle) to the simple grace of the object world, he understands that he cannot give himself to the world in quite the same way. The quasi-religious optimism of the objectivists' careful gaze finally is remote from the bleaker perspective of Auster's naked eye.

A helpful comparison could be drawn between Disappearances (1975), the title sequence of Auster's volume, and the poetry of Oppen, especially Of Being Numerous (1968). Auster's poem bears the clear influence of Oppen's work from the sixties: the same dry, clipped phrasing; the deliberately measured lines of varied lengths, expressive of concerned mental activity; the uncanny abstraction in the face of what is obviously a wildly sprawling urban sensorium. Oppen's great theme, “the ship-wreck / Of the singular” (151), and the consequent social and political exploration “of being numerous,” opens outward, despite his persistent skepticism and frequent horror, into a vision of community:

Which is ours, which is ourselves,
This is our jubilation
Exalted and as old as that truthfulness
Which illumines speech.

(173)

Although the “meditative man” has been subsumed by the crowd, the potential for “clarity”—in poetry as much as in social existence—is preserved.

But in Disappearances (and the very title can be opposed to Oppen's precariously balanced but still hopeful Of Being Numerous), although Auster acknowledges that he too is “beyond the grasp / of the singular,” a brooding counter-narrative develops:

He is alive, and therefore he is nothing
but what drowns in the fathomless hole
of his eye,
and what he sees
is all that he is not: a city
of the undeciphered
event,
and therefore a language of stones,
since he knows that for the whole of life
a stone
will give way to another stone
to make a wall
and that all these stones
will form the monstrous sum
of particulars.

(77-78)

The stones in the wall, the people of the city, produce “the monstrous sum / of particulars”—a horror of anonymous multiplication against which the poet can only oppose “his nostalgia: a man.” Later in the poem, Auster, understanding his subjectivity is lost within such monstrosity, elaborates on his predicament:

It is nothing.
And it is all that he is.
And if he would be nothing, then let him begin
where he finds himself, and like any other man
learn the speech of this place.

(83)

Language may be our only recourse, but it does not offer the same regenerative promise of clarity as in Oppen's work. Auster's conclusions are more limited, tentative, guarded:

… For the city is monstrous,
and its mouth suffers
no issue
that does not devour the word
of oneself.
Therefore, there are the many,
and all these many lives
shaped into the stones
of a wall,
and he who would begin to breathe
will learn there is nowhere to go
but here.

(85)

Here, not elsewhere: no longer a discourse of the other, Auster's poetry resignedly takes up residence in the familiar, for it has nowhere else to go. But if a primal rediscovery of self and world (however historically determined) offers his objectivist fathers renewed poetic opportunities, for Auster such chances have already been exhausted.