The poems of George Oppen continue to occupy a marginal place in most literary histories, even though his work encapsulates some of the major shifts in American writing between high modernism and contemporary Language poetry. In part this marginalization is due to the habit of tying Oppen to Louis Zukofsky's shortlived “Objectivist” tendency of the thirties. Oppen did indeed publish his first collection, Discrete Series, in 1934, and with a strong endorsement from Ezra Pound (“I salute a serious craftsman, a sensibility which is not every man's sensibility and which has not been got out of any other man's books”).¹ Yet after this propitious start Oppen fell silent for twenty-five years, jettisoning poetry for politics. He and his wife Mary were members of the Communist Party between 1936 and 1941, their activities eventually attracting close scrutiny from the FBI.² In 1949, Oppen and his family opted for political exile in Mexico to avoid harassment. They would not return until 1958; only then did Oppen begin writing poetry again, initiating a sequence of major volumes, from The Materials (1962) to Primitive (1978).

The break in Oppen's literary career raises important questions about where we “place” his work historically, questions which are highlighted by the recent publication of two fat anthologies of twentieth-century American poetry. In Douglas Messerli's From the Other Side of the Century, for example, Oppen appears in the early pages in the company of fellow Objectivists like Louis Zukofsky, Lorine Niedecker, Carl Rakosi, and Charles Reznikoff. In Paul Hoover's Postmodern American Poetry, on the other hand, Objectivism is not represented at all, and the volume opens instead with work by Charles Olson and John Cage.³ Clearly, Hoover sees writers like Oppen as contributors to an earlier modernism, whereas Messerli locates the original Objectivist group within the main line of innovation which runs from 1960 to 1990.

Of the two choices, Messerli's seems to me the better one. To begin with, there are the historical facts of publication: each of the poets I have named above was still bringing out collections in the seventies (Zukofsky, 80 Flowers, 1978; Niedecker, Blue Chicory, 1976; Rakosi, Ex Cranium Night, 1975; Reznikoff, Holocaust, 1975; Oppen, Primitive, 1978), and this continued productivity to some extent compels us to reckon with a sort of double chronology. On the one hand, there is “Objectivism,” a phase or tendency which is often (misleadingly) seen as merely an offshoot of Pound's Imagism; this is writing which develops its particular texture and perspectives from the experience of the Depression years. Then there is the later work which shows these writers offering an influential alternative to the so-called “personal” poetry of later decades.⁴ The matter of designation—whether the Oppen-Zukofsky group were “modernists” or not—is not of especial importance in itself, but what does interest me is the intermediary position they now seem to occupy: between modernism and postmodernism, perhaps; a betweenness, at any rate, which seems highly characteristic of much of this writing at the level of both its formal and social ambitions.

As was clear in Zukofsky's own manifesto essay, “Sincerity and Objectification” (1931), Objectivism was (somewhat paradoxically in view of its name) a practice of writing which was ultimately concerned less with objects than with the “shape” of the poem and “the resolving of words and their ideation into structure.”⁵ What was objectified was the poem itself; as Zukofsky put it: “This rested totality may be called objectification—the apprehension satisfied completely as to the appearance of the art form as an object” (274).⁶ The word Zukofsky had reluctantly chosen at editor Harriet Monroe's insistence would, however, continue to mislead; Oppen signalled the problem on several occasions:

Several dozen commentators and reviewers have by now written on the assumption that the word “Objectivist” indicated the contributors' objective attitude to reality. It meant, of course, the poets' recognition of the necessity of form, the objectification of the poem.⁷

At first sight, this version of “objectification” may sound like just another formalism, but it actually entails a significant departure from Poundian modernism. As Rachel Blau DuPlessis observes, “This poetics … had an ethical dimension, for it began with the person, not the word, that is, began with sincerity.”⁸ Pound's notion of “technique as a test of a man's sincerity” lay in the background,⁹ though the absoluteness of that axiom would lead in The Cantos to the very different assumption that linguistic precision was in itself adequate proof of authorial honesty and sound judgement.¹⁰ Oppen seems not to have been an avid reader of that poem, responding to its local felicities rather than to its grand ambition,¹¹ but, as one of his own poems, “Of Hours,” makes clear, the perceived failure of The Cantos and the tragedy of the life which sustained it came to represent one blind alley of a modernism disastrously wedded to a politics it hardly understood (“What is it you ‘loved,’” asks Oppen of this finally “Unteachable” poet).¹² What had begun as unplanned adventure, an Odyssean “sailing after knowledge,” mutated across the thirties into a vision which Pound habitually defined as “totalitarian.”¹³ Increasingly the poem concerned itself with definitions of just authority, even as the writing began to close down questions about its own judgemental legitimacy. Where the early Cantos had to some degree invited the reader's scepticism, now the poem began to demand a certain faith; and, as Pound began to discover in Mussolini a stronger, more authoritative self-image, so the poem acquired an intransigent, often hectoring tone.

It is important to appreciate the difference between the forms of objectification increasingly at work within Pound's poem and the kind of writing that Oppen and Zukofsky define as “Objectivism.” In the latter case, as I have said, it is the poem that is objectified, whereas in one major strand of the earlier modernism—the strand represented by Pound, Eliot, Lewis, and Hemingway—it is “the world outside, the other [that] is always object.”¹⁴ In this aesthetic, the self's relation to the other is generally construed as one of domination, and is characterized by discontinuity and separateness. Successful individuation entails the establishing of boundaries which divide the self from others. Psychic maturity is associated with a break from the feminine and maternal which is now conceived as other and object. The modernist avant-garde we associate with the writers I have named thus has a strong agonistic component—aesthetic form is seen to be won from struggle, in the process of which a masterful and coherent self emerges over against the chaotic, purely appetitive forces of a decadent modernity.

The principal interest of Objectivism is arguably that it marked the point where a new generation of poets initiated a radical departure from these forms of objectification and from the politics they embodied. Pound's Cantos was thus, for this generation, a crucially ambiguous work, offering, on the one hand, an array of dazzlingly new formal devices while, on the other, exhibiting all the dangers of an increasingly pragmatic politics of mastery. As the poem moved into its late sequences—Section: Rock-Drill (1955) and Thrones (1959)—it must have seemed increasingly clear to those readers still in the dinghy astern that Pound was becoming more and more comfortable with an openly didactic mode. These late Cantos developed the mixed tones of the Pisan sequence, oscillating between the fragmentary and indeterminate, on the one hand, and the assertive, not to say imperative, habit on the other. In line with Pound's dependence on neo-Confucian texts like The Sacred Edict of Kang H'si, the rhetoric became increasingly paternalistic while the model of social order invoked was nakedly feudalistic. At this point, myth, politics, and ethics seemed to fold into one, a synthesis which could seem untroubling only in so far as it was projected back into an idyllic and remote past.

Almost from the first, Oppen was keen to dissociate the terms of Pound's synthesis of myth, politics, and ethics. The two poets' divergence in this respect is particularly striking given that both were drawn in different ways to a vision of social totality: Pound came to invest more and more heavily in a unitary model of social process—“The whole tribe is from one man's body,” he declared in Thrones¹⁵—while Oppen returned again and again to the formal and conceptual problems of collective identity. Yet the divergence in their thinking was a telling one—not simply because Oppen went Left rather then Right, but because he insisted on the rigorous separation of poetry from politics. Of twentieth-century American poets, Oppen was perhaps keenest to drive home that lesson in both his work and his life, as his long period of “silence” amply testifies.

For some critics, though, Oppen's political commitments cannot but be felt in the later work, and Burton Hatlen, among others, has made a strong case for the persistence of certain “Marxist” themes in these volumes.¹⁶ Oppen himself, however, was adamant about the incompatibility of politics and poetry—not simply because the poetry of the Left had proved to be little more than sloganeering, but also because (as he put it in “The Mind's Own Place” [1963]), “the aesthetic … will be defined outside of anybody's politics, or defined wrongly,” and “the poet, speaking as a poet, declares his political non-availability.”¹⁷ In comments like these, Oppen seems to look to “writing” or “poetry” as a sort of defence against a totalizing vision. “I was right,” he concluded in a retrospective look at the thirties, “not to write bad poetry—poetry tied to a moral or a political (same thing) judgment.”¹⁸ And, in similar vein, he asserted that “art can no longer present a system, a belief,”¹⁹ a view that led him to emphasize “Not … that I take truth to be a social virtue. I think very probably it is not. But I think it is poetic: I think really that nothing else is.”²⁰ This “poetic” truth is hard to define, though we may take it that once again Oppen is trying to dissociate his own work from any taint of (Poundian) instrumentalism. “There are situations,” he declares, “which cannot honorably be met by art, and surely no one need fiddle precisely at the moment that the house next door is burning.”²¹

Does this divorce between aesthetics and politics distinguish Oppen's work from high modernism, or does it actually tie him more closely to it? Andrew Ross thinks the latter:

Regardless of whether we might agree with Oppen that it is not a question of aesthetics, or “bad fiddling,” his final opinion—that “the question can only be whether one intends, at a given time, to write poetry or not”—would have to be regarded today as a superannuated one.²²

Oppen's dissociation is by this account a modernist one, and he is thus to be distinguished from postmodern writers like the Language poets for whom poetry can become “politically sufficient in itself” (365). Ross is thinking of claims made by contemporary poets like Bruce Andrews for “writing as politics, not writing about politics. Asking: what is the politics inside the work, inside its work? Instead of instrumentalized or instrumentalizing, this is a poetic writing more actively explanatory.”²³ Yet Oppen is wary of this word “political” and its tendency to cohabit with “truth”; for him, poetry has a different role to play:

It is part of the function of poetry to serve as a test of truth. It is possible to say anything in abstract prose, but a great many things one believes or would like to believe or thinks he believes will not substantiate themselves in the concrete materials of the poem. It is not to say that the poet is immune to the “real” world to say that he is not likely to find the moment, the image, in which a political generalization will prove its truth.²⁴

Oppen thus warns us that poetry is not a purveyor of “truth,” but rather that it submits “truth” to a kind of “test.” Exactly what this “testing” might be becomes clearer if we consider politics not just as social action, but as also, in some sense, akin to Poundian myth in its aspiration to totality and “generalization.”

The idea that poetic language may somehow refuse to “substantiate” such myths brings to mind Jean Luc Nancy's more recent account of writing as an “interruption” of myth. In The Inoperative Community, Nancy suggests that myth expresses a desire for communion—“fusion in a shared, immanent Being,”²⁵ the community that becomes “a single thing (body, mind, fatherland, Leader)” (xxxix); by way of contrast, Nancy proposes an idea of community based on “being in common” in which there is no single social identity, but rather an experience of “singularity” through which Being is understood as divided and shared (xxviii), what Nancy calls a “strange being-the-one-with-the-other to which we are exposed” (xxxix). It is literature which “puts into play nothing other than being in common,” concludes Nancy, and, more specifically, it is writing which has the capacity to “interrupt” those fantasies of immanence and fusion which characterize the condition of myth: “once myth is interrupted, writing recounts our history to us again” (69).²⁶

Nancy's account has several points of connection with Oppen's work. First, his notion of “being in common” stresses both “the impossibility either of an individuality, in the precise sense of the term, or of a pure collective totality” (6).²⁷ This refusal of the conventional polarity of individual and society parallels Oppen's evasion of the agonistic structure of the modernist avant-garde, with its tensed subject-object relation. It was this dimension of Pound's poetics which most troubled Oppen: “Pound's ego system, Pound's organization of the world around a character, a kind of masculine energy, is extremely foreign to me.”²⁸ So, too, was the related sense of what Oppen termed “the closed universe, the closed self”;²⁹ he would base his own work on a deliberately alternative model of subjectivity as “encountered, not found.”³⁰ The encounter is somehow tentative because it is grasped as a movement or process, so, when Oppen recalled in an interview that “The first question at the time [the early thirties] in poetry was simply the question of honesty, of sincerity,”³¹ the point was that a poetics founded on the (philosophically) simple recognition of actuality—“That it is”³²—would ultimately concern itself with an equally “simple” and non-agonistic perception of social relationships. Viewed in these terms, poetry might offer a way of acknowledging the world and others without seeking to reduce them to objects of knowledge.

Such a poetics would be quite different from Poundian modernism. In eschewing “knowledge,” for example, it would deprive us of any sense of context or ground, yielding instead, as Marjorie Perloff has remarked, a peculiar sense of disconnectedness.³³ Take the first poem of Oppen's major sequence, “Of Being Numerous”:

There are things
we live among “and to see them
Is to know ourselves.”
Occurrence, a part
Of an infinite series,
The sad marvels;
Of this was told
A tale of our wickedness.
It is not our wickedness.

“You remember that old town we went to, and we sat in the ruined window, and we tried to imagine that we belonged to those times—It is dead and it is not dead, and you cannot imagine either its life or its death; the earth speaks and the salamander speaks, the Spring comes and only obscures it—”

(Collected Poems 147) [hereafter abbreviated as CP]

Disconnected, certainly: Perloff observes that “the number of prepositions and pronouns, taken together, is greater than that of nouns, adjectives, and verbs combined.”³⁴ This unexpected displacement of emphasis gives the lines a curious feeling of provisionality; the thought is, we might say, precisely pre-positional, postponing any resolution or closing formulation.³⁵ The form of the writing thus enacts its main theme, which appears to be the inadequacy of narrative as explanation. So “occurrence,” which here suggests a moment in which we grasp the connectedness of ourselves and the world, is placed over against the biblical “tale of our wickedness” which has tied humanity to a dogma of guilt and false humility (though “it is not our wickedness”). The past, in fact, escapes us—“you cannot imagine either its life or its death”—whereas the essentially non-narrative “series” offers us an opening into “presentness” rather than the dead weight of past experience.³⁶

We may recall here that Oppen's first collection takes the title Discrete Series from mathematics as a way of deriving form from the praxis of perception rather than from any predetermined “rule”:

A pure mathematical series would be one in which each term is derived from the preceding term by a rule. A discrete series is a series of terms each of which is empirically derived, each one of which is empirically true. And this is the reason for the fragmentary character of those poems. I was attempting to construct a meaning by empirical statements, by imagist statements.³⁷

One of Oppen's favourite examples of such a series was the sequence of stations on the New York subway (14, 28, 32, 42), a sequence expressing contiguity but no extrapolable logic.³⁸ Following this example, Oppen aimed to jettison narrative for what Derrida has aptly termed a “seriality without paradigm.”³⁹ This takes us closer to one of the major themes of “Of Being Numerous,” which is that of the apparent unknowability of what is not the self: “the world, if it is matter, / Is impenetrable” (CP, 148). Like the city, which implies the individual's tie to place while all the time actually expressing only pure “flow” (CP, 149), the poem moves forward, bringing one thing within the field of another, but (in contrast to The Cantos) hesitating to insist on the meaningful connection between them. Hence, perhaps, the ambiguity which plays around the idea of “being numerous”: have we “chosen the meaning / Of being numerous” (CP, 151) simply because of our bewilderment over “the shipwreck / Of the singular”? Or is Oppen suggesting that we have chosen merely the meaning of being numerous and not its reality? Readers have, reasonably enough, been so pleased to find a poet confronting this theme that they have tended to wish away ambiguity in order to discover a powerful sense of social collectivity here. Almost alone, Marjorie Perloff has read the poem more sceptically, observing that “A good deal has been written about Oppen's relationship to the masses, but at least in “Of Being Numerous,” the point is that there is no relationship.”⁴⁰ In fact, she continues, the sequence exemplifies the poet's “withdrawal from human contact” (200); we are closer to the world of Beckett than to any kind of populist vision.

One can sympathize with Perloff's sceptical reading—after all, this does seem a poem which is often as concerned with the distances between people as it is with images of collective experience. Yet we should acknowledge, too, that the poem itself is sceptical about the power of such images, and this testifies not to some ill-concealed “alienation” on Oppen's part, but rather to his sense (comparable to Nancy's) of social being as both divided and shared. We may get closer to Oppen's meditation on this theme if we see it as primarily philosophical rather than political, and informed in part by the poet's enduring interest in the work of Heidegger. For, even in his first small volume of poems, Discrete Series (1934), where Oppen, looking back, discerned a clearly “Marxist” component,⁴¹ the major question raised seems to relate to the attempt to see “humanity as a single thing,” as Oppen later put it in relation to the poem called “Party on Shipboard” (“a statement, and a very clear one, of what I was going in search of when I quit writing”⁴²).

Rather obviously, that poem turns on the relation of the particular to the universal, of the waves to the ocean as a whole:

The shallow surface of the sea, this,
Numerously—the first drinks—
The sea is a constant weight
In its bed.

(CP, 8)

The transition between “this” and “numerously” (the old enigma of what is both one and many) pinpoints the principal dilemma of Oppen's work. “I try to get again to humanity as a single thing,” he observes in the same letter, “as something like a sea which is a constant weight in its bed.”⁴³ Yet that singleness and constancy is, like Pound's whole tribe sprung from one man's body, a mythic condition, and even in this early poem the vision of totality splinters before it can be fully grasped (“They pass, however, the sea / Freely tumultuous”).

Reflecting on his early books, Oppen explained: “I had thought I could arrive at the concept of Being from an account of experience as it presents itself in its own terms.”⁴⁴ Oppen had chosen, with Heidegger, “the arduous path of appearance,” a decision with which he deliberately closed the way to any conception of Being as Platonic essence.⁴⁵ Instead, Being is characterized by what Heidegger calls a movement of “withdrawal” (Zurückziehung) by which it constantly retreats into individual beings.⁴⁶ That sense of withdrawal colours Oppen's handling of the concept of “humanity”; as he puts it in a letter glossing “Of Being Numerous”: “We cannot live without the concept of humanity … and yet we cannot escape this: that we are single. And face, therefore, shipwreck. And yet this, the tragic fact, is the brilliance of one's life.”⁴⁷

Even as we think the condition of “humanity,” then, the collective reveals itself as a collection of singularities, and our only way out of a static ambiguity is to map the constant oscillation between these two conditions, their constant fading into each other.⁴⁸ This may help to explain Oppen's scepticism about narrative at the beginning of “Of Being Numerous” and, indeed, the otherwise puzzling reduction of “history” to a date “Frozen in the moonlight” in the second poem of the sequence (CP, 150). As Nancy puts it, when writing interrupts myth we may recover our history,

But it is no longer a narrative—neither grand nor small—but rather an offering: a history is offered to us. Which is to say that an event—and an advent—is proposed to us, without its unfolding being imposed upon us. What is offered to us is that community is coming about, or rather, that something is happening to us in common. Neither an origin nor an end: something in common. Only speech, a writing—shared, sharing us.⁴⁹

“Neither an origin nor an end”—Nancy's conception of the event (or advent) stresses the in-betweenness which is, for him, a condition of both authentic social relations and of the writing in which they are exemplified (“we would not write if our being were not shared,” he observes [69]). The double condition of language, as both personal and collective, as opaque and transparent, embodies the interdependency of self and other: “But compearance is of a more originary order than that of the bond. It does not set itself up, it does not establish itself, it does not emerge among already given subjects (objects). It consists in the appearance of the between as such: you and I (between us)—a formula in which the and does not imply juxtaposition, but exposition” (29).⁵⁰ That idea of “exposition” by contiguity rather than juxtaposition-as-opposition (arguably the Poundian mode) seems very suggestive in view of Oppen's idea of “series” as a “cadence of disclosure.” So, too, Nancy's sense that “something is happening to us in common” is close to Oppen's creation of an open syntax which constantly proposes relationships and shared experiences without formulating them absolutely. In place of Pound's increasingly didactic relation to the reader, we approach what Language poet Lyn Hejinian calls a “generative” as opposed to “directive” writing: “Reader and writer engage in a collaboration from which ideas and meanings are permitted to evolve.”⁵¹ And as Hejinian has said of Gertrude Stein: “it was not truth but understanding that was of value—a shift of emphasis, from perceived to perceiving, and thus to writing, in which acts of observation, as complex perception, take place.”⁵²

Many of these features can be seen together in “Occurrences,” a poem from the late collection Seascape: Needle's Eye (1972):

Limited air drafts
In the treasure house moving and the movements of the living
Things fall          something balanced          Move
With all one's force
Into the commonplace that pierces or erodes
The mind's structure but nothing
Incredible happens
It will have happened to that other
The survivor           The survivor
To him it happened
Rooted in basalt
Night hums like the telephone dial tone blue gauze
Of the forge flames the pulse
Of infant
Sorrows at the crux
Of the timbers
When the middle Kingdom
Warred with beasts Middle Things the elves the
Magic people in their world
Among the plant roots          hopes
Which are the hopes
Of small self interest called
Superstition chitinous
Toys of the children wings
Of the wasp

(CP, 206)

I am not sure that I completely understand this poem, but nor am I sure that I am meant to. The syntax seems broken, precarious, though to describe it as “fragmented” would misleadingly assume a reconstitutable logic of propositions.⁵³ As is often the case in Oppen's work, the poem might be said to enact the inadequacy of thought, or at least to propose poetic form as a desirable substitute for more conventional habits of thinking. The difficulty of the text—registered emphatically in the lateral double spacing and in the characteristic ambiguity of line-endings⁵⁴—dramatizes a resistance to thought and to dialectic, a resistance which the lacunary syntax of the poem seems to signal as that of language itself.

But what are these “Occurrences”? Oppen glosses the word in a letter as follows: “Occurrences—events the heavy events—and down or somewhere to the toys of everyday, small self-interest, the wings of the wasp.”⁵⁵ The poem is caught between the large, catastrophic forces of “history,” we might say, and the minute temporality of the “commonplace” and “everyday.” Like many of Oppen's later poems, this one seems to be written in the shadow of the holocaust, though we deduce that rather obliquely, through references to the survivor and through images of estranged communication (the telephone dial) and the forge flaming. There is no collective pronoun in this poem, no “we” to alleviate the narrow perspectives of “small self interest.” The “incredible” has happened to someone else, the survivor, and all that is left to do in the present is to “move” into the commonplace, as Oppen puts it, a move which in “piercing” or “eroding” the mind's structure will somehow open the sensibility to a sense of community with the experience of that survivor. Yet perhaps the main point of the poem is that such a relationship cannot be formulated directly or rhetorically. Nor can the wasp provide a reassuring image of the natural world, as it could momentarily for Pound at Pisa.⁵⁶ Instead, the anticipation of relationship is articulated through the hesitancy of the syntax, through ambiguity and apposition, through the heavily stressed and repeated “Of”s—all elements which evoke relationship without reducing it to two terms, to a subject-object dualism.

This deliberate lack of closure is, for Oppen, a primary instance of poetry's difference from politics, placing the poem within that intermediary space of which Nancy speaks. To speak politically of the holocaust would be to move within the world of distinct positionalities and moral judgements, whereas these inchoate forms are meant to open up that space between “you and I,” as Nancy puts it, in which the survivor's experience can be understood without being appropriated as part of “our” historical narrative. The lack of totalization here thus seems to suggest that poetry, in contrast to political discourse, can open relations which precede ideology and morality. As Oppen puts it in a prose section of the long poem “Route”:

We are brothers, we are brothers?—these things are composed of a moral substance only if they are untrue. If these things are true they are perfectly simple, perfectly impenetrable, those primary elements which can only be named.

(CP, 189)⁵⁷

Naming, as Oppen makes clear in his interview with L. S. Dembo, entails “an act of faith” which testifies in turn to the “simplest” of theologies: “I do believe that consciousness exists and that it is consciousness of something, and that is a fairly complete but not very detailed theology, as a matter of fact.”⁵⁸ This equation of “truth” with a non-moral impenetrability implies that the sense of commonness Oppen has in mind is one which is primary because it exists prior to social codes and prescriptions.

We may recall at this point a definition of “ethics” which has been much discussed in recent years. I am thinking of the work of Emmanuel Levinas, for whom the Western tradition, and especially the thought of Hegel, has been characterized by a pursuit of knowledge which seeks the subordination of objects and other people to its own power. Philosophy has not, according to this line of argument, been primarily concerned with the claims of other people, but rather with the capacity of the self to elide difference, to make the other like itself. Levinas's antidote to this tradition is what he calls “ethics,” a relation which presupposes that the self comes into being only by first recognizing its responsibility to others. “Ethics” in this usage, then, denotes the claims of others rather than a body of moral rules and values.⁵⁹ In the words of Jean-François Lyotard, it entails “obligation without conditions.”⁶⁰

I am not suggesting, of course, that Oppen knew of Levinas's work, but only that this way of understanding “ethics” may help to elucidate Oppen's evolving poetic. Levinas's sense of a relation to the other as the quintessential expression of the ethical may define something in Oppen's writing which has strong social motivation but which is not, in his terms, “political” as such. At least, once we think of the ethical, in Levinas's sense, at least two consequences follow, both at odds with Poundian modernism. First, a poetics of “encounter” will assume that the domain of the ethical is also the domain of the ordinary and the everyday, of relationships expressing proximity rather than contemplative or legislative distance (“Near is / Knowledge,” says Oppen in “Of Being Numerous” [CP, 176]). Second, the ethical subject is not only open, but vulnerable and in question. Levinas thus speaks of “the risky uncovering of oneself, in sincerity, the breaking up of inwardness and the abandon of all shelter, exposure to traumas, vulnerability.”⁶¹

This way of understanding “sincerity,” not as a question of truth, but rather as one of relation and exposure to the claims of others, has more than a little in common with Oppen's work. For “sincerity” is not so much a true account of one's inner feelings (manifest, then, Pound would say, in precise verbal formulation), as an acceptance of what exceeds the self. In Levinas's sense, this self is always unbounded, open to a perception of radical heterogeneity. As Maurice Blanchot nicely puts it, “the other withdraws me from what would make me unique,”⁶² a view which accords with Oppen's own attempt to transcend what he calls, in “Philai Te Kou Philai,” “a ruined ethic / / Bursting with ourselves” (CP, 76). “The self,” he warns us in “World, World—,” “is no mystery” (CP, 143) but there is instead “a force of clarity, it is / of what is not autonomous in us” (CP, 185). But what is “The act of being, / the act of being / More than oneself” (CP, 143)? Language which hovers on the brink of intelligibility, handing over to the “materials” of poetry rather than producing clear self-expression—this is perhaps one means of “being / More than oneself.” But the difficulty lies in saying what that “more” exactly is, for this transcendence of self is toward something ultimately “impenetrable,” to use Oppen's favourite word again. The idea of collective social being is in this sense “impenetrable,” which is why its strongest expression will always be in the intermediary forms of poetry rather than in any kind of political discourse. As Oppen puts it in his interview with L. S. Dembo:

we have a kind of feeling that the absolutely unitary is somehow absolute, that, at any rate, it really exists. It's been the feeling always that that which is absolutely single really does exist—the atom, for example. That particle of matter, when you get to it, is absolutely impenetrable, absolutely inexplicable.⁶³

It is the idea of a related linguistic impenetrability or opacity which contemporary poets have discerned in this work. For many of the Language poets, it is in the recognition of language as a material and social medium that some sort of “ethical” frame for writing is to be found. Charles Bernstein, for example, assumes that “Language is the commonness in being,” arguing that:

The move from purely descriptive, outward directive, writing toward writing centred on its wordness, its physicality, its haecceity (thisness) is, in its impulse, an investigation of human self-sameness, of the place of our connection: in the world, in the word, in ourselves.⁶⁴

Oppen, as we have seen, certainly moves toward this perception of writing as a kind of intermediary space in which a certain “connection” might be felt. Yet the temptation remains to speak about that connection, and as Bernstein notes acutely, Oppen's

often claimed commitment to clarity, however qualified, annuls a number of possibilities inherent in his technique. … That is, he tends, at times, to fall backonto “clarity” as a self-justifying means of achieving resolution through scenic motifs, statement, or parable in poems that might, given his compositional techniques, outstrip such controlling impulses.⁶⁵

Bernstein's observation invites us to read Oppen's work as a sort of hinge between modernism and something we may choose (or not) to call postmodernism. At some point in that trajectory, ideas of a “commonness” in language underwent a drastic change; Oppen's poems are there to help us see how poets could begin to associate an “ethical” relation with a certain linguistic opacity.

Notes

1. Pound's “Preface” to Discrete Series is reprinted in Paideuma, 10. 1 (Spring 1981), 13.

2. See Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “Introduction” to Selected Letters of George Oppen (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1990), xiv. See also Mary Oppen, Meaning a Life: An Autobiography (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1978).

3. Douglas Messerli ed. and introd., From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960-1990 (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1994); Paul Hoover, ed., Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1994).

4. The contrast is proposed in Jerome McGann, “Contemporary Poetry, Alternate Routes,” Critical Inquiry, 13 (Spring 1987), 624-47. Bob Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 40 also notes that in the seventies “The Objectivists were still active and were in fact a much stronger presence than they had been in prior decades.”

5. Louis Zukofsky, “Sincerity and Objectification,” Poetry, 37. 5 (February 1931), 273, 274.

6. For the counter-view, that Zukofsky's practice “exposes the object-status of the poem as a delusion,” see Michael Davidson, “Dismantling ‘Mantis’: Reification and Objectivist Poetics,” American Literary History, 3. 3 (Fall 1991), 522. I have suggested a qualification to Davidson's argument in “Lorine Niedecker: Rural Surreal,” in Jenny Penberthy, ed., Lorine Niedecker: Woman and Poet (National Poetry Foundation: Orono, ME, 1996), 199-200.

7. Quoted in Serge Fauchereau, “Three Oppen Letters with a Note,” Ironwood, 5 (1975), 79. The letter is dated 19 June 1966. Cf. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, ed., Selected Letters, 47: “‘Objectivist’ meant, not an objective viewpoint, but to objectify the poem, to make the poem an object. Meant form.”

8. “Objectivist Poetics and Political Vision: A Study of Oppen and Pound,” in Burton Hatlen, ed. and introd., George Oppen: Man and Poet (National Poetry Foundation: Orono, ME, 1981), 125. The essay provides a helpful assessment of the relation between the two poets.

9. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1954), 9.

10. See my Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing (London: Macmillan, 1984), 100.

11. See, for example, Selected Letters, 249-50: “that the Cantos would benefit as poetry thru excision as drastic as Pound's editing of The Waste Land—emerges as obviously true // I suspect we all admit to ourselves—or I will admit for myself that I read the Cantos in fragments as fragments. Despite the challenges of the scholars [.]”

12. George Oppen, Collected Poems (New York: New Directions, 1975), 210-12. Further references to this volume as CP will be given in the text.

13. See, for example, Guide to Kulchur (London: Peter Owen, 1938).

14. Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love, 190. I have drawn on Benjamin's critique of this aspect of the Hegelian tradition in my extended account of this aesthetic in Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995).

15. Ezra Pound, The Cantos (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 722.

16. Burton Hatlen, “‘Not Altogether Lone in a Lone Universe’: George Oppen's The Materials”, in George Oppen: Man and Poet, 326: “Oppen's later poetry represents, I believe, a systematic attempt to body forth certain political commitments (Oppen today calls his political position ‘populism’) in and through an uncompromisingly modernist poetic method.”

17. “The Mind's Own Place,” Kulchur, 3. 10 (1963), 8.

18. Selected Letters, 66.

19. Ibid, 68.

20. Ibid. 82.

21. “The Mind's Own Place,” 8.

22. Andrew Ross, “The New Sentence and the Commodity Form: Recent American Writing,” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 362 (further references will be given in the text). Ross goes on to observe that “In modernism, the ‘political’ and the ‘aesthetic’ struggle for sovereignty over every last inch of cultural soil.”

23. Bruce Andrews, “Poetry as Explanation, Poetry as Praxis,” excerpted in Hoover, ed., Postmodern American Poetry, 669.

24. “The Mind's Own Place,” 4 (my italics).

25. Jean Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor (Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), xxxiii. Further references will be given in the text.

26. Cf. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 86: “What the State cannot tolerate in any way … is that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging (even in the form of a simple presupposition).”

27. In an unpublished note, Oppen writes: “Numerous: not only that I could not see the individual merged in ‘humanity,’ but that I saw humanity no less helpless [deletion] than the individual.” Quoted from the George Oppen Papers, Box 13, Folder 8, by kind permission of the Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California at San Diego.

28. Interview with L. S. Dembo, Contemporary Literature, 10. 2 (Spring 1969), 170.

29. Letter to June Oppen Degnan, Ironwood, 26 (Fall 1985), 223. Oppen is glossing his allusion to the serpent Ouroboros in “A Narrative” (CP, 137).

30. Reinhold Schiffer, “Interview with George Oppen,” Sagetrieb, 3. 3 (Winter 1984), 19: “one's subjectivity is also encountered, not found.”

31. See “An Adequate Vision: A George Oppen Daybook,” ed. Michael Davidson, Ironwood, 26 (Fall 1985), 17: “But Numerous actually takes more space for a simpler undertaking than This in Which. The relationship between things—the relationship between people; What it is rather than That it is. Surely simpler tho it is consciously played out against the background That it is. Which is of course why the poem could not be satirical.” For a gloss on the title of This in Which, see Interview with L. S. Dembo, 163: “the nouns do refer to something; that it's there, that it's true, the whole implication of these nouns; that appearances represent reality, whether or not they misrepresent it: that this in which the thing takes place, this thing is here, and that these things do take place.”

32. “An Adequate Vision,” 17.

33. Marjorie Perloff, “The Shipwreck of the Singular: George Oppen's ‘Of Being Numerous,’” Ironwood, 26 (Fall 1985), 193.

34. Perloff, ibid.

35. See also Paul Naylor, “The pre-position ‘of,’” Contemporary Literature, 32 (Spring 1991), 100-15.

36. Referring to Maritain's Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, Oppen remarks: “the word presentness: central to me too” (Selected Letters, 311). The prose section which concludes this first poem recalls Mary Oppen talking about Yves Bonnefoy's On the Motion and Immobility of Douve (see Selected Letters, 129).

37. Interview with L. S. Dembo, 161.

38. See Selected Letters, 122.

39. Jacques Derrida, “Living On: Borderlines,” trans. James Hulbert, in Harold Bloom et al., eds., Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Seabury Press, 1986), 130. For Oppen's negative view of “narrative,” see, for example, Selected Letters, 19: “If the novel is dead it seems likely to me that people just can't bear narrative, with its implication of the incomprehensibility of time, of the non-existence of what's past, and such.” See also ibid., 55-56: “Narrative, which is everyone's art, and everyone's comfort, is wearing. There is no fact more obvious than that every life ends badly.”

40. Perloff, “The Shipwreck of the Singular,” 197.

41. See Selected Letters, 254: “The ‘Marxism’ of Discrete Series is, was felt as, the struggle against the loss of the commonplace.” The last phrase was borrowed from Michael Heller (see ibid., 252-53).

42. Selected Letters, 111.

43. Ibid., 111.

44. Quoted ibid., 410 n. 29.

45. The phrase, from Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics, is used as an epigraph to Oppen's This in Which (1965). The matter of Oppen's interest in Heidegger, dating back to at least 1929, merits further attention. Some useful points are made in Randolph Chilton, “The Place of Being in the Poetry of George Oppen,” in George Oppen: Man and Poet, 89-112.

46. See, for example, Krzysztof Ziarek, Inflected Language: Toward a Hermeneutics of Nearness (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994), 28: “Being covers itself with beings, and in its retreat it becomes indistinguishable from beings, almost a being itself. This retreat is visible in the ‘language of Being,’ which continually missays and unsays Being, unable to escape describing it in the same syntactical and grammatical terms as entities.”

47. Selected Letters, 263.

48. See CP, 141: “Tho I had hoped to arrive / at an actuality / In the mere number of us / And record now / That I did not.”

49. Cf. Nancy, “Finite History,” in David Carroll, ed., The States of Theory: History, Art, and Critical Discourse (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 169: “History is not a narrative or a statement, but the announcement of a ‘we’ (history is writing in this sense).”

50. Cf. Jacques Derrida, “Living On: Borderlines,” in Harold Bloom, et al. eds., Deconstruction and Criticism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 167: “The word ‘and’ is to be understood in each case as a conjunction that does not join logically, for example in contradiction, nor according to chronology, succession or absolute simultaneity, nor according to some fundamental ontology.”

51. Lyn Hejinian, “The Rejection of Closure,” in Bob Perelman, ed., Writing/Talks (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), 272.

52. Lyn Hejinian “Two Stein Talks,” Temblor, 3 (1986), 129-30.

53. Cf. Kenneth Rexroth, “Introduction” to his Pierre Reverdy: Selected Poems (New York: New Directions, 1969), vi: “Eliot works in The Waste Land with fragmented and recombined arguments; Pierre Reverdy with dismembered propositions from which subject, operator and object have been wrenched free and re-structured into an invisible or subliminal discourse which owes its cogency to its own strict, complex and secret logic.” See also my “Lorine Niedecker: Rural Surreal,” 199.

54. See Charles Bernstein, “Hinge, Picture,” Ironwood, 26 (Fall 1985), 240-42.

55. Selected Letters, 419 n. 52.

56. The Cantos, 546. In an unpublished note, Oppen writes: “pull down they [sic] vanity etc It's a remarkably bombastic ant but the wasp, whose head or tip … I think it is the great moment in Pound's writing, the great moment of the cantos.” Quoted from the George Oppen Papers, Box 13, Folder 20, by kind permission of the Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California at San Diego.

57. Oppen tended to reject “ethics” (meaning, for him, moralism) in favour of “ontology.” See, for example, Selected Letters, 118-19, where Oppen notes of “Of Being Numerous” that there “I speak of the ontological not the ethical problem” (118). See also 119: “Atrocity becoming ordinary—worldly—despite the secular ethic, despite our fear of the disappearance of any ethic which is not based on an ontology and an eschatology. This is the meaning of ‘crisis.’” In his interview with Oppen, Dembo observes that “for all your desire merely to report your feelings and to repudiate an ethical aim for your poetry, you do have strong ethical convictions to express. But, as you've said, the important thing is that the ethic be felt and not merely constructed” (174).

58. L. S. Dembo, Interview, 163.

59. See, for example, Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 111: “It is true that Ethics, in Levinas's sense, is an Ethics without law and without concept, which maintains its non-violent purity only before being determined as concepts and laws. This is not an objection: let us not forget that Levinas does not seek to propose laws or moral values, does not seek to determine a morality, but rather the essence of the ethical relation in general.”

60. Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 137.

61. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being Or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), 48, quoted in Gerald L. Bruns, “Dialogue and the Truth of Scepticism,” Religion and Literature, 22. 2-3 (1990), 89. Bruns comments that “the ethical subject according to Levinas is no longer a propositional agent but is dialogically situated, that is, in question.”

62. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 13.

63. L. S. Dembo, 163.

64. Charles Bernstein, Content's Dream: Essays 1975-1984 (Los Angeles, CA: Sun & Moon Press 1986) 32. Cf. ibid., 20: “political writing becomes disoriented when it views itself as description and not discourse; as not being in the world but about the world.”

65. Charles Bernstein, “Hinge/Picture,” 241.