SOURCE: “The Marjorie Perloff Show: The Critic and Her Others,” in Minnesota Review, Nos. 43–44, November, 1995, pp. 212–22.

[In the following review of Radical Artifice, Jarraway criticizes Perloff's reductive view of modernism and her ideological commitment to postmodernism.]

In the field of twentieth-century letters, Marjorie Perloff might be considered one of our premier critics of literary modernism. She's already written three critical monographs on modern poets (W. B. Yeats, Robert Lowell, and Frank O'Hara), two focused studies on general traits in modern poetry (“Futurism” and the modernist/postmodernist “Lyric”), and has produced two collections of essays (The Poetics of Indeterminacy and The Dance of the Intellect), in addition to editing a third (Postmodern Genres). Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media marks her ninth labor in the vineyard of contemporary poetry and poetics. An extended meditation on “The Institution of Literature,” therefore, might give us pause to reflect upon what Marjorie Perloff means most immediately to us by way of her latest book, and how her career as a critic bears on the current construction of modernism.

As it turns out, however, Radical Artifice would appear to mark a transition in Perloff's work to a more complete focus on postmodernism, to the detriment of modernism. In fact, modernism, in her version here, would appear to be somewhat of a liability. In the hands of poets such as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens, modern discourse had for too long laboured the seemingly naive relation between words and things. With such an emphasis on the “natural look” and “natural speech” (27, 186) of modern poetics over the decades, modernism had run its course by mid-century. Due in part to the extraordinary impact of the media in contemporary culture, modernism was thus badly in need of overhauling—by the “paradigm of the postmodern” apparently (in Andreas Huyssen's words, approvingly cited by Perloff), “which is itself as diverse and multifaceted as modernism had once been before it ossified into dogma” (201). The literary discourse of postmodernism, then, is what interests Perloff most now, whose historical and cultural “shift” into the present (and future) her new book never tires of rehearsing (47, 58, 92). And if contemporary poets such as George Oppen, Robert Creeley, and John Ashbery have carried us to this present, just as Language poets like Johanna Drucker, Lyn Hejinian, and Charles Bernstein are likely to spirit us into that future, undoubtedly it's because the artifice of rhetorical construction rather than the discursive representation of nature—the “radical artifice” of postmodern poetics, in a word—forms so total a preoccupation in all their work.

The foregrounding of “artifice” in contemporary writing has several implications for the postmodern paradigm, each of which Perloff investigates by turns. When she locates the term in the media criticism of Richard Lanham, for instance, it's with a view to problematizing the “native transparency” of an otherwise heavily mediated relation between self and world, for example, in John Cage's Lecture on the Weather (18, 22–23). Elsewhere, in the Language theory of Charles Bernstein, “artifice [and] artifact” draw greatest attention to the word “rather than the object behind it or the vision beyond it,” as for instance, in Creeley's Pieces and A Day Book (47, 47–48). For the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers, “there can be no direct connection between art and message … without running the risk of being burned by the artifice,” a risk which Perloff shows we many times over incur in a semantically bankrupt text like that of Steve McCaffery's The Black Debt (102, 104–111). Yet by the same token, “systemic artifice” can disclose tremendous enablement within constraint, according to the Oulipian theory of Georges Perec, and Perloff offers Louis Zukofsky's 80 Flowers and John Cage's Roaratorio as American cases in point (140, 145–61). Ostensibly, then, radical artifice has it all over recidivist nature in the exceedingly recondite discourses in which Perloff happens to take it up.

What is less clear, however, in the obviously modernist myth of progress Perloff seeks to construct as argument, is precisely when the shift to artifice within the story she tells actually occurred. In one place, according to Perloff, artifice is supposed to have become acceptable “only in the past decade or so” (224n28). Yet in another, it is a preoccupation which apparently has overtaken “the more radical poetries of the past few decades” (45). In the continuation of this passage, these same radical poetries (though unidentified) are distinguished by their “making or praxis” rather than “impassioned speech, as self expression”—in Perloff's words, “as a turn toward artifice” (45, emphasis retained). Earlier, however, we're given the characterization of a similar poetry whose “opposition, not only to ‘the language really spoken by men’ but also to what is loosely called Formalist (whether New or Old) verse” is supposed to have marked some kind of “a return to artifice, but a ‘radical artifice’” (27, initial emphasis added). Return to when? Perhaps to the heyday of Hart Crane, for according to Perloff, Crane in the Roaring Twenties was championing a poetic artifice “inherently different from ordinary speech and ‘natural language’ … by no means typical of modernism” (186). But Crane in the past merely serves to return Perloff herself to “the ‘radical artifice’ in fin-de-siècle poetry like Ashbery's and Bernstein's,” in the present. By playing fast and loose with history in this dizzying way, Perloff leaves us not knowing quite where we are in the general remove from modernism.

A similar confusion seems to surround the impact of electronic media in Perloff's mythic argument, as foregrounded in her subtitle. Perloff's inability consistently to historicize her somewhat incoherent narrative concerning the burgeoning of artifice in modern writing might have been considerably offset had she fulfilled the promise of her project announced at the outset: namely, “to see how poetic or art discourse positions itself vis-à-vis these powerful new environments [TV, computers, advertising],” with the more directed view to clarifying “the role, if any, this technology has in shaping the ostensibly private language of poetry” (15, 2–3). From what we gather from this, Perloff's first full-scale foray into “popular culture,” the message is indeed mixed, and again, incoherently so. At times, our hypnotic obsession with the electronic image that Perloff diagnoses as “the videation of our culture” would merely seem to reinforce the seamless and mystified fit between mind and world, and thus, recycle her more general complaint, noted previously, against canonical modernism as a “preconceived idea of crystalline purity” that she finds echoed in Wittgenstein (74, 133). At other times, however, an excessive preoccupation with the visual—“computer graphics, signposts, and advertising formats,” for example—can help to “lay bare” the device as the Russian formalists would say, and thereby advance the argument for the attenuation of artifice in all postmodern discourse—“ways of foregrounding the materiality of the text,” as Perloff puts it, that home laser printing, for example, might conceivably have inspired in cutting-edge “visual poetics” (120, 215, 120).

Clearly, then, the role of the media does little to correct the insufficiency of context with which Perloff aims to chart the historical advance of postmodernism. On her account, advertising copywriters today arguably can still receive much instruction from Poundian principles like “exact treatment of the thing” and “precise definition,” as much indeed as William Carlos Williams can be said to have suffered from those same principles, in a highly referential work like “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” for perhaps having watched too much television or read too many newspapers (94, 74–76). This kind of reductive relativism, to my mind, borders on the fatuous. Pound loathed modern advertisers: “Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap,” he exhorts in his well-known “A Retrospect,” from which Perloff is fond of quoting (Literary Essays 6). And if “copy-writing” was advertising's chief object, Williams could be equally as short: “you do not copy nature, you make something which is an imitation of nature … you no longer copy but make a natural object” (Selected Essays 303).

What Perloff, therefore, is up to in this new study is very much the kind of thing we've seen her attempt before in previous books. Her strategy is ploddingly structuralist and woodenly predictable, invariably setting up a false dichotomy between two mutually exclusive and essentializing terms—in this case, artifice/nature, where before Pound/Stevens, or before that indeterminacy/referentiality, had stood in a similar relation—and inevitably, forcing a totalizing choice for the initial, privileged term within the binarism as its seemingly natural and predestined resolution (Dance 20–21; Poetics 129, 138). As John Timberman Newcomb cogently frames the case, Perloff's reductively ideological approach “may be more usefully seen as a problem of evaluative intolerance and absolutism” (10)—an intolerance and absolutism that Perloff herself has occasion to confront in her own graduate seminar on postmodern poetry at Stanford, when a female Yugoslav student is emboldened to ask why the poets on the syllabus don't write like Kafka: “in what was of course a preliminary and flip answer to her very good question,” Perloff rejoins, “[Kafka] didn't have television” (xi, xiii; see also 46 and 210). But Perloff's methodological approach has even more profound implications beyond the classroom, when we begin to consider it within the much larger context of the institution of literature itself. Before venturing onto that further ground—actually, as a preparation for graduating to it—I would like to take up three further aspects of Perloff's argument: one having to do with modernism, a second with postmodernism, and a third dealing with her view of popular culture, that would appear to be the mediating link between them.

The “natural look” that apparently distinguishes modernist poetics is, as Perloff presents the case shown earlier, the central differentiation from the radical discourse that comes to take modernism's place, a discourse that is at last able to recognize that “a poem or painting or performance text is a made thing—contrived, constructed, chosen—and that its reading is also a construction on the part of its audience” (27–28). That texts are self-referentially contrived or constructed rather than given or declared entities may be a revelation to Perloff. But it's a view that more historically minded critics, philosophers, and social commentators have for a long time thought was crucial to defining modernism, not something that had come to take its place. Carolyn Porter, for instance, following John Berger's study of cubism, significantly reformed our thinking about American literature on this very point well over a decade ago:

Berger concludes that the content of a cubist painting is “the relation between the seer and the seen,” and that the works of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, and Fernand Léger from 1907 to 1914 “do not illustrate a human or social situation, they posit” one. The situation such paintings posit is one which radically redefines the epistemological relationship between perceiving subject and perceived object as interaction rather than confrontation. The detached viewer of an illusionist space in the Renaissance becomes the active participant in a process of vision inaugurated by the cubist painting. … That is, the contemplative stance of the detached observer … is undermined from within, and the observer of an immediately given world is exposed as a participant in the mediated activity of which that world is constituted.

(32, 35)

Porter, it should be noted, is working through a participant or constructivist theory of modernism in an American context, in which notions of self-reliance, self-authority, and self-autonomy had preoccupied writers for over a century. But the idea that reality was something that one could construct or imagine for oneself quite independently from some external source of authentication or legitimation was one of the extraordinary legacies of post-Renaissance Enlightenment, and hence one that Europe could celebrate as well. Thus, in France, observes Michel Foucault, “Modern man, for Baudelaire, is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truth; he is the man who tries to invent himself … [so that modernity] compels him to face the task of producing himself” (42). Julia Kristeva, pursuing a similar line of thought in Mallarmé, refers to this modernist process of imaginative projection as “polymorphism,” and further notes that a reluctance to adhere to any one construction of reality in particular would constitute “the wisdom of artifice,” a phrase of considerable interest to Perloff (156). The implication of all these well-established views, therefore, ought likely to underscore the insight that “modernism” itself was an effect of interpretive construction, and that what one was able to say about it would largely depend upon the historical, social, and cultural context within which it might be taken up and through which it might be mediated.

The aspect of Perloff's view of modernism that one finds extremely problematic here and widespread in all her other work, is that which suggests that there can be one and only one model of modernism—“High” (or “Anglo-American”) as it turns out, that she frequently invokes Andreas Huyssen's After the Great Divide (1986) to support (xii, 9–10, 201–202, passim). The fact that the history of a particular society's politics or economy or culture could offer an alternative to such a model, as in the case of an American modernism or a French modernism suggested above, or in cases where the supervening rhetoric might be one of race (e.g., Marianna Torgovnick's Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives [1990]), or gender (e.g., Marianne DeKoven's Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism [1991]), or class (e.g., Frank Lentricchia's Ariel and the Police [1988]), or even, most recently, genre (e.g., Suzanne Clark's Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word [1991])—none of this extraordinarily rich and suggestive new work on modernism would appear to have made the slightest impression upon what is presently on show in Radical Artifice. Moreover, one begins to wonder whether Perloff's low tolerance for anything but binary, either/or discourse—a case of “too many others” (203), perhaps?—one wonders whether or not this intolerance verging on absolutism might not be curtailing a more nuanced reading of modernism, conditioned also by Perloff's precipitate haste to get on with postmodernism.

I'm thinking especially here of her reading of Ezra Pound's “the natural object is always the adequate symbol” from his “Retrospect” pieces (Literary Essays 5) as some kind of exhortation for a mimetic and correspondent representation of natural truth (e.g., xi, 27, 79, 94, 197). The fact that Pound, in this passage, is at pains to underscore the word “adequate” perhaps indicates how significantly troubled he was by such a naive epistemology, imbricated as it was with the tradition of Georgian pictorialism he was trying so hard to counter in the England of the prewar years, even though he himself would oftentimes appear to be buying into such a “direct treatment” of experience (see Harper, esp. 102–103). Back home in America, a previous gilded age of realism had caused similar problems for burgeoning modernists, as Ronald E. Martin lately observes:

The ultimate reality of the external world was relatively easy to justify in the context of the nineteenth century's absolute, measurable universe of material atoms and causal forces. But then relativity theory and quantum mechanics, in prohibiting the assumption that our concepts can directly represent absolute external states, made the game a whole lot chancier—not in the sense that realisms were erroneous, but in the sense that they were obsolete in the new realm of hypothetical physics and language-as-artifact.

(102)

Artifactual language noted here can perhaps best be explained in terms of the home-grown philosophical tradition of pragmatism within which American modernism—Stevens, Frost, Robinson, for example—began to flourish, as Frank Lentricchia, among several other current theorists, has been steadily and persuasively arguing (“Ideologies of Poetic Modernism”; see also Martin 76–100, Gunn, and most recently, Poirier). Accordingly, if there has been a return to artifice in contemporary poetry, as Perloff argues, it could very well be to its radically pragmatic roots. Without her attending carefully to American history and culture, however, we'll never know. In any case, a current preoccupation with artifice could hardly represent a return in the “radical” sense that Perloff intends. “In our postmodern age,” as Martin remarks further in connection with Gertrude Stein, “that realization [namely, “the intuition that language is an artificial, conventionalized system of arbitrary symbols”] no longer seems so radical, but for a writer at the time of the First World War to challenge the virtually universal assumption that language was purely a medium for the representation of reality was a drastic departure” (182, emphasis added).

If a far too restrictive and monocular approach is the aspect of Perloff's argument that is troubling from the direction of modernism, it's surely the quite ungrounded and totally diffuse character of her postmodernism that troubles even more from the opposite direction. Statements from postmodern writers like Georges Perec to the effect that their radical discourse is the inauguration of “a sort of ‘great vacuum’” whose “violent aspiration” promises the “double virtue of liberation,” or in Perloff's own words on a text of Lyn Hejinian, that the “central” conception of their writing is the “deferral of meaning and denial of plenitude”—such statements hardly seem radical or revolutionary when set beside those of modernists like Stevens and Williams decades ago. For it was the former himself who, in the thirties, once wrote that “Reality is a vacuum,” and the latter who, a decade earlier, denied the plenitude of poetic statement by deferring it, rather, to an “infinity / of combinations,” wherein ultimate meaning might only be able to approximate an “energy in vacuo” (Opus Posthumous 194, Collected Poems 192). “Vacuum” seems a likely trope for reality in both poets since the modernist tradition they helped so much to launch in America would from the beginning insist “that no theory is absolutely a transcript of reality, but that any one of [a number of ‘rival formulations’] may from some point of view be useful” (James 48). Stevens's well-known “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” from 1923 is no doubt exemplary in this regard. The vacuum that the blackbird inscribes in American modernism, by suggesting any number of rival perspectives by which to frame experience, from early on withholds the prospect of the discourse ever drawing to a close. That is why Williams, in a well-known passage in The Embodiment of Knowledge (1928–30), would argue that realism “as a transcription of events or even facts” could never be susceptible to writing in the manner Perloff suggests. More in line with the ethos of pragmatism that comes to him by way of John Dewey in this text (7), Williams prefers instead to argue that “To transcribe the real creates, by the same act, an unreality, something besides the real, which is its transcription,” that is to say, “a fiction,” and would thus conclude: “The only real in writing is writing itself,” or to circle back again to Stevens, “flying is writing” (13, 86). Amy Lowell, from about the same time and by then a sworn enemy of Pound, has several images for such (un)real writing: “hidden distance,” “whiteness of intolerable beauty,” “edge of possibility”—all quite emphatically opposed to realism, which, not unexpectedly, she chooses to call “the Devil of Verisimilitude” (104, 93, 53, 52).

When Perloff, therefore, enlists Baudrillard to exploit further the difference between modernism and postmodernism, a difference, that is to say, foregrounding the relation “no longer between the image and the real, as early Modernists construed it, but between the word and the image” (92; see also 39, 197–98, 224n47), she takes with Baudrillard a step that neither Stevens nor Williams nor Lowell could responsibly countenance. There is “absence in reality,” not of reality, as Stevens tirelessly maintained (Collected Poems 176, emphasis added). Thus, Baudrillard's metaphysical formulation, to which Perloff attaches her infamous “indeterminacy,” that the simulacrum could only turn back upon itself in the form of yet another image is clearly a retrograde notion that would make American modernism, at any rate, quite uneasy. As Amy Lowell points out in her highly inflected version of feminist modernism, referring to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “because words / Are merely simulacra after deeds / … when they take the place / Of actions they breed a poisonous miasma / Which, though it leave the brain, eats up the body” (Selected Poems 51–52). Alarmed also at a postmodernism that might maintain no connection to existential or empirical experience, Iain Chambers perhaps provides the best gloss on Lowell's remark when he observes:

The ‘real’ dissolves into the simulacrum, into a mutable, historical construct. … It is this world, this construction and its languages, histories and heterogeneous complexity, that is our unique habitat, our only possibility.

(62, emphases retained)

Contrary to Perloff, whose brand of postmodernism, except for a rather vague reference to communism in Cage on her last page (216), seems devoid of any kind of political or social engagement, I would instead argue that it is the above sense of unique possibility that distinguishes the postmodern, the sense of possibility that Giles Gunn eloquently attaches to “the purpose of art as life's continuous revaluation of itself” (74). In these terms, the postmodern is not reckoned as some superannuation of modernism—how else to explain so many of the academy's new readings of modernism of late?—but becomes the reformulation of possibility buried deep within the social and cultural and racial landscape of modernism itself (see Vattimo 166–67), what William James once called “the rich thicket of reality” (55). Like modernism, as Foucault suggests, the postmodern, then, becomes more a question of attitude than anything else (39, 41). And the only reason perhaps for classifying Lowell along with modernism, no doubt, is the fact that she is not quite capable of carrying the richness of its promise far enough, for reasons that only a highly politicized feminism can ever hope to explain: “But Sapho [sic] was dead / And I, and others, not yet peeped above / The edge of possibility” (53). Moreover, the new readings that we are now happy to be receiving of deconstruction as a methodological tool “with its emphasis on responsibility to history” (Cornell 150; also 169, 180)—an emphasis that Derrida himself had known was there all along—such readings are able to articulate the kind of powerful interpretive protocols necessary to unlock the postmodern within the modern, as Marianne DeKoven has demonstrated so admirably. With Perloff, however, deconstruction functions in the present text merely as a veiled synonym for comparison or contrast: Lyn Hejinian “deconstructs” the autobiographies of Nancy Reagan and Shelley Winters, for example, or a question “deconstructs itself” at a seminar given by John Cage because it may represent an opinion contrary to Perloff's own (169, 210; see also 22, 80, 92, 129, 130, and 216). The same sort of critical misprision is at work in her overly simplistic understanding of important terms such as “dialectic,” “hegemony,” and even “Theory” (19 and 92, 237n14, 211).

What perhaps disappoints the reader most about Radical Artifice is that, in the end, Perloff herself doesn't believe it. The view her work presents of popular culture says as much. On this final aspect of what we're shown, take the following example:

The flight attendants are, of course, about to tell us to put our tray tables “in their locked, upright positions” and to keep our “seat belts securely fastened”—“securely” and “locked” not being very conducive to enjoyment—but never mind. After we land, taxi interminably to the gate, and push and shove our way to the exit, the smiling flight attendants will surely tell us, yet again, to “Enjoy.” Or, in a slightly more ambiguous version now in vogue, to “Have a good one.”

(181)

This anecdote is offered as one of several by Perloff to demonstrate, if the banal quotations are any indication, that nobody in our society could possibly be listening anymore, that words clearly have no referents, and that communication today is very much a mug's game, with all its real meanings “carefully displaced” (181). It's all a part of the highly overdetermined mediation of our present culture: junk mags, junk mail, junk minds, and the rest. And yet, when we inspect “the overproduction of such instrumental discourses in late-twentieth-century America,” we may be interested to discover that they in fact do have an analogue. And that analogue, curiously, is none other than the “alternate language system” that is Language poetry (49). In other words, present-day culture does have a referent—something to inform it, to explain it, to enlighten and comment upon it. But the recuperation of popular communication within the artifice of language in this quite directed—dare we say, “modernist”?—way should come as no surprise. Minatory direction is something we're given everywhere: “this actually happened!” (37), “what really happens in the external world” (26), “the forced delay … makes us see what is really happening” (111), “these adjectives really mean” (43), and so on. And then, there are all those keys: “the key to Cage's composition” (23; also 211), the “key to Perec's hyper-description” (143), the “key to the behavior of ‘Lyn’” (170), and so forth. For an argument whose postmodernism lays such great store by contriving and constructing and choosing, the elaborate communication game in this text, given such hortatory interventions, would appear to be far from playful. Isn't it a Language poet who is quoted as saying, “There were more storytellers than there were stories, so that … it was impossible to get close to the original, or to know ‘what really happened’” (169)? Maybe so. But in the language game that is being played in Radical Artifice, there is only one storyteller, and the one story she's come to tell turns out, astonishingly, to be the representation of “plain common sense”: “impenetrable as these texts may seem on a first reading, they turn out to be surprisingly mimetic … indeed, confusing reference, functions, I think, to mime the coming to awareness of the mind” (204–205, emphases added). With the mirror at last held up to human nature, Perloff finds herself “coming back to [her] beginning,” once again, and her account quickly ends.

Yet it's not just the beginning of the book presently under review that we sense we're coming back to by the end of Perloff's story. Rather, with the collapsing of artifice back into nature and common sense, we may feel that we're being pulled out of some promising future, and being shown the way back into an all-too-familiar past. What has steadily been moving us beyond this narrative of return in the academy over the last few years is the prospect, to defer to the central tenet of artifice, of constructing radically alternative narratives for ourselves. Often the narratives, as I tried to suggest earlier, have not needed to be entirely reinvented. They've had only to be retold from the point of view of the margin, or repositioned in terms of time and place, or reinterpreted through different rhetorical protocols. Whatever the case, with such a plethora of narratives ready to unfold, human experience, as inflected by gender or race or class or creed, cannot possibly look the same again. Nor should it. Yet experience becomes a far more sinister thing when its institutionalization within the study of English answers to the self-regarding imperatives of control, containment, and absolute mastery—Perloff's several “keys” to the postmodern castle, say—rather than to critical reformulation and reappraisal. The “Consciousness that is aware,” as Emily Dickinson once remarked, traverses the interval between “Experience” and “most profound experiment.” But there can be no revitalization of consciousness within our institution if that profound experiment is hounded, as Dickinson concludes, by “Its own identity” (822). Radical Artifice may suggest something of the order of a radical experiment with consciousness, both inside our institution, in its dealing with modernism and postmodernism, and outside, in its intersection with popular culture and the public sphere. However, by reconfirming the identity of what we've been shown so often before in Marjorie Perloff's criticism, and by reconsolidating her place in an academy no doubt consoled by this particular show of “radicalism,” the book fails—fails, as perhaps Foucault, echoing Dickinson, would conclude, both as an “historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us[,] and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them” (50).

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