LITERATURE NATION
MARIA DAMON AND MIEKAL AND:
THE VISUAL, THE VIRTUAL
AND THE GRAMMARS OF TIME
A Review by Tom HIBBARD
1.
Two similar perfect bound paperbacks Literature Nation by Miekal And and Maria Damon and The Pleasure of the Text by Roland Barthes. The title Literature Nation is unclear. It could imply a nation strengthened in enlightenment. Or it could imply a nation weakened in inbred sensibility. 'Nation' might be misleading, referring symbolically to 'locus of activity' rather than America uptight and at war in Iraq.
Literature Nation contains poetry. Pleasure of the Text contains critical writing. I think it is interesting that the books are not close in publishing datesthe former being published by Potes and Poets Press in 2003, the latter being published originally in Paris in 1973 and yet are close conceptually. My initial reaction to Literature Nation was that, in a Big Bang cosmos, nature is ‘experimental‘ and the inexplicable is requisite. Why shouldn't books in different times be close in theme?
The poetry of one book is similar to the critical writing of the other. Or vice versa. The poetry of Literature Nation isn't stanzaic or free verse. It is eighty-five pages of prose-like paragraphs, written as email exchanges between And and Damon, each paragraph or strophe headed by a phrase in brackets. Each bracketed heading is a bracketed phrase from the previous paragraph. So the form is a linked recurring pattern, perhaps like knitting or a chain-making mechanism. The book is divided into seven chapters called 'travels': Literature Nation, Whether Nation, Whether Hotel, Weather Hostel, Moss Goddess, Doll Goddess, HyperPoesy.
The prose of Pleasure of the Text is impressionistic, poetic. It too is divided into strophe-like paragraphs. The text is interspersed with parenthetical insertions giving the effect of cross-hatch and weaving.
As science has revealed the fantastic nature of physical reality, the aesthetics of writing and art have come more to the fore. More and more the creative work of literature is in form. More and more the form is allowed to take its impossible, relativist shape.
2.
The word 'jouissance' in Literature Nation is a clear reference to Pleasure of the Text (which contains a discussion of this word in its introduction). There are many words in Literature Nation relating to linguistics (including 'Hyperpoesie'). These self-conscious references to Barthes, Jacques Derrida and others, in my view, point toward the subject of 'visual writing'. One paragraph is titled 'visual writing'.
Visual writing is many things and is expanding in its meaning. I think one thing that certainly visual writingalso called visual art or visual poetryinvolves is artistic use of visual aspects of language especially as it is encountered in the history of civilization. Archeological glyphs are prime material for visual writing. So are ornate manuscripts, handwriting, typewriter-written records, historical and legal documentsany language-associated artifact that conveys the special relationship of language to human thought and development.
Usually, visual writing is fairly easy to recognizecolorful treatment of scrolls, collages of typographies, assemblages of texts, artistic logograms and ideograms. Miekal And's recent 2003 chapbook, Spidertangle, is an excellent collection of visual works by various artists and writers. However, the use of phrases and sentences blurs this recognizability and makes the idea of visual writing more complicated.
3.
Something I've wanted to point out in relation to visual writing is the presence of James Joyce's last major work, Finnegans Wake. It seems to me that this work is the first-ever instance of visual writing in this second, more complicated form that uses 'ordinary sentences' and the semblance of a standard literary form, in this case the novel. I have felt that this latter work is different from Joyce’s earlier short story collection, The Dubliners, and even the complicated epic Ulysses. Finnegans Wake has always seemed to me something of a hoax or joke on the reading public and the world of literary criticism. It has been called an example of 'interior monologue' and 'stream of consciousness'. But I feel it has left these devices behind in Ulysses and moved to a style now associated with visual writing. In the approximately six hundred pages of Finnegans Wake, first published in 1939, the words seem an insurmountable verbal edificeperhaps the current computer term 'firewall' is applicableintended to separate Joyce's private world from the uninhabitable world of his literary reputation. Here is a quote from the book taken at random:
Lowly, longly, a wail went forth. Pure Yawn lay low. On the mead of the hillock lay, heartsoul dormant mid shadowed land- shape, brief wallet to his side, and arm loose, by his staff of citron briar, tradition stick-pass-on. His dream monologue was over, of cause, but his drama parapolylogic had yet to be, affact. Most distressfully (but, my dear, how successfully!) to wail he did, his locks of a lucan tinge, quickrich, ripely rippling, unfilleted, those lashbetasselled lids on the verge of closing time, whiles ouze of his sidewiseopen mouth the breath of him, evenso languishing as the princeliest treble treacle or lichee chewchow purse could buy. Yawn in a semiswoon lay awailing and (hooh!) what helpings of honeyful swoothead (phew!), which ear- piercing dulcitude! As were you suppose to go and push with your bluntblank pin in hand upinto his fleshasplush cushionettes of some chubby boybold love of an angel. Hwoah!
There are clues here'lay low', 'heartsoul dormant', 'his dream monologue was over', the mention of 'what helpings of honeyful'that point to a separation of writer from written, a personal world obscured behind the text. I don’t see that there is characterization or novelistic framework. The words seem like unintense language samples. I feel the word 'parapolylogic' is straight visual writing, the meaning of the word secondary to its surface representation of language itself.
In tone and in construction, this writing is similar to a section from Literature Nation. Let me quickly say that I don't think Literature Nation is a hoax, though this would be consistent with a critical interpretation of its title. A literature nation might be one that can’t tell the difference between literary values and real life. I do think that similar to Joyce's work Literature Nation builds, using the value-qualities of words, a symbolic barrier between author(s) and the public at large or perhaps at random. That is one thing it does.
I have argued this in relation to other visual works, for example in works consisting of a word repeated in a geometric pattern. These works are sometimes called ‘concrete’ poetry. There are instances, in my opinion, of this type of intent in other media tooblank canvases in painting. Piano music where the pianist rests hands on the closed piano keyboard. The whole idea of abstract art seems to some extent prompted by an attempt to avoid giving artistic reinforcement to viewer pre-conceptions. Parables and allegories in Christian teaching and elsewhere in art are ways of conveying artistic messages to a select audience within an audience at large. The use of complex word groupings, similar to sentences, as opposed to a geometrically patterned word, gives visual work an appearance more like ‘regular writing’ and more masks their (artistic) function(s) as visual writing.
4.
But this is only the slightest beginning for visual writing. For at this point the philosophical inquiry into the nature of language can be introduced. Visual writers are beginning to apply the theories of writers such as Wittgenstein, Sartre, Barthes, Michael Foucault, Noam Chomsky and a host of others to their works.
Take, for example, this quote from Wittgenstein:
If we look at the actual use of a word, what we see is something constantly fluctuating.
A visual writer might respond by attempting to depict fluctuation in an artwork of letters or text. I have seen artworks of blurred as if vibrating texts.
The Pleasure of the Text, a brief paperback itself of only sixty-seven pages, was written following Barthe’s S/Z and has the character of a companion to it and summation of its insights into qualities of written language. Quickly paging through The Pleasure of the Text, I note these words and phrases in describing the nature of language text: 'tissue' 'mystique' 'embarrassed figuration' 'delicacy' 'intelligence' 'security' 'mastery' 'catalyzable' 'phraseology' 'incandescent metal, outside communication' 'conflict' 'uselessness' 'what happens in the language' 'the sentence is a body' 'the pleasure of the sentence is to a high degree cultural'. This is one book by one author. Of the great number of other writers and books, I would like to mention Noam Chomsky's Language and Responsibility and Derrida's Writing and Difference from which is derived the description of language as a 'system of differences'.
In my view, what these writers are describing is the 'message' of the medium of language, especially of written language. Though Marshall McLuhan gave us this notion, he was drawn more to the emerging electronic and musical media of the sixties, not seeing how it applied to language media. It took these other writers, I would say beginning with Wittgenstein, to fill in the gap, though other earlier philosophers were concerned with language, all the way back to Aristotle’s Poetics and dialogues of Plato.
One other important aspect of language to which visual writers might make reference. The first written language was Egyptian hieroglyphs, a complicated amalgam of lines and pictures that were a part of Egyptian religion and practiced only by priests. Though language has evolved into a simpler, democratic tool, losing its picture qualities in most cases and gaining a more negligible, neutral cursive appearance, as Barthes points out in another place, the ’writer’ in modern culture has achieved a certain status independent of what he writes, perhaps priest-like or ‘prophetic’, which might explain ‘obscurity’ and other directions of modern writing.
In sum, these philosophers of language point toward a variety and complexity in the nature of language that closely parallels the ethical variety and complexity in meaning of life.
5.
At this point, a few examples from Literature Nation would be good. As in the Joyce quote above, these quotes contain self-explaining hints.
[Nouns take things personally]
[Escapist literature] uncovered from deep ancient trenches later translated into bird tracks and paw prints. Evasive bodylanguage is on queue, the route is magnetic & decisive. Small plants in northfacing windows crave the fiction of wilderness, [small planets in northern sky] are not as they appear.
[small planets in northern sky]
was red. A woven pad with fingers going in the wrong place. Thickened wool-batch, longing for the day of stick return, when the tribals would dismantle [theory monument to itself]. The leaning tent of branches and saplings. [beribboned with hair, yarn and skeletal jewelry], is on its way across the state line.
That is a sample from an earlier ‘travel‘. Here is a sample from closer to the end.
[the threadic specificity of our respective projects intertwined]
We go at it variously. Since our collaborative texts are email traded back & forth, they are conducive to sprawl, a crazyquilt garden memoired & tatted with convivial phraseology. Loom metaphors abound in the hypertext worldview, beginning with the [grand looms] which inspired Babbage to construct his first counting machine.
[grand looms]
Grids provide the [field for glyphic dance, linen] chenille, silk and wool the sensuous anchors for cyberflight. Tufts and tuffets, nets and nettles unsettled by catalytic high-rising, rhizomatic, the trees barely rise above the sea-level embankment. The flight from the heartland to the edge is instantaneous; that is why [joy is grounded] in the very day.
These samples contain qualities Barthes describes . . . mystique, tissue, intelligence. There are also Damon/And terms from the text that are similar'rough surfaces', 'bird tracks', 'image', 'verbal architecture’, ‘textured language’. Don't forget the obvious irregular quality that would generally be called 'poetic'. But the prose-like nature of the writing covers this to some extent. Not overtly tied to any standard artistic form, to me, the form also suggests the grandeur of the novel. The words are put together loosely. I would say that the final strophe of those quoted above has a directness that could be called statement yet not like a factual writing. I feel that the strophes of Literature Nation have more directness and a higher energy than the somewhat mechanical Joyce work. Yet, like Joyce's work, no global theme emerges. The overall connection in the text is an unsequential series of insights or realizations that belong to the time of the exhange of the two authors. The randomness of the insights adds up to a humbleness, an increase in the anonymity of the work.
Taken as a whole, Literature Nation could be described as a long, complex, non-narrative visual poem, that uses languagewords, phrases, sentencesin an idiosyncratic combinative way representative of the struggle of mankind individually and as a group to achieve mastery or completion or intelligence consistent with its own distinctive though inexplicable being. This achieving is not necessarily spectacular or notably exceptional but might be a fulfillment of a common or perhaps unknown sort, such as learning to make cookies or giving birth to a child. In other words, the text could be described as using language qualities in a broad way to make a symbolic work of literature.
6.
However I think Literature Nation is more than this. It would seem we have a formula for a new style of writing. Yet I find a consistent criticism. In practice, the more complex style of visual writing becomes monotonous. Its complexity isn't the same as regular writing. Reading Finnegans Wake from cover to cover could be criticized as something like counting railroad ties. Many good readers would consider it a waste of time. ‘One sentence is all sentences'. This leads back to the possibility of a verbal wall that may, in fact, be intended to discourage close reading, apart from the author's personal domain.
What, if anything, is the answer to this problem? A visual writer like Jim Leftwich would argue that ’semiology’ the interaction of signsovercomes it. Leftwich’s visual writing functions on multiple levels. I tend to agree. I think Chomsky’s idea of ‘deep structure’ also applies. What is still undeveloped in visual writing is a fundamental understanding of grammar that can supercede the grammatical rules taught in highschool. Though the verbal constructions of visual writing are complex, they miss the chemical smoothness and release of meaning that ordinary sentences routinely achieve. The question is: What is grammar?
I believe the problem resides in this: Because words are used in a symbolic, ’representative’ way, they remain pictorial and interact pictorially. Words that interact pictorially accrue into a presence. It’s when words interact to accrue into an absence that they attain the diffuse activity characteristic of thought. The level of meaning for language is virtual. It is a level that does not exist. This relates to what language philosophers call ‘praxis’, the changing of words into activity.
Part of the problem I think is that language qualities described by philosophers are by-products of ordinary language use that have appeared over a long period of time and at the cost of much suffering. Though it is good that they can be described and appreciated, these qualities readily duplicated on their own aren't the same as syntactical word use. Prominent language qualities are not as meaningful as language use itself.
Writes James Edwards of Wittgenstein in The Authority of Language,
When one thinks philosophically of language as a calculus of rules, there is the powerful temptation...to be entranced by a certain picture of the matter, to idealize a certain image of language, and thus to forget what it could mean to be able to apply that picture in a concrete instance.
7.
Barthes seems to have an answer for this problem. Barthes describes a further element he calls ’temporality’. I have seen his temporality defined as the time it takes for the words to develop into understanding. I believe that temporality also refers to a time element of the sentence itself, perhaps like music, a timeliness, a quickness. Barthes relates temporality to the pronoun ‘I’, which in turn brings in such elements as ideas, opinion, statement, ‘the person’, predisposition, ‘subject’. For Barthes, temporality is ‘a specific time of discourse’. (A specific time and place?) This temporality seems to relate to the ‘deep structure’ of sentences and the origins of grammar. Grammar is the rules that govern the interaction of words to achieve communication. Grammar is the movement of words together that cause them to cease being objects on their own and combine into meaning.
The priestly specialness of the writer is achieved through the visual, through separation of author and writing in a way that points upward to the iconic cultural eminence of language. But language-use is also associated with a lowness, self-humbling, an addressing of the mundane tasks at hand, and this lowness is what causes words to linguistically interact. Language-use is to some degree timely. The words of an individual author gain meaning in a temporary human context. Temporality is created by intent to communicate. The temporal aspect, that is, the ’temporary’ arises because the context of word use, as long as it involves intent, can not be more than subjective, tied deeply to time, place and individual. Writes Barthes, 'There is never but one sole and great opposition in the discourse, that of the person and the non-person . . .’ (It seems to me that an excitedness or high energy level of writing in this way can also be a temporal grammar.)
Literature Nation, on the cutting edge of these problems, uses the entire spectrum of language device in its poetic journey. It fuses textual and visual writing. It is at times visual and at times virtual, at times pictorial and at times grammatical, at times symbolic and at times explicit, at times permanent and at times temporary, at times withdrawn and at times engage. For a long time, Miekal And has been in the forefront of experimental writing in the U.S. His name reflects the amount of his commitment. Maria Damon, a teacher in the English Department at the University of Minnesota, lists among her special interests 'ethnopoetics', 'cultural poetics' and 'poetry of marginalized American subcultures'. Together, I feel they have pushed language use nearer the asymptotes that would enfranchise the unknowable depths within our collective selves.
Literature Nation is a [soul device]. Literature Nation paved with print and paradise.
To travel in Literature Nation is to vibrate between paranoia and joissance.
back