The Invisible World is in Decline
by Bruce Whiteman
ECW Press, 2000
Reviewed by Geoffrey Cook
I once attended a reading in Toronto which was MC’ed
by a woman, who, having noticed that all her male readers referred to
other male writers, noted, “So many men talking about other men’s
texts!” The sardonic comment took the wind out of some of the
self-regarding stuffiness and insecurity of that literary community. I
recalled this comment while reading Whiteman’s collection.
The
Invisible World is divided into six parts comprised of sequences,
poems in parts, and prose poems, most of which have been previously
published as chapbooks, broadsides, special editions and journals (some
poems appeared in the previous collection, Visible Stars: New and
Selected Poems).
Invisible World is full of references and
allusions to other texts, interpreted in the widest sense to include,
for example, painting. In his notes, where the “ur-texts” for a
couple of the poems are identified, Whiteman writes that one of the
sequences, “The Zukofsky Impromptus”, “are a palimpsestic text
written over words and phrases drawn from Louis Zukofsky’s ‘A-11’”.
“Palimpsest” always reminds me of Ezra Pound’s pretensions and
poses. (The Invisible World is also an apparently endless text -
this being “Book V”). And then I feel the annoyance most readers do,
I think, when confronted with literary cleverness and self-concern
(which is not a necessary result of allusion). Nonetheless, there is
some fine and interesting writing in the book.
Whiteman’s collection involves a number of motifs
involving binary relationships of the body/soul, art/life type. The most
developed of these oppositions, the most articulate tension in the
collection, is that between the “forger” and the “lover”: the
perfection of technique through imitation vs. the realization of
authenticity through desire. Through this central metaphorical tension,
Whiteman explores the ideas of art, authenticity and eros and their
interrelationship.
The first 3 sequences, “The Zukovsky Impromptus”,
“Polyphonic Windows” and “Interrealm” develop the theme of eros:
here the body, love and the lover are credited as noble, beautiful,
heroic aspects of human life. “The body’s love for the world is
permanent”. “Love is set on the body like fate”. “Love makes
last what can last”. In sum, “In love the body, ... knowing its need
and true heart, [says], our honour consists in this”, i.e., love and
loving. The pieces in these initial sequences are moving, at times, and,
particularly in “Polyphonic Windows”, a challenge of one’s
vocabulary.
In the transitional sequence, “Two Poems for Milt
Jewel”, Whiteman meditates on the relation between art and life,
alternately defiant and self-deprecating in tone. But it is the prose
narrative, “The Forger’s Confession” which, ironically, is the
most engaging piece in Whiteman’s book. The forger confesses, “my
failure at love, my inability to be human in any but a mechanical
fashion” has resulted in mastery of mimesis but a profound emotional
“incompetence”. This man works not for money, love, revenge, fame or
spite - other forgers’ motives - but “because [forgery] is the
single thing of which I am master”. Ironically, a forger can be the
greatest of artists:
... Keats’s notion of negative capability, by
which he characterized the nature of literary genius, applies also
to the consummate forger. It is the ability so to sympathize with
another person or object as practically to become that other person
or object, to allow easily for mystery and uncertainty and to be
perfect in spite of them.
The forger sees through the great “illusion” of
art, and Whiteman’s piece is partly a subtle, ironic critique of
romantic and humanist notions of art and the artist:
The great canonized works of art depend on their
ability to go on provoking certain bits of feeling, of intellection,
of human identity over the years and centuries, and it was that
provocation which from the beginning has fascinated me and which I
have wanted to be able to simulate perfectly.
The forger of aesthetic pleasure finds that he can
simulate sexual pleasure with equal finesse, making him the “perfect
lover in a way. I wanted nothing for myself from sex and I was therefore
entirely free to create pleasure for women in what at first they would
mistake for selflessness.” Inevitably, the forger and his lovers find
the sex superficial, “I had no character of my own and ... every act,
thought, and emotion was manufactured in the light of something I had
learned about someone else”. Sex and love proving vapid, the forger
seeks spiritual solace - so romantically - in music; though here too the
forger finds “childish catatonia and selflessness” in the end. The
irony is that from the point of view of theory, the greatest artist is
the forger.
Yet our forger finds that his life and work are ultimately
illusory and void of transcendent significance: “The path I pursue
leads inevitably to death ... but also to silence and loss of
personality.... I am pouring myself more and more into the imagined
lives of others, and less and less is there much remaining that is me.”
The analogy between the lover and the forger serves to establish the
illusion of idealistic theories of art: it is the quality of the self -
the individual, unique, suffering, flawed soul - that matters, that
allows for communion (or love) and authentic communication (always a
risk beyond the safety of theoretical illusions).
While it critiques
certain illusions about art and the artist, “The Forger’s Confession”
returns us - on the level of ideas - to another fundamental truism of
creativity: art that matters rises out of an individual life engaged
emotionally as well as intellectually in the crises of desire and
authenticity.
Aptly, Whiteman’s “Ecstasy: XXIV Short Love Poems”
follows “The Forger’s Confession”, for “Ecstasy” is a
collection of notes on the more authentic Whiteman-in-love. And again,
ironically, these most intimate avowals of desire and affection are the
most artless of pieces in “Invisible World”. And it is this
artlessness of “the authentic”, seen as it must be beside the
artfulness of the prose piece on the forger - which leaves a reader
frustrated.
Do we not seek, in art, the union of authenticity and
artifice, the contingent and the transcendent, the honest with the
artful? Do we not seek a “phrase [that] man can pass from hand to
mouth” as Derek Walcott defines poetry in “The Forests of Europe”?
The technical concerns in Invisible World are
with the logic and clarity of imagery in service of a set of ideas
(aesthetic, moral, erotic, spiritual); with creating various
self-sufficient yet inter-related structures and thus with the coherence
of a totality of form(s)/idea(s). The technical concern is not, that is,
with the line or metre, nor rhythm in a traditional sense. The poems are
artistic objects, certainly; and Whiteman can be credited with
originality of aesthetic and relevance of ideas (particularly in this
time of anxious “intertextuality”).
But the work remains on the
level of ideas and texts, rarely transmogrifying into those salty
phrases from which we take emotional and spiritual sustenance - despite
the poet’s longing to make the word flesh, to discover the flesh’s
immortality, as Wallace Stevens claimed: “Beauty is momentary in the
mind - / The fitful tracing of a portal; / But in the flesh it is
immortal.” In the end, Invisible World appears as the consummate
piece of male anxiety: anxiety over sexuality, over artistry, over other’s
texts. Thus the run for cover in wryness and tricks with texts.
Geoffrey Cook is one of The Danforth
Review's poetry editors. |
