ALH Online Review, Series X 1 ... Reviewed by Walter Kalaidjian, Emory University .... not to mention today's accelerate
ALH Online Review, Series X 1
Ann Keniston, Ghostly Figures: Memory and Belatedness in Postwar American Poetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015), 240 pp. Reviewed by Walter Kalaidjian, Emory University Much of psychoanalytic theory in contemporary trauma studies depends on the latency of recollection: the shocks and returns of Nachträglichkeit, après-coup, screen memory, post-memory, and so on. The ambiguities, inaccuracies, and repressions of memory as such are further complicated in literary and cultural narrative by language’s powers of figurative representation. Subject to linguistic displacement and temporal delay, the challenge of discerning the past—the truth and meaning of what happened—is fraught, we have learned, with radical indeterminacy. Our precarious relation to time’s passage, however, need not be experienced solely as loss. As Ann Keniston demonstrates in Ghostly Figures: Memory and Belatedness in Postwar American Poetry, belatedness too serves as a resource for poetic witnessing to the extremity of postwar history. Belatedness, for Keniston, preserves a salutary tension between the seemingly transparent verisimilitude of political verse and the opaque indirection of experimental poetry. Following precursors like Carolyn Forché, Keniston deploys “postwar” not only in terms of periodicity—referencing the second half of the twentieth-century—but, more importantly, as a marker of traumatic historicity, one that registers the unprecedented extremity of global war, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb, as well as the intensifying pace of geopolitical terrorism. In the poetics of belatedness, the traumatic event is invoked only to be rendered, paradoxically enough, as inaccessible or inexpressible: fragmented by verbal disruptions, formal evasions, and feedback loops where “belatedness impels the figurative to emerge from the failure of the literal” (7). As one case study, Keniston offers Robert Pinsky’s commissioned poem on 9/11, “The Anniversary,” whose temporal repetitions vex both the event’s meaning over time and our desire for, and tolerance of, sustained commemoration. In it, Pinsky revisits the story of the “doomed firefighters” of 9/11 who inscribed their social security numbers proleptically on their arms before ascending into the WTC to rescue those engulfed by the disaster. For Keniston, this now posthumous tale of heroism underscores the impasse in our access to historical reference as even these inscribed traces of the fallen are themselves effaced by the total disintegration of the “doomed towers” (21). This specific erasure condenses a broader turn in postwar verse away from Ezra Pound’s modernist confidence that “an epic is a poem including history.” Rather, the postwar poems she studies “can . . . be read as extensions of a movement throughout twentieth-century poetry toward increasing doubt about the possibility of depicting historical events” (15).
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2 ALH Online Review, Series X In addition to examining the key terms of memory and belatedness set in the postwar era, Keniston’s title signifies on literary trauma’s well-known trope of haunting: namely that, in Cathy Caruth’s oft-cited formula, “to be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event” (17). For her part, Keniston attends to the ghostly side effects that accompany the poetics of loss inscribed in the contemporary elegy. In conversation with critics as varied as Susan Stewart, Peter Sacks, and Paul de Man, Keniston examines the specter of prosopopoeia that haunts the invocation of the departed particularly in the wake of the late twentieth-century AIDS epidemic. “To summon a ghost in a poem,” she concludes, “is thus to draw attention to the poem’s artifice” (18). In this vein, Keniston offers a salutary supplement to Sacks’s claim that the contemporary elegy offers a “deflection of desire” through the aesthetic compensations of metaphor. Just as important for Keniston, however, is the “rawer trope of metonymy” (161) as you find it in the postmodern turn characterizing the elegiac poetics of, say, Susan Howe. Ghostly Figures presents an eclectic range of close readings, focusing on canonical works such as Sylvia Plath’s posthumous volume Ariel, Adrienne Rich’s Dark Fields of the Republic, Jorie Graham’s Region of Unlikeness, Howe’s The Midnight, and a sheaf of AIDS elegies. Approaching such well-known works as Ariel, Keniston reflects on her own belatedness in addressing the vast body of prior commentary that has seemingly exhausted such touchstones as “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus.” Nevertheless, she claims to have found something new to say about Plath’s own literal belatedness to the Holocaust whose formal symptoms appear figuratively in the poet’s “repeated and often violent interrogations of metaphor, simile, metonymy, synecdoche, and apostrophe” (32). Belatedness in encountering Plath today, Keniston observes, involves prolepsis: the uncanny feeling that “reading Plath’s late poems through her subsequent death makes the poems themselves seem posthumous, although of course they are not” (33). Keniston demonstrates how the 2004 publication of Ariel: The Restored Edition, edited by Frieda Hughes, remains haunted by the “proleptic narrative of Plath’s suicide foregrounded by Hughes’s [1965] edition” (33). Turning to close readings of “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus,” Keniston argues that, unlike the linear chronology of death and subsequent mourning on view in the elegy tradition, Plath’s late lyrics stage disrupted temporalities both proleptically and posthumously insofar as “their speakers are drawn back and forth across the line of mortality, at once asserting their similarity to and difference from the dead” (39). Prolepsis also defines the temporal shaping of what Keniston finds in the figures of “address and asymmetrical witness in Rich’s Dark Fields of the Republic.” For example, Rich’s poetic testimony in poems such as “Comrade” negotiates, Keniston suggests, the disjointed, rhetorical temporalities of apostrophe. Invoking an absent, anonymous victim
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effaced by historical extremity, Rich also addresses a reader to come, whose futurity falls outside the frame of the poem’s immediate, ethico-political witnessing. For Keniston, “the poems themselves thus seem proleptically to pose questions about their own reception” (61). Similarly, her discerning reading of Rich’s “Revolution in Permanence” foregrounds the “[a]symmetrical but intimate transhistorical bond between the presentday speaker and the now dead Ethel Rosenberg” (79). Yet Keniston is mindful of the hazards inherent in the poetry of testimony, including the risks of polemic—a certain “overconfidence,” insularity and protective distance afforded by the poet witness’s aesthetic framing of another’s extreme experience—and the disingenuous collapse of self and other that, say, Mutlu Blasing finds in Whitman’s collective identifications and social appropriations. The crossings inherent in poetics of direct address and apostrophe take on a more intimate and passionate vulnerability in Keniston’s reading of the elegiac mode framing much US verse in the wake of the AIDS epidemic. Keniston especially considers the “ghostly animations” and visitations haunting works like Frank Bidart’s “The Second Hour,” Mark Doty’s “Fog,” and “Homo Will Not Inherit,” Paul Monette’s “Three Rings,” D. A. Powell’s Tea, Thom Gunn’s “Words for Some Ash,” and James Merrill’s “Farewell Performance.” Some of these works negotiate degrees of identification with, and remove from, the dead and dying through the literal and figurative presentations of infection and immunization. Following Lee Edelman, Keniston reflects on how language’s “tropological substitution” displaces the biopolitical reality of infection that nevertheless left the elegiac performances of poets like Monette and Merrill on borrowed time. The blurred temporal boundary between the living speaker and the mourned departed is a motif that resonates here with Plath’s posthumous Holocaust verse but is now inflected by the specter of a fatal communicable disease. Keniston also takes up the disjunctive, metonymic poetics of “spatialization” that disrupt narrative certainties in Graham and Howe. Instead of lending historical meaning, coherence, and continuity to the present through analogy to past narrative, received or recollected memories encounter a certain “unlikeness” in poems such as Graham’s “Holy Shroud” and “Fission.” Not only is personal and public history, in Graham’s verse, subject to the nonlinear, redundant temporalities of memory, but spatial displacements of contemporary visual media, compounded by poetry’s verbal disruptions, further complicate access to the past. “While film,” she writes, achieves the illusion of movement and narrative, the poem does the reverse by breaking its story into a series of snapshot like tableaux . . . espousing a metonymic model—that privileges accidental, superficial adjacency—rather than a metaphoric one based on underlying similarity and depth” (139, 140). Finally, Keniston presses further on the metonymic spacings of memory in Howe’s spectral The Midnight and its mourning the passing of the poet’s mother. Writing against
4 ALH Online Review, Series X Sacks’s emphasis on the elegiac metaphor’s “compensatory power” to deflect loss, Keniston explores Howe’s metonymic fragmentation of image/text relations, appropriated passages, recycled citations, and what Howe calls “transitional space” in her compositional technique. “Instead of attempting to look through language,” Keniston concludes,” Howe here looks at it” (162). Ghostly Figures provides an important, poetic supplement to the wave of postwar trauma theory that swept through literary studies especially during the decade following 9/11. Fruitful avenues for future work would question how our readings of literary belatedness, memory, and temporality shift as we move across specific cultural contexts of ethnic, racial, gender, and class difference beyond the US canon and beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. What changes in theme and formal poetics does belatedness undergo through engaging with diverse networks of worldwide literary production and exchange, not to mention today’s accelerated temporalities of global social media? Building on Keniston’s study, future readings of the stakes in the contemporary elegiac mode of AIDS verse or other poetics of human embodiment, disability, species rights, and animal philosophy, would benefit from a dialogue with current theories of biopolitics, social immunity, and ethico-political community as in the work, say, of Roberto Esposito, among others. Right now, however, Ann Keniston’s attention to how belatedness, memory, and temporalities of loss are inscribed in American verse forms serves as a model for scholarship on contemporary poetics.
