Graven Images

Henry Hart

The College of William & Mary

 

Karen Mills-Courts. Poetry as Epitaph, Representation and Poetic Language. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1990. 326 pp. $39.95 cloth, $16.95 paper.

 

It might seem strange that a book erected on the deconstructionist foundations of Jacques Derrida should take its title from that celebrated advocate of hierarchies, T.S. Eliot. Since titles foreshadow unities of theme and stance, at first glance it would appear that Karen Mills-Courts’s Poetry as Epitaph courts the courtly values of Eliot, authorizing and ordering her own critical principles by locating them in Eliot’s authoritative shadow. Eliot’s presence certainly haunts much of her book, most noticeably at the end of the introduction where she quotes from “Little Gidding”: “Every poem [is] an epitaph.” She also provides the longer passage which sketches Eliot’s belief in poetic propriety, “where every word is at home / Taking its place to support the others, / The word neither diffident nor ostentatious, / An easy commerce of the old and new. . . .” For Mills-Courts, this endorsement of a poetic language that is decorous, humble, and unified, organically lodged in tradition yet politely asserting its modernity, mixing memory and desire, ends and beginnings, dead and living, is the gist of “T.S. Eliot’s remarkable moment of insight.”

 

The moment is also an end and a beginning for her own investigation into poetry’s ability to either present or represent, incarnate or imitate the mind’s inspired thoughts. Her attitude towards Eliot typifies the theme of the book. If she supplicates Eliot’s ghost, engraving his words on the gray, tombstone-like cover of her book, she also argues against and periodically expels his presence and the Platonic and Christian notions of spiritualized language (“tinged with fire beyond the language of the living”) that during privileged “timeless moments” supposedly incarnate the poet’s visions. She explains her own stance as poised between “Heidegger [who] thinks of language as presentational or ‘incarnative'” and “Derrida [who] thinks of language as ungrounded ‘representation’.” Through her bifocal lenses she examines representative texts from the beginning of what she would call, with Derrida, the logocentric tradition of western culture, and proceeds to map a gradual disillusionment with the capacity of the logos to embody or present intended meanings. She moves from Plato, the Bible, and Augustine through George Herbert, Wordsworth, and Shelley, and finishes with a lengthy discussion of John Ashbery. In some ways, however, Eliot remains her shadowy guide, her principle example of the poet torn between an ontotheological conviction that poetry is the living incarnation of the maker’s divinely inspired conceptions, analogous to God’s creation and incarnation, and the more sober recognition that word and world are always already fallen, that “Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, / Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, / Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, / Will not stay still,” as Eliot said in “Burnt Norton.” To this disillusioned view, words are simply dead or dying marks on the page, representations of representations that are continually losing their representational power and slipping into a confusion of tangential meanings.

 

Although Heidegger and Derrida provide most of the theoretical framework for her debate, dividing the book between a logocentric viewpoint at the beginning and a deconstructionist one at the end, Mills-Courts shies away from taking a firm, dogmatic stand on one side or the other. She is critical of Plato for his denigration of writing as a paltry substitute for speech but she is also critical of Derrida for his repudiation of authorial intentionality. If Plato is too idealistic, Derrida is too skeptical. In the end she sides with the poets who shy away from factional positions, who, in contrast with the ideologues, vacillate in the tense no-man’s-land between rival camps. Referring to Heidegger’s and Derrida’s conflicting linguistic views, she says: “Caught between them, the poet creates a poem that is overtly intended to work as ‘unconcealment,’ as the incarnation of a presence, the embodiment of a voice in words. Yet, he displays that voice as an inscription carved on a tombstone. In other words, he covertly acknowledges that the poem is representational, that it substitutes itself for a presence that has been absolutely silenced. For the very words that seem to give life simultaneously announce the death of the speaker.” Although Mills-Courts acts as a moderator to the two sides, occasionally stepping aside to note inconsistencies or biases in the views propounded by her theorists, the procedures and preoccupations of her book–the way she progresses from one major figure to another in western tradition, outlining and evaluating their attitudes toward speech, writing, being, and meaning–it readily becomes apparent that she favors one over the other, that her largest debt is to Derrida. In Poetry as Epitaph she has written her own Grammatology, although in a less eccentric style and from a more compromising point-of-view than Derrida’s. Still it is Derrida’s deconstructionist perceptions and tactics that captivate her most overtly.

 

The problem motivating the sort of linguistic discussion that attracts Derrida and Mills-Courts arises from a promise or ideal that language, on close examination, fails to fulfill. Ideally, language would mean what it says; it would communicate an unambiguous message and reveal in unmistakable terms, like a clear window, the being and intentions of its author. But because signs are not what they signify, because there is always a gap between mark and meaning, sign and signified, and because signs usually trigger off chains of significance rather than one, intelligible reference, all sorts of strategies have been concocted to circumvent linguistic imprecision and attain a more fulfilling way of communicating. Plato and Socrates advocated discovering the logos of reason, thought, and spirit through the logos of speech. Writing, they argued, distorted and distanced the mind’s meaning through dead representations which could not be questioned because the author was absent. Meaning and intention were veiled by the text rather than revealed by it. Only the voice through dialogue could present and clarify authorial truths. As a result, Socrates spoke rather than wrote. Christian and other religious ideologies frequently sought to dispense with the cumbersome medium of language altogether, associating it with the corrupt body or the fallen material world. The transcendental silence of meditation provided a more felicitous way to commune with inner spirit and external divinity. Frustrated by the circuitous way words refer to things, Jonathan Swift’s professors at the Academy of Lagado came up with their own way of short-circuiting traditional communication. According to them, it was “more convenient for all Men to carry about them, such Things as were necessary to express the particular Business they are to discourse on.” Swift is obviously ridiculing the linguistic idealists and their schemes to contain the sign’s ambiguous proliferation of meaning–what Derrida calls dissemination or play. In this case the linguistic purists must bear the burden of their rectified language on their backs. Like Mills-Courts, Swift favors a more realistic attitude. Behind her praise for Derrida, Ashbery, and the postmodernists is the same desire to expose and demystify linguistic idealism. She too criticizes the various tribes of Lagado that fail to accept the way language actually works.

 

Her culminating chapter posits Ashbery as Derrida’s closest cousin among postmodernist poets mainly because his poetry expresses the epitaphic way in which she feels language works. Throughout the book she argues that language, and specifically poetry, resembles a gravestone marking the presence of its absent author and the absence of its author’s presence. It is a dead representation haunted by the presence of a dead but somehow living person, one who once intended meanings though they are now obscure (not unfathomable or nonexistent, as some deconstructionists would maintain). In short, poetic language is Derridean as well as Heideggerean. Ashbery bridges these contraries, Mills-Courts believes, like no other contemporary poet. He is radically skeptical of language’s power to present or incarnate the spirit of the authorial logos, but still he believes–and this is why Mills-Courts celebrates him–in “Poetry as performance, as an epitaphic endeavor that displays both the absence and the presence of an intending ‘I,’ poetry that does not delude itself into believing that it has captured self-presence in a privileged moment, [but still exerts] . . . hope against all odds.” For Mills- Courts Ashbery is heroic and exemplary because he deconstructs the sacred tenets of the logocentric tradition, yet he never bottoms-out in nihilistic despair. His poetry keeps questioning and questing, tracing an elegant, quixotic path toward self-representation that never completely arrives. It resists the death of all conclusive representations and resolutions, all its temporary domiciles along the romantic way, in order to generate the desire for new ones which, in turn, must be deemed tentative and dismantled in order to keep the ongoing quest going on.

 

In her Acknowledgements Mills-Courts pays homage to one of her teachers for showing her “the elegance of theory.” Like Ashbery’s poetry, her book manages to be elegant and theoretical at the same time, which is quite a feat, especially when one considers the plethora of theoretical books which equate turgid style with profound thought. Deconstruction, she argues, does not necessarily entail stylistic butchery. This is one of the ironies she insists on: deconstructing often requires the most careful and rigorous constructing; it tears apart old, petrified conceptions but erects elegant scaffolding and newfangled equipment in the process. Its judicious reordering of hierarchies which have imprisoned though and oppressed conduct in the past does not simply scatter all thought, being, and meaning to the winds. Instead, it offers different systems for consideration and most notably advocates a tolerance of differences where intolerance and hierarchy were the rule. She makes this point in an examination of Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”: “The irony involved in writing words that ‘are no words’ has its roots in a gesture in which language is employed to convey even as it declares the impossibility of containing meaning.” Although Ashbery and Mills-Courts elegize the death of traditional concepts of meaning, presence, self, author, and so on, as in most elegies they acknowledge an afterlife for the deceased. Their Elysium is the haunted house of language. Their deconstructionist styles do not demolish the graveyards and empty tombs in anarchic revolt but, by contrast, reembody the remains in epitaphic valediction.

 

While Mills-Courts musters her theoretical arguments with a judicious clarity rare in academic books, and applies her tools to a wide variety of texts with great skill, the book would be even better if more writers were investigated or at least mentioned. After reading Poetry as Epitaph, for instance, one might assume that Ashbery is the only postmodernist poet concerned with such things as authorial status, linguistic dissemination, and logocentric myths. Yet these preoccupations are shared by dozens of other postmodern poets, some conservative and some radical, some formalist and some antiformalist. Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin, James Merrill–to name just a few of the ‘neoformalist’ heirs to the New Critics and Modernists– as it turns out, address the same grammatological issues as the Language Poets, although they are stylistically and often ideologically different. It is odd that none of these poets is mentioned in Poetry as Epitaph. The last word in her book, which is taken from Ashbery, is “guidelines,” and Mills-Courts is probably as aware as we are that her book, which surveys so much, has its limits. Her chosen guidelines contribute to the book’s strengths, but as she says of Ashbery, “longing” surfaces when guidelines are delineated, and our natural response to her own book is to long for more.