Subverters of the Tongue

...Kenner answers the question only indirectly...

...But Kenner's phrase is ambiguous...

...Enter William Carlos Williams (I am parodying Kenner's melodramatic style...

...The lines are pure paradox: The perfect contempt for poetry makes possible the discovery of what is genuine in it...

...Here are egregious instances of Kenner's style...

...The ungainly: "It is a prose [Sherwood Anderson's] in which to tell of lonely people doing things they have no way of thinking about, supposing as they do, off there in the provinces, that their impulses and troubles are unique...

...According to Kenner, language in Stevens is intransitive...

...He succeeds in linking them into something like a literary-historical continuum, seeing them almost as a series of problem-solutions much in the way art critics track the internal history of modern art...

...The "summary" that follows, then, is schematic in a way that the author is never schematic...

...Kenner doesn't simply exposit or argue...

...Are the excluded writers sui generis, or examples of another kind of modernism...

...In European literature the ordinary quickly becomes the banal...

...This does not show in a nostalgia for an older order of civilized values, though, but rather in his acquiescence to the present...

...A Homemade World is not easy to summarize, because the author's style and approach have a dense, incorrigible erudition that sends the mind in multiple directions, forcing it constantly to hold all the threads of the "argument" in a state of tense vigilance...

...His instances, after brief preliminaries with Pound and Amy Lowell, are Fitzgerald, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, the so-called "Objectivists" (of whom Louis Zukofsky is the major representative), the "Projectivist" school fled by Charles Olson), Hemingway, and Faulkner...

...Since he deliberately omits Robert Lowell, Frost, Hart Crane, and E. E. Cummings, among others, it is not altogether clear whether he means to encompass all of American modernism...

...Not the branches half in shadow But the length of each branch Half in shadow As if it had snowed on each upper half Kenner finely characterizes Objectification as profoundly American in its puritanism: "implying as it did a perfect indifference to any reader's approval, tending as it did to thrust arrangements of speech into the perfect thinghood of a snail shell (shaped, achieved, at rest), it comported with a latent sense that the arts ought not exhilarate, save austerely and moreover that in a gray time (1931) they had best be gray...

...He offers us, in short, the anomaly of the conservative who is an unresisting witness to the avant-garde, which is now no more than a simulacrum of industrial civilization itself...

...Yet one must be grateful for Kenner's close attention (informed by a keen intelligence and vast erudition) to the texts...

...Unfortunately, reading him, whatever the subject, is to be made aware not only of an omnivorous curiosity but of a quirky phrasing that sometimes leaves one uncertain about the degree of illumination he provides...

...The so-called "Objectivism" of Louis Zukofsky attempts to instate sincerity, defined as an obsessive attention to each word in a sentence or verse, a dealing with language as if its elements were reified entities...

...Indeed, Kenner's attitude toward him seems unsettled, tending toward negative...

...Reviewed by Eugene Goodheart Chairman, Department of English, Boston University In the Introduction to his latest book, Hugh Kenner declares his subject to be "the homemade world of American modernism...

...For good or ill, Kenner has one of the few unmistakable voices in American criticism...

...The good life is no longer mocked by 'the machine in the garden,' the good life is realized by means of the machine: intelligence impressed on matter...

...It is a sentimental playing on little pipes for the poet to pretend otherwise...

...The context for this is the '20s, and the first writer to receive sustained attention in A Homemade World is Scott Fitzgerald, who appears, particularly in his rendering of Gatsby, to have underscored the lyricism of the American dream at the very same time that he revealed its hollowness...

...He may not have been terribly clear about all this-Pound spoke of him as "the most bloody inarticulate animal that ever gargled"-but Kenner is less concerned with elucidating Williams' muddled theoretical statements than with presenting the poet's intense groping toward a particular view of the autonomy and reality of language: Innocent and unillusioned, unburdened by history or poetic tradition, the imagination for Williams meant the new world, albeit not in Whitman's sense of hopeful anticipation...

...What Kenner is describing is nothing less than the desacralization, the continuous subversion, of American literary language...

...What I take Kenner to be saying is that Stevens was a great poet despite a profound sterility of imagination...

...Kenner, who admits that "machines beget junk," is nevertheless disconcertingly calm in seeing art as another kind of commodity of technological civilization, or at least that is how I construe his cheerful analogies-or his acceptance of them-between art and technology...

...The desacralization of language in American literature outlined in A Homemade World yields a sense of the ordinary that is "genuine," not banal, a symptom of the national appetite for experience...

...Williams' statement that the poem is "a machine made out of words" situates poetry, according to Kenner, in "the field where America's prime energies have been expended ever since Henry Ford...

...Poems do not refer to or embody a reality out there...

...What the book leaves out," he says, "should help underline the pertinence of what it includes...

...Kenner, however, is not interested in social analysis-though he needs the fact of World War I and the Great Depression in the background to foster our awareness of a new attitude toward language in the making-and he suddenly thrusts Wallace Stevens upon us...

...No ideas, but in things," is a famous Williams aphorism...

...The theme of the desacralization of language is carried forward by Marianne Moore, whose "dislike of poetry" became a heuristic for releasing visible existence from the traps and distortions of "poetic convention...

...I, too, dislike it Reading it, however with a perfect contempt for it, One discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine...

...Kenner is a political conservative...

...The bureaucratic: "When Hemingway's Lieutenant Henry discovered for himself what has often been discovered, that nothing producible corresponds to abstract nouns, he hastens to make his separate peace and opt for physical pleasure with Catherine Barkley...

...Instead of saying something about the universe, poetry, Williams believed, was analogous to facts in their quiddity...

...he immerses himself, so to speak, in various idioms, trying at once to reveal the variety and the development of American literary language during a 50-year period...

...The sterility consisted in Stevens' late reenactment of the esthetic belief that poetry-the Supreme Fiction-is "the only possible heaven...

...Yet he also associates their poetry with the ethos of modern technology...

...His position, of course, echoes Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller (a favorite of Kenner's), who abandon the pastoral ideal for the romance of technology...

...And Kenner acutely notes that the feeling for the autonomy of art, a feeling associated with the esthetic tradition, persists among the homemade moderns despite their antiestheticism...

...Stevens is a difficult case...

...Reborn things "enter the new world/cold, uncertain of all save that they enter...

...The vector Kenner is tracing continues through Hemingway, with his own mistrust of big words and grand-sounding abstractions that covered gruesome realities...

...In contrast to Stevens, his whole effort was to demystify poetry, to overcome the conceptual quality of words with their thinginess...

...They continue to regard the language of poetry as hard, self-sufficient, external to the speaker...

...The gnomic verging on the opaque: "Throughout [A Farewell to Arms] time has poured, an unstanchable flow...