Writing Against Time by Michael Clune

Author:Michael Clune
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2003-09-22T04:00:00+00:00

4

THE CULTURED IMAGE

We have seen how writers have scoured the phenomenology of music, the structure of addictive perception, and the logic of the total state for means of imaging the arrest of neurobiological time. To this point, the virtual images that have arisen from this process operate by suspending the object of perception before the moment of its assimilation by habit. Another word for the habitual processes that prestructure perception by replacing intensely sensed color, sound, and shape with recognizable form is “culture.” For the phenomenological tradition that takes its cue from Heidegger, the individual’s assimilation into the world of a culture involves the replacement of the raw present-tense immediacy of perceptual contact with an awareness dispersed in time, organized according to conventional, future-directed projects, and mediated by the norms of a historical society. Given these associations, it is unsurprising that culture has not been an important term for the writing we have been exploring. Indeed, from this perspective, Orwell’s Oceania is less a culture than an anticulture, less a tradition than a means of preventing anything like tradition from taking root in the individual’s sensorium.

But in the last three decades of the twentieth century, a different kind of blueprint for the ideal image emerges. Compared with the strategies discussed in earlier chapters, the basic principle by which this virtual image operates is reversed. If earlier writing is committed to the value of turning the clock back on the known thing, certain strands of postwar science fiction and experimental poetry become interested in the value of making the unknown thing familiar. Taking John Ashbery as my central example, I will argue that his poetic career consists of a rigorous and sustained effort to take something you have never seen before, and show you what it would look like if you had seen it every day of your life.

This reversal of methods records the discovery of a new means of achieving the aim of writing against time. I will show how a peculiar feature of the encounter with an alien thing as it appears in the context of an alien culture produces a shape with strange properties. Ashbery’s familiarizing procedure results in the invention of a new kind of shape, and a new kind of value. In these examples of images that successfully counter time, we will find a new motive for the ubiquitous engagement of late twentieth and early twenty-first century writing with the forms of other cultures.

. . .

In a 1977 essay on Raymond Roussel, Ashbery proposes a striking analogue for the kind of thing he wants to produce in his poetry. He writes that Roussel’s images “are like the perfectly preserved temple of a cult that has disappeared without a trace, or a complicated set of tools whose use cannot be discovered.”1 The artifact from another world,2 the tools of an unknown culture: these objects show up in Ashbery’s poems in a variety of registers. Sometimes they come from the past, as in the 2001 poem which finds

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