Modernism the Morning After by Bob Perelman

Author:Bob Perelman [Perelman, Bob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780817391096
Publisher: University of Alabama Press

I wish I had blonde hair

and was a maiden, on a farm, in Austria,

in the nineteenth century, on a sunny day,

with rosy cheeks and blue eyes, just

like those Nazi images of healthy farmgirls.

But are my great-grandchildren going

to be monsters? Then I will have none.

I will milk the cow and tell Hans

and the others to keep their mitts off me.

I will fill my evening hours with the sad music

of Schubert and the sad poetry of Heine.

It will be so beautiful. (Padgett, 22)

A few quick points: The power of “Ain’t they beautiful!” in the Paterson passage came from Williams’s shocking lack of irony. Here, “It will be so beautiful” is twenty-first-century bathos. It is thoroughly hedged as to whether or not it’s serious. It does not sound as if we’re being told: “Schubert and Heine are part of the soil that fostered Hitler; there is no document of culture that is not simultaneously a document of barbarism.” (Or, perhaps, if that is being suggested, the suggestion has to be swaddled in bathos because a stern lecture would merely seem trite after having been heard so often.) True beauty—Heine and Schubert—has to be unreproductive (as in “keep your mitts off me”) to avoid proving Walter Benjamin right and bringing Hitler into the art sanctuary. The calendar-illustration rhetoric Padgett carefully uses here gives us only a simplified beauty (a “stock response,” in Richards’s terms), which is “sad.”

Turning back to “Variations,” of the many bathetic effects, I will mention two more. One occurs at the juncture of the calypso and fugue sections. The calypso is bathos at its broadest:

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