Not All Poetry - On Some Prose of J. H. Prynne

Not all poetry – On some prose of J. H. Prynne In this essay I will analyse the British poet and literary critic J. H. Prynne’s claims about poetry articulated in the theoretical arguments he provides in his prose work. My main task is to construct an account of the consistent arguments held between three of Prynne’s recent essays on poetics. I feel there is a systematic impulse in the arguments in these pieces, and that this has not yet been made explicit in the growing corpus of Prynne scholarship. Moreover, when taken together these pieces provide an intriguing argument for understanding how to specifically delimit some of the functions of artworks in relation to accounts of mindedness and its capacity for abstraction and agency. However, a contention which I wish to introduce is that whilst Prynne gives a sophisticated account of poetry as a thought practice, his claims only fully apply to some poetry that adequately displays relevant poetic “ambition”. This tends towards reducing the passage of poetic thought to either voluntarism, art reduced to a choice to concentrate a bit harder, or accident, some artworks excluded from Prynne’s scheme by sheer contingency. Ultimately, I find the implicit evaluative position not only underdeveloped, but, due to its obscurity, also detrimental to the clarity of Prynne’s system: there is a fundamental gap between the works’ analytic and polemical ambitions. 1 I will focus my attention on the essays ‘Poetic Thought’ (2010, PT hereafter) and ‘Mental Ears and Poetic Work’ (2010, MEPW hereafter), and the pamphlet Concepts and Conceptions in Poetry (2014, CCIP hereafter). I hope to show how they answer each other, building up a consistent argument. By providing close readings of these essays I will show the general scope of Prynne’s project, and the questions left unanswered. * ‘Poetic Thought’ contains Prynne’s broadest articulation of his vision of poetry and thought. In this essay, poetry, conceived as a thinking process, acknowledges that thought is conducted through language practices, and that these language practices are not the preserve of or reducible to any individual poet, biography, or individual sponsoring consciousness. Poetry should be governed by pressure of imagination, and ask “strong questions” when conducted “at maximum energy and … vigilance”.1 This force of questioning arises from understanding the social and historical nature of language and thought, in which the social, in turn, is understood as being a space not only of intersubjective discursive agreement, but also, more frequently, a space of disputation, abuse, and irresolution. As such, poetry, conducted within social life, language, and thought, encounters limit-features, and as such one must proceed dialectically in order to identify such limits, render them as 1 J. H. Prynne, ‘Poetic Thought’, Textual Practice, 24:4, 595-606 (2010), 597 2 contradictions, put them under pressure, and thereby proceed towards “new work, new use, new hybrids of practice and reference and discovery.”2 Finally, poetic thought, realised thus, attains a specific form of abstraction: What thereby vibrates on the page and in the mind of the reader, in knowledge and memory and moral understanding, thus does not belong to the poet … it does not belong in the domain of the language system … it does not reside in the fabric of dispute about values or competing models of state control, or visions of a future life. … These are the outer shells, of a dialectic energy working through the methods of poetic composition which cannot be defined or contained by its shells but must break them to become altogether new: new poetic thought.3 We can now see the general shape Prynne will advocate across his critical work: a broadly two-stage argument which binds together 1) the analytic argument for a conception of thought which is impersonal (social and historical) conducted through a language medium, which in turn is a protocol for a textual practice of poetic composition or literary analysis, and 2) the polemical exhortation towards contradiction so as to speak to injustice and generate novelty, gathered under the name of dialectics. Let us focus on Prynne’s final claim, quoted above, as I feel it marks some problems in the movement between analytic and polemical intention. It appears, in the name of the dialectic, poetry achieves a noetic transcendence, infinitely unhoused and abstract, wherein novelty is found. If we are to accept that poetic thought can, through sheer dialectical dynamism, transcend all material, 2 Ibid, 598 3 linguistic, and social “shells”, the position and activation of the dialectic becomes slightly unclear. According to the essay poetic thought can be unmoored from its material, social, and linguistic contingencies, but what is uncertain is if the outburst of dialectical energy is an intentional stance or action of a creature which has thought, and thus does not exist independently of thought, or if dialectical energy, so unmoored from outer shells, precedes thought. Stated otherwise, is dialectics ontological, providing the shifting ground upon which our mental acts and relations with non-mental things takes place as such, or is it an epistemological position, insofar as it is a position taken up by a minded agent to know things as contradictions? To work on the enigma of dialectics in Prynne’s argument leads us to a strange admixture. Consider this passage: To work with thought requires the poet to grasp at the strong and persistent ways in which understanding is put under test by imagination as a screen of poetic conscience, … to set beliefs and principles on line, self-determining but nothing for its own sake merely; all under test of how things are. Nothing taken for granted … because these energies are dialectical and not extruded from personality or point of view. Dialectics in this sense is the working encounter with contradiction in the very substance of object-reality and the obduracy of thought4 I believe the core of Prynne’s eccentric account of dialectics can be found in the final sentence. Prynne marks a difference between “object-reality” and “thought”, and, as such, a notional acceptance of a mind-independent reality 3 Ibid, 599 4 that is not reducible to thought, and thought practice as a distinct practice for encountering such a reality. What is eccentric is the placement of the dialectic. If there is “contradiction in the very substance of object-reality” it could be said that dialectics is not simply an organon of “the obduracy of thought”, and thus could be independent of any thinking creature. But the intentional vocabulary of “imagination”, “beliefs”, and self-determination implies that a minded creature is not simply in thrall to pure dialectics of “how things are” at all times. It would then appear that dialectics may simply be the name for “the working encounter” between mind and world, but this leads to the problem of sufficient “work”. The argument that seems implicit here is that a poet whose “grasp” is not “strong and persistent”, but is weak and irresolute will not be dialectical. If one is such a poet or reads such poetry we can assume that contradictions will be ignored; no attempt will be made to test how things are, and no novelty will take place. If such “strong” poetry can exist, can poetry also be un-dialectical? On the one hand, the answer is yes as none of the compositional dynamics and risks Prynne has advanced have been taken up. On the other hand, we could say that even such “un-dialectical” poetry is still implicated in a relation to objectreality, whether it is aware of this or not, and, by extension, is implicated within its pre-mental, substantial dialectics. We thus have a contradiction which can only be overcome by dividing up the good, ethical poetry which releases itself 4 Ibid, 597 5 into dialectical energy, and the bad, complacent poetry which does not. This at least leaves the argument half-won insofar as it lets us account for the dialectics on the polemical side. But Prynne gives no explicit criteria to make such a division, and I do not believe that his generic analytic argument has given any indication of how to more specifically mark “strong and persistent” thought. From this essay, I believe MEPW and CCiP present two specifications of the difficult position articulated here, the former along the lines of phonology as specific analytic methodology for realising such an account, and the latter by articulating the structure of thought and its relation to ethical feeling and selfknowledge. Moving on to these pieces, we begin to get a better idea of how “new poetic thought” can be more rigorously accounted for. * In PT Prynne stated his account of the relation between language and thought as follows: “The activity of thought resides at the level of language practice and indeed is in the language and is the language; in this sense, language is how thinking gets done and how thinking coheres into thought”.5 The nature of this grounding coherence is then formulated by Prynne as ‘lexis’: “the deposits and relationships which comprise words before they are recruited into the action of human agency.”6 The accretion of language structure is, if 5 6 Ibid, 596 Prynne, ‘On Peter Larkin’, from No Prizes 2 (June 2013), 45, emphasis mine 6 not wholly mind-independent, at least independent of instrumental use. The essay MEPW makes explicit the meeting between a minded human agent and such prior existing, historically formed lexis, through Prynne’s articulation of phonology: “the system of sound forms in a speech practice [that] is structural to the coherence of a language and its evolution through time; a part-abstract mental representation.”7 This is distinguished from phonetics, which is broadly concerned with acoustic sonority, and distinguished from a reduction to vocal performances of poetry, which risks mistaking spoken poetry for the opinion and biography of a poet-speaker. The shape of the argument in this piece is similar to PT, but with greater focus on the poet or critic’s work “via … specialised audition [of] the real-time sounds of speech and vocalised utterance … disintegrated into sub-lexical acoustic noise by analogy with the striking clatter of real work in the material world.”8 And again, each level of such an analysis must be aware of the way it “incorporates and instantiates the features of breakage at local and microscopic levels … into a dialectic”, and such an attendance to contradiction at all levels of language use “are the proper arguments of poetry as a non-trivial pursuit, the templates for ethical seriousness”.9 7 J. H. Prynne, ‘Mental Ears’, Chicago Review 55:1 (Winter 2010) 130 Ibid, 128. For more on the analogy between labour (as work) and sub-lexical noise, see Prynne’s book length study of Wordsworth’s poetic account of a singing field worker in The Solitary Reaper… 9 Ibid, 141 8 7 Let me remark on some of new terminology not found in PT. For Prynne phonology gives a view of language as 1) “structural”, 2) its relationship to mindedness only “part-abstract mental representations”, and 3) its relation to the material world not one of sheer inaccessibility, but as an “analogy” to such a non-mental object-reality. What was previously simply articulated with “and” is now fleshed out into a more complex picture of mind-language-world relations. Structural articulation opens onto primary formalism at the level of sound which, realised in its phonological fullness, is not atomistic reduction to particles of language, but is a holistic mind-language-world scheme, and can be seen to give “normative characteristics of how poems work.”10 To provide such binding structural parameters, Prynne argues that phonology does not just identify historical and social usages, but also the bare fact that “mutations [are] not arbitrary or accidental but following observable regularities amounting to descriptive and also proscriptive regulation.”11 By characterising phonology’s parametrical awareness, Prynne can then give more shape to lexical materialism’s deterministic stance: “in varying degrees binding, and not selective options (like for instance a poet's metrical choices): they function as rules of the base structure”.12 Thus structure here is not deterministic in the sense that it determines what statements can or cannot be made (a situation in which we would simply be determined to speak in 10 11 Ibid, 126 Ibid, 131 8 accordance with what is so), but is deterministic or normative insofar as it gives a generative, real, social-historical, base for creative employment and reformulation of sound material: “the rules give shape and expression to the grammar of speech, to its rational and evolutionary linguistic skeleton which supports the productive inventiveness of textuality.”13 However, it is here that Prynne again brings in his appeal for a dialectical viewpoint. What phonological analysis preserves, in principle, is the viewpoint upon which “a language system operates in discrete packets not as an unbroken linear continuity”.14 From such discretion, Prynne can quickly jump to the prevalence of limit features inherent to the language base and its rules, and then move quickly to the familiar ground in which “the dialectical argument of poetic form within the textual domain, when fully activated to encounter the contradictions in poetic diction and discourse, [is aimed] to disrupt a complaisant surface harmony by the head-on turns which generate energy of conception and conscience and bring discrepant aspects face to face.”15 However, the essay then returns us to the problem found in PT: there is an implication of a bad, here “complaisant”, poetry which would lack some relation to the dialectical force that Prynne logically derives from his own argument. Again, the problem is that if dialectics is occasioned by 12 13 14 Ibid, 131 Ibid, 131 Ibid, 140 9 creative activity within the determining, normative rule structure of phonology and its modular divisions of elements, then how can a poem ever not be dialectical? How could one decline such a structure, and would declination be actively chosen denial or accidental laziness? We are still missing any serious account of how “complaisance” is possible. Sure Prynne gives us the vivid, polemically articulated images of “the artificers of consolatory blessing who are the leaders of organised religion are up to their dainty necks in … blood”, but we are given no description of exactly why consolation or apologetics for violence is necessarily un-dialectical based on Prynne’s analytic mind-language-world scheme.16 * In Part Two (§14) of CCIP Prynne moves again to a schematic, theoretical overview of the mental condition of poetry. It is in this piece we can see Prynne’s work culminate under the condition of poetry’s “own free ‘naturalism’.”17 The argument falls in a similar way as it did in both PT and MEPW: mental abstractions, formed via a structural articulation of mindlanguage-world relations, are this time described under the name of “concepts” and “conception”. First, conception is “distinguished from a free-standing idea or moment of insight because it implies a frame or context of structure, often in 15 16 17 Ibid, 140-1 Ibid, 141 J. H. Prynne, Concepts and Conceptions in Poetry (Cambridge: Critical Documents, 2012), 14 10 relation to a scheme or system of mental procedures or representations.”18 Second, a concept “supervenes above … [the] atomic content” of senseperception and appearance.19 Furthermore, Prynne is clear to mark that these structures are constitutive of the public history of social life, as well as private mental activity, ranging over such long and short term normative states as “systems of belief, codes of practice, interpretations of experience … linguistic proficiency and the memory store … creeds, or covenants, legal jurisdictions and moral or political schemes of conduct”.20 The key move towards poetry in this piece comes in the suggestion that “in certain conditions it is possible to maintain the activity of thought consistently at the conceptual level”, and more specifically to delimiting the abstraction of “feeling … constructed beyond the level of simple emotions; ethical feelings such as sympathy and remorse, tenderness on behalf of another, the whole gamut of aroused feelings instigated by works of imagination.”21 This move from emotion to feeling is more generically rendered as a two-part account of construction and self-knowledge: complex multiple forms of interior experience can build up characteristic structures of personhood and set deeply into place ideas based upon many previous encounters and discoveries of personal meaning; this is thought not systematic and rational, as in speculation or deliberate mental experiment, but intuitive and only part-conscious; and yet such 18 19 20 21 Ibid, 13 Ibid, 13 Ibid, 13 Ibid, 14, emphasis mine 11 experience can become self-knowledge through introspection and can become intrinsic to the fabric of conceptual thinking and purpose.22 Prynne is clearly careful for his account of conception not to diminish interior, intuitive, contingent experience, but he is also careful to show that the virtue of the abstraction of concepts is the specific forms of agency they instigate through the activity of accretion, introspection, and integration. The rule-based nature of language found in MEPW and the concern with “what there is” from PT are inflected with the reflexive and revisable activity of self-knowledge. By virtue of poetry being a generic “conscious projection into language itself as a secondorder system of higher-level encoding”, a “code practice or even code structure” which is “generically conceptualised in relation to ‘what is there’, whether real or not, elastic in upwards dimensionality, almost indefinitely so”, the mental activity that engages with such a generic language practices situates itself in view of such normative constraints and their capacity for “upwards dimensionality.” Sustained at a conceptual level, the thought practice of poetry can form improvised rules, and the reader can both interpret the rules and shares “this intermediate framework [conception] with the poet-author as a territory of the imagination where validation rules can be reformulated or even suspended altogether.” If one can sustain thought consistently at the conceptual level then the result is a “free ‘naturalism’”: naturalist insofar as “all is conceptualised”, free insofar as “abstraction functions not as that which is abstracted from 22 Ibid, 14 12 something else but as autonomous at levels of second-order meaning and interpretation.”23 However, this whole transcendental structure of conception again depends on one crucial caveat: the total bounty of “free ‘naturalism’” is only properly the preserve of “the most ambitious forms of poetical invention”. Though Prynne’s polemical tone is subdued in this piece, and explicit reference to dialectic is forgone, for a third time a problem arises because, as we have already seen, we are left with a tricky question: are we to take the theoretical, analytic scheme as being a universal condition of all minded creatures, or unevenly distributed according to literary ability? By now we can certainly accept the idea that poetry is a specific form of negotiation with a socio-historical communal lexis, and we may also accept that, if we somehow wilfully entered into concept formation, rendered as the construction of defeasible, normative structures, their rules could be acted upon. Nevertheless, why exactly is it that some minds cannot do this? Are some mental capacities too limited, and if so is such limitation contingent or is it actively chosen? I take Prynne to be arguing that the capacity for such poetic thought is in principle universal, but we are still lacking a precise elaboration of how it may remain unrealised. As such, the caveat of ambition remains a vague appeal to some as yet unknown criteria or definition of ambition, bereft of any description of what its opposite might be. 23 Ibid, 15 13 * In conclusion, I believe these three essays provide an account of mindlanguage-world, and poetry’s place within this, which advances systematically from general overview in PT, to fuller elaboration in ME and CCiP. Prynne clearly constructs an ambitious scheme which takes a holistic view of “what there is”, incorporating language as a rule structure, implication within social and historical significance, and the abstraction and agency of higher level minded action. I believe this scheme has the analytic virtue of making our account of artworks consistent with a synoptic and revisable picture of normative socio-historical relations and material-linguistic rules, leading to striking reformulations of the position of the poet-author and the agential capacity of poetry. However, what remains problematic is linking this to Prynne’s polemical ambitions found in his positing of the force of the dialectic and his consistent evaluative caveats. If a poetry exists which does not fully participate in the scheme Prynne describes, then his scheme must fall to being reduced to an optional stance, but with the voluntarist entry point left obscure, lying under the undeveloped criteria of “ambition”. My aim here is not to defuse the political and ethical force of this work. It is more to show that as forceful as the polemical element of the work is, it actually trivialises or blocks its analytic clarity. This does not mean polemic should be 14 jettisoned. Instead, we await an important clarification: further explicit pedagogical demonstration of what bad poetry is, and, by extension, an analytic (conducted under a “free ‘naturalism’”) of ignorant or reactionary social practice and its consequences for poetic thought. 15