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Entomologies
Louis Zukofsky and Lorine Niedecker
Yes, the mantis nails it down.
âClark Coolidge, âConversation with Clark Coolidgeâ
Early in the 1930s, Louis Zukofsky and Lorine Niedecker shared a fundamental disagreement about praying mantises and, by way of association, about the literary value of surrealism. Zukofskyâs disapproval of Niedeckerâs attraction to the latest avant-garde interloper from Europe illuminates a rift in modernist poetics regarding both poetic allegory and surrealism, the latter historically having had a difficult time gaining legitimacy in American poetry and criticism. In this chapter, I examine the reasons for this rift by tracking the spectral figure of the mantis as it appears in the pages of the journal Minotaure and in Salvador Daliâs hallucinations, as it wings up out of the entrance of the New York City subway system and haunts the decorative ironwork around the Paris metro, and ultimately as it is treated in the poetry of these two objectivist writers. Zukofsky distrusted the way the surrealists treated this insectâs cannibalistic reproductive habits as allegories for human psychosexual relations; he called such art âpredatoryâ and explicitly conceived objectivism as its polar opposite. The story I relate in the next section is thus itself a kind of allegory for modernist American poetsâ antiallegorical inclinations.
A âPresence in the Airâ
Zukofskyâs sestina ââMantisââ and its companion poem ââMantis,â an Interpretationâ have gradually come to occupy prominent places in the reception of his work and in general discussions of the objectivist movement.1 Critical accounts of the poems focus on one of three issuesâtheir relations to Marxism or their relations to imagism or their relations to formalism. The latter is especially well represented in the literature: in the words of Zukofskyâs biographer Mark Scroggins, the general consensus seems to be that âthe knowledge that [ââMantisââ] bears is a function of its relational structure rather than its referential reachâ (1998, 321).
I wish, however, to return to the poemâs âreferential reachâ because something has been missing from the discussion around ââMantisâââthat is, the figure of the praying mantis itself, clearly the âobject,â the rays of which have been brought to a focus by this objectivist poem.2 It is as if the rigors demanded of critical attention by the poemâs formal frame render invisible the figure at its center. In her essay on the poem, Susan Vanderborg mentions in passing Zukofskyâs sense of the âcost of isolating the insect from its past and present contextsâ (1997, 196); and it is precisely these contextsâin particular the contemporary historical context of ââMantisâââthat I wish to reinvest in the discussion. After all, as Zukofsky says in his essay âModern Times,â âart does not rise out of thin airâ (in Zukofsky 2000, 57); and in âAn Objective,â he speaks directly to the issue of historical and contemporary contexts: âA poem. Also the materials which are outside (?) the veins and capillariesâThe contextâThe context necessarily dealing with a world outside of itâThe desire for what is objectively perfect, inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particularsâ (in Zukofsky 2000, 15). Later in the same essay, he writes, âImpossible to communicate anything but particularsâhistoric and contemporary. . . . The revolutionary word if it must revolve cannot escape having a referenceâ (16). A poemâs âreferential reach,â then, is the necessary other half of the objectivist equation, demanding the same grade of attention as the ârelational structureâ of its form.
Thus, in spite of the fact that Zukofsky stages the mantis as (literally) rising out of thin airâaloft on the updrafts from a subway tunnelâthe praying mantis was visible in myriad contemporary contexts in 1934, the year the two mantis poems were written. My intention here is to recover these contexts, and my main point is that although critics have articulated the poemsâ concerns with imagism, Marxism, and formalism, no one has adequately discussed these concernsâ relationship to surrealism: the praying mantis is the surrealist object as it was being theorized by painters and writersâin particular Salvador Dali and Roger Cailloisâin the early 1930s. References to both of these artists appear in ââMantisââ and âAn Interpretation,â and both prominently featured praying mantids in their works at the time. Hence, just like âthe poorâ in ââMantis,ââ Zukofskyâs praying mantis ârises from the newsââor from the newspapers, journals, and art galleries of the day.
My reading makes visible a critical element in the lineage of the âobjectâ in objectivism: that is, the surrealist object as it was being articulated around 1934. Both surrealism and objectivism are aesthetic epistemologies, concerned to understand how an object means what it means and to provide blueprints for producing what Caillois calls âlyrical objectsâ: paintings, sculptures, films, poems. The differences between these epistemologies, however, are profound, and for reasons that I detail in this chapter they preoccupied Zukofsky in 1934. In ââMantisââ he addresses them directly: his objectivist poem transforms the surrealist mantis from an archetypal and allegorical figure into a fully historical and political object. Situating Zukofskyâs mantis among the numerous images of mantids circulating through the surrealist art and theory of the early 1930s allows us to recover a generative tension in the aesthetic ideologies of late modernism.
This issue is important for several reasons, not the least of which is the fact that both objectivism and surrealism have until recently received short shrift from critics and historiansâalthough for very different reasons. Objectivism, a distinctly American homegrown literary âmovementââwhose status as such has always been problematicalâhas remained obscure, if not entirely invisible, even to American readers and scholars; I address this issue here. Surrealism, in contrast, although easily the most visible and popularly recognizable of the major twentieth-century art movements, has paradoxically suffered from its very successes, which have tended to diminish it in the eyes of critics and art historians. Thus, as recently as 2003 Jonathan Eburne could write of the âreductive tendencyâ that dogs much of the critical work devoted to surrealism, and although he argues that âthe study of Surrealism has begun to move beyond the endless axiomatic work of summarizing and introducing the movementâ (2003, 149), he also acknowledges that a great deal of work remains to be done.3 This is especially true in the North American context: here, the definitive work on surrealism is still Dickran Tashjianâs magisterial study A Boatload of Madmen: Surrealism in the American Avant-Garde 1920â1950, published in 1995âup to which year, Tashjian reminds us, âthere had been no detailed study of Surrealism in its American settingâ (xx).4 He goes on to disavow any âclaim to be comprehensiveâ in this book, but it nonetheless remains a major benchmark in the study of surrealism and American modernism. However, despite Tashjianâs excellent chapters on American surrealist poets such as Parker Tyler and Charles Henri Ford, a definitive critical study of the effects of surrealism on American poetry remains to be undertaken.5
In this regard, it is telling that neither Louis Zukofsky nor Lorine Niedeckerânor, for that matter, Roger Caillois6âis mentioned in Tashjianâs book: for the two Americans poets, surrealism was a contentious issue in the 1930sâfor Niedecker, it remained a critical point for decades to come. The absence of their names does not so much indicate an oversight on Tashjianâs part as it illustrates the two writersâ relative invisibility at the time of the publication of A Boatload of Madmen. Indeed, since 1995, scholars and critics have gone a long way toward making these poets and the objectivist movement in general both more visible and more tangible.7 Something of a sea change is currently under way in the ongoing rewriting of the history of modernism as it becomes increasingly clear to many people that the objectivist poets represent a compelling alternative to the canons of high modernism as they have been articulated over the past half-century and that these writers assertedâand continue to assertâa profound influence on poetic practice after World War II.8 The works of Zukofsky and Niedecker and of the other objectivists are currently being rescued from decades of neglect in a salvaging operation that is changing the landscape of modernism and its poetic legacies.9
In Zukofskyâs and Niedeckerâs mantis poems, the initial collision of these two undertheorized movements of late modernismâsurrealism and objectivismâoccurs. In them, we witness the opening salvos in a debate that will modulate throughout American poetry and poetics of the latter half of the twentieth century and on into the twenty-first, a debate involving fundamental questions regarding poetic agency and the nature of the poetic object, the role of cognition in poetic production, the issue of form and its relations to content, the possibilities for writing a political poetry, and the use of allegory in modern and postmodern poetry. When John Ashbery writes in 1968 that âsurrealism has influenced us in so many ways that we can hardly imagine what the world would be without itâ (1991, 5), he invites us to think more critically of the role that surrealism played both in aesthetics and in larger social circumstances of the midcentury. Because Zukofskyâs ââMantis,ââ in dialogue with Niedeckerâs early poems, stands at the beginning of this critical preoccupation with the practice of surrealism in American poetry, it is important that we understand the issues at stake in this poem.
Zukofsky and Surrealism in the Early 1930s
It is by no means immediately obvious that ââMantisââ and ââMantis,â an Interpretationâ deal in any substantial way with surrealism; this apparent lack of connection again has something to do with the fact that the poems have to date not garnered much critical attention. To begin, then, most simply: ââMantisââ deals with surrealism because in a letter dated March 15, 1935, Zukofsky tells Ezra Pound that it does so.10 However, although Zukofsky does indeed include the stray phrases âSurrealiste/Re-collectionâ and âMillet in a Dali canvasâ (followed by âCirce in Eâs Cantosâ) in ââMantis,â an Interpretationâ (1991, 69, 70), he nowhere else mentions surrealism in the two poems, which are in no technical way surrealistic. It would have been difficult for Pound to do much with these cryptic gestures even if he had read the poem, and they havenât lost their obscurity for most readers in the ensuing decades.
But if we recall the role that surrealism was playing in the arts in America during the early 1930s, we can begin to see Zukofskyâs poems as an urgent response to the movementâs presence. Although officially founded by AndrĂ© Breton in Paris in 1924, surrealism did not become a force in American art and literature until the early 1930s.11 Its full impact had to wait until the Newer Super-realism show at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, which opened on November 16, 1931, and the same exhibition, retitled Surrealism, when it moved to the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in January 1932.12 In March of the same year, Julien Levy premiered LâAge dâor, the collaborative film by Dali and Louis Bunuelâthe original program of which, by the way, featured on its cover a drawing of a praying mantis by Max Ernst. Thus, by the middle of 1932 surrealism had become the subject of a great deal of attention in the...