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1、“A Free Hand to Refuse Everything”Politics and Intricacy in theWork of J.H.PrynneAbstract:This essay considers the relationship betweenthe poet and his audience in the small press milieu in which J.H.Prynne published his poetry between 1968 and 1999.Prynne swriting recognises but resists the margina
2、l status of poetry withthe culture as a whole and examines its relationship to otherforms of language,particularly that of economic systems.Hissequence?Word Order?(1989)employs a language thatre?imagines the world in terms that reflect the priorities of agift economy,while the texts published during
3、 the 1990s andsince evaluate the linguistic practices of the Western statethrough juxtaposition with the forms and relations ofcontemporary non?Western societies,particularly of Chinaand the Middle East.Key words:poetry and economics politics poetic intricacyAuthor:Dr.Rod Mengham is Reader in Modern
4、 EnglishLiterature at the University of Cambridge,where he is alsoCurator of Works of Art at Jesus College.He isauthor of?TheDescent of Language?(1993)and other scholarly books onCharles Dickens,Emily Bront and Henry Green,as well as abook of poems entitled?Unsung:New and Selected Poems?(1996,2001).
5、题目：“拒绝一切的自由之手”：蒲龄恩诗歌中的政治性与复杂性内容提要：本文考察了 J.H.蒲龄恩与他的小圈子读者之间的关系。他于1968 年到 1999 年之间在这个诗歌出版小圈子里发表了他的诗歌作品。蒲龄恩的诗歌创作以整体文化作为背景来认识和抵制诗歌的边缘状态，并审视它与其它语言形式的关系，特别是与经济体系之形式的关系。他的组诗 词序（1989 年）使用一种重新对世界进行想象的语言以反映礼物经济的优越性。他在上世纪 90 年代以及后来发表的作品，通过将西方社会的语言实践与西方以外社会（尤其是中国和中东）的形式与关系并置，对西方的语言实践进行评价。关键词：诗歌与经济学 政治 复杂性作者简介：罗德
6、•孟罕博士，剑桥大学英国现代文学高级讲师，出版过语言的堕落等著作。For over thirty years,from 1968 to 1999,Prynne s poetrywas written and published within a context of networks ofdistribution and reception which were not the economicnetworks available to,or employed by,poets with a moreconventional,more easily assimilable,poet
7、ic.His work wasframed by the avant?garde activity of journals such as?TheEnglish Intelligencer?and?The Grosseteste Review?and bysmall presses such as Cape Goliard,Trigram,FerryPress,StreetEditions,Equipage and Barque.Poets operating within thiscircuit could rely on their audience having in some degr
8、ee thestatus of interlocutors;they were not writing without knowingto whom they were speaking;neither were the readers theywere addressing being construed as reflections of a universalsubject.At the same time,the experimental nature of theirwork on language extended what might otherwise seem thevery
9、 restricted scope of their activities,by holding out thepossibility of constituting at some point in the future theconditions of a pragmatic situation that would not have existedbefore.The possibility arose,and still arises,of the workcreating its own readers,in a fulfilment of the scenario outlined
10、by Merleau?Ponty in his book?The Prose of the World?:“The public at whom the artist aims is not given;it is a public tobe elicited by his work.The others of whom he thinks are notempirical“others”or even?humanity?conceived as a species;it is others once they have become such that he can live withthe
11、m”(86).The point about such an avant?garde poetry is thatthis forward projection is in tension with an awareness of theway that subjectivity is determined historically at the momentof production of the text.There is an unusually direct anddeclarative treatment of the urgent necessity for setting up
12、andmaintaining this tension in“LExtase de M.Poher”from the1971 volume,?Brass?:Why do we ask that,as if wind in thetelegraph wires were nailed up in somekind of answer,formal derangement ofthe species.Days and weeks spin by intheatres,gardens laid out in rubbish,thisis the free hand to refuse everyth
13、ing.Noquestion provokes the alpha rhythm bythe tree in our sky turned over;certainthings follow:who is the occasionnowwhatis the question inwhichshewhat for is a versionof when,i.e.some payment about time again and how“can sequence conduce”to order as morethan the question:more gardens:listthe plant
14、s as distinctfromlateralfront to back or notgrass“the mostsuccessful plant on ourheart?lung by?pass and into passion sliced into brightslivers,the yellow wrapping of what we do.Who is it:what person could be generalisedon a basis of“specifically”sexual damage,the townscape of that question.Weatherof
15、 the wanton elegy,take a chip out ofyour right thumb.Freudian history again makesthe thermal bank:herecredit92%a/c payee only,reduce tonowwhatlaid out in the bodysub?normalor grass etc,hay as a touch of thesocial self put on a traffic island.Tiethat up,over for next time,otherwise thereis a kind of
16、visual concurrence;yetthe immediate body of wealth is nothistory,body?fluid not dynastic.Nopoetic gabble will survive which failsWhat appears to be the isolation and placing of afragment of scientific discourse“the most/successful planton our/heart?lung by?/pass”passes rapidly butimperceptibly into
17、a head?on collision with an obviouslyexperimental poetic diction that completely unsettles theregister:“and into passion sliced into bright/slivers,the yellowwrapping of what we do.”Here we have an almosthyperbolically systematic application of the basic avant?gardeprinciple of montage,which undermi
18、nes the sequentialcoherence of those discursive practices that would otherwise“conduce”to the kind of social and political order that dependson the subordination,or bracketing,of discourses like poetry,because these represent the threat of a potentially much freerattitude towards the dominant syntax
19、 of history.Later on in thepoem,there is a quite violent interpolation of scientificdiscourse,which represents a recognition within the poem ofthe need to measure the effects of a culturally much morepowerful description of the conditions in which the subject ofhistory has to emerge.The actual mater
20、ial involved“1.Steroidmetaphrast/2.Hyper?bonding of the insect/3.6%memory,etc”makes it clear that what this collision of languages andsubject matters effects is the displacement of the subject ofanthropological humanism;a displacement,moreover,in aparticular direction and for a particular purpose.Th
21、e alternativeto this discursive confrontation is satirised in a ludicrousevocation of the historic avant?garde as an advance column,inmarching order,not in advance of an utopian form of society tocome,but heading up an entire army of philistine recuperation,“stuffing its drum.”The apparently destruc
22、tive effect of thisaccentuated montage,this“verbal smash?up,”destroysrecognizable forms of order and coherence,produces debris,produces rubbish.But the production of rubbish is essentialsince it is the inevitable outcome of testing the limits of thesequential procedures of an ideologizing rationalit
23、y.?Paradoxically,the moment when you think you are in fullcontrol of your own subjectivity is precisely when you“putyour choice in the hands of the town/clerk.”This information isgiven in the form of an instruction which tests the limits of thereaders own dependence on the conditions of“statedorder.
24、”Discursive friction,then,provides a means of turning artback into an“intricate presence in/our entire culture”;threading it back into the fabric of the whole,making it intrinsicto social practice.Prynnes deliberate confrontation with bourgeoisconsumer culture in the late 1960s and early 1970s isrec
25、onfigured in subsequent work.By the late 1970s and early1980s,when several American“Language”poets wereformulating the nature of their desire to subvert capitalistculture by textual means,Prynne had already overtaken thisformalism on the route to a different model.By the mid?1980s,several“Language”w
26、riters had issued theoretical bulletinsrecommending the production of poetry in which capitalistprocedures of accumulation were deranged by a methodicalsquandering of meaning;hoarding replaced by spending.Prynneseized on the economic vocabulary(“the market?economymodel seems to me to fit the case ve
27、ry well”?)to arguetheresulting“freedom”of choice among the potentialmeaningswas no more than cosmetic:“Giving”and“taking”mean very different things inthe context of a capitalist economy.The colloquial phrase“giveand take”is habitually used in a spirit of reciprocityit starts toreconcile terms that a
28、re normally marked for disagreement,although it still does not sink the obvious differences betweenthem.In a gift economy,the activity of giving would be regardedas very much the same sort of transaction as the activity oftaking.In certain gift economies,according to Mauss,it ispossible for“only a s
29、ingle word to coverwhat we understandby buy and sell,borrow and lend”(Mauss 30);seeminglyantithetical operations are expressed by exactly the sameword.A whole variety of exchangesof food,marriage partners,possessions,charms,land,labour,services,religious offices(nearly all alluded to in?Word Order?)
30、are not seen asbeing discrete;what would be thought of as heterogeneoussocial phenomena in the West are regarded as part of the sameeconomy,the same order of meaning.According to Mauss,“each phenomenon contains all the threads of which the socialfabric is composed”(Mauss 1);this now seems a strange
31、idea ina capitalist society,but it is precisely what Prynne tries to makethe intrinsic method for producing his text:each verbalphenomenon contains many,if not all,of the threads of whichthe whole fabric of the text is composed.This vocabulary ofthreads and fabrics is reminiscent of BarryMacSweeneys
32、?Wild Knitting?and of the project of“LExtasede M.Poher,”aimed at turning art back into an“intricatepresence in/our entire culture”threading it back into thefabric of the whole,making it intrinsic to social practice.In?Word Order?,contemporary Western society isdisclosed as not operating in terms of
33、this kind of social fabric;its coherence is seen rather as that of a textured surface,wherecertain meanings are fused together in word orders that aredictated by a ruthless economy of exchange,one in which“thecapital is reported to be quiet”(Prynne,?Poems?360).Thisphrase suggests that the capital ci
34、ty is reported to be quiet,butalso that financial capital is reckoned to be quiet;it is the kindof formulation that issues from a bureau of official statements,one whose placations actually betray an underlying unrest.Therole of the poem is to act on this restiveness,this underlyingunrest,in order t
35、o stop the trade of“value for money”(Prynne,?Poems?373)and show how the language of profitand loss is caught up in the inflicting of damage in ways that arenormally?not?reported.In this poem,a phrase like“take acut”(Prynne,?Poems?363)comprises a sense of taking ashare of the proceeds but only alongs
36、ide something else;it alsobecomes part of a vivid but almost subliminal account ofpersonal injury.The writing is concerned to undo phrases likethisit undoes a whole series of language?constructs,following,as it were,the path of the gift.I put it this way,because one of the main points aboutkeeping g
37、ifts in circulation without changing them into money isthat they then behave in some measure,as Mauss puts it,likeparts of the persons involved in their interchange;the passingand repassing of gifts sets up a pattern of spiritual bonds,aperpetual transfer of“spiritual matter”(Mauss 12).Some of themo
38、st important word orders have been established withreference to the operations of spirit(and in this poem there isactually a register associating“spirit”with“purity”and“truth”);these are word orders that have often been achieved by meansof incantation,ritual and the maintenance of very powerfulconve
39、ntions.The languages of spiritual values are in fact whatsecular power needs to fill with its own business:to“put/words into the mouth the truth the life”is to replace the notionof speech as divine gift(“I am the truth and the life”)with apragmatics of control(“put/words into the mouth”)thatrequires
40、 all the usual connections between“truth”and“life”tobe remade.According to Mauss,the forms of communicatingwith spirit are,for gift societies,the most important to develop,the most risky,the most dangerous to omit:“the first groups ofbeings with whom men must have made contracts were thespirits of t
41、he dead and the gods.They in fact are the real ownersof the worlds wealth”(Mauss 13).Contracts with the dead,inwhich proprietorship is an issue,and rights are reciprocal if notexactly symmetrical,can be maintained through linguisticconventions and literary forms;though the relation of thesecontracts
42、 to presiding values and usages in contemporarywestern societies is subject to progressive displacement bymore and more“spiritless forms”:“would we sing/out on sightand give in full/the free the offer”;the separation of termsusually made indistinguishable by cliche(“the free the offer,”rather than“f
43、ree offer”)restores an element of quality to whathas been absorbed into calculations of quantity.Therequirement to“give in full”vulgarises“giving”as the obligationto state a“fullness”that is actually no more than a minimalprojection of self.(When you give your name in full,how muchof yourself do you
44、 really give?)In its first line,the poem registersthe deformed capacity of song(“would we sing/out onsight”),and its devalued vocabulary of“freedom,”“gift”and“offer”provides a revision of song as no more than“compliance”as it says on Page 373with a pneumatic fake,raising“wind as with one voice”(my e
45、mphasis):going throughapretence of unison or wholeness.Much of the language of thepoem is pinched or bruised by officialese;the first line beginsby appearing to fill in a form“We inserted our names”andfrom that point on come what seem like occasional responsesto a questionnaire;at one point,the read
46、er is instructed to“answer each question”(Prynne,?Poems?371).Congress with the dead,maintaining a contract with thespirits of the dead,appears at certain points in the poem tohave become warped into supplying details for a report on anaccident victim.The tones of the poem tend to revolve aroundan ax
47、is that goes from elegy to inquest or“enquiry”(Prynne,?Poems?371);the tiny splinters of social sceneryglimpsed in the writing from time to time reflect two scenariosin the main:a traffic smash?up and a“burying ground.”It ishighly significant that several intimations of death are focussedon a kind of
48、 limbo state;on the condition of the body while it isin the middle of a physiological reaction.What the writing isconstantly wondering about is what happens to flesh when it iscontunded,what happens to brains when they are concussed,and,most especially,what happens in the process of the mostimportan
49、t of all forms of“giving”and“taking,”the giving andtaking of breath?The“auscultation”referred to on the last pageis both clinical and divinatory;a divination of spirits and theoperation of listening to hear whether and how the patient isstill breathing.The lapse of attention that accompanies theindr
50、awing of breath is what gives order to words by establishinga measure(the“frame”is“clipped”by“lapse indrawn”Prynne,?Poems?377).The taking of breath is posited as aform of bracing or protection,while song is construed as thegiving of a cry after the blow has been struck in order to reporton what has