Bill FreindModernism, Advertising, and Lip Service
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Barrett Watten has suggested that language poetry is ‘a species of modernism in the largest sense’ (60-61), and that as a result language writers have been concerned to mark their differences with the high modernist tradition. According to Watten, one of the ways they have done this is to reject the allegedly historicist notion of tradition, as articulated in Eliot’s notion of ‘Dante and me,’ which Watten condemns as ‘a very convenient form of modernist advertising’ (61). |
Artifice aborts
In this passage, the deception coming under attack is the commodified sexualities and the sexualized commodities that stand at the center of mass culture. ‘Pornoptic’ could be a mode of representation in everything from commercials to music videos to pornography: the use of (primarily) female bodies and faces to sell products. It could also represent a way of seeing the world that is directly shaped by that mode of representation; for example, the ideals of beauty and sexuality. ‘Frothy’ (a word that recurs in a variety of forms in the poem) indicates the insubstantiality of those depictions, perhaps associating the space between pixels on a television or computer screen with the air that is the primary component of froth. ‘Crawling with tarts’ suggests a kind of infestation, as of insects, although the anachronism of ‘tarts’ seems slightly comical, and the word ‘primp’ presents a kind of visual rhyme with ‘pimp,’ especially in conjunction with ‘tarts.’ In the context of the previous lines, ‘[c]amera invents to prod this host briefs’ could suggest a kind of male response to these pornoptic images: ‘host briefs’ are men’s underwear that are ‘prodded,’ by the images themselves or by an erection that results from those images. sex figures more & more as discursive within a social world increasingly out of our grasp which sexual writing must still grasp. a more generalized lack of control appears as the problem, rather than the classical motifs of economic exploitation or the repression of drives. this factually congealed matter, this fixing as refrigerating within imagery captivity, this anonymous universality of a massively institutionalized illusion . . . (124)
One ramification of this ‘massively institutionalized illusion’ is that it leads into a kind of scopophilia that is one of the central ways in which sexuality becomes shaped, and ultimately appropriated by consumerism: ads commemorate my awareness, big hair being
The ‘glance’ referred to is the heterosexual male gaze that is the basis of ideals of female sexuality as presented in mass culture. The words ‘overdressed’ and ‘overlooked’ are ambiguous, since they could refer either to the woman being watched, who is excessively dressed and looked over by various men, or the male watcher, whose gaze is both overdetermined and underscrutinized. Andrews’ response to this situation is an attempt to provide ‘a peripheral vision as a jokester of the gaze — to revoke the sponsors’ (‘Paradise’ 270). He looks askance, smirking at these images, in an attempt to undermine the commercial and social interests that sponsor them. |
If I’m . . . feeling that a self is constructed out of inducements, solicitation . . . if I’m bringing into the poem a variety of raw materials, social materials that are embodiments of those very kinds of solicitations and commands and inducements and seductions, that make the self, make the readers identify what it is, then that might make a celebration of any existing identity, whether it is that of the heroic, privileged individual, or the oppressed, marginalized individual, begin to seem . . . not enough. (‘Interview’ 13)
If Marx defines humans as those who make their own history, Andrews responds that humans are those who desire it. Because those desires are not simply ‘natural’ or ‘inherent,’ any discussion of the self must include a discussion of the cultural — which is to say, the economic — origins of those desires. another part of the body loss disappeared into, the mouth
It’s hard not to detect just a touch of irony in this section, especially in lines such as ‘small fine, pretty/little, little soft, soft and white.’ At the same time, the Steinian repetitions recall the manifest eroticism of a work like ‘Lifting Belly.’ Such eroticism constitutes a serious break with the rest of Andrews’ work. All I ask is hearts — the rubbing of two skins
In the context of Andrews’ previous work, the first line and a half is astonishingly romantic, and that tone can plausibly be read as continuing through the end of the fifth line. But the tone changes with ‘healing a puss is a face, right?,’ which plays on the meanings of ‘puss’ for face and the slang term for vagina. The latter meaning is continued in ‘laughing cunt’s alloy’ a problematic line given the charged nature of the word ‘cunt.’ The next line, ‘refashioned as felt juxtaposed by your actually (!)/ liking it’ could be even more problematic. In the context of the preceding lines, they suggest a male speaker expressing surprise that his female lover enjoyed some sexual act. There’s a (perhaps intentional) clumsiness to the line that is a far cry from the near-paradisal eroticism of the first five lines of the section. Sign gains fluidity by passing through a disorder of bodies, a field of flux & constantly negotiated positions & relative weightings of hegemonic & counterhegemonic traditions. The mobilizing of the body — by meaning’s insinuation into our horizon. Embodiment is transformation. Words fleshlike within a body of meaning. (261)
The word is thus made flesh, but in a way that is sensual instead of spiritual. Pound’s ‘I have tried to write paradise’ becomes ‘We (that is, both writer and reader) have tried to unwrite the discourses that limit paradise.’ The last two pages of Lip Service contain a substantial number of references to reading and writing: ‘love melts friends/ all in the punctuation’ (379); ‘kiss the book some’ (ibid.); ‘wait for the book enarmed unionizing future/ prejudging multiple unscissored surprise!’ (380); ‘end of the world dance luscious by-the-book’ (ibid.); ‘equally read abode pink’ (ibid.). |
Works CitedAndrews, Bruce. ‘Be Careful Now You Know Sugar Melts in Water.’ Temblor 6 (1987): 122–125. ———. Lip Service. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2001. ———. ‘Paradise & Method.’ Paradise & Method: Poetics & Praxis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998. Andrews, Bruce, with Kevin Davies and Jeff Derksen. ‘Bruce Andrews Interview May 1990 Vancouver.’ Aerial 9 (1999): 5–17.
Quartermain, Peter. ‘Paradise as Praxis: A Preliminary Note on Bruce Andrews’ Lip Service.’ Rasula, Jed. ‘Andrews Extremities Bruce.’ Aerial 9 (1999): 23–27.
Watten, Barrett, with Lytle Shaw. ‘The Poetics of Historiography: An Interview with Barrett Watten.’ Shark 3 (2000): 42–63. |
Jacket 22 — May 2003
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and Jacket magazine 2003 |