“Living in the Same Place”:

The Old Mono-Nationalism and the New Comparative Literature

Marjorie Perloff

published in World Literature Today, 69, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 249-255. Translated into Serbo-Croat, in Transkatalog, 6/7 (1998): 76-84.

–A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same place.

–By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if that’s so I’m a nation for I’m living in the same place for the past five years.

So of course everyone had a laugh at Bloom and says he, trying to muck out of it:

–Or also living in different places.

James Joyce, Ulysses

Leopold Bloom’s definition of nationhood is not as foolish as his fellow Dubliners in Kiernan’s Pub took it to be. As citizens of the United States we are, after all, “the same people living in the same place.” And when we travel or go abroad, thus living in different places,” we retain a good measure of our “Americanness.” Whenever I watch the bleary-eyed plane travellers divide into those two passport lines–U.S. and “Foreign” –at Kennedy Airport or LAX, I am aware that national identity still plays a marked role in one’s sense of self.

In his much cited essay “DissemiNation,” Homi K. Bhabha speaks eloquently of the inherent “porosity” of modern nation states, what he calls the “intermittent time, and intersticial space, that emerges as a structure of undecidablity at the frontiers of cultural hybridity.” [1] But when Bhabha adds that we are entering an era in which “The liminal figure of the nation space [will] ensure that no political ideologies could claim transcendent or metaphysical authority for themselves” (HKB 299), he is, I think, engaging in wishful thinking. The “nation space”–pace Chechnya and Serbia, pace the People’s Republic of China–shows no signs of opening itself up to the sort of dissolution Bhabha and like-minded critics desire. What is the case, however, is that the nation as we know it today can no longer be understood according to the nineteenth-century paradigm which continues to be regarded as normative, at least in the academy[2] We still, for example, divide literary study into such areas as “Modern British Fiction,” “Victorian Poetry,” “French Renaissance Literature,” “the German Enlightenment,” and so on. And the most powerful literary subgroup in the academy, American Literature, together with its more socio-historical sibling American Studies, acts on the premise that our first (and often our last) obligation is to know those works that, however diverse the race, ethnicity, and gender of their author, have been made in the U.S.A. Hence the emphasis on Chicano rather than Latin American literature, on James Baldwin and Toni Morrison rather than on Aimé Césaire, and the exclusion of Canadian (both Anglo- and Francophile), or Australian literature from the canon.

This, I shall argue here, is where Comparative Literature can–indeed must– play a central role. For, given the migrations and emigrations, the exiles (sometimes voluntary, more often forced) that have created U.S. citizenry in the late twentieth century, how can we continue to take “American literature,” as it continues to be called in survey courses and textbooks, as a mono-national entity? And what about an earlier period like the Renaissance? Given the movement from nation to nation in that period, coupled with the exploration of the New World, is it meaningful to study, say, English Renaissance lyric in isolation?

I am thinking not so much about comparisons between national literatures–the old Comparative Literature, which was, in many ways, a natural response to nineteenth-century national paradigms– as about the simple reality that today the national literatures are themselves assemblages of many “other-national” strands, sedimentations where different national and hence linguistic elements won’t separate out, compost heaps, so to speak, in which nations of origin become curiously conflated. To understand this new situation, we must begin by looking at the nineteenth-century model of a “nation-space.”

Take a book all of us have come across, at one time or another, no matter what our speciality: the standard-bearing Norton Anthology of American Literature, used in freshman and sophomore courses from Fort Lauderdale, Florida to Anchorage, Alaska as well as in nations around the globe. The Third Edition of the Norton (1989) includes forty-five writers in the nineteenth century (1822-1914) sections, writers whose names alone are revealing: Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, William Cullen Bryant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Edgar Allen Poe, Abraham Lincoln, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Washington Harris, T. B. Thorpe, Johnson Jones Hopper, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, James Russell Lowell, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Rebecca Harding Davis, Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, Ambroce Bierce, Henry James, Joel Chandler Harris, Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Booker T. Washington, Charles W. Chesnutt, Hamlin Garland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jane Adams, Edith Wharton, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Sa), and Henry Adams.

The Norton editors were, of course, making every effort to include women and minority groups: this edition has eleven women, one of whom is a Native American, and five African-American men. No doubt newer editions will feel called upon to include an even larger percentage of women and minority writers, [3] but this is not the issue that concerns me here. For what is fascinating, from the perspective of the Comparatist, is the national, cultural, and religious uniformity of the writers who really were the leading writers of the U.S. nineteenth century. Of the forty-five (so many of them Boston bred and Harvard educated), all but three were born and died in the U. S. Henry James and Edith Wharton lived their later lives abroad (London and Paris respectively) but their careers were very much formed in their native country as was that of Ambrose Bierce, who died in Mexico. And further: whether these writers were male or female, white or black, all but two (Kate Chopin who was Catholic and the Sioux Indian Gertrude Simmons Bonnin) were Protestant [Bonnin, for that matter, was brought up in a Quaker Missionary School]. Again, almost all the white writers here included were of English descent–an ancestry, by the way, that, judging from their middle names, includes both sides of the family. Theodore Dreiser, whose parents were impoverished German immigrants, is a grand exception.

A similar mono-nationalism characterizes English, French, and German writers of the nineteenth century. From William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Gordon, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Jane Austen, William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, and Felicia Hemans down to Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning, George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray, John Ruskin, John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater, English writers were, well, English writers. There are, of course, certain class and regional differences: Byron was aristocratic, Keats lower middle-class, Dickens a child of urban poverty. But ethnically and religiously, English writers of the nineteenth-century are an astonishly uniform English Protestant lot: when Gerard Manley Hopkins, following John Henry Newman, converted to Catholicism in the late 1860s, it was considered a major event.

There are three basic ways for literary critics and historians to respond to this situation. The first, and perhaps the most common in the age of multiculturalism, is to deny special status to, say, the six great Romantic poets in England or the American Renaissance writers in the U.S. and elevate to equal (or superior) status the work of “forgotten” women and African-American writers, to insist that these writers are “just as important” or “valuable” as are Blake and Byron, Emerson and Hawthorne and Melville. There are two difficulties here. First, the typical “forgotten” writer–say, Susan Warner– is often just as “authentically” Anglo-American as her canonical counterpart–say, Harriet Beecher Stowe. And second, sooner or later readers discover for themselves that Melville’s Moby Dick is, after all, a more interesting novel than Wide, Wide World.

A second response to the mono-nationalism of the nineteenth century is to retain the existing canon, as, say, Edward Said does in his 1993 Culture and Imperialism, but to reread Austen and Dickens and Thackeray for the light they shed on imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism. This approach has generated a whole growth industry of nineteenth-century studies: I note that the prospective sessions listed in the most recent MLA Newsletter lists have a high preponderance of titles like “Race, Travel and Imperalism in Late Nineteenth-Century American Literature,” “Imperial Fantasies in German Nineteenth-Century Literature,” and so on.

But the Imperialist-Colonialist paradigm is already showing signs of strain as everything written has to be ground through its mill. And the irony for Comparatists, as the above titles suggest, is that these studies continue to be conducted along strictly national lines: those expert in British imperialism seem to know little about the German situation and vice-versa. A third –and to my mind more satisfactory–approach would be to recognize that our current drive to discover national porosity, hybridity, difference, dissolution, intersticial space, and all those other positives Homi K. Bhabha and like-minded critics speak of, stems, not from some kind of new and definitive theoretical paradigm, a new canon law, but from the simple and practical reality that the writers, artists, and composers of our own time who are “living in the same place,” no longer represent the mononationalism that really was the norm in the nineteenth century, and which hence inevitably influenced historians and theoreticians of the period. “Philosophy,” as Wittgenstein reminds us, “does not attempt to deal with questions which do not really arise” (LEC 1 74).

“The discipline of comparative literature,” writes Emily Apter in her essay responding to the Bernheimer Report, “is unthinkable without the historical circumstances of exile. . . . the psychic legacy of dislocation[4] Apter is referring, of course, to the first wave of Comparative Literature in this country, the European refugee culture of what she calls the “founding fathers”– Leo Spitzer, Erich Auerbach, René Wellek, Wolfgang Kaiser– and she argues that the American “converts to the field” in the fifties and sixties — Fredric Jameson, J. Hillis Miller, Neil Hertz– suffered from “Euro-envy,” an “ethic of linguistic estrangement, a secessionism from mainstream American culture” (EA 89). By contrast, Apter suggests, the “current generation of exilic critics–the generation of postcolonialists whom she regards as normative for the “new” Comparative Literature– “is often . . . deeply antithetical to their Eurocentric counterparts: non-German speaking, nonmetropolitan, nonwhite, antipatriarchal, and, in varying degrees, hostile to elite literariness.” (EA 90). And she cites Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak, Anthony Appiah and Sara Suleri, V. I. Mudimbe, Edward Said and Rey Chow as examples (EA 94). The contemporary situation thus becomes, in Apter’s words, “a border war, an academic version of the legal battles and political disputes over the status of ‘undocumented workers,’ ‘illegal aliens,’ and ‘permanent residents” (EA 94).

This now-fashionable formulation is not without its ironies. For one thing, all the theorists mentioned above were themselves educated in elitist Western institutions and, in the case of Spivak and Bhabba, are the direct heirs of those European, which is to say, French and German, fathers (especially Derrida) Apter now takes to be so retro. But more important, the teleology proposed here (the “old” Comparative Literature must be succeeded by the “new” postcolonialism) replicates precisely the blind spot of the earlier model: it demands an exotic other (Pakistan or Nigeria replace France and Italy) in place of the literature close to home, the literature, that is to say, actually written in the United States today.

It is a commonplace that English literature on the eve of World War I was largely the creation of a few Irishmen (Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, Shaw), two Americans (Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot), a Pole, who knew no English before he was twenty (Joseph Conrad), and a second-generation German who changed his last name from Hueffer to (Ford Madox) Ford. And it is a second commonplace that after the War, dozens of American writers lived in Paris as expatriates, even as, in the World War II years, the flow was reversed, New York becoming the home for Andre Breton and Max Ernst, Kandinsky and Mondrian, Willem de Kooning and Hans Hoffmann, not to mention an entire colony of German exile writers and British expatriates like Auden and Isherwood living in New York and Los Angeles. But what is less well understood is that, by mid-century, the language of American poetry, to take just one example, had become something quite different, not only from its English model, but also from the Emerson-Whitman-Dickinson poetics which was its more immediate source. And here, I want to argue, a Comparatist approach is needed in order to locate the peculiar momentum of the work.

By 1910, according to the census, it is estimated that roughly one person in four in the continental U.S. learned English as a second language. Five years earlier, Henry James warned the graduating class at Bryn Mawr, that the new immigrants were destroying the “ancestral circle” of the American language, turning it into “a mere helpless slobber of disconnected vowel noises,” an “easy and ignoble minimum,” barely distinguishable from “the grunting, the squealing, the barking, or the roaring of animals.” [5] “The forces of looseness,” James warned, “are in possession of the field,” and they “dump their mountain of promiscuous material into the foundations” of the language itself (QS 43).

One such immigrant, herself to come under the influence of Henry James, as of his philosopher brother, was Gertrude Stein. Born in Allegheny, PA., to an affluent Jewish-German but wholly secularized immigrant family, she was eight months old when her German-speaking family moved to Vienna and stayed there until she was four and a half, when they moved to Paris (which they left when Stein was five). She grew up in Oakland, California (of “no there there” fame), attended Radcliffe where she studied with a great Anglo-Saxon Protestant American, William James, and then enrolled as one of the first women in the Johns Hopkins Medical School. But she did not matriculate and soon moved to Paris where she lived the now legendary life recounted in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, returning to the U.S. only once in 1934, on a very successful lecture tour.

How did Gertrude Stein respond to the “force of looseness” of immigrant, and then emigrant language? Criticism has been largely silent on this question. For all the discussions of her friendship with Picasso, her debt to Cubism, her place in the Paris art world and in the lesbian salon of Natalie Barney, and for all the talk of gender definition in her work, the actual determination of Stein’s language field remains largely misunderstood. The headnote in the recent Norton Anthology, which includes only Stein’s early and accessible “The Good Anna” along with the Introduction to The Making of Americans, informs us that, because of her Cubist connection, “[Stein] came to think of words as they were thinking of brush strokes on canvas, as tangible entities in themselves rather than vehicles conveying meaning or representing reality.” And again, “she treated words as things, carefully ignoring or defying the connection between words and meanings[6] In other words, her texts don’t really “mean” anything; they engage in what various scholars have called “non-referential play.”

Interestingly, French poets and critics from Jacques Roubaud to Emmanuel Hocquard have taken Stein’s meanings more seriously. In an essay called “L’Ecriture sans rature,” Françoise Collin remarks:

She has accomplished her depaysement once and for all by the age of twenty, taking up residence in a country where her language isn’t spoken. This is her only exoticism but it is a radical one. . . . Living in a foreign environment, Gertrude Stein distances herself from the language that she hears all around her–French–which is not her own, and which is for her an object of fascination to the point where she appropriates any number of its elements and formulae. But she is also distancing herself from her own language, American, which is not spoken around her, which has become the language of the other, even if it is the language of intimacy. The writing of Gertrude Stein is ex-centric with respect to two languages, according to different formulae: it is a third language. [7]

Once we become aware of the element of appropriation, many of Stein’s so-called impenetrabilities open up. Take “Ladies Voices: Curtain Raiser,” written in 1916 in Mallorca, where Gertrude and Alice had retreated from the war and were living the hotel life of the international set. Here is “Act IV”:

What are ladies voices.

Do you mean to believe me.

Have you caught the sun.

Dear me have you caught the sun.

In French (the lingua franca in Mallorca), to take the sun or sunbathe is “prendre le soleil.” Now one of the most common meanings of “prendre” is “to catch” as in “prendre un voleur” (“to catch a thief”). So “Have you caught the sun. Dear me have you caught the sun,” is simply Stein’s way of showing, as realistically as possible, what “ladies’ voices,” overheard in a beach resort, sound like and what they say. “Dear me, have you caught the sun” also contains a double entendre: when re-translated into English, it sounds as if the “you” has “caught” a disease. “Dear me, “have you caught the flu? Have you caught sunstroke?” and so on.

There is, in any case, nothing meaningless about Stein’s locution. At the same time, we find, in Stein’s “French-English, traces of childhood German as well: for example, in her predilection for “this one” (“dieser / diese”) and “one” (“Einer”).

But the larger question would be to explore why Stein felt so compelled to write in a “third language,” why the very fabric of language–its syntax, vocabulary, punctuation, and semantic possibilities–became such an obsession for her. The case of William Carlos Williams is similar. The son of an English father and a Catholic, Puerto Rican mother who had both French Basque and Dutch Jewish blood, Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey. Spanish was the predominant language in the house when Williams was a small child; his mother, who shifted easily from Spanish to French, learned English only reluctantly. In Rutherford, the Williamses, who wanted very much to “belong,” joined the Unitarian Church and, although they were not affluent, they sent their son to an expensive private school (Horace Mann) in New York, even though the commute, which the poet has described lovingly in his Autobiography, took hours. One year, he attended a French boarding school at Anneçy, and later he did postdoctoral work in Leipzig. But in contrast to Stein, as to Eliot and Pound, Williams is always cited as the poet who “stayed home,” who practiced medicine in his New Jersey home town for the rest of his life.

Like Stein, Williams was aggressively American: In The American Grain, reconstructs American history as a kind of contest between redskin and paleface, and his long poem Paterson purports to tell the story of the quintessential American polis. But, again like Stein, Williams invents a language (though not as deconstructionist as hers), highly self-conscious in its representations of “authentic” speech idiom, as in the “retarded” language of the “Billy” section of Paterson 1, the stilted flowery language of “Cress” in 1 and 2, and the medical case histories throughout. Thus, whereas Americanists have emphasized Williams’s debt to Emerson and Whitman, his relationship with Ezra Pound and H.D., his close bonds with the art world of the Arensberg circle, comparatist critics have paid more attention to the “Carlos” strain and have read the love poetry against its Petrarchan and Dantean models. Not that Williams “translated” French or Spanish into English equivalents as did Stein, or that he relied heavily on foreign phrases and locutions as did Ezra Pound. But when Williams explains that his poetic practice is informed by prosodic adjustments, for example, the transformation of the five-line stanza

My shoes as I lean

unlacing them

stand out upon

flat worsted flowers

under my feet.

to a four-line one by eliminating the last line (“See how much better it conforms to the page, how much better it looks[8] one has the sense, as in Stein, of a peculiar linguistic self-consciousness, a struggle that would not take this particular form in the native speaker.

A third and especially striking example of the multinationalism of the interwar period is that of Mina Loy. Born Mina Gertrude Lowy in London in 1882 to Sigmund Lowy, a Hungarian Jew, and Julia Brian, she left England when she was seventeen to study art in Munich. At nineteen, she married a fellow artist and they moved to Paris where she changed her name to Loy and exhibited in the Salon d’Automne. In 1906, they moved on to Italy, where her children were born, her marriage dissolved, and she came under the spell of Futurism, having an affair first with Marinetti and then with the writer Papini. In 1916, when war was declared, she moved to New York, where she immediately became the center of New York Dada and had her fabled meeting with Arthur Cravan. By now she was writing poetry as well as producing art work; Eliot praised her in The Egoist and Pound chose her poetry as an example of the term logopoeia, the “dance of the intellect among words.” After the war, when Cravan disappeared mysteriously in Mexico, she returned to Paris and again became a “figure” in the literary and art world. But the last thirty years of her life (1926-53) were spent back in the U.S.; in these “silent years,” she more or less vanished from public view.

What nationality was Mina Loy and under what rubric should her work be studied? She wrote under so many anagrammaticaly and numerologically derived pseudonyms, and misdated so many of her paintings that in the twenties a rumor circulated around Paris that Mina Loy was not a real person at all, but some sort of hoax. Upon hearing this,” her editor Roger Conover tells us, Mina Loy turned up at Natalie Barney’s salon and declared: “I assure you I am indeed a live being. But it is necessary to stay very unknown. . . . To maintain my incognito the hazard I chose was–poet.” [9] This is, I think, an exemplary tale, for the title “poet” is always something of an incognito; in Loy’s case, especially so since she was fluent in English, French, Italian, and German. But–what is most curious–the English of her poems, as the “Love Songs” and her long poem “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” attest, is neither quite British nor yet American but a curious hybrid, a kind of café society overlay on an English “school-girl” base. And that hybrid– phrases like “conundrums of finance / to which unlettered immigrants are instantly / initiate” (LLB 115) — is now receiving the recognition it has long deserved, even though much U.S. scholarship has been stymied by its inability to read Loy’s work in its French and Italian contexts.

What we might call the “thick” nationalism of Loy, Stein, and Williams has become almost the norm today. In London, at this very moment, one might be able to see a play by Samuel Beckett (whose French / English bilingualism is now understood as a form –but a very individual form–of Irish speech), by Harold Pinter, born and raised in the East End in a Jewish household, or by Tom Stoppard, whose adopted Anglo name belies his Jewish Czech ancestry. Last season the West End had a production of Death and the Maiden by the Chilean Jewish writer Ariel Dorfman, who, incidentally, has been on the faculty at Duke University. And there is the further irony that Beckett’s later plays and his works for radio like Eh Joe and Quad have been more frequently produced in Germany and in Japan than in London or Dublin. Some forms of exile exact a price: at the Yeats Summer School in Sligo, some years ago, I heard a well-known Irish professor declare that Beckett wasn’t nearly as good as the American poet John Berryman. What linguistic and thematic qualities, one wonders, create this kind of transatlantic flow?

Before one can make generalizations about British literary culture based on the theatre, one must come to terms with the fact that the poetry situation is, for various reasons, antithetical. After Pound, after Eliot, the English Establishment turned back to its own roots, Donald Davie memorably declaring in the seventies that the tradition of English poetry was not that of the Americans (Pound and Eliot, and certainly not “Carlos Williams,” as Davie dismissively called him) but of Thomas Hardy. Hardyesque poetry from Philip Larkin and Donald Davie himself to Andrew Motion and Blake Morrison seems all but incomprehensible to, say, U. S. as to French readers–incomprehensible not because it is difficult but because we have difficulty in seeing what its importance is. And surely this again has to do with the Englishness (old style) of these poets, an Englishness self-consciously assumed in imitation of the nineteenth-century model, vis-à-vis our own polyglot, multinational, multi-dialect poetry. And it explains why “Contemporary British Poetry” is not a popular subject in U.S. universities.

The opposite situation–and it is the one with which I want to close–is that of the French movement of the 1970s and 80s called

Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle), whose leading figure is the late novelist Georges Perec. I say French movement, but how French is it? In his W, ou le souvenir d’enfance (1975, English translation by David Bellos, 1988), Perec gives us two alternating narratives–the two V’s of the double-V (W). The first is an allegorical adventure story about a sports Utopia, “a land in thrall to the Olympic ideal’; the second an autobiography, “a fragmentary tale of a wartime childhood.” [10] The latter takes its point of departure from Perec’s own history: his Polish Jewish father, who had emigrated from Warsaw to Paris in 1926 and worked as a hairdresser, was killed in the War when Perec was four, his mother, née Cyrla (then Cecile) Shulevitz, died at Auschwitz when her son was six. The double text traces the complexities of postmodern identity, using, as is typical of this novelist, the most seemingly scrupulous factual documentation only to make us more aware of the wide gap between fact and meaning. In Chapter 8, footnote 8, for example, we find this etymology of the name Perec.

My family name is Peretz. It is in the Bible. In Hebrew it means “hole,” in Russian it means “pepper”, in Hungarian (in Budapest, to more precise) it is the word used for what in French we call “pretzel” (“pretzel” or “bretzel” in in fact merely a diminutive form [Beretzele] of Beretz and Beretz, like Baruch or Barek, is formed from the same roots as Peretz–in Arabic, if not in Hebrew, B and P are one and the same letter). The Peretzes like to think they are descended from Spanish Jews exiled by the Inquisition (the Perez are thought to be Marranos, or converted Jews who stayed in Spain), whose migrations can be traced to Provence (Peiresc), then to the Papal States, and finally to central Europe, principally Poland and econdarily Romania and Bulgaria. One of the central figures of the family is the Polish Yiddish writer Isaac Leib Peretz, to whom every self-respecting Peretz is related even if it occasionally requires a feat of genealogical juggling. As for me, I am supposed to be Isaac Leib Peretz’s great-great-nephew. Apparently he was my grandfther’s uncle.

My grandfather was called David Peretz and lived in Lubartow. He had three children: the eldest was called Esther Chaja Perec; the second, Eliezer Peretz; and the last-born, Icek Judko perec. In the period between the first and third births, that is to say, between 1896 and 1909, Lubartow was, in succession, Russian, then Polish, then Russian again. An official hearing in Russian and writing in Polish, it has been explained to me, will hear Peretz and write Perec. But it is not impossible that the opposite is also true: according to my aunt, the Russians are supposed to be the ones who wrote “tz”, and it was the Poles who wrote “c”. This explanation signals but by no means exhausts the complex fantasies, connected to the concealment of my Jewish background through my patronym, which I elaborated around the name I bear, a name which is distinguished, moreover, by a minute discrepancy between the way it is spelled and the way it is pronounced in French: it should be written Pérec or Perrec (and that’s how it always is written spontaneously, either with an acute accent or with a double “r”0; but it is Perec, despite the fact that it is not pronounced Peurec. (W 36).

On the following page (footnote 12), the narrator recalls that in 1955 or ‘56, he made the pilgrimage to his father’s grave: “seeing the words PEREC ICEK JUDKO followed by a regimental number, stencilled on the wooden cross and still perfectly legible, gave me a feeling that is hard to describe. The most enduring impression was that I was playing a role, acting in a private play: fifteen years after, the son comes to meditate on his father’s grave. But beneath the role-playing there were other things” (W 37-38), and the narrator goes on to extricate the complex feelings engaged in finally “put[ting] a boundary around that death which I had never learnt of, never experienced or known or acknowledged, but which for years and years I had had to deduce hypocritically from the commiserating whispers and sighing kisses of the ladies” (W 38).

Here, I want to suggest, is a Comparatist paradigm of our times. For if Georges Perec is a “French” author, his Frenchness must be read as the sedimentation of complex strata of Eastern European and Near Eastern cultural, national, and linguistic layers. When, for example, in the other narrative, the nameless narrator, having been mysteriously summoned to a meeting with the unknown Otto Apfelstahl at the Berghof Hotel in Hamburg, the following exchange takes place:

“Do you want some pretzels?”

“Excuse me?” I said not grasping.

“Pretzels. pretzels to eat with your beer.”

“No thank you. I never eat pretzels. Give me a newspaper instead. (W 16)

This takes place in Chapter V, before we have learned that the name Perec-Peretz is the same word as “pretzel.” Only when we reread W does the connection between “never eating pretzels” and the question of Perec’s origins become apparent. And indeed, the whole text is a language-game where clues are distributed in this fashion.

So far as I know, neither Derrida nor Lyotard nor Deleuze have ever written a word on Georges Perec, their “French” deconstructionist contemporary, and neither have the postcolonial theorists whom Emily Apter takes to be the Comparatists today. Nor is Perec’s work taught in courses in the contemporary American novel. Theory, the wisdom here goes, may–indeed must–be read in translation, but when it comes to literature, the line continues to be drawn in the sand. American means American, even as it did in the nineteenth century, right? And this despite the simple fact that nationally, culturally, and ethnically, Perec may well be closer to many contemporary Americans than he is to “the French tradition” and to the language in which he writes.

But the irony is that for U.S. fiction writers and to their students, Perec is now a kind of cult figure, that those “pretzels” constitute something of a hidden signifier, rather like the missing e in Perec’s La Disparition, just translated into English. And the ACLA thus has its work cut out for it. For if we are to place and understand literature as it is being composed at the end of the twentieth century, we must rediscover the simple truth that the U.S.A. is not an island and that its writing is not only ethnically and racially diverse but always already bears the imprint of the nations, not only of the exotic Third World, but, closer to home, of the nations in the neighborhood. To put it another way, in the age of the information highway, it is American Literature that must begin to “comparatize” itself.
Footnotes

MINA LOY’S  “ANGLO-MONGRELS AND THE ROSE”

Marjorie Perloff

published in Mina Loy: Woman and Poet, ed. Maeera Schreiber and Keith Tuma (National Poetry Foundation, 1996), pp. 131-48. Rpt. in French translation in Après l’usure de toutes les routes: Retour sur l’épopée, Volumes 49-50 of in ‘hui, ed. Jacques Darras (Brussels, 1997): 127-145; trans. Dominque Goy-Blanquet

The U.S. stay lasted from October 1916 to January 1918–a little over a year–but it is during this year that the entire sequence Songs to Johannes  was published as a special issue of Others (April 1917) and brought Loy to the attention of Pound and Eliot.  In 1918 she followed Arthur Cravan to Mexico; a year later, after a long drawn-out idyll, Loy, penniless and pregnant, sailed for Europe to have her baby.  Cravan, who was to follow shortly, disappeared mysteriously;  his body was never recovered.   Their child Fabi was born in London in 1919.  Loy returned to Italy for two years and then settled with her two daughters (her son Giles had been kidnapped by her former husband and was to die soon thereafter) in Paris, where she lived from 1923 to 1936.  Her long poem “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” and her unfinished novel Insel date from this period.  It is only in 1936, at the age of 54 that Loy moved to the U.S. where she remained, first in Manhattan’s Bowery and then with her daughters in Aspen, Colorado until she died in 1966.  In these later American years, she published very little and all but disappeared from sight.

Loy would thus seem to be the prototype of the deracinated cosmopolite, the sort of expatriate figure Eliot (who praised her poetry in The Egoist)  must have had in mind when he had the Wasteland’s Marie say, “Binn gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.”   Fluent in French, Italian, and German as well as in her own late Victorian English, she lived in New York for only one of her first fifty-four years.    How, then, could Pound call her work a “distinctly national product”–an oeuvre that couldn’t “come out of any other country”?   And how is it that Virginia Kouidis would call her book on Loy (the only book-length critical study to date) Mina Loy: American Modernist Poet?

Kouidis herself gives three reasons.  First,  she argues, Loy was “aware that the subjects and structures of English poetry in 1910 were inadequate to experience” (VK 135), and that she must therefore, like her fellow-Americans, Eliot and Pound,  draw upon French models.  Second, Loy’s logopoeia (Pound’s term, of which more below) is characteristically American: “she employs a compressed diction that abandons the poetic commonplace. . . .this diction reflects modes of perception and utilizes the spoken language” (VK 136).   Here Kouidis is thinking of William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and especially of Gertrude Stein.  And third, “Mina Loy is linked to the Americans by her translation into poetry of the techniques and structures of modern European painting, especially Futurism and Cubism” (VK 137).   Again, Stein and Moore, Stevens and Williams are cited as parallels.

Two of the three traits here cited are largely negative: Loy is judged to be “American” by her borrowings from French poetry (Laforgue) as well as French and Italian art forms (Cubism, Futurism).  As for the third, the purported adoption of an American speech idiom, the fact is, as we shall see, that Loy’s language is anything but direct, colloquial, or idiomatic–what Eliot called the “return to common speech,” or Ezra Pound, “direct treatment of the thing.”    All the same, Pound was on to something important when he declared that Loy’s poetry couldn’t come out of any other country but the U.S.   For what does make Loy, like her friend Gertrude Stein, so curiously “American,” I shall suggest here, is her invention of an intricately  polyglot language–a language that challenges the conventional national idiom of her British (as well as her French or Italian, or, paradoxically, even her American) contemporaries.

It is significant that, from the beginning, it was the United States, not England, whose little magazines– Camera Work, Trend, Rogue, Blind Man, Others, and Dial–were receptive to Mina Loy’s writing.   The first two installments of “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” came out, very appropriately as we shall see, in the “Exile” issue  (1923) of the Little Review ; the third, in Robert McAlmon’s Paris-based Contact Collection of Contemporary Verse (1925).   As an “Exile” in New York, Loy was linked to the Arensberg Circle and, later to the American expatriate circles in Paris.  When Alfred Kreymborg came to write his survey of American poetry called Our Singing Strength (1929),  he placed Loy in his chapter on “Originals and Eccentrics,” grouping her with Marianne Moore, Lola Ridge, and Adelaide Crapsey, as well as with Mardsen Hartley, Pitts Sanborn, Helen Hoyt, and Emmanuel Carnevali.   “During the war,” we read in Kreymborg, a  “curious woman, exotic and beautiful, came to New York from foreign shores: the English Jewess, Mina Loy, [whose]  clinical frankness and sardonic conclusions, wedded to a madly elliptical style scornful of the regulation grammar, syntax, and punctuation, horrified our gentry and drove our critics into furious despair.”  Her work as well as her personality, Kreymborg reports, “created a violent sensation.”

But in what sense, if any, is the “elliptical style” of this “English Jewess,” who spent so little time in America before her fifty-fourth year, identifiable as “American,” especially since, overtly, it has little in common with the “American” styles (and settings) of such of her contemporaries as Stevens and Williams?   To answer this question,  I propose to examine Loy’s remarkable long (and still almost unknown) poem “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” (1923-25).   For here, in this allegorical, parodic, often disjointed  pseudo-narrative of the poet’s ancestry, birth, childhood, and coming of age,  we have Loy’s most compelling representation of her “mongrelization”– the “crossbreeding” of the English and Hungarian-Jewish strains that produced, so the author herself seems to feel,  a form of mental and emotional gridlock that could be overcome, in life as in art, only by large doses of the transnational avant-gardism of the interwar period.

The Mongrel-Girl of Noman’s Land

What Pound rightly called logopoeia, “the dance of the intellect among words,” as he put it in “How to Read,” aptly characterizes Loy’s poetics.    Whereas melopoeic poetry is one in which “the words are charged, over and above their plain meaning, with some musical property,” and phanopoeia is “a casting of images upon the visual imagination,” logopoeia “employs words not only for their direct meaning, but it takes count in a special way of habits of usage, of the context we expect to find with the words, its usual concomitants, of its known acceptances, and of ironical play.”   Kenneth Rexroth seems to have these qualities in mind when, in a 1944 appreciation, he suggests that Loy’s neglect is probably “due to her extreme exceptionalism.  Erotic poetry is usually lyric.  Hers is elegiac and satirical.  it is usually fast paced.  Hers is slow and deliberately twisting.  If it is bitter and dissatisfied, it is at least passionate.  And Rexroth adds, “Her virtues are self-evident.  She is tough, forthright, very witty, atypical, anti-rhetorical, devoid of chi-chi.”

Now consider the opening section of “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” called “Exodus,” in which the impersonal narrator tells the tale (in the present-tense and in swift, cartoonish strokes) of her father’s childhood in “Buda Pest,” his coming to the “cancellated desert of the metropolis” which is Victorian London,  his youthful employment as “highest paid    tailor’s / cutter in the City,” his lonely boarding-house life and sexual fantasies, and his, to her mind, ill-fated meeting with the  “English Rose” who is to be Loy’s despised Protestant, virginal, bourgeois, cold and prudish mother.  Here is a passage about fifty lines into the narrative:

The arid gravid
intellect      of Jewish ancestors
the senile juvenile
calculating prodigies of Jehovah
crushed by the Occident ox
they scraped
the gold gold golden
muck from its hoofs

moves Exodus       to emigrate
coveting the alien
asylum      of voluntary military
service     paradise        of the pound-sterling
where the domestic Jew        in lieu                                             of knouts        is lashed with tongues

This passage makes an interesting contrast to the work of a poet closely linked to Loy– Williams, whose Spring and All was published by Contact the same year as “Anglo-Mongrels.”  Here is the opening of VIII:

The sunlight in a
yellow plaque upon the
varnished floor

is full of a song
inflated to
fifty pounds pressure

at the faucet of
June that rings
the triangle of the air

pulling at the
anemones in
Persephone’s cow pasture–

Williams’s verse is at once “free” (the lines range from three to seven syllables and from two to four primary stresses) and yet highly structured.  The lines are suspended, breaking at odd junctures, as in “a/ yellow plaque upon the / varnished floor.”  But visually  these lines are gathered into neat tercets of roughly equal size.  And the language of these tercets is concrete and particular, the poet’s response to the natural world being conveyed without commentary by means of image and metaphor.   The sharply visualized “yellow plaque” of sunlight on the “varnished floor” is described synaesthetically as a “song / inflated to / fifty pounds pressure / at the faucet of /June,” and then, in terms of myth, as “anemones” lighting up “Persephone’s cow pasture.”

In contrast, Loy’s “stanzas” are intentionally ungainly, syllable and stress count, line length, spacing, and stanza length being much more variable than Williams’s.   Indeed, Loy’s is not so much “free verse,” in the usual sense of the term, as it is a variant on skeltonics (so named for the Tudor poet John Skelton), that is, “a distinctive shortlined meter [in which] typically the lines carry only 2-3 stresses in 3-6 syllables (though longer lines are not uncommon), and there are frequent short runs of monorhyme called ‘leashes’ [and] parallelism is a major rhetorical device.”    In Loy’s version, these “leashes” often come within lines, as in “arid gravid,” “senile juvenile,” or “Occident ox.”  What holds these stanzas together is not a larger rhythmic contour or consistent image pattern as in Spring and All, but a network of elaborate rhyming, chiming, chanting, and punning, as in the sequence “Jewish–juvenile–prodigies–Jehovah,” where jew is found in every word, or in the rhyming and chiastic linkage between “Occident ox” and “Exodus.”  “Crushed by the Occident ox,” Exodus”  naturally “covet[s] the alien / asylum   of voluntary military service   paradise  of the pound-sterling.”  “Voluntary”–”military”:  doesn’t this sound like a contradiction in terms?  And what sort of “asylum” is “alien”?  Yet these tightly packed lines make perfectly good sense:  to join the British army voluntarily provides Exodus with the “alien” (to him) “asylum” of the “paradise of the pound-sterling.”  Once “domesticated,” in his new country, the Jew   in lieu / of knouts    is lashed with tongues.”  Not lashed with the whip as were his ancestors in Hungary, just lashed with tongues.”  And the rhyme “Jew” / “lieu” suggests that the Jew can never be more than a substitute in English society, a kind of simulacrum, in lieu of  the true blue Englishman.

Mina Loy’s debt to Futurism (as well as her critique of her male Futurist mentors) has been frequently discussed,   but what has gone unnoticed is that Loy’s very diction and syntax constitute a sharp critique of Marinetti’s famed parole in libertà.   In the “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature” (1912),  Marinetti had defined poetry as “an uninterrupted sequence of new images” or rather image-bearing nouns in apposition.  “Every noun,” he declared, “should have its double; that is the noun should be followed, with no conjunction, by the noun to which it is related by analogy.  Example: man-torpedo-boat, woman-gulf, crowd-surf, piazza-funnel, door-faucet.”  At the same time “One must abolish the adjective, to allow the naked noun to preserve its essential color,” and again “One must abolish the adverb, old belt buckle that holds two words together.”  A sequence of naked nouns, tactile, concrete, imagistic, and often, as in Zang Tumb Tuum, onomatopoeic: here is the source of immaginazione senza fili (imagination without strings).

In “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose,” Loy turns this aesthetic on its head.  Her nouns are abstract, not concrete–intellect, ancestors, prodigies, asylum — and they are modified by adjectives that often overwhelm (and even contradict) her nouns as in “the senile juvenile / calculating prodigies,” or in “coveting the alien / asylum   of voluntary military service.”  Not parole in libertà but conceptual words and phrases (whatever the part of speech); not lyric sequences of analogies but schematic, parabolic narrative:

The cannibal God
shutters his lids of night     on the day’s gluttony
the partially     devoured humanity
warms its unblessed beds     with bare prostrations  (LLB 113)

Here is Loy’s version of late Victorian London, with its alien devouring Deity presiding over the sordid nighttime couplings (“bare prostrations”) in the “unblessed beds” of the dreary mass metropolis. If this passage brings to mind Eliot’s “Preludes” (“One thinks of all the hands / That are raising dingy shades / In a thousand furnished rooms”), Loy’s “unblessed beds” are purposely left unspecified, their occupants never quite materializing as actual human beings.

In this respect, Loy is much closer to Wyndham Lewis than to Eliot or Pound, Williams or Stevens,  or, for that matter, to Moore, to whom critics from Pound on down have linked her, evidently because of gender.   The de-particularization of “Exodus,” as of  “English Rose” in the next section, and of “Ova” (Mina Loy herself),  “Esau Penfold” (Stephen Haweis), and “Colossus” (Arthur Cravan), is symptomatic of Loy’s larger metaphysical perspective.  Whereas Marinetti (and the Imagists as well) put his faith in objects, lining up catalogues of concrete nouns (torpedo-boat-battleship-machine gun) and onomatopoeic sounds (“zang-tumb-tuum,”  “ta-ta-ta-ta”) for their immediate presentational value, Loy is a satirist, a diagnostician who is willing to regard her very own parents as nasty stereotypes, representative of a late Victorian Imperialist England in which the outsider, especially an Eastern European Jewish outsider (“Exodus”) could only gain a foothold by marrying an “English Rose,”, no matter how great the mismatch.

Indeed, in her portrait of her father Sigmund Löwy, Loy seems to accept all the anti-Semitic stereotypes of her time and place.  Exodus’s mother has “hair     long as the Talmud” and “tamarind eyes”  (LLB 111); his father stuffs him “with biblical Hebrew and the seeds of science   exhorting him/ to vindicate / his forefathers’ ambitions” (LLB 111-12).  In the passage I have cited above, “the senile juvenile / calculating prodigies of Jehovah” (senile because even as children they must push and shove and make their way) learn to “scrape / the gold gold golden muck” from the “hoofs” of the Occident (read “gentile”) ox.”   Arriving in London, Exodus is soon the “highest paid   tailor’s / cutter in the City,” masters “business English,” “stock exchange quotations / and conundrums of finance / to which unlettered immigrants are instantly initiate” (115).   His gift to his daughter,  we learn later, is none other than “The Jewish brain!” (132).  But the stereotype is not only of the shrewd, money-grubbing Jewish immigrant.   Loy endows her father with the reputed “Jewish” artistic bent (a Sunday painter (“Painting feeling his pulse. . . .Under his ivory hands / his sunflowers sunwards / glow”, 118), as well as with the powerful sex drive of dark “Eastern” males: “He / loaded with Mosaic / passions that amass / like money” (124), and again, “Exodus / Oriental / mad to melt / with something softer than himself” (126).

Inevitably, the union with his opposite, the cold, virginal “English Rose,” is bound to prove disasterous.   Loy’s portrait of her mother in Part 2 of “Anglo-Mongrels” contains some of her most devastating satire, satire in which, again, the language itself is as “mongrelized” as are the principals of her narrative.  Here is the opening:

Early English everlasting
quadrate Rose
paradox-Imperial
trimmed with some travestied flesh
tinted with bloodless duties         dewed
with Lipton’s teas
and grimed with crack-packed
herd-housing
petalling
the prim gilt
penetralia
of a luster-scioned
core-crown

Rose of arrested impulses
self-pruned
of the primordial attributes
a tepid heart         inhibiting
with tactful terrorism
the Blossom Populous
to mystic incest with its ancestry
establishing
by the divine right of self-assertion
the post-conceptional
virginity of Nature. . . .   (LLB 121)

Here Loy has produced a brilliant parody of Le Roman de La Rose, her skeltonic rhymes inverting the value of virginity in Machaut’s medieval romance so as to make it an absurd value, a cash commodity whereby the British empire plies its trade.  The opening “litany” might be interestingly compared to Eliot’s slightly later (1930) quite serious litany in “Ash Wednesday” (“Rose of Memory / Rose of forgetfulness /. . .  . The single Rose / Is now the Garden”).   Loy’s alliterating opening, “Early English everlasting” also echoes parodically Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable. . .” (from “Spelt from Sybil’s Leaves”), while the reference to the four-petalled rose (“quadrate”) refers to the Rose of fin-de-siècle occultists, most notably Yeats’s “Far-off, most secret, and inviolate Rose.”

But what is entirely Loy’s own poetic signature is that her rose images, far from producing an imagist or symbolist landscape, jostle with conceptual nouns, puns, and aggressive rhymes, in a curious “mongrelization” of linguistic registers.  The poet’s rose is “paradox-Imperial” in that her vaunted purity and modesty can “work” on male suitors only because this “Blossom Populous” can bank on its “mystic incest with its ancestry,” its “divine right of self-assertion.”  Rose’s very “flesh” is “travestied” by its class origin, “tinted with bloodless duties,” and “dewed / with Lipton’s teas.”   Here not only do the suffixes match, but “dewed . . . teas” nicely puns on the “duties” this “pouting / pearl beyond price” has been trained to perform.  And a further pun relates those “teas” to the “tease” which “She / simpering in her / ideological pink” (124) turns out to be.   For what are those “petals” but the “prim gilt” (“guilt”) or fake “luster” covering the “penetralia” to Rose’s “core-crown”–crown” by virtue of the “divine right of self-assertion,” the assertion of her illustrious Imperial pedigree.  Even the lady at Exodus’s boarding-house dinner table, after all, excuses what are evidently her bad table manners by saying, “Our Dear Queen picks chicken bones / in her fingers” (115).   Why, then, should Exodus not pick a few chicken bones of his own?  Trained as he is to “scrape / the gold gold golden / muck” from the hoofs of the “Occident ox” (112),  why not a little “prim gilt” from the “luster-scioned / crown”?

The narrative of Exodus’s meeting with and courtship of “Alice the gentile” is high comedy:

While she
expecting the presented knee
of chivalry
repels
the sub-umbilical mystery
of his husbandry
hysterically

His passionate anticipation
of warming in his arms
his rose     to a maturer coloration
which was all of aspiration
the grating upon civilization
of his sensitive organism
had left him

splinters upon an adamsite
opposition
of nerves like stalactites

This dying chastity
had rendered up no soul
yet they pursued their conjugal
dilemmas        as is usual
with people
who know          not what they do
but know      that what they do
is not illegal                                    (LLB 126-27)

In the first stanza above, the six “leash” rhymes — “she” / “knee”/ “chivalry”/ “mystery”/ “husbandry”/ “hysterically”– concisely and bitingly define the misalliance of Exodus and his Rose.  To be brought up to expect the chivalry of the “presented knee,” only to be exposed to that “sub-umbilical mystery” of his “husbandry” (the phrase combines euphemism and pun to describe, from Rose’s perspective, the act that can’t be named) culminates in that free-floating adverb that destroys, in more ways than one, the decorum of the preceding noun sequence.  Hysterically  is what we’re left with.   The same effect is rendered in the next stanza by the rhyming of suffixes of abstract nouns–“anticipation”/ “coloration”/ “aspiration”/ “civilization”– where the last word “civilization” doesn’t belong semantically in the catalogue of mental states that precede it, the irony being that this “civilization” consists precisely of such foolish forms of flirtation.

Rose’s resistance to Exodus’s “passionate anticipation” is defined in terms of minerals: “adamsite”  (a greenish-black mica) and “nerves like stalactites.”  Again, the two geological terms rhyme.  “No soul,” it seems, in this “conjugal” union.  But–and now Loy switches to ordinary diction to make a fine point– these Victorians were “people/ who    know not what they do / but know   that what they do / is not illegal.”   The indictment of marriage as an institution could hardly be more scornful.

The logopoeia of these early sections of “Anglo-Mongrels” is extremely intricate.  Punning will often depend on foreign words or on breaking up words into their morphemes.  “Deep in the névrose night,” for example, enables Loy to embed her “rose” in the French word for “neurotic.” The “disciplining” of “the inofficial / ‘flesh and devil’ / to the ap     parent  impecca     bility / of the English,” plays on “parent” and sinning (i.e., “non peccavi”).  And perhaps most wittily, Loy uses personification and circumlocution to create burlesque scenes of virginal defensiveness:

For of this Rose
wherever it blows
it is certain
that an impenetrable pink curtain
hangs between it and itself
and in metaphysical vagrance
it passes beyond the ken
of men unless
possessed
of exorbitant incomes
And Then–
merely indicates its presence
by an exotic fragrance   (128)

The image of the hymenal “impenetrable pink curtain” hanging “between it and itself . . . in metaphysical vagrance” is wonderfully absurd, especially since the reference is embedded in the nursery-rhymes “Rose” / “blows”, “certain” / “curtain”, “unless”/ “possess”, and especially the crescendo of “ken” / “men”/ “And Then–”.  The only “presence” here, as the final pararhyme suggests, is not of a living body but only a teasing fragrance.  Withholding is all.

In the course of the poem,  Loy pulls out all the generic stops–allegory, mock epic, biography, realist narrative–so as to foreground the ironies inherent in her tale.      But it is the tone of the poem, the distance between its aloof narrator and her cartoonish characters,  that makes Loy’s work distinctive.  For who, after all, talks about her parents this way?  Who would characterize her own birth as the extraction from her mother’s loins of “A clotty bulk of bifurcate fat” (130), or describe her baby self as “feed[ing] / its mongrel heart on Berger’s food / for infants” (132)?   Is the poet too cruel to the memory of her parents?  Too intolerant and unforgiving?  Just plain nasty?

In the later sections of “Anglo-Mongrels,” the poet details Ova’s coming to consciousness, her gradual separation from “the heavy upholstered / stuffing” of the “netherbodies” of both mother and nurse (LLB139), whose presence can no longer stifle the child’s curiosity about words, for example “iarrhea,” which the two-year old toddler overhears and transforms into a kind of magic wand.  Yet neither her precocious love of language nor her later forging of her own version of Christianity,  can quite break the family tie:

Suburban children
of middle-class Britain
ejected from the home
are still connected
with the inseverable
navel-cord of the motherland
and
need never feel alone   (154)

This extract from “Ova among the Neighbors” lacks the punning, sound play, and high-spiritedness of the earlier satire:  indeed, Loy consistently seems less comfortable talking about herself than about her cold and hypocritical mother, her ineffectual father, and the series of  nursemaids and governesses who try to control her childhood activities.  In the course of the narrative, the emphasis remains squarely on the indictment of the imperial England of the poet’s childhood, with its “bland taboo / from the nursery to the cemetry” (156) and its “twilight turbulence / of routine in coma” (157).

But–and I want now to come back to Virginia Kouidis’s representation of the American Mina Loy–the poet does not, at least not in this poem, turn to French models;   she does not adopt natural speech rhythms (as do Eliot and Pound), and by no means is hers the Cubist aesthetic one associates with Gertrude Stein.  Cubism, after all, implies multiplicity of perspectives, the blurring of figure-ground relationships, and the indeterminacy or reference, the outlines of a wine glass doubling as the stick figure of a man, guitar strings as letters of the alphabet or body parts, and so on.  And further: unlike the Marinetti who invented parole in libertà, or the Dadaists of the Cabaret Voltaire, or the Eliot of the Waste Land and Pound of the Cantos, Loy was not a collagiste.  She does not paste together disparate verbal fragments, letting  their spatial juxtapositions create a complex network of meanings.    Rather, hers is a temporal mode,  a satiric narrative, however broken and self-interrupting, in which structures of voice and address take precedence over the “constatation of fact,” as Pound called it, of the Image.

Where, then,  does this logopoeaic mode come from?  Perhaps the first place to look is at the Yellow Nineties of Loy’s London childhood: the England of Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, of Art Nouveau and her one-time art teacher Augustus John.  Like the calla lilly lamps she invented in the late twenties (see figure 1), her verbal compositions are highly stylized, intentionally artificial, extravagantly mannered.  As she herself put it in an unpublished homage to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Tipped off as it were by the poet I preferred, I at last began to function” (LLB 315).

At the same time, she infuses the language of the fin de siècle with solecisms, neologisms, foreign phrases (characterizations of Cravan, for example, seem to demand  French as in Loy’s designation of him as “un brute mystique” or “le dieu qui se conserve et le fou qui s’evade,”LLB 318-319), Jewish inflections, and realistic references to bodily functions that would not have been tolerated by the Rhymers’ Club or the Savoy.   Indeed, her curious polyglossia reflects her own “Anglo-mongrel” ancestry as well as the expatriation of her adult life.

“Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose,” written in Paris after the traumatic loss of Cravan — a loss from which, by her own account, Loy never recovered — thus represents a rupture with a lyrical tradition that parallels Gertrude Stein’s break with conventional narrative some ten years earlier.   Like Stein (or, for that matter, like Loy’s American expatriate friend Djuna Barnes), Loy maintains an  ironic distance to her materials.  The “Buda pest” of the Löwys was not, after all, a place she really knew but largely a mythic space she herself had invented.   And, compared to the “Unreal city” of Eliot’s Waste Land, published the year she began “Anglo-Mongrels,” her own London locales remain curiously abstract and schematic. The “isolate consciousness / projected   from back of time and space” that Loy explores in her narrative poem is not given to fantasies of shoring fragments against its ruins.   Rather, as Pound and Rexroth recognized, the poet’s sardonic wit and bitter acerbity find their outlet in the play of language itself, the logopoeia that finds satisfaction in discovering the paragrams and puns latent in any given vocabulary.

If this logopoeic poetry has finally come into its own, it may well be because our own “American” English has become so thoroughly mongrelized.   Interestingly, Loy herself predicted this turn of events. “It was inevitable,” she remarked in one of her rare critical essays “that the renaissance of poetry should proceed out of America, where latterly a thousand languages have been born, and each one, for purposes of communication at least, English–English enriched and variegated with the grammatical structure and voice-inflection of many races. . . . Out of the welter of this unclassifiable speech, while professors of Harvard and Oxford labored to preserve, ‘God’s English,’ the muse of modern literature arose, and her tongue had been loosened in the melting pot.”

This was written in 1925, the same year “Anglo-Mongrels” was published.  At the end of the century, as “English” in the U.S. becomes increasingly other, no longer the language of the mother country but an amalgam of “névrose” locutions and syntactic structures taken from African, Latin American, and Asian as well as European cultures, Loy’s poetic language no longer appears especially eccentric.   Such neologisms as “increate altitudes” (LLB 169) or “the more formulate education” (LLB 152) no longer seem, as they did even to favorable critics like Rexroth, “lapses of skill” (see KR 69), and the campy artifice of her Exodus/Colossus narrative can now be understood as deploying verbal displacement and syntactic dislocation for essential satirical ends.

Roger Conover recounts an anecdote that is apropos in this regard:

[Loy] wrote under an elaborate system of anagrammatically and numerologically     derived pseudonyms.  Was she impersonating herself or did she have a double? . . .     .Was it her pseudomania, perhaps, which accounts for a rumour that was circulating     around Paris in the Twenties–that Mina Loy was in fact not a real person at all, but     a forged persona, a hoax-of-critics.  Upon hearing this, the story goes, Mina Loy     turned up at Natalie Barney’s salon in order to convince guests of her existence:

I assure you I am indeed a live being.  But it is necessary to stay very             unknown . . . To maintain my incognito the hazard I chose was–poet.  (LLB         xvii-xviii)
It is a nice parable of the grim advantages of what we might call negative identity.   Mina Loy’s “pseudonymity” may well have been the signature that gave her the “American” freedom to invent a verbal world of her own.  “I began,” she recalls, “to ‘furnish’ England with a small pattern, an incipient rhythm, a wisp of folklore” (LLB 315).  And again, in “Ladies in an Aviary,”  “It is so sweet this sugar, the sugar of fictitious values” (LLB 316).

FOOTNOTES

[1]  Ezra Pound, “A List of Books,” Little Review, March 1918; rpt. in Ezra Pound, Selected Prose 1909-1965, ed William Cookson (New York: New Directions, 1973), pp. 424-25.

[2] The Haweises’ first child Oda was born in 1904 in Paris but died on her first birthday.  My biographical sketch is largely based on Roger Conover’s Introduction and Time-Table: see Mina Loy, The Last Lunar Baedeker, ed. Roger L. Conover with a Note by Jonathan Williams (Highlands, N.C.: The Jargon Society, 1982), pp. xv-lxxix.   Subsequently cited in the text as LLB.  Loy scholars have discovered that this edition is by no means definitive and Conover’s spacing of lines and stanzas does not always follow the originals, but for the moment, his is the best edition we have.  A small detail that deserves notice here:  Conover lists Loy’s father as Lowy, the Anglicized spelling of the German Löwy;  Löwy, in turn, would derive from Löwe (lion), Löwenthal, and so on.
Carolyn Burke’s long-awaited , forthcoming biography, to be published by Farrar, Straus in 1996, will no doubt fill in the picture much more fully.

[3] In the Egoist, V (1918): 70, T. S. Apteryx [Eliot’s pseydonym] called “The Effectual Marriage” (a thinly veiled account of her relationship with Papini) “extremely good.”   And year laster, Ezra Pound recalled “Effectual Marriage” as  one of the poems of the last thirty years which by virtue of its ‘individual character’ remained in his memory.  See Pound, Profile: An Anthology Collected in 1931 (Milan: John Scheiwiller, 1932): 13.

[4]  Virginia M. Kouidis, Mina Loy.  American Modernist Poet (Baton Rouge and London: Louisia State University Press, 1980); subsequently cited in the text as VK.   The American label is all but ubiquitous: see, for example, Jane Augustine, “Mina Loy: A Feminist Modernist Americanizes the Language of Futurism,” Mid-Hudson Language Studies 12.1 (1989): 89-101;  Carolyn Burke, “The New Poetry and the New Woman: Mina Loy,” in Coming to Light: American Women Poets in the Twentieth Century, eds. Diane Wood Middlebrook and Marilyn Yalom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985): 37-57;  Linda A. Kinnehan, Poetics of the Feminine: Authority and Literary Tradition in William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Denise Levertov, and Kathleen Fraser (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

[5] Eliot, “The Music of Poetry” (1942), On Poetry and Poets (New York: Noonday Press,
1961), p. 23; Ezra Pound, “A Retrospect,” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. with an introduction by T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1954), p. 5

[6]  Alfred Kreymborg, Our Singing Strength, An Outline of American Poetry (1620-1930)  (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc. 1929), pp. 488-89.

[7]  Ezra Pound, “How to Read” (1928), in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London:  Faber and Faber, 1954), p. 25.

[8] Kenneth Rexroth, “Les Lauriers Sont Coupés,” Circle 1.4 (1944): 69-70.

[9]  LLB 112-113.  Conover normalizes Loy’s dramatic spacing and omits her dashes, hyphens and other special punctuation devices.  In my citations, I reproduce the spacing of the original: for the passage cited here, see Little Review, 9 (Spring 1923): 11-12.

[10]  William Carlos Williams, Spring and All, in Imaginations, ed. Webster Schott (New York: New Directions, 1970), p. 109.

[11]  See T. V. F. Brogan, “Skeltonic,” in  The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 1154-55.    An example from Skelton’s “To Mistress Margaret Hussey” goes like this:
Merry Margaret,
As midsummer flower,
Gentle as falcon
Or hawk of the tower
With solace and gladness,
Much mirth and no madness,
All good and no badness;
So joyously,
So maidenly,
So womanly. . . .

[12]  See VK 49-59;  Carolyn Burke, “The New Poetry and the New Woman: Mina Loy,” 39-43;  Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “‘Seismic Orgasm’: Sexual Intercourse, Gender Narratives and Lyric Ideology in Mina Loy,” in Ralph Cohen (ed.), Studies in Historical Change (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992), pp. 264-91; and especially Elizabeth Arnold, “Mina Loy and the Futurists,” Sagetrieb 8.1-2 (1989): 83-117.

[13]  F. T. Marinetti, “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature” (1912), in Let’s Murder the Moonshine: Selected Writings, trans. R. W. Flint  (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1991), pp. 92-97.

[14] For a discussion of Loy’s brand of Christianity and Freudianism, see  Keith Tuma, “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose’,” Sagetrieb 11. 1&2 (1992): 207028.

[15]  Virginia Kouidis suggests Jules Laforgue as a model (see VK 91-94), but Laforgue is much lyrical than Loy, and, despite his ironic registers, much more concerned with self expression.

[16]  See, on this point, Chapter 2 of my Futurist Moment:  Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), and my essay on  “Collage,” forthcoming in the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp.

[17]  In the final issue of the Little Review (1929), Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap gave their authors a questionnaire to fill out.  One question was:
What has been the happiest moment of your life?  The unhappiest? (if you care to tell).  Mina Loy responded: “Every moment I spent with Arthur Cravan.  The rest of the time.”  See LLB 305-306.  Cf. Loy’s apotheosis of her lover in “Arthur Cravan is Alive!”, LLB 317-22.

[18]  Mina Loy, “Modern Poetry,” Charm, 3, no. 3 (April 1925):  17.  I owe the discovery of this essay to Marisa Januzzi, who has uncovered so much important uncollected Loy material.