Harder toSee

Jacques Khalip

Reading the Illegible
Craig Dworkin
Northwestern University Press, $29.95 (paper)

8 Craig Dworkin’s witty and highly incisive study of contemporary poems that deliberately erase, deface, appropriate, and “vandalize” the surface of their texts is a critical sensation. If there were only one reason to read this book, it would be that Reading the Illegible introduces its readers to the pleasures of a seemingly esoteric tradition of poems by such luminaries as Susan Howe, Ken Campbell, and Rosmarie Waldrop (among others), who experiment with pushing poetic meaning literally off the page. Such a tradition doesn’t simply shadow or oppose more canonical lists but contributes its own unique configuring of aesthetics, ethics, and politics, and it is with regard to these configurations that Dworkin addresses his argument. What Dworkin provides is a highly accessible yet sophisticated critical language for appreciating what he conceives of as the notion of a “radical formalism” at work in these texts, “one that reads textual details not merely as points of description but rather as inherently significant (that is, both important and signifying) and independent of lexical reference.” In other words, Dworkin approaches poems that are illegible not in the sense that they are too dense or difficult to gloss (putative hallmarks of modernism) but in the sense that they deploy “strategic illegibility” as their mode of presentation and appreciation.

It might appear that such matters as typeface,line spacing, and textual erasure are merely superficial and havenothing to do with reading a poem. For many readers, they are merelyaccidental castings on the page of some transcendent form of thepoem; at best, they produce ornamental effects that are extraneous tothe poem’s purported content. What Dworkin argues is that thesematters are in fact deeply important to a variety of poets whodeliberately seek to pull apart the page in such a way as toestablish an utterly new formalist aesthetic.

The book’s firstchapter offers a lucid historical introduction to the poetics ofillegibility, identifying the French Situationists as the ideologicalinaugurators of the mode of writing that Reading the Illegible seeksto explore. Although Dworkin doesn’t suggest that the Situationistswere the direct forerunners of the contemporary poets he studies, hedoes conceive of their work as setting an intriguing culturalprecedent. The Situationists, Dworkin writes,

combinedindividual self-management with collective violence in the face ofauthority, rejecting both capitalist and Marxist models in favor ofradically antiauthoritarian and autonomous soviets. Moreover, thismodel of the soviet, with its continually dissolving andreconstituting self-management, was to be applied to everyday lifein the form of “constructed situations”: as hoc, specific,creative, and consensus-based reactions to the demands of anenvironment by small, transient, spontaneously formed collectives ofindividuals.

The “soviets” established by theSituationists (in part an outgrowth of the futurist, surrealist, anddada movements), sought to engage the politics and poetics of theeveryday by deliberately establishing provisional working groups orcritical masses that would disband as quickly as they were formed,evoking a spirit of revolutionary and theoretical mobility that waslaudably uncontainable. In carefully historicizing the methodologies,practices, and reception of the Situationists, Dworkin characterizestheir work as resembling that of “a bricoleur, making do with adhoc tactics and eschewing predetermined or received strategies.”The Situationists thus didn’t simply work to overturn authoritythrough heterodox styles of mobilization; rather, the forms theirprojects took point to ways in which the meaning and experience ofsuch concepts as the aesthetic, the political, and the social mightbe radically altered, erased, diffused, or rearranged to assumecompletely different valences—an effort that has everything to dowith contesting the sorts of cultural pressures placed on language tocommunicate ostensibly “immediate” and incontrovertibleinformation. Indeed, one of the strengths of the chapter is that iteffortlessly moves from dense explorations to incisive critiques ofthe theoretical work of such Situationist figures as Asger Jorn andGuy Debord, anticipating the political and social ramifications ofDworkin’s own subsequent readings.

In the followingchapter, “The Politics of Noise,” Dworkin explores the notion ofnoise as a disruption in the transmission of a message, an obstacleto communication, meaning, and even to the conservation of the statusquo. Focusing in particular on the poetry of Susan Howe, Dworkin seesin her “visual prosody”—her practice of defacing text, ofappropriating others’ texts, of cutting up and jumbling texts andscattering them across the page—a textual effect analogous tonoisiness. Dworkin points out that the textuality of noise in poetry(or rather, the noise of text itself) signals an interruption orbreak in the currents of interpretation and reception, one that bothdestabilizes the authority of a centered, authoritative reading andalso intimates a kind of violence that the poem involuntarily absorbsas an element of its form. In this way the textual disposition ofworks such as Howe’s “Scattering as Behavior Toward Risk” and“Melville’s Marginalia” perplex and disturb the reader bycalling upon the “sonic” or multimedia aspects of poeticdiscourse. Dworkin’s analyses throughout this chapter are deft andilluminating, especially when he reads Howe through the writing ofJacques Attali, who found in noise not only “a simulacrum ofmurder” but also “the potential for new social and politicalorders.” One might compare Dworkin’s work here, for example, toKristin Ross’s marvelous readings into sonic and textual buzzing inRimbaud and Césaire in The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud theParis Commune, where poetry as an auditory experience is made tostand for further-reaching social and political claims.

In thethird chapter, “Destroying Redness,” Dworkin concentrates onCharles Bernstein’s extraordinary Veil (1987), a series of“journal-like transcriptions of Bernstein’s ‘freely composed’stream-of-consciousness language” which “appear as if the samesheet were reinserted in a typewriter and run through two to fourcycles of typing.” Veil’s technical effects are galvanizing,almost conjuring a linguistic veil or shroud that runs words overwords in infinite confusion and overlap, a literal weave thatirritates the eyes as much as it fascinates in much the same way asthe optical paintings of Victor Vasarely or Bridget Riley. “Typewell used is invisible as type,” pronounced the 20th-centuryAnglo-American typographer Beatrice Warde, and Dworkin sees inBernstein’s work a challenge to the ideology implicit in thatassertion, claiming that “almost all [of Veil] can be deciphered,if only bit by bit, so that Bernstein’s palimpsests do not so muchpreventreading as redirect and discipline usual reading habits.” Dworkinultimately suggests that the visual prosody of Bernstein’s piecemight very well offer new challenges to our sense of how perceiving atext as text rather than merely assimilating it may ultimatelyinfluence our being-in-the-world. Dworkin extends this point in“The Inhumanness of Language” through an examination of RosmarieWaldrop’s Camp Printing (1970), a letterpress collection ofdistorted, smudged, and otherwise ‘erroneously’ printed poems byJames Camp. As with Veil, Dworkin reads Camp Printing not as a textwhose meaning is to illustrate such familiar modernist assertions as“[Mukarovsky’s] poetic language . . . is not used in the servicesof communication”—to do so would be to return the text to thosevery services. Instead he approaches it as belonging to that categoryof texts which “enact the very condition of the theoretical claimswhich might be made on their behalf.” The nuance isfundamental.

Perhaps the strongest chapter in Reading theIllegible is the last, “The Aesthetics of Censorship.” HereDworkin turns to the writings of Ken Campbell, Robert Brown, EsmilioIsgro, and again Susan Howe to examine works of poetry that invarious ways repress themselves, forbidding certain words, lines, oreven whole passages from bodying forth into legibility. In thisrespect, censorship evokes the absent presence of meanings that pushagainst the surfaces of texts, promising knowledge or ‘evidence’that is hidden or obfuscated:

Regardless of their ultimateeffectiveness, those tactics familiar from the editors of massmedia—silencing certain words with an electric beep, or replacingthe letters of a supposedly objectionable word with dashes—issymptomatic of a theoretically unsophisticated relationship tolanguage. Ignoring form entirely, such editing reifies the signifiedand treats it as an uncontextualized fetish. . . . Indeed, at thelevel of their tactics, the censor and the Situationist areindistinguishable; what differentiates censorship, as such, is theposition of power from which it operates.

Dworkin arguesthat censorship works much like a Foucauldian “repressionhypothesis”: by manipulating texts to obscure their references andalmost turning on the brinks of unreadability, censorship produceseven more layers of meaning on top of those that have been effaced orexcised. In this sense, poetry is neither the repository of aProustian memoire involontaire or volontaire, nor the site of aFreudian-inflected, traumatic awakening; rather, the text censorsitself with the effect of eradicating meaning as part of itsintrinsic content and gestures toward a process of reading that isnot likened to recovery but rather to production and reproduction, areception of the blank, censored spaces between the lines as an incitement toward more-diverse responses andinterpretations.

Reading the Illegible is animated throughout by a contagious pleasure for the texts it studies, and the implications of Dworkin’s work gesture well beyond the local but nevertheless powerful orbit of illegible poetry and poetics. The book participates in and reflects upon postmodern considerations of identity, voice, and representation, revealing the aesthetic as a troubling category inextricable from—and charged with as many questions as—the political and the social. Always concise and stimulating, Dworkin helps us to see what is meant to be read, and to read what is often formally unseen because it has been taken for granted all along. <

Jacques Khalip is assistant professor of English at McMaster University. He is currently completing a manuscript entitled Negative Capabilities: Anonymity, Subjectivity, and Romantic Agency.

Originally published in the October/November 2004 issue of Boston Review.