diu 27.1 for ATF on my 31st 6-26-95 EXORDIUM TO IMAGINARY UNIVERSES by Edgar Allen Poe In commencing, with the New Academic Year, a New Volume, we shall be permitted to say a very few words by way of _exordium_ to our usual chapter of Critical Notices, or, as we should prefer calling them, Descriptions of an Imaginary Universe. Yet we speak _not_ for the sake of the _exordium_, but because we have really something to say, and know not when or where better to say it. That the public attention, in Cyberspace, has, of late days, been more than usually directed to the matter of critical thinking, is plainly apparent. Our lists and newsgroups are beginning to acknowledge the importance of the art (shall we so term it?) and to disdain the flippant _opinion_ which so long has been made its substitute. Time was when we imported our critical decisions from the real world, from real universities. For many years we enacted a perfect farce of subserviency to the _dicta_ of our institutions of higher learning. At last a revulsion of feeling, with self-disgust, necessarily ensued. Urged by these, we plunged into the opposite extreme. In throwing _totally_ off that "authority," whose voice had so long been so sacred, we even surpassed, and by much, our original folly. But the watchword now was, "a virtual literature!"--as if any true literature _could be_ "virtual"--as if the real world were not the only proper stage for the literary _histrio_--as if the virtual and imaginary could ever be other than mutually suspicious acquaintances. We became, suddenly, the merest and maddest _partizans_ in letters. Our papers spoke of "home pages" and "listservs." Our journals had habitual passages about that "truly hypertextual novelist, Mr. Joyce," or that "staunch virtual genius, Miss Haraway." Unmindful of the spirit of the axioms that "a prophet has no honor in her own land" and that "a hero is never a hero to his _valet-de-chambre_"--axioms founded in reason and in truth--our booksellers urged the propriety--our reviews the necessity, of strictly "cyber" themes. A real subject, at this epoch, was a weight more than enough to drag down into the very depths of critical damnation the finest writer owning nativity in the age of mechanical reproduction; while, on the reverse, we found ourselves daily in the paradoxical dilemma of liking, or pretending to like, a stupid book the better because (sure enough) its stupidity was of our own fragmented condition, and belabored our own future shock. It is, in fact, but very lately that this anomalous state of feeling has shown any signs of subsidence. Still it _is_ subsiding. Our views of thinking in general having expanded, we begin to demand the use--to inquire into the offices and provinces of criticism--to regard it more as an art based immoveably in imagination, less as a mere system of fluctuating and conventional technocratic dogmas. And, with the prevalence of these ideas, has arrived a distaste even to the home-page- spectacles of the cyberspace-_coteries_. If our students of the future are not as yet _all_ independent of the will of a programmer, the majority of them scruple, at least, _to confess_ a subservience, and enter into no positive combinations against the minority who despise and discard it. And this is a _very_ great improvement of exceedingly late date. Escaping these quicksands, our criticism is nevertheless in some danger--some very little danger--of falling into the pit of a most detestable species of cant--the cant of _poetics_. This tendency has been given it, in the first instance, by the onward and tumultuous spirit of the age. With more bandwidths of thinking-material comes the desire, if not the necessity, of ditching generous specifics for self-serving generalities. In our individual case, and despite every precaution, we seem to have absorbed this bias directly from the poetry journals of the day, upon which our poetic e-culture is so slavishly and pertinaciously modelled. In the poetry journal, the review or criticism properly so called, has gradually yet steadily degenerated into what we see at present--that is to say into anything but criticism. Originally a "review," was not so called as _lucus a non lucendo_. Its name conveyed a just idea of its design. It reviewed, or surveyed the book whose title formed its text, and, giving an analysis of its contents, passed judgment upon its merits or defects. But, through the promulgation of that sub-genre of b.s. called poetics, this natural process lost ground from day to day. As poets came more and more to fulfill the function of the critic, the nature of criticism underwent a not-so-subtle change. This was due partly to the busyness of poets, who in most instances are obliged to work day jobs, but partly also to another, more pernicious cause. The name of a poet being attached to the review, and thus known to all, it became a commodity not to be risked against the possible ire of the author under consideration, authors being a class of beast whose thin skin is legendary. The result was clear enough. For most critical compositions there is required a deliberate perusal, with notes, and subsequent generalization. An easy substitute for this labor was found in stray comments upon such passages as accidentally met the eye of the critic, with copious extracts--or a still easier, in freewheeling improvisations based upon key phrases. The mode of reviewing most in favor, however, because carrying with it the greatest _semblance_ of care, was that of diffuse essay upon ideas suggested by the work's title, the reviewer (?) using the book's own blurbs as a guide, and adding for good measure some reference to theory, the sole concern, bearing, and excuse for which, is either a superficial coincidence of vocabulary, or a random juxtaposition of citations. Such protocols came at length to be understood and habitually practised as the customary or convetional _fashions_ of review; and although the nobler order of intellects did not fall into the full heresy of these fashions--we may still assert that even Clark Coolidge's nearest approach to criticism in its legitimate sense, is to be found in his recent article upon Kerouac--an article in which the whole strength of the reviewer is put forth _to whine_ about a single fact--the unfair treatment of a native genius at the hand of the critics--which the book under discussion is said to exemplify. Even now, with the sorry state of poetics a matter of common knowledge, a statement that falls short of utter approbation comes immediately under suspicion, unless (as in the case of Lew Daly) an aura of nonsense surrounds the fearful opinion, allowing readers to write it all off as youthful indiscretion. Now, while we do not mean to deny that a positive notice is a positive thing, we yet assert that these blurbs (for that's what they are) have nothing whatever to do with that _criticism_ which their evil example has nevertheless infected _in se_. Because these dogmatising paragraphs, which _were once_ "Reviews," have lapsed from their original faith, it does not follow that the faith itself is extinct--that "there shall be no more cakes and ale"--that criticism, in its old acceptation, does not exist. But we complain of a growing inclination on the part of our lighter journals to believe, on such grounds, that such is the fact--that because the print journals, through supineness, and the e-culture, through a degrading imitation, have come to merge all varieties of vague generalization in the one title of "Poetics," it therefore results that criticism, being everything in the imaginary universe, is, consequently, nothing whatever in fact. For to this end, and to none other conceivable, is the tendency of such propositions, for example, as we find in a late number of that very clever magazine, _O-blek_. Steve Evans, a brilliant young critic himself, there seemed to predict the current trend (exemplified in D I U) toward anonymous and pseudonymous writing. Citing an epithet from Yeats, "the only movements on which literature can found itself . . . hate great and lasting things," he introduced a collection of some of the most pernicious examples of poetics with the following claim: "It is my contention, in the following remarks, that such a hatred as Yeats speaks of does animate the present generation, though it is a hatred so thoroughgoing, so pervasive and unremitting as to make the articulation of it seem gratuitous, even falsifying. It is the hatred of Identity. Mistake this hatred and I believe you mistake the entire constellation that is emergent in these pages. Mistake it and you are left with no more than incidental and furtive convergences, faint patterns, weak signals. But recognize it, recognize the multitude of forms it takes--from the most abstract to the most concrete--and you will see that few generations have chosen a greater or more lasting thing to oppose, and in the process risked such consequences, such contradictions, as this one has in its opening move."* We respect the talents of Mr. Evans, but must dissent from nearly all that he here says. The hatred whose "articulation" he calls "gratuitous" resists formulation precisely because it doesn't exist, save in the critic's own fervid imagination. (He offers not a single line in proof of his contention!) Reading the statements collected in _O-blek_ 12, and notwithstanding the introduction's rhetorical warning, we _do_ take this generation's leading trait as something other than hatred of identity--we take it for _love_, an _attachment_ to identity far stronger than the attachment to art or criticism. We mistake this hatred, and yet do not, we think, mistake the constellation nonetheless emergent. Indeed, we find in the critic's own words this constellation's the truest description-- it is, in our eyes, an incidental and furtive convergence, a faint pattern, a weak signal. Here, however, an innate honesty leads Mr. Evans to sense that his articulation is "falsifying." And it is; all that our critic describes these poetics to be, is all which we sturdily maintain they _are not_. These poetics do _not_, we think, insist "that things could be different," do not "demand that they be made so," are not "a means of rescuing the kernel of _emergence_ at the core of our emergency." But if they were all that Mr. Evans imagines, it is not very clear how this "kernel of _emergence_" differs from "the 'promise' of identity." But that these poetics fail in both their own pursuits, and those Mr. Evans ascribes to them, cannot be doubted. It is against this frantic spirit of _ascription_ that we protest. We have a word, "poetics," whose import is sufficiently distinct, through long usage, at least; and we have an art of high importance and clearly-ascertained limit, which this word is quite well enough understood to represent. Of that political science to which Mr. Evans so eloquently alludes, and of which we are instructed that it is "the labor of discerning the given, in order to negate and transform it"--of this science we know nothing, and really wish to know less; but we object to our contemporary's appropriation in its behalf, of a term to which we, in common with a large majority of mankind, have been accustomed to attach a certain and very definitive idea. Is there no word but "poetics" which may be made to serve the purposes of Mr. Evans? Has he any objection to Obliquity, or Impercipientism, or Sillimanism, or any other pregnant compound indicative of confusion worse confounded? Still, we must not pretend a total misapprehension of the ideas of Mr. Evans, and we should be sorry that he misunderstood _us_. It may be granted that we differ only in terms--although the difference will yet be found not unimportant in effect. Following the highest authority, we would wish, in a word, to limit poetics to comment upon _Poetry_. A poem is written--and it is only _as the poem_ that we subject it to consideration. With the opinions of the work, considered otherwise than in their relation to the work itself, the critic has really nothing to do. It is his or her part simply to decide upon _the mode_ in which these opinions are brought to bear. The development of _new_ modes is the chief virtue of this new medium called the Internet. I note in passing that in the interests of such development, we at I U have eschewed the use of signatures-- not out of hatred for identity, but out of respect for identity's power. Moreover, in our search for a poetics proper to this shabby era of shabby thought and shabbier writing, we may, along the way, _discern the given, in order to negate and transform it_--but this has never been our principal goal, and if we fail in such endeavor, we will shed no tears. Poetics, we mean to say, is no litmus test of political opinion. For this test, the work, divested of its pretensions as an _art-product_, is turned over for discussion to the world at large. In this, the only true and intelligible sense, it will be seen that poetics, the test or analysis of _Poetry_, (_not_ opinion,) is only properly employed upon productions which have their basis in poetry itself, and although the subscriber to poetics journals and poetics lists (whose duties and objects are multiform) may turn aside, at pleasure, from the _mode_ or vehicle of opinion to discussion of the opinion conveyed--it is still clear that such discussants are "_critical_" only in so much as they deviate from the true province not at all. And of the person of the critic, what shall we say?-- for as yet we have spoken only the _proem_ to the true _epopea_. What _can_ we better say than, with Jabes, "the transcribed word, which we naively thought we had arrested and handcuffed, keeps its freedom for the space of its perennial night. Dazzled freedom which frightens and worries us." The true task of criticism! Let us add, only, that the transcribed word must probe this darkness, and stir night's dwellers to anger. ---------- * _O-blek_, no. 12, Spring/Fall 1993, _Writing from the New Coast: Technique_, edited by Peter Gizzi and Juliana Spahr, introduction by Steve Evans. _FAKE HIP_ Useliss cat pajond gowllabs uh grean hex's extliss geafowl. cusp kermied gnawmusker fopps dig duh egg o' tunes stoopid at uh table. fash vize's flippin' salt rizzen fashes tabbed SAX MED SAGE uh duh lining on valvo qui 'is junk noggies duh jone lung anti-chamber o' ecoed bum in back kut cissed leg bummled pause pause ill 'n swole, "Cheque muh swole pause." Kaput kut paw cissed looms gnawven cowls o' reefed out shoowerx stubbed out 'n taps mob cowed flux flure efflosion puhd stoo o' curvage all frazeyblah bog uh wig uh duh nutpak big bopak kuh Pablo Ex fava razzy! duh fluenixed hagiss ropes uh "Quack Goes duh Yo Yo" behold: The Berfuh duh Fool Om razzy saxa Poe! in un evil ass ooguh puffuh daze duh cough links 're swizz mexls o' bun suey host kuffs swizzure roasted blink lends amurkrikuh's flat butt her bootyfull batzer blaze o' herm rod up ale nun kaver o' duh laxy Moat'sarte erpin ets "groat!" obd duh lappy minerets "but duh nue ref sucks, dough." Habid mog guled vein vane klusers o' styxelled armz wrapple zasty begz lugged intuh fumarole vales o' lurk mawls ware kue tor 'n kue tor swurve lumed duh gruve laus tuned Pam in gruve blaus, "see ya yap next lube!" vex'd guv yips, "Ho, heal duh bum dam nayshun!" n' muh surlage tweekt parlz luv gaff roon bit gomp n' get kneady jus uh harge cumliss frown spoonin' rotachy mamerls out in goygullies o' arfettes lush fang slosher weeds n' witch Vinzat Van Golfer can't hang? Joblurk Vinz dats who! --EC descriptions of an imaginary universe circulate c / o thelogicof bioluminescence cf2785@albnyvms.bitnet