Jean Cocteau’s 1950 film Orphée begins with the unlikeliest of scenes: a public brawl over poetry. It’s midday in Paris when a dominatrixy princess pulls up to the Café des Poètes, young hotshot bard Jacques Cégeste in tow. Like most teen idols, Cégeste is wasted, and when the princess tries to hand off a few of his poems for safekeeping, he shoves someone into a table. Before you can say “Apollinaire,” the whole place descends into mayhem.
What’s even more surprising than a dustup about poetry is that the poems behind it don’t say anything. As tension builds leading up to the fight, another poet named Orpheus is sitting on the sidelines with a friend who shows him a magazine where Cégeste has been published. It’s called Nudisme, and it contains nothing but blank pages. Later in the film, we hear more examples of Cégeste’s poetry, fragmented verses broadcast over the radio. These poems have words, but they’re just as flummoxing. “The bird sings with its fingers,” goes one. “Once. I repeat. The bird sings with its fingers.”
Today we might call writing like the radio poems surrealist, and Nudisme a conceptual poem. We might also call both of these texts “nonreferential,” to the degree that they’re interested in the gap between what a text says and what it might mean. This kind of semiotic hijinks is often found in works associated with modernism and postmodernism, especially Language Poetry, but it’s not something many people would associate with Romanticism.[1] Yet Anahid Nersessian’s new book, The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life, argues persuasively that many of the most famous works of Romantic poetry are in fact thoroughly nonreferential, in response to the overwhelming transformations wrought by the expansion of capitalism. What’s more, Nersessian suggests that comparing the Romantics with twentieth-century aesthetics more commonly understood as nonreferential may be vital for apprehending how nonreferentiality works in these poems. Indeed, in her third chapter, she takes Cocteau’s blank-paged Nudisme as an interlocutor for examining how blankness registers capitalism’s corrosion of the personal, the social, and the corporeal in the work of none other than John Keats.
Unlike Cocteau, Nersessian is interested in poems that fail to start fights, and in the historical conditions that prevent them from doing so. She argues that many canonical Romantic poets—Keats, William Cowper, William Wordsworth, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe—repeatedly stage their inability to comprehend capital’s transformations of social and ecological systems. Try as they might, these writers find it impossible to put their pens on geopolitical plights like the enclosure of the commons and the transatlantic slave trade. What’s getting in their way is the bewildering expansion of capital into a totalizing, life-shaping order that tends to obscure its own processes.
But while the poets in this study are far from writing agitprop, the pressure to, as Nersessian puts it, “recognize and render the disfiguration of the social” still shows up in their work, specifically in their use of rhetorical figures and tropes.[2] Where a conventional understanding of figures might define them as ways of expanding, accentuating, or embellishing an image or statement, the figures Nersessian examines give shape to a traumatized unknowing of the world, or nescience, wherein the poems say things, but what they say foregrounds their speechlessness. As Europe falls under the thrall of ever more damaging regimes of dispossession and accumulation, dragging the rest of the world into ever more vicious colonial and chattelized subjugation, these poets’ language becomes helplessly nonreferential, “directed not toward an encounter with what is real but toward an encounter with the inaccessibility of the real.”[3] If “these are poems in which big moments get lost,” it’s because the poets weren’t equipped to wrap their heads around their epoch’s full momentousness.[4] Perhaps they couldn’t have been. As Ruth Jennison has argued, “Capitalism is not a topic. The representation of capital itself is, of course, impossible; its sheer size and abstraction could never concretize fully in a text.”[5]
Four figures make up the backbone of the book. They are parataxis (a juxtaposition of disjoined phrases or ideas), obscurity (a semantic smudge where the basics of what someone’s saying are clear, but the bigger meaning isn’t), catachresis (a pointed misuse of language), and apostrophe (a poetic address to someone absent or disappearing). Nersessian associates each with a distinct set of writers and artists—Cowper gets parataxis, Wordsworth obscurity, Keats catachresis, and Keats and the painter John Constable get apostrophe—with others like Hölderlin and Goethe making brief appearances throughout. An eclectic array of critics shores up the argument as well. In understanding figures and tropes as nonreferential, The Calamity Form self-consciously recalls the work of poststructuralists like Paul de Man. But Nersessian aligns her project more strongly with a different tradition, that of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rhetoric and its inheritors, for whom figures foreground the gap between language and its referents, but don’t give way to an endless abyss of shifting meanings and ambiguities, as they might for a poststructuralist. This lineage holds that language can be nonreferential without being devoid of definite significance and dovetails nicely with what Nersessian, in a rather Adornian mode, calls “the relative autonomy of aesthetic objects from the obligation to make sense of the world” and “the relative autonomy of criticism from the obligation to explain its objects in evidentiary terms.”[6] Simply put, poems don’t have to be about things, these poems aren’t about things, and critics shouldn’t expect poems to teach us about anything but themselves.
The pairing of Keats and Cocteau exemplifies the manner and methods of the project, particularly Nersessian’s investment in transhistorical comparisons. This rendezvous occurs midway through Chapter 3, which argues that Keats’s well-known sensuousness and emotionality in poems like Isabella, Hyperion, and the “Ode to Psyche” actually represent an underlying blankness. Nersessian’s achievement here is to highlight how the poems’ numb exuberance responds indirectly to capital’s encroachments on life. She shows that Keats’s blankness, which the poet also calls his “posthumous existence,” manifests the way capitalism makes all life moribund: sundering people from their means of survival, flattening social relationships, and even deranging the senses, as Marx observed.[7] To understand how Keats figures social and sensory degradation, Nersessian turns to Craig Dworkin’s analysis of Cocteau. For Dworkin, the blank magazine Nudisme reveals how blankness isn’t the same thing as absence—blankness foregrounds a substrate that is normally covered. Similarly, Nersessian explains, Keats’s obsession with disembodiment gestures toward the degradation of the body in a world restructured by capital.[8] Although the choice to read these texts together may seem eccentric, Nersessian zeroes in on what’s singular in Cocteau and Dworkin—significant blankness—and demonstrates that although we may be able to understand Keats without this connection, we can’t grasp his peculiar form of evaporated subjectivity without it.
Moreover, roping in Cocteau and Dworkin helps Nersessian formulate a Marxist redefinition of Keats’s notion of “Negative Capability.” A standard interpretation of that phrase takes it to describe great artists’ ability to tolerate ambiguities by transcending rationality and the individuated psyche. But Nersessian’s examination of Keats’s catachreses, such as the paradox of a “posthumous existence,” reveals that the poet may have intended something more complicated. Much as blankness doesn’t mean a total void, the “negative” in Negative Capability points, in Nersessian’s reading, to a selfhood that has been gutted by capitalism but nevertheless survives. Negative Capability means understanding that the harms perpetrated by capital create a shared social experience of living in dispossession. But Keats’s poems don’t wallow. Through catachresis, they strive to envision what the poet would never know: namely, how it would feel to reclaim the senses and remake them as conduits of liberated social life.
This is a complicated argument, and like many of Nersessian’s readings, it takes relatively small textual details as the basis for startling associations and hefty claims. Across the other chapters, Cowper’s epic poem The Task (1785) finds a political and literary fellow traveler in Derek Jarman’s journals from the late 1980s; Kate Bush’s 1985 art pop bop “The Big Sky” illuminates climatological evanescence in John Constable’s 1820s cloud studies; and Robert Barry’s conceptual performance piece Inert Gas Series (1969) shares with Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere journal a close attention to the ways vast, imperceptible processes transform the environment. The function of these comparisons varies from case to case, but on the whole their accomplishment is to flesh out how capital’s ascendence pressured writers and artists to create remarkably complex figures of nescience.
The most provocative thing about The Calamity Form isn’t its anachronistic reading list—it’s the book’s attitude toward critical practice, and specifically toward historical materialism. In the introduction, Nersessian voices a pronounced skepticism about the usefulness of a Marxist theory of history for literary scholarship. “What’s the point of reading a poem as a record of verifiable social and historical processes?” she asks. “What will that tell you that you don’t already know?”[9] For many scholars, the knee-jerk answer might be, “A lot!” I, for one, would never have understood how Cowper’s short and sweet lyric “The Rose” or Keats’s insular “Ode to Psyche” bear the marks of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century capitalism if this book hadn’t helped me see it. The historical background of Nersessian’s analysis opened these texts up to me in ways a strictly formalist approach could not have.
At first, then, Nersessian’s wariness of historical materialism seems a rather perplexing tack for an inquiry invested in exploring the effects of a specific moment of capitalist development on poetic production. But as she spells out her reasoning, the importance of this tension in her method becomes clearer. Near the end of the introduction, she addresses the dissonance head on: “on the one hand, I want to say these poems tell you nothing; on the other, I want to say that they tell you what it is to know nothing, under social conditions where the knowing of nothing becomes instrumental to the reproduction of unlivable life.”[10] Her point is that, with Romanticism in particular, it’s essential to avoid treating poems like records or evidence because if one accepts the rest of her argument, these poems are all about their inability to make sense of the world. They have no evidence to give. What’s at stake in studying the nonreferentiality and nescience of Romantic poetics isn’t a return to some kind of insular, New Critical formalism—it’s a refined way of understanding how literature responds to history, even when it seems like it isn’t responding at all. Keats, Cowper, Wordsworth, and company each answer their epoch with bafflement; for that reason, historical analysis of their work must take distance from history or risk getting them wrong. It must, as Nersessian insists, avoid scouring the poems for historical knowledge or political economic analysis that isn’t there, and instead pay attention to how the poems conceive of not knowing, in a socioeconomic order that thrives on remaining unknown.
So despite Nersessian’s aversion to historical materialism, The Calamity Form gives a compelling demonstration of how we might have our formalist cake and eat history too. In this, Nersessian shares certain priorities with Anna Kornbluh’s recent book The Order of Forms, a self-avowedly Marxist formalist study of nineteenth-century novels. For both Kornbluh and Nersessian, formalism doesn’t mean a total sidelining of the historical, but a commitment to studying how literature creates structures that are abstracted from the world. Kornbluh is more optimistic about literature’s political potentials—for her, many Marxists’ emphasis on history can downplay futurity and ignore the ways texts model possible modes of relation.[11] Nersessian, by contrast, is wary of any attempt to instrumentalize Romantic poetry, including as a resource for political imagination. (Even Keats’s utopian desire to reclaim the senses is doomed to fail.) Both scholars’ work, however, points toward exciting possibilities for respecting texts’ autonomy while retaining the insights afforded by scrupulous historical thought.
Contra Cocteau, poetry may seldom start fights (though as a slew of recent online reckonings can attest, it’s regularly the subject of literary and paraliterary conflicts).[12] But poetry, even nescient, nonreferential kinds, still registers the murmurings of fights brewing around it, fights it wishes it knew how to have, or tries hard to avoid thinking about, or simply can’t think about because the time isn’t right. And sometimes, if not most of the time, we need Marxist criticism to see how this works. As Jordy Rosenberg has suggested, we might do well to think of the relationship between aesthetics and history as one of an “uneven development of thought,” where the same events and themes can figure in literature, sociology, theory, history, and elsewhere, but in drastically divergent ways.[13] Considering the unevenness of literature’s relationship to history and other extraliterary domains allows us to retain the Marxist insight that literature always emerges out of a social, intellectual, and artistic nexus, and bears the traces of those conditions, even if it does so unconsciously or silently.[14] But the idea of an “uneven development of thought” also reminds us that history hits literature differently in different moments—and this is the point of Nersessian’s methodological reflections in The Calamity Form. Historicism must adapt to its archive, heeding what texts require and how they confront or recoil from their historical background.
The Calamity Form is a work of Marxist criticism whose key tenet and admirable example is to call for Marxist critics to do their jobs carefully: to use the tools of formal analysis to make precise, ambitious claims about how texts mediate the conditions of their composition. The book’s most telling ars poetica comes, once again, in its loaded, complex introduction, where Nersessian urges scholars to “do more with less.”[15] Even as Romantic poets figure what they can’t know, critics must figure out how to make the most of what we can.
Notes:
[1] See for example Albert Gelpi’s argument, drawing on Marjorie Perloff, Bruce Andrews, and Ron Silliman, that “Language poetics is explicitly and vehemently not a poetics of representation but of deconstruction … a non-referential writing that emphasizes the word as signifier rather than as signified.” Gelpi goes so far as to state that “Modernism minus Romanticism = Postmodernism,” partly on the basis of the latter’s nonreferential approach to language, as opposed to what he views as Romanticism’s attachment to referential signification. Albert Gelpi, American Poetry after Modernism: The Power of the Word (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 224-25, see also 10-15.
[2] Anahid Nersessian, The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 8-9.
[3] Nersessian, 5.
[4] Nersessian, 16-17.
[5] Ruth Jennison, “29 | 73 | 08: Poetry, Crisis, and a Hermeneutic of Limits,” Mediations 28, no. 2 (Spring 2015), 43.
[6] Nersessian, 2.
[7] Marx writes: “In place of all these physical and mental senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these senses—the sense of having … The transcendence of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and attributes.” Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, second edition, translated by Martin Milligan (New York: Norton, 1972), 87, original italics.
[8] Nersessian, 110-15.
[9] Nersessian, 8.
[10] Nersessian, 19.
[11] Anna Kornbluh, The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 32.
[12] I’m thinking of the endemic racism in North American contemporary poetry, which has been the subject of numerous internet polemics over the past decade, from the activism of the Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo to Twitter’s “metaphor-gate” in late November 2020 concerning Ocean Vuong’s supposedly catachrestic definition of metaphor in a series of Instagram stories (about which see here and here). Thanks to my friend Ashleen for alerting me to this conversation and in particular to the Phillip B. Williams thread.
[13] See Jordy Rosenberg, “The Birth of Theory and the Long Shadow of the Dialectic,” PMLA 130, no. 3 (2015), 799-808, especially 806-07.
[14] See, for instance, Raymond Williams’s discussion of mediation. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 95-100.
[15] Nersessian, 8.