Figures of Time: Disjunctions in Modernist Poetry

322 Pages·2018·1.99 MB·English

by  David Ben-Merre

Figures of Time
SERIES EDITORS
David E. Johnson (Comparative Literature, SUNY Buffalo)
Scott Michaelsen (English, Michigan State University)
SERIES ADVISORY BOARD
Nahum D. Chandler, African American Studies, University of California, Irvine
Rebecca Comay, Philosophy and Comparative Literature, University of Toronto
Marc Crépon, Philosophy, École Normale Supérieure, Paris
Jonathan Culler, Comparative Literature, Cornell
Johanna Drucker, Design Media Arts and Information Studies, UCLA
Christopher Fynsk, Modern Thought, Aberdeen University
Rodolphe Gasché, Comparative Literature, SUNY Buffalo
Martin Hägglund, Comparative Literature, Yale
Carol Jacobs, Comparative Literature & German, Yale University
Peggy Kamuf, French and Comparative Literature, University of Southern California
David Marriott, History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz
Steven Miller, English, University at Buffalo
Alberto Moreiras, Hispanic Studies, Texas A&M University
Patrick O’Donnell, English, Michigan State University
Pablo Oyarzún, Teoría del Arte, Universidad de Chile
Scott Cutler Shershow, English, University of California, Davis
Henry Sussman, German and Comparative Literature, Yale University
Samuel Weber, Comparative Literature, Northwestern
Ewa Ziarek, Comparative Literature, SUNY Buffalo
FIGURES
OF TIME
Disjunctions in
Modernist Poetry
David Ben-Merre
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2018 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval
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otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press,
Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Jenn Bennett
Marketing, Fran Keneston
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ben-Merre, David 1978- author.
Title: Figures of time : disjunctions in modernist poetry / David Ben-Merre.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, 2017. | Series:
Suny series, literature in theory | Includes bibliographical references and
index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017011556 (print) | LCCN 2017027951 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781438468341 (e-book) | ISBN 9781438468334 (hardcover :
alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Poetry, Modern--History and criticism. | Modernism
(Literature)--United States. | Modernism (Literature)--Great Britain.
Classification: LCC PN1271 (ebook) | LCC PN1271 .B46 2017 (print) |
DDC 809.1/04--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017011556
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For the love of my life . . .

CONTENTS
| “ ”
ix PREFACE ON TIMELINESS

xxiii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
|
1 INTRODUCTION FIGURING ANACHRONY
Kurt Gödel and Other Liars:
The Metaleptic Methods of Modernity
:
PART I FIGURES OF OPPOSITION
|
35 CHAPTER ONE PARADOX
“Inherent Opposites, / Of Essential Unity”:
Wallace Stevens’s “Connoisseur of Chaos”
|
57 CHAPTER TWO REVISION
“The Brawling of a Sparrow in the Eaves”:
Revision and the Romantic Imagination in W. B. Yeats
:
PART II FIGURES OF RECOLLECTION
|
81 CHAPTER THREE MEMORY

Shellfish Readings: On H.D., Nachträglichkeit,
and Anagrammatic Wanderings
|
119 CHAPTER FOUR TRADITION
“Strange Spars of Knowledge and Dimmed Wares of Price”:
Ezra Pound, “Portrait d’une Femme,” and the Literary Anthology
:
PART III FIGURES OF SELF
|
139 CHAPTER FIVE VOICE

We’re, Like, Talking on the Page: Sound, Simile,
and the [Langston] Hues of African American Verse
|
169 CHAPTER SIX LYRIC IDENTITY

“The Patient Is No Longer Here”: T. S. Eliot’s Late Lyric Moment

191 NOTES

255 WORKS CITED

283 INDEX

|
PREFACE ON “TIMELINESS”
THE GREATEST FAILURE OF A BOOK IS ITS UN-TIMELINESS, its placement into
a world that has moved beyond its concerns. My hope here is to reimagine
the timely possibilities of modernist poetics within the critical debates of the
past few generations. The book takes, as a jumping-off point, the rhetorical
overlap between the expectations of current scholarly work and theories of
modernism, each a facet of modernity and each symptomatically espousing
“newness” in its own way. The introductory chapter ties together critical
theories of modernism with modern theories of criticism, likening both to
an old paradoxical bind, which I argue is temporal in nature. Rather than
have my remaining chapters echo this specific claim, I attempt to push the
boundaries of how we have come to understand the variously complicated
cultures of temporality that lurk behind, inside, and around modernist poems.
The scholarly work on modernism and time is exhaustive. To borrow
a phrase from Joseph Conrad, “It has got filled with rivers and lakes and
names.” Rather than re-exploring what Dinos Patrides called “aspects of
time”1—the important but now well-trod ground comparing literature to
“new” senses of eschatological (Augustine),2 subjective (Woolf),3 ethical
(Bergson),4 industrialized (Marx),5 or cosmological (Einstein)6 time—I look
at how nuances of poetic form, often disjunctions of sound and sense, alter
how temporalities might be understood. By listening to the sounds of words,
I make an unsound claim, arguing that poetic figures of time (which are as
much historical as tropological) often have a backward etiology.7 I turn to
the strange temporal figure of metalepsis, which, for the purposes of this
book, I understand in its tropological sense as a substitution of cause for
effect, where, anachronistically, “later” events are thought to bring about
earlier instantiations.8 Against the historicist claim that the present structures
the present, I argue that in some manners of cultural understanding, the
future structures the present.9 Such inversions arise significantly in various
poetic guises and, although related to their narratological cousins, seem to
follow a different sort of figurative logic, challenging the supposed grounds
of understanding. In a sense, something odd happens to our cultural
categories (how we have come to understand our world) once time is seen
as a figural effect.
Pairing poets with what I call different metaleptic “figures of
time”—a poet revising, a lyric subject trying to capture an earlier moment,
an identity trying to shape itself—I consider how each cultural temporality
ix