Paterson
PATERSON:THE
DISCONTINUOUS UNIVERSE OF THE PRESENT
[Reprinted
from The Centennial Review, October 1974, Volume 24]
Thomas
Pison
I
ONE OF THE MOST PROFOUND AND TENACIOUS
IDEAS of western man has been the notion of time's linearity. Writers in
western culture had only to secularize the Judeo-Christian concept of time as a
"fortunate fall." This move put all mankind on a steady path toward
redemption and salvation, to arrive at the conviction that all human action is
based on the past and strives toward a future which will distribute in the
profane world the just rewards of definitive culmination. Time became, not the
place of the random change and senseless flux, but the dimension in which and
through which meaning revealed itself. The lesson that time taught was that
"things add up." No moment, fact, or event is ever singular and
discrete, but rather finds its place within a line that is developmental,
evolutionary, cumulative and always continuous.
More lessons follow: The present moment is caused by the past and predictive of
the future. A fact is regarded as merely a piece of evidence in a chain of
reasoning which leads to effective generalization, and an event acquires the
status of a means to an end. Thus, mere chronological sequence is perceived as
a succession fraught with significance. This dominance of the line in western
thought is usually categorized as the "historical consciousness," yet
its imperative pervades disciplines other than history. Not only Hegel and
Marx, but Lyell in geology, Darwin in biology, and Freud in psychology have
found the present explicable only in terms of the past.
So also in literature, whose function
has been perceived largely as mimetic, does the line hold sway, most noticeably
in the case of narrative. The "story line" is an exercise in the
establishment of a fictional continuity, in which the fictional past accrues
within a structure that produces causes for events and assigns motives and
consequences. Our expectations of plot formation are still satisfied by
Aristotle's mandate that the beginning, middle and end will conform to an
ever-tightening net, which in its grand climax will have converted possibility
to probability, and probability to necessity. At the end of a narrative, as at
the end of a life, one expects to reap the rewards of temporality, that is the
culmination of meaning. However, one need not wait until the end of a story for
culmination. As utterance, the significance of sequence is revealed at the end
of every sentence. Its subject made continuous with action, the sentence serves
as a kernel sampling of the linear proclivities of thought and expression.
Literary modernity may be defined as a
protest against the dominance of the line. For Baudelaire as much as for
Nietzsche, forgetting the past was the single virtue that enabled an experience
of the present in its immediacy. All conceptions concerning anteriority must be
abandoned or suppressed if the perceptions of the present moment are to be true
and original. The effect of such a program is to sever the present from the
other two dimensions of time, from the weight of the past as well as the
concern with a future. The problem presents itself immediately: how is the art
form, then, to achieve its duration? How does one convey the sense of totality
in terms that are atemporal?1
William Carlos Williams was one of the
earliest American artists to hear this call, face its implications, and attempt
a resolution. There was a definite ambivalence in Williams' attitude toward
time. Although he was eager for a discontinuous present – the "cheerful
present" of Nietzsche and purified image of the Symbolist poets – unlike
them, he also required for his life and art a sense of order in the large
universe of things. Joyce's epiphanic moment, Pound's image "seized in a
moment of time", the timeless utterance of the lyrical - these would not
suffice to grasp the totality. What was required was not the negation of the
past, but a new way of "rolling up the sum, by defective means." The
old blind confidence in the ancient system of addition undermined, what was
needed was a new mind that could conceive and express, not by addition, but
"by multiplication a reduction to one."
unless
the mind change, unless
the
stars are new measured, according
to
their relative positions, the
line
will not change, the necessity
will
not matriculate: unless there is
a
new mind there cannot be a new
line,
the old will go on
repeating
itself with recurring
deadliness
. . . 2
All the habitual expressions within
linearity – sequence, succession, continuity, duration – would have to be
supplanted by a new "plan for action," which was essentially a new
math, a new way of relating parts and whole. Paterson was to be the proving ground for this new
aesthetic, and Williams could not have set himself a more difficult task. The
very length of the poem would seem to demand the customary tools of the linear
pursuit, and the concerns of the poem, even more so. Paterson is at once the history of a place, the biography
of a man, and an epic of a nation, and each one of these genres – history,
biography, epic – has traditionally relied upon the relations between past and
present or, in other words, the causal understanding of antecedent and
consequent. Thus, Williams situated himself within the domain of the line in Paterson. How he eluded its dominance is the concern of
this inquiry.
II
Williams did not, first of all,
accomplish his escape through the familiar back door of "organic
form." A concept given critical legitimacy by Coleridge, organic form
confers upon a poem a formal principle that appears to distinguish it from the
linear order of prose narratives. The poem, like a plant, exhibits its own
unique system of interdependence between part and part and between parts and
the whole, even if this system works independently of the temporal line
governing the profane disciplines of history and science. Thus, if a meaningful
continuity for the poem cannot be constructed through sequence and succession,
then its continuity may be discovered in the motifs and themes projected by a
poetic imagination whose most salient power is that of "shaping"
diverse images and metaphors into organic unity.3 To
put it simply, there will always be a pattern, a "figure in the
carpet," even if the order of temporality has been temporarily suspended.
The idea of organic form has provided
the critic of poetry with a convenient license for talking about the poem, for
if he can manage to isolate its essential and dominant images, then he can
argue for the poem's totality by inference. Paterson has attracted such critics who, lighting upon
the unicorn, or the man-city metaphor, or the river, have argued very persuasively
that their particular element is the poem's essence.4 I would argue that the critics, unlike Williams himself, are
victims of their own rage for order. What has happened is that modern criticism
– which is, after all, but a specialization of modern thought – has allowed
itself to be trapped by its own metaphor of organic unity, a metaphor which is
based upon the dominant myth characterizing life itself. Life, it is agreed,
either flows like a stream or grows like a plant; and it does not really matter
which metaphor you embrace, because each one betrays an historicist or temporal
bias that equates the value of the present with an ultimate justification
situated either in the past or projected to the future. Just as a river flows
from one point to another, and has a beginning and an end, so also the plant,
at every moment, is either being born, maturing, decaying or dying. Either
metaphor serves to place the present in the service of the past and future, and
when applied to the work of art, works to subordinate the part to the whole.
Merleau-Ponty has discussed at length the implications of "river"
metaphors of time, and its points, I suspect, would have had the enthusiastic
approval of William Carlos Williams:
We say that
time passes or flows by. We speak of the course of time. The water that I see
rolling by was made ready a few days ago in the mountains, with the melting of
the glacier; it is now in front of me and makes its way towards the sea into
which it will finally discharge itself. If time is similar to the river, it
flows from the past towards the present and future. The present is the
consequence of the past, and the future of the present. But this often repeated
metaphor is in reality extremely confused. For, looking at the things
themselves, the melting of the snows and what results from this are not
successive events, or rather, the very notion of event has no place in the
objective world. When I say that the day before yesterday the glacier produced
the water which is passing at this very moment, I am tacitly assuming the
existence of a witness tied to a certain spot in the world, and I am comparing
his successive views: he was there when the snows melted and followed the water
down, or else, from the edge of the river and having waited two days, he sees
the pieces of wood that he threw into the river at its source. The
"events" are shapes cut out by the finite observer from the
spatio-temporal tonality of the objective world. But on the other hand, if I
consider the world itself, there is simply one indivisible and changeless being
in it. Change presupposes a certain position which I take up from which I see
things in procession before me: there are no events without someone to whom
they happen and whose finite perspective is the basis of their individuality.5
For Merleau-Ponty, the notion of
temporality arises from the subjectivity of the individual, who creates himself
by dividing time into three discreet parts, which can then be calculated and
reassembled into a meaningful whole. The entire notion of change – and hence,
development and progress – is a purely human one, absolutely necessary for
human thought but totally untenable from the objective viewpoint of the world
itself. Without an observer on the banks of time's river, there is not time,
but only "indivisible and changeless being." By moving from the
notion of time to the perceiver, Merleau-Ponty demystifies the metaphor of
time-as-linear, and, incidentally any concepts that define the totality by
adding up its parts.
Our poet's project parallels the
philosopher's in that Williams also seeks to abrogate an old way of thinking
about time. In Paterson the
Passaic River exists not in relation to its source or its estuary (both of
which are familiar concerns of Joyce in the "riverrun" of Finnegan's
Wake ), but rather in the
immediacy and presence of its falls. Williams subverts the whole idea of a
continuous universe with a single, simple, and complete motion (of which
Merleau-Ponty would have approved): abandoning the bank, he leaps into the falls.
And in that one leap, the poet signals his rejection of all systems of order
that unite beginning with end, and individual parts with the collective whole:
the past
above, the future below
and the
present pouring down; the roar,
the roar of
the present, a speech
is, of
necessity, my sole concern.
. . . I
cannot stay here
to spend my
life looking into the past:
the future's
no answer, I must
find my
meaning and lay it, white
beside the
sliding water; myself –
comb out
language – or succumb (III, p. 172)
Instead, the poet will interrupt the
dull and predictable flow of the human mind; and his imagination, like the
falls, will refract it into beauty. And he will speak in a language not yet
understood by men, or even by himself. Williams is altogether frank about his
faith in impoverishment during those initial stages in the creation of the
poem:
I took the
city to be my case to work up, really to work it up. it called for poetry such
as I did not know, it was my duty to discover or make such a context on the
"thought." to make a
poem, fulfilling the requirements of the art and yet new, in the sense that in
the very lay of the syllables Paterson as Paterson would be discovered, perfect
in the special sense of the poem, to have it – if it rose to flutter into life
awhile – it would be as it-self, locally, and so like every other place in the
world. For it is in that, that it can be particular to its own idiom, that it
lives.6
This statement represents the poet's
steadfast resistance to the prevailing tendencies toward order, those which
foster a logical continuity by moving from particulars to their generalized
abstractions, and those which assert a temporal continuity between past,
present, and future. In essence, Williams' antipathy is directed toward the historical
understanding which, as it embraces unquestioningly the metaphors of flow and
growth, promotes rhythms of accumulation and themes of development that are too
easily assimilated within the general structures of literature.7 It is the basic discontinuity
of all immediate and unanalyzed experience that needs to find its expression in
the poem; and this achievement depends upon the presentation of all events in
their ultimate singularity, without reference to larger laws or processes, so
that in the presence of their present, time may not become a factor. Against
the "Minds like beds already made up / (more stony than a shore) /
unwilling or unable," Williams is both willing and able to move "from
mathematics to particulars / divided as the dew" (I, preface, p.13). In
division rather than in their positives, Williams effected a new liberation for
his poetry from the age-old imperatives of the line.
III
Williams' offenses against certain
linear continuities inherent within most literary structures are immediately
apparent and more easily discussed than the philosophical impact of his
discoveries which followed his offenses. The publishing history of Paterson, for instance, refutes two cherished
assumptions: 1) that poets launch their works as recognizable wholes and 2)
that a narrative (especially one that exhibits strong autobiographical and epic
biases) will necessarily build to a decisive climax. In 1952 Williams gave his
public a "finished" Paterson, complete with a courteous "the end" to round it off,
only to offer a Book V seven years later, and to leave at his death notes
toward a Book VI. Nor did he avail himself of the order created by a defined
narrative point of view, the static observer on the banks of the river. Of the
many comparisons with Ezra Pound that could be sustained, the most provocative
is that of Odysseus the voyager in the Cantos with Paterson the walker in the park in Book II.
In both there is a strong forward movement toward discovery that renders their
rich pasts unimportant. Having abandoned the all-knowing and all-organizing
hero-narrator, Williams presents a Paterson who – like any dog in the park – is
loose, unleashed, sniffing out experience. And the content of the whole poem
(not only this one book) is whatever comes out of the future at Paterson – the
unbidden, unsought, unanticipated epiphany, what Pound describes in the
Eighty-Third Canto as the "periplum," the fullness attendant upon
just sailing around without a predestined linear course.
Williams furthermore offends the rules
of genre definition, which
establish a continuity between certain types of literature and their
discontinuity with other types. The kind of mind that asserts that poetry is
one thing, and prose quite another, will surely be put off by the innumerable
prose inserts in Paterson,
reflecting every level and function of communication. If Williams had labeled
his poem a "compilation" or "sourcebook" or even
"reflection," he would have made it much less difficult for genre critics, because the minimal act of naming it
something other than a poem would have freed them from the a priori limitations they are impelled to impose upon it.
As it is, they must find their way through a diction distinctly and
deliberately dissonant, disharmonious, and discontinuous. The voice of the
aspiring poetess in its painfully sustained efforts at emotional inventory, the
preemptory jerks and twitches in the letters from Pound, the rhetoric of
newspapers and chronicles and government abstracts – all these prose passages,
and more, contribute to the destruction of any notions about a single
continuity within poetic diction, and emphatically impede any habit of reading
which rushes forward to arrive at an end. Williams instead forces us to
recognition that the poet’s language is always appropriate and always discontinuous, and that there is a
multiplicity within poetic languages.
Williams’ attack upon linear continuity
extends also to language, insofar as its nature and function are supposed to be
a reflection of the orderly human mind. Linguists generally agree that the
semantic level of language begins with the sentence, the minimal unit in which
words added to words culminate in meaning. The progression from beginning to
end is also the progress from uncertainty to certainty – a mathematical
relationship entirely congruent with what I have been positing as the power of
the line inherent in western thinking about life, history, and literature.
However, in Paterson, the
"new mind" required for "rolling up the sum" needs a new
language, and Williams charges the sentence with enforcing a deadening
sterility which does not allow the new to emerge:
Kill
the explicit sentence, don’t you think? and expand our meaning
– by verbal sequences. Sequences, but not grammatical sentences; dead falls by schoolmen. Do you think
there is any virtue in that?
better than sleep? to revive us? (IV, p. 222.)
Poets, of course have always
discriminated against the grammatical sentence, preferring its disruption with
the illogical analogies we call metaphors. Williams, to the contrary, would
permit sentences to survive, but not grammatical ones, whose undesirability
resides in their being "explicit" and "dead-falls"; the
virtue of his new sentence, then, would reside in a "live-rise" which
produces the inexplicit. A Williams sentence ends without concluding; its
interior rhythms, alternating between descent and ascent, always more
significant than any cessation point at its end. The poet’s strategy is readily
apparent, typographically, on any page of his poetry: the clusters of words
varying in number than meander down the page vertically instead of marching
across it in a horizontal line, the periods that are pauses before a
continuation rather than full stops, the dashes and parentheses that do not close
down meaning but open it up.
And in this instance, content perfectly
parallels form. Philosophically as well as linguistically, the containment of
an idea was for Williams both a reduction and an impossibility. His definition
of the "anti-poetic" as the antidote for the rampant
intellectualization of experience represents a plea for liberation from the
rational mind that organizes life and language within an inevitable, predictive
line leading to meaning-as-accumulation; whereas it is the potentiality and
virtuality of experience and words that Williams wants to make apparent. Even
in a meditative mode, when he seems most likely to leave his "things"
for "ideas," Williams fails admirably. Consider, for example, the
section in Book Four, when a gift ashtray (inscribed "La Vertue est toute
dans l’effort") inspires Paterson to meditate upon the abstract idea of
Virtue:
Virtue
is wholly
in
the effort to be virtuous.
This
takes connivance,
takes
convoluted forms, takes
time!
A sea-shell.
Let’s
not dwell on childhood’s
lecherous
cousins. Why
should
we? Or even on
as
comparatively simple
a
thing as the composite
dandelion
that
changes
overnight. Virtue
a
mask: the mask,
virtuous.
(IV, p222.)
The convolutions through time of the
seashell and the overnight changes of the dandelion reveal the
"comparatively simple" as "composite," and if Virtue is a
mask, then the wearing of it may nevertheless be a virtuous act. This circular
ambivalence, this reciprocity within process that defies a solid meaning, is
further attested by the poet’s grandmother:
Virtue,
she would say.
(her
version of it)
is
a stout old bird,
unpredictable.
And
so
I remember her,
adding,
as
she did, clumsily
not
being used to
such
talk, that –
Nothing
does, does
as
it used to do
do
do! I loved her. (IV,p. 223.)
Man in time – man in his wisest
recognition of discontinuity and disorder within the universe – knows, at the
level of the popular song lyric, the negative wisdom which experience teaches:
"Nothing does does as it used to do do do!" Paterson’s meditation
upon Virtue does not close down in a conclusion or a summation, but opens up
again – to a Haitian President who, amid the public display of his family for
reasons of pageantry, departs "in a private plane with his blonde
secretary", and to Margaret, Lucille, Alma, and Nancy – "Not one to
escape, not one" out of Paterson’s past.
IV
By insisting upon the heterogeneity of
experience and the disparity of our thoughts, and by refusing to incriminate
these discrete elements with any "ideas," Williams destroys the
homogeneity necessary to parts if they are to exhibit a meaningful succession
adding up to a whole. What passes for human knowledge is largely the ability to
measure things in relation to our perceptions of likeness and difference.
Continuity may be established only between like things that have been separated
from things unlike themselves and therefore can form a chain, a sequential
series, formed by relations between parts that conform to an original
perception of similarity. A series of dissonant elements is illogical and
unthinkable; apples and oranges will only add up to apples and oranges.
Nevertheless, such "verbal sequences" provide the structural norm for
Paterson. They are the
enabling poetic acts by which the authorial pronouncements in the preface are
realized: the suggestion of essence through dissimilarity "indistinctive terms," and
the achievement of "a reduction to one" by
"multiplication," not addition.
The closures of Book IV and Book V (the
structural point, it is to be remembered, where meaning should accumulate in a
culmination) provide a lesson in Williams’ new math and openness attendant upon
the taking-on of heterogeneity:
This
is the blast
the
eternal close
the
spiral
the
final somersault
the
end. (IV,p. 238.)
The open end of a spiral and the
metamorphosis of a somersault qualify this "end" of Paterson as surely as does the book V that follows
The
measure intervenes, to measure is all we know,
a
choice among the measures. . .
the
measured dance
"unless
the scent of a rose
startle
us anew"
Equally
laughable
is
to assume to know nothing, a
chess
game
massively,
"materially," compounded!
Yo
ho! ta ho!
We
know nothing and can know nothing
but
the
dance, to dance to a measure
contrapuntally,
Satyrically,
the tragic foot. (V, p. 278.)
Another "end" to the poem
which is anything but a "dead-fall". Just as the meaning of
"measure" shifts throughout the passage, so is the firm declaration
about knowledge immediately undermined by the sole "but," which
opposes poetry to logic and elevates rhythm over sense. The ideal
representation of wholeness would feature the accommodation of multiplicity, as
before the primordial separation of things into homogeneous groupings, in an
original goat-song where the ideas are already in things and not imposed upon them.
In his book, Closing Time (Harper and Row, 1973), Norman O. Brown quotes
this passage from Paterson to
support his argument that, as a mode of demystification, "an interlude of
farce" is necessary before there can occur a re-mystification, whereby man
will be given back his body which has been divorced from his mind during the
acquisition of a human identity. Only beyond tragedy and farce to their fusion
will man pierce the mystery and become whole again – become a "giant"
living a new mythology which is neither solemn, elitist, nor occult. (It is
interesting that both Williams and Brown feature chapters in their respective
works entitled "The Delineaments of the Giants.")
Like Brown, Williams affirms that they
rhythms of recurrence abrogate the prevailing sense of linear time, and that
the discovery of what is and has been requires a descent below the level of
rationality to experience, before the mind has demystified it into linearity.
For Williams, however, the wholeness did not manifest itself in a mythical
timelessness before history, but is itself historical: the "sea that sucks
in all rivers," the One that is immanent in all our linear projects, is
"the time sea. . . afloat with weeds, bearing seeds" (IV,p.234).
Williams would not have us dwell in the collective unconscious or in private nostalgia
in order to recover a mystical timelessness. "The sea is not our home," he emphatically repeats, and
Paterson must head inland after his swim in that sea. Objectively, there is a
changelessness in the Oneness, and the poet does not make sense of the
timelessness of One through the old patterns promulgated by historical time.
Instead, Williams seeks in a
discontinuous present an approximation of timelessness, a "stop-time"
attendant upon the close observation of particulars in all their particularity.
Since his concern is with an historical totality (Paterson then and now), he
has discarded the historical method of adding past to present; the success of
his endeavor depends upon the absence of any original, and therefore
predictive, scheme. In this manner, repetition produces only variety, never
variation on a first cause or theme. The luminosity of the concrete event
itself, "the radiant gist" within all action, the uranium shining
through Marie Curie’s pitchblende – this poet can reveal. But this "elucidation by
multiplicity" (II, p.77) can be achieved only if the "things" of
the poem are left intact, untampered with, multiple, unsafe for addition. The
major concerns of the poem’s first chapter, for instance, are returned to more
than once, but their repetition never clarifies any positioning as parts in a
whole, either historical or structural: rather, there is a celebration of
heterogeneity in Paterson’s dalliance with a woman by the Falls, in the National
Geographic picture of the nine
African wives on a log, in the newspaper account of Mrs. Sarah Cummings’ death,
in a letter from a young man distraught with his sister’s domination, in the
public legend of the jumper Sam Patch, and in the poet’s search for a language
not divorced from experience.
Ordered by the poet to construct his
own order out of all this variety (Music it for yourself" I, p.41), the
reader may be tempted to generalize about these "layers" of
particular experience, much as the archeologist does in his retrieval missions.
Without making temporal connections of causality, the reader may nevertheless
discern a certain sameness, that is, theme or essence, in human projects
concerning war, love, money, fame, or communication. Yet immediately, this
sense of One must be diffused by the return to the concrete, to "the stain
of sense," for the poet’s duty is
To
bring himself in,
hold
together wives in one wife and
at
the same time scatter it,
the
one in all of them. (IV, p. 224.)
The uranium in the pitchblende is,
after all, not final. It is a descent to "basic thought – leadward,"
and must then be fractured in an ascent into radium, into "the radiant
gist that / resists the final crystallization" (III, p. 133). Just as
atomic fission is infinitely generative, just as money as credit is all
potential, so the poem of Paterson never
closes without opening. In other words, the poetic fire, like Marie Curie’s,
does not build up, but breaks down, to be rebuilt and broken down again and
again:
Uranium,
the complex atom, breaking
down,
a city in itself, that complex
atom,
always breaking down
to
lead.
But
giving off that, to an
exposed
plate, will reveal. (IV, p. 209.)
Williams achieves his discontinuous
present through the major task of destroying the traditional understanding of
"part" in its ancillary, constituting role in relation to the
developed and complete whole. Instead, he pushes us to an appreciation of
"parts" – as sensitive, valuable, mobile elements which are an end in
themselves. In repeating them, or laying them side by side, he is careful that
they should not add up to a general pattern or conclusion, that they should
never exhibit a stasis that might be attributed to teleological or structural
purposefulness. And when word-events are not tied together, according to the ancient mandates of
the line, but are tried
together, in the spirit of the accommodation of particulars, the result is a
successful poetic venture into temporal discontinuity.
1 See Paul DeMan, "Literary History and
Literary Modernity" in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of
Contemporary Criticism (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 142-65. I am also personally indebted
to Robert Creeley for the elaboration of these questions in his seminar at the
State University of New York at Buffalo.
2 William Carlos Williams, Paterson (New York:
New Directions, 1963), ll., p. 65. Subsequent references will refer to this
edition and be cited in the text.
3 See Organic Form: The Life of an Idea, ed. G. S. Rousseau (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1972)
4 See William Carlos Williams: A Collection of
Critical Essays, ed. J. Hillis
Miller (Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), especially Louis Martz,
"The Unicorn in Paterson: William Carlos Williams," and Sister M.
Bernetta Quinn, "On Paterson, Book I."
5 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of
Perception (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), pp. 410-11
6 The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams
(New York: New Directions,
1967), p. 392.
7 See Roland Barthes, "Littérature et
discontinu" in Essais Critiques (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1964), pp.
175-87