Reconstruction 9.3 (2009)
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The Moving Figure: Dialogism in Williams' "The Great Figure" / Tom Lavazzi
<1> In recent years, Henry M. Sayre, Christopher J. MacGowan, Barbara M. Fisher, Dickran Tashjian, William Marling, and Peter Halter, among others, have written about the influence of visual artists, especially Marsden Hartley, on Williams' poetry, and, conversely, the influence of Williams' poetry on painting. These critics have variously examined the personal, cultural, aesthetic, and ontological dimensions of the visual arts background of Williams' poetry, including "The Great Figure," first published as the final poem in Sour Grapes, 1921, and well-known as the source for Charles Demuth's 1928 painting, The Figure Five in Gold. Especially relevant to the current writing, in The Revolution in the Visual Arts and the Poetry of William Carlos Williams and "Dialogue of the Sister Arts: Number-Poems and Number-Paintings in America, 1920-1970," Halter unpacks the figure 5 as a compact embodiment of the technological dynamic of modernism, and notes the cinematic effect of Williams' poem as well as its indebtedness to Futurism, Cubism, and Dadaism (The Revolution in the Visual Arts . . . , 97-101) and its influence, via Demuth, on later artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Indiana ("Dialogue of the Sister Arts . . . ," 212-216), arguing, in the latter article, that the intertextual dialogue among the postmodern artists and Demuth consciously influenced form and aesthetic decisions in the latters' works; referring to Johns' encaustic-and-oil-on-canvas The Black Figure Five (1960), for example, commissioned by a collector, Halter notes that "both of them [artist and collector] had the same idea: the two epochs, the twenties and the sixties, and the styles of the two painters [Demuth and Johns] should be confronted with, and related to, one another, in and through, a common motif" (Halter, "Dialogue of the Sister Arts . . . ," 212).
<2> Having a broader, more contextualist/historicist agenda in mind for his article (parts of which later appeared, somewhat amended and expanded, in chapter 4, "Soothing the Savage Beast," of his 1994 book The Revolution in the Visual Arts and the Poetry of William Carlos Williams), Halter understandably does not substantially investigate the complexities and tensions of these relationships, which I attempt to somewhat unravel below. Taking the lead from these critics, the current critical (re)formulation will further explore the dialogic dimensions of Williams' imagist poem, "The Great Figure," to see how the linguistic construction, Williams' poem, is transported - or translated - through a series of cultural and formal positionalities, via Demuth's re-creation and two postmodern re-visions of Demuth - Robert Indiana's serigraph The Figure Five (1971), and Jasper Johns' portfolio of lithographs 0-9 (1960-1963). Analysis of the dialogic exchange among these works touches on a broad and complex range of socio-cultural, formal, as well as psychological issues, beginning with a shift in registers in the title descriptors of Demuth's painting from symbolic resonance to figural surface - the paint/language is what it all, or, to quote from that perhaps most famous imagist articulation of Williams' oeuvre, "so much [of it] depends / upon." We may read Demuth's painting, evolving from the same cultural episteme as the poem, as a visual analogue to it, though taking it a step further toward abstraction (as noted in the title, above); but perhaps more crucially, how is subjectivity - not only of the speaker of the poem but the self-presence of the artists (Demuth, Johns, Indiana) as (re)constructed through the materiality and "style" of the particular works - challenged by the apprehension of the larger Work that is this dia-logos?
* * *
Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure five
in gold
on a red
fire truck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city. (Collected Poems, 174)
<3> Demuth's The Figure Five in Gold (1928, oil on cardboard) (fig1) [1] plays on thematic and formal tensions in the host poem, recasting the imagistic/linguistic movement of Williams' poem as Cubo-Futurist [2] dynamo (suggesting a possible mise en scene for further development - a mimetic, popculture, cinematic reenactment of Williams' poem can be seen on the Spotlight on Visions & Voices website). Of the three "5"s depicted in the painting, each larger than the one preceding it, seeming to rush toward the viewer and overwhelm the painting itself, it's the middle 5 - signed engine "No. 5," - that's gold (almost gold leaf), signaling the irony Williams notes in his poem's title: in a 1955 letter to Henry Wells, the poet expresses contempt for the rhetorical mask of "great" (human) public figures vis a vis the representation of a quanta, the actual determinant of value in modern society, "riding in state with full panoply" (MacGowan, 92). Demuth's painting complicates this dialectic (as do the opening and closing images of Williams' poem, as we will see). The smaller 5, losing some of its value, bleaches toward light yellow as it seems to recede, while the larger 5, rapidly approaching in the moment of passing, fades to a brownish yellow. Much as the "figure five" in Williams' poem stands in relief against the background of rain, street lights, and darkness, while ultimately being subsumed by them, the design of the entire painting spins metonymically out of the central figure - itself at once emblematic of and synecdochic for an abstract system of logic, reason, quantification - simultaneously universalizing and deconstructing the integrity of the figure and ideological dominance of numerical order and the number system. Structurally, this non-human Other, the "Great Figure," is co-opted piecemeal - the knob ends of the 5s rhymed by the street lights which rhyme in turn the headlights of the fire engine, both lights whitening (or draining), by association, the gold from the 5. Self-substantiality and coherent identity are challenged by other details in the painting, as well. A play of name fragments and initials/graphemes strike out at the margins of the painting - "BILL, C.D., W.C.W., "Carlo" in points of gold light like a night club sign; "BILL" and the fragments of two other words "ART Co," at the top and right margins, respectively, are partially framed out of the painting. A yellow-gold fragment of arc in the top right corner of the painting suggests yet a fourth 5 (and perhaps more?) at the moment of passing (surpassing?) the viewer, catching her/him as in the eye of a hurricane in this wind-tunnel of modernism, at once sucking us down and thrusting against us, evacuating any stable point of reference. The hues and tones of night and street light spin into Futurist force lines around the canvas, seeming to cross both in front and behind other forms in the painting - the 5s, the red center representing the archetype components of the machine (axle and angular architectonics of the engine) - further confusing foreground, middle ground, and background. The imagistic simultaneity of the painting's surface - its extension and collapse - is, like the poem's imagistic drive, a moving vortex, the figure "5" at once leaping forward and receding, as, in the poem, it streams past us, in its "greatness," its gravity, bending and holding perception, focusing the moment, here/there and gone; ("I saw the figure 5 / in gold / on a red / fire truck / moving / tense / unheeded . . . through the dark city").
<4> In a frequently quoted passage from his autobiography, Williams recalls the source of the poem: how, as he was on his way on a July evening to visit his friend, the painter Marsden Hartley in his studio, he saw the "golden figure 5 on a red background flash by" on an downtown-running avenue between rows of buildings, just as "I approached his [Hartley's] number" (Autobiography, 172). This brief narrative tells us a lot about the breach in narratives (and logical structure) that constitutes one vector of modernism and, simultaneously, a pitfall gapping (gaping) to the mise en abyme of postmodernism: The event, reduced to a formal insight, notable for its directness and lack of extraneous detail - its boldness - and its rapidity, partialness, and brevity; the painter, identified not by name but by "his number" - his individuality, his subjecthood (and, by association, that of the autobiographical speaker who "approaches his number") become subject to some indefinable Other; that "Other" an unavoidable yet threateningly self-obliterative force, at once the machine and the all-consumptive force its little self-contained fires propel it toward, and something in the motion itself, consuming it and all conflagration, hinted at by the uncanniness of a number, flashing by in the night, rushing through and beyond the machine in Demuth's painting, seeming to ride it all out unscathed; all of this resonating as well in the frameless dissolution washing at the edges of the poem (a formal insight picked up in Jasper Johns' lithograph, as we will see) that begins in diffusion, an implied greyness "among the rain / and lights" and ends in darkness and "rumbling." The "Great Figure:" solidly present (when it is present - always in the painting, fleeting in the poem, mnemonically sustained), the number itself, yet (in)stressing, as Slavoj Zizek would say, something in itself more than itself*
* Analyzing scenes in films involving dialogues in which two "interlocutors" do not confront each other, but, often blocked one behind the other, speak to a "third gaze," outside the frame, effectively short-circuiting "face-to face intersubjectivity," Zizek comments that the subjects are at once often fascinated and distraught by this absent presence of an anonymous, disembodied "gaze that sees ‘what is in himself more than himself' . . . " (154). More on this later . . .<5> Comparing Williams' post-war poetry (especially Paterson) to Jackson Pollock's "Action Paintings" (or "all-over" paintings, as art critic Clement Greenberg dubbed them), critic Joan Burbick points out that although the work of both artists is "self-referential," they also leap beyond the boundaries of the self in an "attempt to convey [a] quality of life, primarily envisioned as kinesis" (what critic Charles Altieri terms postmodernist "immanentist thinking,' as opposed to the "symbolists theories" of language of high modernism) (Altieri, 44; Burbick, 117); we can see how, through quick, sharp line cuts and pared-down syntax "The Great Figure" - and Williams' imagist-influenced poetry in general - pushes in this direction from within the modernist period, streamlining language and syntax to serve direct perception (a pre-sounding, in this gong clang, of Olson's 1950 dictum "one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER) (Hoover, 614), a step away from removing the subject from the field of language altogether (or perhaps a good two-step, since whatever pre- or post-exists the subject is, in Williams' poem, still caught within the self-mirrorings of a representational aesthetic, "rumbling" away beneath it, even as the pure kinetic drive of the poem's syntax and imagery strive to break free from subjectivization).
<6> This sense of life as "kinesis" is enticing, since it leans away from notions of a self-identical, self-coherent and stable Cartesian subjects, guarantors of the literal "truth" of their observations, and toward subjects in jeopardy –or, signified positively, to a more processual mode of being in the world (Dasein, in the Heideggerian, rather than Jaspersian or objectivist, sense). A letter Williams wrote to Demuth in 1928, after seeing an unfinished version of the painting, suggests that he was as concerned about, perhaps troubled by, the shakiness and insubstantiality of the entire perceptual experience as by the apparent solidity and frontal self-assertiveness of its central image (or what is taken as the center of interest, though the complexities of the poem lie elsewhere, in the margins, the emergings and dissolutions of the perception); we can also see the dialogic trace of Williams' "hand" in the finished painting. In the version Williams criticizes in the letter, he complains about the red center being too much of an unyielding self-presence - "the blankness of red in the center bothers me [notice he doesn't refer to it as its representational equivalent]. It should be blackened or something." He goes on to suggest interfering with the "red center"'s identity through the use of "overlapping planes . . . through the solid red center" (advice that Demuth apparently took in the finished work); but stopping short of following (or perhaps detouring) this insight to what would in effect be a proto-postmodern conclusion (and how could he not), which would challenge the authority of the image, its sense of delivering a tangible point of reference, and in fact call into the question the entire Imagist program, Williams heads straight in the direction of formalist closure: the use of planes/rays would impart a "unity of treatment" and "cast a unity of feeling over it all" (see Tashjian, 71-72). But this call for a (perhaps impossible) "unity of feeling" does not rescue the self-conflicted performance of his own work. In fact, his dissatisfaction with Demuth's painting defers, or projects, ambivalent feelings about his poem onto the latter's canvas; summarizing his intentions in Sour Grapes, Williams comments that he "struggled" to "get the line on paper . . . . To fit the words so that they went smoothly and still said exactly what I wanted to say" (I Wanted to Write a Poem, 34). The struggle is due partly to Williams' commitment to a poetics of "contact" with the realities of his environment, the often dis-integrating modern urban experience ("The artist works to express perceptions rather than to attain standards of achievement" and "America is bastard country where decomposition is the prevalent spectacle," Contact I, 1920) (A Recognizable Image, 64, 66). The imagery of the poem, on the whole, registering this struggle, riddles its structure, straining the "Precisionist" (the visual art equivalent of Imagist") syntax; the struggle to hold the poem together formally, vis a vis the impermanence of the perceptual moment ("the mood had to be translated into form") (I Wanted to Write a Poem, 34), exacerbates the tension in the poem. Another kind of tension, rubbing against the apparent realism of the poem's imagery and a consequence of the need "to fit" the words, is a denaturalizing, self-consciousness of aesthetic effect. [3] The poem begins in near soundlessness, with a visual image rising out of a vaguely expressionistic background, like a film in which image and sound are slightly out of sync. Following the visual impact of the "figure five / in gold," the sound track bursts, wildly and percussively open, only to lose itself, through an indistinct decrescendoing, in the defamiliarizing darkness from which it arose; simple as the poem is, its effect is imbalancing, appearing simultaneously to be the report of a straightforward encounter with the urban real and a reproduced, manipulated experience occurring within/through the language and aesthetics of the poem itself. Commenting on Williams' plays of the 1940s (Many Loves and A Dream of Love), Elizabeth Klaver observes that the poet/playwright mixes divergent literary/linguistic styles (much as he does in Paterson) that, from a "postmodern perspective . . . present a problematic that specifically works to undermine coherence, subverting modernist desire for formal integrity" (Axelrod, 213). This somewhat reductive definition of "modernism" aside (avant-garde European, American and Russian art movements, such as Cubism, Dadaism, Futurism, Vorticism, Synchronism, Rayonism, and Cubo-Futurism, among others, had been a thorn in the side of "modernist" urges for formal unity since early in the 20th century, and Williams got his modernism as much - perhaps more so - from visual art as literature), though not resulting in a collage of "diverse styles," the divergent impulses fissuring "The Great Figure" have a similar alienating effect, preventing the reader from resting too securely in the poem's apparent self-consistency. It is no accident that "The Great Figure" closes the movement of Sour Grapes. On one side, the penultimate poem "The Lonely Street," which begins with the straightforward observation "School is out," and goes on to image an initiation ritual into an (anti)life lacking depth and direction (an anonymous and unspecified number of young women, high school graduates, passing the speaker's field of vision, nearly ghosts of themselves, dressed "in white from head to toe" with "idle look" and bearing "pink flames" [cotton candy] "mount the lonely street," this final action, the closing image of the poem, an abysmal heaviness, weighing them down despite themselves); on the other side, whatever remains - more words? more text? what persists beyond the text? sheer blankness? - left unarticulated, at the closing of the book.
<7> Critic Peter Schmidt highlights, among other modern-art influenced techniques, Williams' ego-derailing attempts (in early poems such as the 1917 "Overture to a dance of Locomotives") to incorporate a "cubist polyphony of voices" into his writing (64). A train porter speaks through the center of "Overture" - "this way ma'am! / - important not to take / the wrong train!" - the poem's speaker momentarily sharing compositional direction and control with the voice of an other outside the self, and perhaps responding to his collaborator, the separation of voices being unclear. Similarly, though without mimetically quoting an identified other/voice outside, the self-conflicted presentation of the "The Great Figure" breaks down the assumption of a subjectivised center of perception, or the authenticating presence of an experiencing subject, even as the lines break unnaturally, almost forcing a fragmentary, slowed-down re-vision of the encounter through a depersonalized, particulated syntax. The "central" image in the poem is metonymic for this Lacanian split in the subject (the subject, or Imago, as a suturing together, netting of identity over a fundamental lack, gap, or void): though some critics (see Fisher, above, as an example) arrest the "5" as a central image, how permanent is it? True, in terms of stress and syllable count, line three ("I saw the figure five") gets most weight of any single line in the poem, but imagistically and prosodically, the final two lines of the poem, twelve and thirteen, circling back to the tone of the opening image ("rain . . . rumbling . . . darkness") far outweigh the "Great Figure" (which is not, in any event, centrally located in the poem). As the "figure five" passes away even as it is noted, an anti-center, on hold only artificially, after the fact, in the poem's image, the poem admits to an ontological fiction: we must take pulse of the margins of the poem to catch (out) the myth of center, permanence, and totalizing unity (and the dualism of center v. margin - the margin is the center, of action, import, in the poem), even as, imagistically, the poem dialogizes the syntactical centrality of what the speaker "saw" with reference to what else he sees, and hears, and doesn't/isn't able to see. There is a sense of doubling, then, in the voice of the poem as the speaker is jostled about by the "Otherness" of his own discourse. Demuth's painting is prescient on this point (perhaps saying/imaging more than it knows, as Lacan would say), bringing Williams into the scenario, but only piecemeal, in language fragments and as end-stopped initials, rather than a cohesive or unitary identity; a rubble/ babble of part-objects (Lacanian petite as) "rumbling" about the canvas and tumbling toward the pre-Symbolic darkness of the Lacanian Real.
<8> The Lacanian trick lens, focusing by refocusing, evading focus . . . the inter-action of Williams' poem and Demuth's painting may be seen as a demonstration of - and, at least in the case of the poem, an apprehension of - "scopic drive," an urge toward (self)dissolution in the visual field, emptying of self into the non-human Other - a some thing other that is suppressed by, hence the excess (the ghosted other) of, the Symbolic Order (the order of signs). [4]
<9> Or if one could simply be the icon, the Great Figure, the number 5 . . .
<10> Heeding the "gong clangs" and "siren howls," jolted through urban modernism by the spare drive of the poem and the Futurist dynamism of the painting, hanging on as we spin off the page and out of the framing era of painting and poem toward post-war Indiana, we suddenly find ourselves visually immersed in a cartoon-like, popcultural, (a-geo-topo)graphic hyperreal - a postmodernist poster-art display of critical consciousness - as if the whole ride were a kind of alchemical illusion, a poetic fiction. Indiana's serigraph The Figure Five (The Portfolio Decade, 1971) (Fig. 2) [http://img1.artprice.com/img/classifieds/original/264/264046_1.jpg] [5]further abstracts and flattens the imagery of both poem and painting toward pure "design" and iconography, screening out any references to a Futurist "romanticism" of fragmentation through a reduced title and stenciled one-syllable words around the ubiquitous pentagon - a recurring motif in Indiana's work. Compositionally, the print consists of a yellow figure five repeated 3 times in different sizes over a pentagon-bound, five-point red star (substituting a political icon for an industrial/civic icon - the abstracted fire engine in Demuth) set within a variegated grey circle; the largest 5 overrides the arms of the star, whose points mark the corners of the black pentagon. The symbol complex/ assemblage is placed emblematically on a flat, radiant grey ground above the print's title stenciled within the image frame in light shades of the same. The circle containing the pentagon, star, and 5s is a "color wheel" of greys, repeating the dominant color scheme of the print's "back" and "middle" ground," (the "foreground" role played by the stylized star and the central "figure," literally the figure 5 identified in the title, as in Demuth's painting). Restating the 5s in the host panting, the centrally located "5"s in the print are derivatively yellow, as they might be in a low-quality reproduction of the painting, not "gold" or any other thematized luster fading to a modernist romance of self-annihilation, fragmentation and self-destructive force. This undecideability of - or qualitative interference with - the print's two primary colors is further evidenced by the five-point star, in two tones of red, shallowing the bottom and top outer edges of the large 5 as well as areas of the smaller numerals (as do the "overlapping planes," or ray lines, in Demuth, which are perhaps also partly the inspiration for the star shape - the force lines, we recall, at the suggestion of Williams, also interfere with the (Self)centeredness of the fire engine). In the triangular sectors of the pentagon, formed by the legs of the star and lines drawn to connect the points, single syllable words, acronyms and abbreviations are stenciled, in caps, "signifying on" (to apply Henry Louis Gates' phrase) not self-deconstructiveness, as the graphemes and part words in Demuth's painting, but stereotypical pop-American traits (reading from bottom clockwise - "USA," "FAT," "HUG," "DIE," "ERR", returning the eye back to "USA" to begin again . . . ); each "word" contains three graphemes, the first two matching the grey value of the "spoke"/ray of the color wheel with which they coincide, while the last picks up on the lightest shade (there five rays/values for each sector. Indiana gets the grey spoke/sectors of his color wheel from the rays of night light and shadow, the splintering and fragmentation of the street scene in Demuth, rewriting them for what they are - abstract elements in a design scheme, rather than representations of natural (i.e., urban) force, posing a postmodern, mediated, standardized, consumerist, icon-overdetermined "reality" against a modernist scene of existential depth behind/beyond the surface to which the painting is responsive/responsible. [6] While both works acknowledge a play of form and art as composition, in Indiana, the meaning is the surface; the essential design motifs - circle, circle sector and the triangular forms derived from them, the combination of hard right angles and rounded forms in the central figure, all of this leading to the pentagon (5 sides, cued be the figure 5) - are themselves the iconic subject matter of the print. The flatness of texture, stenciled graphemes and two-dimensional geometric forms, and the 3-5 number play in compositional elements (i.e., the "5" controlling value and form in the print, as we've seen; the thrice repetition of the number determining the allowable graphemes in each sign) all contribute to the surface, frontal impact of the print, sans the dramatic dynamism of Demuth. The print's minimal playfulness throws into more obvious relief the illusionary movement through space of the 5s and the dramatic representationality of Demuth's and Williams' works - the imagist poem re-visioned as a concrete one, modernist referentiality transmuted to postmodern self-referentiality - as well as the impersonal, systemizing control of the Symbolic Order (one of the many "impersonations," or back formations, of the Big "O" - Lacan's grande Autre) [7] that stands in for the creative decision making of the "Artist"/"auteur." While the play of name fragments and graphemes in Demuth's painting may be the seeds for Indiana's use of color and stencil to emphasize the arbitrary nature of sense making and art as sense-making, ultimately, for Indiana, it's all a matter of style, of design, an arrangement of marks in space (the apparent fragments of two words in Demuth's painting - "Art Co" - may hint as much); there is no "self" do deconstruct.
<11> It's the "5" that moves, rides it out whole, until it, too, after all, flashes into darkness.
<12> Jasper Johns' series of ten lithographs, 0-9 (1960-1963) (fig 4) [http://starr-art.com/exhibits/johns/johns_05.html], is more in the spirit of Williams' poem, in terms of the transitoriness of the number, the sense of an undercurrent that can sweep away - in fact is in the act of sweeping away even as articulated - any objective or permanent signification. In the print featuring the number 5, [8] the "expressionistic" (sub)surface is cut by, while mottling over, the hollowed out, yet clearly delineated, form of the figure "5." Johns brings the abyss gaping ("rumbling") at the poem's edges back into play at the center of his field. Stylistically, a heavy black wash plays against re-presentational art by challenging, rather than highlighting or shadowing, the objective stance of the central figure (or it does shadow it, i.e., foreshadows its demise, delivering its negative other, the un/non-figural, non-representable). However, the state of visible presence and abyssal negative space are held in tension. The black wash both defines and disrupts the number, negative space becoming positive force negating (literally, in a sense, subtracting from) - or, from a more dramatic perspective, overwhelming, partially consuming - its boundaries. The number is also more human, crudely drawn, than Demuth's Precisionist rendering and Indiana's hard-edged stencil.
<13> In a 1998-99 interview with Richard S. Field (curator of prints and drawings at Yale University Art Gallery), Johns assets that art "has to be not a deliberate statement, but a helpless statement" (www.yale.edu.opa28.n17/story4.html; qtd. In Yau); citing this in his recent article in the American Poetry Review, poet and critic John Yau glosses "'helpless statement'" as "necessary actions over which we have little or no control," limiting these to "fundamental" biological necessities, the "bodily part of his existence" (Yau, pars. 13-14); but beyond immediate, physical needs, these "fundamental" necessities "over which we have little or no control" can also be cultural/ideological imperatives, ways of functioning in the world that seem to come out of nowhere, or from something in ourselves more than ourselves (to paraphrase Zizek), or from the O as SO, where Johns locates them in his lithograph, and which seem to render us "helpless." Veering from host painting and poem, Johns reinscribes the person (if not a specific personality) within the act, deferred to an interaction of line and form; responding to "helplessness" with direct, embodied action, rather than limning an abstract dialogue, Johns' print traces a visceral encounter between desiring self and abstract systemization - a struggle acted out through stone and ink (rendered all the more starkly by printing the featured numerals in black) . The outlines of the figure are flattened, broken, the knobular tip of the base a solid mass, like a base signature in musical notation, echoing the heavy black wash flooding in the gaps between the lighter top/serif of the figure and the body, darkening toward the knob point. The black border framing the figure - as in Indiana's serigraph, the print narrativizes its own boundaries - is also irregularly outlined, overwashed in places by the print field; in other figures in the series, such as the figure 4 [fig 5], the dialogic tension is sharpened by scribbling over the defining (out)lines [http://starr-art.com/exhibits/johns/johns_04.html]. [9] Like Indiana, Johns' self-reflexive lithograph questions art making, and the position of the postmodern artist vis a vis the conventional mandates of "representational" art, but, working the other side of Indiana's broad, public, culturally critical statements, Johns is more in tune, in an immediate, bodily way, with the self-dispersive "rumbling" of Williams' poem, pointing us back that way through Indiana and Demuth. Yau describes Johns' work as presenting "an incredibly compressed, layered," and, I would add, dialogic space; "they are ‘things,' not images" (Yau, par. 36), records of active engagement with the other works of art as well as the O/SO.
<14> In Indiana, by contrast, essential forms break to abstraction, rationalizing away, as with a proto-PhotoShop "magic eraser," any sense of a shifting and uncertain background. Deploying non-individialized, pre-fab forms and stencils eliminates or overrides radical otherness, while at the same time beating the SO at its own game, torquing it toward socio-political (self)critique: a stenciled, impersonal "Kiss" is really no kiss at all, but the empty form or signage of an extra or pre verbal event; physical, intimate pressure replaced by a cool, abstract, standardized sign, marking the formal/fromularistic orientation of all sign systems. Indiana's stenciled words make use of "negative" space to define the positive, to complete the gesture toward meaning, at the same time as they break into independent forms held to sense by our habit of reading over the blanks, connecting the dots; the stenciled forms foreground the words as signs, reproductions - standardized symbols that we all too willingly misprision as our "own." What Indiana highlights is the postmodern turn away from modernist angst to what Guy Debord designated as the "society of the Spectacle," in which "reality" is a (anti)matter of simulated stimuli and multimediated, primarily ocular (Debordian Situationism is a product of pre-Ipodtm culture) re-presentations flashing over a cultural (and ontological) void; "Lacan" (and through that compacted sign Zizek) reconfigures this multilayered aporia of simulacra as the superdense, unrepresented/unrepresentable Real, flipside of the Hyperreal (and today, the increasingly screenal Virtual real). Johns print takes us on precisely this Lacanian postmodern ride. Transported through Johns' print, Demuth's and Williams' works elide the era of Baudrillardian simulations and drop spinning as out of John Malkovich's brain (re the film Being John Malkovich) into postmodern psyho-cultural theory, where a fear of something in ourselves more than ourselves is what drives the work. From this perspective, unlike Indiana, Demuth and Williams play on the tension between clarity and dissolution, the breakup of the personal not toward a quantifiable or prefabricated abstraction, but a "rumbling" otherness, a pure force of nature/energy that, once the safety net between self and other is cut away, comes close the Zizek/Lacan's scopic drive running inevitably toward the breaches and gaps of self-control and self-substantiality, where one("self") becomes merely a particle in a phantom eye/(not-mo(i)t)"I."* Ultimately, Demuth and Williams spare the self's dissolution by displacing this tension to forces of nature and culture/industry; Johns offers us no such security, but restless engagement without the momentary plateaus of definition, as definition is always in the act of being subsumed by a trackless and un-prisonable/inarticulable otherness.
*One of Zizek's favorite images for this is an improvisation on a scene in Hitchcock's Rear Window. In the scene that stages a narrative parallel to the imagistic near demise of the subject in Williams' poem, Demuth' s painting and Johns' prints, the photographer Jeffries (James Stewart), wheel-chair bound and recovering from a recent car accident, stares through his apartment window (which returns the slight reflection of himself watching himself) across an air shaft into the black screen of another apartment window, fascinated by fragmentary sounds and sights, flashes of what he soon realizes is an act of murder, seeing the act before it happens but unable to warn the victim. As long as he remains the watcher of a taboo act among strangers, Zizek theorizes, Jeffries remains within in the movement of desire (which can ultimately be an evasion of Thanatos, death drive, by displacing it to others outside the self - the endless chain of petite a's that, in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, sustain a momentum away from a longed for though impossible and hence endlessly deferred return to a pre-imago - pre-subjectified - state of being). Jeffries' rear window faces another rear window, the two out-facing each other: vision streams across the gap behind, or blind spot in, the public eye - space of prohibitions, secretive goings on, potential danger (plummeting falls out of self, compart(apart)ments of subjectivity) to come . . . Putting themselves (Jeffries, the nameless murderer) behind screens, there is always the risk of being exposed, caught in/trapped by the act (as both are); as soon as the murderer/Other turns (in the silence of the insulated window) to see - returns the gaze of - the subject, Jeffries, making himself "seen to the object of his seeing," suddenly loses his sense of self/subject as seer, and becomes an object of sight, an unknowable quanta in an other's - the Other's - field of vision (grande Autre, in Lacan's figuration, not an identifiable other or part-object, but "what is in [ourselves] more than [ourselves]," a role sometimes played by the SO). At this point, Zizek contends, Jefferies free falls from the "register of desire" into the (anti)territory of pure drive - in this case, Lacanian scopic drive. Further propelling this slip from subjectivity, from sense of self as desiring subject in control of its field of observation, when the Other/murder actually enters the space of the subject - breaks into Jeffries' apartment - -Jeffries shoots several flashbulbs to evade reconnaissance by the Other, an act that ironically transforms him into a white spot in the Other's eyes - a non-being (a multiple irony, since he may have simultaneously - was there film in the camera? - captured (an image of) the Other) - foreshadowing the moment when the murderer/Other succeeds in breaking through these evasions to reach the subject in the moment of its annihilation, throwing Jeffries through his own window - i.e., what was formerly his own field of vision - rendering Jeffries a spot, a non-object in a field of vision ungrounded in any sense of subjectivity, or desiring subject/petite a equation. For the "rumbling" murderer, on the other hand, agent of the Other, conveyor of a-moral, a-subjective, destructive force, the case is totally different . . . (see Zizek, "A Hair of the Dog that Bit You," Interrogating the Real, 162-63).
<15> What "rumbles" beneath Williams' "5," of course, is explosively figured on Demuth's canvas, vis a vis Italian Futruism; however, the modern American artists' aesthetic rests on a moral ground, a belief in the individual's ability to observe, understand, and act on that understanding - if we did "heed" the "Great Figure," in all that it implies, then we might know something about life, and perhaps (re)act or behave differently as a consequence - that seems to have been swept away in the wake of the raw power of war abroad. For Williams, finally, it is not the "gong clangs" or "howls," but what is beneath the city that finally silences, carries away the "noise of civilization" (as Objectivist poet Charles Reznikoff images it in his 1960 book Testimony, based on trial transcripts from the NRS). The closing image of "The Great Figure" prevents closure, yielding an apprehension not so much of something more in ourselves than ourselves, of the Otherness in us (though it is this, as well - the speaker, we can imagine, feeling the reverberations within as he senses them outside his body, beneath the street), as of an ongoing, uncodeable Real beyond the image/picture frame that renders the implied "moral" of the poem as clear, fleeting and inscrutable as the "5" itself.
<16> The eye of the viewer/critic, scanning these works, moving from imagist directness to Futurist fundamentalism to cool minimalist abstraction to conflicted, self-referential formalism then back again, catches the resonance, as though by double (or multiple) vision, of the host poem. Oppositions collapse as, within the poem, perception begins above ground, diaphanously, in rain and light, wraps itself around (or is raptured by) the epitome of the Symbolic Order (precise center of the decimal system), and ends, paradoxically, on a sonic, seismic "rumbling" through darkness; a drive toward the im(anti)personal through technology and abstract systemization - electricity and number - and through uncontainable, unpredictable force generated by that same technology as its self-destructive other. As Demuth's painting foresees - the representational figure "5" thrusting forward toward the off-canvass space of its current viewer(s) - this presentation, as a sort of critical collage, has attempted to read through the poem and the paintings as facets of a larger, ongoing, dialogical project that is the Great Figure in its ever-expanding cultural contexts.
Select Bibliography
Altieri, Charles. Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry during the 1960s. Lewisberg, PA.: Bucknell U. P., 1979.
Axelrod, Steven Gould and Helen Deese, eds. Critical Essays on William Carlos Williams. New York: G. K. Hall, 1995.
Burbick, Joan. "Grimaces of a New Age: The Postwar Poetry and Painting of William Carlos Williams and Jackson Pollock." Boundary 2 10.3 (Spring, 1982): 109-123.
Chou, Peter. "Charles Demuth's Painting The Figure 5 in Gold Inspired by William Carlos Williams' ‘Poem The Great Figure'" [collates reproduction of the poem and painting along with a brief commentary by Chou]. WisdomPortal.com. http://www.wisdomportal.com/Christmas/Figure5InGold.html. 2/18/07.
Demuth, Charles. The Figure Five in Gold [oil on composition board, 36" x 29 3/4"] The Alfred Stieglitz Collection. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1928.
Dijkstra, Bram, ed. A Recognizable Image: William Carlos Williams on Art and Artists. New York: New Directions, 1978.
---. The Hieroglyphics of a New Speech: Cubism Stieglitz, and the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams. Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. P., 1969.
Fisher, Barbara. Noble Numbers, Subtle Words: The Art of Mathematics in the Science of Storytelling. London: Associated University Presses, 1997.
Halter, Peter. "Dialogue of the Sister Arts: Number-Poems and Number-Paintings in America, 1920-1970." English Studies 63:3 (1982): 207-19.
---. The Revolution in the Visual Arts and the Poetry of William Carlos Williams. New Yortk: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Hoover, Paul. Postmodern American Poetry. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994.
Indiana, Robert. The Figure Five [serigraph, 35 7/8" x 29 15/16"]. Decade [portfolio]. Collection, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1971.
---. The Figure Five [oil on canvas, 60" x 50"]. Collection, National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1963.
Johns, Jasper. 0-9 [lithographs, 20 ½" x 15 ½"]. Collection, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1963.
---. Black Numerals [lithographs, 37" x 30"]. Collection, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1968.
Klaver, Elizabeth. "Williams Drama: From Expressionism to Postmodernism in Many Loves, A Dream of Love, and Paterson IV." In Axelrod, 213-225.
MacGowan, Christopher. William Carlos Williams Early Poetry: The Visual Arts Background. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1984.
Marling, William. William Carlos Williams and the Painters, 1909-1923. Athens, OH: Ohio U. P., 1982.
Olson, Charles. Projective Verse. New York: Totem Press, 1959. Rpt. in Creeley, Robert, ed. Selected Writings. New York: New directions, 1966,1967. Rpt. in Hoover.
Sayre, Henry M. The Visual Test of William Carlos Williams. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1983.
Schmidt, Peter. William Carlos Williams, the Arts, and Literary Tradition. Baton Rouge: Louisiana U. P., 1988.
"Spotlight on William Carlos Williams." Spotlight on Visions and Voices. Compiled by William Wargo. http://www.learner.org/catalog/extras/vvspot/Williams.html. 7/21/07.
Tashjian, Dickran. Skyscraper Primitives: Dada and the American Avantgarde 1910-1925. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1975.
Williams, William Carlos. Autobiography. New York: New directions, 1967
---. I Wanted to Write a Poem: The Autobiography of the Work of a Poet. New York: New Directions, 1977.
---. The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams. Volume I: 1909-1939 Eds. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan. New York: New Directions, 1986.
Yau, John. "Jasper Johns' Preoccupation." American Poetry Review 35.1 (Jan/Feb 2006). Find Articles. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3692/is_200601/ai_n17170027. 7/21/07.
Zizek, Slavoj. "A Hair of the Dog That Bit You." Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure, and Society. Mark Bracher, et al, eds. New York: NYU Press, 1994. 46-73. Rpt. in Zizek, Interrogating the Real, 141-168.
---. Interrogating the Real. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens, eds. New York: Continuum, 2005.
Notes
[1] A digital zoom reproduction is viewable on the Metropolitan Museum of Art website, http://www.metmuseum.org/Works_Of_Art/viewOnezoom.asp?dep=21&zoomFlag=1&viewmode=0&item=49%2E59%2E1. [^]
[2] Or perhaps "Cubo-Futurist Precisionism" would be a better designator for this work: it has affinities with the Italian and Russian movements as well as, in its precise handling of fragmented forms, the American school most clearly represented by Charles Sheeler. [^]
[3] Partly due perhaps to another possible source for the poem: the opening line of the artist Kandinsky's poem "Klange" ("Sounds) - "There was a big figure 3 - white on dark brown" - assuming Williams might have had this in mind as he approached the other painter's studio, or that it might have been called to mind simultaneously with the immediate perception as a sort of ghost layer or over-inscribing aura, suggesting the poem may have formally, in part, preexisted itself (Marling, 174). [^]
[4] Or put another way, with a view toward Indiana, Williams' poem double plays loss of self through the materiality and mechanics of both art and perception. The selective eye of the artist is engaged, but abstracted from the "man who suffers" (to quote half of Eliot's famous moral precept, in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," for creative personalities). [^]
[5] Compare to the more rugged 1963 version in Demuth's own medium (oil on canvas), stenciled forms cutting against the texture of paint: [http://www.tfaoi.com/am/3am/3am300.jpg] (fig 3). Ironically, this version has a slightly more aggressive surface than Demuth's work, the use of composition board in the latter painting somewhat smoothing out the forms. [^]
[6] Another intertextual link between the two works: in the bottom section of Demuths's painting, the force rays fan out in a near circular pattern, mirroring the loop of the 5 body, and flashing over the initials of the two artists. The formal dialogue between the works is not mere coincidence. According to Peter Halter, after viewing Demuth's painting in 1963 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Indiana was inspired to paint a series of 5 number paintings (note that the numerical value influences aesthetic structure even beyond the particular work under discussion) in "direct homage to . . . Demuth," "The Figure Five" being on of this series (Halter, "Dialogue of the Sister Arts . . . ," 214). [^]
[7] Hereafter SO and O, respectively. For more discussion of Lacan's Big Other ("Grande Autre") as distinct from the small other ("petite a") as I've been deploying in this writing, see below, Zizek on Hitchcock . . . [^]
[8] The entire series is reproduced at the top of each print in miniature [^]
[9] See also prints in Numbers (0-9) (1960, graphite on paper) [http://www.wellesley.edu/DavisMuseum/exhibitions/exhibitions_infinitum.html] as enactments of a similar dialogic minimalism. [^]
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