The biopoetic: toward a posthuman epic

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THE BIOPOETIC:

TOWARD A POSTHUMAN EPIC

by

Richard Boswell Snyder

______________________________________________________________________

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMPARATIVE LITERATURE)

December 2014

Copyright 2014 Richard Boswell Snyder

ii
Acknowledgements

I would thank all of my committee members for their thoughtful and generative responses
to this work. My committee chair, Greg Thalmann, helped me to conceive and complete this
dissertation. I will miss being able to stop by his office to discuss ideas about Homer, epic poetry
in general, and the ancient and modern worlds. David Lloyd introduced me to the productive
complexities of modern aesthetics and conceptions of representation, and I would not have been
able to undertake this study had I not participated in his seminars. His deeply insightful
commentary on these chapters provoked me to refine my thoughts and inspired me to continue
with this project. Panivong Norindr offered support at critical junctures in the development of
this project and provided me with key suggestions about how to improve and expand it. Mark
Irwin graciously agreed to serve as my outside reader and offered insightful, nuanced responses
to this work.
Many faculty members and students in the departments of comparative literature,
classics, and English at USC helped me to conceive and refine the ideas in this work. I would
like to give special thanks to Vincent Farenga, who supervised an independent study on the
social and cultural contexts in which archaic epic flourished that allowed me to refine and
expand my understanding of the relationship between politics and literature. Special thanks are
also due to Gabriel Giorgi, whose provocative seminar on biopolitics served as the initial proving
ground for early iterations of some of the concepts put forward in this dissertation. Among
fellow students, Michelle Har Kim, Mayumo Inoue, Alex Montes, Allyson Salinger, Sharon
Wang, Olanna Mills, Matthew Taylor, Lisl Walsh, Richard Ellis, Jodi Valentine, Beau Lindsay,
Phillip Horky, Michael Cucher, Jean Neely, Stacy Lettman, Mary Traester, Sam Solomon, Seth
Michelson, and Shaoling Ma all offered vital intellectual and social support at various points in

iii
my graduate study. During my stay in Rochester, NY, my ability to continue with this project
was enhanced by the warm generosity and hospitality of Jason Middleton, Eden Osucha, EJ Van
Lanen, Betsy Jenson, Jason Peck, Jennifer Creech, Cary Peppermint, Leila Nadir, Brad Weslake,
and Rachel Haidu. Among poets and critics, who are perhaps the best audience for this work, I
am grateful for the friendship and support of Joanna Fuhrman, Joshua Beckman, Nada Gordon,
Gary Sullivan, Drew Gardner, Douglas Rothschild, Dan Machlin, Michael O’Leary, John Tipton,
Stan Apps, Aaron Kunin, Jen Hofer, Matvei Yankelevich, Anna Moschovakis, Jennifer Moxley,
Steve Evans, and Kevin Davies, to name just a few.
If I am able to intimate my indebtedness to peers, friends, and teachers, I cannot express
the amount of gratitude I owe to my parents, Frank Richard and Josephine Snyder, and my
sisters, Melinda Kinder and Martha Steele, for their steadfast support and encouragement over
the years. I am even less capable of conveying the extent of my gratitude to my partner, Eleana
Kim, who discussed every aspect of this project with me and has been a constant source of
inspiration for the past 15 years. Our ongoing conversations about politics, poetry, and
everything else spurred this project and sustained it while I was searching for and sketching out
the directions it should take. I would not have been able to complete this dissertation without her
incisive commentary, unflagging support, and remarkable capacity for kindness, joy, and
patience. Finally, no acknowledgement of those who helped me over the past decade would be
complete without a mention of the domestic companions who sustained me through the good
times and the bad: Mao and Boxer, who moved to New York and LA with me, and Mary and
Baby, who found me in Rochester.

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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ii

Abstract v

Introduction 1

Chapter 1: Toward the Biopoetic Long Poem 9

Chapter 2: The Biopolitical Basis: Conceptions of “Man” and Modernity
in Agamben and Foucault 48

Chapter 3: “A Language Of New York”: Logos and Polis
in George Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous” 89

Chapter 4: “‘A State of Matter’”: Speech and Autonomy
in George Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous” 132

Chapter 5: “Participation Without Belonging”: Genre and Nation
in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee 194

Chapter 6: “Not Like” “A Human Woman”: Alice Notley’s Speculative Epic 276

Conclusion: Toward a Posthuman Epic 338

Bibliography 359

v
Abstract

This dissertation theorizes “the biopoetic,” a recasting of the epic genre in a post-generic
age, by examining three American long poems, George Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous,” Theresa
Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, and Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette. The biopoetic engages with
biopolitical theory and illuminates how these poems address key social and political issues of the
late modern and contemporary landscape. This dissertation analyzes the representational
techniques and thematic approaches of the poems in question within the contexts of genre theory,
social theory, and political philosophy. Drawing upon theorists who trace connections between
literary forms and political systems, this study begins with a consideration of the changes in
generic standards and expectations that arose with the emergence of liberalism in modernity and
led to the dominance of the lyric and the novel as modernity’s preeminent forms.
In contrast to these forms, the epic is often held up as historical testimony of holistic life
cast aside with the ascendance of capitalism and individual rights. The modern long poem, in
turn, is sometimes tasked with the impossible goal of reconstituting elements of the “organic”
premodern world. Whereas canonical long poems of high modernism, such as The Cantos and
The Waste Land, took up this task directly, the poems analyzed in this study interrogate the
notions underlying it in ways that are best understood through the biopolitical thought of
Foucault and Agamben. Engaging issues such as the (poorly) disciplined body, social holism and
aggregation, sovereign power, “state racism,” and the significance of speech to conceptions of
the human, these poems evince (bio)political concerns in ways that would elude dominant
conceptions of the political, whether oriented around “engaged” literature or around
poststructuralist subversions of discursive and representational norms.

vi
Issues of genre and its relations to conceptions of the individual and his or her larger
community are explored in the first chapter, which focuses on the materialist theories of genre
put forward Fredric Jameson, Jacques Rancière, and Raymond Williams. This chapter also
contains extended analyses of the “modern verse epic” and long poem, as formulated by Michael
André Bernstein and Charles Altieri, before concluding with an examination of the implications
of Lukács’ seminal notions of epic totality and the “problematic individual” of the modern novel.
Chapter 2 expands the theoretical purview of this study to include the biopolitical formulations
of Foucault and Agamben, focusing on the ways in which Aristotle’s notion of man as a
“political animal” relates to their respective approaches.
Chapters 3 and 4 analyze George Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous” in the context of these
conceptions of genre and biopolitics, calling out the implications of Oppen’s interrogations of
“the meaning” of being numerous and the difficulty of speech in the modern polis. In chapter 5, I
turn to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, which engages notions that are similar to those found
in Oppen’s work but is refracted through the complex realities of colonialism, race, and diasporic
dislocation. Chapter 6 takes up a very different work, Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette, and
analyzes the ways in which it appropriates tropes of romance and epic to call into question the
boundary between the human and the animal. The dissertation concludes with an interrogation of
the poststructuralist theories that influenced the fields of poetry and literary criticism during the
period in which these poems were published, 1968-1992, and seeks to highlight the ways in
which these poems are marked by and distinguished from the dominant literary trends of their
time.

1
Introduction

Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his
descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon
himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his
own heart. (99)

--Alexis de Tocqueville

The Liberal Epic

Twenty years after Tocqueville published his assessment of the effects of democracy and
individualism in North America, Whitman published an untitled version of “Song of Myself” in
the first edition of Leaves of Grass. A “long poem” by almost any definition, “Song of Myself”
can also be seen as an epic of liberalism. An epic, of sorts, because the poem clearly aspires to
represent a totality of the poet’s social and, significantly, natural world, but one of liberalism
because the entire work is refracted through the speaker himself. This speaker famously
“contain[s] multitudes” (113), but no matter how much he incorporates, no matter how many
occupations and activities he catalogues, he is never able to transcend his own perspective, never
able to step beyond, in Tocqueville’s words, “the solitude of his own heart.” Rather, the various
people and animals that he encounters and the events that he describes are, as he puts it,
“aborb[ed] all to myself and for this song” (48), so that there seems to be no escaping the poet’s
objectifying gaze. If his contemporaries are not separated from him, as Tocqueville’s description
of democracy would have it, they are effectively annulled in his absorption of them.
Significantly, these contemporaries are not offered the chance to speak within Whitman’s
poem, and they are typically described, moreover, in ways that attribute little individualism to
them, but instead offer them up as representatives of a certain type: the slave, the butcher, the
squaw, the conductor. To be sure, Whitman’s poem is commendable in its inclusiveness, which

2
extends far beyond absorptive descriptions of his contemporaries, but his momentary
apprehensions and absorptions of others effectively reify them as mere instantiations of an
occupation, race, or geographical category. In its taxonomizing and instrumentalizing logic, then,
Whitman’s poem stands in contrast to archaic epic, which categorizes many individuals who
appear only briefly (often to be killed), but which does so by asserting their paternal lineage.
These individuals may also be described by their occupations and, often, their native land, but
they are always connected back to their (male) ancestors and often placed within networks of
social and familial relations that emphasize their social identity.
If Whitman’s descriptive technique demonstrates Tocqueville’s point regarding the
ancestors of “every man,” who are “forgotten” in a democracy, it is significant that the poet
invokes his own ancestral lineage early in the poem. The poet claims, moreover, an essentially
autochthonous relation to his birthplace: “My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this
soil, this air, / Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same”
(33). While this claim undoubtedly betrays an anxiety about Whitman’s status as a true
“American,” it is also notable that it withholds the names of the poet’s ancestors—as well as any
other identifying or personalizing information. Perhaps the democratic poet does forget his
ancestors, as Tocqueville would have it. Such forgetfulness, however, doesn’t mesh well with the
claim’s larger intent, which is to establish some type of organic authenticity for poet’s ability to
speak as an American poet.
The tension that inheres between the poet’s desire to exist as a free-standing individual, a
wholly independent, autonomous being who would absorb all others and is not limited or in any
way defined by birth right, and his insistence on staking some type of organic attachment to the
land that would authorize his work, may be constitutive of what I am calling the liberal epic.

3
Indeed, liberalism is premised on the notion of the autonomous individual, untethered from any
concerns save his own inviolable interest, while epic, at least in the modern theories of it,
necessarily entails a representation of some larger social whole that would subsume the
individual. The paradox of Whitman’s poem is that individuals are subsumed, as we have seen,
not by the larger social group, but by the omnivorous individual who sings himself.
The power of voice, then, the ability to speak or sing, is everything in Whitman’s poem,
granting the poet an ability to constitute the social body within the confines of his own
subjectivity. While this subjectivity is remarkably progressive and egalitarian, encompassing not
only many different types of people but also animals, which seem to be the only creatures
capable of eluding, if only partially, the poet’s embrace (“they scorn the best I can do to relate
them”) (49), and disclosing a sweeping vision of a cosmological cycle of life that, guided by a
conception of purposive nature, is fundamentally optimistic, it can also be seen as an audacious
yet strangely poignant attempt to countermand the atomizing effects of modern social systems, as
diagnosed by Tocqueville. Irrevocably separated from his family and fellow travelers, the poet,
like some shaggy Cronus, would consume them to keep them close.
A Theoretical Overview
If the liberal epic is a contradiction in terms, one that affixes the political philosophy
typically associated with modernity and its dominant literary form, the novel, to the genre deeply
associated with the premodern, and the distinctly illiberal, social systems that it reflects, it is also
one that insists on the conjunction of the literary and the political. This study will attempt to
maintain this insistence, focusing on three more-contemporary works—George Oppen’s “Of
Being Numerous,” Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, and Alice Notley’s The Descent of
Alette—that engage and, at times, move beyond the central issues brought up in our brief reading

4
of Whitman: Who is able to speak?, What is the political significance of speech?, What social
horizon, if any, is implicit within a poem’s representational world?, How does a poem engage
notions of liberalism and social organicism?, How can these and other political formulations,
conversely, inform and broaden our understanding of a poem? In what ways is genre informed
by political assumptions, and vice-versa? To be sure, these are large and unwieldy questions, and
this dissertation won’t pretend to provide definitive answers to them but will rather use them as
ways to initiate and complicate analyses of the poems under discussion. Indeed, the larger goal
of this project is not simply to make theoretical “interventions,” which may never transcend their
own discourse, but to disclose and clarify important political implications of the poems in
question. That the poems might stand as interventions themselves can be seen as a desire or even
a goal of this study, but one that is, admittedly, far beyond the control of any individual author or
reader.
While Whitman, the father of so many aspects of American poetry, serves as a fine
starting point for this study, it perhaps goes without saying that the poems that will be discussed
bear little resemblance to his seminal work. All of these poems are very different from one
another, but it is significant that not only do they depart radically from Whitman’s metastasis of
the “lyric I,” but they also demonstrate little, if any, of the 19
th
century poet’s incorrigible
optimism. It would be inappropriate, in many ways, to consider any of these poems a liberal
epic—a designation that is perhaps best suited for Whitman’s work alone—but these poems have
been selected, in part, because they have demonstrable relations to epic. That is to say, all of the
works contain what can be seen as an epic impulse, or a desire to move beyond the parameters of
the poet’s subjectivity, but to do so in ways that don’t simply deconstruct subjectivity per se. In
the case of the first two works, Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous” and Cha’s Dictee, these relations

5
to epic or implicit ideas of a social whole have been little discussed or discussed in ways that
need to be expanded or refined, while the more overt relationship of Notley’s The Descent of
Alette to conceptions of epic has not been fully understood.
To undertake these readings, this study will appropriate a critical-theoretical version of
Whitman’s omnivorous approach, taking in a range of theories about genre and politics with
little regard for larger schools to which any theorist may be attached. To that end, Franco
Moretti’s deeply Hegelian approach to epic will be used in conjunction with Oppen’s work;
Derrida’s deconstructive notion of “participation without belonging,” a concept that applies to
both literary and political categories, will be applied to Cha’s work; and Northrop Frye’s
structuralist conceptions of romance and epic will inform the discussion of Notley’s poem. The
larger intent of these readings, as is likely apparent, is not to erect some larger and ostensibly
universal theory of genre, in general, or the epic and long poem, in particular, but to pick and
choose from an already expansive toolkit of existing theories, à la Deleuze, with the hopes of
finding an approach that can enhance our understanding of the ways in which the respective
works in question engage notions of genre and their various political implications.
While the individual or “local” readings of each poem in question roam somewhat freely
in search of adequate theories of genre, this study’s overriding approach—as the recurrent claims
of genre’s connections to politics may indicate—is more limited and determinant. It might be
said that most contemporary theories of genre are essentially materialist in their respective
approaches—adopting the idea that genres are inherently relational and interpretative categories
and rejecting any implicitly idealist conception of them as “eternal” or ahistorical categories that
would transcend their constitutive works—and this study will rely on conceptions of genre, such
as those put forward by Fredric Jameson and Raymond Williams, that maintain a distinctly

6
materialist and Marxist approach. Beyond these more general approaches, when discussing epic
as a distinct genre, this study will turn to Georg Lukács’ nearly century-old but still influential
formulations of epic and the novel in Theory of the Novel. This work, which predates Lukács’
embrace of Communism, is emphatic in its distaste for bourgeois European culture of the first
decades of the 20
th
century but can only be seen as Hegelian, rather than Marxist, in its
orientation. Although this study will make use of other theorists and critics, such Michael André
Bernstein and Charles Altieri, whose work is not explicitly allied with the Hegelian-Marxist
tradition, this tradition will predominate the initial discussion of genre, in general, and the epic
and long poem, in particular, that occurs in chapter one and lays the groundwork for later
analyses of individual works.
Following this initial exposition of conceptions of genre and their political implications,
however, this study will turn to theorists who operate outside this tradition. More specifically,
the theories of biopolitics formulated by Giorgio Agamben and, especially, Michel Foucault will
be examined with an intent to disclose the particular ways in which the poems analyzed in this
study engage with differing and sometimes highly nuanced conceptions of the individual and
larger social formations. As was the case with theories of genre, aspects of biopolitical theories
will be used selectively, to call out or clarify the political implications of elements of the poems
in question. As often as not, ancillary or supporting aspects of each thinker’s respective
formulations, such as Foucault’s notions of liberalism and the emergence the homo economicus
as the necessary preconditions of biopolitics and Agamben’s conceptions of “forms-of-life” that
might operate outside of what he posits as an originary split between zōē and bios, will be
applied to the poems under discussion.

7
While elements of Foucault’s wide-ranging theories will be introduced as they are
relevant to the poems, chapter two will analyze the Aristotelian foundation of the split between
zōē and bios that underwrites Agamben’s much used (and abused) notion of the homo sacer. This
analysis will reveal the inseparability of Agamben’s theories not only from the hierarchical
assumptions operative in Aristotle’s work, but also from the ancient philosopher’s deeply
teleological and organicist notion of man as the “political animal” whose existence is ratified by
his possession of logos. This notion of man as “political animal” is precisely the one, of course,
that Foucault will contend, in vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality, has been left behind by modern
political structures, which seek instead to manage “life itself” at the level of the individual body
and aggregated population. While opposed in the origins they posit, then, both Agamben and
Foucault can be seen to present the body as the basis for modern politics, and this dissertation
will consider the profound implications of this development, with a particular concern for the
ways in which notions of speech and the body are represented within the poems.
If biopolitical theory will be used to help read the poems in question, the poems will also
reflect back on the theory, calling out limitations inherent in it. These limitations involve the
inability of the theories, and particularly Foucault’s genealogy of the emergence of the modern
forms of governmentality, to account adequately for the colonialism that provided the material
basis for the economic and political transitions that mark modernity, which Cha’s work makes
apparent. Just as important, though, these poems can be seen as pushing the theories to their
logical ends, which is the reconfiguration of our understanding of “life itself” and the various
taxonomies by which it is organized and implicitly valued. Indeed, close readings of the poems
can force us to ask why the possession of logos still underwrites anthropocentric and deeply
instrumentalizing worldviews when it no longer constitutes the basis of political participation. If

8
all forms of life now constitute mere “bodies,” why are some bodies seen to be so valuable,
while others are only worth the amount their meat can fetch on the market? Such questions no
doubt push these poems to their limits, just as they themselves push the theories that are used to
clarify them. Nevertheless, in using the aesthetic, representational means at their disposal to
engage these key issues and force difficult questions upon us, these poems operate by means of a
method that can perhaps best be described as biopoetic. As my readings of each poem and the
concluding chapter suggest, in breaching the limits of biopolitical theory, these poems can be
seen as charting a movement toward a posthuman epic, one whose origins might well be found in
Whitman’s problematic attempts to embrace all forms of life.

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Chapter 1: Toward the Biopoetic Long Poem

A New Age of Anxiety
“What could be more arrière-garde,” writes Page duBois, “trailing behind, looking
backward, than an epic poem at the end of the twentieth century?” (86). DuBois’ question, which
opens her 2001 review of Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette, may be, in part, a rhetorical one
designed to pique a reader’s interest, but duBois uses this inquiry to highlight the qualities that
make Notley’s poem both wildly anachronistic and “a stunning intervention in a brutal present”
(95). As duBois notes, with its openly epic aspirations, Notley’s work is not merely
“unfashionable” but “un-post-, even pre-modern, arrière-garde epic poetry” (95). The degree to
which duBois contorts the English language in her attempt to register the flagrant nature of The
Descent of Alette signals, no doubt, her excitement about the book’s “allegorical, utopian call for
tyrannicide in the name of a postcapitalist, postpatriarchal future” (95). Her language may also,
however, be symptomatic of a larger breakdown in social and literary conventions that,
paradoxically, makes it more difficult to talk about a work that actually hews to a generic form
than one that doesn’t—or, more precisely, than one that develops its own motifs and refrains in
an “organic” or “fugal” fashion, as critics have long claimed for the Cantos, Paterson, “A” or
other foundational long poems of the 20
th
century.
Such difficulties are not confined, of course, to discussions of Notley’s brilliant attempt
at a feminist epic.
1
In an era in which the “prose poem” is fast becoming the norm, when literary
works that don’t aspire to the status of the “hybrid” run the risk of seeming outmoded or
conservative and online publishing offers seemingly limitless opportunities for new forms of
conceptual and formal experimentation, as well as the means for cataloguing experiments of

1
The viability of claims, such as duBois’, that Notley has written an epic will examined in the chapter dedicated to
The Descent of Alette.

10
years past, talking about genre seems a peculiar and largely thankless task.
2
Yet it is also a task
that continues, and that may need to continue, if readers hope to understand the full implications
of canonical as well as new or marginalized literary works. As Fredric Jameson noted more than
thirty years ago, well before the emergence of the phenomena listed above, “literary production
in modernity has ceaselessly and systematically undermined” the “notions of literary kinds” that
“literary criticism seems unable to do without completely” (Political Unconscious 106).
Such an assertion does not indicate, however, that Jameson sees no value in pursuing
discussions of genre. Value is seen to reside, particularly, in examinations of genres, such as
epic, that have fallen by the wayside or become difficult, if not impossible, to practice in a given
period: “the failure of a particular generic structure, such as epic, to reproduce itself not only
encourages a search for those substitute textual formations that appear in its wake, but more
particularly alerts us to the historical ground, no longer existent, in which the original structure
was meaningful” (Political Unconscious 146). While the novel is typically seen as the primary
form to follow and replace the epic, this study will focus on three mid-to-late 20
th
century long
poems, George Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous,” Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, and Notley’s

2
The description that the online journal Tarpaulin Sky offers about itself, replete with slash marks to indicate the
fluidity, if not redundancy, of the terms used to designate hybrid forms themselves, is emblematic of this larger
tendency toward the valorization of generic indeterminacy: “Tarpaulin Sky focuses on cross-genre / trans-genre /
hybrid forms as well as innovative poetry and prose.” It is worth pointing out, if only in passing, that this gesture
toward generic fluidity carries none of the political and ideological charge of similar gestures promulgated by the
Language poets in the 70s and 80s. If the pronouncements of these poets were at times reductive in their association
of discursive or generic subversion with political activism, the editors of Tarpaulin Sky take the type of eclectic but
apolitical stance inaugurated by the print journal Fence in the late 90s, which is now de rigeur for writers who seek
to experiment for experiment’s sake: “The journal is not allied with any one style or school or network of writers;
rather, we try to avoid some of the defects associated with dipping too often into the same literary gene pool, and the
diversity of our contributors is evidence of our eclectic interests.” (See Evans for an insightful critique of Fence.)
Such eclectic experimentalism, moreover, has its benefits within the world of institutionalized poetry: “Tarpaulin
Sky contributors have published numerous books and received numerous awards (the Glatstein Award, Fence Books
Alberta Prize, Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, Slope Editions Book Prize, Sawtooth Poetry Prize, National Poetry
Series, Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, Whiting Award, Iowa Poetry Prize) along with grants and fellowships from
the likes of NYFA, the MacDowell Colony, the Camargo Foundation, the Karolyi Foundation, and the NEA.” While
many poets undoubtedly remain committed to cross-genre work as a means of expressing, in Ron Silliman’s words,
“opposition to the normative or inherited practices of that literature which embodies the status quo” (132), it is fair
to say that generic indeterminacy, as part of a larger strain of depoliticized experimentalism, has entered the
mainstream of American poetic culture and may well represent both the status quo and its opposition.

11
The Descent of Alette, as works that seek out new forms and themes capable of addressing the
social and political exigencies of contemporary Western societies. The claims this study stakes
for these poems, moreover, will be largely based on an analysis of the shifting historical ground
to which Jameson believes the failure of a genre alerts us.
In particular, this study will analyze the ways in which these poets use the long poem to
move beyond the private or “interior” concerns typically associated with poetry, and lyric poetry
in particular, yet do so without seeking to reengage the types of pre-modern or ancient civic,
social, or mythic structures valorized, in different ways, in works by modernist forerunners such
as Pound, H.D., and Eliot.
3
Of special interest will be the specific ways in which the authors of
the long poems under discussion address biopolitical concerns, including bodily discipline, an
aggregated population, and what Foucault calls “state racism” to engage larger civic issues such
as imperialism and war, instrumental logic and economic liberalism, and the inclusion or
exclusion of individuals from the larger body politic. Though all of the poets under discussion
write in different, highly distinctive styles, by engaging biopolitical concerns to move the long
poem into the public realm of the postmodern world, all three poets develop an approach that
could be described as “biopoetic,” seeking to engage the subversive potentiality of the (poorly)

3
Because of the importance of The Cantos to later poets and critics, the significance of Pound’s turn to premodern
social structures will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter. While mythology is important to The Cantos,
especially the figures of Aphrodite and Circe, it is central to the long poems of Eliot and H.D. In Terry Eagleton’s
estimation, Eliot’s adaptation of fertility myths in The Waste Land is inseparable from his conservatism: “The crisis
of European society—global war, severe class-conflict, failing capitalist economies—might be resolved by turning
one’s back on history altogether and putting mythology in its place. Deep below finance capitalism lay the Fisher
King, potent images of birth, death and resurrection in which human beings might discover a common identity”
(41). As The Cantos make clear, however, the inclusion of history within the long poem is no guarantee that
“scandalous avant-garde techniques” won’t be “deployed for the most arrière-garde ends,” as Eagleton asserts of
Eliot’s disjunctive collage techniques (41). H.D.’s work represents, to some degree, an inversion of the dynamic
found in that of her male peers, deploying classically chiseled work in the service of a revisionary, rather than
reactionary, feminist appropriation of the Stesichorean and Euripidean version of the Helen story in Helen in Troy
and seeking to abstract timeless, mythological universals from the horror of the London fire bombings in Trilogy.
This drive toward the mythological and eternal, whether through the Helen story or the “alchemical” syntheses of
Greek and Egyptian figures in Trilogy, is precisely what limits her work, however, and effectively elides the
historical and material.

12
disciplined body and the animal, which, like the sovereign, in Derrida’s adaptation of the time-
honored formulation, stands outside the law. By virtue of this approach, moreover, all three poets
point toward a posthumanist horizon in which the terms and concepts, often formulated by
means of rigid binaries, that have characterized discussions of genre are effectively obviated in
the larger effort to diagnose and, at times, think beyond the anthropocentric logic that has long
underwritten both notions of epic totality or objectivity and lyric (or novelistic) subjectivity.
As this brief overview indicates, this study will not attempt to offer extensive
commentary about the state of late-20
th
century and contemporary poetry and poetics, in general,
or about that of the long poem, in particular. The field itself, even when limited to the “sub-
category” of the long poem, is far too expansive and unruly to allow such commentary, except at
the cost of generalization so great as to be of little use.
4
This field is also growing on what seems

4
A partial and highly subjective list of noteworthy English-language long poems from the past 50 years not
otherwise mentioned in this chapter would include such works as Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” and
Flow Chart, Notley’s Close to Me and Closer...(The Language of Heaven), Desamere, and Alma, or the Dead
Women, Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Drafts, Anne Waldman’s Iovis, Ron Silliman’s The Alphabet, Lyn Hejinian’s My
Life, Oaxata, and A Border Comedy, Carla Harryman’s The Words After Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories and
Jean-Paul Sartre, Hejinian and Harryman’s The Wide Road, Tom Raworth’s Ace, Derek Walcott’s Omeros, Gary
Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers Without End, Kenneth Koch’s When the Sun Tries To Go On and The Duplications
(to name just two), James Schuyler’s “The Morning of the Poem,” Bruce Andrew’s Lipservice, Harryette Mullen’s
Muse and Drudge, Bernadette Mayer’s Studying Hunger, Memory, and Midwinter Day, Ronald Johnson’s Ark,
James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover, Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger, Armand Schwerner’s The Tablets, Ammiel
Alcalay’s from the warring factions, George Stanley’s Vancouver, Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust Melvin Tolson’s
Harlem Gallery, and Basil Bunting’s “Briggflatts.” As this list indicates, I am primarily, but not exclusively,
interested in poetry that has emerged out of the New York, Objectivist, and Language strands of post-War American
poetry. If the field is expanded to include longer serial works or sequences of lyrics, as it perhaps should be, it would
also include Robert Duncan’s “Passages” and “The Structure of Rime,” much of Jack Spicer’s work, especially After
Lorca and The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether, Robin Blaser’s “Image-Nations”, Raworth’s Eternal Sections,
Stephen Rodefer’s Four Lectures, John Berryman’s Dream Songs, Theodore Roethke’s “The Far Field,” Rosmarie
Waldrop’s The Reproduction of Profiles and Reluctant Gravities (to name just two), Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s The
Heat Bird, Philip Whalen’s On Bear’s Head, Leslie Scalapino’s Way and That They Were At the Beach, Steve
Benson’s “Blue Books,” Jerry Estrin’s “Rome, a Mobile Home,” Diane Ward’s Imaginary Movie, John Taggart’s
Peace on Earth and When the Saints, Nathaniel Mackey’s Songs of the Andoumboulou and “Mu,” Michael Palmer’s
“Sun,” Notley’s Disobedience, Myung Mi Kim’s The Bounty and Commons, much of Ted Berrigan’s work,
especially The Sonnets and “Tambourine Life,” and much of Susan Howe’s work to date, especially that contained
in the Europe of Trusts, Singularities, and Peirce-Arrow. These lists, partial and problematic as they are—since
many of the long poems could be considered serial works and vice-versa—include primarily works by writers who
began publishing between the 1940s and 70s. A list of long poems or longer serial works by younger writers that
have appeared over the past 20 years, such as Rachel Levitsky’s Neighbor, Kevin Davies’ The Golden Age of
Paraphernalia and “Karnal Bunt,” Barbara Jane Reyes’ Poeta en San Francisco, Anselm Berrigan’s Zero Star

13
a weekly basis. Instead, this study will focus on three long poems, each distinctive in its style and
its thematic concerns, to explore the larger ramifications of the respective poets’ engagement
with political and biopolitical concerns as means of addressing issues that would typically be
seen as outside the purview of poetry, so often equated, in 20
th
century, with the solitary speaker
of lyric.
5
In the simplest sense, this study will ask how poets attempt to address concerns
typically seen as public or civic, rather than personal and private, in an age in which notions of
the public sphere and the social contract have been largely eroded by transnational capitalism
and its attendant philosophy of possessive individualism, which reaches an extreme with the
emergence of neoliberalism in the latter part of the 20
th
century and is perhaps best summed up
by Margaret Thatcher’s infamous proclamation that there is “no such thing as society, only
individual men and women” (cited in Harvey, Neoliberalism 23). If the poets discussed in this
study differ in their stylistic and thematic approaches, they are united in their attempt to address

Hotel, Gabriel Gudding’s Rhode Island Notebook, Juliana Spahr’s thisconnectionofeveryonewithlungs, Craig Santos
Perez’ From Unincorporated Territory, Lisa Robertson’s XEclogue, Debbie: An Epic and The Weather, several of
Rodrigo Toscano’s works, such as Platform and The Disparities, Bhanu Kapil Rider’s The Vertical Interrogation of
Strangers, Aaron Shurin’s Involuntary Lyrics, Laynie Browne’s Daily Sonnets, much of Rob Fitterman’s work,
especially the Metropolis books, and much of Caroline Bergvall’s work, would be considerably more extensive, as
seriality is, at this point, practically endemic to contemporary poetry. At the other end of the historical spectrum, this
list also omits many earlier yet still modern long poems that are highly significant and influential, from Whitman’s
“Song of Myself” to Yeat’s The Wanderings of Oisin, Hart Crane’s The Bridge, Reznikoff’s Testimony, Hugh
MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, Melvin Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic of Liberia, Robinson
Jeffers’ Roan Stallion and other poems, David Jones’ In Parenthesis and The Anathemata, Stevens’ “Notes Toward
a Supreme Fiction” and “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” Eliot’s Four Quartets, Auden’s The Age of Anxiety,
Ginsberg’s Howl and Kaddish, and Langston Hughes’ Montage of a Dream Deferred. A final caveat is that, with
numerous exceptions made for works by Canadian, English, and Irish poets that seem exceptionally influential in the
U.S., this list focuses on works by American poets.
5
In reading works of modern and contemporary poetry in the context of larger political and historical developments,
this study takes part in a larger undercurrent, if not trend, within American literary criticism that seeks to complicate
or reverse the assumption that poetry constitutes, in Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ critical summary, the “opposite of
society and its discourse” (8). Other noteworthy examples of criticism striving to countermand this assumption
would be Joshua Clover’s “Toward a Renewed Marxist Poetic,” which argues for “an explicitly social and political
understanding” of modern poetry (324), by virtue of its formal engagement with notions such as the shift “from
temporal to spatial logics” and reification in modernity (322), and Jasper Bernes’ “Bernadette Mayer and the
Capitalization of Everyday Life,” which reads Mayers’ work of early and mid-70s against the backdrop of the larger
transformation of the American economy from a system Harvey calls “embedded liberalism” to one marked by
modes of “flexible accumulation” (Harvey 11-12; 75-76). This study thus seeks to extend what DuPlessis describes
as “culturalist readings of poetry” that “struggle deeply and continuously against … institutionalized paradigms
concerning both the nature of poetry and its critical reception” into the realm of the biopolitical, the emergence of
which constitutes, for Foucault, a distinctive and momentous aspect of modernity in the West (Society 239-264).

14
broader, civic concerns not by renovating older notions of the polis or “the people” but by
expanding those notions beyond the anthropocentric boundaries that helped to motivate them,
thus moving the public sphere beyond the phusis/nomos divide and interrogating hegemonic
assumptions of human exceptionalism.
Although this study will examine prevalent notions of genre in the latter half of the 20
th

century in an attempt to conceptualize the significance of the poems under discussion, it will not
seek to contest the dominance of the novel—or the film, or massively multiplayer online role-
playing game, as the case may be—as the premier postmodern narrative genre. Rather, this study
will limit itself to asserting, in the words of Adorno, “that the novel was the literary form specific
to the bourgeois age” (“Position of the Narrator,” 30). While Adorno’s use of the past tense may
have been slightly premature, or a wistful attempt at the mimetic magic he relates to the artwork
in Aesthetic Theory,
6
this age has, in many ways, survived Adorno but may well be coming to a
close much sooner than most would have been guessed even twenty years ago. If so, the
historical ground Jameson speaks of may be shifting again—or shifting with more noticeable
force for residents of the developed North.
More specifically, the ongoing financial calamity instigated by the neoliberal
deregulation of Western financial systems, which David Harvey characterizes as part of “a whole
generation of sophisticated strategizing on the part of ruling elites to restore, enhance, or … to
construct an overwhelming class power” via the wholesale transfer of wealth from those in the
middle and lower classes (Neoliberalism 201), coupled with looming and massive environmental

6
Analyzing the implications of Kant’s “paradoxical formulation” of the purposive purposelessness of art, Adorno
asserts that “the course of this development was marked out by the origin of artworks in magic: They shared in a
praxis meant to influence nature, separated from this praxis in the early history of rationality, and renounced the
deception of any real influence” (Aesthetic Theory 139; hereafter AT). Critically, however, this origin inheres in
works of art, in Adorno’s view, regardless of any renunciations: “What is specific to artworks—their form—can
never, as the sedimentation of content [Inhalt] fully disown its origin” (AT 139). For a more detailed elaboration of
the relation of “magic and mimesis” (AT 329) and “aesthetic comportment” (AT 330), see the excursus on “Theories
on the Origin of Art” (AT 325-331).

15
disruptions and the social changes they will undoubtedly bring in tow, indicates that the
bourgeois era, ushered in by the French political and British industrial revolutions more 200
years ago, may be undergoing vast changes. While the political and social effects of the
economic damages wrought by neoliberalism are still unfolding, the increasing visibility of
environmental stress and catastrophe has led some scientists to advocate for the designation of
new geological era, the Anthropocene, to account for changes caused by the proliferation and
activity of humans (Kolbert np). As Hobsbawm asserts, with disarming clarity, in as an essay
from 2007’s Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism, the world underwent such a drastic shift
in the 20
th
century as to warrant proclamations of a new “historical phase,” if not geological era,
even if such claims must be guarded in light of earlier ones:
[T]he process of change in human life and society and the human impact on the global
environment, has been accelerating at a dizzying pace. It is now proceeding at a speed
which puts the future of both the human race and the natural environment at risk. When
the Berlin Wall fell, an incautious American announced the end of history, so I hesitate to
use a phrase so patently discredited. Nevertheless, in the middle of the last century we
entered a new phase in world history which has brought to an end history as we have
known it over the past ten thousand years—that is to say, since the invention of sedentary
agriculture. We do not know where we are going. (“War, Peace and Hegemony” 31)
While the future may seem distressingly uncertain, we do have some conception of the
past—even if it can be seen as more distressing, in the dread certainty of its catastrophe, than the
future. Although Adorno’s memorable formulation that no universal history leads “from
savagery to humanitarianism,” but one does lead “from the slingshot to the atom bomb” wisely
cautions against the temptation to search out, via the divining rod of culture, any type of larger

16
historical progress or evolution (Negative Dialectics 320), it nevertheless seems clear, as
Adorno’s own writings on Schoenberg indicate (New Music 29-34), that all forms of art have
their own histories, and ones that are inseparable from the larger world of slingshots and bombs.
If the novel was swept to the fore by large social forces associated with the dual bourgeois
revolutions (the British industrial and French political), such as increasing urbanization, higher
literacy rates, and the proliferation of printing technologies, as Ian Watt (Rise of the Novel 35-
59), Benedict Anderson (33-46), and others have discussed, perhaps new social formations or
classes—and with them, new forms of culture—will become prominent in the era following the
one shaped by, in Hobsbawm’s words, “the full explosive impact of … the ‘conquering
bourgeoisie’” (Age of Revolution 19).
Or, perhaps nothing will change substantially. Perhaps assessments such as Hobsbawm’s
or prognostications, such as Žižek’s, that the world, faced with the prospect of ecological
devastation from capitalist over-production and -consumption, as well as the emergence of more-
formalized varieties of global apartheid,
7
is rapidly approaching a crossroads in which both
developed and developing nations face two choices, a new form of communism or an
authoritarian version of capitalism, such as is now found in China (86-157), will be seen as
alarmist responses to a few bumps in the road to increasing prosperity and equality on a global
scale. Perhaps a miraculous clean energy source will be developed, a Kantian “perpetual peace”
will develop, and civil rights will be restored in the U.S. and extended by benevolent

7
Žižek lists four “antagonisms … sufficiently strong to prevent [contemporary capitalism’s] indefinite
reproduction” and thus necessitate a new or modified political-economic system (91). Along with “the looming
threat of an ecological catastrophe” and “the creation of new forms of apartheid, new Walls and slums,” he includes
“the inappropriateness of the notion of private property in relation to so-called ‘intellectual property’” and “the
socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially in biogenetics)” (91, italics in original).
He also notes that “a qualitative difference” exists between the possibility of new forms of apartheid and the other
antagonisms, but one wonders if he isn’t underestimating the magnitude of the ecological threat (91).

17
governments to all global citizens. Perhaps the “multitude” will be freed to network
spontaneously (Hardt and Negri).
As unlikely as I think this latter possibility may be, the prospect that late modern or
contemporary long poems, of any variety, will constitute a dominant or even widely-recognized
form in the future is even less likely. Such an admission does not mean, however, that these
poems shouldn’t have a larger role in cultural field of the future, or that the critiques of life under
liberal and neoliberal state forms and the possibilities of epistemological orientations not
dominated by instrumentalizing forms of anthropocentrism that they offer are somehow invalid
or frivolous. If anything, given the general unease and anxiety that underlies everything from
Žižek’s dire analyses to reactionary denials of the existence of climate change and divinely
inspired assertions of American exceptionalism on the political right, the critiques and visions
these poems offer are more necessary now than ever.
Precisely because these poems are so far removed from the from hegemonic forms of
American culture, moreover, it is possible to read them as cultural artifacts that “brush history
against the grain,” in Benjamin’s oft-cited yet still potent phrase (“Theses” 257), offering a
critique of that culture that runs little risk of being appropriated by it as commodities, whether in
the iconic “cart” at Amazon.com or via cinematic adaptations that go “straight to video.” Indeed,
if epic effectively functioned as the repository of “master narratives” for history’s winners, as
David Quint contends (15), the novel and film have long since taken its place as the narrative
forms that naturalize the central tenets of bourgeois ideology, in which both the possessive
individual and possessive nation state are seen as autonomous and natural, while nature itself is a
mere externality in accounting procedures. That these poems operate against the grain of this
history, both formally and thematically, will be a major aspect of this study’s argument.

18
Benjamin’s purposefully utopian proposition leaves readers of these long poems in a
bind, however, and one that is familiar to critics of Adorno, as the very marginalization of these
poems—their uselessness, in Adorno’s view—is precisely what allows subversive potential to
inhere in them.
8
The very process of actualizing that potential, however, would run the risk of
neutralizing it, effectively turning the poems themselves into commodities.
9
The solution to this
dilemma, of course, is a wide-scale transformation of the underlying logic of commodity system
itself, a move toward the “commons” so popular in contemporary theory, but whether any art
form itself can contribute to this type of transformation is a question that remains to be answered,
though the fate of the historical avant-gardes of the 20
th
century, swiftly incorporated into the
language of mainstream advertising and graphic design, does not offer a great deal of hope.
While this study will, if only implicitly, posit a reason for hope in the sheer existence of
these poems, it will not be so self-assured as to offer the solution to what seems the Sphinx’s
riddle of postmodern aesthetics by proposing how the long poems it discusses, or any cultural
work, for that matter, can function to bring about viable changes to the world of slingshots and
bombs. Instead, the goal will be to elucidate, in some detail, the ways in which these poems
operate against the grain of history, as moments of sanity forged against the logic of suburbs,
smart-bombs, and pork-belly futures. To begin to understand how these poems might be seen as
accomplishing this task—a proposition that is admittedly instrumentalizing but that can perhaps
be seen as a type of strategic essentialism in the realm of poetics—it is helpful to read them

8
Speaking of “the truth content of artworks … their social truth” in the age of late capitalism, Adorno contends that
“only what is useless can stand in for the stunted use value. Artworks are plenipotentiaries of things that are no
longer distorted by exchange, profits, and the false needs of a degraded humanity” (AT 227).
9
To be sure, Adorno himself is aware of this problem, which makes the condition of contemporary art “aporetic.”
He explains: “If art cedes its autonomy, it delivers itself over the machinations of the status quo; if art remains
strictly for-itself, it nonetheless submits to integration as one harmless domain among others” (AT 237). Speaking
more specifically about the limitations and dangers of success within the field of culture proper, he comments,
“Works are usually critical in the era in which they appear; later they are neutralized, not least because of changed
social relations. Neutralization is the price of aesthetic autonomy. However, once artworks are entombed in the
pantheon of cultural commodities, they themselves—their truth content—are also damaged” (AT 228-229).

19
against Jameson’s “historical ground” of both the modernist long poem, which constitutes the
clearest progenitor of these works, and the epic and novel, against which the modernist long
poem—and, just as important, the theories that sought to explicate it—took shape.
Because genre itself is a particularly vexed conception in the critical and theoretical
postmodern landscape, with some critics denying its validity all together, while others seek to
create new categories for hybrid works, it may be helpful to provide a brief overview of several
prominent and relevant conceptions of genre in modernity, before moving on, in the next
chapter, to discuss the political and biopolitical implications of key concepts, such as totality and
individuality, that arise in this overview. Such an overview will not only seek to highlight and
clarify aspects of criticism of the modern long poem qua long poem, but also to call out critical
elements necessary to understanding the ways in which the long poems under discussion provide
a significant point of departure from the modernist works that preceded them. Because genre
theory, like all forms of literary criticism and literary works themselves, does not operate in a
historical or social vacuum, the social and political implications of critical understandings of
genre will also be emphasized, as they are by each of the critics—Jameson, Raymond Williams,
and Jacques Rancière—whose work will be discussed.
Genre Trouble
That works such as the Cantos and Paterson, the masterpieces of the American
Modernist fathers against which Notley is rebelling in The Descent of Alette, departed from not
only generic conventions but also the typical conventions of their medium, freely mixing free
verse and prose—some of the latter taken from found text—is well-known. These developments,
moreover, aren’t unique to poetry but are representative of all the literary and visual arts with the
advent of modernism. As a result, genres and media blur together, especially in the latter part of

20
the 20
th
century, with one of the most significant long poems of that era, John Ashbery’s Three
Poems (1972), composed almost entirely of ornate but finely calibrated and, at times,
metaphysical prose and numerous other poets, such as Ron Silliman and Rosmarie Waldrop, to
name two prominent experimentalists of the 70s and 80s, writing extended works in non-
narrative prose as well.
While identifying generic categories for works may be of little importance, in and of
itself, these departures from convention have caused considerable difficulties for critics, as not
merely generic categories but even seemingly basic descriptive terms such as “lyric” and
“narrative” have become less than self-evident.
10
In the context of poetry, for example, a critic
such as Charles Altieri could assert, in a well-known 1978 essay, that “the most distinctive
feature of the modernist long poem is the desire to achieve epic breadth by relying on structural

10
“Narrative” and “lyric” are frequently seen as two of the three “modes” or “universals” of discourse, with “drama”
being the third. Extrapolated from Aristotle’s discussion of types of mimesis in the Poetics (1448a), these modes are
often viewed as overarching, universal categories from which genres themselves are constituted. As Michael
McKeon notes in Theory of the Novel, “these three modes are basic in the sense that they purport to cover the range
of logical possibility: for the poet may speak in a single voice [lyric], or represent two or more voices in dialogue
[drama], or alternate between these two modes [narrative]. If genres are historical, modes are transhistorical. Genres
change; modes do not” (1-2). Genette is right to contest the basis of this tripartite division in Aristotle’s examination
of poetic types in the Poetics and to contend that Aristotle’s “system did not and by definition could not assign any
place to lyric poetry” because of its almost exclusive interest in poetry as a mimetic representation of actions (21).
He locates a common source of this misreading in early modern texts that seek to find a place for lyric by “deriving
from a fairly marginal stylistic comment a tripartition of the poetic genres into dithyramb, epic, and drama” (33).
Then, these commentators “interpre[t] dithyramb as an example of the lyric genre, which allows one to attribute to
the Poetics a triad that neither Plato nor Aristotle had ever considered” (33). Genette does not, however, contest the
validity of modes themselves, as derived from Aristotle, but rather, the way in which they have been applied to
overarching generic categories: “The fallacious attribution projects the privilege of naturalness that inheres
legitimately in the three modes pure narration/mixed narration/dramatic narration (‘there are and there can be only
three ways of representing actions in language,’ etc.) onto a triad of genres, or archigenres, lyricism/epic/drama
(‘there are and there can be only three basic poetic outlooks,’ etc.)” (70, italics in original). While it may be a
worthwhile endeavor to point out this “error” and thus denaturalize assumptions that may rely on Aristotle for
ahistorical or universal claims about genre (2), Genette’s correction lends little to our understanding of these modes.
After detailing the history of this error, moreover, he contends that the Aristotelian exclusion of genres typically
seen as lyric is “no longer justifiable” (74), so the reader is right back where she began, with a universal tripartite
division of modes that map onto “archigenres,” only one that has a partial, rather than complete, basis in Aristotle.
For a more helpful reading of the presentation of modes in the Poetics that takes account of the “variety of …
reasons” that 19
th
and 20
th
century philologists have “offered for Ar.’s omission” (280 n. 44) and includes a helpful
discussion of the “evaluative aspect” operative in Aristotle’s view that “poetic genres ….are parts of a single,
evolving art” (279) as a possible, partial explanation for the devaluation of non-mimetic verse forms in the
Aristotelian hierarchy, see Halliwell, 276-285.

21
principles inherent in lyric rather than narrative modes” (“Motives in Metaphor” 653). In
accordance with this claim, Rosenthal and Gall contended in their 1983 volume The Modern
Poetic Sequence that most long poems of the 20
th
century are in actuality sequences “of mainly
lyric poems and passages” (9). On the other hand, another well-known critic, Michael André
Bernstein, claimed in 1980 that three of the best-known modernist long poems, the Cantos,
Paterson, and The Maximus Poems, constitute “modern verse epics” that attempt to tell “the tale
of tribe.” In Bernstein’s view, the turn to “lyric” in each of the three poems can only be
construed as a failure, a betrayal of the poem’s original intent: “Undeniably, the most typical
gesture of the modern verse epic is a stubborn attempt to tell the tale of the tribe until the
pressures of an indifferent and ethically ‘incoherent’ tribe compel a withdrawal back into the
private accents of a lyric or verse meditation” (268).
Moreover, as Marjorie Perloff points out, the signal phrase (and title) of Bernstein’s
book, “the tale of the tribe,” indicates implicitly that these poems rely on narrative: “by
definition, the ‘tale of the tribe’ means narrative” (“Postmodernism and the Impasse” 182).
Brian McHale also asserts, in an article from 2000, that narrative is a critical component of
modernist long poems. McHale believes, however, that it was “submerged” as a result of the
inderdictions of early Modernist practice, heavily invested in the epigrammatic image as a
bulwark against what Pound called the “mushy technique” of Symbolist and Victorian poetries
(Gaudier-Brzeska 97), but increasingly interested, especially after World War I, in more cultural
capital than a collection of pithy images could provide. “Modernism’s legacy, then,” McHale
writes, “amounts to a classic double bind: you must write long poems; but you must not narrate,
hence, in effect, you must not write long poems” (251). Because of this legacy, modernist poets
and many of their successors have resorted, out of necessity, to the collage techniques that

22
characterize The Cantos, The Waste Land, and Paterson. The job then falls to the critic to
reconstitute the narrative submerged within the poet’s collaged fragments (251-252).
Regardless of a reader’s opinion about these claims, that prominent critics have come to
such different conclusions about whether modernist “long poems” rely primarily on lyric or
narrative is noteworthy—and speaks to the poverty of the critical terminology itself. Without
meter or rhyme, or some other formal stricture to regulate the genre, and also without any civic
or religious performance context of the sort that distinguished ancient epic from lyric and elegiac
forms, the critic is left, not so much to her own devices, as to the devices of the poems, often
“improvised,” as Norman Wacker points out, “upon the forms of received tradition” (131).
Trying to abstract generic traits from these improvisations, the critic’s task is perhaps best
summed up by Williams’ ars poetica in the Preface to the first book of Paterson: “to make a
start, / out of particulars /and make them general, rolling / up the sum, by defective means” (3).
The generic designation the “long poem” can be seen as a direct outgrowth of the
difficulties encountered with this task. While the term may not typically provoke disagreement, it
seems the result of critical concession rather than consensus. As Joseph Conte notes, this term
“tries not to offend the interested parties, but in doing so, suits virtually no one” (“Seriality” 35).
This inability to suit “interested parties” can be seen as a gauge of the confusion surrounding the
works it designates, the variety of which now outstrips even this most basic of designations.
Discussing the innovations that have occurred in the 20
th
century and the wide variety of long
collage, prose, and serial poems that now exist, Christopher MacGowan admits that “such
diversity has sometimes made difficult the identification of what is a long poem” (292, italics in
original). That MacGowan’s text—an introductory analysis of canonical works—doesn’t even
mention, let alone attempt to categorize, more recent “conceptual” transcriptions of newspapers,

23
such as Kenneth Goldsmith’s Day, or “newlipian” sequences such as Christian Bök’s Eunoia,
only underscores the accuracy of his claim.
Modernity and the Fate of Genre
Such assertions should not be seen, of course, to constitute any kind of a lamentation for
a lost state of generic or critical plenitude and certainty. If anything, the impoverishment of
critical terminology for poetry indicates that poetry has kept up with other genres and media (and
vice versa, one supposes, if they can no longer really be distinguished). As Fredric Jameson
argued more than thirty years ago, at approximately the same time Altieri’s and Bernstein’s
respective works were appearing, a long series of developments has worked to undermine these
conventions:
the emancipation of the ‘realistic novel’ from its generic restrictions . . . the emergence,
first of modernism, with its Joycean or Mallermean ideal of a single Book of the world,
then of the postmodern aesthetic of the text or écriture, of ‘textual productivity’ or
schizophrenic writing—all seem rigorously to exclude traditional notions of literary
kinds, or of systems of the fine arts, as much by their practice as by their theory.
(Political Unconscious 106)
In Jameson’s view, of course, these developments of modernism are tied directly to the larger
economic developments of modernity, which destroy older forms of patronage and expose the
artist to the forces of the broader economy. “The gradual penetration of a market system and a
money economy,” he writes, leads to “the elimination of an institutionalized social status for the
cultural producer and the opening of the work of art itself to commodification” (Political
Unconscious 107). Because of these socio-economic processes, in Jameson’s formulation, “the
older generic specifications are transformed into a brand-name system against which any

24
authentic artistic expression must necessarily struggle” (Political Unconscious 107). While one
may quibble with the high-modernist overtones of Jameson’s reference to “authentic artistic
expression,” his larger account resonates with those of Raymond Williams and Jacques Rancière,
both of whom link changes in generic category in modernity—and the viability of genre itself, in
the terms inherited from premodern societies—with larger social and political developments
associated with modernity and the emergence of industrial capitalism.
For Rancière, the advent of modernity signals the demise of the “representative regime of
images,” in which a mimetic code, shared by both producers of art works and their audience,
allowed works to be assessed by their fidelity to the most generically appropriate forms and
styles (Discontents 6-7).
11
For example, in this system, epic, as the highest poetic genre, would
address the deeds of heroes and kings in an appropriately lofty style recognizable to both poets
and their readers.
12
The larger system itself, moreover, is analogous with “a fully hierarchical

11
In Rancière’s system, which is indebted to the Hegelian notion of “forms of art,” the “ethical regime of images”
precedes the “representative regime of images,’’ which is, in turn, followed by the “aesthetic regime.” The “ethical
regime” is characterized by the Platonic conception of mimesis and the “representative regime” by the Aristotelian.
The “aesthetic regime” is characterized by its freedom from either of these conceptions. In the first regime, mimesis
is essentially subsumed by its relation to “the truth,” or the accuracy with which it represents objects in the world
and its imagined (moral or ethical) effects on viewers or listeners. As a result, art does not “individualiz[e] itself as
such” in this regime (Politics 21). Perhaps most important, for Rancière, this regime reinforces “the distribution of
the city’s occupations” and thus its social hierarchy (Politics 21). In the second regime, art is extricated from “the
legislative reign of truth over discourse and images” and exists as “art,” within a hierarchical set of expectations: “It
develops into forms of normativity that define the conditions according to which imitations can be recognized as
exclusively belonging to an art and assessed, within this framework, as good or bad, adequate or inadequate:
partitions between the representable and the unrepresentable; the distinction between genres according to what is
represented; principles for adapting forms of expression to genres and thus to subject matter represented. …”
(Politics 21-22). These “forms of normativity” will collapse in the “aesthetic regime,” which “asserts the absolute
singularity of art” (Politics 23). It is worth noting that in this system, the first regime is essentially pre-generic. Art
as such does not exist as such, since works are fully integrated within civic or religious functions; as result, genre
can best be determined by performance context and is applied retroactively, once those very contexts have fallen
away. The final regime is emphatically post-generic, as it “strictly identifies art in the singular and frees it from any
specific rule, from any hierarchy of the arts, subject matter, and genres” (Politics 23). Genre thus only exists in the
second regime, of which it is a key component. Rancière doesn’t provide firm dates for these regimes, but the first
would seem to run from Homer until the Hellenistic or Roman period and the second until advent of modernism,
usually associated, in literary studies, with Baudelaire and Flaubert.
12
It should be noted that Rancière’s assertions that generic standards change in the early modern period, while
emphatic, are by no means novel. In his seminal work from 1957, The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt contends that,
before the emergence of the novel in the early 18
th
century, “previous literary forms had reflected the general
tendency of their cultures to make conformity to traditional practice the major test of truth: the plots of classical and

25
vision of the community” (Politics 22). Such a vision dominated the premodern “social
imaginary,” in Charles Taylor’s terms, and underwrote the deeply naturalized ideological
framework of “organic” societies, in which “hierarchical differentiation itself [was] seen as the
proper order of things. It was part of the nature or form of society” (Taylor 95).
When popular sovereignty and liberalism eclipse this vision, however, the “aesthetic
regime,” which “identifies art in the singular and frees it from any specific rule, from any
hierarchy of the arts, subject matter, and genres” begins to predominate (Rancière, Politics 23).
In liberating art from older hierarchical systems and classificatory schema, not only does the
aesthetic regime “asser[t] the absolute singularity of art,” but it also “destroys any pragmatic
criterion for isolating this singularity” (Politics 23). Rancière will assert, via an uncritical reading
of Kantian disinterest and Schillerian “free play,” that this regime “founds a new art of living, a
new form of life-in-common” (Discontents 30).
13
The larger movement of his system, however,
from a regime of generic specificity that both mirrors social hierarchy and is supported by it,
within a system of patronage, to one in which the radical singularity of individual art works is

renaissance epic, for example, were based on past history or fable, and the merits of the author’s treatment were
judged largely according to a view of literary decorum derived from the accepted models of the genre” (13). While
Watt’s approach overlaps with the respective orientations of Rancière, Williams, and Jameson, each critic
foregrounds a different political or philosophical valence of the changes that occur to conceptions of genre in the
modern period. Whereas Rancière typically abstracts the sociopolitical significance of these historical developments
through readings that emphasize the ways in which art forms operating within the generic schema of any given
period affect the “distribution of the sensible,” implicitly shaping a viewer’s or reader’s understanding of the ways
in which resources and tasks are allocated within a society, Watt emphasizes their epistemological implications,
charting the move from a widespread reliance among writers on inherited forms and stock or mythological themes
that presume an acceptance of the notion of a static and unchanging human nature to the novel’s attempt to record
and foreground unique experiences of individuals and thus “embody the individual’s apprehension of reality as
freely as the method of Descartes and Locke allowed their thought to spring from the immediate facts of
consciousness” (15). Williams and Jameson, of course, foreground the materialist underpinnings of these changes,
with Williams comparing changes in conceptions of genre to broader understandings of class status and Jameson
emphasizing the effect of commodification on the arts with the emergence of capitalism and economic liberalism.
13
This apparently utopian assertion is surprising, especially in relation to foundational aesthetic precepts formulated
more than 200 years ago and often seen to have less than emancipatory effects. For a critique that reads the
disinterest required by Kantian and Schillerian aesthetics as an attempt to universalize the particular interests of the
emergent bourgeoisie and to establish “nothing less than the monopoly of humanity” (490, italics in original), see
Bourdieu, 485-500. For a more extended critique that asserts that aesthetic culture founded on disinterest “represents
… the very form of bourgeois ideology” and “allows politics to take place as if material conditions were a matter of
indifference” (7, 15), thereby perpetuating inequality, see Lloyd and Thomas, 1-30.

26
valorized within a pluralistic society that, on the surface, at least, is not structured by rigid
hierarchies of birth right and inherited privilege, supports the notion that genre itself is
complicated, almost to the point of incomprehensibility, with the advent of modernity and the
breakdown of social structures that predominated in the ancien regime.
The emergence of “aesthetics” itself, as a distinct philosophical undertaking in
modernity, underscores these changes: “Aesthetics is the thought of the new disorder. This
disorder does not only imply that the hierarchy of subjects and of publics becomes blurred. It
implies that artworks no longer refer to those who commissioned them, to those whose image
established the grandeur they celebrated” (Rancière, Discontents 13). Along with the end of a
“hierarchy of subjects,” this disorder also eventually entails, with the development of
contemporary artistic and literary practices, a loss of rigidity and differentiation within and
among various art forms and genres, all of which move “towards a despecificiation of the
instruments, materials and apparatuses specific to different arts” (Rancière, Discontents 22). This
dual movement of disorder, away from the hierarchy and prescribed specificity within both the
content of art and the means of its production, establishes the foundation for Rancière’s
“aesthetic regime,” in which the singularity of individual art works, operating outside generic
norms, is emphasized. While Rancière’s system may, indeed, accurately characterize the
development of many modernist and postmodernist artistic and literary practices, it is worth
noting that the emergence of art’s radical singularity, outside of rigid, prescriptive generic norms
and formulas, occurs not only during a time of art’s commodification, as Jameson points out, but
also in an era of economic liberalism (and, eventually, neoliberalism) that valorizes the creative
capabilities of the individual “entrepreneur.”
14
This emphasis on the (allegedly) singular creative

14
Speaking of New York when the city was subjected to a series of neoliberal reforms in the late 1970s and 1980s,
David Harvey notes, “artistic freedom and artistic license, promoted by the city’s powerful cultural institutions led,

27
work in a society of (allegedly) singular creative individuals echoes the analogies found between
premodern social systems and rigid, regulatory generic structures.
Raymond Williams’ view of the historical complication of generic systems would bolster
the legitimacy of such a comparison. For Williams, the breakdown of generic categories occurs
with the development, in Romanticism, of the theories of individual creativity and genius. This
development can be compared directly, moreover, “with the defeat and replacement of a social
theory of estates, with fixed rules and functions, by a social theory of self-realization, individual
development, and the mobility of primary forces” (Marxism 181), a characterization that isolates
precisely the emergence of the dominant tenets of economic liberalism. The larger
transformation, however, doesn’t simply end with the valorization of the individual creator and
his singular work; instead, both are partially recuperated by new organizational schema, with
“class replacing estate and order in uneven and complex ways” and “new kinds of grouping and
classification” emerging in the literary and artistic fields (Marxism 181; italics in original). With
these new modes of grouping and classification, however, “genre and kind los[e] their
neoclassical abstraction and generality, and los[e] also their senses of specific regulation”
(Marxism 181), leaving the broader category of form to replace genre in literary theory (Marxism
186).
For Williams, forms are not only less specific and rule-based, or regulatory, than genres,
but they arise from material interactions of readers and writers in any given period and locale—
from the trials and errors of expression and comprehension—rather than from critical
abstractions or idealizations based on a small selection of canonical works, as is the case with

in effect, to the neoliberalization of culture. ‘Delirious New York’ (to use Rem Koolhaus’ memorable phrase) erased
the collective memory of democratic New York” (Neoliberalism 47). Although Harvey’s assessment may be more
reflective of American than Continental experience, its basic premise serves as a powerful corrective to Rancière’s
formulations of the aesthetic regime, which consistently fail to take into account the potential effects of both cultural
institutions and social and economic policies on artists and their works.

28
neo-classical genre theory (Marxism 187). This movement away from abstract notions of generic
formalism, or genre theory, implicitly predicated on idealistic notion of perfect (or Platonic)
forms and toward a model of form as a “common property” (Marxism 187) based on social (and
always already, for Williams, material) processes runs the risk, in Williams’ own estimation, of
falling prey to a “rootless but also a reckless empiricism” (Marxism 182).
15
Such risk may be
acceptable, however, given the proliferation of modern literary activity that doesn’t conform to
older generic models, and Williams argues that the model of literary forms avoids the tendency
of neo-classical theory to “hypostatize history” as well as the tendency of Romantic theorists to
“fail to recognize, within their stress on uniqueness, the quite general forms that emerge” from
literary activity (Marxism 187).
Forms are thus considerably broader and more flexible than traditional genres but also
capable of recognizing commonalities between works within a shared discursive sphere, rather
than holding them up as sheer singularities. Indeed, it is the commonalities shared by literary
works, even ones that first appear to be wholly singular, that allow them to be—or to go through
a process of becoming—legible in a community of readers and writers.
16
“As in the case of
language,” Williams writes, “new formal possibilities, which are inherently possibilities of a
newly shared perception, recognition, and consciousness, are offered, tested, and in many but not
all cases accepted. It is indeed commonplace to observe of this type that later generations find no

15
Certainly, on a more specific level, Brian McHale’s assertion that discrete subcategories exist within the larger
rubric of the long poem would seem to exemplify Williams’ notion that new kinds of grouping and classification
spring up around a more generalized form (“the collage poem assembled from imagistic fragments,” “the
discontinuous lyric sequence or cycle . . . subsequently updated in de-centered serial poems of the postmodernists,”
“ruminative verse essays,” and “certain postmodern revivals of the obsolete long poem genre of the georgic”) (251).
16
Wai Chee Dimock presents a conception of genre that has affinities with Williams’ notion of form: “Genres have
solid names, ontologized names. What these names designate, though, is not taxonomic classes of equal solidity but
fields at once emerging and ephemeral, defined over and over again by new entries that are still being produced.
They function as a ‘horizon of expectations’ … but that horizon becomes real only when there happen to be texts
that exemplify it” (1379). Her invocation of Jauss’ signal phrase calls out the element of reader-response theory
operative in Williams’ formulation, but the value in Williams’ approach resides not just in his inclusion of the reader
in the process of determining forms, but in his insistence on distinguishing between form, as a more open-ended
process, and genre, as a regulative system, on the basis of historical and political shifts that transcend the literary.

29
difficulty with a form, now shared, that was once virtually inaccessible and indeed widely seen
as formless” (Marxism 189). A new form, in Williams’ conception, thus constitutes a type of
metalanguage that either gains a degree of acceptance among some readers, who become
increasingly adept at understanding its nuances—no doubt encouraging writers to explore new or
different variations and combinations of its constituent elements, and thus increasing the form’s
visibility—or fades into the annals of literary history, mimicking the fate of the so many natural
languages and dialects.
The notion of a more capacious but still legible form emerging to replace the regulatory
capacity of genre can be seen in development of the long poem—and, particularly, the collage-
based long poem as practiced by Pound and Williams—as an attempt at a modern version of
epic. As a broader form, rather than a genre tied to specific regulatory functions—such as meter
and prosody or lofty subject matter and martial exploits—the long poem can both distinguish
itself from the shorter lyric (also a form untethered by specific generic regulations) and the
novel, the open-ended form par excellence. If this account conceptualizes the emergence of the
long poem in the literary realm, and perhaps helps to explain some of the confusion surrounding
critical terminology such as “lyric” and narrative” in relation to the long poem, as these
discursive modes can be deployed in varying degrees by works within the larger form, without
either mode becoming dominant or regulatory, it doesn’t, however, adequately conceptualize the
differently nuanced but nonetheless powerful correspondences that Jameson, Rancière, and
Williams all find between political, economic, and social developments and changes undergone
by literary generic systems over the past few centuries. A desire to see the long poem as relevant
to these broader social and political developments is readily apparent, however, in the theories
put forth by both Bernstein and Altieri. Significantly, both envision the chosen mode in which

30
they see the long poem operating—the implicitly narrative “tale of the tribe” for Bernstein and
the lyric for Altieri—as allowing the poet to attempt to recuperate aspects of the premodern,
“organic” social structures lost with the development of modernity.
The Dialectic of Lyric
For Bernstein, this desire is inscribed in the title of his book, The Tale of the Tribe, which
clearly invokes a notion of national coherence in an era of plurality, in which the modern state
form has emerged to encompass and subsume multiple “tribes,” each with its own language and
heritage.
17
As many commentators have noted, however, the paradox of Pound’s work is that, in
telling this tale, he includes numerous languages, both classical and modern, Western and
Eastern, and largely avoids conventional narrative techniques in favor of collaged material from
a wide of array of sources, both historical and contemporary. As a result of this linguistic and
temporal heterogeneity, Pound’s “tribe,” in Bill Freind’s words, “spans the globe and more than
two millennia” (552).
18

While Pound’s work clearly transcends national and historical boundaries, the notion that
he aspires to present a tale of the tribe perhaps needs to be modified further, as Pound is never
really engaging with the “creation myth” of national-ethnic group, but merely extracting
“exempla” from different cultures to convey his beliefs about the proper order of society, which

17
Bernstein takes his title directly from Pound, of course, who takes it from Kipling and uses it to characterize the
Cantos in the Guide to Kulchur: “There is no mystery about the Cantos, they are the tale of the tribe—give Rudyard
[Kipling] credit for the use of his term” (194, cited in Bernstein 7).
18
Though Pound’s work certainly contains an abundance of cultural references and may be distinctive in its
emphasis, in the later Cantos, on historical Chinese materials, Freind’s assessment of the work’s “global” scope
overlooks the cultural biases implicit in the work, which includes little or no material from Africa, South Asia, and
Central and South America, or what is now known as the Global South. Pound’s modernism is thus distinguished
from that of Picasso or Tzara, both of whom sought to incorporate aspects of the “primitive” into their work.
Extending Franco Moretti’s reading of the Waste Land, which points out that Pound’s editorial interventions did
away with an opening reference to Africa, via Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, one could say that the Cantos, for all
their anti-semiticism and Fascist sentiment, aspire to the “rhetoric of innocence” that Moretti finds in the Waste
Land, by maintaining an approach to cultural history that appears cosmopolitan but conveniently elides references to
territories strongly marked by the geopolitical realities of imperialism (54).

31
typically replicates the rigid hierarchies found in premodern societies.
19
In his use of formal
modernist techniques, moreover, such as the ideogrammic method, which seeks to isolate and
juxtapose key phrases and concepts in the poem, to present these exempla, Pound creates the
type of radically singular work that Rancière invokes as characteristic of the “aesthetic regime,”
but one in service of a vision that is universalizing and regressive, founded on such notions as
benevolent artistic patronage, as embodied by Malatesta, an ethical, “organic” society, as
presented in Confucian precepts, and Aristotelean economics, which can be seen as the origin of
his condemnation of usury (Parker 105-107).
20
Essentially, Pound seeks to abstract the “tale of
the tribe” from historical and cultural particulars—his “luminous details,” collaged together—
and implicitly asks the reader to engage in a task similar to the one that McHale believes must be
undertaken by critics of the modernist long poem.
Although the form of the Cantos may require the reader to discern the connections
between the poem’s linguistic motifs and draw out their larger significance, effectively forcing
her to learn a metalanguage of sorts, just as Williams’ notion of the literary form describes, the
detached, impersonal tone that collage imparts is precisely what allows Pound to assert that he is,
in fact, telling the tale of the tribe—rather than a more circumscribed, personal tale. While Pound
will famously assert, in Canto CXVI, that he is “not a demigod” and “cannot make it cohere”

19
As Bernstein notes, “a distinctly nostalgic conservatism … marks Pound’s attitudes toward history and
government. Much like Edward Gibbon, Pound seems to long for ‘a state in which a benevolent prince or oligarchy
protected and defended a majority that did not matter much’” (71). Freind comments, in a similar vein, that
“Pound’s belief in the importance of the dynamic and insightful leader relies on the Confucian emphasis on duty and
on a social order founded on hierarchies and strong leadership that stems from personal rectitude and insight” (553).
20
Parker writes: “The basic principles of Pound’s economic theories derive almost without exception from
Aristotle’s classic treatment on government, the Politics—one of the few texts with which Pound ‘would conclude
the compulsory studies of every university student’. …” In Chapters 8 and 9 of the Politics, Aristotle differentiates
between antithetical forms of exchange: ‘economics’ as such (oikonomikē), described as ‘natural,’ ‘original’ and
‘proper’; and ‘wealth-getting’ (chrēmatistikē), defined as ‘artificial,’ ‘secondary’ and ‘improper’” (105). Usury,
which grows out of “chrematistics,” is condemned explicitly by Aristotle: “Usury is most reasonably hated, because
it makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural object of it” (Politics, 1258b, cited in Parker, 105).
Pound inveighs repeatedly against usury in The Cantos, particularly in Canto 45, where he boldly pronounces it
“CONTRA NATURAM” (230). Pound is, of course, also infamous for adding anti-Semitism to his readings of
Aristotle and coining the term “Jewsury” in his Italian radio broadcasts (Speaking 254).

32
(810)—or weld his particulars into the overarching tale he desires—Bernstein locates the poem’s
failure much earlier, in the poet’s reversion to personal experience, rather than collaged,
transhistorical exempla, in The Pisan Cantos. Composed during and after Pound’s imprisonment
at the end of World War II, these cantos are more palatable to some readers precisely because of
their turn to a more “personal” voice, one often imagined to be grieving for the poet’s personal
shortcomings, rather than the fall of Mussolini (“the twice crucified”) (Cantos 439).
Bernstein asserts, however, that “the foregrounding of [Pound’s] private situation is
attained only at the cost of compromising The Cantos’ epic ambitions” (180). These ambitions
are compromised because once the poem presents “the experiences of an individual’s unique
sensibility—it no longer pretends to function as a spokesman for values acknowledged as part of
the entire community’s heritage” (180). Bernstein doesn’t address the possibility that some
members of the community may not wish to have Pound’s deeply conservative and, at times,
egregiously offensive poem serve as the mouthpiece for their values, but concludes with a
somewhat wistful summation of the situation that Pound, as a modern artist, faced in attempting
to write an epic: “I suppose that what distinguishes a modern verse epic from its classical
predecessors is the necessity, in a society no longer unified by a single, generally accepted code
of values, of justifying its argument by the direct appeal of the author’s own experiences and
emotions” (180; italics in original). With this turn to the poet’s “private situation,” the epic
collapses—not into multiple particulars that Pound extracted as “exempla” for society—but into
the non-universalizable particularities of the poet’s unique situation. In other words, it collapses
into lyric, into “the private accents of a lyric or verse meditation,” a fate shared by all the modern
verse epics Bernstein treats in The Tale of Tribe (268).

33
While other critics and poets may see the entire Cantos as indelibly marked by Pound’s
personality—or driven through “by the beak of his ego,” in Charles Olson’s words (“Mayan
Letters” 81)—and perhaps more of a product of his “unique sensibility” than Bernstein would
contend, Bernstein’s configuration of lyric as a mode of privacy that cannot have significance for
the larger “tribe” is important. Not only does it establish a binary that is perhaps too simplistic,
but it also runs directly contrary to the claims made for lyric by Altieri. In Altieri’s view, lyric
represents not a necessary divorce from—but a privileged space of—social relevance. More
specifically, Altieri contends that lyric allows a poet a mode of resistance against the
instrumentalizing modes of post-Enlightenment thought, or “what [Wallace] Stevens called ‘the
pressure of reality’” (656). This type of thought, which Altieri calls “lucidity” or “lucid self-
consciousness,” refers broadly to the emergence of scientific rationality not based on
“teleological thinking,” or any a priori metaphysical systems, and the development of a critical
stance toward “any idealistic claim or self-presentation” (656).
21

Altieri’s conception of lyric, then, resonates with Adorno’s presentation of it, in “Lyric
Poetry and Society,” as the last bastion of modern subjectivity against the depredations of
capital, acting as “a form of reaction against the reification of the world, against the spread of the
wares of commerce over people which has been spreading since the beginning of the modern
era” (215). Altieri’s language is, admittedly, less politicized, but still far-reaching in its claims:
“Lyricism is the means for preserving in secular forms the variety of predicates about the human
person which gives him dignity or depth in religious or ‘organic’ cultures” (656). Presumably,
these “predicates about the human” are what a poet would seek to convey, in Bernstein’s

21
One could contend that, in Altieri’s system, Pound is attempting to create a universalizing “tale of the tribe” but
without relying on teleological thinking, per se, or an “Aquinas-map,” in Pound’s own shorthand (Letters 323). That
most of his political and social views were decidedly pre-Enlightenment in character only accentuates the
complexities of his position.

34
schema, through work that speaks to the broader sensibility of a people and perhaps even helps
to establish or strengthen that sensibility and thus unify “the tribe.” Altieri’s conception of lyric,
then, stands as the inversion of Bernstein’s but seeks to perform a task similar to that of the poet
aspiring to craft a modern verse epic.
The problem confronting a poet operating in Altieri’s mode, therefore, is not the social
insufficiency of lyric, but lyric’s typical status as a brief or slight and deeply felt, private work,
one so personal and private that it should, in Mill’s famous formulation for poetry, be overheard
rather than expressed directly in polite company (345). The limitations inherent in this
condition—which may be part of what allows lyric to resist the very “lucidity” of post-
Enlightenment rationality—drives poets, in Altieri’s formulation, to attempt to expand it. As
Altieri notes, lyric’s “status as isolated, intense vision and its inability to develop or to test
complex ideas lead ambitious modern poets to explore longer and more elaborate lyrical forms”
(657). In Altieri’s appraisal, lyric attains a privileged status because of its intensity and isolation,
but this very intensity and isolation make it difficult for a poet working with lyric to explore
more intellectually sophisticated, and perhaps socially resonant, constructions. Altieiri’s
conception of lyric presents the poet with a paradox, then, that she must try to overcome by
producing works of greater formal complexity, eventually moving beyond the “lyric mode.”
22

Just as important, Altieri’s desire for lyric to function as a conduit of sorts to premodern social

22
Altieri’s elaboration of the ways in which long poems seek to operate at greater levels of formal complexity while
remaining in the “lyrical mode” relies upon an abstract consideration of what seems to be a deeply Romantic
conception of “organic” poetic process, asserting that “in the modernist long poem, lyrical vision becomes an
imaginative form created by a capacity to structure what moments of intense perception provide” (657). Exactly how
vision becomes a form that provides structure is not clarified or rendered more concrete by examples. The
discussion proceeds by greater degrees of abstraction, relating discursive and narrative forms to “surface features of
mental events,” which are counterposed to “overlapping fields of mental energies” and “spiritual realities” related to
the lyric imagination, but indicating, it seems, that the lyrical long poem develops by associative rather than strictly
logical processes (657). Ultimately, the argument resolves into a tidy synthesis in which lucidity no longer opposes
lyricism but enhances it: “lucidity itself becomes a quality of self-reflective vision rather than a reliance on specific
cultural beliefs, and thus it becomes a crucial means for intensifying lyrical energies” (658).

35
paradigms—even if translated into secular form—makes lyric function in a way similar to
Bernstein’s vision of the “tale of the tribe,” which would gather up the disparate parts of
different societies and histories into a meaningful whole. Thus, although they specify apparently
antithetical modes, the long poem functions as a privileged form for both critics, allowing the
poet to seek to transcend particularity and interiority by means of “longer and more elaborate
lyrical forms,” for Altieri, or by an extensive, layered presentation, for Bernstein, of
transhistorical exempla that strives to avoid, at all costs, the inevitable collapse into the personal
and private.
23

Both critics, then, present the long poem as a vehicle that could, potentially, at least, if it
were able to transcend or avoid “lyric,” recuperate aspects of the premodern societies in which
epic, in particular, and regulative genre theory, in general, were viable elements in the cultural

23
As much as the “long poem,” the “lyric” is a vexed genre in modernity. While probably best viewed as a more
open-ended form, in Williams’ sense, the assumptions surrounding lyric in modernity are very much the product of
larger historical and cultural forces. As Adorno points out, only in modernity does the lyric become seen as a
privileged site of interiority, and most “lyric” poets of antiquity “are immensely distant from our dominant
conceptions of about lyric. They lack that quality of intimacy, of non-materiality which we have justly or unjustly
adopted as our criterion of lyric utterance” (“Lyric Poetry” 215). In the U.S., this development, by which lyric
comes to be seen as both intimate and dematerialized, or divorced from its historical and material context, occurs at
roughly the same time that the lyric becomes the dominant form of poetry, or the form with which poetry itself is
equated, as the novel becomes the pre-eminent narrative form. As Mark Jeffreys notes, “Lyric became the dominant
form of poetry only as poetry’s authority was reduced to the cramped margins of culture. … Poetry was pushed into
a lyric ghetto because prose fiction became the presumptive vehicle for narrative literature, not because the rhetoric
of lyric conquered all poetry” (200). Jeffrey’s assertion is in response to Marjorie Perloff’s complaint about lyric’s
rise to dominance, at the expense of “much outstanding narrative and collage poetry” in modernity (Jeffreys 200; see
Perloff, “Postmodernism and the Impasse” 176-179), but his larger point is relevant to the ways in which both
Altieri and Bernstein construe lyric in relation to the long poem, as Jeffreys sees the dissatisfaction with the equation
of poetry with lyric as part of a larger cultural struggle. “Pound’s efforts in his Cantos at reclaiming poetry’s
didactic authority,” he contends, “like the more recent struggles by Charles Bernstein and Ron Silliman to make
both the composition and reading of poetry intrinsically revolutionary acts, indicate that however numerically
dominant it may be in poetry anthologies, what Perloff terms the ‘Romantic lyric’ has not commanded enough
respect to satisfy the poet’s own desire for cultural influence” (200). One might add, in view of the criticism of the
long poem discussed in this chapter, that the lyric doesn’t satisfy the critics’ desire for poetry’s (and by extension,
their own) cultural influence either. In light of the equation of poetry with lyric, moreover, one might be tempted to
say that Altieri and Bernstein, in their desire to avoid or transcend lyric, are effectively seeking to exempt the long
poem from the category of poetry per se, a move that would surely enhance its cultural authority. Of course, the
larger assumption subtending these cultural maneuvers—that lyric is intrinsically intimate and dehistoricized—is the
product of ideology, and lyric, as Jeffreys notes, can thus be seen as a casualty of both the New Critics’ formulations
of it as detached and ironic and the attempts of later critics to move beyond them precisely by maintaining the New
Critics’ “late-Romantic assumptions about lyric monologism and ahistoricity, the same assumptions that were
supposedly under attack” (203).

36
field. Altieri asserts that the lyric mode can operate as a bulwark against the instrumentalizing
logic of the Enlightenment, allowing a poet to import secular versions of the predicates that
allowed a people a sense of dignity in premodern societies, and Bernstein views the modern
verse epic as a valiant attempt to speak for the “tribe,” or “for values acknowledged as part of the
entire community’s heritage” (180), long after that community has dissolved into series of what
Raymond Williams calls the “ultimate apotheosis of that central bourgeois figure: the sovereign
individual” (“Avant-Garde” 55). If the long poem, as a form, results from the breakdown of the
regulative genre theory that both marked and mirrored the rigidly structured hierarchies of
premodern societies and the subsequent development of modern social and economic
structures—or the movement from premodern estates to modern classes composed of individuals
with their own particular social and economic interests—the long poem is also envisioned as the
vehicle by which aspects of modernity itself can be undone via the recovery of secular predicates
of human dignity or the presentation of values representing the entire community, or the implicit
reconstitution of that community itself. Is it any wonder, then, that long poems are so commonly
regarded as “failures,” when they are given the task of undoing the very conditions that brought
them into existence?
“The autonomous life of interiority”
A dynamic similar to the one presented by Altieri and Bernstein for the long poem
underlies George Lukács’ conception of the epic and novel in his influential early work, The
Theory of the Novel. Although Lukács’ focus on classical epic and the modern novel as narrative
modes that reflect the cultures creating them leads his work in directions different from those
pursued by Altieri or Bernstein, who both stick quite closely to the modernist long poem as a
distinct vehicle, the overarching concepts of his work resonate with those presented by Altieri

37
and Bernstein. Analyzing the terms of his work, while respecting its differences from that of
Altieri and Bernstein, can thus help call out the significance of Altieri’s and Bernstein’s
respective visions of the modern long poem and can help lay the groundwork for a conception of
later long poems that operate within the experimental tradition associated with and largely
inaugurated by Pound but that depart radically not just from the conservative impulses that drive
The Cantos, but also from the anthropocentric, Enlightenment-oriented vision that implicitly
shapes influential theories of both the modern long poem and the classical epic.
If Bernstein rues the collapse of a long poem aspiring to commonly held, civic values into
“private accents” (268) and “the direct appeal of the author’s own experiences and emotions”
(180) and Altieri seeks the construction of a long poem to escape the limitations of an “isolated
vision,” Lukács sets up a strikingly similar polarity, between the public or external and the
private or interior, but with different genres at each pole. Because narrative maintains, in
Jameson’s words, “the absolute value as the privileged means of access to reality” for Lukács
(Marxism and Form 171), lyric receives relatively little attention in his work, and the novel
operates in his schema as the form marked by an inescapable interiority. Indeed, the novel’s
unavoidable focus on an alienated, “problematic individual” derives not so much from any
inherent defect in the form itself as from defects of the societies that create it, and which it
invariably reflects, in what Martin Jay deems the early Lukács’ “essentially mimetic theory of
culture” (Marxism & Totality 90).
Although Lukács asserts, in the book’s final paragraph, that the work of Dostoevsky
“belongs to the new world” (152), as either a harbinger or an as yet unheralded culmination of
new social reality, this claim doesn’t mesh easily with his emphatic pronouncement in the
preceding paragraph that art cannot, on its own, cause large-scale social change: “But art can

38
never be the agent of such a transformation: the great epic is a form bound to the historical
moment, and any attempt to depict the utopian as existent can only end in destroying the form,
not in creating reality” (152). Lukács thus not only denies the claims implicitly operative in
Altieri’s and Bernstein’s work that the long poem can somehow recuperate social aspects of
earlier eras, but also foregrounds the epic as the genre that represents the social condition of
premodernity.
24

Whereas Bernstein and Altieri both effectively oppose the interiority of lyric to the civic
or social quality of the long poem or modern verse epic, Lukács presents the novel as the site of
interiority and the epic as its opposite—as a vehicle that conveys the “organic totality” of the
premodern world. Although both Altieri and Bernstein present the long poem as attempting to
recuperate elements of the premodern world, wisely, neither invokes the notion of totality for this
world. Apart from Althusser’s attempts to elaborate a “decentered” totality based on structuralist
principles and a “scientific” reading of Marx, the term had largely fallen into disrepute by the
late 70s, and would continue to do so with the ascendance of poststructuralism in academia in the
West.
25
Indeed, critical practices that emphasize difference and indeterminacy, undermine the
notion of the Grand Narrative, or posit the emergence of disciplinary practices as superseding
legislative or juridical precepts can only be hostile to a concept that is so patently universalizing.
Whether totality is a concept that should or could be “rehabilitated,” or whether its
association with totalitarianism and adjunct notions of Stalinist “rehabilitation” leaves it beyond
repair is an open question, but it is clear that part of what Altieri and Bernstein are responding to

24
Although Altieri makes little or no mention of classical epic, Bernstein does refer to it, but primarily as a
counterpoint to the failed ideal of the modern verse epic.
25
For a detailed discussion of Althusser’s attempts to elaborate a Marxist totality that constitutes “a decentered
whole which ha[s] neither a genetic point of origin nor a teleological point of arrival” in Reading Capital and For
Marx, see Jay, Marxism & Totality, 385-422. All of my commentary on the concept of totality in this chapter and the
next is indebted to Jay’s expansive and nuanced analyses.

39
in their claims for recuperative long poems is the sense of alienation that inheres in modern,
pluralistic, liberal societies, in which a poet can only express the particularities of her “private
situation” or her “isolated vision.” For his part, Lukács is nothing if not explicit in his
presentation of the dichotomy existing between the novel marked by interiority and alienation
and the epic conveying a natural totality so pervasive that it precludes individuality per se. “The
epic hero,” in Lukács’ words, “is, strictly speaking, never an individual” (66),
26
because he is too
closely linked to the community to which he belongs, a connection that may be seen as
constitutive of the genre itself: “It is traditionally thought that one of the essential characteristics
of the epic is the fact that its theme is not a personal destiny but the destiny of a community”
(66). While a cursory reading of Homeric epic, particularly the Odyssey, might lead one to
qualify this assertion, it constitutes a cornerstone of Lukács’ of approach to genre.
The main character of the novel, on the other hand, is definitively characterized by his
lack of connection to any sense of a larger community. “The epic individual, the hero of the
novel,” Lukács writes, “is the product of estrangement from the outside world” (66). The
disarming, and potentially confusing, designation that opens this statement (“the epic
individual”) is highly significant, transforming “epic” from a noun indicating a category of
transcendental wholeness, in Lukács’ larger paradigm, and into an adjective modifying a
singular, estranged person. This estrangement occurs, moreover, because of stratification within

26
Lukács’ claim resonates with Dodds’ well-known assertion that “Homeric man has no unified concept of what we
call soul or personality” (15), because emotional states and affective changes are largely attributed, in archaic Greek
literature, to the will of gods or Fate and thus projected onto elements of the external world, rather than the interior
“mind.” Dodd’s claim may well derive from Freud’s assertion, in Totem and Taboo, that “Primitive man transferred
the structural relations of his own psyche to the outer world” (118, cited in Mayes 100). Lukács’ denials of
individuality in archaic epic would thus seem to have a basis in psychological concepts of the first half of the 20
th

century—even if Lukács himself expressed antipathy to psychology (Marxism & Totality 88-89). See Mayes for an
elegant reading of how these and other influential claims for the historical movements from psychic externalization
to internalization “function as a narrative of legitimation for the self-possessing subject that a modern liberal
capitalist society is ostensibly designed to accommodate” (102). In this sense, Lukács’ claim is more
understandable, given his hostility, even in his pre-Marxist period, to early 20
th
century European bourgeois culture.

40
the social world itself, which is somehow absent from the world of the archaic epic: “When the
world is internally homogeneous, men do not differ qualitatively from one another; there are of
course heroes and villains, pious men and criminals, but even the greatest hero is only a head
taller than the mass of his fellows, and the wise man’s dignified words are heard by the most
foolish” (66).
27
As a result of the loss of social homogeneity, Lukács contends, a profound
degree of estrangement becomes inevitable and leads to a heightened form of subjectivity: “the
autonomous life of interiority is possible and necessary only when the distinctions between men
have made an unbridgeable chasm” (66). The distinction Lukács presents, then, is stark, between
the epic in which the individual proper does not exist, but serves only as a type of metonymic
extension of the community to which he belongs, and the novel, in which individuals are
separated from one another by irreparable divisions.
Such a formulation, which constitutes a foundational premise in Lukács’ work,
effectively and indelibly linking generic category with social structure, raises several key issues.
It should be noted, first, that Lukács’ claims about the ancient world, while powerfully rendered,
are not based on any analysis of its material reality. As Martin Jay notes, “the mimesis [Lukács]
invoked” when speaking of the Homeric Greeks “was of the idea of an integrated civilization,
rather than of its material foundation. The Greeks were thus as romantically depicted as in any of
the earlier fantasies of Winckelmann and his followers” (Marxism & Totality 93). With this
depiction, moreover, Lukács isn’t merely creating a fantasy based on German idealist notions of
classical art, but is establishing his own literary-critical Verfallgeschicte, presenting “a history of

27
This statement is problematic, because it is difficult to see how men do not differ “qualitatively” if some are
clearly taller, or, more significantly, some can be considered the “most foolish.” Such a claim reproduces, however,
the perspective of the aristocratic warrior-class presented in the epics, in which only the tribal leaders, or basileis,
and their closest followers really count (Thalmann, Swineherd and Bow 49-52). Among these men, the heroes of the
epics, qualitative differences would still seem to exist—indeed, the Iliad might never start without Achilles’
awareness of his physical superiority to Agamemnon—but on a much smaller scale.

41
decline from an original moment of perfect integration or complete satisfaction” (Steiner 45).
Such a notion not only shapes well-known ancient conceptions of the “golden age” in Hesiod or
Ovid, as Steiner notes, but influences modern “theories of history” as well, in Jameson’s
estimation. These modern theories may not overtly lapse into “metaphysical nostalgia” of the
sort in which Lukács indulges, but nonetheless
tend to organize themselves around the covert hypothesis of just such a moment of
plenitude: think of Jeffersonian America or the ‘unity of sensibility’ of the Metaphysical
poets; of the humaneness of medieval economic doctrine or of the organic continuity of
an ancien régime unsullied by regicide or by the hubris of political self-determination;
not to speak of the innumerable ideological exploitations of ancient Greece (Marxism and
Form 38-39).
While Jameson’s last “moment of plenitude” sums up Lukács’ approach, the list as a whole, with
the possible exception of the Metaphysical poets (Eliot’s project), seems like a crib sheet for the
quite literal conservatism of Poundian poetics, based on the conservation of select values from
historical times and places. Such conservatism may not be inherently problematic, in and of
itself, but when it erects an entire theory of genre, in the case of Lukács, or drives a political
program, as with Pound, on the basis of what can only be seen as romantic fabrications of a
historical period known primarily through literary representations of the period’s social elite, it
becomes more so.
Even if the fantastic nature of Lukács’ conception of ancient Greek life is overlooked,
however, it is not insignificant that he valorizes a society that is distinctly non-democratic, ruled
by “warrior-kings” or “big men” (basileis) whose authority is often seen to be endowed by Zeus
himself. Just as Pound turns to premodern political and social structures in an attempt to remedy

42
the problems created by the rise of capitalism and the commodification of the arts, Lukács looks
to a society that predates the democratic structures—available only to male citizens, of course—
of classical Athens. In presenting this society as an alternative, typically rendered in highly
positive terms, to the shortcomings of modern social realities as depicted by the novel, he runs
the risk of sacrificing the successes of political liberalism—universal enfranchisement and
individual rights—in an attempt to address the ailments of economic liberalism and capitalism.
28

The Origins of Organicism
Such a risk is heightened, moreover, by Lukács’ foregrounding of the notion of totality in
his discussions of the differences between ancient epic and the modern novel. If a conservative
impulse can be located in both Lukács’ idealized version of the past and the specific era he
chooses to idealize, such an impulse may be even more prominent in the concept of totality that
marks his work.
29
While the concept of totality can be configured in different ways, depending

28
In The Theory of the Novel, written several years before his well-known “conversion” to communism, Lukács
clearly inveighs against the social conditions of modernity, marked by an “unbridgeable chasm” between men and
the “transcendental homelessness” expressed by the novel, but he doesn’t relate these conditions to any material
aspects of society, instead seeing them as part of an “epoch of absolute sinfulness” (152). His assessment of
modernity thus mirrors his conception of antiquity, as both are devoid of any discussion of economic or material
conditions. Pound’s positions on the relation between economic and social conditions are considerably more
complex, in part because of his voluminous and often confused writings on economic theory in 1930s. Even if, in
Leon Surette’s assessment, “it cannot be said that Pound’s grasp of economic theory was competent or even
coherent” (9), the basic premise of his approach is that social ills can be remedied by changes in monetary policy
(e.g., Douglas’ social credit and Gesell’s “stamp scrips”), rather than through the types of structural changes, such as
collective ownership and more-egalitarian labor practices, prescribed by socialism.
29
Perhaps this assertion of Lukács’ conservatism marks the best juncture at which to point out some of the obvious
ways in which his work corresponds with but ultimately differs, markedly, from that of Bakhtin, the other deeply
influential modern theorist of the epic and novel. For Bakhtin, epic is founded on an immersion in the “absolute
past” (16), a time of national genesis that is “sacred” (15), ideas that are perhaps implicit in Lukács’ theory. In a
formulation that resonates with Lukács’ view of the individual in epic, moreover, Bakhtin believes that epic is
centered on an individual hero whose “view of himself coincides completely with others’ views of him—the view of
his society (his community), the epic singer and the audience also coincide” (34). For Bakhtin, however, this
distance breaks down, in ancient culture, with the introduction of contemporary reality via Socratic dialogue and
Menippean satire (22). Ultimately, laughter, of all things, “destroys the epic” (23), transforming the unified and
unifying hero of epic into the more starkly individuated figure of the novel: “A crucial tension develops between the
external and internal man, and as a result the subjectivity of the individual becomes an object of experimentation and
representation—and first of all on the humorous familiarizing plane. Coordination breaks down between the various
aspects: man for himself alone and man in the eyes of others” (37-38). Perhaps the most pronounced difference
between the two theorists’ respective approaches to the emergence of the novel, however, resides in their
interpretations of its larger, ethical and political significance. Whereas Bakhtin sees the novel as potentially

43
on whether it is bounded temporally or spatially, or results, as in the case of the later Lukács,
from the actions and consciousness of a particular group or class of people,
30
the concept itself is
implicitly linked to ideas of social holism or organicism, which date back to Aristotle, at least,
and are typically seen as opposed to the conceptions of individualism that underlie modern
liberalism.
31
As Norberto Bobbio notes, “the entire history of political thought is riven by the

liberating in its ability to represent members of multiple social strata—and not just the political and cultural elite—
through its use of implicitly dialogized constructs that countermand what he deems as poetry’s monological attempts
at “the task of cultural, national and political centralization of the verbal-ideological world in the higher socio-
ideological levels” (273), Lukács’ melanchonic reading sees not a joyously polyglottal cacophony, but only discrete
individuals trapped in their own interior worlds, unable to bridge the gaps between one another and themselves.
30
In “The Concept of Totality in Lukács and Adorno,” Jay details five specific types of totality: Longitudinal, “a
synonym for universal history;” Latitudinal, which is restricted to a single, bounded time period and a certain
culture; Expressive, in which “a totalizer, a genetic subject, creates the totality through self-objectification;”
Decentered, in which a totality “is seen … as a constellation of interactions without a specific origin;” Normative, in
which totality is considered “a desirable goal towards which humanity should strive in an age of fragmentation”
(130-31). As the language of the definition of the final type indicates, the totality expressed in The Theory of the
Novel is normative, as well as latitudinal. Lukács’ more famous expression of totality, in History and Class
Consciousness, is expressive and longitudinal.
31
While notions of social wholeness and organicism have a long history, the most obvious source for Lukács’
conception of “totality” is clearly Hegel, who speaks of the “epic proper” as marked by “a vision of totality
complete in itself” in his Aesthetics (1044). For Hegel, epic attains its sense of totality by representing “the
occurrence of an action which in the whole breadth of it circumstances and relations must gain access to our
contemplation as a rich event connected with the total world of a nation and epoch” (1044). While Lukács’ overall
vision of the distinction between epic and novel tracks quite closely to Hegel’s ideas, David Cunningham’s assertion
that “it is no exaggeration to say that almost the entirety of the conceptual apparatus of Lukács’ work on the novel
derives” from “an account of the ancient epic to be found in what comprises little more than a page or two in
Hegel’s Aesthetics” (11; italics in original) is potentially misleading, since Lukács departs, significantly, from
Hegel’s ideas and the broader attitude informing them in his assessment of the ramifications of the emergence of
novel and the decline of epic. To be sure, both see the novel as a type of “modern popular epic” (Hegel, 1092) that is
inherently limited by the impossibility of conveying the totality of modern life. As Cunningham astutely notes, “it is
a structural feature of modernity, as regards its potential mediation by the artwork (if not the philosophical concept),
that it precisely resists being grasped as a totality (12; italics in original). This caveat, however, regarding mediation
by art or philosophy, is critically important and informs each critic’s respective attitudes toward the novel as a
metonym for modernity itself. For Hegel, the novel’s rise can be taken as a sign of mankind’s move toward a greater
sense of spirituality, which necessitates the larger movement from classical to romantic art forms and the even larger
movement toward the ultimate “end of art” and its replacement by religion and, ultimately, philosophy as the form
of the thought best equipped for dealing with mankind’s deepening sense of interiority (Pinkard 294-304). In stark
opposition to Lukács’ denunciations of the limitations of both the novel and modern world it represents—perhaps
best summed up in his appropriation of Fichte’s assessment of it an “epoch of absolute sinfulness”—in which
totality is no longer possible, Hegel presents the condition of modernity, “the prosaic state of affairs in the present”
(192), with a strong degree of detachment, as he does the novel itself, which “presupposes a world already
prosaically ordered” (1092). Hegel’s view of the novel is, of course, ultimately bound up with his ideas about the
emergence of the modern state, in which “‘all’ are free” (Pinkard 293), but particular differences or factional
interests within a given society are “made compatible and raised to the higher level of general interest” (Balibar,
Philosophy of Marx 51), thus establishing, on a universal level, and for the modern world, a type of “harmonious …
ethical life” consonant with that experienced, in his view, by the ancient Greeks (Pinkard 243). Lukács, then, adopts
Hegel’s attitudes about Greek antiquity but not his teleological ideas regarding the “progress” of thought and the

44
great dichotomy between organicism (holism) and individualism (atomism)” (41), a dichotomy
that might well be seen as underwriting Lukács’ binary conception of epic totality and the
novel’s problematic individual. “Though there is no unilinear pattern” within this dichotomy,
according to Bobbio, it can be said, “roughly speaking, that organicism is ancient and classical,
and individualism is modern (or at least that it is in individualism that the theory of the modern
state finds its origin)” (41). Such a dichotomy clearly maps the diachronic arc of Lukács’
construction, in which the modern novel, inaugurated by Cervantes, features a “contingent
world” and “problematic individual” that “mutually determine one another” (78), while the
Homeric epic—“for strictly speaking, his works alone are epics” (30)—presents a hero who is so
intimately “connected by indissoluble threads to the community” that he cannot be said even to
constitute an individual, per se.
While Lukács limits his claims to the epistemological parameters of generic types, or the
world as constituted and known within the epic or novel, the notion that individuality per se is
meaningless within an overarching civic or even cosmological totality or organic whole is an
important aspect of classical theories of holistic social structures. As Bobbio asserts, “for
organicism, the state is a body, an overall corporate structure made up of parts, each of which has
its own destiny, but which all cooperate in relation to interdependence, to further their joint
collective life: individuals uti singuli are not regarded as possessing any autonomy” (41). The
individual may thus exist within a social structure conceived of as an organic whole, but bereft of
any autonomy, this existence itself is rendered a mere technicality.
If Lukács’ novel versus epic binary effectively recapitulates the long-standing dichotomy
of organicism versus atomism as ways of conceptualizing the operations of the state or society as

development of the Rechtsstaat. Rather, as was noted earlier, Lukács’ melancholic reading views the emergence of
the novel as part of a larger decline of humanity, a history of man’s fall.

45
a whole, the effects that he attributes to the holistic totality represented by epic can be seen as
contrary to those of organic conceptions of society in general. Whereas Lukács asserts that the
organic totality of epic prohibits social division, organic conceptions of societies are often seen
by modern commentaries as reinforcing starkly hierarchical systems and naturalizing social
division. In Martin Jay’s assessment, “organic naturalism was generally used to legitimate social
differentiation and hierarchy, a function it served as early as Aristotle’s defense of slavery. In
this way it helped reconcile men to the status quo by naturalizing it” (Marxism & Totality 27-28).
Although espousing a perspective more sympathetic to the development of economic
liberalism than that of the Marxist theorists presented by Jay, Charles Taylor concurs with Jay’s
analysis of the ideological function of naturalism. In asserting that “hierarchical differentiation”
was “seen as the proper order of things,” as “part of the nature or form of society” (95; my
italics), in premodern societies, Taylor effectively presents the same rationale for naturalism as
Jay, without invoking the term directly. In Taylor’s view, moreover, “premodern social
imaginaries … were structured by various modes of hierarchical complementarity” (95). Both of
these aspects of organicism or naturalism—hierarchical differentiation within the social whole
and complementarity among the differentiated social strata—are implicit in the “body politic”
metaphor that so often represents the system, as it does in Bobbio’s example above.
32
Clearly,
those individuals who belong to the “head” of the state, in the corporate metaphor, can expect
greater privileges and material prosperity than those who make up the feet or hands.
Binaries and Biopolitics
Thus far, this analysis has examined the social and political implications of several
important conceptions of genre in the 20
th
century, focusing on the degree to which genre

32
This metaphor isn’t limited to representations of organicism, of course, but is famously “modernized” in Hobbes’
vision of “that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE, (in latine CIVITAS) which is but an
Artificiall Man” in the introduction to Leviathan (9).

46
becomes complicated, at times to the point of illegibility, with the collapse of pre-modern,
“organic” social structures and the development of more liberal systems. Along with this
development, binaries have been isolated in prominent discussions of genre that appear to mirror
the larger social structures affecting the viability of regulative genre theory, in general, and epic
poetry, in particular. In Altieri’s discussion of the lyric long poem and Bernstein’s analysis of the
modern verse epic, the long poem is effectively charged with recuperating elements of
premodern social structures, implicitly seen to be preferable, in some aspects, at least, to a
modern liberalism that has emerged under the signs of chaotic pluralism and Enlightenment
logic. For these critics, lyric interiority is the symptom of modernity that must be avoided or
transcended if a long poem is to succeed at its recuperative task.
If these theories of the modern long poem are tinged with a nostalgia that threatens to
veer into overt regression, as it does in Pound’s attempt at a modern epic, Lukács’ binary of the
epic’s organic totality versus the novel’s problematic individual indulges in such a vehemently
nostalgic approach that threat of regression seems a constant menace, one that’s heightened,
perversely, by the power and beauty, even in translation, of the author’s fantasies about the world
of archaic epic.
33
Although Lukács portrays the novel, rather than the lyric, as the villain in his
schema, the stark dichotomy he presents between a world of organic totality and one of
atomized, alienated individualism both lays bare the dynamic that underwrites the theories of
Altieri and Bernstein and replicates the larger binary evident in the history of political thought
about the proper constitution and function of social groups.

33
A prime example of Lukács’ expressive abilities is the oft-cited opening passage of The Theory of the Novel:
“Happy are those ages when the starry sky is the map of all possible paths—ages whose path are illuminated by the
light of the stars. Everything in such ages is new and yet familiar, full of adventure and yet their own. The world is
wide and yet it is like a home, for the fire that burns in the soul is of the same essential nature as the stars; the world
and the self, the light and the fire, are sharply distinct, yet they never become permanent strangers to one another
…” (29).

47
The next chapter will present a sustained interrogation of the two poles of this larger
binary, organicism and atomism, in the attempt to disclose the particular ways in which both of
these conceptions of social structures can be understood through theories of biopolitics. That the
two most prominent exponents of biopolitics, Foucault and Agamben, locate the emergence of
biopolitics in the opposed poles of the binary itself—with Foucault believing biopolitics emerges
with the collapse of pre-modern structures of sovereign right and the development of modern
liberalism (Birth of Biopolitics 267-316; Society Must Be Defended 239-264), and Agamben
asserting that it is encoded in notions of sovereignty that developed in antiquity (Homo Sacer 1-
12; 71-115)—will no doubt facilitate the analysis. The larger objective of this chapter will be to
establish the biopolitical assumptions operative in both organicism and individualism. Such an
analysis will thus seek to lay the foundation for future claims that the biopoetic approaches
devised by the long poems under discussion have the potential to subvert these biopolitical
assumptions and effectively obviate the binary that underwrites the considerations of genre that
have been discussed thus far.

48
Chapter 2: The Biopolitical Basis: Conceptions of “Man” and Modernity in Agamben and
Foucault
“Biopolitics” as Homonym?
Though numerous theorists have written about biopolitics over the past 15 years, the term
is primarily associated with the work of Michel Foucault, who coined it in his research on
modern epistemologies of governance and power in the 1970s, and with that of Giorgio
Agamben, who foregrounded it in his influential study of sovereign power, Homo Sacer (1995).
Though both theorists are essentially referring to the same basic process—the politicization of
life itself in modernity—when using the term, important differences exist in the larger theories
they construct around the processes of this politicization. Indeed, these differences are so great
that a Foucauldian such as Mika Ojakangas can contend that Agamben’s version of biopolitics is
essentially incompatible with the notion as elaborated by Foucault. Other scholars, such as
Michael Dillon, however, acknowledge the significance of the differences that exist in the
respective approaches but believe that such differences make them complementary, rather than
contradictory.
34
Similarly, on a more applied level, it is commonplace for scholars in a variety of

34
The fundamental basis for arguments by Ojakangas and others, such as Claire Blencowe, who believe that
Agamben’s formulation of biopolitics displays greater differences than similarities to that of Foucault, is typically
that Agamben’s theory is centered on death, on the ability of a sovereign power to take life, while Foucault
explicitly argues that modernity marks the emergence of governmental powers dedicated to fostering and optimizing
life. “The original problem of Agamben’s analysis,” Ojakangas argues, “is that he sees bio-power as power based
upon bare life, defined in turn solely by its capacity to be killed. Foucault’s bio-power has nothing to do with that
kind of bare life. In fact, to the same extent that [Foucault’s] bio-power is the antithesis of sovereign power, its
concept of life is the antithesis of bare life” (11). Blencowe concurs: “the thrust of at least some of Foucault’s
arguments is all but inverted in their representation in Homo Sacer, wherein Foucault’s biopolitics for life becomes
Agamben’s thanatopolitics for unity and order” (114; italics in original). In a claim that resonates with some of the
criticism of Agamben’s work presented in this chapter, she also contends that Agamben “transforms Foucault’s
thickly historical, genealogical concept of ‘biological life’ into an abstracted concept referring to a presumed
transhistorical category—zoē” (115). While Dillon concedes that “there is a certain betrayal in the way Agamben
reworks Foucault,” he also contends that Ojankangas’s argument “threatens to elide the intrinsic violence of
biopolitics and its essential relation with correction and death” (44). The threat of such elision is what makes
Agamben’s “nomological” conception of biopolitics complementary, in Dillon’s view, to Foucault’s historicizing
formulations (42-46).

49
fields to use elements of the work of each philosopher selectively, implicitly indicating that both
theories offer productive frameworks for analyses of contemporary politics.
While Ojakangas’ argument is compelling and prompts deep-seated reservations about
the ultimate compatibility of the philosophers’ respective conceptions of biopolitics, the last
approach listed above will be the one adopted throughout this study. The intent of this study is
not to attempt to determine which approach to biopolitics is more correct or viable, nor to judge
(if it were somehow possible) whether one philosopher’s construction is more accurate or
relevant to the experiences and ideas conveyed by the poems under discussion. Rather, the intent
of reading late modern and contemporary long poems through the prism of biopolitical theory, as
configured by both Foucault and Agamben, is to illuminate ways in which the poems themselves
speak to the political and social realities of their environments. To that end, key concepts from
both Foucault and Agamben will be used in this study.
Before beginning to discuss the ways in which these concepts might relate to late modern
and contemporary long poems, however, it is necessary to present an overview of the concepts
themselves. Because important aspects of Foucault’s conception of biopolitics will also be
discussed in the analyses of Oppen and Cha, this chapter will focus primarily on Agamben’s
influential formulation of biopolitics and the complex ways in which this formulation relates to
ideas of social organicism. Although any overview of these theoretical considerations must be
necessarily partial and selective, this examination will seek to sketch an outline of the broader
formulations of biopolitics presented by each thinker while emphasizing aspects of the work that
are particularly relevant to the poems under discussion. Along with this overview of biopolitical
concepts, this chapter will also examine several important and relevant critiques of these
concepts that have been made by other scholars and examine one of the most significant points

50
of distinction between the respective approaches of Foucault and Agamben. Not only does this
point of difference call out the degree to which the theorists’ respective approaches to biopolitics
may ultimately be incompatible, but it also helps to lay the foundation for an analysis of the ways
in the long poems under discussion engage critical elements of biopolitical theory, whether
promulgated by Foucault or Agamben.
At the heart of this difference lies Aristotle’s well-known formulation of the polis and
man as a “political animal” in book one of the Politics. Aristotle’s work constitutes a
foundational text for Agamben’s version of biopolitics, but one that Foucault alludes to only in
passing—and in distinction to all that he places under the banner of biopolitics. The conceptual
frameworks supporting each theorist’s relation to (or distance from) Aristotle’s ideas in the
opening of the Politics, moreover, connect directly to the ways in which each thinker relates
biopolitics to larger forms of social organization. As the chapters on Oppen and Cha will
demonstrate, Foucault’s conception of biopolitics is directly indebted to his ideas about
liberalism and the emergence of a society aggregated from individuals. Agamben’s version of
biopolitics, on the other hand, posits a deep continuity between ancient and modern social forms
and thus establishes an ongoing relationship between biopolitics and the social organicism that
drives Aristotle’s notions of both the city and mankind. In this way, biopolitical theory itself
bears directly on the considerations of social structure that were apparent in the earlier discussion
of literary genre. As was noted in that discussion, Lukács’ deeply nostalgic conception of epic
strongly associates the genre with social organicism, and both Bernstein and Altieri attempt, in
very different ways, to reconcile a notion of lyric, associated with interiority and individualism,
with a larger concept of the long poem that must recuperate elements of organic, premodern
social structures.

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An Alternative to Lyric Interiority and Epic Organicism
These connections are critical to an understanding of the poems to be discussed. An
analysis of the relations between biopolitics and social structures lays the foundation for a
discussion of the various ways in which the poems, in addressing elements of biopolitics in
modernity, move beyond the binaries of epic versus lyric (or novel) and organic whole versus
interior individual that have marked the considerations of genre examined thus far. In doing so,
these poems seek an alternative to the positions that have defined the literary field since the
emergence of Williams’ literary forms and Ranciere’s aesthetic regime. These approaches to
genre arise alongside or in the wake of the larger social and political developments that mark
modernity at large in the West: the bourgeois revolution and the emergence of the modern
individual, along with the dissolution of sovereign forms of right based on organicist political
theories or divine cosmologies.
In essence, with the emergence of the modern liberal state, writers have been left with
two forms of what Lukács calls “the autonomous life of interiority,” the novel and the lyric, with
the former becoming the pre-eminent narrative form and the latter becoming synonymous with
poetry itself (66). Although it is always problematic to generalize about large-scale literary
forms, especially in an era in which generic distinctions themselves have consistently been
eroded and cross-pollinated with one another, both the novel and lyric have essentially been
“private” forms in modernity, with the novel, in Lukács’ influential view, seeking a
reconciliation of the alienated protagonist with his or her society and the lyric expressing the
subjective experiences of the poet, which are often seen to transcend her historical and political
context. In distinction to these dominant forms stand works such as the Cantos and The Waste
Land that attempt to reinstall some type of “organic” or mythic framework in which a poem can

52
transcend the particularities of the poet’s experience and function as epic did for premodern
societies, as a “tale of the tribe” or a vehicle that imports predicates of premodern societies. With
such an approach, these poems are marked by a nostalgia for the wisdom and order of earlier,
pre-liberal systems, as are the Cantos, or gripped by a melancholic alienation that seeks
deliverance through universal mythemes, whether secular or sacred.
In turning to biopolitical aspects of contemporary society, the poems discussed in this
study seek to address the social and political realities of their environments in ways that
transcend the personal lyric, but to do so without valorizing the organicist social or mythological
structures that inform the works of Pound and Eliot. Rather than looking back to earlier social
forms, these poems interrogate the basis for common conceptions of “man” and society in ways
that are best illuminated by biopolitical thought. In focusing attention on biopolitical elements of
modernity and critiquing hegemonic conceptions of life itself, moreover, these poems move
toward a posthumanist terrain and perhaps pave the way for future works that might satisfy
Eduoard Glissant’s call for epics that don’t “‘universalize’ abusively” (121).
At the same time, however, in carrying out these critiques, these poems may even exceed
the boundaries of biopolitics proper and thus suggest the limitations of biopolitical thought, as
construed by Foucault and Agamben. Although biopolitical theory encompasses both modern
liberalism, in the Foucauldian iteration, and ancient organicism, in Agamben’s conception, it is
also constrained, particularly in Foucault’s work, by its focus on humanity as a metonym for life
itself. If biopolitical theory can enhance an understanding of the significance of the poems’
engagements with notions of the body, the ability to speak, and the boundaries of the body
politic, the poems themselves repay this understanding by helping to illuminate the extent to
which biopolitical theory remains fixated on notions of the human, via Foucault’s homo

53
economicus, which is central to his exposition of liberalism as the fertile ground of biopolitics,
and Agamben’s key distinction of zōē and bios, or the forms of life by which humanity exposes
itself to the threat of death and ceaselessly re-legitimates the hold of sovereign power over it.
To understand how the poems in this study both illuminate and are illuminated by
biopolitical thought, it is necessary to examine in some detail particular aspects of the ways in
which each theorist formulates his theory of biopolitics. The limitations of Foucault’s theory,
which focuses heavily on the evolution of political thought and conceptions of the state in
modernity, are somewhat transparent. The limitations of Agamben’s theory, conversely, are in
some ways more difficult to ascertain, but are also more significant. As a result, this chapter will
spend more time discussing Agamben’s work than Foucault’s. Such an emphasis on Agamben’s
formulation of biopolitics does not mean, however, that Foucault’s ideas are of less importance
to this study.
One of the virtues of Foucault’s work is that it very clearly spells out the ways in which
the economic logic of modernity both undercuts the remaining elements of sovereign or juridical
political forms, creating the homo economicus and invisible hand of liberal economics over
which no sovereign can claim control or mastery, and the ways in which new forms of power
emerge to assert control over individuals at the level of the body and over an aggregate
population. Some of the poems to be discussed will critique the economic logic that underlies the
emergence of liberalism, and Foucault’s work allows one to see the full resonance of these
critiques, which aren’t merely about material inequality or the injustices of economic systems,
but also about the conception of the human that is produced by them. Some of the poems also
address issues of the disciplined body and the regulated population, and Foucault’s work also

54
helps to call out the ramifications of these issues, as it directly links them to larger notions of
government and power.
While Agamben’s conception of biopolitics has been widely influential and is at least
well-known as Foucault’s, the value of Agamben’s work, for this study, resides less in his much-
discussed notion of the homo sacer and more in the ways in which he relies heavily on
Aristotle’s conception of man as politikon zōon, as presented in the opening pages of the Politics.
As we shall see, Agamben is quite selective in his use of Aristotle’s political theory, and the
analysis presented in this chapter will focus attention on the elements of Aristotle’s work that
Agamben elides as he effectively transcendentalizes, via the split between zōē and bios, the
social hierarchy that Aristotle seeks to naturalize through his vision of man as a “political
animal” and the city as a site that both precedes man, ontologically, and provides a teleological
ratification of his existence. This chapter will thus argue that closer attention to the Aristotelian
basis of Agamben’s version of biopolitics can not only reveal the limitations of this formulation
but can also point toward a posthumanist conception of life that stands as an alternative to the
eschatological scenario that Agamben offers as the only viable solution to the contemporary
political situation. This alternative conception, rooted in the intimate relationship between
Aristotle’s notion of man as political animal and his teleological vision of social organicism, will
be of considerable importance to the poems analyzed in this study. While Agamben’s theories of
bare life and biopolitical capture will be of less importance, they frequently serve as valuable
heuristics when discussing contemporary political scenarios and deserve attention in their own
right. It is necessary, moreover, to discuss what exactly these theories entail before moving on to
analyze how they operate and what they omit.

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The Polis as Origin, and the Camp as Nomos
While Foucault presents liberalism—economic liberalism, in particular—as a historical
phenomenon that must be understood before biopolitics itself can come into focus (Birth of
Biopolitics 22, 317), Agamben never directly invokes social organicism when discussing
biopolitics. He derives key aspects of his theories of biopolitics, however, from the opening
passages of the Politics, in which, according to Bobbio, “Aristotle gives us give us the definitive
formulation of the constitutive principles of organicism” (41). Agamben may not intend to
associate his theory of biopolitics with Aristotelian organicism, but his larger approach to
questions of political sovereignty asserts a strong continuity from antiquity to the present day,
indicating that he clearly does not find the type of epistemological rupture in the emergence of
modern liberalism that Foucault does. As an examination of Aristotle’s text will indicate,
moreover, it is very difficult to extract constituent ideas from Aristotle’s text without carrying
over residual elements of other aspects of the ancient philosopher’s work, as that work itself is
wound around a tightly conceived metaphysical teleology, outside of which the individual ideas
themselves make little sense.
Agamben’s entire conception of biopolitics is based on a distinction between different
conceptions of life—zōē, or “natural life,” and bios, or “politically qualified life”—that he
contends exists in the ancient Greek language and culture. This initial distinction is critical to
Agamben’s theory, because it is the politicization of one type of life, zōē, that leads to
Agamben’s well-known formulation, based on an obscure category from Roman law, of the
homo sacer, who can be killed with impunity (or killed but not murdered), but who also cannot
be sacrificed, and thus stands outside the realms of both secular and sacred law. In Agamben’s
formulation, however, the sovereign’s ability to place the homo sacer outside the law is also a

56
means of including him within the law—as the law itself decrees that it will not apply to the
homo sacer, an operation Agamben deems “the sovereign ban” (Homo Sacer 46). With this ban,
moreover, not only is the figure of the homo sacer created, but sovereign power itself is also
either created or reaffirmed in the very act of generating the inclusive exclusion that results in the
homo sacer. As such, Agamben’s vision of sovereign power is heavily indebted to Schmitt’s
work, built around the influential assertion that “sovereign is he who decides on the exception”
(5).
In discussing the operations of sovereignty, moreover, Agamben also aggressively
extends the reach of the sovereign exception in modernity. The dynamics of this expansion are
complex and constitute the primary arena in which “the Foucauldian thesis,” in his words, is “to
be corrected or, at least, completed” (Homo Sacer 9). Foucault posits the emergence of
biopolitics as a distinctively modern phenomenon, and one that represents the diminishment, if
not elimination, of classical forms of sovereign power; Agamben, in grounding his theory in a
distinction between ancient conceptions of zōē and bios, finds the origin of biopolitical thought
in antiquity. Agamben then claims, however, that those categories have moved increasingly into
a zone of indistinction in modernity. The prevalence of this zone of indistinction represents a
pronounced intensification of biopolitics, in Agamben’s view, and it is on the basis of this
intensification and the prevailing indistinction between zōē and bios that Agamben makes his
controversial claims that today everyone is potentially a homo sacer and that the concentration
camp “is the new biopolitical nomos of the planet” (Homo Sacer 176), the place “in which power
confronts nothing but pure life, without any mediation” (Homo Sacer 171).
Agamben’s theory of biopolitics may seem unremittingly dire, but he presents his work
as a necessary intervention into a global political climate in which the state of exception has

57
become the rule. It is because of the current conditions, in fact, that he thinks “the time is ripe to
place the problem of the originary structure and limits of the form of the State in a new
perspective” (Homo Sacer 12). This originary structure, of course, is that of the sovereign
exception and, by extension, the sovereign ban and the creation of bare life, which has been
increasingly incorporated into the domain of the state in modernity.
Precisely because of the prevalence of this structure in his theory, however, Agamben
believes that all forms of intervention into existing political systems are essentially pointless.
Instead, he seeks a form of politics that looks beyond the state, as it is currently conceived (and
has always been, in his view): “until a completely new politics—that is, a politics no longer
founded on the exception of bare life—is at hand, every theory and every praxis will remain
imprisoned and immobile, and the ‘beautiful day’ of life will be given citizenship only either
through blood and death or in the perfect senselessness to which the society of the spectacle
condemns it” (Homo Sacer 11). What this statement contains in breadth—seamlessly
counterposing Aristotle’s reference to “natural life” as a kind of “beautiful day” to both a
shorthand reference to the Foucauldian symbolic of the juridico-sovereign order (“blood and
death”) and Debord’s notion of modern society based on the reification of images, rather than
things—it lacks in any concrete detail about how the “completely new politics” would actually
operate. As we shall see, this preference for breadth over detailed exposition consistently marks
Agamben’s work, much to the consternation of his critics.
The Casualties of Conceptual Fundamentalism
Indeed, while almost intoxicating in its elegance, Agamben’s theory is also deeply
problematic and has been widely criticized. Some of these problems exist on the level of what
modern-day IT executives would call “scalability,” as Agamben’s argument doesn’t “scale well”

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from the limited scope of the ancient polis, as envisioned by Aristotle, to the wider and more
complex field of globalized politics. A deep skepticism about the degree to which Agamben’s
theories of the homo sacer and the sovereign ban are applicable to contemporary scenarios is
what motivates, in part, at least, criticism of his conception of biopolitics by theorists as different
as Ernesto Laclau, William Connolly, and Aihwa Ong.
In Laclau’s view, Agamben’s theory absolutizes sovereign power in a schematic manner
and fails to take into account the possibilities of political resistance to a sovereign instituting the
ban. Laclau contends, moreover, that “some extra presuppositions have to be added” to the ban
for it “to assimilate all situations of being outside the law to that of homo sacer” (14). These
presuppositions are that the banned individual be “dispossessed of any kind of collective
identity,” or have no recourse to any other group of people who may help him or her survive, and
be in a situation of “radical indefension, wholly exposed to the violence of those inside the city”
(14). Perhaps these presuppositions were valid for the original Roman homo sacer, but in
modernity—in which everyone is potentially a homo sacer, in Agamben’s view—the situation
can be much more complicated. As Ong points out, just because a state may attempt to ban an
individual and expose him or her to death does not mean that other states, not to mention non-
governmental organizations (NGOs) and religious groups, necessarily acknowledge and abide by
the ban (22-25). In a world of complex international relations and NGOs, Agamben’s theories,
working from ancient political formulations and legal codes, effectively substitute the modern
nation-state for the classical polis and, in Connolly’s assessment, “pa[y] little heed to the
changed global context in which sovereignty is set” (35).
35

35
It should be noted that Agamben sees the intensification of biopolitics in modernity as the direct outgrowth of the
decline of the nation-state. In his view, the concentration camp becomes the “the fundamental biopolitical paradigm
of the West” (Homo Sacer 181) precisely because of the problems encountered by the nation-state: “[the camp] is
produced at the point at which the political system of the modern nation state, which was founded on the functional

59
This criticism regarding the applicability of Agamben’s appropriation and adaptation of
ancient political and legal theory is related to frequently voiced critiques of Agamben’s larger
methods of argumentation. These critiques, as presented by Laclau, Paul Patton, William Rasch,
and others, pivot around two related points, each of which may be seen to entail the other: that
Agamben privileges what he believes to be the origins of a concept or institution and that his
work is essentially a closed teleological system. Regarding the first point, Laclau states that
“reading [Agamben’s] texts, one often has the feeling … that in some sense the origin has a
secret determining priority over what follows from it” (11; italics in original). Similarly, Paul
Patton asserts that Agamben’s work is prone to a “conceptual fundamentalism according to
which the meaning of concepts is irrevocably determined by their origins” (218). As the larger
arguments of Laclau and Patton make clear, moreover, the problem resides not in the emphasis
on philosophical formulations such as the supposed split between zōē and bios in antiquity or the
emergence of the homo sacer, but in the way these concepts are seen to determine Agamben’s
arguments about modernity and to allow his theory such a massive sweep, often at the expense of
the historical detail. In this regard, Agamben’s methodology is vastly different from that of
Foucault, who attempts to reconstruct the basis for modern political institutions and concepts
precisely through the painstaking examination of historical detail.
While Foucault’s historico-espistemological approach entails its own limitations, it is
clear that Agamben’s reliance on large-scale, trans-historic concepts provokes much of the

nexus between a determinate localization (land) and a determinate order (the State) and mediated by automatic rules
for the inscription of life (birth or the nation), enters into a lasting crisis, and the State decides to assume directly the
care of the nation’s biological life as one of its proper tasks” (Homo Sacer 174-75). Agamben’s critics and other
theorists, such as Hardt and Negri, however, see the nation-state’s relative decline as a sign of the complexity of
contemporary global politics, a situation in which Agamben’s ideas of the sovereign exception and bare life become
overly schematic. These positions are not mutually exclusive, but the extent to which Agamben does not take into
account notions of the larger “global context in which sovereignty is set” (Connolly 35), focusing instead on only
one element of this context, “the lasting crisis” into which the political systems of the nation-state have entered,
opens his work to such criticism.

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criticism of his formulation of biopolitics. In characterizing Agamben’s argument as “structural,
foundational, and historical only in the most apocalyptic sense” (100), William Rasch both
echoes and extends this criticism beyond Agamben’s emphasis on deterministic origins and
expansive concepts shorn of historical detail. Rasch’s critique leads, moreover, to another
potential problem of Agamben’s work, which is not only that its “secret determining origin”
leads to a “naïve telelogism,” as Laclau asserts (21), but that the content of the teleological
structure leads to a conceptual homogenizing of all political structures in modernity. “What
reveals itself in the sovereign ban,” Rasch contends, “is the telos of the West, an ingrained
imperfection that inheres as much in the democratic tradition as it does in absolutism or
twentieth-century totalitarianism” (100). This “ingrained imperfection” is responsible,
ultimately, for the “inner solidarity” Agamben finds “between democracy and totalitarianism”
(Homo Sacer 10), a provocative claim, but one that Agamben begins to substantiate by a later
reference to “the otherwise incomprehensible rapidity with which twentieth-century
parliamentary democracies were able to turn into totalitarian states” and vice-versa (Homo Sacer
122).
Rather than provide actual historical details, however—or define exactly how rapid a
state’s transformation must be in order to be comprehensible—Agamben instead pushes his
argument further, seeking, it would seem, the telos to his claims regarding the sovereign ban and
the emergence of zōē into the polis. When introducing the notion of an “inner solidarity between
democracy and totalitarianism,” Agamben contends that he is not making “a historiographical
claim, which would authorize the liquidation and leveling of the enormous differences that
characterize their history and their rivalry” (10), but in the paragraph before this caveat, he refers
to “modern democracy’s decadence and gradual convergence with totalitarian states in post-

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democratic spectacular societies” (10). He goes further in later passages about state
transformations, stating that “once their fundamental referent becomes bare life, traditional
political distinctions (such as those between Right and Left, liberalism and totalitarianism,
private and public) lose their clarity and intelligibility and enter into a zone of indistinction”
(Homo Sacer 122). Perhaps there is a larger distinction to be made between a leveling of
differences between two political systems and the entrance of those systems into a zone of
indistinction, but if so, Agamben doesn’t provide any ideas about the basis or significance of this
larger distinction. The degree to which his argument does, in fact, level the “enormous
differences” between two forms of modern government appears to be the direct result of his
“structural” argument, which posits that all modern state forms develop from the same sovereign
ban and are thus fated to converge, to the point that they become indistinguishable. Even for
those amenable to this conclusion, the extent to which Agamben disregards his own caveat and
ultimately contradicts himself is problematic, as is the lack of specific, historical detail he
provides to bolster his theoretical claims.
36

Edenic Varieties, or Verities?
What unites all of the criticisms of Agamben’s theory discussed thus far are concerns
with the application and extension of his foundational premises regarding the originary
distinction between zōē and bios, the emergence of “bare life,” or zōē held under the threat of
death, and the sovereign ban which initiates this threat. Numerous critics have addressed these
concerns, as we have seen, but fewer have contested the bases on which they stand. Among those

36
The question isn’t whether liberal ideals can be and have been easily discarded or overturned in modernity, as an
abundance of recent evidence from the U.S. alone indicates, but whether Agamben’s split between zōē and bios and
the subsequent creation of bare life is what underlies this movement to diminish or eliminate individual rights. This
question is far too large and complex to engage in this chapter, but it seems clear that Agamben’s claims about the
“convergence” of democratic and totalitarian states both evacuates the specificity of any state’s movement toward a
reduction of individual rights and discounts the possibility of resistance to such movements by civil liberties groups,
international organizations, and other states.

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who have raised important arguments about the foundations of Agamben’s argument are
Connolly and Derrida, who make similar points but come at them from different directions, and
whose arguments are not equally effective.
Connolly addresses political and cultural aspects of Agamben’s foundational premises,
astutely pointing out that Agamben’s analysis “reflects a classical liberal and Arendtian
assumption that there was a time when politics was restricted to public life and biocultural life
was kept in the private realm” (29). While Connolly rejects this assumption outright, going so far
as to call it “a joke” (29),
37
the assumption itself remains a critical component of Agamben’s
larger theory of biopolitics, as Agamben’s lucid conclusion to a discussion of the biopolitical
grounds of totalitarianism makes clear: “When life and politics—originally divided, and linked
together by means of the no-man’s-land of the state of exception that is inhabited by bare life—
begin to become one, all life becomes sacred and all politics become the exception” (Homo
Sacer 148). Not only does this comment, essentially Agamben’s vision of biopolitics in nuce,
foreground the extent to which his approach is prone to universalizing gestures (encompassing
“all life” and “all politics”) that would systematically eliminate the possibility of alternative
political formations, as Laclau points out, and deny the complexity of modern political practices,
in a Foucauldian sense, it also registers the degree to which the theory is based on a sense of a
prior—and much preferable—condition from which the present world has fallen. In this sense,
his theory of biopolitics can be seen as yet another instance of the “metaphysical nostalgia” that
Jameson discusses in Marxism and Form (38), even if it retains the novelty of being a “golden

37
While Connolly calls important attention to an originary premise of Agamben’s works, his response to the
“Arendtian assumption” itself is dismissive, and his own formulation of the relations between politics and life is so
expansive as to add little to the discussion of Agamben’s version of biopolitics. “What a joke,” he exclaims after
introducing the assumption of a time when oikos and polis were cleanly separated. “Every way of life involves the
infusion of norms, judgments, and standards into the affective life of participants at both private and public levels.
Every way of life is biocultural and biopolitical” (29).

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age” based on some sense of separation and division (that of polis and oikos), rather than on the
imagined and longed for sense of wholeness, “plenitude,” and integration that marks most
secular versions of Eden.
Agamben never specifies, however, precisely when or where the clean and stable
separation of zōē and bios existed, only that it did exist, presumably in a time before the
emergence of “sovereignty” proper. In this regard, the notion of a definitive separation serves as
a type of pre-lapsarian placeholder, against which to judge the historical past and foreseeable
future. It should be noted, however, that Agamben does not contend that this originary separation
can or should be recuperated. Rather, the intensification of biopolitics in the 20
th
century and the
emergence of the concentration camp as the nomos of the contemporary world (Homo Sacer
176), in his conception, mark an irremediable turn in this history of humanity, one that makes it
impossible to re-establish a politics based on this ideal of a clean division between oikos and
polis: “There is no return from the camps to classical politics. In the camps, city and house
became indistinguishable, and the possibility of differentiating between our biological body and
our political body … was taken from us forever” (Homo Sacer 188). The contemporary situation,
then, is one of the total indistinction of zōē and bios and of house and state, and the reappearance
of clear distinctions between these things is impossible, if not inconceivable.
It is against the backdrop of both the posited, pre-historical separation of house and state
and the contemporary indistinction of these entities that Agamben calls for his “completely new
politics,” which would mark a radical transformation of politics, not by attempting to reinstall
clear divisions between house and state and zōē and bios, but by effectively eliminating the
distinctions altogether. In this sense, then, Agamben does present a utopian ideal of wholeness
and integration, a condition in which the originary fracture in conceptions of life that makes

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possible such notions as the sovereign ban and the constitution of the homo sacer, as an instance
of one form of life, zōē, exposed to the threat of death, is somehow overcome. While his
formulations of this complex dynamic are typically cryptic, Agamben essentially contends that
the distinctions between forms of life itself and, more critically, the political mechanisms by
which these distinctions are made and valued, must be eliminated altogether, to allow for “a form
of life that is wholly exhausted in bare life and a bios that is only its own zōē” (Homo Sacer
188). As noted previously, Agamben provides little by way of concrete detail about how this
distinction and the political structures bound up with it would be eliminated, or what such forms
of life would look like, in reality.
38
Nevertheless, this messianic impulse toward a politics that
transcends all distinctions among forms of human life is the future-oriented counterpart of
Agamben’s clear supposition that a separation had once existed among these forms. In essence,
then, he presents almost the entirety of human history in the West, from Aristotle to Auschwitz
and the society of the spectacle, as a type of biopolitical continuum, bracketed by an originary

38
Perhaps the clearest statements about the elimination of political distinctions occur in The Coming Community,
which precedes Homo Sacer and Agamben’s full elaboration of the notion of bare life. In the book’s opening
chapter, Agamben presents his evocative notion of “whatever being,” which derives from the quodlibet ens of
Scholastic philosophy and “relates to singularity not in its indifference with respect to a common property (to a
concept, for example: being red, being French, being Muslim), but only to its being such as it is” (1; italics in
original). Such a utopian consideration of identity markers, universally acknowledged and accepted but not
incorporated into a hierarchical taxonomy of any sort, would seem to point toward the elimination of political
distinctions that leads to the creation of bare life, but without also eradicating singularity itself. Similar valorizations
of a notion of singularity that somehow escapes human manipulation of taxonomies for the sake of greater power—a
clear impossibility for Nietzsche and those who follow him, such as Foucault—occur in Hardt and Negri’s Empire
and Multitude. It is significant, however, that Agamben’s conception of “whatever being” operates at the level of
identity markers and not at the level of conceptions of life itself, as zōē and bios do. Agamben attempts to propound
a notion of singularity at the level of life itself in the 1993 essay “Form-of-Life,” which is included in the collection
Means Without End, but his assertion that a “form-of-life” constitutes “a life that can never be separated from its
form, a life in which it is never possible to isolate something such as naked life” (3-4) adds little to the formulations
presented in Homo Sacer. Agamben elaborates on the notion of “form-of-life,” however, by relating it to
potentiality, or the capacity not to act (4). It is noteworthy that this elaboration serves to qualify the notion of “form-
of-life,” as one that’s exclusively anthropocentric, as much it clarifies the ways in which a “form-of-life” would
actually operate: “[This formulation] defines a life—human life—in which the single ways, acts, and processes of
living are never simply facts but always and above all possibilities of life, always and above all power” (4; italics in
original). Such a distinction seems odd, since claiming that a person isn’t really “a human” but merely an animal is a
common means of reducing him or her to bare life. Nevertheless, Agamben maintains the primacy of this distinction
in his very definition of a form that would eliminate all distinctions.

65
scenario of the separation of forms of life, on the one side, and an eschatological scenario of the
integration of these forms, or the elimination of distinctions between them, on the other.
A Matter of Semantics
If Connolly contends that the notion of an originary separation between house and state is
misguided, thus calling into question a critical premise of Agamben’s larger, historical argument,
Derrida also points out the degree to which Agamben’s conception of biopolitics relies on the
assumption of a meaningful division in the ancient world, but he does so on a linguistic basis,
contesting the clear and stable distinction that Agamben finds between zōē and bios. Such a
distinction is, of course, central to Agamben’s analysis. “All of Agamben’s demonstrative
strategy, here and elsewhere,” Derrida contends, “puts its money on a distinction or a radical,
clear, univocal exclusion, among the Greeks and in Aristotle in particular, between bare life
(zōē), common to all living beings (animals, men, and gods) and life qualified as individual or
group life (bios: bios theōrētikos, for example, contemplative life, bios apolaustikos, life of
pleasure, bios politikos, political life)” (Beast & Sovereign 316). Because this “distinction is
never so clear and secure,” in Derrida’s view, “Agamben himself has to admit that there are
exceptions,” such as Aristotle’s reference to the zōē aristē kai aidios, or the noble and eternal
life, of a god in the Metaphysics, and his invocation of man as politikon zōon in the opening of
the Politics (Beast & Sovereign 316).
In Agamben’s argument, this distinction is problematic in the extent to which it
compresses and distills the larger force of Aristotle’s conception of man as the being who lives in
the polis by dint of his ability to possess logos. On a semantic basis, however, the distinction is
far less insecure than Derrida contends.
39
The examples that Derrida marshals to argue for the

39
The essential distinction between the two terms inheres in this difference: that zōē refers to the simple act of being
alive, while bios typically invokes a sense of how a life is conducted and sustained. The words thus correspond, in

66
lack of clarity in this distinction, moreover, are the same ones that Agamben himself provides in
the exposition to his discussion of bare life and can be seen to function simply as a
counterargument employed by Agamben to head off presupposed objections to his thesis.
Agamben addresses these objections, moreover, in a credible manner, claiming that Aristotle’s
reference to God as a zōē aristē kai aidios serves “to underline the significant truth that God is a
living being” (HS 1). Indeed, to assert that God is somehow a bios would make little sense, as it
would claim that God, in the words of the LSJ, is somehow “a mode of life” or a “manner of
living.”
Though Derrida’s contentions about the linguistic basis of Agamben’s argument may not
be as firmly grounded in the Greek language as he believes, they form the basis of a larger claim
about Agamben’s attempts to negotiate the historical development of biopolitics that is
provocative in its own right. In an assertion that resonates with critiques of Agamben’s theory as
being too beholden to notions of both conceptual “origins” and their inevitable telos, Derrida
keenly points out that Agamben “wants both to be the first to announce an unprecedented and
new thing, what he calls this ‘decisive event of modernity,’ and also the first to recall that in fact
it’s always been like that, from time immemorial” (330). Apart from the assertion that Agamben
seeks to be “the first” to announce or notice certain developments, a tendency that Derrida
highlights repeatedly, this claim isolates the diachronic tensions in Agamben’s argument.
These tensions, the result of a theory that “completes” Foucault by locating a
foundational, epistemic shift of modernity in ancient structures of sovereignty and conceptions of

many ways, to the distinction between biological life and biographical life that the analytical philosopher James
Rachels presents in his discussion of post-Darwinian ethics and moral individualism (199). Lexical support for this
distinction, moreover, is not obscure or relegated to scholia of ancient fragments, but is found in the first definition
that the Liddell Scott Jones Greek-English Lexicon (hereafter LSJ) provides for bios, which directly counterposes
the word with zōē: “life, i.e. not animal life (ζωή), but mode of life.” For more information, see the entries for βίος
and ζωή in the LSJ and Chantraine.

67
life, are what underwrite the critiques of theorists such Laclau, Patton, and Ong, who focus on
Agamben’s reliance on “secret determining origins” and on the inapplicability of his ideas to the
complex dynamics of modern sovereign structures. While Derrida isolates the same tension that
supports these critiques of Agamben’s theory, he takes his critique in a different direction, not
claiming that Agamben’s work doesn’t do justice to the complexities of modern politics, but
arguing that Agamben’s work fails to acknowledge the extent to which biopolitics proper—and
not just the conceptual origins that determine its development in modernity—may have been
operative in antiquity. In Derrida’s view, because Aristotle’s politikon zōon constitutes “a zōē
that is qualified and not bare,” Agamben must therefore attempt to demonstrate this situation
does not undermine his entire thesis, by arguing, as he does in his brief explication of the
“politikon zōon,” “that there is tenable distinction between an attribute and a specific difference”
(327).
Not surprisingly, Derrida believes that this argument is very difficult, perhaps “even
impossible” to make (327). He contends, moreover, that Agamben attempts to argue the validity
of this distinction to avoid admitting “that Aristotle already had in view, had already in his own
way thought, the possibility that politics, politicity, could, in certain cases, that of man, qualify or
even take hold of bare life (zōē), and therefore that Aristotle might already have apprehended or
formalized, in his own way, what Foucault and Agamben attribute to modern specificity” (327).
While it may, in fact, be possible to argue that important aspects of biopolitical thought—
particularly that of Foucault—can be found in antiquity, in Aristotle’s own remarks on the
importance of population management in book 2 of the Politics, for example, or in Augustus’
attempts to regulate birth rates among different classes of Romans with the leges Iuliae, Derrida

68
doesn’t invoke these, or any, examples.
40
Instead, on the basis of his contention that Aristotle’s
politikon zōon constitutes a qualification and politicization of zōē, he “suggest[s] that ‘bio-
power’ itself is not new” (330), though he does allow that “incredible novelties in bio-power”
may appear in modernity. With this allowance, however, Derrida’s assessment—presented as a
critique of the biopolitical theories of Agamben and, to a lesser extent, Foucault—begins to
accord, to a degree, with Agamben’s thesis that biopolitics stems from an originary conception
and structure of sovereignty in antiquity that becomes much more intensive in modernity.
What is ultimately at stake in this critique is a determination of what it means for an
animal, zōon, to be qualified as politikon. For Derrida, this qualification represents the
establishment of biopolitics proper, a way in which life itself is contained within the political
terrain of the city, rather than the domestic environment of the household. For Agamben,
however, this qualification merely represents the first biopolitical capture, or inclusive exclusion,
by which a notion of the “good life,” associated with the polis, is established in distinction to life
itself, associated with the household. This capture represents the origins of biopolitics, which

40
Although Foucault presents biopolitics as a distinctly modern mode of power, passages in the Politics and Roman
legislation resonate strongly with his ideas about population management. In the Politics, Aristotle states that
“anyone might have supposed it more necessary to limit (hōristhai) the production of children than property, so as
not to produce more than a certain number, and to determine this number by looking toward the chance that it might
happen that some of those produced die, and toward the childlessness of others” (1265b5-10). The rationale for this
attention to population, moreover, is to prevent the poverty bred by overpopulation, which can produce discord
(stasin) and crime (kakourgian) (1265b10-12). This formulation, with its desire to produce security for the state
through a knowledge of the random elements of population growth (child mortality and infertility), accords strongly
with Foucault’s claims that biopolitics seeks to understand the “aleatory” aspects of population growth, with a
similar motivation of “security” (Security 242-46). While not as direct in his motivations, Augustus made attempts
at population management in the leges iuliae, a series of laws presented in 18 B.C. and the following years (Scullard
231). These laws are sometimes seen as “moral” legislation because of the harsh penalties they imposed on adultery,
but they also provided strong incentives for Roman citizens—as opposed to freedmen or other non-citizens—to have
more children. While attempting to increase the number of Romans and Italians in the newly pacified Italy,
Augustus also sought to limit the influx of foreigners and non-citizens in Rome: “Augustus wished not only to
increase the Italian element in the Roman citizen body, but also to limit the foreign element that was mixing with it,
especially as a result of manumission” (Scullard 232). Such desire to regulate different elements of the population
also clearly accords with Foucault’s formulation of biopolitics. The primary caveat to any claim that either Aristotle
or Augustus proposed a biopolitical state would be that neither actually possessed or had the means of acquiring the
type of detailed and accurate knowledge necessary for bona fide biopolitical regulation of the population. Both men
may have sought the power, but they lacked the knowledge, in a Foucauldian sense.

69
won’t actually flourish until the advent of modernity and the emergence of democratic
governments that enshrine notions of individual rights but do so on the basis of zōē, rather than
bios. For Foucault, however, the notion of man as a politikon zōon represents all that biopolitics
leaves behind, as modern approaches to governmentality modify or abandon classical
conceptions of sovereignty based on territory and the threat of death held over individual
subjects (Security 96-110; History of Sexuality 135-36). In modernity, politics operates on a
principle of “making live or letting die” in Foucault’s conception (Society Must Be Defended
247), but also represents a threat by which not just individual members of a society, but large
segments, if not the entirety, of the human species itself, are exposed to the threat of death via
nuclear war and wholly industrialized and rationalized attempts at genocide (History of Sexuality
136-137; Society Must Be Defended 254-63). Each theorist thus represents a step on a
continuum, with Derrida claiming that biopolitics exists for Aristotle, Agamben asserting that it
begins, conceptually, with Aristotle but doesn’t flourish until modernity, and Foucault arguing
that it only exists in modernity and in contradistinction to conceptions of politics as elaborated
by Aristotle.
Zones of Mystification
As this analysis of Agamben’s formulation of biopolitical theory and some the criticisms
that have been leveled against it make clear, Aristotelian conceptions of “life” and “man” are of
central importance to Agamben’s notions of biopolitics. The prevalence of these concepts in his
thought and his attempts to apply them to modern scenarios may be what drive the criticism of
his work as bound by a “conceptual fundamentalism,” but, as we have also seen, Agamben is
careful to distinguish the originary separation of forms of life that he finds in Aristotle from the
later expansion of biopolitics and the entrance of both zōē and bios into a “zone of indistinction.”

70
Indeed, in his discussions of the ways in which “bare life” has been produced historically,
Agamben relies heavily on examples from Roman law and society, such as the father’s power of
life or death over his sons (Homo Sacer 87-90), to make his argument. In doing so, he clearly
distinguishes the Roman production of “sacred life,” which can be killed but not sacrificed, from
the Aristotelian separation of zōē and bios, stating that “decisive as it for the origin of Western
politics, the opposition between zōē and bios, between zēn and eu zēn (that is, between life in
general and the qualified way of life proper to men), contains nothing to make one assign a
privilege or a sacredness to life as such” (Homo Sacer 66). In this way, the clean separation of
forms of life, or between “life in general and the qualified way of life proper to men,” establishes
a conceptual framework fundamental to the biopolitical production of “sacred life,” serving as
the originary foundation, based on a clear division of oikos and polis, from which the forms of
life themselves will fall into indistinction. In Catherine Mills’ incisive summary, “Aristotle’s
division provides the conceptual arthron that drives the originary biopolitical structure of
Western politics” (Philosophy 109).
This dynamic of the production of conceptual differences that later fall into indistinction
is at the heart of Agamben’s notion of biopolitics. Beyond the Roman production of sacred life, a
vital step of this fall into indistinction occurs in modernity, when bare life, or zōē, is incorporated
into the polis via the extension of rights to people not as bearers of qualified forms of life, but of
life itself. The expansion of rights in this manner, Agamben indicates, is central to growth of
democracy in the West: “Nascent European democracy placed at the center of its battle against
absolutism not bios, the qualified life of the citizen, but zōē—the bare, anonymous life that is as
such taken into the sovereign ban” (Homo Sacer 124). Central to his argument regarding this
incorporation of zōē is the reference to “Corpus X”—rather than a person, human, or man—in

71
the 1679 writ of habeas corpus. Regarding the writ’s formulation that “a body” must be
presented to the courts, Agamben contends that “nothing allows one to measure the difference
between ancient and medieval freedom and the freedom at the basis of modern democracy than
this formula. It is not the free man and his statutes and prerogatives, nor even simply homo, but
rather the corpus that is new subject of politics” (Homo Sacer 124). The end result of this
incorporation of the body or life itself, as opposed to qualified forms of life, is that the
production of sacred life found in the Roman homo sacer becomes prevalent, if not ubiquitous,
in modernity, via the very political form that ushers in regimes of popular sovereignty. “Modern
democracy,” Agamben contends, “does not abolish sacred life but rather shatters it and
disseminates it into every individual body, making it what is at stake in political conflict” (124).
The spread of democracy and the liberal ideals of individual rights are thus responsible, in
Agamben’s view, for the modern condition in which everyone is a potential homo sacer.
While other critics may contest the ways in which this dissemination of bare life is
actually carried out in modern political contexts, what is also noteworthy but frequently
overlooked in these formulations of the ways in which the corpus becomes the bearer of rights in
modernity is the degree to which Agamben avoids addressing the profound and troubling
implications of the split between forms of life in Aristotle’s Politics. Agamben may be correct in
contending that “the opposition between zōē and bios” does not inherently reduce life to a
condition of sacredness (Homo Sacer 66), but in construing the Aristotelian formula in this
manner, Agamben elides the repressive hierarchy on which Aristotle’s notions of life and the
“good life” of the polis are based. As we shall see, the “body,” which Agamben claims is the
basis for modern notions of freedom, also plays a prominent role in Aristotle’s elucidation of the
polis. Although Agamben does not address the importance of notions of the body in the ancient

72
text, it is by virtue of their use of the body that slaves, women, and domestic animals are
confined to the realm of the oikos, where reproductive labor is performed.
Throughout his expositions of ancient conceptions of life, Agamben never examines in
any detail the critical qualifications that Aristotle places on the notion of “living well” within the
polis, stating only that “in Western politics, bare life has the peculiar privilege of being that
whose exclusion founds the city of men” (7). The dynamics of this exclusion are not discussed,
but Aristotle’s qualifications for participation in the polis are bound up with his definition of
man, as the being who possesses logos, in distinction to all other animals, as well as to slaves.
While Agamben does briefly engage this seminal formulation, he doesn’t acknowledge the
extent to which this definition itself—a “supplement of politicity” (Homo Sacer 3), in
Agamben’s view—denies the “good life” of existence in the polis to slaves, explicitly, and
women, implicitly.
These denials form the basis of the hierarchy on which Aristotle’s organic conception of
politics itself stands and are part of a larger metaphysical teleology that imputes the ontological
precedence of the city over the individuals who constitute it. Without this teleological structure,
in fact, Aristotle’s ideas lose much of their power and instead seem like attempts, often popular
with political elite, to rationalize a beneficial power structure by imputing it to “nature” itself. In
this sense, Agamben’s emphasis on a distinction between zōē and bios, at the expense of the
larger, organicist arguments constructed within the first chapter of the Politics, constitutes a
mystification of the aristocratic privilege that Aristotle repeatedly contends is founded by nature
(phusei), in the arrangements that place the free man within the polis, and the woman and slave
within the oikos. Whereas Aristotle relies on a metaphysical teleology to “naturalize” the
distinction between the citizen who possesses logos and the slave and animal who do not,

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Agamben transcendentalizes this very distinction, inscribing the differences on which the
Aristotelian conceptions of both man and the polis are founded onto a trans-historical binary that
must be now sublated, in his view, if humanity is to move beyond its current condition.
Because the Aristotelian premises of organicism are intimately linked to Agamben’s
foundational notion of an originary split between zōē and bios, they may thus constitute an area
of research relevant, in their own right, to an understanding of biopolitics as construed by
Agamben. Notions of logos and the ability to speak are also central aspects, moreover, of the
long poems under discussion in this study. In examining passages from Aristotle’s Politics that
form the basis for both Agamben’s formulation of originary biopolitical capture and Aristotle’s
notion of the city as the site that precedes the individuals and families that constitute it, the
following sections of this chapter seek to illuminate the negative space of Agamben’s theories,
taking up critical elements of Aristotle’s political thought that don’t register explicitly in
Agamben’s work but that nevertheless can inform biopolitical thought, pushing it away from its
own anthropocentric assumptions.
41
In doing so, this reading will help to establish this study’s
framework of biopoetics.

41
Agamben begins to question these anthropocentric assumptions himself in The Open, which originally appeared in
2002. This work presents the helpful notion that the longstanding attempts of people to distinguish themselves,
categorically, from all other animals, or to exempt themselves from the category of “animal” per se, effectively
constitute “anthropological machines,” producing “man” where it would otherwise be impossible to distinguish him
with certainty (33-38). (For an interesting account of characteristics or behaviors deemed exclusive to man by
writers in antiquity, see Sorabji 90-93). Agamben’s work is marked, however, by its reliance on Heideggerian
notions of the “abyss” that separates the “world-poor” animal from the “world-forming” man (Open 50-51).
Agamben’s reading of Heidegger is elegant, but in working from a philosophical progenitor so deeply invested in
anthropocentrism, Agamben limits the ability of his interrogation of conceptions of man and animal to address the
professed goal of his study, which is “understanding how [anthropological machines] work so that we might,
eventually, be able to stop them” (Open 38). Although The Open does present a messianic vision, via Benjamin, of
the “saved night” in which something “for which we perhaps have no name and which is neither animal nor man
settles in between nature and humanity and holds itself in the mastered relation” (83), as a whole, the work offers
few concrete suggestions about how anthropological machines might be stopped and evinces little concern for the
effects of these machines on both humans and animals. The actual details of the work’s “Benjamin ex-machina,” in
de la Durantaye’s charming formulation for a device commonly used by Agamben (331; italics in original), are
problematic, moreover. In The Open, the presentation of sexual fulfillment that Benjamin offers in Einbahnstrasse is
rendered as a means by which not only is man “delivered from his mystery” by a woman, as Benjamin proposes, but
also as a means by which the “the machine is, so to speak, stopped” (83). As Mills notes, “Agamben is unconcerned

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Nature and Body in Aristotelian Organicism
Aristotle’s entire conception of man as a political animal is intimately bound up with his
excursus on political organicism, or the polis as a natural entity that precedes the individuals who
constitute it, in the opening pages of the Politics. Aristotle’s overall argument is so closely
woven, in fact, that it is difficult to analyze just one of its strands.
42
It is not surprising, then, that
this opening contains both the famous definition of man as political animal and a well-known
example of the “body-politic” metaphor, which Bobbio deems “the definitive formulation of the
constitutive principles of organicism: ‘The whole is necessarily prior to the part. If the whole
body is destroyed, there will not be a foot or a head.’ We thus see that ‘the polis exists by nature
and that it is prior to the individual’” (41-42, citing 1253a).
43
Before examining this seminal
formulation in more detail in and discussing the significant ways in which it relates to Aristotle’s
notion of man as a political animal and Agamben’s conception of biopolitical capture, it is first
necessary to look briefly at a few other aspects of Aristotle’s work that are significant to notions
of organicism and biopolitics.
Much more could be said about the first book of the Politics, of course, which contains
the infamous defense of “natural slavery,” as well as the denunciation of usury that so influenced
Pound (see chapter 1, note 20). For the purposes of this discussion of organicism and biopolitics,
however, the most noteworthy aspects of the book’s opening are frequent references to

by the highly gendered (and heterosexist) aspects of the concept of salvation and happiness that this ‘hieroglyph of a
new inhumanity’ induces” (Philosophy 114). Perhaps just as important is that Agamben’s vision for a world in
which anthropological machines have ceased to operate is as messianic as that in which the “completely new
politics” of Homo Sacer would appear. In both cases, it is hard to see how the movement from the lamentable
realities of the present to the messianic redemption of the future will take place, outside of some type of divine
intervention.
42
Keyt contends that “the idea that the polis is a natural entity cannot be discussed in isolation from two other ideas
to which it is closely tied—that man is by nature a political animal … and that the polis is prior in nature to the
individual” (56). Similarly, the idea of man as political animal cannot be discussed in isolation from the other two
elements of Aristotle’s political thought.
43
Bobbio quotes from Ernest Barker’s 1948 Clarendon translation of the Politics. All other translations of Aristotle
are my own.

75
hierarchical structures that occur “by nature” (phusei), as in the body-politic metaphor cited by
Bobbio; the denigration of the body as, essentially, a tool used by slaves to benefit their “natural”
rulers; and the reliance on a teleological notion of self-sufficiency (autarkeia). All of these
elements of Aristotle’s argument relate directly to his conception of organicism and the well-
known claim that man is distinguished from other animals by his use of speech, or logos, an
assertion that is central to contemporary articulations of biopolitics. Because Aristotle’s
argument is so tightly conceived, however, all of these aspects of the argument can at times
overlap or interact with one another, which makes it all the more difficult to parse out the ideas
he’s advancing.
The first aspect of Aristotle’s text, the philosopher’s commonplace reliance on the
assertion that social arrangements and orders occur “by nature,” not only seems a convenient
way to reinforce the status quo, as Jay asserts (27-28), but also strains credulity at times. For
example, in the passage Bobbio cites, Aristotle contends that the city-state precedes the family
and individual, by nature, but he does so shortly after an extended analysis of the genesis of the
state.
44
By his own account, the city-state only emerges—as a de facto aggregate—after series of
unions among individuals, the first of which are the unions of male and female and of “the ruler
and the one ruled by nature” to form a family (1252a31).
45
Just as the precedence of the city-

44
In an acute analysis, Keyt points out that Aristotle’s argument regarding the polis is inconsistent with his own
theory of natural generation: “Aristotle’s account of the origin of the polis in Politics I.2 is inconsistent with his
theory of natural genesis. By this theory … a thing that comes to be by nature comes to be through the agency of a
distinct object that is the same in species as itself (Met. Z.7.1032a15-25, 8.1032b29-32). But according to I.2 the
polis evolves from the village and the household, both of which differ in species (though not in genus) [because all
three are communities (koinōniai)] from the polis” (58). The bulk of Keyt’s article constitutes a painstaking
investigation of the logic of Aristotle’s assertion that the city exists by nature and precedes the individuals who
constitute it. He concludes with a straightforward assessment of Aristotle’s argument: “On this one issue at least,
whether the political community is a natural or artificial entity, Hobbes is better than Aristotle” (79).
45
Organicism necessarily precludes the notion that a larger structure is an aggregate of individual, independent
components, insisting that the organic whole somehow transcends the parts of which it is composed. In Watt’s
formulation, “the term ‘organic’ usually depends on the understanding that a whole is different from, and in some
sense larger than, its constituent parts. The opposite is the mechanical view; there, each part is separate, and each
must be consciously engineered to fit together into a whole” (Modern Individualism 187-88).

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state—a central aspect of organicism—occurs by nature, according to Aristotle, so do the unions
of the families that constitute it. More examples of Aristotle’s “political naturalism” will be
presented in this section (Miller 195), but these two alone, which constitute claims that would
seem to contradict one another, if taken outside of Aristotle’s teleological theory of causation,
may serve to indicate how heavily Aristotle relies on the figure of nature to convey his ideas of
proper social and political order.
Ample evidence of the second noteworthy aspect of the text, Aristotle’s denigration of
the body, can be found in his presentations of the unions of individuals who constitute the city.
Significantly, the passage quoted above marks Aristotle’s first exposition, in the Politics, of his
conception of “natural” slavery. Although he elaborates upon this notion later in the book,
particularly in 1254a and 1254b, which include the infamous assertion that slaves “have enough
of a share in reason (logos) to understand but not to possess it” (1254b.22-23), this passage
establishes a fundamental hierarchy based on the types of labor that individuals, by nature, are
capable of performing, with the ruler performing mental labor, by means of “forethought,” and
the slave suffering or enduring (ponein) labor that is done, explicitly, with the body (tō sōmati):
“for the one capable of foreseeing with thoughts is the ruler by nature and the master by nature,
and the one capable of suffering the same things with the body is by nature the slave” (1252a32-
34). That the body of the slave is, by nature, merely a tool for those seen as being capable
(dunamenon) of a higher level of thought is made even more clear in the extended discussion of
natural slavery in 1254b. After asserting that “other animals serve not reason but feeling”
(1254b23-24), Aristotle yokes the animal and slave together, conceptually: “And indeed their use
differs little, for with the body, both help with the necessities [of life], both the slaves and the
tame animals” (1254b24-26). As the opening of the Politics makes clear, Aristotle is thinking of

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the master’s interests when referring to “the necessities of life,” and he is not concerned with
whether the slaves and animals receive these necessities.
What is also clear, moreover, is that a notion of nature, or nature as a figure, typically
rendered in the instrumental dative (phusei), provides a default rationale for domination, but one
in which the dominated—slaves and animals—are linked to their “natural,” organic forms, their
bodies, while those seen as naturally superior are linked solely to their mental labors (dianoia).
Although Aristotle is clearly presenting his ideas about slavery in response to those who opposed
the practice in ancient Greece, it would be a mistake to attribute the clear connections he makes
between slaves and the body as a mere rhetorical ploy, or to believe that he’s somehow speaking
figuratively. As Thalmann notes, “the analogy of the slave to the body is not simply a trope;
Aristotle seems to intend it literally in some respects and to refer it to the kind of work the slave
does to give the free citizen leisure for political activity” (Swineherd and Bow 35). All in all, the
social division that Aristotle presents between the embodied slave and “rational” master, which
seems to anticipate Marx’s distinction between mental and physical labor, if not the Cartesian
split between a calculating cogito (master) and a material body (slave), is quite stark, and only in
one problematic excursus does Aristotle acknowledge that “freemen” too possess physical
bodies.
46

46
The lone passage in which Aristotle explicitly discusses the bodies of “freemen” (eleutherōn) (1254b27-1255a2)
constitutes perhaps the most confused and specious argument in the opening pages of Book 1. Claiming that nature
“wants” or “means” (bouletai) to distinguish (diapheronta poein) the bodies of freemen and slaves, “so that one is
strong for necessary uses and the other straight and useless (achrēsta) for such tasks (ergasias), but useful for
political life (politikon bion),” he concedes that “the opposite often turns out, and some men have the bodies of
freemen and others the souls.” He then asserts that “since this is apparent, if men were born so different with respect
to only their bodies, as are the statues (eikones) of the gods, everyone would say that those who are inferior are fit to
be slaves for these men.” That the referent for “these men” (toutois) is unclear only underscores the oddness of this
hypothetical assertion, which offers no explanation as to why nature wants to distinguish between the bodies of
freemen and slaves but fails to do so. Instead, representations of the gods are invoked as the basis of a simpler, albeit
wishful, discrimination, on the basis of the body alone. These representations then serve as the basis for comparative
claims that follow, stating that “regarding the soul, it is more just to divide men, but it is not as easy to see the
beauty of soul as that of the body.” With no empirical evidence found in the body to support the claims for a
“natural” difference between freemen and slaves, Aristotle resorts to the soul, where ever less evidence can be

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Aristotle elaborates even further on the notion “that some men are by nature free, and
others slaves” in the following section of book I (1255a1). In addressing the differences between
men and women, however, whose union constitutes another prerequisite for the eventual
formation of the city-state, he is considerably more direct and concise: “besides, the male is by
nature superior, and the female inferior, and the one rules, and the other is ruled” (1254b14-15).
Such clarity apparently lends itself to extension, as he asserts, by means of the concept of
“necessity,” which often serves as a foil for notions of the “natural,” that “this way is necessary
for all people” (1254b15-16).
With these domestic structures of inequality firmly in place, families combine to form a
village, and villages combine to form the larger community of the city-state (1252b). When it’s
finally formed, however, the city-state is said to precede the individuals, families, and villages
that constitute it. Aristotle’s rationale, of course, is that the city itself is the teleological goal of
the prior unions. This goal or end itself determines our understanding of the nature of things,
according to Aristotle, so that “the end is the nature” of anything, whether “man, horse, or house.
Moreover, on account of this, the end is the best” (1252b30-32). In the Aristotelian construct,
then, a teleological notion of a thing’s “final nature” is a vital component of organicism, which
would otherwise run the risk of collapsing back into the serial parts that constitute it. While this
assertion of the primacy of the end (telos), in and of itself, seems stand on its own, Aristotle
follows it with a claim that implicitly provides a further rationale for the desirability of the end,
as it apparently allows a thing to be self-sufficient, and “self-sufficiency is the end and the best”
(1252b33-1253a1). All of these concepts are thus linked together in the Aristotelian argument:

discerned. Nevertheless, he feels his case has been made and concludes: “it is accordingly apparent that some men
are free and others are slaves by nature, for whom it is both fitting (sumpherei) and just to be a slave.”

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the telos (end) is the phusis (nature); the telos is also the beltiston (best); and the telos and the
beltiston are autarkeia (self-sufficiency). As such, they constitute the logic of organicism.
47

The body-politic metaphor itself can thus be seen as a defense, via exemplification, of
Aristotle’s teleological notion of self-sufficient organicism. Asserting that “parts” such as the
hand or foot cannot survive if separated from the larger body, Aristotle is essentially claiming
that they lack self-sufficiency and thus don’t constitute the end, or the nature, therefore, of
anything. Perhaps because he realizes the problems inherent in valorizing a “whole” after listing
its pre-existing constituent parts, Aristotle quickly offers another defense of the city-state’s
primacy, which again relies on a conception of the city-state’s “nature,” but contends explicitly
that an individual’s lack of self-sufficiency (autarkēs) offers evidence of the city-state’s primacy,
by nature: “Therefore it is clear that the city-state is by nature before each individual: for if each,
having been divided, is not self-sufficient, he is like other parts in relation to the whole”
(1253a26-27). Such passages may not be persuasive for a modern reader who is skeptical of
Aristotle’s teleological doctrine, but they provide powerful examples of the extent to which
Aristotle relies on conceptions of nature to justify his arguments, which construe the body (of the
slave) as tool to be used by the master and the city as the site in which the free man attains his
final nature as a member of a “self-sufficient” community.
The (Bio)Political Animal
Aristotle’s famous exposition of man as a “political animal” who possesses speech occurs
in the middle of these formulations about the nature of the city and the slave and is heavily
bound up with them. His first assertion that man is a politikon zōon is presented as the logical
extension of his argument regarding self-sufficiency and occurs alongside the claim that the city-

47
As Miller points out, Aristotle’s political naturalism can be seen to derive from his metaphysical naturalism,
which is “a teleological doctrine, because things that exist by nature (of which the central cases are living
organisms) come to be and exist for an end or final cause” (195).

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state exists by nature: “From these things [that self-sufficiency is the end and the best], it is clear
that the city exists by nature and that man is a political animal by nature.” More than he does for
many of his other uses of phusei, which merely inscribe forms of domination as somehow
“natural,” Aristotle offers a coherent rationale for this claim about man as a political animal by
nature. On the simplest level, of course, if a reader accepts the organicist logic that the polis itself
exists by nature, then the notion that man, as a member of the families and villages that
constitute the city, is naturally a member of the polis, a politēs (citizen) or a zōon politikon, is
apparent. Such a reading, which merely follows the etymological basis (polis) of politikos,
denaturalizes modern presumptions about what the “political” signifies and merely places it
outside the oikos and in the larger, public realm of the city composed of multiple houses.
Aristotle’s further assertions about the “nature” of man, moreover, follow directly along
the lines of this basic, etymological reading. Immediately after the assertion that man is a
political animal, he refines the definition by claiming that anyone who, “on account of nature
(dia phusin), and not by bad luck (ou dia tuxēn), is city-less (apolis) is certainly low in rank (ētoi
phaulos) or stronger than man” (1253a2-3). This use of phaulos—in the positive, rather than the
comparative degree, which would mirror kreittōn (stronger)—indicates that some version of
man, at least, can exist in an apolitical, or city-less, condition, as does the qualification regarding
nature or luck as the cause of the condition, implying that some men exist outside the city against
their will, but exist nonetheless. Even with these possibilities of apolitical man, however, this
claim establishes normative parameters for man as one who is neither too low in rank nor too
strong to live outside the city.
Such parameters are made considerably more exclusive in a powerful formulation that
appears later in the introduction. Immediately after his attempt to prove, by virtue of the

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individual’s lack of self-sufficiency, that the city precedes the individual, he asserts that “the one
unable to form a partnership or lacking nothing on account of self-sufficiency is in no way part
of the city, so that he is either a wild animal or a god” (1253a27-28). This line of argument not
only continues the thread of self-sufficiency as the determinant factor of the nature of the city but
extends it to the nature of man, effectively offering a definition of man as one who, because of
his lack of self-sufficiency, must live in the city. Unlike the earlier version, this one provides no
wiggle room on the basis of low rank or ill fortune. Instead, those who are able to live outside the
city, in an apolitical state, are categorically not man, but either below or above man in the
Aristotelian hierarchy.
In light of this reading, it might be possible to recalibrate Foucault’s oft-cited—and, for
contemporary biopolitical thought, foundational—assessment of man as “he was for Aristotle”
and remained “for millennia,” “a living animal with the additional capacity for political
existence” (History of Sexuality 143). What Foucault deems an “additional capacity” can be
seen, instead, in the Aristotelian construct, as more of an inherent limitation, one that defines
man as man, the animal who must live in a city and thus be of the polis, politikos. While the
second half of Foucault’s assessment seems true beyond a doubt (“modern man is an animal
whose politics places his existence as a living being in question”) (History of Sexuality 143), the
first presents as a capacity a characteristic that Aristotle claims to be the direct outcome of man’s
inability to attain self-sufficiency on his own. In this sense man’s inability to live outside the
city, rather than his capacity to live in it, is what causes him to occupy the middle ground
between the gods and wild animals. Such a claim may not call into question Foucault’s overall
distinction between modern man and man as he was for Aristotle, but it does lend a different
valence to the formulation, rendering Aristotle’s presentation of man as a distinctive type of

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animal not as a strength or an ability but as a limitation. Such a claim, directly bound up with
Aristotle’s valorization of self-sufficiency as the ultimate end of nature, also reinforces the
organicist claim that individuals, or the man detached from the larger whole of the polis,
effectively cannot exist, at least not as “man.”
If this aspect of Aristotle’s representation of man can be seen as based on an inherent
limitation—that is, man’s lack of self-sufficiency and subsequent need for a city—man’s
possession of logos is presented by Aristotle in a manner more consonant with Foucault’s
assessment: as an additional capacity. As a result, any mitigation or qualification of
anthropocentrism implicit in the presentation of man’s political nature as the result of a limitation
is countermanded by the overtly positive presentation of man’s linguistic abilities. Such a
presentation strongly differentiates man from all other animals. Whereas self-sufficiency, or the
lack thereof, may be seen to differentiate man from both gods and animals, man’s possession of
the faculty of speech—and all the capabilities that Aristotle believes stem from it, such as the
perception of good and evil and, most importantly, justice—distinguishes him from other
animals, and Aristotle makes no references to those above man, the gods, in his exposition of
man’s possession of logos. Aristotle’s premise is not simply that man, because of his possession
of logos, is a political animal, but that he is more political than other animals, a claim made in
the passage’s well-known opening:
That man is a political animal (politikon ho anthropos zōon) more than all bees and all
herd animals is clear. For, as we say, nature makes nothing in vain, and man alone of the
animals has speech (logos). The voice (phonē) in fact is the sign of the painful and the
pleasurable, on which account it belongs to the other animals (for their nature has come
so far as to have perception of the painful and the pleasurable and to indicate (sēmainein)
these things to one another), but speech is to make clear the beneficial and the harmful, so
as also the just and the unjust: for this is the property characteristic (idion) to man in
comparison to other animals, that man alone has perception of good and evil and just and
unjust and other things. The partnership (koinōnia) of these men makes the household
and the city.

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A great deal could be said about this passage, which is of unsurpassed significance for
biopolitical thought and constitutes a deeply influential source for the species imperialism that
has predominated in philosophy up to the present day. In Richard Sorabji’s estimation,
Aristotle’s denial of logos to animals has had “tremendous consequences” both ethically, in
relation to how people treat animals, and philosophically, as Aristotle’s denial ran counter to
many pre-Socratic conceptions based on a commonality between people and animals and led to
“a massive re-analysis of psychological capabilities” available to people and animals by Aristotle
and the Stoics (103).
48
As Derrida notes, moreover, regarding the philosophers he discusses in
The Animal That Therefore I Am, “from Aristotle to Lacan, and including Descartes, Kant,
Heidegger, and Levinas … all of them say the same thing: the animal is deprived of language”
(32). Thus, this difference constitutes a foundational claim by which non-human animals are
seen as inferior to man and, as a result, obligated, by nature, to serve him, whether as a source of
food or labor. As a result, the moral status of animals as sentient beings capable of suffering, in
Bentham’s influential 19th century counter-formulation, is seen as secondary to that of man, who
alone possesses justice, as the bearer of logos, but is not obligated to adhere to codes of justice
when dealing with animals, which are essentially a natural resource to be consumed for man’s
benefit.
While some recent and contemporary philosophers and ethologists have attempted to
contest this claim, contending that certain animals such as chimps or dolphins possess
sophisticated communicative and cognitive abilities, the main intent of this examination will not
be to countermand Aristotle’s assertions. Rather, the intent will be to interrogate the significance

48
The line between ethical and philosophical implications is not always clear, of course. In Sorabji’s account,
Aristotle’s interest in the capacities of animals “was very largely scientific,” but the ethical dimensions of Aristotle’s
inquiry were also “extremely important” to the Stoics, whose orientation “has exercised great, perhaps excessive,
influence on our own Western Christian tradition” (104).

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of these assertions in relation to both organicism and biopolitical formulations, such as
Agamben’s, that draw heavily on them. In doing so, this discussion will also lay the foundation
for later analyses of postmodern poems that not only address man’s distinction as the animal that
possesses logos, in a contemporary environment of spectacular mass media and androcentric
Western imperialism, but also Aristotelian notions of hierarchies inscribed in nature, by virtue of
the figure “nature,” and of the body as a simply tool for use in service to those who dominate
nature.
It should be noted that while this passage clearly establishes man as a distinct type of
animal—the one who is more political than any other—it does so in ways that strongly affirm
man’s status as an animal. This affirmation, in fact, is one of the most striking aspects of the
passage, contained not merely in the designation of man as a “political animal,” which is found
elsewhere in the book’s opening, but in the Greek language’s chiastic representation of man
within, as it were, the body of the politikon … zōon.
49
The semantic effect of this syntactic
nesting of man within the category of animal is enhanced by the context in which it appears, a
direct comparison of man to other animals seen as social or “gregarious,” such as bees and herd
animals. Aristotle may be asserting that man constitutes an animal distinct from these others by
virtue of being more political, but the direct comparison only underscores man’s place within the
larger category of “animal.”
50

A similar but even stronger effect is found in the assertion that man alone of the animals
has speech, as well as in the direct comparison of man to “other animals” later in the passage.

49
The passage contending that man is a political animal embeds the words for man, ho anthropos, within the larger
designation politikon zōon (“political animal”), so that that phrase reads politikon ho anthropos zōon. Such syntactic
stylization is by no means unorthodox or unusual in classical Greek prose, but the grammatical norms of the
language also do not dictate that Aristotle construct the phrase in this way. Rather, he is choosing to embed the term
for man within the larger category “political animal.”
50
See Mulgan for an insightful summary of Aristotle’s uses of the term politikon zōon across his scientific, political,
and ethical works.

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While both of these statements assert man’s distinction by virtue of his unique possession of
logos, this distinction is qualified by Aristotle’s implicit acknowledgement, via the comparison,
that man’s larger peer group is made up of the other animals with which he is being compared. In
these instances, one can easily find support for Cary Wolfe’s emphatic assertion, in citing Martha
Nussbaum, that “the Aristotelian idea of the human as the political animal must receive its proper
accent—the political animal—so that we properly understand the human being as ‘not just a
moral and political being, but one who has an animal body, and whose human dignity, rather
than being opposed to this animal nature, inheres in it” (66, citing Nussbaum 87; italics in
original).
The passage’s double-edged effect, by which man is distinguished from other animals
while being included among them, results not only from direct comparisons of man with other
animals, or the implicit “animalization” of man, but also from the limited but still effective
communicative skills that Aristotle attributes to animals, implicitly “humanizing” them. In this
sense, although the passage does speak to the type of “inclusive exclusion” that marks
Agamben’s approach to biopolitics, a close reading of the Greek passage yields another valence,
in which the exclusion of animals by virtue of their inability to communicate is undermined by
the very terms of Aristotle’s explication. To be sure, Aristotle’s larger point is to make a strong
distinction between animals who possess only phonē and man, the zōon logon echon, a
designation that will occasion so much commentary from Heidegger, but the very basis of this
distinction serves to underline the commonality between man and other animals, which also
communicate. As a result, the rationale for Aristotle’s emphasis on the possession of logos as the

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ultimate distinguishing factor of mankind—a novel claim, at the time, according to Sorabji—
becomes apparent.
51

Indeed, while the basis of Heidegger’s argument may lie, as Derrida contends, in his
belief that the concept of logos has been debased to be primarily logical or calculative, to the
detriment of man’s ability to comprehend his Being (Beast & Sovereign 317-323, 338-339), he is
also troubled by the proximity of the concept of man to that of the animal, which effectively
“abandon[s] man to the essential realm of animalitas,” as he states in the “Letter on Humanism”
(203; cited in Beast & Sovereign 322). In the opening pages of the Politics, this realm does
indeed seem to include both humans and animals, who don’t possess logos per se, but
communicate feelings of pain and pleasure. Significantly, Aristotle contends that animals use
phonē not just to express these feelings, or to make incomprehensible (to human ears) noises as
some type of physiological response to painful or pleasant stimuli, but to make signs (sēmainein)
to one another (allēlois). By asserting that these signs made by the voices of animals have an
intended recipient, Aristotle is clearly attributing some degree of communicative skill to the non-
human animals. As a result of this attribution and the comparisons that distinctly include man

51
Sorabji deals primarily with philosophical sources, but it is important to note that the possession of logos is also
not the distinguishing factor of mankind in archaic epic, recorded several centuries before Aristotle. That mortality
is perhaps mankind’s only distinguishing factor (and one that distinguishes him from gods, but not animals) in the
world of archaic epic is a gauge of the degree to which that world is less anthropocentric than the one inhabited
since Aristotle. In Thalmann’s estimation, in the world of archaic epic “man is only one of several kinds of being,
and the world does not exist for his sake” (Form and Thought 78). Evidence of this more expansive worldview can
be found in Homeric conceptions of speech and mental capabilities. In terms of speech, audē, rather than logos, is
the Homeric term that “denotes the human voice and speech” (Clay 134). While this term consistently signifies
human speech in the Homeric epics, it is noteworthy that the gods can and do assume the human audē to
communicate with mortals. In one instance, as well, an animal, Achilles’ horse Xanthus, is briefly granted an audē
by Hera to talk with Achilles as he rides out to battle. Beyond the physical production of a certain type of speech,
moreover, animals and humans share a number of mental or “psychological” characteristics in the epics. As Heath
points out, “references to seats of emotion or psychological or mental states are found in nearly two-thirds of animal
similes in the Iliad, and in almost two-thirds of these an analogous mental state is mentioned in the surrounding
narrative. Homer assumes, then, that animals are motivated by the same emotions and causal thoughts as humans”
(43). Such an outlook accords much more with Darwin’s assertion, in The Descent of Man, that “there is no
fundamental difference between man and the higher animals in their mental faculties” than with Aristotle’s claims
for man’s distinction via the possession of logos (86), which has predominated in philosophy through Descartes,
Kant, and beyond.

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within the category of zōon while distinguishing him from it, one could say that Aristotle
effectively represents the distinction between man and animals as one of a difference of degree,
in the terminology he provides on the Politics’ first page, rather than one of kind (eidos).
52

As the previous discussion of the hierarchies inscribed “by nature” within the Aristotelian
cosmos makes clear, however, grave consequences result for those who are not seen to possess
logos. Without logos, the animal or slave becomes nothing more than a body for labor. The
possession of logos is also bound up, moreover, with the teleological logic that directs Aristotle’s
larger claims regarding the nature of man as one whose very lack of self-sufficiency not only
secures his place as a political animal but also ensures the city’s primacy, as the organic whole
the transcends individuals who are unable to survive outside it. As such, the city itself becomes
the locus of self-sufficiency for man, the arena in which the Aristotelian telos of autarcheia is
achieved for man. Through this notion of autarchy, then, both man and the city are founded via a
logic of exception, in which man is an animal, but an animal who cannot exist—as man—in an
apolitical or city-less condition.
In this sense, the extent to which Aristotle’s foundational formulation of organicism—in
which the social whole precedes and defines the capabilities of the individual who is part of it—
relates to Agamben’s version of biopolitics, founded on the logic of exception in terms of forms
of life, is readily apparent. Not only does the exclusion of bare life, in Agamben’s terms,
“foun[d] the city of men” (HS 7), but neither the city nor “man” can exist, in the Aristotelian
construct, without the presence of logos, which functions as the caesura separating the free man
from slave and animal. Although Agamben’s focus on the philosophical implications of the split

52
In analyzing Aristotle’s presentation of man as animal who’s more political than others, Mulgan reaches a similar
conclusion: “The fact that Aristotle gives these two faculties [phonē and logos] which enable communication
between animals of the same species and attributes one to man in common with other animals and one to man only
suggests that he meant that the difference is one of degree. Other animals may be [political] but man is more so”
(444).

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between zōē and bios elides the implicit brutality of Aristotle’s hierarchical construct, which
relegates some to labor and others to “living well” within the polis, he does not deny the
importance of the concept of logos in relation to the organicist city, stating that “there is politics
because man is the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare
life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion”
(8). With this assertion, however, Agamben universalizes the significance of the Aristotelian
construct, associating it with “politics” per se, rather than acknowledging the organicist and
teleological basis of the Aristotelian polis.
The question that remains is what happens to the concept of man if it’s disarticulated
from the overarching concept of autarcheia. Modernity will show that, as the concept of
organicism dissolves, along with its corresponding ideologies of hierarchies instantiated by
nature, the notion of a wholly independent, liberal subject will emerge, driven by a ideal of
autonomy, rather than autarchy. Predicated on its ability to dominate nature, as Adorno and
Horkheimer powerfully demonstrate, and marked by an anthropocentrism perhaps stronger than
that found in Aristotle, this subject would seem to preclude the possibility of somehow
distinguishing humanity by its lack of distinction, or its un-transcendable imbrication within
webs of life in which all animals and plants are necessarily dependent on one another. The notion
of man as an animal remains, however, regardless of how deeply it’s repressed in the ideologies
of antiquity or modernity, and it is by interrogating notions of speech, the body, and individual
autonomy that the poets analyzed in this study seek to reconfigure hegemonic conceptions of life
itself, operating by procedures that might best be described as “biopoetic.”

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Chapter 3: “A Language Of New York”: Logos and Polis in George Oppen’s “Of Being
Numerous”
The Perils of Perverse Revisionism
“I don’t want,” writes Alan Golding, “to make a perversely revisionary case for Oppen as
a writer of epics. Obviously, he never wrote anything on the scale of ‘A,’ the Cantos, Paterson,
The Maximus Poems, Trilogy, or Helen in Egypt” (85). Golding’s argument is impeccable, on
sheerly quantitative terms, as Oppen’s most sustained and most acclaimed work, 1968’s “Of
Being Numerous,” runs to merely 25 pages over 40 sections in the poet’s New Collected Poems
of 2002. While the poem totaled 40 pages in its original typesetting, it still didn’t exhaust its
initial eponymous collection, which included several short lyrics as well as the series “Route,”
which covers 10 pages in 14 sections, and the short series, “Power, the Enchanted World,” which
contains five sections. Indeed, to place a work that doesn’t even fill up a slim volume of poetry
in relation to monumental efforts—“life” works, as they are sometimes known, because they are
really only finished when their author dies—such as the Cantos or The Maximus Poems, does
seem “perversely revisionary.”
Golding’s larger point, however, is not simply to emphasize that Oppen didn’t write a
massive poem that could casually be deemed epic by virtue of its size or scope, but to draw
attention to the serial mode in which he frequently worked—as the presence of three serial
poems in Of Being Numerous alone underscores. The appearance of multiple, though typically
shorter, serial works in the two volumes preceding Of Being Numerous—not to mention his first
published volume, 1934’s Discrete Series, which announces the poet’s serial method in its title—
only bolsters the notion that Oppen worked frequently in the form and lends credence to
Golding’s claim that Oppen’s work in serial form needs greater consideration to ensure that

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critics don’t “misunderstand, by limiting, the nature of his achievement” (85). Such a risk of
misunderstanding and limiting the poet’s accomplishments is very real, as Golding demonstrates
by a quick examination of critical works about the long poem in English, most of which make no
mention of Oppen’s work.
While Golding’s article is clearly framed as an intervention into the existing critical
literature that all too often overlooks Oppen’s work, it could also be claimed that by implicitly
segregating serial works from the category of “epic,” as configured by massive modernist,
collage-based works such the Cantos and “A,” Golding runs the risk of doing precisely what he
seeks to avoid—limiting Oppen’s achievement. If one believes that Oppen’s work, by virtue of
the civic, political, and historical issues it addresses and the manner in which it addresses them,
is as significant as Pound’s for 21
st
century readers, to state that the one wrote an epic while the
other did “distinguished work… in the genre of the serial poem” (Golding, 85) implicitly confers
distinction on the former, since epic has long been considered the foremost poetic genre, even if
generic conventions have long lost what Raymond Williams calls “their neo-classical abstraction
and generality” and “senses of specific regulation” (Marxism 181). To avoid such limitation,
perhaps what needs to be revised are not claims about the scope or scale of Oppen’s works but
notions of what constitutes an “epic”—as well as of the value accorded to such literary
taxonomic distinctions. Perhaps some specificity of regulation, in Williams’ terms, should be
reconsidered when using long-standing generic terms. Perhaps a modern poem shouldn’t be
deemed an “epic” just because a poet couldn’t finish it.
Peter Middleton suggests as much in his helpful discussion of the modern long poem,
which is defined, paradoxically, by its resistance to definition, or its failure to satisfy
conventional generic expectations within the larger field of literary works. Just as the short story

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is defined against the novel—and must thus carry the designator “short”—so the long poem
earns its baldly descriptive name by exceeding the expectations of the lyric, now equated with
the poem in general: “Long poems, apart from epics, which are arguably a historical form only
practiced in partially oral cultures, are like short stories, excess to requirements, a wilderness of
weeds outside the garden, a heterogeneous field that does not lend itself to definition” (par. 11).
In Middleton’s view, then, the “long poem” is a category whose very heterogeneity can
encompass all works that exceed lyric expectations—except, perhaps, for the epic, whose
heterogeneity is cultural and historical, rather than simply quantitative.
Where Middleton hedges his argument, however, asserting that epic is “arguably” a
historical form specific to oral cultures, Franco Moretti is considerably more emphatic in his
claims that epic exists solely as a historical form. Relying heavily on a Hegelian conception of
the genre, Moretti asserts, in no uncertain terms, that the epic cannot be produced after the
emergence of modernity: “For if epic conventions have a real foundation only in the pre-State
era—and this is a historiographic judgment that will not henceforth be questioned—then between
epic and modernity an inversely proportional relation obtains. Where there is one, the other
cannot be—and vice versa. The nearer we come to the present, the more epic loses any meaning”
(12). This inverse relation between epic and modernity exists, in the Hegelian schema, because
epic must not only present a social totality, taking as “its object the occurrence of an action
which must achieve expression in the whole breadth of its circumstances and relations … as a
rich event connected with the total world of a nation and epoch” (1044, cited in Moretti 11) but
one predicated on the individual and his immediate world: “Everything that later becomes firm
religious dogma or civil or moral law still remains a living attitude of mind, not separated from
the single individual as such” (1045, cited in Moretti 11). Although one may question whether

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any work can present a social totality in the modern world—or whether, in fact, the Greek epics
present actual totalities of the worlds they depict—the latter qualification, the insistence on the
“single individual” existing before but in harmony with, and effectively embodying, the laws and
norms that will develop, is the one that drives Moretti’s claims about the impossibility of epic
after the emergence of the modern state: “With the coming of the State, in short, individuality
must no longer give totality a form, but confine itself to obeying it: master its own energies, and
keep to what is prescribed” (12). What exactly constitutes this state, however, and how it
emerges, are not questions that Moretti takes up.
While the actual “historiographic judgment” Moretti presents may, in fact, be beyond
question in the 21
st
century, the emergence of the modern state is hardly an insignificant
development, but one bound up with larger political and economic forces—such as the hard-
fought development of popular sovereignty, the ascent of capitalism as a dominant economic
model in the West, with liberalism as its reigning ideology, and the expansion of imperialism as
a means of securing resources for the West. In short, these are the conditions of modernity that
don’t allow epic conventions to continue and flourish as they did, according to Hegel and his
literary-critical followers, in premodern societies. Thus, for all of the admirable clarity and
brevity of his analysis, Moretti leaves entirely unexamined the larger social and political
implications of a historicization—and a Hegelian one, at that—of epic predicated upon the
emergence of the modern state.
While detailed analysis of such massive and complex world-historical phenomena is
(mercifully) the task of other disciplines, ignoring their significance entirely is equally
problematic and can lead to readings of literary works that are deeply distorted and that run the
risk of misunderstanding and limiting the nature of an author’s achievement, just as Golding

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fears will be the case for Oppen. Oppen’s achievement may, in fact, be liable to such
misunderstanding precisely because his work addresses issues of direct significance to the
changed and changing conditions of modernity in the West—such as capitalism, liberalism, and
secular humanism—that make epic a historical genre. By addressing notions of individuality and
community, of language and its relation to community or the lack thereof in an era of liberalism
and corporate mediation, and of the role of the poet in modern society, Oppen interrogates issues
fundamental to both the “becoming-historical” of epic and the constitution of the modern state
itself.
The Importance of Being Skeptical
Along with simple considerations of length, the type of language the poem itself deploys
is an important factor in Golding’s resistance to the claim that Oppen wrote an epic. As Golding
correctly notes, Oppen’s work does not accord with commonplace literary-critical assumptions
about the nature or intent of the modern long poem, such as Roy Harvey Pearce’s assessment
that such a poem makes “‘an effort to wrest a hero from history’ … an effort on the poet’s part to
make himself or herself into that hero by pursuing through poetry a struggle for ‘self-definition
and self-preservation,’ what Pearce calls ‘the epic struggle of modern times’” (85, citing Pearce
133, 130). If Oppen presents a long poem that doesn’t attempt to fashion its maker into a hero,
thus shirking the “epic struggle” of modernity, he also doesn’t issue the type of “polemical call
… to alter and direct the national will” that Jeffrey Walker finds in the “bardic” long poems of
the modernists and that he associates with the influence of Whitman (xi, cited in Golding 88).
Oppen may well be signaling his awareness of this tradition by concluding “Of Being
Numerous” with a long, somewhat curious quotation from Whitman, but even in the poem’s
most impassioned moments, such as section 20’s invocation of the animals in Hardy’s poem, the

94
poem never reaches for, let alone attains, a vatic register. In a similar way, Oppen’s work has
little apparent relation to the “modern verse epics” discussed by Bernstein, and “Of Being
Numerous” cannot be construed, in the terms Golding uses to summarize Bernstein’s conception
of these long poems, as “a didactic cultural narrative addressed to the polis” (85).
Such assessments, however, presented in negative terms and indicating the ways in which
Oppen’s work does not fit the parameters of the “heroic” or “bardic” long poem, run the risk of
perpetuating the misunderstanding of Oppen’s achievement that Golding is attempting to
counter. It is perhaps more instructive to indicate what Oppen’s poem does accomplish and to
sketch the ways in which these accomplishments can be seen as relevant to conceptions of the
long poem and their implications for social and political formations. For in “Of Being
Numerous,” Oppen is not merely abstaining from issuing a “didactic cultural narrative addressed
to the polis” but is, rather, actively interrogating the constitution of the polis itself in modernity.
Such a distinction—between the poet as “bardic” teacher addressing the polis and the poet as
skeptic questioning whether the polis presently exists in any historically recognizable form—
accords with Oppen’s oft-noted desire to “think” through the poem, or to use poetic composition
itself as a vehicle of thought.
53

53
In a daybook from the 60s, Oppen compares the poet to a mathematician to convey his point about poetry as a
vehicle of thought: “the lines being an instrument of thought, one cannot always foresee conclusions, as the
mathematician cannot / foresee the result of his work” (Selected Prose 118; underline and strike-through in original).
A variant of this concept is Oppen’s assertion that the poet write his perceptions, not his beliefs. As he states in a
letter from 1959, “Have to write one’s perceptions, not argue one’s beliefs. And be overwhelmingly happy if they
turn out not to be altogether unconscionable” (Selected Letters 22). In the same letter, Oppen asserts that poetry
must be “protean” and not convey “any statement already determined before the verse” (22). Although these
statements, taken on their own, are essentially prescriptive and can be seen as merely one poet’s preference for work
that doesn’t dress up ideas in rhetoric, they also form a pivot that links the aesthetic with the political in Oppen’s
thought, despite—or because of—his longstanding objection to calls for “political” poetry. While Oppen rejects the
notion of political poetry, which would merely be “versifying” preconceived ideas about the world, be they socialist,
fascist, or anything in between, his insistence on the “protean” nature of poetry ties in directly with his assertion that
poetry is “democratic” by refusing to adhere to any systematic program or method: “----And being democratic has
got to be absolutely non-dogmatic, a-political, unsystematic: whereas system, dogmatism and all the rest is found
tolerable in Yeats Pound Eliot” (22). Similarly, these ideas can also take on distinctly ethical hue. In his lone
published statement on poetics, the 1963 essay “The Mind’s Own Place,” Oppen extends his belief in poetry as a

95
Oppen referred frequently to this notion of poetic thought as a principle of composition,
and critics such as Golding, Peter Nicholls, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and John Taggart have noted
its importance to an understanding of Oppen’s work, especially as it relates to that of Pound and
other high Modernists.
54
In Nicholls’ estimation, Oppen’s work is distinguished from that of his
Modernist forebears because Oppen writes to test his ideas and discover what he thinks, rather
than to present a vision of the world that conforms to his pre-established view of it. “The
subordination of the world to the poet’s ideas,” which Nicholls’ finds in the work of the older
modernists, “marks the crucial divergence between Oppen and the modernists, a divergence at
once formal and political” (Fate of Modernism 38-39). While such an assessment, in and of
itself, approaches critical orthodoxy in commentary on Oppen’s work, it is important to highlight
its relevance to a discussion of the poem in the context of critical expectations for the long poem
or epic. In this context, Oppen’s refusal to subordinate the world to his ideas effectively makes it
difficult, if not impossible, for him to issue a “bardic” call or present a “didactic cultural
narrative” to the polis, as the poem itself is a means for Oppen to test his own attitudes and
assumptions about the world, rather than a vehicle for the presentation of a narrative, even if

mode of thought by making it a heuristic of sorts—the test by which one determines if one’s beliefs and assumptions
are actually true—and also adds a clear ethical imperative to poetry itself: “It is a part of the function of poetry to
serve as a test of truth. It is possible to say anything in abstract prose, but a great many things one believes or would
like to believe or thinks he believes will not substantiate themselves in the concrete materials of the poem” (Selected
Prose 32). As these statements indicate, Oppen’s intense commitment to a poetry that operates by thought and
perception—rather than preconceived belief or a predetermined system of thought—has profound political and
ethical implications. In this way, Oppen adapts a traditional precept of aesthetics, Kant’s foundational assertion that
the aesthetic not be subordinated to a concept (Critique of Judgment 175-76), and extends it to the realm of the
social. If Kant hoped for his aesthetics to form the basis of a broader sensus communis that would unify members of
a community in ways that transcend their physical proximity to one another, Oppen believes that poetics has direct
relation not only to political systems but to one’s ability to determine whether his or her beliefs about those systems
are true or mere wishful thinking.
54
As Golding notes, “For Oppen, poetry is a form of thinking, and the serial poem allows him a different, a more
extended and more flexible form of thinking than is possible in the lyric” (89). Taggart contends that Oppen’s
“adaptation” of Poundian imagism, which entails a rejection of “Pound’s self-ideogramic method,” “allows him to
think actively in his poetry” (4; italics in original). Contrasting Oppen’s approach to that of Pound, DuPlessis asserts
that “Pound does indeed write what he knew before he wrote the poem. For Oppen, this represents a failure to create
poetry from the objectivist poetics which Pound had, in effect, invented” (“Objectivist Poetics and Political Vision”
139).

96
heavily collaged, that confirms and conveys these assumptions. If Oppen’s skeptical impulse
prohibits him from issuing a “bardic” call that confirms his pre-existing views of the world,
however, it also allows him to analyze the polis qua polis and begin to unravel the social and
political implications of a world in which cars “Echo like history” down avenues “In which one
cannot speak” (New Collected Poems 171; hereafter NCP). Ultimately, then, the skeptical stance
that can be construed as a limitation, if one associates a didactic impulse with epic, enables the
poem’s engagement with the conditions of modernity that make epic-proper a historical genre.
“A decisive expression of a period”
Golding’s admonition of the “perversely revisionary” aside, it should be noted that
reading the poem in light of these issues does not seek to assert that Oppen wrote or attempted to
write an epic. While it is perhaps safe to say that “Of Being Numerous” constitutes a “long
poem,” or a poem that wildly exceeds the boundaries of expectation for a lyric work, in
Middleton’s formulation, it is clear, as we shall see, that his work bears little similarity to the
other modern works that are often deemed “epic.” It would be a mistake, however, to conclude
that, because the poem does not share many of the traits or tendencies that lead critics to label
other works “epic,” it is somehow lacking in ambition in relation to these long poems.
55

That Oppen hoped for “Of Being Numerous” to transcend the boundaries of expectation
for a lyric poem, as described by Middleton, is abundantly apparent in Oppen’s working papers
(known as daybooks) and in the letters he wrote and the interviews he gave while writing the
poem and shortly after its appearance. In these texts, Oppen expresses what could be described

55
The relationship of “Of Being Numerous” to the modernist long poem or modern verse epic has received little
attention to date, though critics have intermittently noted that the topic warrants more investigation. In her important
1981 essay “Objectivist Poetics and Political Vision,” Rachel Blau DuPlessis notes that “someone should examine”
the reasons for which “Oppen does not decide on the epic” (124). More than 25 years later, Henry Weinfield
comments that “Oppen’s relationship to Eliot and to the modernist project of reconceptualizing the epic is a complex
subject that has received very little attention” (69). Without pretending to provide definitive statements about these
large, complex topics, this chapter intends to bring additional attention to them and to provide analyses of some of
the implications involved in Oppen’s approach to the long poem.

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as an “epic desire,” presenting “Of Being Numerous” as his attempt at “a decisive expression of
a period” and invoking Eliot’s The Waste Land as exemplary of the effect he sought, while also
asserting that the poem seeks to investigate “the concept of humanity” (Dembo 162). As these
texts also make clear, moreover, the two notions are linked in Oppen’s conception of them—as
he implies that the second, the investigation of the concept of humanity, allows or necessitates
the first, the “decisive expression of a period”—but they are also often mediated by third notion,
that of humankind’s loss of “faith” in itself. As he writes to his niece Andy Meyer in late 1964,
before the publication of This In Which, the volume that precedes Of Being Numerous, “Not so
easy for me as [T.S.] Eliot --- whose metaphysical standpoint is faith and the whose
anthropocentric standpoint is the Age of Faith. And therefore I haven’t, I’m afraid, written a
Wasteland, haven’t written a decisive expression of a period. I meant to try in this book. I mean
to try in the next [Of Being Numerous]. Probably can’t” (Selected Letters 108).
If Oppen’s lack of faith is what makes the creation of a “decisive expression” difficult,
the prevailing absence of such a faith in the larger culture is what makes the investigation of the
“concept of humanity” a pressing concern for Oppen. In his discussions of this lack of faith,
Oppen is not simply talking about Eliot’s conversion to Anglicism, but about a broader belief in
anthropocentrism and secular, Enlightenment-inspired ideas of the “progress” of humankind. In a
daybook that, according to editor Stephen Cope, was likely composed between 1962 and 1965,
Oppen refers to “‘anthropocentric rationalism’” as “a rationalism which derives its force and its
purpose from the idea of the infinite possibilities of man” and contends that “the major fact of
this century” is “that we have lost the faith in man which was the foundation of 19
th
c
rationalism” (Selected Prose 81). Though Oppen does not elaborate on the why he believes this
faith has been lost, his notion that it has been definitely lost is surely not exceptional after the

98
Holocaust and the wide-scale development of nuclear weaponry following the American
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II. Indeed, in a later section of the same
daybook, commonly known as “the pipe-stem daybook” because of its unique binding material,
Oppen asserts that “an age of anthropocentric optimism has ended in human devastation” (SP
95), which would seem to point to these unimaginably tragic events, if not to the broader reality
of “world wars” in the 20
th
century.
While “Of Being Numerous” makes no direct references to either the Holocaust or the
advent of nuclear weaponry, the poem clearly evinces an apocalyptic mood, as we shall see.
Oppen’s apocalyptic outlook is stated more directly in the daybooks, however, and there it is
directly linked to the loss of “faith in mankind” that he discusses in the passages above: “I think
it probable that man cannot exist without faith—I think it possible that man will not exist
forever” (SP 82). That this “faith in mankind” is closely related to Oppen’s concern with “the
concept of humanity”—or perhaps a belief in the idea of humanity—is clear his 1968 interview
with L.S. Dembo, at the University of Wisconsin, and in his letters. As he states to Dembo,
“there are certain [concepts] without which we are really unable to exist, including the concept of
humanity” (162). As Oppen’s comments also make clear, moreover, this “concept of humanity”
is necessary for survival precisely because it contains an implicit sense of altruism and futurity.
Later in the interview with Dembo, he comments, “we care about the idea of what’s going to
happen to humanity, including after one’s death” (Dembo 166). Tying the necessity of the
concept directly to its implicit sense of futurity, he writes in a letter from 1973, “we cannot live
without a concept of humanity. The end of one’s life is by no means equivalent to the end of the
world, we would not bother to live out our lives if it were----” (Selected Letters 263). The loss of
faith in the possibilities for humankind—and the consequent damage to a “concept of humanity”

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that would contain a sense of futurity that exceeds the self—that Oppen perceives, then,
constitutes not only an impediment to the creation of “a decisive expression of a period” but also
a spur that compels Oppen to attempt such an ambitious project, as he believes the absence of
such faith may have catastrophic consequences for humankind.
While a desire for “the decisive expression of a period” may, in one sense, stop short of
the Hegelian formulation of a work that presents “the total world of a nation and epoch,” with its
concern for a larger “period” it conveys a historical intent directly and a geographical intent
implicitly, thus approximating the Hegelian expression in a way that summations of lyric
poetry—often seen as the expression of intense, but deeply personal and specific, emotion—
typically do not. In another sense, however, Oppen’s desire to create this decisive expression via
an investigation of the concept of humanity resonates more deeply with Hegel’s notion of art’s
movement into philosophy, as Oppen is concerned with issues that transcend Hegel’s conception
of epic, oriented around the nation, as a form in which an individual embodies the yet-to-emerge
law of his society. It could be said, in fact, that Oppen is dealing with the consequences of the
emergence of the modern state, such as the loss of faith in civil society or any sense of coherence
among the citizenry at large.
It is important to note, moreover, that while the poem betrays an implicit geo-political
limitation—as the work of an American writing about predominantly Western concerns during
the 1960s—the poet’s emphasis on the “concept of humanity” in his ancillary writings and
interviews shows clear affinities with biopolitical thought engaged with ideas of human life on
the level of the species. The apocalyptic outlook that helps shape Oppen’s engagement with a
notion of humanity, oriented around a loss of faith following an era of optimistic rationalism that
ended in “human devastation,” also bears affinities with both dominant strands of biopolitical

100
thought. Agamben’s version of biopolitics, as we have seen, is deeply affected by the Holocaust,
proposing that the concentration camp itself has become the nomos of modernity, and Foucault’s
assertion that man no longer exists as he did for Aristotle conveys an apocalyptic outlook for
modern man that clearly speaks to nuclear situation: “modern man is an animal whose politics
places his existence as a living being in question” (History of Sexuality 143).
56

While a close reading of sections of the poem itself will help call out some of the ways in
which Oppen’s work can be seen as relevant to biopolitical thought, it is abundantly clear that
Oppen did harbor a desire for his work to move beyond the conventional parameters of the lyric.
As the comments from his ancillary works and interviews indicate, Oppen envisioned “Of Being
Numerous” as relevant not just to his complex personal situation, but to the larger historical and
political forces that shaped the era.
57
Importantly, though, Oppen doesn’t imagine that his work
can somehow exclude or eradicate these personal elements, or that he can somehow achieve
objectivity via the poetic presentation of experiences that are necessarily personal and subjective.
In his interview with Dembo, Oppen affirms Dembo’s claim that “even though ‘Route’ and ‘Of
Being Numerous’ seem to be about the general human condition, they are actually very personal
poems” (172). He refuses to settle, however, on one quality at the expense of the other and
quickly reiterates that he’s “also writing about the human condition” (172). In not opposing the

56
Elsewhere in the final chapter of The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 Foucault is more explicit about the relevance of
nuclear arms to his conception of biopolitics: “The atomic situation is now at the end point of this process: the
power to expose a whole population to death is underside of the power to guarantee an individual’s continued
existence” (137).
57
As both a former Communist activist and a World War II veteran wounded during the Battle of the Bulge who’s
returned to New York in the 60s, after a period of self-imposed exile in Mexico during the McCarthy era, Oppen’s
personal situation is, indeed, complex. Unfortunately, the complexity of this situation is sometimes diminished by
critics who read Oppen’s work through his biography—whether to find a renunciation of politics, as Perloff does, or
a continued engagement with it, as Hatlen does. Without aspiring to a New Critical embrace of the isolated aesthetic
object, this chapter will not emphasize biographical information in its assessments of “Of Being Numerous,” in part
because that information is quite patchy for some periods, such as the 30s and 50s. This chapter does make use,
however, of Oppen’s letters and notebooks when those materials are particularly relevant to aspects of “Of Being
Numerous” or to larger, theoretical questions under discussion. The best sources of information about Oppen’s life
are Mary Oppen’s Meaning A Life and Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ introduction to Oppen’s Selected Letters.

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personal to the universal, Oppen essentially seeks to inhabit a zone between the impossible
totality of epic and private interiority of lyric, between all-encompassing objectivity and sheer
particularity. Such a refusal to oppose the historical to the personal may thus find its critical-
theoretical analogue in Rachel Blau duPlessis’ “critical, culturalist reading” (Genders, Races 7),
which seeks to engage both social-historical and specific textual aspects of a text, and this type
of reading may be seen as simply an attempt to understand the work in its multiple valences.
The ways in which Oppen seeks to inhabit this liminal terrain in “Of Being Numerous”
will be the focus of this chapter and the next. In presenting a poem that is “very personal” but
that also aspires to be the “decisive expression of its period”—and that does so by ambitiously
offering a sustained investigation of whether the “concept of humanity” is “valid” or is “simply a
word” (Dembo 162)—Oppen clearly moves his work outside the binary of interior lyric and
objective epic that has motivated the considerations of genre, as presented by Bernstein, Altieri,
Lukács, and others, discussed in chapter 1. As that chapter also contended, moreover, these
conceptions of genre are not strictly literary but are intimately bound up with larger notions of
social and political formations, with epic strongly associated with social organicism and the lyric
or novel associated with the autonomous, alienated individual. In interrogating the “bright light”
of “the shipwreck / Of the singular” and “the meaning / Of being numerous” (NCP 166-67),
Oppen engages both poles of this binary, presenting a work that is keenly aware of the singular
subject’s isolation but also mindful of the difficulty of formulating, in modernity, any type of
viable “social contract” or means of unifying a diverse populace.
Works that engage ideas of alienation are by no means rare in the 20
th
century, of course.
One need only think of the very different examinations of the alienated individual in Eliot’s “The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Ginsberg’s Howl, and Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” not to

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mention the countless lyric “epiphany” poems that frequently documented a poet’s alienated
existence in suburbs in the 60s, 70s, and beyond, to realize the commonplace nature of this
theme. As these examples make clear, moreover, such engagement does not necessarily indicate
that a writer’s work is moving or seeking to move beyond the confines of what could be
considered traditional lyric subjectivity. What makes Oppen’s work distinctive, however, is not
simply the degree to which it maintains a notion of “the meaning / Of being numerous,” or an
idea of social life that extends, even in its incapacity, beyond the singular individual, but also the
ways in it which carries out this interrogation, at both the formal and thematic level.
As Golding’s essay makes clear, serial form is a vital aspect of Oppen’s work. Although
serial form itself can be seen to have a conceptual significance that allies it, in a broad sense,
with political issues relevant to Oppen’s work, this chapter and the next will engage more
directly with the poem’s central thematic elements.
58
Form will be taken in consideration, if only
briefly, in this chapter’s discussion of Oppen’s use of collage technique, but this chapter will
primarily seek to lay the groundwork for analyses of his engagement with notions relevant to the
becoming-historical of epic. These analyses will engage notions of the singular and the
numerous, which constitute one of the poem’s major thematic emphases, and this chapter will set

58
As Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain note, “The problem of ‘formal connection’ is played out
structurally and thematically in the work of Oppen, as the relation between fragment and series parallels the
thematics of individual and community” (7). The formal aspects of Oppen’s serial work become more intriguing if,
as Joseph Conte indicates, serial form eschews the “characteristic desire for ‘totality’” found in the Cantos and other
“modernist epics” and instead strives for “accumulation” in “the serial articulation of particulars” (Unending Design
37). These terms resonate strongly with Foucault’s account of the development of biopolitics and modern forms of
governmentality, which turn away from the totalizing approaches of sovereignty that mark premodern states and
instead deal with the aleatory and “serial phenomena” of the aggregated population (Society Must Be Defended 246).
In Foucault’s account of development of biopolitics, as we will see, the emergence of economics as a field that is
“non-totalizable” and thus beyond “the totalizing unity of the juridical sovereign” leads to the creation of the
modern, liberal state predicated on a conception of the individual as the wholly autonomous bearer of unique
interests, the homo economicus (Birth of Biopolitics 282). In its presentations of Crusoe and “the bright light of
shipwreck” (NCP 167) and of the populace and “the meaning / Of being numerous” (NCP 166), Oppen’s work
certainly engages notions of autonomy, the homo economicus, and the population on the thematic level, and one
wonders if Oppen’s poem, as a formally “un-totalizable” work that does not seek closure or any overarching sense
of coherence, relying instead on a sequence of sections that are in dialogue with one another, enacts some of these
aspects or qualities of modernity on a formal level.

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the foundation for these analyses through a discussion of the Foucault’s notions of ascending and
descending modes of individualization, as presented in Discipline & Punish, and his emphasis on
the importance of notions of the population—as an aggregate of individuals, as opposed to an
organic whole—to modern conceptions of governmentality. These concepts will be treated in
relation to Moretti’s contentions about the impossibility of epic in modernity and will seek to
illuminate the terrain in which Oppen’s poem can be understood, as a long poem that is neither a
Communist call to arms nor an quietist retreat from “the masses,” but an extended meditation on
issues central to the modern understanding of epic and the novel. These analyses will grow out of
close readings of the poem’s opening sections and will be continued in the next chapter, which
will look at several later sections of the poem that directly engage ideas of the singular and the
numerous.
While notions of the singular and numerous are central to the poem, Oppen’s work is also
marked by other emphases that relate to these notions and often may be seen to amplify the
isolation of the singular in modernity. One major emphasis is speech—or the seeming
impossibility of speech in a time of war, which is largely known in the contemporary West
through its mediated forms—and another, albeit lesser one, is consumerism. If consumerism can
be seen as the outgrowth of the liberal philosophy of individuals pursuing their own unique
interests, an important but perhaps shopworn critique of modernity, the poem’s assertions that “It
is not easy to speak” require more analysis (NCP 173). This chapter will begin that analysis, but
it will only be taken up in full in the next chapter, which will look at the poem’s emphasis on the
difficulty of speech in the context of its presentation of the autonomous individual, which is
exemplified by its references to Robinson Crusoe.

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“An infinite series”
Oppen’s interrogation of the polis begins early in the poem, in the second of its 40
sections. The poem’s opening section does not engage conceptions of the city directly, but
functions as an ars poetica of sorts, presenting a highly economical overview of the poet’s
philosophical and aesthetic approach. The poem begins with a well-known tercet that
encapsulates Oppen’s dialectical and existential orientation, in which perception of the world
leads to knowledge of the self: “There are things / We live among ‘and to see them is / Is to
know ourselves’” (NCP 163). This statement of perceptual method is immediately followed by
an abstract invocation of existence itself, which also serves to invoke Oppen’s preferred
compositional method of seriality, “Occurrence, a part / Of an infinite series” (NCP 163). While
this couplet may effectively align Oppen’s serial method with some notion of existence or “the
way of the world” in the most general sense, any notion of grandiosity in this alignment is
immediately undercut by the following line, which deems this infinite series of existence “The
sad marvels.” The abstract and detached nature of these opening six lines signals that Oppen is
engaging with core philosophical notions of existence and perception, but it also indicates that he
is doing so outside of any pre-fabricated teleological framework in which the “infinite series” of
occurrences might “make sense” or be inherently meaningful. Rather, the infinite series is simply
that, a sequence of events or occurrences, and the only potentially meaningful aspect of them is
found in the poem’s opening tercet, with the notion that by witnessing “things” of the world
people come to know themselves. If this opening carries the implication that people themselves
are “things,” its flat declarative language betrays no moral weight or judgmental attitude.
The following tercet in the opening section, sometimes seen as an allusion to the opening
of Paradise Lost, peremptorily dismisses one of the most common teleological frameworks in

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modernity: “Of this was told / A tale of our wickedness. / It is not our wickedness” (NCP 163). If
these lines indicate that Oppen’s long poem will be operating outside the traditional coordinates
of Judeo-Christian thought regarding man’s “fall” and thus signal Oppen’s aversion to the most
conventional “metaphysical nostalgia,” in Jameson’s terms, regarding the loss of humanity’s
Edenic origins, they also dispose of any notions of traditional “epic” grandeur that may still be
lingering. As we shall see, however, Oppen is not entirely immune to this type of nostalgia, and a
later section of the poem engages notions of “primitive” life in terms that are clearly preferential
to the ones used to depict life in modernity. This section also makes clear, however, that Oppen
realizes the impossibility of reinstating this type of life—or this attitude toward the world—and
this realization starkly differentiates his “metaphysical nostalgia” from that of Pound. This
distinction is only heightened, moreover, by Oppen’s association of the past with the possibility
of more open communication, or the possibility of speech, which Oppen believes to be a key
component of the democratic process.
If the poem’s first nine lines present an austere and open-ended vision of the world as
infinite series of occurrences in which the commonplace tales that help people make sense of the
world are simply not true, the first section concludes on a very different note—with a short but
more conversational prose paragraph presented in single quotation marks. According to Michael
Davidson’s editorial notes on the poem, the passage is a quotation from Oppen’s wife, Mary:
“‘You remember that old town we went to, and we sat in the ruined window, and we tried to
imagine that we belonged to those times—It is dead and it is not dead, and you cannot imagine
either its life or its death; the earth speaks and the salamander speaks, the Spring comes and only
obscures it—’ (NCP 163). The conversational tone of the opening of this paragraph, with its
direct address and its recollection of an experience shared by the speaker and the “you” invoked,

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strongly distinguishes it from the stark philosophical formulations with which the poem opens.
Almost from the outset, as well, the passage is distinguished by a tone that, in comparison with
the poem’s opening lines, is both Romantic (“we sat in the ruined window”) and Eliotic,
depicting a spring that mixes memory and a type of desire—to imagine that one belongs to a
certain time—and ultimately indulging in the type of paradox that marks the Four Quartets : “It
is dead and it is not dead” (NCP 163).
While later sections of the poem will pick up several of the thematic aspects introduced
by this paragraph—such as notions of belonging to a time or place, the significance of a person’s
dwelling, and the idea that the earth and its animals, in some sense, “speak”—what is as
significant as the constituent ideas themselves is the formal effect of presenting this paragraph
after the poem’s opening meditations. In one sense, the incorporation of unsourced material
aligns the poem with the collage-based works of Pound and, particularly, Williams, who relies
on more conversational (if bitterly rebarbative) passages from the letters of Marcia Nardi in
Paterson, thus lessening the distance from Oppen’s work to that of the “modern verse epic” or
bardic long poem. Oppen’s use of the collage method itself does not eliminate this distance
entirely, of course, as collage per se does not alter the poem’s fundamentally skeptical
orientation, but the collaged nature of the poem’s opening section is significant, highlighting the
ways in which the poem itself proceeds by dialogical and, at times, dialectical turns and
counterturns.
For if the first section opens in a quasi-Lucretian manner, with relatively abstract
considerations of “the nature of things,” it concludes with a somewhat more concrete approach,
invoking an “old town” and the experiences of two people there. In this way, the opening section
demonstrates Oppen’s comment to Dembo—indicating that the poem aspires to be both

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“universal,” evoking the “infinite series” of existence, and also deeply personal, integrating not
only a memory of a European trip but doing so in his wife’s words. While the quoted paragraph
can, and perhaps should, be read as a response to the abstract nature of the poem’s opening lines,
the experiences presented in the paragraph also serve to exemplify, at some level, a few of the
“occurrences” that make up the infinite series invoked in the poem’s opening. The absence of
any explicit connection between the opening meditation and the prose paragraph, however,
signals the poem’s investment in the collage method, indicating that large-scale shifts in both
tone and content can take place not just between, but within, individual sections of the poem.
This dynamic, between the inherently disjunctive nature of collage and the responsive nature of
lines and passages in dialogue with another, constitutes the motor of the poem, propelling the
reader forward while maintaining his or her interest through jump-cuts and the inclusion of
different voices.
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“A city of the corporations”
Section two highlights this dynamic, starting with a voice that seems both a return to the
philosophical meditation of the poem’s opening and an acknowledgment of the immediately
preceding prose passage. “So spoke of the existence of things / An unmanageable pantheon /
Absolute, but they say / Arid” (NCP 163). What it means for “things,” or their “existence,” to
somehow attain a divine status and constitute a “pantheon” that is at once unmanageable and
absolute, is not explained. Such a statement, however, clearly recalls the poem’s opening
emphasis on “things,” though these “things” are now spoken of, rather than seen (“to see them /
Is to know ourselves”) (NCP 163). This distinction may seem trivial, but these two modes—one
of visual perception and the other of verbal expression—will be important aspects of the poem,

59
As Henry Weinfield notes, in speaking about the movement of the poem’s first section, “The disjunctive leaps that
poem employs, both in its own narrative and the cultural narratives to which it alludes, contributes to its strangeness
and its resonance as poetry” (Music of Thought 42).

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as Oppen explores both the phenomenological appearance of the world, or “That which one
cannot / Not see,” as he states in section 36 of the poem (NCP 185), and the mediated visual
reality of modernity, along with the possibilities for meaningful verbal expression in modernity.
As such, the poem’s recurrent allusions to sight and speech recapitulate the twin emphases of
Objectivism, committed to a visual notion of the poem as a “lens” on the objects of the world
(with an emphasis on the objects themselves rather than the poet’s subjective response to them)
and, especially in Oppen’s construal of the theory, to the formal objectification of the poem as a
“sincere” mode of expression.
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While notions of speech will predominate later in the poem, at this early juncture the
poem gives more emphasis to ideas of sight. Shifting from its oracular statements about the “the
existence of things” and beginning to focus on the city, the poem calls out the city’s mediated
nature in modernity in a series of short lines that evoke the society of the spectacle only a few
years after Debord wrote his seminal work:
A city of the corporations
Glassed
In dreams
And images— (NCP 163-64)

60
The notion of the poem as a lens on the objects of the world is one of the main precepts of Objectivism in
Zukofsky’s 1931 essay. The essay opens with the following statements: “An Objective: (Optics) – The lens bringing
the rays from an object to a focus. (Military use) – That which is aimed at. (Use extended to poetry) – Desire for
what is objectively perfect, inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars” (189, italics in
original). Oppen doesn’t typically renounce this statement or any of Zukofsky’s characterizations of Objectivism,
but he frequently comments that, for him, Objectivism indicates an attention to the formal qualities of a poem, or the
poem as an object. As he writes in a 1961 letter to Mary Ellen Solt, “‘Objectivist[’] meant, not an objective
viewpoint, but to objectify the poem, to make the poem an object. Meant form” (Selected Letters 47). For an
engaging critique that argues that these approaches to the theory—the poem as a means of apprehending the objects
of the world and the poem itself as an object—are inherently contradictory, see Weinfield 28-29. For a nuanced
analysis of the epistemological limits of objectivity in Oppen’s work, see Finkelstein, passim.

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Marjorie Perloff asserts that these lines convey “a conceptual rather than perceptual reality”
(“Shipwreck” 196), and while they certainly convey a high degree of generalization—not
specifying which corporations constitute the city or the types of dreams and images that are
produced—one wonders if such a clean distinction can be made between the conceptual and
perceptual. Even if the lines are seen to convey a conceptual reality—because the description of
the city they provide is shorn of particular detail—the force of this reality still needs to
acknowledged, as does the conceptual complexity of the lines themselves.
Henry Weinfield’s analysis of the potential ambiguities inherent in the construction
“Glassed / in” begins to parse this conceptual complexity. As Weinfield rightly notes, the
passage’s imagery of glass and its “ambiguous syntax” make it “all transparent” in one sense and
“entirely impenetrable” in another (Music of Thought 44). Weinfield locates this transparent
impenetrability in its participial phrase spread across a line break: “the city of the corporations is
‘glassed [participle] in dreams,’ but those ‘glassed[-]in [compound adjective] dreams’ are also
trapped in bodies that contain them, and thus they can never emerge from those bodies or
penetrate outward” (Music of Thought 44-45). Such a reading, which essentially reads the phrase
“Glassed / in” as either describing the “city of the corporations” or standing in apposition and
presenting a free-standing idea of dreams and images that are somehow “glassed-in,” begins to
point to the complexity of the passage, which presents a conception of the modern city as both
thoroughly commercial and strangely sealed off, trapped within the transparency of glass.
61

Such a conception of the city is only complicated by the ambiguity of the genitive
construction in the passage’s opening line, “A city of the corporations.” Is Oppen merely
contending that the city is composed of and thus constituted by corporations, or that it is

61
For a provocative but at times tendentious analysis of the thematics of glass in Oppen’s work, see Wilkinson’s
“The Glass Enclosure: Transparency and Glitter in the Poetry of George Oppen.”

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somehow owned or literally possessed by them? Or is it plausible to read the possessive as
having more of an objective force and asserting that the city somehow exists for the
corporations? All of these valences inhere within the construction, of course, though the first
interpretation seems the most viable. Regardless of exactly how this line is construed, however,
its implications, which are far-reaching, should not be understated.
Weinfield hints at some of these implications through his interpretive assertion that the
“Glassed / in dreams” could somehow be trapped in “bodies” (Music of Thought 45). Such a
term would seem to refer to human bodies, which are entirely absent from this passage of the
poem, but Weinfield’s claim highlights the aspect of the line that makes it so powerful, its
substitution of the incorporated commercial body for the physical human one as the constituent
element of the polis. Such a substitution, while not constituting a novel or path-breaking critique
of the of American life in the mid-60s, does lend a new meaning to the notion of the “body
politic.” As chapter two discussed, Aristotle thematizes this notion of the body politic through
his contentions that the polis precedes the individual ontologically because an individual outside
the polis is not self-sufficient, but is instead like a part of the body, a hand or foot, but one in
name only, since no part can function outside the whole (Politics 1253a13-15).
Without putting too much weight on this admittedly ancient conception of the city, it is
also interesting to recall that Aristotle actually distinguishes between the inhabitants of the city—
the political animals whose status as such is ratified by their possession of logos—and those,
such as slaves, animals, and women, who provide reproductive labor outside the polis proper and
therefore are seen as mere “bodies” or tools in the Aristotelian conception. As we shall see, the
difficulty or impossibility of “speech” within the city is a major component of “Of Being
Numerous,” and this aspect of the poem gains significance in the context of Aristotelian

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conceptions of the organic city as both preceding and validating the human as a distinctive kind
of animal who possesses speech and in light of the dominant critical association, as discussed in
chapter one, of the epic with notions of organic societies. In presenting a “city of the
corporations” in what he hoped would be an epic-like “decisive expression of a period” that
investigates the “concept of humanity,” Oppen is clearly operating outside the terrain of both
epic, as conceived by Hegel and his followers, and the modern long poem that would seek to
recuperate elements of the organic societies that made epic possible. This line, then, begins to
indicate the ways in which Oppen presents not “a didactic cultural narrative addressed to the
polis” so much as a vision of a polis that is significantly different from the one with which epic
has been traditionally associated. In doing so, moreover, Oppen gets at the heart of the changed
political and social conditions that have made epic an impossibility.
Such changed conditions, of course, are no secret in modernity. Against the Aristotelian
model, what distinguishes modernity, in the view of both Agamben and Foucault, is the
incorporation of the body into the domain of the polis, which is then given over to the
management of life per se, whether through bodily disciplines and regulatory mechanisms
operating at the level of the aggregate population, in Foucault’s conception, or through the
potential reduction of all people to homines sacri, in Agamben’s. While “Of Being Numerous,”
unlike the works of Cha and Notley that will be discussed in subsequent chapters, does not
emphasize the body as a potential site of resistance to the dominant forces of modernity, in
asserting the difficulty of speech within the city, Oppen’s poem gestures toward the biopolitical
reality of the modern polis, in which an individual is not granted inclusion within the city
because of some supposed possession of logos but because of the government’s commitment to
fostering and managing life. In presenting the city as a place of corporations as opposed to

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human corpora, moreover, Oppen engages one of the fundamental tenets of Foucault’s
conception of biopolitics, which is that the economic logic of modernity laid the foundation for
the emergence of biopower and biopolitics, undercutting whatever basis of support remained for
conceptions of absolutist or organic societies.
For Foucault, the modern economy is non-totalizable field that undermines the
sovereign’s claims for absolute power. Foucault asserts that not only is economics “an atheistic
discipline,” undermining one traditional avenue for claims of authority, but it is also one that
“begins to demonstrate not only the pointlessness but also the impossibility of a sovereign point
of view of the state that he has to govern” (Birth of Biopolitics 282). In this way, the emergence
of modern notions of the economy, much more than ideals of the sanctity of natural rights or
popular sovereignty, erode the basis of traditional societies that modern theorists associate with
epic. Significantly, this modern conception of economics as a non-totalizable field that
undermines notions of absolute sovereignty operates in conjunction with the primary principle of
liberalism, in Foucault’s account, which is that an individual possesses an “interest,” or “an
irreducible, atomistic, individual choice which is unconditionally referred to the subject himself”
(Birth of Biopolitics 273).
On the basis of the premise of liberalism, man becomes homo economicus, looking out
for his own best interest, and the multiplicity of these interests within any given state operates
beyond the understanding of any sovereign power, requiring such notions as Adam Smith’s
“invisible hand” to impart a sense of totality to an otherwise untotalizable field of activity (Birth
of Biopolitics 278-280). Contrasting such a notion of the invisible hand to Aristotle’s idea of the
severed and un-self-sufficient hand—a hand in name only—might point out the differences
between these respective conceptions of society, but the larger point is that Oppen is operating

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squarely within the type of atomistic, non-totalizable society Foucault presents as necessary for
the emergence of biopolitical regimes. In presenting not “citizens” but “shoppers, / Choosers,
judges” (NCP 170) within a “city of the corporations,” Oppen is clearly pointing toward the
economic basis of the modern polis, and his invocation of “the shipwreck / Of the singular”
(NCP 167), associated in the poem with Crusoe, a stalwart emblem of liberal individuality, can
be seen as a critique of the type of subjectivity that emerges in the polis founded not on notions
of the possession of logos or any notion of the individual as a participant in civic life, but on
ideas of the human as homo economicus.
To back away from these interpretations of the significance of the notion of a city of
corporations within the context of genre and political theory, it is apparent that, regardless of
how one parses the four lines introducing the city, this city is clearly associated with “dreams /
And images.” While the poem does not make clear whether this reference to “dreams” refers to
those that occur during sleep or to the hopes that one might harbor for the future, its reference to
them clearly imparts a sense of “unreality” to the city, though this city, at this point in the poem,
remains a far cry from the “unreal city” of Baudelaire or Eliot. The invocation of “images” calls
to mind Debord’s notion of the “society of the spectacle,” in which images, rather than physical
commodities, are reified in the operations of late capitalism, based heavily on intellectual labor
and the production of “lifestyles.” Regardless of whether Oppen was familiar with Debord’s
work, the presentation of a city of corporations glassed in dreams and images clearly seems to
invoke an idea of false consciousness, in which the corporate world manufactures the “visions”
of reality on which ideology itself is based.
If these four lines can be seen to have powerful implications in the context of political
theory and modern conceptions of genre and to present an image of the city as a site of false

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consciousness, it is significant that Oppen follows this passage with a sequence of lines that turn
away from any conception of the polis. The poem’s second section concludes with this
somewhat abstract invocation of the “natural” world:
And the pure joy
Of the mineral fact

Tho it is impenetrable

As the world, if it is matter,
Is impenetrable. (NCP 164)
Whereas the preceding passage about the city of corporations presents an image of glassy
transparency while maintaining a degree of impenetrability, these lines find a type of “joy” in
empiricism, or the “mineral fact” of the natural world, while also foregrounding the
“impenetrability” of that world. Such a juxtaposition—of the human world of cities and
corporations to the natural world of “matter”—is part and parcel of the collage technique Oppen
is deploying in the poem. If the first section moves from the abstract and “infinite” to the
personal and particular, section 2 maintains a fairly consistent degree of abstraction in presenting
two different aspects of the world—the human and the natural. Neither aspect, it should be noted,
is very appealing or welcoming, as the “dreams and images” of the city seem insubstantial and
perhaps dangerously alluring, and the “pure joy” of the natural world is modified by the caveat
that it is “impenetrable.”
What it means for this mineral fact and the world to which it belongs to be impenetrable
is not entirely clear, of course, but Peter Nicholls has offered a compelling reading of these lines

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within the context of Heidegger’s elaboration of the “earth” versus the “world” in “The Origin of
the Work of Art” and other writings.
62
Essentially, Oppen’s reference to the “impenetrable”
nature of matter (and thus the material world) corresponds the Heideggerian idea of the “earth,”
which resists human conceptualization in its sheer presence and thus can serve as a potential
bulwark against technological domination and “calculative” (as opposed to “meditative”) thought
(Fate of Modernism 81). As Nicholls notes, “Oppen … crystallized his own version of
Heidegger’s ‘earth’ in what would become a favourite word, ‘impenetrable’. … and this idea of
an aspect of the world which is resistant to thought plays an important part in his subsequent
work” (Fate of Modernism 81). As these lines indicate, moreover, this resistant element of the
world has two aspects; it can be, as Nicholls asserts, “the source of ‘joy’ in the sheer facticity of
the world, or it can be associated with the dull inertness of an objective world which mutely
exceeds humanity” (Fate of Modernism 81-82). While this resistant quality of the earth’s
conceptually impenetrable nature may offer some type of avenue to non-calculative or non-
dominating thought, the comfort it provides is cold, to say the least. Taken together, the two
passages of the poem’s second section present a vision of the human world in which corporations
spin out fantasies within their glass enclosures and an evocation of a material world that is
obdurate and forbidding—even if that forbidding nature can be seen, through the lens of
Heideggarian thought, to stand as a bulwark against the instrumentalization of thought itself in
modernity. Oppen’s investigation of the concept of “humanity” operates, then, between these

62
As Nicholls indicates, “The Origin of the Work of Art” appeared in English in 1971, after the publication of “Of
Being Numerous” (1968) and the shorter serial poem “A Language of New York” (1965), in which these lines first
appeared. Oppen’s correspondence with literary critic and theorist Frederick Will, who writes about Heidegger’s
conception of the earth in “Heidegger and the Gods of Poetry,” indicates that he was aware of this conception in the
mid-60s, however (Fate of Modernism 81).

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two poles in “Of Being Numerous”: an unreal world of false consciousness and an all-too-real
world of brute facticity and sheer materiality.
63

“A language of New York”
Oppen’s attentiveness to the “impenetrable” material reality of the world and the “things
we live among” is compelling and can be seen as a legitimate attempt to move beyond a
thoroughly rationalized world of corporations and wars. While the impenetrable world of matter
will reappear throughout the poem, setting its depictions of the social and political realities of the
“city of the corporations” in relief periodically, the first half of the poem focuses substantially
more on the city. This “city,” however, is curiously abstract, as Perloff has noted. In a discussion
centered on the poem’s third section, she contends that Oppen, unlike well-known New York
School poet Frank O’Hara, “cares little about New York and its characteristic images but a great
deal about the phenomenology of the mind” (“Shipwreck” 197). Her assessment may be accurate
for the opening stanzas of the section, but the section’s closing statements require more attention:
The emotions are engaged
Entering the city
As entering any city.

We are not coeval
With a locality
But we imagine others are,

63
These two poles of human instrumentalization and material facticity appear throughout Oppen’s work in the 60s,
and my conceptualization of them in “Of Being Numerous” is indebted to Nicholls’ discussion of “the world”
presented in Oppen’s first book after returning to poetry in the 60s, The Materials: “It is a world in which the
absolutely reified ‘stone universe’ finds a counterpart in the false allure of ‘The streets of stores’ with their ‘worn
and squalid toys in the trash’ (‘Image of the Engine’, NCP, 42)” (Fate of Modernism 50). While Oppen’s language
has become more sophisticated and abstract in “Of Being Numerous, with “impenetrable matter” replacing a “stone
universe” and “the city of the corporations” replacing “the streets of stores,” the world presented in the later serial
poem is similar to that found in Oppen’s earlier work.

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We encounter them. Actually
a populace flows
Thru the city.

This is a language, therefore, of New York. (NCP 164)
While the entire section is, in some ways, abstract, or lacking the “fierce concentration on the
perceptual and particular” that Perloff finds in O’Hara’s work (“Shipwreck” 197), this
abstraction results from a sense of distance with which the passage is imbued. The first stanza
presents New York in the same light as “any city,” and this de-specification of the locale is
significant, especially since Oppen is discussing the city that, following World War II, had
become the premier global center for both high finance and high art. To assert that New York is
the same as “any city” in terms of its effect on those entering it is clearly to work against any
comfortable notions of New York as the center of world, the place where dreams are realized. As
Oppen has already indicated, the dreams found in his version of New York are associated with
corporations. None of these corporations, however, are mentioned, and the poem as a whole is
noteworthy, especially in relation to the work of O’Hara or later New York School writers such
as Ted Berrigan, for its lack of brand names.
Rather than simply viewing Oppen’s presentation as less specific than that of other poets
who have written about New York, however, it might be worthwhile to consider the effect of this
de-specification—for Oppen is resisting the notion that the city can be defined by its “brands” or
its “characteristic images,” which are often inseparable in late modernity. Oppen’s resistance to
brand names and characteristic images might be seen in light of Heidegger’s commentary, in

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“The Question Concerning Technology,” on the tourism industry, which appropriates and frames
natural beauty for the sake of profit. While Times Square or the “House of Seagram” found in
O’Hara’s works might be a far cry from Heidegger’s notion of the Rhine as “an object on call”
for “a tour group” (“Technology” 16), Oppen is not concerned with orienting the reader within
any familiar locale or with leveraging the types of cityscapes or urban scenery one might find on
a postcard.
64
He is not interested in making the reader feel comfortable or giving her the
“experience” of entering New York. He does not even specify which emotions are engaged when
entering “any city,” and he asserts that “We,” a designation that implicitly includes both reader
and writer, don’t really belong to the city, though we imagine that others do. Such a statement
may reveal an interest in “the phenomenology of the mind,” as Perloff indicates (“Shipwreck”
197), but it is also insistently other-oriented and directed outward, less engaged with the
activities of the speaker’s mind than with the fact that others are present, having experiences that
are imagined to be similar to those of the speaker.
The notion of not being “coeval with a locality” picks up on the prose passage quoted
from the poet’s wife in the poem’s first section, in which a different “we,” composed of the
quoted speaker and her addressee, “tried to imagine that we belonged to those times” (NCP 163).
Section three forsakes the straightforward yet Romantic tone of this passage, mixing spatial and

64
The lone instance in the poem in which Oppen does invoke a familiar or famous sight of New York occurs in
section 11, where he refers to the Empire State Building. The stanza in which this reference occurs, however,
conveys an atmosphere of isolation and estrangement so powerful that it serves to demystify whatever appeal might
otherwise be found in the familiar urban landscape:

Hollow, available, you could enter any building,
You could look from any window
One might wave to himself
From the top of the Empire State Building (NCP 168)

The loneliness and alienation expressed in this scenario culminate in the nearly autistic shunting of self-expression
presented in the final two lines. This stanza offers an unsettling view, then, of one of New York’s “characteristic
images” (Perloff “Shipwreck”197), or one in which the view itself has been erased in favor of a haunting sense of
isolation.

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temporal terms to indicate in a language that seems purposefully ungainly that “we” are not
contemporary (“coeval”) with a place (“locality”). While the meaning of the phrase is curious,
causing a reader to pause, the repeated L-sounds in the phrase also slow the reader down or
perhaps make her stumble on her entrance into this or any city. In indicating that “we” are not
contemporary with places or locales, Oppen seems to be asserting not that the people in the poem
don’t belong to a historical period, represented by things that evoke that period, as in the poem’s
first section, but that places in the present are marked by their own historicity, which makes the
current occupants themselves strangely anachronistic. Oppen exemplifies this lack of temporal
connection several times in the poem, most notably in section 25, which begins “Strange that the
youngest people I know / live in the oldest buildings” (NCP 176), but the larger point of these
claims seems to be a desire to hold on to a sense of the historical.
Such a desire calls to mind the Poundian prescription that the modern epic is a poem that
contains history, but Oppen is not dealing with the type of great historical figures—Jefferson,
Malatesta, Mussolini—that Pound treats, nor with the type of mythological history found in Eliot
or H.D. Rather, Oppen is looking for traces of the past—the year “‘1875’” carved into a pylon on
a bridge in section 5, “the old marks of wood in the concrete” of a basement room, in section
27—in the current city of corporations (NCP 165, 180). This attention to historical detail of a
mundane variety may be seen as an effort to combat the sense of ahistoricism that Jameson and
others believe characteristic of late capitalism, but in the larger framework of Oppen’s ideas, it
also relates to his investigation of the concept of humanity. For the sense of futurity that Oppen
believes inheres in a concept of humanity finds its counterpart in the historical, in the lived traces
of real people who exist outside the dreams and images produced by the corporate city. If Oppen
despairs that his contemporaries “have lost the metaphysical sense / Of the future,” as he puts it

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in section 26, and “feel themselves / The end of a chain // Of lives, single lives” (NCP 177-78),
this despair finds its antidote in the traces and marks left behind by those who have come before,
implicitly demonstrating that the chain of lives does not, in fact, end when one individual dies.
This dynamic, in which both historicism and futurity are implicated in a concept of humanity, is
an important aspect of the poem that is foregrounded strongly in its opening section and
reinforced in various other sections. “Any sense we may have of our own existence as a special
or singular ‘occurrence,’” Nicholls notes, “must be tempered by the fact that we are also ‘a part /
Of an infinite series’” (Fate of Modernism 87).
If humanity constitutes an “infinite series,” in the poem’s lexicon, it is significant that the
word “humanity” never appears in the poem. Though Oppen insists that the poem itself
constitutes an investigation of the concept of humanity, the “others” encountered in section three
are not presented as part of humanity or mankind, but must be seen as part of the “populace” that
“flows / Thru the city” (NCP 164). The encounter with these others is as understated as the
section’s opening lines about “emotions” and “any city,” but it occurs in a grammatically
awkward comma splice across a stanza break, forcefully juxtaposing the real existence of the
others to their place in the speaker’s imagination (“But we imagine others are, // We encounter
them. Actually”) (NCP 164). It is tempting to allow the adverb starting the new sentence in
stanza three, “Actually,” to do double duty, modifying both the sentence that comes before it and
the one that it begins, and the suspension of the word at the end of the line heightens the force of
the preceding encounter. The rest of this stanza moves quite smoothly, gliding along the long
vowel sounds of “flows” and “Thru,” enjambed after the short vowels and plosives of
“populace,” and the smoothness of this construction itself may be seen to retroactively highlight
the awkward force of the encounter that precedes it.

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This populace that flows through the city is then said to constitute “a language … of New
York.” While Perloff contends that the poem presents a language “not ‘of New York’” but “of
the enclosed glassed-in cityscape as seen from office or automobile” (“Shipwreck” web, np), it is
difficult to understand how a critic can make this distinction. Might not Oppen’s point be that,
with its proliferation of offices and automobiles, New York is now the very “enclosed glassed-in
cityscape” that Perloff finds opposed to some presumably “authentic” vision of the city? On a
more basic level, Oppen’s statement about “a language … of New York” can be taken literally
and presents a structuralist, if not post-structuralist, vision of the city, in which the movement of
people throughout the urban environment can be seen as a type of semiotic activity.
65
This
conception of the city, in which the movement of people is of central importance and constitutes
a variable but constrained system, resonates strongly with Foucault’s notion of the modern city
based on “security,” or the regulation of the population.
66
Such a city is not designed to highlight
architectural grandeur—the monuments to the sovereign or the dominant corporations—but to
allow for the circulation of goods and people in ways that are beneficial to those in power.
Speaking about modern urban planning in the 18
th
century, Foucault says that “it was a matter of
organizing circulation, eliminating its dangerous elements, making a division between good and
bad circulation, and maximizing the good circulation by diminishing the bad” (Security 18).
Oppen certainly doesn’t go into the detail that Foucault provides in his analysis, but his
presentation of the city as a site through which the populace “flows” accords with Foucault’s

65
This conception of semiotic “flow” can be contrasted with the “semaphoring chorus” that Oppen presents in his
first work, Discrete Series, which indicates a longstanding awareness of the potential for semiosis inherent in human
movement (NCP 17).
66
The regulation of the population constitutes one half of the conceptual regime that Foucault presents, in vol. 1 of
The History of Sexuality and Society Must Be Defended, as “biopower,” with the discipline and normalization of the
individual body constituting the other half. In his later work in the 70s, Foucault introduces the term “security” to
address ways in which governments seek to regulate the population, but he does not elaborate on the distinctions
between the two terms. As Mariana Valverde notes, “It is clear … that ‘security’ and ‘biopolitics’ shade into one
another in practice, even though security/govermentality is said to operate largely through economic logics rather
than through biological or quasi-biological distinctions among populations” (“Beyond Discipline and Punish” 213).

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ideas about the centrality of circulation to the modern city. Oppen’s use of the word “populace”
only heightens this comparison, as the modern city Foucault analyzes is designed to manage the
“population” by regulating circulation.
“There shall be peoples”
Although the appearance of “populace” within the poem has occasioned some keen
remarks from critics, these comments have not addressed the full implications of the term, which
can be seen to encapsulate both poles of the binary between the numerous and singular that
Oppen will engage later in the poem. The “populace” may not be identical with the “population,”
but the two words are closely related, both deriving from the Latin populus. In Latin usage, the
word populus often appeared in relation to Roman politics and typically referred to the common
people as opposed to the Roman senate, as is seen in the common designation senatus
populusque Romanus (the senate and the Roman people). While the word may maintain, as
Nicholls contends, a “root connection to an idea of commonness” (Fate of Modernism 94), it is
also marked by a degree of abstraction, as Perloff argues. Nicholl’s etymologically based claim
would seem to offer some support for critics such as Burton Hatlen, who find a “populist vision”
in the poem, but Perloff’s insistence on the poem’s “conceptual” nature and its reliance on
“abstract” words such as “populace” is geared to counter these readings of the poem, which she
finds unsupported by the work itself. The reading offered here, in which “populace” is taken to
retain both its connection to commonness and its sense of abstraction—or its detached sense of
quantification, which results in it having very different connotations than words such as “crowd,”
“masses,” or “nation”—is meant to sidestep this debate. Several of the key essays in this debate
appeared in 80s, and the terms of the debate now seem locked in a Cold War binary in which
Oppen is either still a militant Marxist in the 60s or a quietist who now cares more about “the

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separation that makes contemplation possible” (Perloff, “Rescue” 569) than social or political
realities.
Although they provide valuable insights into the poem, both positions are clearly
reductive. Nicholls has adroitly laid to rest the related controversy surrounding the compatibility
of Oppen’s interest in existentialism and his Marxism, demonstrating that the two approaches
were viewed as complementary in the 60s by thinkers, such as Sartre, who maintained a social
commitment but had grown weary of the violent excesses and doctrinaire tendencies of existing
Communist states and parties (Fate of Modernism 52-53). This argument, however, doesn’t
exhaust the ways in which “Of Being Numerous” engages ideas that can be seen as relevant to
the political and social realities of Oppen’s day. In presenting the others he encounters in the city
as part of the larger populace, Oppen is, at once, signaling both his commitment to an “idea of
commonness” and his sense that the people living in a given locale can’t be contained within
labels such as the “masses” or the “nation,” which may not encompass the diversity and plurality
of inhabitants.
In section 24 of the poem, Oppen acknowledges these concerns directly, qualifying the
concept of “nation” and fracturing any idea of a unified, singular “people”:
In this nation
Which is in some sense
Our home. Covenant!

The covenant is
There shall be peoples.

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Michael Davidson explains, in his helpful notes to the text, that “the New England Puritans
believed that they were under a direct mandate from God to form a New Jerusalem in the new
world” and that “they found doctrinal support for this idea in the Covenant made with Abraham
(and ratified with the birth of Christ)” (NCP 385). While Oppen is clearly rejecting the Biblical
basis for such notions of divinely inspired American exceptionalism, his presentation of the
plural “peoples,” along with his qualification of the nation, which constitutes a home “in some
sense,” is of greater interest to this discussion of Oppen’s conception of larger social structures in
“Of Being Numerous.” Oppen’s presentation of “peoples” clearly runs contrary to the unifying
impulse behind any desire for a “tale of the tribe.”
While less emphatic, Oppen’s use of the term “populace,” in section three, also runs
contrary to this impulse, as the term lacks a totalizing or unifying force. Unlike terms such as
“people” and the “nation,” the word “populace” merely accounts for presence of individuals in a
given area, but does not unify these individuals under any larger rubric. Rather, “populace”
speaks to “an aggregate of ordinary people,” in Vincent Leitch’s words, who happen to be living
in a demarcated territory (160). This idea of individuals constituting an aggregate, rather than an
organic whole that would in some sense take precedence over the individuals themselves, as in
Aristotle’s conception of the organic polis, marks a key distinction between ancient and modern
conceptions of social formations. As Ian Watt indicates, “the vast transformation of Western
civilization since the Renaissance … has replaced the unified world picture of the Middle Ages
with another very different one—one which presents us, essentially, with a developing but
unplanned aggregate of particular individuals having particular experiences at particular times
and at particular places” (Rise of the Novel 31). Whereas an aggregate is simply the sum of
constituent parts, a whole deemed to be “organic” transcends these parts, as “the term ‘organic,’”

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in Watt’s words, “usually depends on the understanding that a whole is different from, and in
some sense larger than, its constituent parts” (Modern Individualism 187). If the populace refers
to an aggregate, then, as this chapter contends, it stands in stark contrast to the organic totality
that Lukács finds in ancient epic and that, as chapter one discussed, theorists of the modern long
poem, such as Bernstein and Altieri, hope the modern long poem will somehow reconstitute,
whether through the importation of secular predicates of pre-modern societies or through the
reconstitution of a unifying “tale of the tribe.”
Although it may seem self-evident, it is important to stress that a conception of the
populace can only come into existence with the emergence of modern ideas of individuality. As
chapter one demonstrated, Lukács’ conception of the organic totality represented by ancient epic
effectively precludes individuality per se, and the development of conceptions of individuality,
within political structures, is seen by Bobbio to mark a critical distinction between modern and
ancient systems of governance. As an aggregate, then, rather than a totality or organic whole, the
populace might be said to contain implicitly a notion of the modern individual.
Such a relationship between ideas of the population and modern individuality is strongly
foregrounded by Foucault in his account of the emergence of disciplinary and regulatory powers
in the 17
th
and 18
th
centuries. For Foucault, disciplinary power, which emerges when traditional
conceptions of sovereignty and birth right are undermined, creates the modern individual:
“Instead of bending all its subjects into a single uniform mass, [disciplinary power] separates,
analyses, differentiates. … It ‘trains the moving, confused, useless multitudes of bodies and
forces into a multiplicity of individual elements. … Discipline ‘makes’ individuals” (Discipline
& Punish 170). The modern notion of the “population,” which will constitute one half of the
conceptual scaffolding of biopolitics in Foucault’s later work, is actually an outgrowth of the

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data collected through the creation of individuals by the disciplinary measures, as “the
constitution of the individual as a describable, analyzable object” allows for “the constitution of
a comparative system that made possible the measurement of overall phenomena, the description
of groups, the characterization of collective facts, the calculation of gaps between individuals,
their distribution in a given ‘population’” (Discipline & Punish 190).
Every demarcated territory, whether state, city, or province, has had a population, of
course, but Foucault is talking about the significance of ideas about the population to specific
governmental rationalities that emerged in the 17
th
, 18
th
and 19
th
centuries. From the perspective
of these new ways of governing, the simple acquisition of territory and the maintenance of
internal power relations, which had been the goal of “sovereigns” and “princes” through the
Middle Ages and which finds, according to Foucault, its final defense in Machiavelli’s The
Prince, is superseded by a growing awareness “that government is not related to the territory, but
to a sort of complex of men and things” (Security 96). It is not necessary to rehearse all the
nuances of this nascent “governmentality” that Foucault charts in various early Modern
approaches to governance, such as Mercantilism, but it is important to point out that these
developments led a new understanding of the importance of the population—its birth rates,
incidences of risk and disease, and other factors that can be statistically quantified—and
effectively ushered in fundamental break in the way in which the Western states operated. As
Foucault contends, “the transition in the eighteenth century from a regime dominated by
structures of sovereignty to a regime dominated by techniques of government revolves around
population, and consequently around the birth of political economy” (Security 106). While the
term “political economy” itself, as Hannah Arendt, Victoria Kahn and Neil Saccamano, and
others have pointed out, speaks to the changed, biopolitical condition of modernity, merging the

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realms of polis and oikos kept separate in antiquity, the larger point is that this shift in
governmental rationalities heralds the emergence, in the broadest sense, of the modern nation-
state.
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The emergence of this state, of course, is what Moretti contends makes epic an
impossibility. Epic becomes impossible not simply because, as Lukács argues, the modern world
is too rich in gifts for a writer to represent it in its totality (34), but because with the emergence
of the modern state, “individuality must no longer give totality a form” (Moretti 12).
Individuality, of course, is something that Lukács believes to be essentially absent from epic,
which necessarily reflects a holistic structure so cohesive as to deny stark individuation.
Moretti’s claims thus contradict those of Lukács, but this contradiction is minimal, as the
“individuals” Moretti is discussing are really only the heroes of epic, the “big men,” such as
Achilles and Odysseus, who are seen to effectively embody the norms and morals of a
community before they are codified as “law.”
While the degree to which these figures in Homeric epic did reflect emergent political
structures in archaic Greece is likely much more complex, as Moses Finley might contend,
Moretti’s larger point about individualization and epic needs to be further refined. For if the
emergence of the modern state prohibits the heroic individual from embodying the law itself, the
mechanisms by which this very state emerges—and thus moves beyond organicist and absolutist
structures based solely on sovereign right—effectively create “individuals” throughout the state,
in Foucault’s schema, and not just at the top of its social structures. These mechanisms, of
course, are disciplinary procedures of monitoring, training, and “normalizing” the individual

67
Arendt writes, in The Human Condition, that “according to ancient thought on these matters, the very term
‘political economy’ would have been a contradiction in terms: whatever was ‘economic,’ related to the life of the
individual and the survival of the species, was a non-political, household affair by definition” (29). Kahn and
Saccamano likewise note that “in the classical conception of politics, the category of ‘political economy’ would
have been idiotic or senseless because it is a contradiction in terms until the modern period” (4).

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body and regulatory procedures that essentially seek to normalize the larger, aggregate
population.
Foucault addresses the effect of these disciplinary mechanisms explicitly, in Discipline &
Punish, indicating that they “mark the moment when the reversal of the political axis of
individuation—as one might call it—takes place” (192). Elaborating on this phrase, Foucault
argues that the emergence of disciplinary mechanisms initiates a shift from ascending to
descending modes of individualization within societies. With ascending procedures of
individualization, which tend to occur in pre-modern societies, “individualization is greatest
where sovereignty is exercised and in the higher echelons of power. The more one possesses
power or privilege, the more one is marked as an individual, by rituals, written accounts or visual
reproductions” (Discipline & Punish 192). Although Foucault’s account of these procedures is
somewhat open-ended, it seems apparent that these “written accounts or visual reproductions”
are, in many cases, works of art. If so, his account resonates strongly with Ranciere’s
descriptions of the function of art in what he calls “the representative regime,” in which rigid
generic structures thrived within equally rigid hierarchical social structures and many artistic
works depicted powerful members of an artist’s society. Foucault’s account of the importance of
genealogy and heroic deeds to the process of ascending individualization does mention “literary
accounts” explicitly, as one of the vehicles by which individuals are represented: “The ‘name’
and the genealogy that situate one within a kinship group, the performance of deeds that
demonstrate superior strength and which are immortalized in literary accounts, the ceremonies
that mark the power relations in their very ordering, the monuments or donations that bring
survival after death … all these are procedures of ascending individualization” (Discipline &
Punish 193). Although Foucault doesn’t mention epic poetry directly, his account of the function

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of literature in processes of ascending individualization also accurately describes the ways in
which an epic poet confers kleos or fame on the heroic individuals he represents.
Descending modes of individualization come to the fore when disciplinary practices
emerge and record-keeping of all sorts becomes widespread as literacy becomes more
commonplace. With these changes, “power becomes more anonymous and more functional” and
has the effect of individualizing “those on whom it is exercised” (Discipline & Punish 193).
Significantly, this power “is exercised by surveillance rather than ceremonies, by observation
rather than commemorative accounts, by comparative measures that have the ‘norm’ as reference
rather than genealogies giving ancestors as points of references; by ‘gaps’ rather than by deeds”
(Discipline & Punish 193). The overall effect of these changes is that the “normal” supersedes
the ancestral in the processes of individualization, “thus substituting for the individuality of the
memorable man that of the calculable man” (Discipline & Punish 193). Whereas Foucault
doesn’t specify the types of literature most relevant to ascending modes of individualization, he
invokes genre explicitly in characterizing the shift from the ascending to descending modes,
which he likens to “the passage from the epic to the novel, from the noble deed to the secret
singularity” (Discipline & Punish 193).
In engaging ideas of both “the meaning / Of being numerous” and “the shipwreck / Of the
singular,” Oppen addresses issues fundamental not only to late modernity but to the “shifting
historical ground,” in Jameson’s words, that made epic an impossibility. Moretti contends that
the emergence of the modern state made epic an impossibility by not allowing “individuality to
give totality a form,” but his account doesn’t acknowledge the tremendous shifts in processes of
individualization that took place with the emergence of that state. While the novel would
certainly be seen as the pre-eminent form to engage “the secret singularity” that accompanies the

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descending modes of individualization that mark modernity, in Foucault’s schema, a poet could
instead interrogate and leverage notions of individuality and multiplicity, of singularity and
numerousness, in an attempt to move beyond the sense of interiority and privacy that
distinguishes both the novel and the lyric.
In constructing a serial poem around these notions, Oppen both employs a form adequate
to the changed conditions of modernity and explores thematic issues highly relevant to any
viable “conception of humanity” in the West in the 20
th
century. His use of the term “populace”
in section three of “Of Being Numerous” hints at some of the ways in which the poem will
explore these issues, as the term “populace” invokes the multiplicity or numerousness of
individuals in a given place but does so without seeking to impart any unifying or totalizing
meaning to them. Rather, as an aggregate, the “populace” implicitly contains an
acknowledgement of the secret singularities that constitute it.
Before looking at the poet’s engagement of the singular and the numerous in the next
chapter, a final point needs to be made regarding the “populace” in section three and its
paradoxical relation to language. If the populace that “flows / Thru the city” can be seen as “a
language … of New York,” as Oppen asserts (NCP 164), the paradox of this construction is that
the individuals who constitute this language often encounter, as we shall see, a great deal of
difficulty in attempting to speak or use language themselves. Thus, in the contemporary city of
circulation, the movement of the people themselves may constitute a language, but language
itself, the use of which determined who was a legitimate inhabitant of the polis in Aristotelian
thought, is no longer available to the members of the populace. Instead, “the roots of words”
hang “dim in the subways” and “It is not easy to speak” with “A ferocious mumbling, in public /
Of rootless speech” (NCP 172-173). As these passages, from the poem’s seventeenth section,

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make clear, moreover, a further paradox is that the poet’s assertions of this difficulty of using
language constitute or contribute to some of the most powerful statements of the poem—which is
nothing if not a finely tuned linguistic construction. As the next chapter will demonstrate, it is
precisely because Oppen is interrogating the significance of speech, in a poem that addresses the
validity and significance of social structures in late modernity, that the poem attains such power.

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Chapter 4: “‘A State of Matter’”: Speech and Autonomy in George Oppen’s “Of Being
Numerous”
“So we have chosen”
Ideas of the singular and the numerous enter “Of Being Numerous” explicitly in its sixth
and seventh sections. These ideas recur, in various forms, throughout the first two-thirds of the
poem, but are largely absent from the concluding sections, which engage ideas of family more
than notions of larger society. If the poet “does retrieve an authentic ‘we’ … rooted in the family
rather than in a larger social group” in the final sections of the poem, as Nicholls contends (Fate
of Modernism 103), this retrieval occurs only after the intensive and, at times, impassioned
engagement with notions of the singular and the numerous in the poem’s opening and middle
sections. Significantly, these sections also contain the poem’s most sustained examinations of the
difficulty of speech in the modern “city of the corporations.” Analyses of the poet’s engagement
with ideas of the singular and numerous will, at times, enter into considerations of the
significance of speech within the poem, as these concepts are inter-related throughout the poem.
Speech, of course, is a fundamental component of biopolitics, especially in Agamben’s
Aristotelian formulation of the concept. As the discussion in chapter 2 indicated, the ability to
possess speech marks a critical caesura in the constitution of both the polis and the citizens who
are allowed to inhabit it, and this chapter will investigate the significance of Oppen’s emphasis
on the difficulty of speech. The implications of this emphasis are far-reaching, as we shall see,
and one wonders whether notions of citizenship itself are meaningful in an environment in which
speech is presented as nearly impossible, an idea that’s only heightened by Oppen’s frequent
portrayal, in his letters and daybooks, of speech as vital component of democracy. These
considerations of the significance of speech reach a climax in Oppen’s own attempt to find a

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resolution to the (false) dialectic of the singular and the numerous, precisely at the center point of
the poem, where he presents a scenario that looks beyond the human, questioning the viability of
Aristotelian and Heideggarian conceptions of man and animal. Significantly, the poem’s
inclusion of this scenario, while very powerful, also clearly forsakes one of central aesthetic
tenets of Objectivism that drives the poem, offering an almost kitschy “posed tableau,” in which
the poet, by implication, also poses.
68
As such, this scenario implicitly questions the viability of
Objectivism, the rigorous aesthetic approach derived from Poundian imagism and promulgated
by Zukofsky in his essay “Sincerity and Objectification,” which appeared in a 1931 issue of
Poetry dedicated to the “movement.”
69
Before looking at this passage, however, it is necessary to
analyze Oppen’s treatment of notions of the singular and the numerous.
Section six introduces ideas of singularity and numerousness but doesn’t use these terms
directly. Rather, the section opens with an aspect of the condition of numerousness before
invoking the figure of Crusoe as an emblem of singularity that, at first glance, seems to stand in
opposition to the condition of being numerous:
We are pressed, pressed on each other,
We will be told at once

68
This assessment is based on Oppen’s memorable statement in a letter from 1966. To distinguish between
Objectivism and the related movement that preceded it, Imagism, Oppen asserts that “That lucence, that emotional
clarity [of Imagism], the objectivists wanted. But not the falsity of ingenuity, of the posed tableau, in which the poet
also, by implication, poses” (Selected Letters 146).
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As much as any poetic school or movement of the 20
th
century, Objectivism is marked by a variety of approaches
among practitioners who have typically been seen as participating in it. As DuPlessis and Quartermain note,
“Objectivist … is a notably unstable term,” and some of the writers included in the Objectivist publications of the
early 30s “resisted the label” (1). Objectivism per se will not be a major focus of this chapter, and space precludes a
detailed examination of the ideas associated with it. Nevertheless, the summary statement used by DuPlessis and
Quartermain to describe the contemporary assessment of Objectivist poetics is helpful: “the term ‘Objectivist’ has
come to mean a non-symbolic, post-imagist poetics, characterized by a historical, realist, antimythological
worldview, one in which ‘the detail, not mirage’ calls attention to the materiality of both the world and the word
(Zukofsky, Prepositions, 12)” (3). For more information, see DuPlessis and Quartermain (passim) and Charles
Altieri’s “The Objectivist Tradition,” which does a fine job of contrasting “the basic modes of lyric relatedness—
symbolist and objectivist style” (26), but confuses matters by including Charles Olson and Robert Duncan, both of
whom are heavily invested in mythopoetic structures, under the category of Objectivists.

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Of anything that happens

And the discovery of fact bursts
In a paroxysm of emotion
Now as always. Crusoe

We say was
‘Rescued’.
So we have chosen. (NCP 165-66)
The section opens with a reference to a “we” that seems even more general than the one that
appeared in section three. The emphatic tone of the section derives largely from the repetition of
“pressed” in the opening line, which heightens the sense of overcrowding that marks the section,
but this sense is also enhanced by the vagueness of first-person plural pronoun, which hints at the
idea that everyone is pressed against everyone else. Several later sections of the poem take place
in buses (section 11) and on the subway (sections 17 and 20), and the section can be seen to
anticipate them in its phrasing.
While Nicholls contends, in his helpful analysis of Oppen’s complex deployment of
pronouns within the poem, that the pronoun in the opening line of the section is “far from … all-
inclusive” but is instead “a populist ‘we’ implicitly oppressed by some vaguely defined other”
(Fate of Modernism 99), this reading seems contrary to the force of the passage, which is largely
determined by the passive verbs that appear in the first two lines, “are pressed” and “will be
told,” as well as the generality of the verb “happens” in line three. Perhaps a “they” or “some
vaguely defined other” is implicit in the scenario presented, but the phrasing itself emphasizes a

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“we” with no apparent opposition except those who are also a part of it and are “pressed on each
other.” Perhaps more important, such a scenario emphasizes the passivity and apparent
powerlessness of those within the “we,” who will be told what happens rather than announcing
it—or participating in the things that are being told. Imputing a “they” who would do the telling
of these events necessarily diminishes the sense of passivity that the lines seem designed to
convey.
As the next brief stanza makes clear, these things that “we will be told” are not pleasant.
Although the stanza doesn’t indicate in any detail what these things actually are, they cause a
powerful reaction, as “the discovery of fact bursts / In a paroxysm of emotion / Now as always.”
While the final line of this stanza adds a fatalistic sense of inevitability to the scenario presented,
the fatalism itself is linked to the emotional response that follows “the discovery of fact,” rather
than to the condition of passivity emphasized in the first stanza. The language of the second
stanza marks a shift to the active voice, but the “we” invoked in the first stanza is absent—and
the locution “the discovery of fact,” which serves as the subject of the sentence, strips any sense
of agency that might be conveyed by the active construction. The overall statement is both
detached, withholding particulars such as examples of the “facts” discovered or the types of
“emotions” produced, and highly charged, using language that seems more appropriate for a
description of a military airstrike, in which missiles burst into paroxysms of flame. In such a
way, the language of the poem may look ahead to later passages that address the “logic” of the
Vietnam War, which was intensifying while Oppen wrote and revised the poem.
If the first stanza of the section relies heavily on passive constructions and the second
stanza employs a construction that is technically active but devoid of agency, the section’s final
stanza continues this movement toward the active voice but again troubles notions of agency. In

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concluding with the word “Crusoe,” after a full sentence stop, the second stanza both suspends
Defoe’s famed traveler, a prosodic gesture clearly mimetic of Crusoe’s long isolation on his
“Island of Despair,” and associates him with the fatalistic phrase “Now as always.” The third
stanza heightens the sense of suspension created at the end of stanza two, inserting the phrase
“We say” before the predicate that completes the action initiated by the subject “Crusoe.” While
this predicate is passive, indicating that Crusoe “was / ‘Rescued,’ the active phrase “We say”
predominates the stanza, appearing unexpectedly after the subject “Crusoe.” The stanza
concludes with a straightforward, active statement, “So we have chosen,” but the cumulative
effect of the stanza is to cast doubt on the ideas presented.
After the appearance of the word “‘Rescued’” in single quotes, as if the word is being
used ironically or in some sense other than its most basic one, and the insertion of “We say” in
the middle of the phrase, which also can imply that the statement that follows, “was / Rescued,”
is a figure of speech more than a reality, one wonders what exactly “we have chosen.” In this
stanza, which seems very straightforward and even “easy,” in relation to the poetry of Pound or
Eliot, Oppen presents a carefully calibrated and deliberately hedged statement that introduces the
figure of Crusoe, who will exemplify the notion of singularity, associated in later sections of the
poem with “shipwreck.” With this introduction of Crusoe, the poem’s sixth section comes full
circle, from a vague and dystopian presentation of numerousness in the form an amorphous and
passive “we” that is “pressed, pressed on each other” and “will be told” of anything that happens,
to a deeply ambivalent presentation of singularity in the form of Crusoe. The lines presenting
Crusoe restore a sense of agency to the “we” in the section but also undermine the legitimacy of
that agency, as it is not at all clear what we have chosen, or what the terms of this “choice”
mean.

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The following section addresses this situation but doesn’t entirely clarify it. After the
fraught yet open-ended scenarios depicted in section 6, the seventh section presents a declarative
statement that seems to recapitulate the preceding action in more definitive terms:
Obsessed, bewildered

By the shipwreck
Of the singular

We have chosen the meaning
Of being numerous. (NCP 166)
The figure of Crusoe is not invoked directly in this passage but seems implicitly present through
the notion “shipwreck.” This term on its own is highly significant, for not only does it recall
Crusoe, who appeared somewhat mysteriously in the preceding section, but it also complicates
the implicit value attached to the figure of Crusoe. If section six implies that Crusoe’s rescue is a
figure of speech, and, thus, that his isolated condition on the island is somehow preferable to his
rescue and return to society—as some critics contend is the case in the novel—the seventh
section reverses or at least qualifies this implicit valorization of isolation in the figure of Crusoe
by emphasizing the shipwreck rather than rescue. While serving as metonym for Crusoe, the
term “shipwreck” takes on a metaphysical resonance in its extension to the human condition,
“the shipwreck / Of the singular,” in this section (NCP 166). The term is also presented as having
effects so powerful they seem nearly intoxicating and addictive, as the “we” in section 7 is
“Obsessed, bewildered // By the shipwreck / Of the singular.” The section strongly implies that
the strange force of the shipwreck, leaving us dazed, is what causes us to choose “the meaning /

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Of being numerous” (NCP 166). The present perfect tense of “have chosen” in the section’s
penultimate line, moreover, indicates that this choice is ongoing, or that we remain obsessed and
bewildered by the shipwreck of the singular.
Whereas the sixth section opens with a dire consideration of numerousness and resolves
with an invocation of Crusoe, as an exemplar of singularity, the seventh section inverts these
thematic polarities, moving from the “singular” to the “numerous” and using these terms
directly. The section thus addresses the situation presented in section 6 but opens more questions
than it answers. In qualifying the implications associated with Crusoe, whose rescue is implicitly
questioned in section 6, the section presents shipwreck, when extended to a metaphysical
condition, as a powerful, perhaps seductive, force, one that causes obsession and bewilderment,
terms more readily associated with an infatuated lover than a stranded seafarer. Just as
problematic as the strange force of shipwreck of the singular is the choice to which it leads, “the
meaning / Of being numerous” (NCP 166). What exactly this phrase means is not at all clear, as
Oppen is not indicating that we have chosen the “condition” or “reality” of being numerous, but
the “meaning” of it. In addressing “the ambiguity which plays around the idea of ‘being
numerous,’” Nicholls asks “have we ‘chosen the meaning / Of being numerous’ … simply
because of bewilderment over the ‘the shipwreck of / Of the singular’? Or is Oppen suggesting
that we have chosen merely the meaning of being numerous and not its reality” (“Of Being
Ethical” 247; italics in original). While my reading has favored the first interpretation presented
by Nicholls, the second one is certainly viable, though one would have to wonder what the
“reality” of being numerous would be—or if that reality itself is, in fact, what’s disclosed at the
start of section six, in the statement that “we are pressed, pressed on each other” (NCP 165).

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The depth of the ambiguity surrounding the figure of Crusoe and attendant notions of
singularity and numerousness in these sections is made clear by two readings of the sections that
appeared in The National Poetry Foundation’s seminal George Oppen: Man and Poet, from
1981. That these readings, by Randolph Chilton and David McAleavey, are diametrically
opposed but equally compelling is a testament to the complexity of the poem. In Chilton’s
opinion, the poem’s phrasing in its presentation of Crusoe conveys a social commitment:
“Crusoe is rescued from solitude to society … and simply by calling it a rescue, we make a
social commitment” (98). Such a reading takes the terms in the poem at face value and
emphasizes the communicative speech act inherent in a sincere notion of “choosing” to rescue
someone. Where Chilton finds sincerity, however, McAleavey finds it lacking. “Oppen’s irony in
section #6,” he writes, “our saying Crusoe was ‘Rescued,’ indicates that an apparently happy
self-sufficient man was brought back to a civilization that was practically insane” (388). While
McAleavey’s contention that the early Modern England to which Crusoe was returned “was
practically insane” is difficult to assess and may be influenced by later sections of the poem, in
which Oppen invokes “Insanity in high places,” a reference to both the decisions of LBJ in the
Vietnam War and to the military helicopter, “Which, over the city / Is the bright light of
shipwreck” (NCP 173), his reading of Oppen’s invocation of Crusoe’s rescue as ironic stands in
stark contrast to Chilton’s assertions of communal commitment in the passage.
If Oppen’s treatment of the figure of Crusoe can be seen as ambivalent, as the readings
by Chilton and McAleavey indicate, it is important to understand exactly what the figure of
Crusoe represents. Such an understanding of what Crusoe represents may not diminish or clarify
the ambivalence of Oppen’s approach to Crusoe, or of the complexity of his notions of both the
singular and the numerous, but it will help us to see what’s at stake in these terms. The matter of

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what Crusoe represents, of course, is not inherently clear-cut but is the result of interpretation
and readerly engagement with the text.
70
Nevertheless, within the context of considerations of
social structure and generic standards foregrounded in this study, several interpretative themes
regarding Crusoe can and should be emphasized.
Homo Economicus and “the concept of humanity”
McAleavey’s reading provides some insight into this matter, as he depicts Crusoe as “an
apparently happy self-sufficient man.” Crusoe’s happiness might be said more properly to vary
throughout the book, depending on what he’s experiencing, but McAleavey’s assertion of
Crusoe’s self-sufficiency is a central aspect of the book. Crusoe is thus not just a figure of a
isolation and singularity, or of tenacity and survival against all odds, but of self-sufficiency and
individual autonomy. These terms, in fact, often figure prominently in contemporary assessments
of the novel. In Gerald Bruns’ estimation, Defoe’s novel “is a master-narrative of bourgeois
autonomy and self-sufficiency” (23). John J. Richetti contends that Crusoe achieves “a special
kind of autonomy” in the novel (373), one that allows him to be “a human imitation of
providence” (372), while Leopold Damrosch Jr., reading the narrative against the backdrop of
Defoe’s Puritanism, asserts that the book “celebrat[es] a solitude that exalts autonomy rather than
submission” (374). Watt concurs, asserting, in his influential reading of the work, that “Crusoe
… enjoys the absolute freedom from social restrictions for which Rousseau yearned—there are
no family ties or civil authorities to interfere with his individual autonomy.” (Rise of the Novel
86). As these readings indicate, although the figure of Crusoe can be understood through

70
Oppen scholars have devoted relatively little attention to the figure of Crusoe in the poem, and much of that
attention has centered on Marx’s dismissive references, in the first volume of Capital, to political economists who
use the story of Crusoe “to naturalize and universalize the acquisitive impulse and so give natural warrant to
capitalism” (Izenberg 796; see Capital 169-70). Weinfield’s article in George Oppen: Man and Poet is perhaps the
first to connect Oppen’s references to Crusoe to Marx’s “‘Robinsonades’” (376), and his later work expresses regret
that his article “may have sent scholars on a wild goose chase” (The Music of Thought 48). Izenberg’s ambitious
article engages the Marxist conception of the Crusoe story but also addresses the appearance of “a structural Crusoe”
in the works by Ayers, Kripke, and other 20th century philosophers of language (799).

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different prisms, such as Puritanic self-discipline or Romantic solitude, the notion of individual
autonomy is nonetheless central to the contemporary understanding of Crusoe.
As chapter two discussed, such conceptions of individual autonomy were wholly foreign
to the Aristotelian notion of the organic polis that figures strongly in modern conceptions of epic
totality. This shift in conceptions of social structure is not lost on Watt, who comments that
“Aristotle … would surely have found Crusoe a very strange hero” (Rise of the Novel 87). In
Watt’s view, moreover, it is because of this shift that the genre of the novel itself comes into
existence. For Watt, “the novel requires a world view which is centred on the social relationships
between individual persons” (Rise of the Novel 84). This worldview, in turn, “involves
secularisation as well as individualism, because until the end of the 17
th
century the individual
was not conceived of as wholly autonomous, but as an element in a picture which depended on
divine persons for its meaning, as well as on traditional institutions such as Church and Kingship
for its secular patterns” (Rise of the Novel 84).
In a broad sense, Watt’s conception accords with Foucault’s account of the novel as the
vehicle of a “secret singularity,” discussed in the previous chapter. Regardless of what one
believes accounts for this development of the individual as an autonomous agent—the
emergence and growth of capitalism following the break-up of feudal estates, the emergence of a
belief in an individual’s “natural rights” that traditional proponents of liberalism favor, or the
Foucauldian notion of disciplinary practices—this development itself is central to both the
appearance of modern political structures and to the generic possibilities afforded writers in
modernity. The figure of Crusoe can thus be seen to represent, through his actions and attitudes
in the novel, the very autonomy that makes his representation possible. In using Crusoe as the
prime exemplar of “the shipwreck / Of the singular,” Oppen isn’t isolating a literary figure who

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simply represents isolation and solitude, or the “withdrawal from human contact” that Perloff
finds in the poem (“Shipwreck” 200). He is, instead, isolating the figure who perhaps best
represents the notion of individual autonomy that marks the emergence of both modern social
structures and the premier modern genre, the novel.
It is important to note that the notion of man as homo economicus is intimately related to
this conception of individual autonomy. Religious or spiritual valences of autonomy can clearly
be found in Defoe’s depiction of Crusoe as a Puritan, as the comments by Richetti and Damrosch
indicate. Such valences, of course, are by no means divorced from the novel’s depiction of
Crusoe’s economic activities on his island, much as Protestantism is embedded with capitalism
in Max Weber’s famous treatise, but these economic activities are arguably more central to his
character—and, thus, to the novel’s depiction of modern individual autonomy. Watt remarks that
“Robinson Crusoe has been very appropriately used by many economic theorists as their
illustration of homo economicus,” and then contrasts the modern paradigm of individualism to
historical conceptions of social order: “Just as ‘the body politic’ was the symbol of the
communal way of thought typical of previous societies, so ‘economic man’ symbolised the new
outlook of individualism in its economic aspect” (Rise of the Novel 63).
Watt is well aware of the broader social and cultural effects of the emergence of this
conception of man as homo economicus. Citing Weber, he states that it “logically entails a
devaluation of other modes of thought, feeling, and action,” as well as a weakening of “the
various forms of traditional group relationship, the family, the guild, the village, the sense of
nationality” (Rise of the Novel 64), but his discussion of the effects of the emergence of the homo
economicus stops short of attributing a causal force to it. Rather, he takes a more orthodox
Marxist position, arguing that “this inclusive reordering of the components of human society

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tends to occur whenever industrial capitalism becomes the dominant force in the economic
structure,” as it was “particularly early” in England (Rise of the Novel 64).
Typically hesitant to cede explanatory power to existing Marxist positions, Foucault takes
a different view of the emergence of the homo economicus, which assumes a central importance
in his account of the erosion of sovereign right and organic conceptions of society. Also
dismissive of the traditional accounts of liberalism that would view the “natural rights” of
individuals as vehicles of social transformation, Foucault asserts that the emergence of a
conception of the individual as homo economicus and the resulting tendency to associate the
welfare of the economy with that of the state itself are what drive the emergence of the modern
nation-state. For Foucault, modernity itself is in many ways concomitant with the appearance of
the homo economicus, which represents an economic logic that challenges the legal and juridical
assumptions of sovereignty inherited from the Middle Ages. As a key component of Foucault’s
particular conception of liberalism, the homo economicus also helps set the stage for the
development of biopolitics, which cannot be understood outside of liberalism and its economic
logic (Birth of Biopolitics 22).
The homo economicus has such power in Foucault’s schema because it is the result of
fundamental change in Western thought. Foucault’s definition of the homo economicus as “a sort
of non-substitutable and irreducible atom of interest” (Birth of Biopolitics 292) is predicated on
the English empiricist notion of the individual subject as the possessor of his own “interest,”
which constitutes, per Foucault, “one of the most important theoretical transformations in
Western thought since the Middle Ages” (Birth of Biopolitics 71). This transformation has
profound effects on political regimes. In Foucault’s view, the individual as an “atom of
interest”—the homo economicus—undermines older, totalizing notions of sovereign power much

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more effectively than assertions of individual rights. “Homo oeconomicus,” Foucault contends,
“strips the sovereign of power inasmuch as he reveals an essential, fundamental and major
incapacity of the sovereign, that is to say, an inability to master the totality of the economic
field” (Birth of Biopolitics 292). Because of this inability, the state is forced to cede autonomy to
individuals as the economic agents best equipped to make decisions regarding their own welfare.
While this autonomy is often compromised, as any Marxist would contend, by the relations of
production—so that many individuals are “free” to sell their labor doing dangerous, dispiriting,
and poorly compensated work—an equally important point, for the purposes of this study, is the
equation of individual freedom with the logic of the homo economicus. With this logic, an
individual is only free via his or her reduction to a totally atomized individual who is legible
within the paradigms of the market.
As an exemplar of the modern, autonomous individual and homo economicus, the figure
of Crusoe has an obvious relevance to Oppen’s “investigation of the concept of humanity.” As
we have seen in chapter two, Aristotle’s definition of “man” is explicitly based on the idea that
humans are not self-sufficient. Those who are self-sufficient, Aristotle famously argues, are
either beasts or gods. It is only by the use of speech that man differentiates himself from the
other gregarious animals and earns a place within the polis, which precedes mankind
ontologically and ratifies his existence as man. If modern conceptions of humanity depart
radically from Aristotle’s formulations, they don’t necessarily invert them, claiming that the
human is defined by his or her ability to attain autonomy, but they do, as the figure of Crusoe
indicates, hold up the notion of autonomy as an ideal. Oppen will question the validity of this
ideal in “Of Being Numerous,” presenting the autonomous individual as incapable of speech in
the modern city of the corporations. In doing so, not only does Oppen isolate a key aspect of

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modernity, its valorization of the individual as wholly independent and autonomous, but also the
development that, according to Moretti, Lukács, and others who read the historical development
of genre through Hegel, necessitates the emergence of the novel and the demise of epic.
In invoking the figure of Crusoe in a poem that investigates the concept of humanity,
moreover, Oppen is asking what conceptions of larger social groups can be said to exist in a
society of ostensibly autonomous individuals. We have already seen him use the term
“populace,” which invokes the idea of an aggregate of individuals, rather than a whole under
which the individuals are subsumed, and we have seen him subvert the notion of a divine
covenant for the American pilgrims by claiming that “The covenant is / There shall be peoples”
(NCP 176), rather than a singular, coherent people. If Oppen is not seeking to write a tale of tribe
that would implicitly reconstitute the tribe itself or to import secular predicates of organic
societies, as are the writers of long poems in the respective formulations of Bernstein and Altieri,
he is asking if any larger sense of unity or common purpose can be found a society of
autonomous individuals. Such unity was easy to come by in the organic totality exalted by
Lukács, but it was also inherently repressive, presenting a model of social coherence that, at least
in its classical, Aristotelian formulation, explicitly denied the participation of women and slaves,
insisting that the polis, the existence of which allowed male citizens to participate in the body
politic, stand wholly outside the biological body and the necessities of reproductive labor.
As we shall see in sections 9 and 14 of the poem, Oppen is wary of unifying terms such
as “the people,” but he also seems clearly unsatisfied with the present “meaning of being
numerous” that “we have chosen,” and which I take to be roughly equivalent to the idea of the
populace, a simple aggregate of individuals. Oppen does not resolve this tension in the poem
between a distrust of larger categories that would point toward a potential organic totality and his

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dissatisfaction with a “meaning of being numerous” aggregated from the shipwreck[s] of the
singular, but the tension fades or abates in the poems final third, when he turns his attention to
the family. While interesting in its own right, such a turn might be said to represent the poem’s
most important shortcoming, because this tension between a distrusted unity and a dissatisfying
numerousness drives some of the poem’s most powerful sections, many of which appear in the
poem’s first half.
“The bright light of shipwreck”
If Oppen is suspended between equally unpalatable conditions in his investigation of
larger social structures, an analogous tension can be found in his ambivalent response to the
notion of singularity. Readily apparent in his initial treatment of Crusoe, this ambivalence
continues in later sections of the poem, in which singularity is at once the sign of catastrophe,
“the bright light of shipwreck,” but is also figured as a strangely enticing force:
To dream of that beach
For the sake of an instant in the eyes,

The absolute singular

The unearthly bonds
Of the singular

Which is the bright light of shipwreck. (NCP 167)
The use of the deictic “that” in Oppen’s presentation of the “beach” opens the question of what
beach he’s talking about—one from personal memory, the beach on which Crusoe washed up, or

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something else entirely. As is typical in the poem, Oppen does not provide such specific details.
Since this passage, which concludes the poem’s ninth section, occurs only a few sections after
the introduction of Crusoe, however, it is impossible not to associate the beach invoked with
Crusoe, especially since the passage contains directs references to “the absolute singular” and
“shipwreck.” Yet by withholding any specific details about the beach, Oppen imparts a larger
significance to it, perhaps not universalizing it, but associating it with more than just Crusoe’s
predicament as a marooned seafarer. This technique, by which Oppen invokes Crusoe, the
archetype of modern autonomy, while presenting the condition of singularity as one that
transcends Crusoe himself, is one of the ways in which the poem attains its tremendous power.
Such power is only enhanced by the profound ambivalence with which Oppen renders
singularity itself. The opening of this passage clearly presents “The absolute singular” as
attractive, so that it practically beckons the reader, with the formal sounding infinitive, “To
dream,” which is followed by a run of three anapests that propel the reader forward, before
resolving with two iambs: “of that beach / For the sake of an instant in the eyes” (NCP 167). The
overall effect of this statement, which is conspicuously graceful in relation to some of the
passages that have preceded it, is to present the beach itself—or the ability to conjure it, to dream
about it—as distinctly alluring, a type of escapism that one can practice simply by closing his or
her eyes. Dreams have already been associated in the poem, however, with the “city of the
corporations,” which might give one pause about their ultimate effect. Oppen will ultimately
complicate, if not undermine, this beautifully alluring prospect of “The absolute singular” in the
section’s final line, which equates the singular with “the bright light of shipwreck.”
Even this formulation, however, is deeply ambivalent. The notion of shipwreck itself
must be seen as negative, but the association of it with “bright light” is puzzling. In the context

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of sea travel, a bright light—such as one that comes from a lighthouse—typically has a positive
connotation, precisely because it prevents shipwrecks. The wreck itself, one would assume,
would be the product of the darkness. In reversing these associations, so that the condition of
“shipwreck” possesses the bright light, Oppen is playing against traditional assumptions
regarding imagery that is also quite traditional and that seems out of step with the urban
environments that predominate in the poem. Oppen’s use of this type of traditional imagery,
however, helps offset the poem’s detached nature, which Perloff finds so problematic, adding
another valence to the poet’s meditations on the sparsely sketched cityscape.
Before he presents this disarmingly complex formulation, however, Oppen also invokes
“The unearthly bonds / Of the singular,” another phrase whose brevity belies its complexity. In
light of Oppen’s presentation, in the poem’s second section, of “the pure joy / Of the mineral
fact” and the impenetrability of the world, as a potential bulwark against the dreams and images
of the city of the corporations, the notion of such “unearthly bonds” would seem problematic for
Oppen—but the invocation of such bonds provides no hint of critique or dissatisfaction. Nicholls
is perhaps right to gloss this phrase as indicating that “only if individualism acquires some false
metaphysical sanction” can the shipwreck of the singular “appear in anything but a negative
light” (George Oppen 95), but one wonders if the light in which singularity appears in this
section is too complex to be judged as simply negative.
Section 19 will present a much more forceful critique of this “bright light of shipwreck,”
equating it with a helicopter, at a time when helicopters were being widely used in Vietnam, and
asserting the “If it is true we must do these things / We must cut our throats” (NCP 173), but it is
important not to minimize the degree to which Oppen does present the notion of singularity, of
the absolute autonomy embodied by Crusoe, as appealing. Indeed, were the poem to figure

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singularity and all the elements of the poem associated with it, such as Crusoe and “the bright
light of shipwreck,” as simply bad or morally debased, the poem would be nothing more than a
moralizing tract.
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Oppen acknowledges the pull of the notion of autonomy, however, in his
complex presentations of singularity. While the light associated with singularity may ultimately
be destructive, it is also seductive, part of a force that obsesses and bewilders us, and that causes
us to dream of it “For the sake of an instant in the eyes” (NCP 167).
It is also important to note that these presentations of singularity are often intertwined
with other conceptions that are central to the poem. Whereas section six links Crusoe with the
condition of passivity and overcrowding and section seven links “the shipwreck / Of the
singular” with “the meaning / Of being numerous,” section nine associates “the bright light of
shipwreck” with both a distance from “the people” and with the work of the poet himself.
Because of the poem’s collage structure, these associations are more tenuous than those found in
sections six and seven, to be sure, but they exist in the poem nonetheless. The lines about the
beach and the light of shipwreck discussed above conclude the ninth section, which opens with
the following passages:
‘Whether, as the intensity of seeing increases, one’s distance
from Them, the people, does not also increase’
I know, of course I know, I can enter no other place

Yet I am one of those who from nothing but man’s way of
thought and one of his dialects and what has happened
to me

71
As Jeremy Hooker notes, in line with the arguments made in this analysis, “‘Of Being Numerous’ would be a
much less complex poem if Oppen’s attitude to isolation were not ambivalent: while he sees it as a ‘shipwreck,’ he
sees it as a ‘bright light’, too” (84).

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Have made poetry (NCP 167)
Despite the typically understated nature of these lines, a tremendous pathos inheres in them.
Opening with a quotation of a letter written by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, who was a student at
Columbia at the time (NCP 382), the passage is at once cognizant of the inherent or inevitable
elitism posited in its opening statement, and also quietly defiant, asserting the poet’s creative
ability to make poetry from the most attenuated of means, “man’s way of / thought and one his
dialects and what has happened / to him” (NCP 167). This idea of the simplicity of poetry,
moreover, serves to counterbalance the sense of distance from “the people” in the opening
quotation. While the seeming inevitability of this distance is heightened by Oppen’s response, “I
know, of course I know, I can enter no other place,” which foregrounds a fatalistic sense of
necessity in its final phrase, his comment about his status as “one of those who … Have made
poetry” presents a conception of poetry that should be available to all. Indeed, if poetry is made
of thought, language, and experience, who wouldn’t be able to participate in it, as either a reader
or a writer?
When taken as a whole, however, the ninth section presents a less populist vision. The
lines about “that beach” and “The unearthly bonds / Of the singular” follow directly after
Oppen’s personal “defense of poetry,” and if seen to stand in apposition to this defense, they
imply that “the bright light of shipwreck” is a result of one’s ability to make poetry and liken the
creation of poetry to dreaming about “that beach.” Such an implication, it should be pointed out,
operates within a fairly static structure in which a “Them, the people,” is seen as a coherent,
unified entity, a notion that we have already seen Oppen contest in other sections of the poem.
Oppen will engage this notion of “the people” again in section 14, which can be seen as direct
response to some of the ideas presented in the ninth section. Outside of this engagement with

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unifying notions of the people, he also directly addresses the role of the poet within society at
other several points in the poem, such as section 26’s assertion that it is “Stupid to say merely /
That poets should not lead their lives / Among poets” (NCP 178) and section 27’s meditation on
how “It is difficult now to speak of poetry” (NCP 180). The larger function of art in general and
the proximity of the artist to “Them, the people” is engaged most directly, however, in the
poem’s next section, the tenth.
“But I will listen to a man”
Significantly, this section also invokes the failure of language. This failure of language
occurs, however, in the context of popular, progressive art forms of the 60s. In Davidson’s gloss,
the conclusion of the section’s first line (“Dithyrambic, audience-as-artists!”) “presumably refers
to the youth revolt as well as to Brechtian happenings and the living theater in [the] late 1960s art
world” (NCP 383). Appearing directly after section’s nine invocation of “the shipwreck of the
singular,” this section also picks up on the thematic of light:

Or, in that light, New arts! Dithyrambic, audience-as-artists!
But I will listen to a man, I will listen to a man, and when I
speak I will speak, tho he will fail and I will fail. But I will
listen to him speak. The shuffling of the crowd is nothing—
well, nothing but the many that we are, but nothing.

Urban art, art of the cities, art of the young in the cities—
The isolated man is dead, his world around him exhausted

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And he fails! He fails, that meditative man! And indeed they
cannot ‘bear’ it. (NCP 168)
This passage is difficult to pin down because its tone seems to shift as it develops. The repeated
exclamation points of the opening line clearly convey a sarcastic, almost biting, force, but as the
first stanza continues, a more sincere pathos begins to emerge in both the repetitions that mark
the stanza (“will listen,” “will speak,” “will fail”) and invocation of the “nothing but the many
that we are.” While these repetitions may be aping stylistic tics of the avant-garde, they lead to
lines that seem conspicuously padded in a poem that is often so spare as to be cryptic and thus
serve to reinforce the notion of the “nothing but the many that we are,” as the stanza contains
“many” words but actually says little.
These lines do, of course, say more than nothing, and what they say is significant in the
larger economy of the poem, as well as in the context of conceptions of epic and the modern long
poem. In this passage, Oppen is making a commitment to the importance of speech among
members of a given community, but in light of its opening tone and its stylistic quirks, it is
difficult to determine the sincerity of Oppen’s avowals of speaking and listening. This difficulty
is only enhanced by the passage’s insistence that such speech will “fail,” though no reasons for
such failure are given, and no details are provided that would help exemplify exactly what
constitutes the “failure” of speech, which could result in a misunderstanding or an inability to
agree on the matter that’s being discussed.
While this passage is difficult for these reasons, a brief look at some of Oppen’s
correspondence from the 60s may help to address some of these difficulties. Not only do these
letters shed light on Oppen’s valorization of speech and its importance to democratic
governance, but they also elucidate some of his doubts and mixed feelings about the speech of

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the New Left and the avant-garde of 60s. Since speech is one of the central aspects of several
other sections of the poem, analyses of the Oppen’s comments regarding speech in his
correspondence will help set the stage for a reading of those sections, as well.
As his letters make clear, Oppen associates speech—or the ability of members of a
community to communicate freely with one another—with democracy, indicating that it is the
crucial component of what he calls “a truly democratic culture” (Selected Letters 64). Such a
culture, he writes, is not “polemic” or “moralistic,” but one “which permits a man to speak to
another honestly and modestly and in freedom to say what he thinks and what he feels, to express
his doubts and his fears, his immoral as well as his moral impulses, to say what he thinks is true
and what he thinks is false, and what he likes and what he does not like” (Selected Letters 64).
While this passage emphasizes a type of freewheeling expressive pluralism, the ability to speak
honestly about one’s desires and fears, Oppen also believes that speech can have directly
political consequences, as his comments about the Vietnam War indicate.
In 1965, as the war was intensifying, Oppen writes that “people should march on
Washington and arrest the president” as a means “to stop all action in Vietnam pending public
discussion” (Selected Letters 112). While he finds the war itself reprehensible, what he
emphasizes in this letter, to June Oppen Degnan, is the need for “public discussion.” Thus far, he
writes, the war has been carried out by “secret actions,” “secret policies,” and “secret means,”
which he considers the antithesis of democratic governance. Underlying this call for
governmental transparency is Oppen’s belief that “if we should begin honestly to converse—as
against the present tenor of editorials and election campaigns … we would reject the worst
excesses” of the war (Selected Letters 113). Such a comment not only demonstrates a faith in the
power of “honest” conversation, but also an awareness of its limits, as Oppen imagines that

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conversation would lead to a rejection of “the worst excesses,” such as “dropping burning
gasoline on people from helicopters,” but not necessarily to any more widespread pacifist
resolutions. Even with such pragmatic limits, Oppen’s belief in the power and ethical necessity
of speech in a democratic culture is clearly demonstrated in this letter.
If Oppen maintains a faith in the efficacy of honest conversation among the citizenry, he
is less sanguine about the efficacy of speech in relation to the works of avant-garde artists and
writers in the 60s. Significantly, Oppen figures these works as a reflection of a type of
“meaningless” speech. The avant-garde forms, among which Oppen, writing in 1962, includes
“new wave movies, the electronic music, or rather the music depending on hazard, the
‘accidental’ music, those paintings which are deliberately formless, the poetry which is
automatic writing, more or less,” “may indeed display the truth,” Oppen concedes, but this truth
is that of “the meaningless river which flows with ourselves and our talk” (Selected Letters 67).
These forms, in other words, merely reflect the contingencies of daily life but don’t seek to find
or create any meaning from the events that occur within this “meaningless river” of days and
words. In arguing against these types of art, Oppen relies heavily on the significance of speech,
which, he contends, is the means by which people survive: “If it is that river, that meaningless
river in which we are, it is nevertheless talk by which we are alive. If we want to continue to
invent life for ourselves and for our children and for our friends, it might be worth one’s whole
effort to find the alternative, some seed of an alternative, to this art” (Selected Letters 67).
Without such an alternative, Oppen fears, art may continue on its present course to become “the
narrative of our nothing, or of the inhuman event of humans” (Selected Letters 67). As these
comments indicate, these issues transcend aesthetic considerations for Oppen, touching on

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conceptions of what it means to be human, as well as on his fears of the consequences that might
result from humanity’s loss of faith in “anthropocentric rationalism” (Selected Prose 81).
While Oppen holds strong opinions about the necessity of certain kinds of speech, none
of the ideas he expresses are particularly unusual. Speech has long been seen as a necessary
ingredient for democratic states to function, and we have also seen the centrality of speech to
Aristotle’s conception of the organic polis. Whereas the possession of logos constitutes the
mechanism by which anthropos distinguishes himself (and never herself) in Aristotle’s work,
Oppen presents art as the means by which people move beyond “the inhuman event of humans”
to become, presumably, human in some larger sense. This idea, as well, is fairly commonplace in
modernity, and the initial formulations of aesthetic theory by Kant and Schiller effectively
present the reception of art as a way for people to become “truly human” (Schiller 205).
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While
Oppen’s conceptions of the human and the role of art may not seek to undermine these
conventional notions, his emphasis on the failure or difficulty of speech in a long poem that
addresses issues of individual autonomy and collective identity, or the lack thereof, is significant.
Oppen’s presentation of the city’s inhabitants as a “populace” and his realization that
their circulation through the city constitutes a type of language show affinities (NCP 164), as we
have seen, with Foucault’s work on biopolitics and liberalism in the 70s, but Oppen cannot be
seen as a Foucauldian avant la lettre. Even with these affinities, it should be remembered that
Oppen’s major influences are Heidegger and Marx, and the effect of the former is particularly
evident in some sections of “Of Being Numerous,” as we have seen. As his letters indicate,
moreover, he remains wedded to rather traditional conceptions of the functions of both speech

72
The larger force of Schilller’s assertion clearly indicates the “humanizing” function of the aesthetic, which lifts
“man” out his natural state: “Wherever, then, we find a disinterested and unconditional appreciation of pure
semblance, we may infer that a revolution of this order has taken place in nature, and that he has started to become
truly human” (205).

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and art, which affect his considerations of the concept of humanity. While it would be a mistake
to claim that Oppen is somehow harboring a desire to return to organic social structures, which
are clearly valorized by Pound and implicitly sanctioned by Eliot, his conception of speech has
affinities with Aristotle’s notion of man as the possessor of logos. Oppen clearly believes that the
possession of speech is what allows one to participate in politics—and he wants nothing more
than the opportunity to have an “honest conversation” that would affect the nation’s policies.
This possession of speech isn’t, of course, what distinguishes the human, as is the case for
Aristotle, but his belief in the power of art to move us beyond “the inhuman event of humans” is,
in actuality, a mere variation on the Aristotelian theme, as it specifies the type of language or
visual representation by which the human is distinguished as more than just an animal. Oppen is,
then, keenly aware of aspects of modernity that resonate with Foucauldian conceptions of
biopolitics, such as the notions of the populace and the autonomous individual, but is also deeply
committed to conceptions of language and art that bear affinities with the more traditional,
Aristotelian notions of speech that form the basis of Agamben’s version of biopolitics. As we
will see, Oppen returns several times to the idea of the difficulty of speech in the modern polis
defined by singularities accreted into numerousness, and this difficulty itself may be an inherent
aspect of “the meaning of being numerous.”
In a more immediate sense, Oppen’s investment in these notions of speech and the role of
art certainly help clarify some of the opacities found in section ten’s presentation of avant-garde
art and the failure of speech. On the basis of his statements about speech in his letters, it is likely
that the poet’s avowed commitment to speech in the section—in the form of both speaking and
listening—is sincere, but this sincerity is negated by an equally powerful presumption of the
failure of speech among those participating in the “New arts.” It is important to remember,

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however, that these new arts are presented squarely in the context of the autonomous individual,
which predominates the preceding section. Section nine concludes with a reference to “the bright
light of shipwreck,” and section ten opens with a clear reference to that light, in which the new
arts appear: “Or, in that light, New arts! Dithyrambic, audience-as-artists!” (NCP 167). If Oppen
doesn’t directly attribute a causal relation between the autonomous individual and the new arts
based on contingency, he clearly connects and correlates them through the light that spans the
two sections, implying that these arts result from the speech of those who are wholly singular
and share no common bond with others, but only “The unearthly bonds / Of the singular” (NCP
167). As such, the so-called Dionysian and participatory elements of the new arts signify not a
renewal of the integration of art and life, in Oppen’s eyes, but a reaction—the desperation and
potential violence of which is signified by the first line’s exclamation points—of shipwrecked
singulars who are not able to converse with one another in any meaningful fashion.
Also worth noting is the section’s conclusion, which presents the failure of “that
meditative man” shortly after announcing the death of “the isolated man,” around whom the
world is exhausted” (NCP 168). These dire pronouncements stand in apposition to the section’s
sixth line, which recapitulates the context in which speech fails in the section (“Urban art, art of
the cities, art of the young in the cities”) (NCP 168), and the implied relation between urban art
and the death of the isolated man is important. The isolated or meditative man—the latter term
clearly invoking Heidegger’s distinction between meditative (or non-instrumentalizing) and
calculative thought—stands in distinction to the “absolute singular,” “Which is the bright light of
shipwreck” (NCP 167). Just as the condition of being numerous, expressed through the dystopian
conditions of overcrowding and sheer passivity, resolved into the rescue of Crusoe, exemplar of
autonomy and singularity, in section six, and just as section seven moves fluidly from “the

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shipwreck / Of the singular” to “the meaning / Of being numerous,” section 10 presents urban art
and the failure of speech as part of the condition of being numerous, of “the shuffling of the
crowd,” which is “nothing but the many that we are” (NCP 168). It could perhaps be said that,
for Oppen, the “New arts” mirror the condition of being numerous or reflect the contingencies of
an aggregate of autonomous individuals. Oppen clearly finds this condition unsatisfactory—and
is thus lamenting the death of the meditative man.
This closing lamentation mirrors the section’s opening line its use of two exclamation
points, but the conclusion is far from a tonal echo of the section’s beginning. While the section’s
initial references to the new arts can and probably should be read as caustic and dismissive, the
conclusion, after the section’s avowals of speaking and listening and its assertion of the failure of
speech in the context of the “art of the young in the cities,” comes across as a sincere lamentation
of the failure of “that meditative man” (NCP 168). A sense of the irony of the poem’s opening
lingers, however, in the reappearance of the exclamation points in the conclusion, casting doubt
about the sincerity of the conclusion. This doubt has the effect, in turn, of provoking questions
about the poem’s opening—which may be more serious and sincere than it first appeared.
Regardless of how one understands Oppen’s repetition of exclamation points in section
ten, however, it is significant that the section concludes with the assertion that “indeed they
cannot ‘bear’” the failure of the meditative man. The antecedent of “they” in this conclusion
cannot be easily ascertained, but the pronoun appears to gesture back to the young who embrace
the new arts. While this assertion is foreboding, precisely what it indicates and implies is unclear,
though it seems to indicate that the young are the ones who suffer from the demise of the
meditative man. Oppen’s use of the term “‘bear,’” set off in single quotation marks, adds to the
complexity of the passage. The primary sense of the statement, of course, is that the young

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people cannot tolerate the death of the meditative man, a paradox since they seem implicitly
opposed to him in the section. The term “bear” can also mean to produce, however, which may
speak to the exhaustion of the world around the meditative man in the section’s seventh line or
point to the inability of the new artists to produce “the talk by which we are alive” that Oppen
calls for in his letters (Selected Letters 67). The term may also be seen as a pun on the nudity that
sometimes accompanied the “dithyrambic” events of the young in the 60s.
Even with these opacities, section ten is clearly engaging notions of the role of the arts
and artists in a larger community, and it does so squarely within the context of the poem’s larger
concerns about individual autonomy and the failure of speech. When taken in isolation, the
section’s lines about the death of the isolated man and the failure of the meditative man
undoubtedly offer support for Perloff’s assertion that significant portions of Oppen’s poem are
characterized by a “withdrawal from human contact” (200). Such a reading, however, is
dismissive of both the complexity of the section’s argument and tone and the poem’s larger
dynamics, in which “human contact” becomes bodies pressed against each another on a subway
car and meaningful speech is all but impossible.
“‘A state of matter’”
These dynamics inform much of the poem but are expressed most clearly in the
seventeenth section. Opening with the powerful locution “The roots of words / Dim in the
subways,” in which “dim” may stand as either a participle or a verb, the section goes on to state,
in its second stanza, “There is madness in the number / Of the living / ‘A state of matter’” (NCP
172). Such an assertion not only points to overcrowding, or the scenario in which “We are
pressed, pressed on each other” (NCP 165), as a condition of being numerous, but ends with the
provocatively multi-valent assessment that this condition is “‘A state of matter.’” It is unclear

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why this assessment appears in single quotation marks, and Davidson’s notes for the text list no
source for it, but such attribution would likely do little to affect the statement’s haunting
ambiguity, for it, at once, recalls the poem’s opening, in which people are implicitly equated
with “things,” and stands as a devastating pun on the biopolitical condition of modernity, in
which the state is composed not of free men who possess logos, as in the Aristotelian
formulation, but of bodies, matter.
As we have seen, however, Oppen is suspended between the biopolitical insights
generated by his skeptical method of poetry as “a test of truth” and his belief in more traditional
notions of speech as the foundation of human communities and the guarantor of humanity itself.
The section ends with the following lines, which highlight what Oppen finds to be the
destabilizing effects of speech made difficult, paradoxically, by a profusion of meaningless
speech:
He wants to say
His life is real,
No one can say why

It is not easy to speak

A ferocious mumbling, in public,
Of rootless speech. (NCP 173)
This conclusion pivots around the line “No one can say why,” which both looks back to the
unidentified “He” who “wants to say / His life is real,” for apparently mysterious reasons, and
propels the reader forward with the assertion that no one can say why “It is not easy to speak.” If

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the reflexive ironies of this condition are apparent, with the difficulty of speech itself precluding
anyone’s ability to diagnose it, the poet offers a final summation that indicates that too much
speech is precisely what makes it difficult to speak. This paradox is elucidated by the distinction
Oppen makes in his letters between the meaningful speech on which a “truly democratic culture”
could be founded and the meaningless talk that merely accompanies the “the inhuman event of
being human” (Selected Letters 67). Such a distinction had previously been confined to the new
urban arts but is now seen to be a pervasive condition of modernity, associated with the
“madness in the number / Of the living” and the resultant “‘state of matter’” (NCP 172).
These readings have relied heavily on Oppen’s assertions about the significance of
speech in his letters, but the poem itself never offers a definition of “rootless speech.” Section
seventeen clearly presents the “ferocious mumbling” of this speech as a type of menace,
however, a force that causes or contributes to the difficulty of speech. This difficulty, in turn,
seems to prompt the desire of the unidentified “he” to say that his life is “real.” While the poem
offers no philosophical or theoretical basis for its statements about speech, it seems likely that
Oppen’s conception of speech in this section is informed by the well-known Heideggerian notion
of language as “the house of Being” (“Letter on Humanism” 217).
Such a conception would help to explain why the unidentified “he” in section seventeen
wants to say his life is real, because language is associated, from a Heideggerian perspective,
with a sort of existential authenticity, as logos is what distinguishes humans from other animals
and allows them to perceive being “as such,” a capacity that animals do not possess. Without
language, the human would thus resemble the animal that is world-poor [weltarm] rather than
world-forming [weltbildend], as “man” is, or would perhaps be suspended in the “abyss” that

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Heidegger believes separates human and animal.
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Such suspension would no doubt diminish the
apparent authenticity or “reality” of one’s life, from a Heideggerian perspective, and Oppen
appears to be contending that the “ferocious mumbling” of “rootless speech” causes or
exacerbates this suspension.
“They become unreal, unreal”
Regardless of what one makes of these Heideggerian formulations and their pertinence to
Oppen’s invocation of “rootless speech,” the poem clearly presents speech as a key component
of its investigations of individual autonomy and the condition of being numerous. While most of
the poem’s invocations of speech point to its difficulty or impossibility, one section does present
a scenario in which speech is not difficult, but a natural and vital component of communal life.
This section, the poem’s twelfth, sketches a deeply romanticized tableau of “primitive” life, and
its inclusion in the poem heightens the sense that Oppen believes the difficulty of speech to be a
function of modernity, a condition of a society composed of shipwrecked singulars. Although
Oppen clearly indulges in a type of “metaphysical nostalgia,” in Jameson’s terms, in this section,
fantasizing about the time when speech was not only possible but was a key component of the
political process, he also makes it clear that these conditions will not return. The clarity and
forcefulness of Oppen’s refusal of his own primitivist fantasy distinguishes his work from that of
his modernist forebears.
They made small objects
Of wood and bones of fish

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Heidegger’s nuanced argument addresses what he believes to be the diminishment of the conception of “man” that
occurs when the Latin ratio is used to translate the Greek logos. Logos, in a sense that exceeds speech or reason, is
central to his conception of man. “If in antiquity the [logos] represents that phenomenon with respect to which man
is understood in terms of what is proper to him, and if we ourselves are saying that the essence of man is world-
forming, then this expresses the fact if the two theses are at all connected, then [logos], language, and world stand in
an intrinsic connectedness. … Thus man is [zoon logon echon], whereas the animal is [alogon]” (Fundamental
Concepts 305-306; italics in original). For a summary of Heidegger’s approach to the distinction between man and
animal, see Calarco 15-53.

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And of stone. They talked,

Families talked.
They gathered in council
And spoke, carrying objects.
They were credulous,
Their things shone in the forest.

They were patient
With the world.
This will never return, never,
Unless having reached their limits

They will begin over, that is,
Over and over (NCP 169-170)
What is perhaps most notable about these passages is the degree to which speech is emphasized
as a constitutive element of the community being presented. As is typical in the poem, Oppen
doesn’t specify what “primitive” community is being described; he doesn’t name the people or
even place them in a specific locale, but he is obviously presenting a premodern and non-urban
community. What he does convey, however, is that speech was abundant in this community. The
first reference to speech is open-ended, “They talked,” and suspended at the end of a stanza. This
reference is immediately followed by a re-iteration that specifies, somewhat, who talked,
“Families,” which is then followed by another reference that places speech within a political

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context: “They gathered in councils / And spoke, carrying objects” (NCP 170). The overall effect
of these iterations is to convey a sense of the “democratic culture” that Oppen longs for in his
letters.
If this sparsely sketched tableau betrays no divisions of power among those who are
talking, implying that all members of the community are represented equally, it also emphasizes
the degree to which these people are at home in their environment. Indeed, against the backdrop
of modern, industrialized societies, long since disenchanted by capitalism, instrumentalizing
reason, and technological “progress,” section twelve depicts an absolutely enchanted world, in
which the community’s “things shone in the forest” (NCP 170). Oppen describes these people as
“credulous,” a word that seems somewhat loaded, implying both faithfulness and gullibility, but
the majority of the section conveys the degree to which these people are intimately connected to
the physical world, making “small objects” from natural materials and carrying them when they
speak in council. Objects, in fact, are as present in the section as speech, and the people’s
interaction with them—making and carrying them—stands in stark contrast to the poem’s
opening sections, in which people see and speak about “things.” The act of seeing things is
presented, famously, as a form of self-knowledge in the poem’s opening lines, but in light of the
depiction of the “primitive” community in section twelve, even this mode of knowledge seems
divorced from the larger world.
The distinction between the “primitive” and modern ways of interacting with the world
is, as Oppen makes clear, largely epistemological, as the people in section twelve “were patient /
With the world.” Along with their credulity, this patience effectively distinguishes the
inhabitants of the premodern community from those of Oppen’s present day; modern consumers,
and New Yorkers, in particular, are legendarily impatient. As the section’s conclusion also

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makes clear, Oppen doesn’t hold out hope that such patience or credulity can reappear in the
modern world. He emphasizes the impossibility of such a change in the way people view and
interact with the world by asserting that this patience will “never return, never,” and his
concluding statement is so suffused with foreboding as to seem apocalyptic, evoking at once an
end of the modern world and an eternal recurrence of the “primitive” mode of seeing and being
(NCP 170).
Significantly, this deeply idealized yet fatalistic depiction of a premodern life appears
immediately before a passage that focuses squarely on the qualities of modernity that the poet
finds objectionable. If section twelve is idealized in its depiction of premodern life, the section
that follows it is not only dystopian but dyspeptic in its representation of modernity. Section
thirteen not only contains the poem’s most embittered and judgmental passages, but it also offers
the poem’s clearest exposition of the modern individual as homo economicus and posits a link
between the mindset of the autonomous individual and the impossibility of speech. The section
begins in medias res, as it were, with an uncapitalized phrase that alludes to the lines that
conclude the preceding section, “They will begin over, that is / Over and over,” and proceeds
quickly to its harsh analyses of modernity:
unable to begin
At the beginning, the fortunate
Find everything already here. They are shoppers,
Choosers, judges. … And here the brutal
is without issue, a dead end.
They develop
Argument in order to speak, they become

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unreal, unreal, life loses
solidity, loses extent, baseball’s their game
because baseball is not a game
but an argument and difference of opinion
makes the horse races. They are ghosts that endanger

One’s soul. There is change
In the air
That smells stale, they will come to the end
Of an era
First of all peoples
And one may honorably keep
His distance
If he can. (NCP 170-171)
I have presented the entirety of this passage, which is relatively expansive, by Oppen’s
standards, because of its importance to the poem as a whole and to the arguments regarding the
long poem and social and political structures advanced in this study.
While this section is provocative, in its own right, in its depiction of modern consumers
so bound to economic logic that they become “unreal,” the effect of this passage is no doubt
enhanced by its appearance immediately after the poem’s romanticized depiction of “primitive”
life. The two aspects of life that distinguish the premodern community, in fact, its immersion in
speech and its close connection with the materials of the world and the objects that can be made
from them, are conspicuously lacking in section thirteen’s depiction of modern life. The modern

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inhabitants of section thirteen don’t make objects of wood, stone, and bone, but instead “Find
everything already here” (NCP 170). As a result of this situation, “They are shoppers / choosers,
judges” (NCP 170). While the first two terms Oppen uses here are not surprising and clearly
establish that Oppen views modernity as the domain of homines economici, the last designation
is more unexpected. In painting the shopper as a judge, Oppen is no doubt seeking to contrast the
modern city inhabitants to the premodern people portrayed in section 12, indicating that whereas
the latter gathered in council, the former merely serve as “judges” in the supermarket, but such a
formulation may also hint at a change in the significance of the law in modernity.
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This summary of the dominant roles of the modern consumer is followed, after a series of
ellipses, by an enigmatic pronouncement, “And here the brutal / is without issue, a dead end”
(NCP 170). This statement clearly points toward a dark side of modernity, and the use of the
ellipses and conjunction posits a connection between the existence of the shoppers who “Find
everything already here” (NCP 170) and some type of brutality. Oppen doesn’t specify what
precisely constitutes “the brutal,” but it is tempting to read the statement as in the same vein as
Benjamin’s assertion that every document of civilization is also one of “barbarism” (“Theses”
256), or founded on a legacy of violence and domination.
Brutality, it should be noted, will enter the poem near its midpoint, in the sections
eighteen and nineteen, which evoke the Vietnam War and the ways in which the war itself is
mediated and “normalized” for many Americans. The eighteenth section, only five lines long, is
devastating in its understated presentation of brutality:

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Less than a decade after the appearance of “Of Being Numerous,” Foucault argues that the power of the juridical
diminishes substantially in modernity, as the “law” become less important than the “norm,” which is established by
both “experts” (such as psychiatrists) and individuals, who actively work to reinforce and modify it. While Oppen is
speaking metaphorically, of course, in his assertion that shopping is a process by which the individual acts as a
“judge” in the marketplace, this equation of the consumer with the judge is intriguing, and speaks to the larger
dynamics of liberalism and consumerism that poem interrogates.

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It is the air of an atrocity,
An event as ordinary
As a President.

A plume of smoke, visible in the distance
In which people burn. (NCP 173)
Regardless of whether the reference to brutality in section thirteen should be construed in
relation to the Vietnam War or understood in a more general sense, Oppen’s particular
presentation of it only increases its enigmatic nature. In saying that “here the brutal / is without
issue, a dead end,” Oppen presents a polysemous statement that plays on the words “without
issue” (NCP 170). In one sense, this statement could be construed as suggesting that the brutal
causes no objections from the modern homines economici, who simply continue about their
business. The phrase “without issue,” however, also implies a type of barrenness, indicating that
brutality produces nothing beyond itself—and this meaning, perhaps, helps to explain how it
constitutes “a dead end.”
Oppen’s initial presentation of modern individuals as a “shoppers” who exist in some
proximity to “the brutal” is clearly negative, but this negativity is mitigated by the way in which
the passage opens. In asserting that the inhabitants of the modern city are “unable to begin / At
the beginning,” Oppen presents the existential conditions of the modern consumer as inevitable
or beyond the control of the individuals themselves, who have no choice—provided they are
among “the fortunate”—but to “Find everything already here” (NCP 170). This caveat regarding
the “fortunate” is important, in its own right, as it helps to dispel the otherwise totalizing sense
that the section imparts to the modern individuals, the “They” that shop and choose and judge. In

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stating that these people are “fortunate,” moreover, Oppen is clearly implying that less-fortunate
others also exist, though he does not provide any details about them. The designation itself
complicates Oppen’s critical stance toward these “shoppers,” as it subtly introduces the notion of
scarcity or deprivation, or the idea that the fortunate could become less-fortunate if conditions
changed or they somehow contested the status quo that has thus far favored them.
The following stanza, which focuses on speech, also opens with a phrase that subtly
complicates the critical force that otherwise dominates the rest of the section.
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In stating that the
shoppers “develop / Argument in order to speak,” Oppen clearly critiques the type of speech on
which they rely, argument, but he doesn’t provide any specific details about this type of speech.
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In a broad sense, this term has epistemological implications and gestures to a type of worldview
that, if not the opposite of the patience and credulity that Oppen associates with the premodern
people of section twelve, still serves as strong contrast to the qualities emphasized in that section.
While the rest of the section will emphasize the deleterious effects associated with a reliance on
argument, it should be noted that the phrase Oppen uses to introduce the notion of argument

75
Taken together, these two mitigating elements of the section’s opening call to mind Oppen’s note in a daybook
from the 60s, which speaks to his concern with the limits of traditional politics in the face of population growth: “we
have become preoccupied in discussing what people should do—probably the habit of our political conceptions, and
forget the actual fact which is simply that people find themselves born—and in unimaginable numbers—without
preparation and quite involuntarily and must try to find something to do with the fact, some, want at least not find it
pure suffering” (Selected Prose 72).
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Presumably, this type of speech does not lead to the type of “truly democratic culture” that Oppen desires in his
letters, but it is also clearly different from the type of “meaningless” speech that he criticizes in his comments on the
new arts. Oppen’s letter discussing “democratic culture” offers some suggestions about what speech as argument
may constitute, as he specifies that the type of culture he desires is not “polemical” or “moralistic” (Selected Letters
64), and one can infer that “argument” is related or leads to these qualities. His 1965 letter regarding the escalation
of the Vietnam War also contrasts a type of “honest” speech with one that could be construed as strictly
argumentative: “if we should begin honestly to converse – as against the present tenor of editorials and election
campaigns --- I believe we would reject the worst excesses [of the war]” (Selected Letters 112-13). While newspaper
editorials and election campaigns can clearly be seen forums for speech that is primarily argumentative, perhaps the
clearest explanation of the type of speech that Oppen is associating with the modern shoppers comes in his statement
on poetics in a 1959 letter, which inveighs that, to be “democratic,” the poet must be “absolutely non-dogmatic” and
“write one’s perceptions, not argue one’s beliefs” (Selected Letters 22). Reading section thirteen’s statement about
the modern shoppers in light of this comment requires a translation from the realm of the poetic or aesthetic to that
of the social or political, but the cumulative force of all these comments indicates that Oppen’s reference to
“Argument” invokes a type of speech that is not open and “democratic,” but sealed off in its predetermined certainty
of correctness.

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implies that no other type of speech may be available to these people. Oppen’s use of the
subordinating conjunction “in order to” could, of course, simply indicate that the modern
shoppers choose to argue rather than speak in any other fashion, but in the larger economy of the
poem, in which the failure and difficulty of speech are emphasized, this phrasing suggests that
argument is only way in which they can speak at all.
The stanza contains a second reference to “argument,” but this reference occurs in the
context of a relatively opaque comment about baseball, which is somehow “not a game,” and
offers little insight into the significance of the term. The effects of a reliance on argument are,
however, clearly conveyed in this stanza, which links the shoppers’ development of argument
with a profound sense of unreality. Oppen does not directly state that relying on argument causes
the modern individual to become “unreal,” but the assertion of unreality occurs immediately after
the first reference to argument, in the first comma-splice of a six-line run-on sentence that relies,
like section ten, on repetition and echoing, repeating key words such as “unreal,” “loses,”
“baseball,” and “game.”
These repetitions are powerful in their own right, granting the poem a force that, if not
incantatory, nonetheless demands the reader’s attention. They also mark, as do the repetitions in
section ten, an instance in which the poem’s otherwise very economical approach to language is
modified to demonstrate a failure of speech. If section seventeen asserts, paradoxically, that too
much speech makes “It difficult to speak” (NCP 173), sections ten and thirteen exemplify this
condition. Whereas section ten merely asserts, in the context of the new arts, that speech will fail,
section thirteen presents more dire effects for the modern shopper who relies on argument to
speak: “They develop / Argument in order to speak, they become / unreal, unreal. …” (NCP
170). This assertion is followed by the claim that “life loses / solidity, loses extent” for these

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people, before moving on to its claims about baseball and horse racing as the appropriate
pastimes for them. Regardless of how one understands these unexpected references to sports, it is
clear that Oppen intends them to buttress the supposition that these modern shoppers rely not on
any form of conversation that would be open or “democratic,” in Oppen’s view, but on
“argument” and “difference of opinion.” (NCP 170).
The second stanza ends with the assertion—perhaps more unexpected than the references
to baseball—that these modern shoppers who rely on argument are not, in fact, people, but
ghosts. While this assertion may be seen as an emphatic restatement of the claim that these
people become “unreal” through their use of argument, the notion of the modern consumer as a
ghost can also be seen as a complement to section two’s claim that the modern city is composed
of corporations. If we take Oppen’s vision of the city literally, then, the city’s commercial
entities are embodied, while the residents of the city itself are not. It is significant, of course, that
these corporations—or perhaps the entire city itself—is “glassed in / dreams and images,” and
the conjunction of these “unreal” entities in one place may, in fact, rival Eliot’s London as the
“unreal city” of the 20
th
century. Whereas Eliot’s London speaks to the profoundly destabilizing
psychological effects of World War I, however, Oppen’s New York is a scene of post-War
prosperity, though one that’s also troubled by a foreign war. While we have seen Oppen directly
engage the brutality of the Vietnam War, section thirteen presents no physical violence but
clearly conveys that the “unreal” shopper should be seen a danger. The threat that these modern
shoppers are seen to represent, in fact, is foregrounded in the poem by a stanza break: “They are
ghosts that endanger // One’s soul” (NCP 170).
The charged yet, in many ways, conventional language used in this assertion is important.
As we have seen, “Of Being Numerous” is not the type of work that makes blithe references to

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the “soul.” This reference, in fact, would seem to constitute a betrayal of Objectivist practice,
which is founded on the “detail, not the mirage, of seeing.” As Oppen’s letters make clear,
however, he is not interested in being a doctrinaire adherent to any system, but in writing his
perceptions and “thinking” with the poem. Instances in the poem where Oppen’s thought and
perception lead to expressions that forsake Objectivist strictures of essentially realist, image-
based poetry necessarily demand attention, as Oppen clearly weighs every word of his poems
and is not prone to expressionist excess. Oppen’s assertion that these people are “ghosts” and his
reference to the soul convey, then, the extent to which he considers the modern consumer a
danger, but one that operates on a spiritual or psychological level.
The portentous force of the stanza’s concluding lines, with their references to “stale” air
and the “the end / of an era,” only heightens the sense that Oppen views these people as a threat.
His comment that the modern shoppers will arrive at the end of an era “First of all peoples” is
distressing yet cryptic, implying both a race to extinction and a sense of meaningless or
destructive victory (NCP 170). As is his tendency, Oppen doesn’t specify exactly what
constitutes this era, but it is significant that the poem appears as the post-War industrial boom in
the U.S. is ending, with the upheaval of the 60s already underway and the stagflation of the 70s
on the horizon. More likely, however, is that Oppen is invoking, with this reference, what he
presents in his daybooks and letters as the end of the age of “anthropocentric rationalism”
(Selected Prose 81). As we have seen, Oppen’s belief that this era is ending is clearly a
motivating force for the poem’s interrogation of “shipwreck of the singular” and “the meaning of
being numerous.”
Section thirteen doesn’t use these terms but constitutes an important point in the poem’s
development. Appearing after section twelve, which foregrounds a premodern people’s

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immersion in speech and closeness to the natural materials of the world, as well as their
integration in larger social units, such as families and political councils, section thirteen presents
a dire vision of modernity. More important, this section clearly links the modern homo
economicus—the shopper, chooser, judge—with a type of speech that Oppen not only finds
unsatisfactory but that produces dangerous results, turning shoppers into ghosts and causing their
lives to become “unreal.” While this analysis has emphasized the ways in which Oppen subtly
mitigates and complicates his indictment of the modern individual, presenting them as people
who have little choice but to shop and rely on argument, the conclusion of the section leaves no
doubt about Oppen’s distaste for them, advising that “one … honorably keep / His distance / if
he can” (NCP 170-171).
“How forget that?”
As the start of section fourteen makes clear, however, Oppen is not able to follow his
own advice. While it would be an overstatement to claim that section fourteen represents the
dialectical synthesis to the antithetical scenarios and implicit epistemologies of sections twelve
and thirteen, the section does serve as a resolution of sorts to the sequence initiated by the twelfth
section, presenting both an ineradicable human bond and the impossibility of speech in
modernity. The bond presented in this section results from the exigencies of war, however, and
Oppen can hardly be accused of a Whitmanesque outpouring of admiration for his fellow man.
The acknowledgement of this bond, nonetheless, spurs him to interrogate notions of a unified
people—and to thus engage in a dialogue with the poem’s ninth section, which speaks of a
distance from “Them, the people” (NCP 167)—before ending in what is perhaps the poem’s
most powerful assertion of the failure of speech. As such, the section implicitly questions both
the bond invoked in the section’s first half and the sacrifices endured by the soldiers presented:

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I cannot even now
Altogether disengage myself
From those men

With whom I stood in emplacements, in mess tents,
In hospitals and sheds and hid in the gullies
Of blasted roads in a ruined country,

Among them many men
More capable than I—

Muykut and a sergeant
Named Healy,
That lieutenant also—

How forget that? How talk
Distantly of ‘The People’

Who are that force
Within the walls
Of cities

Wherein their cars

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Echo like history
Down walled avenues
In which one cannot speak. (NCP 171)
What is perhaps most notable about this section is swiftness with which it turns from a
recollection of wartime experiences and their significance to the speaker to an indictment of the
post-War world in which the speaker now lives, and in which the vast majority of the poem is
set. The swiftness of this turn itself is important, as the section seems to implode after its
deliberate build-up to the invocation of “‘The People.’” This effect is enhanced by the rapidity
with which the section concludes, moving through seven short lines that contain no punctuation
until the final period.
The section is clearly divided into two halves and pivots around the couplet “How forget
that? How talk / Distantly of ‘The People’” (NCP 171). The first half of the section consists of a
single sentence and proceeds somewhat leisurely through several prepositional phrases (“With
whom, “Among them”) that impart a slightly formal, detached tone. This tone is heightened by
the section’s opening line, which conveys an almost begrudging acknowledgement of the bond
the speaker still maintains with his fellow soldiers. This opening can be seen as a reply to the
preceding section’s closing injunction that “one may honorably keep / His distance” from
modern “ghosts,” “If he can” (NCP 170-71). The speaker’s concession that such distance is
impossible, however, is mitigated by his awareness of the tenuous nature of the connection he
shares with his fellow solders.
The concession’s qualification by the modifiers “even now” and “Altogether” convey this
tenuous nature, as Oppen is not claiming that he maintains a strong bond with his fellow soldiers,

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but that his experiences with them have persisted with him over time. The poet’s assertion that
he “cannot … Altogether disengage” himself from those with whom he fought complicates the
issue, as it implies that the poet has, in fact, been trying to disengage himself from them. Any
veteran may seek distance himself from painful memories of suffering and loss, but the honesty
of Oppen’s assertion—while perhaps refreshing in light of the types of “brothers in arms” stories
that Hollywood has since concocted for American GIs in World War II—has a somewhat
disarming effect. Following the critical denunciations of modern “ghosts” in section thirteen
however, the admission of a remaining human connection that opens section fourteen still
represents a significant softening of Oppen’s approach—and suggests that he, too, is haunted by
his own ghosts.
While it would be inaccurate to claim that the first half of the section presents an
optimistic vision of social cohesion, it does the depict some of the activities that have led to the
sense of camaraderie that persists for the speaker, even against his will. The second stanza lists
these activities, which are decidedly non-heroic, conveying, more than anything, a strong sense
of boredom that is punctuated by fear, as Oppen remembers the men “With whom [he] stood in
emplacements, in mess tents, / In hospitals and sheds and hid in the gullies / Of blasted roads in a
ruined country” (NCP 171). Even with this non-heroic approach, the inclusion of these scenarios
within the poem is important, as it serves as a counterweight to the bleak and critical depiction of
autonomous individuals shopping in section thirteen. The limits of this scenario are abundantly
apparent, however, as the connection Oppen feels extends only to “those men” with whom he
served—not to the average member of the “populace.” Oppen’s reference to men, moreover, is
not merely conventional shorthand for “people,” and the bond Oppen feels, tenuous as it is,
seems not to extend to women. While Oppen will engage issues of gender explicitly in the

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poem’s latter half, in several sections that both reproduce stereotypical gender norms and present
some of the poem’s most explicitly biopolitical content, invoking “the young women // Carrying
life / Unaided in their arms” (NCP 184), for example, section fourteen limits itself to the men
with whom Oppen fought.
Until recently, of course, war has been seen as the exclusive province of men, and it is
not coincidental that epic, traditionally viewed as the highest and most “masculine” of genres,
traditionally focused on martial themes, at least in its “heroic” or Homeric form. Even though
Oppen’s depiction of war-time experiences is brief and distinctly non-heroic, as we have seen, its
inclusion within the poem is significant in relation to ideas of genre and its connections to social
structure. Not only does Oppen’s presentation of these experiences allow his attempted “decisive
expression of the period” some exposure to a traditional topos of epic, thus tingeing Oppen’s
first-person account of wartime activities with themes traditionally seen to be “universal,” but it
also allows him to introduce individuals, in a poem that features very few proper nouns of any
variety, in a context in which both their mere appearance and their lack of distinction,
paradoxically, are significant.
As we have seen, Lukács believes that epic presents an organic totality so encompassing
as to preclude individualization, in which heroes such as Achilles are essentially seen as
metonymic extensions of their larger communities, and Moretti contends that the emergence of
the modern state effectively spells the end of epic because individuals must conform to the
state’s law rather than embody it proleptically. While the soldiers Oppen mentions, Muykut and
Healy, exist only as names within the poem and are not fleshed out via further descriptions or
accounts of their backgrounds, their appearance in the poem can, nevertheless, be seen to
exemplify Foucault’s descending mode of individualization, in which “common” people, as

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opposed to aristocratic heroes or rulers, become individuals in relation to the state (Discipline &
Punish 192-93).
It is significant, then, that although Oppen notes, with characteristic modesty, that “many
men” with whom he served were “more capable” than he was, he does not present any of them as
heroes. In not depicting Muykut or Healy (or himself) as modern-day heroes renowned for their
martial exploits, bravery, or loyalty (as the epic paradigm would dictate, even if updated for a
modern medium such as film) and in also not attempting to depict their subjective experiences,
as a novel typically would, Oppen presents individuals qua individuals, which speaks to the
reality of modern war fought by otherwise unremarkable men, but leaves them, in many ways,
functionally anonymous, in that he conveys little about them beyond their last names and, in the
case of Healy, his rank. In such a way, Oppen navigates a literary strait between conceptions of
epic and the novel. As a result, the appearance of the names in the poem is strangely affecting
and seems almost talismanic, demonstrating the psychological power that Oppen’s wartime
experiences still hold over him.
Just as important as the two named soldiers in the section, however, is the one who’s
mentioned but left unnamed. After invoking Muykut and Healy, Oppen refers to another solder
by rank only, and in a way that implies that he is unable to recall the soldier’s name, mentioning
“That lieutenant also.” The statement that follows—which occurs after a dash and constitutes an
abrupt interruption of the extended, rather stately sentence that opens the section—makes a
reference to forgetting, but the object forgotten is not the name of lieutenant in question. Instead,
the poem quickly pivots, and Oppen expresses frustration not at a lapse of memory but at
totalizing notions of social cohesion: “How forget that? How talk / Distantly of ‘The People”
(NCP 171). While one would typically expect “him” to be used as the pronoun for the lieutenant

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in question, “that” could stand for a longer phrase, such as “that name” or “that man,” but the
next line eliminates all ambiguity and indicates that Oppen is talking not about the names and
ranks of his wartime cohort, but about the larger dynamics of individuality and social cohesion.
If Oppen is critical of the condition of numerousness that accretes in a society of autonomous
individuals operating primarily by economic logic, as depicted in section thirteen, he also rejects
a totalizing conception that would necessarily eradicate individual differences, or allow for
individualization, in Foucault’s terms, only as one ascends the social hierarchy. In this way, the
poet’s inability to remember the name of “that lieutenant” stands not just as a lapse of memory—
but as a demonstration of the depersonalizing force of totalizing conceptions of society.
After this crescendo, the section spirals down into a stark denial of the possibility of
speech in the modern city. Before looking briefly at this conclusion, however, it is necessary to
take a step back to analyze the complex logic by which the first half of the section develops,
which helps to clarify the significance of the section’s powerful conclusion. In the section’s first
thirteen lines, Oppen presents a scenario of potential social cohesion, albeit qualified and limited,
or an instance in which a human bond prevails even against the conscious intent of the speaker.
On the basis of this scenario, however, he emphatically rejects a totalizing conception of “The
People.” We have already seen him use the term “populace” and revise a “divine” covenant to
mandate “peoples” rather than the totalizing singular “the people,” so this rejection of the notion
of “The People” can hardly come as surprise and may, in fact, be seen as a response to section
nine’s meditation on the distance of the poet from “them, the People.” Section fourteen begins,
however, with a qualification or repudiation of Oppen’s rejection of the autonomous shoppers in
the preceding section and seems to be gesturing, however tentatively, toward some type of
ineradicable sense of fraternity felt by the poet. Precisely when the reader might expect Oppen—

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as a result of this bond—to embrace an encompassing notion of solidarity, however, he rejects it.
This rejection attains a tremendous power within the poem because it comes unexpectedly within
the logic of the section but accords well with several of the poem’s other formulations regarding
totalizing social conceptions. Whereas Oppen presented, in sections six and seven, “the meaning
/ Of being numerous” as a less-than-desirable social condition that accretes from individuals
“obsessed” and “bewildered” by “the shipwreck / Of the singular” (NCP 166), in the first half of
section fourteen he dismisses a totalizing conception of social cohesion because it threatens to
overwrite individuals such as Muykut, Healy, and the poet himself.
Thus far, the analysis of this section has contended that Oppen rejects the totalizing
notion of “‘The People,’” and while this contention seems indisputable within the larger context
of the section, it should be noted that Oppen lets the questions he raises (“How forget that? How
talk / Distantly of “‘The People’”) stand as rhetorical gestures. Rather than answer the questions,
Oppen instead offers a definition of the people, in the second half of the section, that speaks at
once to their power, or potential power, and to the present condition of the modern city, which
Oppen finds almost unremittingly bleak. As he did in speaking of the beach in section nine,
Oppen uses an ambiguous deictic to characterize the people as “that force.” While not entirely
clear, this designation both maintains a notion of the people as singular, not conveying that they
are “forces,” and conveys a sense of populism, indicating that the people possess a certain power
or potential power, at least. As the rest of the section makes clear, however, whatever latent or
manifest power the people possess is contained by the civic structures in which they operate,
“Within the walls / Of cities” (NCP 171), a statement that conveys a potentially anachronistic
conception of the city, or one that invokes both ancient walled cities and modern cities in which
the streets are walled in by skyscrapers.

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The notion of the people presented in section fourteen may call to mind section three’s
presentation of the populace flowing through the city, but it is differentiated from that earlier
presentation by both the sense of menace inherent in the idea of the people as “that force” and by
the idea of containment that the passage emphasizes. This sense of menace is heightened by the
passage’s lack of specificity, which leaves the reader to wonder what kind of force the people
represent, one of good or evil, for example, or of change or the maintenance of the status quo.
The sense of containment that marks the passage, however, distinguishes it even more strongly
from the reference to the populace in section three. Whereas the notion of a populace flowing
through the city indicates a structured but flexible and unpredictable dynamic—one that’s only
heightened by the equation of this dynamic with a language (“a language, therefore, of New
York”) (NCP 164), the conception of the people as a force contained within walls conveys a
sense of constriction and pressure. This sense is heightened by the gradual winnowing of the
lines that presents the notion of the people as a force (“Who are that force / Within the walls / Of
cities”) (NCP 171), so that the lines themselves seem to be clamping down on the people, or
offering them less and less space in which to operate.
After constricting to convey the notion of the people as a force squeezed by the very
walls of city in which they live, the section begins to dilate with a sequence of four lines that
returns to the poem’s important theme of the impossibility of speech in the modern city. The first
line of this conclusion, “Wherein their cars” (NCP 171), constitutes the poem’s first reference to
automobiles, which is significant considering that the poem is set, primarily, in a modern city
and that it refers, as we have seen, to subways, buses, and helicopters, as well as to pedestrians,
presuming that the others who flow through the city and constitute the populace, in section three,
are on foot. Cars appear in a number of Oppen’s poems, and although Oppen indicates an

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appreciation for them in his letters, they often serve, in his work, as “restrictive pods,” as John
Wilkinson puts it (224), or as devices of alienation and atomization that sever the driver or
passenger from the landscape in which they travel. Like the helicopter, then, which serves as
both a figure for modern warfare in the 60s and as the emblem of autonomous individuality, or
“the bright light of shipwreck” that hovers “over the city” in section nineteen (NCP 173), the car
is a symbol not of freedom, as Wilkinson points out, but of isolation (224).
Isolation is not figured as an entirely negative quality in the poem, as the section ten’s
reference to “the isolated man” (NCP 168) and section nine’s meditation on “The unearthly
bonds / Of the absolute singular” indicate (NCP 167). Any ambivalence that Oppen feels about
the seductive pull of autonomy and isolation is absent, however, from the end of section
fourteen, which portrays the effects of car travel in the city as distinctly negative. The section
concludes by stating that the cars of the people “Echo like history / Down walled avenues / In
which one cannot speak” (NCP 171). This first line of this stanza is both powerful and puzzling,
as it is difficult to know exactly how urban traffic could “Echo like history,” but the declaration
clearly signals that the modern city is a site where history either does not exist or is transformed
beyond recognition.
As such, the statement is disturbing in light of the importance the poem places on
historicity, as the counterpart to futurity, as discussed above. Within the context of the section,
moreover, one wonders if the history that’s being transformed by traffic refers to Oppen’s own
truncated account of his activities in World War II, or to the larger events of the war. Such a
reading would imply that the massively traumatic events of the war itself resulted in the isolation
of individuals in their own material prosperity, as symbolized by the prevalence of cars, or that
this prosperity itself is part of what isolates individuals and constrains the force of the people,

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whether that force itself is figured as a positive or negative. While the poem itself doesn’t make
these direct connections, they don’t seem far-fetched in light of his strenuous critique of
“shoppers” in the preceding section.
The section’s final two lines are less enigmatic but no less provocative, as Oppen returns
again to a declaration of the impossibility of speech in the modern city. The section’s
penultimate line enhances the sense of enclosure and constriction that predominated earlier in the
section by referring to “walled avenues.” This second reference to “walls,” in the space of four
short lines, is striking, and makes clear the degree to which Oppen conceives of the car travel not
as a source of freedom, as Wilkinson notes, but of movement that’s prescribed by the larger,
man-made landscape. Such movement may not be the opposite of freedom, but it is clearly
marked by constraint and implies that the freedom granted by modern technology and material
prosperity is more illusive than authentic. The effects of this travel, as the section’s last line
conveys, are not illusive, however, as the noise of the traffic makes speech impossible.
“We might half-hope to find the animals”
As we have seen, the first half of “Of Being Numerous” makes numerous references to
the difficulty or impossibility of speech.
77
These references to speech, moreover, are often bound
up with Oppen’s ambivalent and complexly nuanced portrayals of singularity and “the meaning
of being numerous.” Because of the importance of speech to the poem’s interrogation of its
central theme, it is surprising that so little critical attention has been devoted to these
references.
78

77
While this analysis has attempted to comb through some of the complexities of these references to speech, it has
not been exhaustive. Other important references to speech can be found within the poem, such as section eleven’s
command “Speak // If you can // Speak,” which follows a deeply alienated portrait of a person looking out “any
window” in the city of the corporations and “waving to himself” from “The top of the Empire State Building” (NCP
168).
78
Alan Marshall has commented on the importance of speech to Oppen’s work in the 60s, in general (238), and to
“Of Being Numerous,” in particular, but his assertion that “the verb speak—which supported by the verbs say, talk,

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In relation to the theories of genre and social structure foregrounded in this study, it is
clear that Oppen’s assertions of the difficulty or impossibility of speech within the modern city
are both relevant and troubling. If epic requires an organic totality predicated, in its classical,
Aristotelian formulation, on man as the politikon zōon who possesses logos, Oppen’s emphasis
on the inability to speak in the modern polis points to a rationale for the impossibility of epic in
modernity. As was noted in the previous chapter, moreover, Oppen’s work does not follow the
Poundian course of issuing “a didactic cultural narrative addressed to the polis” (Golding 85) but
instead actively interrogates issues central to both the viability of inherited conceptions of the
polis in modernity and to the becoming-historical of epic. The (im)possibility of speech certainly
constitutes one of these issues, as do the concepts of the autonomous individual and the
aggregated populace, to which it is intimately connected within the poem.
Oppen’s repeated assertions of the difficulty or impossibility of speech in the modern
“city of the corporations” may ultimately transcend these considerations, however, as they touch
on what is perhaps the foundational premise of anthropocentrism. As much as this study has
attempted to chart, if only in broad strokes, changes that occur with the emergence of capitalism
and liberalism in modernity, the notion that the capacity for speech distinguishes man from all
other animals extends across the premodern and modern eras. As Derrida notes, “from Aristotle
to Lacan, and including Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, and Levinas … all of them say the same
thing: the animal is deprived of language” (32). In this regard, then, anthropocentrism, or the

tell, and listen will provide the poem with its most poignant motif and the nearest thing it will offer by way of an
answer to the problem of human numerousness” requires more elaboration than Marshall provides (264; italics in
original). As we have seen, speech often appears in the poem not as an answer to any problem, but as a symptom—
in its failure or impossibility—of the problem itself, which also, it should be noted, is never presented so directly in
the poem itself, but always in more nuanced fashion, as is exemplified by Oppen’s invocation of “the meaning”
(rather than the problem) of being numerous. Marshall is certainly aware of the degree to which Oppen presents
speech as difficult or impossible in “Of Being Numerous,” indicating that “as often as not it is the difficulty of
speaking that Oppen invokes” (266), but this allowance has little effect on his analyses, which stress the arc of
Oppen’s career and his entrance, in the 60s, to what Marshall considers a Benhabibian or Arendtian mode of
“‘linguistically mediated socialization’” (255).

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notion that humankind is distinguished from and superior to all other forms of life because of its
possession of speech (and attendant qualities such as justice and rationality), can be seen as the
“missing link” that unites the social structure associated with the epic, a totalizing organicism,
and the liberalism or individualism associated with the novel and the lyric, the two predominant
meta-forms of modernity. Important differences exist, to be sure, in the ways in which
organicism and liberalism construe their respective forms of anthropocentrism, differences that
are compounded, no doubt, by the nuanced ways in which different theorists approach them, but
these differences do not efface the essential species-based distinction that links them. As
Derrida’s comment indicates, this distinction often revolves around the idea that non-human
animals do not possess language.
In asserting the difficulty or impossibility of speech in the modern city, Oppen is not
challenging this fundamental precept of Western thought, indicating that non-human animals
possess language (as some clearly do), but is instead undermining the basis of mankind’s
distinction as the animal who possesses language. While Oppen’s assertions cannot be taken at
face value—for it is clear that people could, in fact, speak in New York in the 1960s—they
cannot be dismissed out of hand, either, as Oppen’s repeated insistence on them and his deft
association of them with both the meaning of being numerous and the shipwreck of the singular
indicate the degree to which he believes the impossibility of speech to be a central aspect of life
in the modern city. In relation to the conceptions of social structure sketched above, which are
united in their reliance on anthropocentrism, Oppen’s denials of the capacity of speech in
modernity is, therefore, both staggering and somewhat mystifying.
These denials can be understood, however, in relation to Foucault’s foundational claim
of biopolitics, which quietly asserts that modern forms of government effectively undermine the

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long-standing basis for human exceptionalism. Foucault’s assertion is that man, having remained
for centuries what he was for Aristotle, “a living animal with the additional capacity for political
existence,” has moved into a new realm or era in modernity, one in which his politics puts his
existence itself in question (History of Sexuality 143). This capacity for political existence to
which Foucault refers, as we saw in chapter two, is the direct result of man’s possession of logos
and his subsequent capacity for justice.
If Foucault isn’t so bold as to state, in his writings on biopolitics, that “man” can no
longer speak, the implications of his formulation are profound, and one can surmise that even if
man can still speak, speech as such doesn’t hold the same value that it did in the classical,
Aristotelian scenario. Such an implication extends, as the discussion of anthropocentrism above
indicates, to liberal modes of modernity, as well, which Foucault tends to discount as irrelevant
to the actual operations of power on individual and collective bodies. Such an implication also
represents, moreover, the posthumanist threshold of Foucault’s work on biopolitics and
governmentality, and Foucault’s subsequent work retreats from this threshold to more mundane,
though still provocative, considerations of the population, the homo economicus, and, eventually,
the care of the self.
Oppen, as we have seen, engages notions that can be seen as connected to Foucault’s
writings on the aggregated population and the homo economicus, most notably through his
presentation of Crusoe and “the populace” in the early sections of “Of Being Numerous.” Oppen
also, it should be noted, shares Foucault’s concern that man’s politics in modernity puts his
existence in question, as the previous chapter’s examination of elements of his letters and
daybooks make clear. These apocalyptic fears may not be expressed so directly in “Of Being
Numerous,” but Oppen’s concern for the viability of “humanity” and for what succeeds the era

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of “anthropocentric rationalism” are directly tied up with his assertions that speech fails among
the free-spirited “Dithyrambic” youth (NCP 167-68) and that modern shoppers, who must rely
on argument to speak, are “ghosts that endanger // One’s soul” (NCP 170).
These assertions are especially powerful not just because they point to the biopolitical
realities of the modern city, in which “man” is no longer the political animal he was for Aristotle,
but also because they strike at the heart of Enlightenment (and specifically Kantian) assumptions
of anthropocentrism, based on mankind’s autonomy and transcendence of nature, as a rational
being.
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In isolating a prime exemplar of the modern autonomous individual, Crusoe, and in also
claiming that it is now not possible to speak, Oppen undermines the basis of the essential
Enlightenment assumption of man’s privileged position as the rational, autonomous being who
needn’t remain in “a state of heteronomous subservience to nature” (Jay 46).
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It would be an overstatement, of course, to claim that Oppen’s denial of speech to the
modern city-dweller somehow constitutes an intentional salvo against anthropocentrism or
demonstrates any implicit concern for the status of non-human animals. Oppen’s letters indicate
that he views speech as a necessary component of “democratic culture,” and he also clearly
believes that certain kinds of talk are precisely what make humans human, a view that accords
well with modern conceptions of the role of the art and literature. The force of Oppen’s denials
of the capacity of speech should also not be ignored or minimized, however. If Oppen is
suspended between equally unsatisfying conceptions of a society accreted from shipwrecked
singulars and one in which the individual is subsumed under a totalizing notion of “the people,”

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Martin Jay’s gloss on the Kantian notion of Bildung conveys the extent to which rationality and autonomy are
valued within his moral system: “The self-cultivation, or Bildung, of the species meant the progressive
transcendence of man’s purely animal existence and the increased perfection of his rational faculty, which implied
practical or moral reason. From a state of heteronomous subservience to nature, man would achieve autonomous
self-determination” (Marxism & Totality 46).
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In this regard, it may be noteworthy, as Oren Izenberg points out, that Crusoe himself is silent within the poem
(799).

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as this chapter has argued, his denial of the capacity for speech would be one of the chief insights
generated by his poetic investigation of this condition. This denial, to be sure, runs directly
against the grain of his most cherished—and typically traditional and anthropocentric—beliefs
regarding the importance of speech to the notion of humanity, but it is a symptom of the impasse
diagnosed in the poem, in which a totalizing social unity is justly rejected but the alternative
social aggregation, “the meaning of being numerous,” is seen as insufficient, if not meaningless.
Critics typically contend that Oppen finds no way beyond this impasse in the poem.
Nicholls notes, against the assumption that a dialectic is at play in the poem’s central thematic
investigation, that “the ‘singular’ and the ‘numerous’ are not susceptible of any easy dialectical
resolution, and the poem’s reflections on contemporary American culture certainly permit no
easy acceptance of ideological variations on ‘e pluribus unum’” (Fate of Modernism 97). No
synthesis results from the poem’s interrogation of “the shipwreck of the singular” and “the
meaning of being numerous” because the latter term is not the antithesis of the former, but the
result of a society aggregated from shipwrecked singulars. Golding’s assessment is similar, but
without the Hegelian overlay. Asserting that “Oppen does not feel his sequence has to get
anywhere,” Golding contends that “the dilemma of self and society” is “explored rather than
resolved” in the poem, and he buttresses this view with Oppen’s comment, from a daybook, that
“his poem ‘simply shares the problem’” (96, citing Oppen, “An Adequate Vision” 21).
Without seeking to contest these valid assessments of the poem, this chapter will
conclude with a brief look at one instance in the poem in which Oppen gestures beyond the
parameters established by the shipwreck of the singular and the meaning of being numerous. In
doing so, Oppen’s work moves beyond the anthropocentric assumptions that guide not only the
rest of the poem, but also both of the social structures, organicism and liberal individualism, that

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underwrite modern conceptions of the epic and the novel. As we have seen, it is these social
models that Oppen’s poem interrogates and ultimately rejects. While it would certainly be
inaccurate to claim that “Of Being Numerous” maintains, on the whole, a posthumanist
orientation, the section in which his work moves beyond the anthropocentric assumptions that
underwrite so much of Western thought, coupled with his repeated denials of the human capacity
to speak in the modern city, show Oppen moving, fitfully, via his method of poetry as a mode of
exploratory thought, toward a posthumanist horizon that calls into question the centrality of the
human.
This section, the poem’s twentieth, occurs precisely at the poem’s midpoint and takes
place on a subway. The section thus recalls both section seventeen and its assertion that “It is not
easy to speak” (NCP 173) and the poem’s primary formulation of numerousness in section six, in
which “We are pressed, pressed on one another” (NCP 165). Time precludes a detailed analysis
of all of the elements of this section of the poem that may be relevant to the issues discussed in
this chapter and the preceding one, but the section’s importance to the larger argument of this
discussion makes it worthwhile to present the section in its entirety:
—They await

War, and the news
Is war

As always

That the juices may flow in them

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Tho the juices lie.

Great things have happened
On the earth and given it history, armies
And the ragged hordes moving and the passion
Of that death. But who escapes
Death

Among these riders
Of the subway,

They know
By now as I know

Failure and the guilt
Of failure.
As in Hardy’s poem of Christmas

We might half-hope to find the animals
In the sheds of a nation
Kneeling at midnight,

Farm animals,

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Draft animals, beasts for slaughter
Because it would mean they have forgiven us,

Or which is the same thing,
That we do not altogether matter. (NCP 174-75)

What is most notable about this section is its conclusion, in which Oppen’s investigation of the
concept of humanity extends, if only momentarily, far beyond the traditional boundaries of the
“human.” In invoking “Farm animals / Draft animals, beasts for slaughter” and presenting the
notion that these animals could forgive us (NCP 174-75), Oppen is clearly upending traditional
assumptions about the capabilities of humans and animals and, in a distinct sense,
anthropomorphizing the animals, or interpreting their actions as if they could have a significance
for humans. Such a gesture calls to mind nothing so much as the ancient practices of interpreting
bird flight, another way in which humans found some type of semiotic significance in the
movements and actions of animals. In a broader sense, however, this gesture speaks to a longed-
for re-enchantment of the natural world, and the section’s powerful concluding line highlights
the type of decentering of the human that would be necessary for the natural world to become
valued in its own right, rather than merely an externality in accounting procedures, or a source of
raw materials to be manipulated and sold.
If the conclusion of the section presents a scenario in which animals, in some sense,
speak, communicating their forgiveness of humans or indicating that “we do not altogether
matter” (NCP 175), this development represents the inversion of the biopolitical condition
foregrounded in the poem’s repeated claims that speech is impossible or difficult. Rather than

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simply noting that humans can’t talk, the conclusion of section twenty looks to a scenario in
which animals are seen to do more than merely communicate “pain and pleasure,” as Aristotle’s
foundational formula would have it. This assertion of the capabilities of non-human animals
constitutes the counterclaim to the Foucauldian notion that man is no longer the political animal
he was for Aristotle, indicating that the emergence of biopolitics could signify not just the
demotion of humanity—to mere bodies that are disciplined and normalized, or to homines sacri,
in Agamben’s terms—but the promotion of non-human animals to a different status, one in
which they are not seen as inherently subordinate to humans.
Such a counterclaim is fanciful, to say the least, and it is important to note that Oppen
strongly hedges it, presenting it as something that “we might half-hope to find,” a locution in
which the combination of the designation “half-hope” and the modal “might” indicate that
Oppen recognizes its extreme improbability. The need to hold on to some sliver of hope,
regardless of how improbable it is, seems to arise in the poem from the speaker’s recognition of
not just the mortality that unites “these riders / Of the subway” (NCP 174), but also a powerful
sense of “Failure and the guilt / Of failure” (NCP 174). Oppen doesn’t elaborate on exactly what
constitutes this failure and its subsequent guilt, but it is significant that the section follows two of
the darkest episodes in the poem.
Section eighteen presents a disarming depiction of modern warfare, seen from afar (“a
plume of smoke, visible in the distance / In which people burn”) (NCP 173), and section nineteen
equates a helicopter with “the bright light of shipwreck,” contending that the logic behind the
helicopter’s use is essentially suicidal: “If it is true we must do these things / We must cut our
throats” (NCP 173). Taken together, these two sections, with their references to people burned
alive and helicopters, bring to mind Oppen’s impassioned defense of speech in his letter to his

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step-sister and confidant June Oppen Degnan, in which “public discussion” and honest
conversation might lead the U.S. to stop “dropping burning gasoline on people from helicopters”
(Selected Letters 113). Faced with the failure of these hopes for civic discussion and martial
restraint, Oppen is left with the “half-hope” of animals kneeling in a remarkable re-imagining of
the nativity scene.
81

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In the larger context of the emphasis on warfare in sections eighteen through twenty, the notion of even a “half-
hope” may be too optimistic for this conclusion. As Jeremy Hooker insightfully notes, “the implicit parallel between
the oxen and young Americans drafted for the war … introduces a terrible irony” into the section (100). Indeed, one
can’t help but think that the resonances of the word “draft,” in “Draft animals,” might lead naturally, in the mid-60s,
to the idea of “beasts for slaughter” (NCP 174). Such a connection, however, between these animals—the same
types of animals that Aristotle equates with slaves, as animate tools—and draft inductees only heightens the sense of
what’s at stake in the suggestion that they could forgive us.

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Chapter 5: “Participation Without Belonging”: Genre and Nation in Theresa Hak Kyung
Cha’s Dictee
A Hyper-Generic Book?
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee has been called a novel, an autobiography, a récit, and
an epic.
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As this proliferation of labels suggests, Dictee is a work that invites categorization,
suggesting to different readers different bodies of texts—or different families of resemblances—
to which it should be compared and assimilated. Although these labels indicate, perhaps
incorrectly, that Dictee is a certain kind of work—one that revolves around a non-dramatic
narrative—they also convey the lack of critical consensus, regarding genre, that the work has
generated. Such a lack of consensus ultimately lends credence to Lisa Lowe’s assertion that “it is
impossible to reduce the work to a single classification” (36). Even if this inability to be
categorized is considered, paradoxically, as the work’s dominant generic trait, it is important to
stress that the work problematizes or defies categorization not by avoiding commonplace generic
traits or labels but precisely by engaging with them. As a result, the work can be said to have a
“hyper-generic” quality, which is foregrounded in the book’s presentation of the nine classical
Greek Muses and the genres with which they are associated in the book’s opening pages. The

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Eric Hayot refers to the text as a novel (616) and also claims that the text has “the feel of an edited archive” (605).
Thy Phu refers to “avant-garde artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s autobiography Dictee” (18) and notes that the book
“has variously been described as a récit, artist’s book, and, as we know, autobiography” (19). Anne Anlin Cheng
calls Dictee an “apparently postmodern, seemingly ahistorical and dislocated récit” (“Memory and Anti-
Documentary Desire” 120) and asserts, in a later work, that “Dictee is generally accepted as Cha’s autobiography,”
even though the “text offers a great deal of resistance toward autobiography as a traditional genre” (Melancholy
140). Cheng subsequently uses scare quotes to refer to Dictee as “Cha’s ‘novel’” (Melancholy 140). Josephine Nock
Hee Park dubs the work an “experimental epic” (213) and asserts that “the text as a whole inhabits the dark terrain
of the modernist epic” (226). Amie Elizabeth Parry refers to Cha’s “poetic, experimental novel Dictee” (19). Other
critics sidestep the issue of genre entirely by referring to Dictee simply as “the text” or “the book.”

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Muses and their respective genres thus serve as the book’s de facto “Table of Contents” and
primary structuring device.
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Such a use of the Muses to divide and structure a work invokes Herodotus’s historical
accounts, early editions of which were also divided into nine chapters or books named by the
Muses, an interpolation, most modern scholars assert, of an unknown Alexandrian editor
(Baldwin 31). History is certainly an important aspect of Dictee, the opening sections of which
present historical accounts of Korean women that are both public and private, but the work does
not aspire to be a legible or traditional “history” of any single nation, group, or individual.
Instead, the colonial, post-colonial, and diasporic histories of Korea and individual Korean
women constitute one important aspect of the work that is inflected by its presentation of
classical figures. Even within its opening pages, which constitute a wide-ranging, untitled
section, the book contains two other classical allusions that resonate with strong generic
implications: a fabricated quotation attributed to Sappho and an epigram that derives from first
and tenth lines of the Odyssey but bears no attribution: “O Muse, tell me the story / Of all these
things, O Goddess, daughter of Zeus / Beginning wherever you wish, tell even us” (7).
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The

83
Several critics have noted that Cha omits the Muse “Euterpe” (goddess of flute-playing) in favor of “Elitere,” a
name with no derivation from Greek or Latin, which Cha assigns to “Lyric Poetry.” While this gesture can certainly
be seen as part of what Lisa Lowe calls the text’s “aesthetics of infidelity,” arguments, such as Wong’s and Park’s,
that emphasize Cha’s assignment of “Lyric Poetry” as the domain for Elitere run the risk of overstating the degree to
which this fabrication should be seen as an intervention into the construction and significance of genres (Wong 115-
116; Park 228). As The Oxford Classical Dictionary (hereafter, OCD) notes, “[The Muses’] names, number, and
function fluctuated” in antiquity (1002). Moreover, the OCD lists Erato, to whom Cha assigns “Love Poetry,” as the
muse of “Lyric Poetry.” While contemporary notions of genre map imprecisely on to the terms and concepts
prevalent in antiquity—which tended to parse poetry by its performance contexts and social functions—it would be
odd if the Greeks, who produced so many famous lyricists, overlooked lyric poetry in their configuration of the
Muses’ duties. Cha’s intervention in the text is not, then, as Park claims, the elevation of lyric poetry to a higher
status (228), but the invention of an unattested name for the lyric Muse and the assignment of the name often
attached to Lyric—Erato—to an invented category, Love Poetry, along with the removal of the name Euterpe and
the category of flute-playing.
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Critics who have discussed this epigram, such as Nicole Cooley and Kun Jong Lee, have not questioned Shelley
Sunn Wong’s assertion, in her 1994 essay, that it derives from Hesiod’s Theogony. While the prevalence of the
Muses in both Dictee and the proem in the Theogony makes it tempting to find a connection between the two works,
Cha’s epigram bears a striking resemblance to the beginning of the first and the entirety of the tenth and final line of
the invocation in the Odyssey: “Tell me, Muse, of the much-turned man … / Of all these things, beginning wherever

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juxtaposition of these epigrams, together with the work’s veiled allusion to the “father of
history,” speaks to the work’s generic complexity as much as to Cha’s skilled deployment of
classical knowledge. Through the reciprocal gesture of fabricating a quotation for Sappho and
omitting attribution for a recognizable but essentially faithful quotation of Homer, Cha
simultaneously invokes and erases the founding figure of epic, the genre traditionally associated
with masculinity, while also flagrantly re-inscribing the name of the hopelessly fragmented lyric
mother.
In light of the work’s generic heterogeneity and its allusive complexity, which only
complicates its generic status, Dictee can perhaps best be seen as an instantiation of the type of
writing Derrida finds in Blanchot’s “Un recit?”, which operates “in literature, satirically
practicing all genres, imbibing them but never allowing herself to be saturated with a catalog of
genres” (“Law of Genre” 81). Dictee and “Un recit?” bear a superficial resemblance, in that both
works have blandly “generic” or descriptive titles, with Blanchot’s signifying “an account” or
“narrative” and Cha’s labeling itself a “dictation.” Cha’s title, while descriptive, does not signify
a “literary” genre, of course, but one that would typically exist outside the bounds of literature,
as a pedagogical exercise or transcription of someone else’s spoken words.
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Yet the work’s
inclusion, via the Muses, of all the classical genres certainly touts its literary qualities, so much

you wish (hamothen), Goddess, daughter of Zeus, tell us too (kai)” (12; my translation). The translation of Hesiod
by Norman O. Brown that Wong presents, in fact, bears little resemblance to Cha’s epigram: “Relate these things to
me, Muse, whose home is Olympus; tell me which of them first came into being” (113). In re-presenting a truncated
version of the invocation from the Odyssey, Cha subtly invokes ideas of homecoming in the work’s opening section
but also removes the reference to “the much-turned man,” Odysseus himself, just as she withholds attribution to
Homer.
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The implications of the work’s title are profound, especially in light of the book’s obvious concern with
colonialism, nationalism, and gender, and have been considered in some detail by critics. Extensive and provocative
readings of these implications can be found in Lowe, who regards dictation as the work’s “emblematic topos” (38),
and Min, who contends that “dictation … critiques the model of reading as mere reception as well as the notion of
authorial originality” (310).

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so that it seems a better subject of Derrida’s analysis (“satirically practicing all genres”) than
Blanchot’s text, which only practices (or refuses to practice, as the case may be) one genre.
The appearances of the Muses and their respective genres in Dictee constitute, in
Derrida’s terms, the “remarking trait[s]” that every text must contain to be legible as a work of
art (“Law of Genre” 64). Certain narrative texts, for example, will be explicitly labeled as novels
and others biographies, but the “remarking trait” or traits they contain need not be limited to a
“designation or ‘mention’” of a type of work, of course, nor to thematic aspects of a text, which
might seem the antithesis of straightforward textual labeling. Nor does this trait function only
with certain kinds of literary texts. Rather, Derrida asserts that “this re-mark can take on a great
number of forms and can itself pertain to highly diverse types” of texts (“Law of Genre” 64). The
text itself can participate in multiple genres, as well, but every text must participate, in Derrida’s
view, “in one or several genres,” because “there is no genreless text” ((“Law of Genre” 65).
While generic participation may be what makes a text “literary,” in Derrida’s formulation, this
participation does not imply that any text “belongs” to a genre, regardless of the degree to which
it may be marked by it. Since these marks of belonging are themselves “supplementary,” in
Derrida’s terms, and “d[o] not properly pertain to any genre or class,” the text that has been
marked by them can be said to participate in a genre or genres, but “such participation never
amounts to belonging” ((“Law of Genre” 65).
As this brief summary indicates, Derrida presents these notions of generic participation,
as opposed to belonging, as axiomatic. Regardless of whether these notions can be extended to
all or even most texts that would be designated as “literary,” they are quite illuminating in
relation to Dictee and its critical reception. With its proliferation of generic labels—both those
supplied by the text itself and those provided by critics—and its resultant generic indeterminacy,

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Dictee can perhaps best be said to participate in a number of genres but to belong to none. As we
have seen, however, considerations of genre also entail social and political implications—and
these implications are absent neither from Derrida’s illuminating analyses of a text’s generic
“participation” nor from Dictee itself. A brief examination of these implications in Derrida’s
essay on genre and the ways in which he develops them in later works that address political
considerations more directly will help establish the framework through which Dictee’s multi-
valent presentation of civic and political “participation without belonging” can be understood.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Derrida broaches some of these implications himself in his
essay. While dwelling most extensively on literary considerations, the essay ultimately ranges far
beyond considerations of textual categorization and engages conceptual limits at large, asserting
that “the question of literary genre … covers the motif of the law in general, of generation in the
natural and symbolic senses … of an identity and difference between the feminine and
masculine” ((“Law of Genre” 74). Beyond this somewhat abstract extension of the
“classificatory and genealogico-taxonomic” imperative of genre to natural reproduction and
gender difference ((“Law of Genre” 61), his conception of textual participation without
belonging resonates, as Jonathon Crimmins notes, more specifically with the interrogations of
civic and political identity that he develops in his later works such as Specters of Marx, The
Politics of Friendship, and Rogues (47). “Read through the lens of [Derrida’s] later work,”
Crimmins contends, the notion of participating without belonging “appears to be a description of
the democratic citizen, who participates in a State without belonging to it as a subject” (47).
While Derrida does not, to the best of my knowledge, adapt and develop this formulation directly
(or literally) in the voluminous works that follow deconstruction’s so-called ethical turn,

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Crimmins’ application of Derrida’s formulation to the terrain of the civic and political does, in
fact, accord with ideas foregrounded in these later works.
In all three works mentioned by Crimmins, for example, Derrida elaborates on the notion
of a “democracy to come,” in which participation in the state is not based on calculations of
fraternal belonging, which are inherently androcentric and patriarchal, he contends, but on an
openness to “exposure to the other” (Rogues 152). While Derrida himself figures it as “most
difficult” and “most inconceivable,” such radical, non-calculative exposure to the other would
result, he contends, in “an extension of the democratic beyond nation-state sovereignty, beyond
citizenship” (Rogues 87). If hard to conceive, as Derrida acknowledges, this scenario clearly
foregrounds the ability of individuals to participate in “the democratic” without belonging to any
nation-state. Participation without belonging necessitates, then, “the creation of an international
juridico-political space” (Rogues 87), and internationalism is a hallmark of these later works.
It is, in fact, perhaps in his discussion the “new International” that he conceives in
Specters of Marx that Derrida is most emphatic about his desire to efface the categories or
classifications through which notions of “belonging” typically accrue:
[The new International] is an untimely link, without status, without title, and without
name, barely public even if it is not clandestine, without contract, ‘out of joint,’ without
coordination, without party, without country, without national community (International
before, across, and beyond any national determination), without co-citizenship, without
common belonging to a class” (106-07).
While Derrida’s vision of the new International is certainly compelling, Aijaz Ahmad is right to
contend that it “absolutizes the monadic individuals who constitute no ‘community’” (105). Such
a radical effacement of all modalities of belonging runs the risk, no doubt, of effacing the

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individual’s ability to participate in the state, regardless of whether it is constructed at the inter-,
supra-, or sub-national level.
Perhaps more troubling than these aspects or implications of Derrida’s description,
however, is the sense of cosmopolitan privilege that inheres it. If Derrida’s vision of the new
International accounts for the desire of a highly educated white male to participate without
belonging in any specific culture, national or otherwise, it does not adequately account for the
desires and needs of less empowered others, such as migrant workers or refugees, who are
effectively compelled by global economic and political forces to “participate” in American or
European cultures, but are not allowed to “belong” to them, whether they desire such belonging
or not. This type of participation without belonging can be the result of outright legal
disenfranchisement, a condition Derrida’s democracy to come would no doubt seek to transcend,
or because of ethno-cultural, racial, and linguistic differences—which may be both more subtle
and more pernicious—of the sort that Etienne Balibar has analyzed.
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If this starker type of
participation without belonging has been a hallmark of modernity—although one that’s often
suppressed or hidden by mainstream representatives of culture—Derrida’s vision of participation
without belonging in the democracy to come also does not adequately address the complex forms
of attachment and desires for belonging that can develop among those who are compelled, by
political forces, including colonialism and neoliberal forms of economic imperialism, to
participate in cultures in which their sense of belonging is tenuous or strained. As we shall see,

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In “The Nation Form: History and Ideology,” Balibar interrogates the nuanced ways in which ideas of language
and race interact to produce the “‘fictive ethnicity’” of “the community instituted by the nation-state” (96). In
Balibar’s estimation, norms of speech, mediated by modern educational institutions, serve to produce or reproduce
differences both at the level of class and race: “Though formally egalitarian, belonging to the linguistic
community—chiefly because of the fact that it is mediated by the institution of the school—immediately re-creates
divisions, differential norms which also overlap with class differences to a very great degree” (103). Not only do
these differences “assign[n] different ‘social destinies’ to individuals,” but they also “confer on the act of speaking
in its personal, non-universalizable traits the function of a racial or quasi-racial mark” (104). As a result, “the
production of ethnicity is also the racialization of language and the verbalization of race” (104).

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the notion of participation without belonging can become quite complicated for those, such as
Cha, whose histories entail both colonialism and diasporic migration.
To be fair, Derrida’s new International is not presented as mandatory or inevitable for all,
but as self-selecting, composed of “those … who continue to be inspired by at least one of the
spirits of Marx or Marxism,” even if they “no longer believe or never believed” in basically any
of the central tenets traditionally associated with socialism or communism (Specters 107).
Derrida is also aware, in his later, political works, of the political exigencies that can affect the
dynamics of participation without belonging. Even though critical of the contemporary nation-
state system throughout his later works, for example, Derrida does occasionally make real-world
allowances for the continued necessity of the nation-state as “an indispensible bulwark” against
the depredations of other aggressive states (Rogues 158). Even with these allowances, however,
the obvious and ostensibly universal desirability for an international or cosmopolitan community
shorn of all particularized modalities of belonging is abundantly apparent in his later works.
Symbiotic Alienation
Derrida’s notion of participation without belonging can be seen as problematic when
extended to the realm of the political, but it nevertheless provides a valuable paradigm through
which to analyze the ideas of civic and political identity and community interrogated in Dictee. If
the work’s generic status is marked by an irreducible complexity, the status of Dictee’s speaker
is also highly complex, as she and her family have been affected by decades of colonialism and
imperialism, as well as by a more recent diasporic dislocation. Just as the work foregrounds its
generic complexity, moreover, it also embraces the social and political complexity inherent in
the speaker’s post-colonial and diasporic condition. Not only does Dictee refuse to relinquish or
downplay ethnic, racial, and gender particularities, in the name of reconciliation with mainstream

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white culture in the U.S., as Shelley Sunn Wong has demonstrated, but it also presents a potent
form of Korean nationalism.
While the book’s nationalist sentiments have not gone unnoticed, they have, on the
whole, received less critical attention than the aspects of the work that can be seen as subverting
or problematizing hegemonic processes of assimilation and minoritization in the West.
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Both of
these aspects of the work contribute to the complexities of Dictee’s portrayal of participation
without belonging, however. If Cha resists the hegemonic imperatives to “belong” to American
culture as a well-adjusted, aspirational minority—in her case, as an artist whose depictions of her
experiences allow her to be seen as “representative” of the broader Asian immigrant experience
(Wong 103-06)—she also is not able to “belong” in South Korea, as a naturalized American
whose Korean language skills have eroded during her time in the West. The tension between
these modes of participation without belonging informs much of the book and contributes to its
powerful sense of pathos, a quality that is not always adequately accounted for by critics
emphasizing the book’s resistant qualities.
As this overview indicates, the notion of participation without belonging can be seen to
operate in two primary locales in Dictee. While the book’s untitled opening section and most of
its back half appear to be set primarily in the U.S., three of the first four named chapters take
place primarily in Korea or Manchuria, where Cha’s family moved in the 1930s in an attempt to

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Lisa Lowe and Shu-mei Shih have offered the most extensive discussions of nationalism in Dictee. While both
critics present valuable insights, neither considers the differences between the types of nationalism that predominate
in the two locales in which Dictee operates, the U.S. and South Korea, but instead treat “nationalism” as a
monolithic entity (Lowe 49-51; Shih passim). Whereas in the U.S. an ostensibly voluntaristic form of liberal-
individualist nationalism predominates, the legacy of its former status as a settler colony, South Korea developed an
organicist, “blood-based” nationalism, largely in reaction to Japan’s colonization of the country in the first half of
the 20
th
century (Shin, Ethnic Nationalism 1-24). This chapter will attempt to account for these significant
differences in its readings of Dictee’s representations of both the individual and her larger community, as they bear
strongly on the particular dynamics of participation without belonging that operate in the book.

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escape colonization by the Japanese.
88
All of these chapters set in Korea or Manchuria are
“remarked,” in Derrida’s terms, by different Muses and their respective genres—Clio/History,
Calliope/Epic, and Melpomene/Tragedy—but they also share several strong commonalities.
Each focuses on the actions of an individual woman in the context of colonial or post-
colonial oppression, in which violence is either explicit or threatened, and each is strongly
nationalistic in its content. Clio/History presents historical information about the Japanese
colonization of Korea but focuses on Yu Guan Soon, a teenage girl who dies fighting Japanese
colonial forces in 1919; Calliope/Epic highlights the travails of the speaker’s mother working as
school teacher in Manchuria in 1940 but also includes a story about the speaker’s own return to
Korea decades later; and Melpomene/Tragedy is split between an account of the speaker’s
recollection of a military violence at a student protest when she was a girl and her participation
in a protest that is violently suppressed in the late 70s or early 80s. Though these chapters
themselves contain heterogeneous materials, such as the letter from Syngman Rhee to Theodore
Roosevelt in Clio/History and the map of a divided Korea in Melpomene/Tragedy (34-36; 78),
each is composed in prose that is, for the most part, quite straightforward. Taken as a whole, the
chapters present a powerful portrait of the effects of colonial and imperial power on Korea and
Koreans, but they also fabricate a “feminist genealogy” of sorts for the author, moving from the
martyred freedom fighter Yu Guan Soon to the speaker’s mother and the speaker herself (Parry
140).

88
It is important to note that locations are not specified for chapters other than the three that are set primarily in
Korea or Manchuria: Clio/History, Calliope/Epic, and Melpomene/Tragedy. Because of Cha’s biography and the
emphasis on French and English language-acquisition and the body as a language-producing machine found in the
sections in which a location is not specified, however, it is difficult not to read these chapters as set in the West. The
larger point of this discussion is not to determine a location for those chapters in which one is not specified, but to
highlight the different thematic concerns and literary strategies found in those chapters set in Korea or Manchuria
and those that are marked by a sense of placelessness and presumably occur in the U.S.

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This genealogy, part literary and part biological, constructs an alternative to the dominant
histories that minimize the role of women in Korea’s resistance to colonialism, but it can also be
said to engage in the “epic struggle” that Roy Harvey Pearce finds characteristic of the 20
th

century long poem. In Pearce’s words, these poems are marked by “‘an effort to wrest a hero
from history’ … an effort on the poet’s part to make himself or herself into that hero by pursuing
through poetry a struggle for ‘self-definition and self-preservation’” (133, 130; cited in Golding
85). Self-definition and self-preservation are distinctly important, and complicated, aspects of
Cha’s work, but the attribute of heroism, which fits the book’s depiction of Yu Guan Soon and,
perhaps, the speaker’s mother, seems inappropriate for the speaker herself, who portrays the
difficulties and psychological stress of her “homecoming” in ways that are more melancholic
than triumphal. In a similar way, Cha’s work also resonates but fits uneasily with Jeffrey
Walker’s assertion that the long poem issue a “polemical call … to alter the national will” (xi;
cited in Golding 88), not because it contains no polemical calls, but because the idea of “the
national will” is complicated by both Korea’s colonial history and eventual division into two
states and by Cha’s diasporic condition.
Whereas critical commentary to date has emphasized the ways in which Cha
acknowledges or foregrounds these complications, insisting on “‘remainders’ of nonequivalence”
that mark her aesthetics (Lowe 51), this chapter will argue that such an approach runs the risk of
eliding the degree to which Dictee contains a powerful epic impulse, one that’s strongly invested
in the Poundian “tale of the tribe,” or “the history of one people. One nation” (Dictee 37). To be
sure, Cha does not, as Wong asserts, envision this history as the site of a recuperation “of an
essential, founding identity,” nor does she, in her presentation of her mother, “seek to reproduce
herself upon the authentic ground of the Korean feminine” (126). Such an acknowledgment of

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the impossibility of some unmediated cultural essence does not entail, however, that Cha rejects
the organicist underpinnings of epic tout court. Rather, the book is driven by the tension that
results from its investment in “the history of one people” and the speaker’s awareness that an
“essential, founding identity” among these, or any, people is not a viable option for her.
The book’s problematization and subversion of identity on the level of the individual can
be seen, in fact, as directly related to the epic impulse that marks the chapters set in Korea and
Manchuria. If the speaker of Dictee resists, as Wong and Lisa Lowe have convincingly argued,
the hegemonic imperative to belong to American culture as a minority whose equality is a legal
fiction, the price of which would be her identity as an ethnic Korean and a woman, it is precisely
by her insistence on, if not reification of, these categories that such resistance is possible. This
insistence on the viability of these categories, then, forms the basis of the book’s epic impulse, as
the work is, at least in part, more interested in “the destiny of a community” than that of an
individual, as Lukács says of epic (66).
That an insistence on the history and future of an ethno-national group forms the basis of
this epic impulse is no surprise, of course. More surprising, on the surface, is the book’s
representation of women as active agents within the sections motivated by an epic impulse.
While these representations do subvert traditional notions of epic, they also undermine the
premises of Korean nationalism, which is deeply patriarchal and androcentric, as Elaine Kim,
Seungsook Moon, and others have demonstrated. While noteworthy, Cha’s intervention into the
epic tradition can be seen as a simple inversion, however, rather than an interrogation, of gender
categories. Her insistence on the active roles of women in Korea, moreover, maintains significant
continuities with the militant emphasis of Korean nationalism, forged in response, as Gi-Wook

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Shin has noted, to historical pressures such as Japanese colonialism and U.S.-sponsored
economic imperialism (19).
89

If Cha’s resistance to interpellation within the West can be seen to be a result of her
investment in the destiny of the Korean community, what complicates the matter, and contributes
to the book’s affective power, is that speaker of the book cannot be seen to belong to this
community. Rather than being connected to the community by “indissoluble threads,” as Lukács
describes the epic hero (67), she is represented as seeking a connection that’s frustrated by this
community upon her return to Korea at the conclusion of Calliope/Epic Poetry. As a result, she
becomes a “problematic individual,” in Lukács terms (78), or a person whose view of herself
doesn’t correspond, in Bakhtin’s formula, to the community’s view of her (34). Such a lack of
correspondence, of course, already marks her participation in Western culture, but where her
subversion of the terms of belonging in the West is rightfully read as resistant, her alienation in
Korea must be seen as the result of her reception upon her return. If the book’s speaker does not
seek to recuperate an “essential, founding identity” in South Korea, it is, at least in part, because
her legal identity, as a naturalized American, and linguistic abilities have precluded it.
90

89
In Elaine Kim’s assessment, Dictee “explores the interpretation of the Korean woman’s sacrifice not as a gesture
of resignation but as an act of aggressive self-determination, quite in keeping with Korean nationalist ideals” (16-
17).
90
In a compelling reading, Shu-mei Shih attributes the affective complexity of Cha’s work to her status as a member
of the “1.5 generation” of immigrants, who have been born in Asia but emigrate at an early age. Laura Hyun Yi
Kang also offers an insightful reading, in Compositional Subjects, of Cha’s work in relation to her status of the “‘1.5
generation’” (216). Coming to the U.S. at the age of 12, Cha seems to fit the description Shih offers of these
immigrants: “Though not always bilingual, they are often bicultural, and they maintain a profoundly ambiguous
relationship to the country in which they grow up and the country of their birth” (145-46). Cha’s work is clearly
bicultural, demonstrating a deep interest in Korean history but written primarily in English and influenced by
Western classical sources, modernism, and poststructuralist theory. Despite the linguistic difficulties dramatized to
such great effect in her work, moreover, Cha was trilingual, according to Constance M. Lewallen, who states that
she was “fluent in Korean, English, and French” (9). Shih’s description of the difficulties faced by a member of this
generation resonate with this chapter’s reading of Dictee: “Before a 1.5 generation Korean American writer
understands the complexity of her relationship to the American nation … she is already multiply disenfranchised by
her immigrant status, ethnicity, and race. In a similar manner, her relationship to the Korean nation is anything but
unambiguous: strictly circumscribed by a patriarchal nationhood, no longer a Korean citizen, and often unable to
speak the language, she is ostracized or, at best, left out” (8). While informed by Shih’s and Kang’s accounts, this

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As this brief synopsis makes clear, it would be inaccurate to contend that Dictee as a
whole is driven by the demands of epic, invested in the notion of a holistic community, or by
those of lyric, more concerned with interiority and psychological alienation. Rather, the work
casts the two modes into a complex symbiotic relationship, but one that’s deeply inflected by the
social, political, and affective dynamics of the speaker’s diasporic condition.
91
The notion of
diaspora is, in fact, central to the work’s negotiation of these generic demands, and it is through
the prism of dispersal and return that the work leverages different notions of alienation in
relation to the mythos of a homeland.
92

The particular ways in which these different notions of alienation are represented in
Dictee will be the main focus of this chapter, which will analyze Dictee’s representations of

chapter will analyze the ways in which Dictee represents and performs the affective complexity of her situation,
rather than read her work in relation to her biography.
91
Shelley Sunn Wong and Josephine Nock Hee Park have both examined the inter-relations of lyric and epic in
Dictee. While both examinations are engaging, they are also both limited by the respective conceptions of epic put
forward by each critic. Park asserts that “Homer’s [Odyssey] is about homecoming,” and contends that, in
modernity, “Pound’s innovation is to turn the homecoming into a series of exemplars of the ideal state” (227). Park
offers no analysis of this “ideal” Poundian state, which is driven by a nostalgic conception of order and hierarchy
and becomes “nakedly feudalistic,” in Peter Nicholls’ assessment, as the Cantos progress (“Of Being Ethical” 243).
If such analysis seems warranted, Park’s reading of Dictee disregards any social or political implications of the epic
as a generic form and instead reads the nekuia, or descent to the underworld, as an effective metonym for epic. Park
believes that Elitere/Lyric, which contains an evocative reference to a voice that “penetrat[es] the earth’s floor”
(123), somehow describes a nekuia, thus allowing Cha to insert “the fragile, lyric self” into epic (232). While such a
reading is questionable, Park’s conclusion about the appearance of the “lyric self” in a “modern epic” is remarkably
consonant with the ideas put forth by Bernstein and Altieri and discussed in the first chapter. In a more productive
reading, Wong contends that Dictee “bring[s] into contention the different subjects formed by lyric and epic—the
former characterized as an autonomous, transcendent unified self, and the latter characterized as the object of higher
determinative forces, or the plaything of the gods” (118). Wong’s assertion that Dictee brings different types of
subjectivity into contention is astute and her assessment of lyric subjectivity unobjectionable, but her conception of
epic is problematic. Such a conception is implicitly dismissive of the genre, but this approach may be necessary if
one is wedded to the notion of subjectivity in relation to genre. As we have seen, epic has traditionally been
construed as marked not by a form of subjectivity—which is the hallmark of the modern novel and lyric—but a type
of objectivity, in which the “organic” community represented by epic, in Lukács assessment, is seen to be so
cohesive as to preclude individuation in the modern sense.
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Ideas of dispersal and return are key elements of diasporic consciousness, which strongly influences the ways in
which the book engages with modalities of belonging in the two main cultures it represents. In James Clifford’s
summary, “the main features of diaspora” are “a history of dispersal, myths/memories of the homeland, alienation in
the host (bad host?) country, desire for eventual return, ongoing support of the homeland, and a collective identity
importantly defined by this relationship” (247). Whereas the first three features are easily identifiable in the opening
chapters of Dictee, the work’s relation to the final three is more complicated, as this chapter will seek to
demonstrate.

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individuality and community in the West and Korea. The significance of language—or what it
means to possess logos—will constitute a common theme uniting the book’s portrayal of what’s
at stake in belonging in both the U.S. and Korea. Though common, this theme itself will be
deeply affected by the respective locales in which it appears. Cha will present herself as a poorly
disciplined speaker in the West, one who translates incorrectly, imbuing the work, in Lowe’s
terms, with “an aesthetics of infidelity,” but she will also complicate the notion of the “mother
tongue,” as Naoki Sakai points out, in her depictions of her mother, who is forced to speak
Japanese in Manchuria. While these depictions are deeply specific to the contexts in which they
appear, they both serve, in the larger context of biopolitics put forward in this study, to
problematize the notion of what it means to possess logos. As we have seen, this notion
constitutes the fundamental caesura—the primary taxonomic imperative—operative in both
Foucault’s and Agamben’s accounts of biopolitics. Although Cha does not present the type of
radically post-humanist stance that Notley foregrounds in The Descent of Alette, or even the
despairing gesture beyond anthropocentrism that Oppen offers in section 20 of “Of Being
Numerous,” she calls sustained attention to primary means by which people belong not to any
specific nation-state, but to the category of the human itself. In doing so in a work that also puts
a strong emphasis on the physical body, her work touches on fundamental concepts of
biopolitics, denaturalizing speech as the province of the human—as an exceptional category—
and emphasizing the operations of power on the body of the speaker.
While biopolitical thought can help illuminate the significance of Dictee’s emphases on
speech and the body, the work itself speaks to the limitations of biopolitical theory. As critics
such as Couze Venn, Walter Mignolo and others have noted, biopolitical thought is blind to the
legacies of colonialism and imperialism that underwrote, in many ways, the development of

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modernity and economic liberalism in Western Europe and the U.S. In focusing on speech and
the physical body in contexts that are steeped with colonial violence and diasporic longing, Cha
calls out the blind spot of Eurocentrism that afflicts the work of both Foucault and Agamben,
offering compelling evidence for Walter Mignolo’s assertion that “biopolitics is half of the story.
Coloniality is the missing half, the darker side of Modernity” (140). While not offering an
explicitly post-colonial reading, this chapter will remain attentive to the particular ways in which
Cha’s work is ineluctably connected to the colonial history of Korea, thus providing a lens onto
both halves of the modernity mapped by Mignolo.
Along with these readings, this chapter will also analyze two key moments in the book
when Cha moves beyond the dynamics of the individual and the community to interrogate and
dismantle the prevalent logics by which identity per se is constructed and ratified by nation-
states. These passages, which occur at the end of the book’s opening, untitled section and the
conclusion of Calliope/Epic Poetry, gesture toward a (de)construction of identity that resonates
with Derrida’s ideas of participation without belonging and with Agamben’s notion of
“Whatever being,” as presented in The Coming Community. As we shall see, however, these
passages, and particularly the one that concludes Calliope/Epic Poetry, are hardly celebratory or
jubilant in their tone, conveying not a cosmopolitan embrace of the ability to shuttle between San
Francisco and Seoul, but a deep sense of loss—as the speaker realizes that she does not and
likely cannot belong to either of the communities in which she participates. Even with this sense
of loss, though, these passages point toward a conceptualization of the individual that is neither
subsumed by notions of inclusion within a larger totality nor defined by demands of total
autonomy.

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“She mimicks the speaking”
Before exploring the ways in which Cha represents ideas or ideals of an organic Korean
society to which she cannot return, this chapter will focus on the specific ways in which she
interrogates and subverts assumptions of individual autonomy in portions of the work set in the
West. While these portions of the work are frequently compelling, the task they carry out, in and
of itself, is not novel. Indeed, in the wake of post-structuralism, many innovative or progressive
English-language poetic works of 70s and 80s sought to interrogate and subvert the notion of the
autonomous subject associated with lyric and the novel. Cha’s work is noteworthy, however, for
the ways in which it insists on the body as an integral part of this interrogation, emphasizing not
just the materiality of language, as is done in the influential long poems of Lyn Hejinian and Ron
Silliman, two of the most prominent practitioners of Language Poetry in the 70s and 80s, but of
the language-producer. This insistence begins early in the work, in its fabricated quotation of
Sappho, which links notions of language with those of the physical body:
May I write words more naked than flesh,
stronger than bone, more resilient than
sinew, sensitive than nerve.
Sappho (np)
Prominently foregrounding the body and associating it with language by means of a comparative
injunction, the quotation at once maintains the comparative form common to ancient invocations
and flaunts its non-Sapphic pedigree, as it bears little resemblance to extant fragments of
Sappho’s poetry. Importantly, in this quotation, language is asked to surpass the body, implicitly
conveying the limitations and transitory nature of physical existence.
93
To be sure, the invocation

93
Nicole Cooley has recognized the important links between language and the body emphasized in this epigram.
Cooley does not indicate the epigram is fabricated, however, and her assertion that, in the epigram, “language

211
asks for language to do more than merely survive—or “[to] live more than a generation,” as
Catullus seeks for his carmina—but to be, at once, more expressive (“more naked than flesh”)
and more powerful, more durable, and more sensitive than the body itself.
These are tall orders for a literary work, of course, and ones that speak to Cha’s recurrent
concern with the expressive capacity of language in relation to the devastating realities of
colonialism and war, realities that destroy the physical bodies of those whose land is invaded and
colonized. This concern is engaged most directly in an extended passage from the work’s first
named section, Clio/History, in which Cha rails against the shortcomings of language. In this
passage, Cha asserts that language is “[n]ot physical enough” to convey the particular realities of
Japan’s colonization of Korea (32), and laments that her own work, composed of language, is
“[n]eutralized to achieve the no-response, to make absorb, to submit to the uni-directional
correspondance” (33). While the fabricated Sappho quotation is not as fiercely expressive of
Cha’s concerns as the passage in Clio/History, it does establish an early conceptual link between
physical and textual corpora that will be explored in other parts of the book. Just as important,
the attribution of this quotation to Sappho, whose work has survived only in fragmentary form,
adds a bitter irony to the emotive force of the epigram’s stated desire for expressive clarity and
longevity and speaks to the ways in which women have been silenced historically.
While the Sapphic epigram’s concern with language’s expressive capabilities
foreshadows the extended interrogation of language’s limitations in the context of colonialism
and nationalism in Clio/History, its comparative yoking of language to the physical body is
relevant to the more disciplinary aspects of the work foregrounded later in the opening section.
As Naoki Sakai notes, the body is an obdurate presence in Dictee, and one that is particularly

becomes a force greater than the powers of the body” disregards the optative force of the statement, or Cha’s wish
for language to become this greater force (127).

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relevant to the work’s engagement with notions of language. Sakai contends that, in Dictee, “The
speaker’s body … refuses to disappear and be forgotten. Therefore, every utterance she makes is
‘in parenthesis,’ surrounded by quotation marks, and framed by her body” (30). This reading
effectively links the speaker’s body, as a framing device, to the notion of dictation or translation,
as forms of writing in which authorial originality is problematized by the utterance’s appearance
in “quotation marks.” Just as quotation marks point to an anterior presence, a different “body” of
work, so the presence of the physical body in the production of language short-circuits the
emergence of an autonomous, self-identical subjectivity. The production of language thus
remains a self-conscious activity, an exercise, rather than an index of consciousness and a
seamless demonstration of the capacity that marks the human as human.
This foregrounding of the body as a self-conscious language machine occurs in several
passages in Dictee. It is important to note that these passages occur only in sections that are not
set in Korea or Manchuria. Significant references to language, and particularly the Korean and
Japanese languages, are found in those sections, but the work’s emphatic presentations of the
body as a vehicle for language production appear only in sections that take place, presumably, in
the West. A poem that the concludes the section Urania/Astronomy dramatizes the difficulty of
coming to speech as a distinctly physical, embodied act:
Stop. Start. Starts.
Contractions. Noise. Semblance of noise.
Broken speech. One to one. At a time.
Cracked tongue. Broken tongue.
Pidgeon. Semblance of speech.
Swallows. Inhales. Stutter. Starts. Stops before

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starts. (75).
Placing its powerful evocation of the “cracked” and “broken” tongue in the middle of a series of
staccato descriptions of both the bodily processes involved in speech (“Swallows. Inhales.
Stutter.”) and the results of these processes, “Broken speech … / Pidgeon. Semblance of speech,”
the passage not only shows the body “refusing to disappear and be forgotten,” as Sakai indicates,
but operating as the privileged locus of speech. The body thus serves as both the laboring source
of the description—in which the passage’s reference to “contractions” may be a pun—and one of
the primary objects described.
In its depictions of speech as a difficult, physical act, moreover, the passage directly
equates the body with language through its reference to the “cracked” and “broken” tongue,
which invokes both an (injured) organ and language itself (Lowe 47). Further highlighting the
passage’s association of language with not just the physical body, but the physical world, is the
passage’s novel spelling of “Pidgeon.” This term invokes not only the common city bird, thus
adding a valence to the seemingly descriptive “Swallows” in the following line and contrasting
with the poem’s earlier references to “swans,” a bird with very different symbolic resonances,
but also a derogatory term (“pidgin”) for the accented or grammatically incorrect speech
“associated with immigrants and specifically Asians in the United States and often invoked as a
racist stereotype to degrade or dismiss its speakers” (Kang, Compositional Subjects 222-23).
94

As such, the term invokes the racialized power dynamics at stake in speech acts in modern
liberal democracies, as Balibar has demonstrated (see note 86). In not just presenting this
“broken tongue” but reveling in it with polyvalent homophones such as “Pidgeon,” Cha is no

94
See Park for an insightful reading of Cha’s “Pidgeon” in relation to the poem’s earlier references to a swan and
Baudelaire’s “Le Cygne” (225).

214
doubt subverting linguistic norms and the interpellative demands bound up with them, as critics
have emphasized.
The passage also, however, problematizes the fundamental assumption operative in
Aristotle’s presentation of man as the being who finds his telos within the polis, or the greater
civic body, via his use of language. In Aristotle’s formulation, such use of language distinguishes
man, as the politikon zoon, from women, slaves, and animals, who are mere bodies, and whose
function is to free man from the need to participate in reproductive labor. By emphasizing the
embodiment of her speaker to the extent that it seems to be the telos of language, rather than the
(forgotten) condition of its emergence, Cha calls attention to this originary division, which is
fundamental to biopolitical thought, as we have seen.
95
In collapsing language into the body, Cha
not only subverts ideas of autonomous subjectivity, which are central to modern conceptions of
lyric and the novel, but highlights the body, which constitutes the focal point for modern
(bio)politics. The emphatic lack of linguistic fluency depicted in this passage is what allows Cha
to call attention to the body, of course, and one paradox of the work is that it achieves a powerful
type of poetry— legible, with its multi-valent puns such as “Pidgeon,” within the aesthetic
parameters of modernism—through its evocations or performances of the inability to speak.
This inability, of course, is not the result of some random occurrence or neurological
catastrophe, but of the speaker’s diasporic condition. Although the location in which this section
occurs is unspecified, the passage quoted above can be understood as depicting, almost in
extremis, the difficulties experienced by a “non-native” speaker. The reasons for the speaker’s

95
Whereas Agamben transcendentalizes this division, in Homo Sacer, through his formulation of the split between
zōē and bios and his contention that, with the attribution of formal rights to the body (“Corpus X”), everyone
becomes a potential homo sacer in modernity, effectively installing a thantapolitics as the modus operandi of all
Western political systems in modernity, Foucault contends that modernity marks the emergence of systems of
government dedicated to the proliferation of (human) life through an anatomo-politics directed at the body and a
biopolitics that seeks to regulate the aggregated population. Despite their antithetical orientations, then, both
formulations implicitly present the body as the basis of politics, rather than the Aristotelian possession of logos.

215
need to learn a language are not specified directly in the chapter, but the two chapters preceding
this one, Clio/History and Calliope/Epic, as well the one that follows it, Melpomene/Tragedy,
present the hardships endured by Koreans, including Cha’s family, during the earlier parts of the
20
th
century. These hardships not only inform our understanding of the presentation of speech as
a physical travail, but also call out the larger historical forces of colonialism and war that
necessitate the acquisition of a new “tongue.” In collapsing language into the body, Cha not only
engages foundational premises of biopolitical thought but also complicates them by placing them
in the historical context of migration necessitated by colonial domination.
Other notable instances of this conjunction of the body with language can be found in the
sections of Dictee that are not set in Korea or Manchuria. One such instance appears in
Elitere/Lyric Poetry, which presents language as a type of physical “secretion”:
Secrete saliva the words
Saliva secrete the words
Secretion of words flow liquid form
Salivate the words. (130)
If the passage from Urania/Astronomy discussed above relied on portmanteau constructions
(“Pidgeon”) and double entendres (“Broken tongue”) to associate language with the physical
world and body in a way that added resonance to the physicality of the description of its
production (“Swallows. Inhales. Stutters.”), this excerpt is more direct in its approach, presenting
“words” as a type of bodily fluid. Such an equation of language production with an autonomic,
biological process, such as the production of saliva, de-naturalizes the significance of the
possession of logos but does so, paradoxically, by presenting it precisely as a “natural” process,
one that is thus outside the rational, conscious control of the speaker.

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Representations of language production as an autonomous process that undermines the
supposed autonomy of the individual subject also occur in the book’s most striking depiction of
speech as a physical, embodied act. This depiction is found in passages that occur under the
heading “DISEUSE,” which appears immediately after a dictation exercise that follows the
presentation of the Muses in the book’s opening section. Much like the book’s title, which labels
the work a “dictation,” the term diseuse is baldly descriptive, simply denoting a female speaker.
The term takes on additional resonance, however, and one that affects considerations of the
book’s title, as well, by its association with fortune-telling via the phrase “diseuse de bonne
aventure.” While this phrase itself can evoke a range of associations, from seedy scams to
divinely inspired prophecies and divinations, the book’s initial presentation offers no glimpse
into the future, but a powerful portrayal of the difficulties of speech itself: “She mimicks the
speaking. That might resemble speech. (Anything at all). Bared noise, groan, bits torn from
words” (3). Such a description not only renders the diseuse as almost animalistic, tearing bits
from words, but also makes mimesis itself a corporal act, one in which the gerund “speaking” is
imitated by another would-be speaker, and not one in which a referent is conjured by a
transparent language whose materiality is simply a (momentary) condition of its existence. The
actual “language” produced by this speaker, in fact, is presented as “bared noise” that resembles
speech, but only conditionally. Instead of language seamlessly reproducing the world, Cha
presents a speaker whose very difficulty with language denaturalizes mimesis by emphasizing
the material production of all spoken language, so that mimesis becomes an imitation of the
physical production of language, rather than a linguistic representation of the material world.
This notion of language production as an act of physical mimicry continues in the
passage’s opening paragraph. As it proceeds, the paragraph tightens its focus, moving from

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meta-commentary about mimesis as an imitation of the physical act of speaking to a detailed
description of the gestures and micro-gestures of the body struggling to produce language:
Since she hesitates to measure the accuracy, she resorts to mimicking gestures with the
mouth. The entire lower lip would lift upwards then sink back to its original place. She
would then gather both lips and protrude them in a pout taking in the breath that might
utter some thing. (One thing. Just one.) But the breath falls away. With a slight tilting of
her head backwards, she would gather strength in her shoulders and remain in this
position. (3)
While the passage presents series of close-ups of body parts struggling to produce language, the
composite image that results is of a speaker who is, in a Foucauldian sense, poorly disciplined
and not fully in command of her body. Critics such as Lowe have emphasized the ideological
implications of language use in Dictee and noted its emphasis on the body, but none have
analyzed, in any detail, the particular ways in which Dictee presents the body in conjunction with
questions of language use, the operations of power, and diasporic longing.
Although efforts to attain linguistic fluency may not be directed toward the body as
obviously as the military drills discussed by Foucault as a prime exemplar of modern disciplinary
techniques (Discipline & Punish 153), Cha’s presentation of the diseuse nevertheless betrays a
mindset strongly affected by techniques of disciplinarity. The quotation’s opening statement,
“She hesitates to measure the accuracy,” invokes both the quantitative and normalizing aspects
of disciplinary techniques, in which the abilities of individuals are measured and corrected,
according to standards deriving from data collected from large numbers of individuals, and the
subject’s acute sensitivity to the movements of the mouth and upper body (“with a slight tilting

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of the head”) demonstrates a keen awareness of the body as a machine for language production.
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The speaker, in other words, isn’t simply described as failing to speak clearly or coherently, but
is depicted through the lens of a disciplinary awareness of the body’s potential for language
production, even if that production is deemed unsatisfactory.
While the beginning of the passage focuses on the precise movements of a body that is
less than docile, in Foucauldian terms, Cha begins to incorporate more psychological elements as
the passage develops. If the reference to “utter[ing] one thing. (One thing. Just one.)” invokes
both a frustration with the failure to speak and a continued, almost desperate, desire to succeed at
the attempt, this desire to speak becomes a central aspect of the next paragraph, which is both
indented and italicized, and begins to present speech as a mysterious, perhaps mystical, act: “It
murmurs inside. It murmurs. Inside is the pain of speech the pain to say. Larger still. Greater
than is the pain not to say. To not say. Says nothing against the pain to speak. It festers inside.
The wound, liquid, dust. Must break. Must void” (3). With no clear antecedent, the “It” that
opens this paragraph points toward an autonomous force, inside the diseuse, apparently, that is
itself on the verge of audible speech, or murmuring. This sense that the diseuse is “occupied” by
another force adds a considerable layer of mystery to Cha’s presentation of her, but it is
important to keep in mind that, even as the passage moves away from the particularities of the
body straining for fluency and toward the notion of oracular occupation, the physical nature of
language production, for the diseuse, is still registered in the passage’s recurrent references to
“pain.”
Pain can be psychological or mental, of course, but the passage’s appearance after such
minutely detailed physical descriptions of attempts at speech, combined with its references to

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In François Ewald’s succinct summary, “disciplines are concerned with the body and its training, while the norm
is a measurement and a means of producing a common standard” (141).

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“the wound,” maintains a partial focus, at least, on the body of subject who is attempting to
speak. The passage’s closing, truncated and subject-less assertion, “Must void,” also speaks to
physical as much as psychological processes, presenting the necessity of speech as if it were a
euphemism for more unseemly bodily functions. This necessity of speech, it should be noted, is
presented in an agonistic relationship with silence or not speaking; both alternatives, speaking or
not speaking, are presented as painful for the speaker, leaving her in an apparently desperate
situation.
If this passage moves toward psychological torment as much as physical pain in its
depiction of the diseuse straining to speak, the next paragraph opens with a return to descriptions
of the embodied speaker: “From the back of her neck she releases her shoulders free. She
swallows once more” (3). The paragraph concludes with an assertion that pain of speech welling
up inside the speaker is a distinctly autonomous force: “It augments. To such a pitch. Endless
drone, refueling itself. Autonomous. Self-generating. Swallows with last efforts last wills against
the pain that wishes it to speak” (3). While the notion of speech is represented as an “it” that has
no clear antecedent, as in the paragraph above, this “it” is now represented in auditory terms, as
if it were a form of tinnitus, or Sappho’s ears that “roar.” Perhaps most important, this “it” is
represented as “self-generating” and “autonomous,” terms that clearly call out the extent to
which Cha is inverting traditional paradigms of identity construction, in which speech is a key
component of the autonomous, singular, self-identical individual that is the cornerstone of both
the lyric and the novel. In Cha’s depiction of the diseuse, however, the atomized individual is not
presented as autonomous; rather, “it”—the pain of speaking and not speaking, one presumes—is
autonomous, and the individual per se comes into focus only as a series of disjointed bodily
movements and a portrait of suffering. Such a representation clearly shows the diseuse as

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beholden to heteronomous forces, in the Kantian sense, operating far outside “the individual
legislation of choice by reason” (Lectures on Ethics 266).
This subversion of a central tenet of the autonomous individual in modernity is
compounded by a more explicit rendering of the diseuse’s “occupation,” which occurs
immediately after Cha’s presentation of her as beholden to the autonomous pain of speaking and
not speaking: “She allows others. In place of her. Admits others to make full. Make swarm. All
barren cavities to make swollen. The others each occupying her. Tumorous layers, expel all
excess until in all cavities she is flesh” (3-4). Rather than a body in pieces, straining under an
autonomous, pain-inducing force, the diseuse is now depicted as given over wholly to “others.”
Such an occupation of the diseuse may cast her in the light of a soothsayer or prophet, such as
the Sibyl of Cumae, but it is significant that the she is not explicitly linked to any external force,
divine or otherwise, and that she is occupied by plural entities—whose identities are never
specified. This occupation, moreover, doesn’t cast the diseuse as a conduit to a higher form of
knowledge, but causes her to become even more embodied, becoming “flesh” “in all cavities.”
The pathological nature of this development, moreover, is underscored by the passage’s
references to “Tumorous layers,” though it is unclear exactly how the process of “expel[ling] all
excess” leads to the apparent metastasis of flesh.
This description of the occupation of the diseuse focuses on its effects on her body, but
its appearance after the minutely catalogued presentation of her laborious attempts to speak
makes it difficult not to associate the occupation with language production. This association is
made more transparent in a later passage that directly invokes elements of language: “She would
take on their punctuation. She waits to service this. Theirs. Punctuation. She would become,
herself, demarcations. Absorb it. Spill it. Seize upon the punctuations” (4; italics in original). As

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in the previous passage describing the diseuse’s initial occupation, this passage presents the
diseuse as an active agent, “tak[ing] on” the punctuation of others, but this activity itself is a
form of self-effacement, or a composition of the self via occupation by others. As in the earlier
passage, as well, the identities of the others are not specified. Whereas the earlier passage clearly
expressed the invasive and pathological nature of the others, this passage represents a more
subtle form of occupation, using constructions that highlight the oppositional nature of the
situation by the isolation and repetition of the third-person plural pronoun, “Theirs.” The end
result of the linguistic occupation represented in this passage is, however, no less complete than
in the earlier passage. Whereas the diseuse previously became grotesquely full, with flesh in “all
cavities,” she now becomes figuratively disembodied, reduced to a semiotic code, or mere
“demarcations” of content.
While this reduction of the diseuse to demarcations or the punctuation of others is
puzzling, Dictee’s larger concern with notions of demarcation may help shed some light on the
significance of the term in this early passage. Although the term “demarcations” appears only
here in the work, the word’s clear relationship to notions of boundaries and borders makes it
resonate within the larger context of Dictee. The work includes a map of the two Korean states
with a boldly etched line marked “DMZ” (78), as well as both Chinese- and English-language
representations of the human body, in which body parts are clearly demarcated, in the English
version, by labels and call-out lines (63, 74). While the Chinese-language version depicts the
entire human body, the English-language one represents only the lungs and larynx, or the areas
from which speech is generated. While these examples are pictorial or graphic in nature, the
work’s investment in notions of demarcation extends to the written, as well. An italicized section
that appears, in Melpomene/Tragedy, after a wrenching description of a violent protest for

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democracy in South Korea, concludes with the invocation of “Imaginary borders. Un imaginable
boundaries” (87; italics in original).
Although the passage describing the diseuse’s occupation does not offer any more
information about the types of demarcations she takes on, the concept of demarcation itself is of
critical importance to Dictee, associated with both the production of language as an operation of
distinct body parts and with division of Korea into two opposing states. The diseuse’s
assumption of the demarcations of others, then, speaks to these larger concerns, in which a
taxonomy is imposed on an entity, dividing and classifying it in operations that are always linked
to power. As we have already seen, the larger text itself both indulges in and contests the
legitimacy of taxonomies on the level of genre, dividing and classifying itself in so many ways
that the text itself is ultimately unclassifiable. The diseuse’s passage, from a poorly disciplined
speaker to one who takes on the demarcations of others, speaks to this complexity, as the diseuse
not only “becomes … demarcations” but actively begins to both “absorb” and “spill” them,
“seiz[ing] upon their punctuation” (4).
While notions of absorption and references to punctuation also resonate within the larger
context of Dictee, with the former appearing in a description of blood spilled during a medical
procedure in Urania/Astronomy and the latter figuring prominently in the dictation exercises that
appear in the opening section, it is perhaps sufficient to note that Cha’s representation of the
diseuse engages notions of taxonomy and power central to the larger work but maintains a
powerful focus on the embodied nature of language production. From a poorly disciplined body
straining for fluency to one that’s bloated by “others” and then winnowed to a mere boundary
marker for them, the section presents language production not as the telos of the human, but as a
traumatic act, one in which the “self” is either overwhelmed or hollowed out by the act of

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speaking. Such representations of the speaking subject not only denaturalize the significance of
the possession of logos, but they also point, if only obliquely, in the larger context of the work, to
the historical forces that necessitated the acquisition of a new language.
Before moving on to discuss the very different ways in which language and individuality
are represented in the sections of the book set in Korea and Manchuria and marked by the work’s
epic impulse, a final element of the work’s opening section needs to be discussed, if only briefly.
This passage, which concludes the opening, untitled section, deals with the production of
language but also engages a related concept that is central to Foucault’s representation of the
modern individual in vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality. This passage resonates with the
depictions of the diseuse, in that Cha focuses on the Biblical provenance of “the word made
flesh,” but it does so, most significantly, for the purposes of this argument, via a subversion of
the practice of confession, which stands as a central aspect in Foucault’s account of modern
conceptions of the autonomous individual.
The passage is most notable, for the purposes of this analysis, for its representation of a
“confession” as a language exercise. This mock-confession occurs on the fifth page of a seven-
page sequence that begins with a description of a communion ceremony that borders on the
parodic: “Open the eyes to the women kneeling on the left side. The right side. Only visible on
their bleached countenances are the unevenly lit circles of rouge and their elongated tongues. In
waiting. To receive. Him” (13). Garish and suggestive, the scene reads like a description of a lost
Toulouse-Lautrec rather than one of piety and devotion, and this suggestiveness is highlighted by
the staccato effect of the periods breaking up the final statement, which also calls attention to the
gender dynamics of larger statement, with women on both sides, heavily made up, waiting to
receive the singular male, whose presence is deferred by excessive punctuation. The tongue will

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become an important motif in the book, as we have seen, but the “elongated tongues” presented
here contribute to the quasi-parodic nature of this passage, which distinguishes it from others in
which references to the tongue appear.
The bolder tone of the communion scene also prepares the reader for the provocative
appropriations of religious language that appear in the pages immediately following it. These
appropriations first occur when the text abruptly shifts to a translation exercise, instructing the
reader to “Translate into French” (14). Following this instruction, nine numbered passages
appear, most of which are relatively substantial, though one, the third, is a mere two words
(“Near Occasion”) (14). While several of these passages contain information about France and
are Gallocentric in their orientation (“Paris is not only the capital of France, it is the capital of the
world”) (15), and could perhaps pass as pedagogical material, others contain charged religious
language. The second exercise, for example, reproduces the Catholic act of contrition: “‘O my
God, I am heartily sorry having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins because of Thy just
punishments, but most of all, because they offend Thee my God, who are art all good and
deserving of all my love’” (14). In presenting this quoted statement as a translation exercise—
and thus on par with information about the geographic divisions of France and a trip from Dover
to Calais—Cha not only denaturalizes its religious content but converts it into a different type of
speech act, one in which the speaker, rather than expressing remorse and seeking penance from a
divine figure, merely provides fodder for a recipient who aspires to reproduce it in a different
language.
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This appropriation of religious language occurs in the first and eighth exercises, as well.
The first inserts religious content into the pedagogical style of typical translation exercises, such

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For an incisive reading of the ways in which Cha’s translation exercises can be understood within the parameters
of Austin’s speech act theory, see Sakai (27-28).

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as one emphasizing conditional verbs (“Today would be the Feast Day of the Immaculate
Conception. She would have been voted to crown the Blessed Virgin.”) (14), but the eighth
presents the standard language of a confession, before veering off into language that blurs the
lines between language exercise and religious absolution:
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen. Bless me father, for
I have sinned, my last confession was . . . I can’t remember. Name how many; one. two.
three. weeks months years.
Name all the sins.
Name all the mortal sins if any, how many.
Name all the venial sins, how many.
Get the penance.
Say thank you Father.
Say all the penance. (16; ellipsis in original)
In blurring the line between a confession and a language exercise, this passage merely mirrors
the larger effect of the presentation of religious language under the heading “Translate into
French.” Both gestures effectively level the distinction between the sacred and the secular,
presenting all forms of language, including invocations of the divine, as simply that, forms of
language. Subverting received hierarchies of the sacred and profane, these ideologically critical
and perhaps transgressive gestures add a surprising valence to a work that is often marked by
pathos and melancholia.
These gestures also pave the way for the next passage, following the conclusion of the
numbered translation exercises, in which the speaker admits to fabricating a confession. Told in
the first-person, this passage constitutes a meta-confession of sorts, in which the speaker begins

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by saying that she is “making up the sins” in order to be absolved (16), but admits (or confesses),
at the end of the passage, that she is doing so simply to use the language: “I am making the
confession. To make words. To make a speech in such tongues” (17; italics in original). Such a
confession lays bare the dynamics at stake in the incorporation of religious language in the
translation exercises that precede it, as it transforms a speech act predicated on faith into a form
of language practice, or a generative device. Whereas the confession in exercise eight blurs the
lines between religious speech and pedagogical exercise, this statement explicitly renders the
speaker’s interest, which is not to participate in a ritually sanctioned exchange that leads to
absolution, but “to make words,” “to make a speech” in a presumably new tongue.
While such a gesture may be mildly transgressive to those who believe in ritually
sanctioned forms of absolution, it can also be seen as complicating the speaker’s status a
singular, self-identical subject. Confession is not a recurrent motif in Dictee, and it would be a
mistake to place too much emphasis on this episode, but it would also be short-sighted to limit
the implications of this episode by considering it solely as the subversion of religious discourse.
Taken in conjunction with the obstinate presence of the body in Dictee and the book’s
representation of the diseuse, whose autonomy as a speaker is radically compromised, as we
have seen, Cha’s depiction of the speaking subject in the confession episode, as an individual
interested in “mak[ing] words,” rather than one invested in disclosing her deepest secrets, has
powerful implications that extend far beyond the realm of organized religion.
These implications are apparent if one considers confession as the dynamic by which an
individual discloses his or her innermost thoughts or feelings, especially regarding actions or
desires that may not be sanctioned by larger social mores and conventions. If the disclosure of
these thoughts and feelings, whether in a religious, pedagogical, or clinical setting, is thought to

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produce some deeper “truth” about the nature of the individual, as Foucault contends is the case
for modern Western societies, it is clear that confession itself can be viewed as a procedure by
which the individual is constituted as an autonomous entity. Such constitution, moreover, takes
place outside of the network of family and kinship relations or the dependencies inherent in
highly stratified societies, and thus stands as a distinctively modern means by which individual
identity is constructed.
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Indeed, it is for these reasons that Foucault contends, in the first volume
of The History of Sexuality, that “Western man has become a singularly confessing animal” (59).
While this “confessing animal” may be constituted outside the constraints of traditional
kinship relations and the hierarchies of birth right that typically mark premodern societies, it is
no less beholden to the operations of power, as Foucault makes clear. These operations of power
have shifted, however, from the premodern setting of kinship and social status to one of
institutional authority and expertise. The modern individual is constituted, then, in relation to this
institutionally sanctioned authority. “The confession,” Foucault argues,
is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement; it
is a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the
presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the
authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in
order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile. … (History of Sexuality 61-2)
The speaking subject in Cha’s mock confession may, technically, also be “the subject of the
statement,” but this speaker is not disclosing her innermost feelings or desires—and thus
speaking the “truth” about herself—but her desire to view to the confession as yet another

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Kang has noted the important connection between confession and the production of “truth,” but does not elaborate
on the relation between this “truth” and subject formation: “The choice of the Catholic confession is interesting
because the speaking subject must submit to the ritualized form and more importantly to the requirement of truth,
leaving very little room for any act of personal imagination or invention in language” (“The ‘Liberatory Voice’” 87).

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language exercise, a way to “make words.” Such a constructivist gesture clearly confounds any
association of psychological interiority with institutional authority, but it also undermines the
legitimacy of this authority, as well, withholding the material that would allow its representative
the opportunity to intervene and thus ratify his role in the larger dynamic. Cha’s gesture, then, of
converting the confession into a means of language production, rather than one by which “the
expression alone … produces intrinsic modifications in the person who articulates it” (History of
Sexuality 62), speaks to the work’s larger impulse to complicate or undermine the basis of the
autonomous individual.
“The mark of belonging”
If this individual is a crucial element of the modern lyric and novel, the significance of its
emergence is not lost on Foucault. Much as he contrasts “the secret singularity” explored in the
novel with “the noble deed” of epic in Discipline & Punish (193), he presents the emergence of
“the confessing animal,” in vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality, as the catalyst for “a
metamorphosis in literature” (59). As a result of this development, he contends, “we have passed
from a pleasure to be recounted and heard, centering on the heroic or marvelous narration of
‘trials’ of bravery or sainthood, to a literature ordered according to the infinite task of extracting
from the depths of oneself, in between the words, a truth which the very form of confession
holds out like a shimmering mirage” (The History of Sexuality 59). If Cha’s work resists this
“infinite task” through its emphasis on the body of the poorly disciplined speaker, its
presentation of the desire to speak as an overwhelming, heteronomous force, and its subversion
of the confession as a means of creating and disclosing interiority in modern, institutional
settings, it also demonstrates a strong investment in “the heroic or marvelous narration of ‘trials’
of bravery or sainthood.” Indeed, such narration forms an important part of the sections of the

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work set in Korea or Manchuria, as we will see, and it is especially important in Clio/History,
which tells the story of the young Korean nationalist Yu Guan Soon, and in Calliope/Epic, which
presents the travails of the speaker’s mother in Manchuria.
Just as important, for the purposes of this study, as any type of narration that could be
linked to epic or older forms of literature based on the heroic or marvelous is the association of
elements of these narratives with notions of organic social forms. As we have seen, this notion of
organicism undergirds Lukács’ prominent considerations of the epic, and it is also important to
the respective conceptions of the long poem promulgated by Bernstein and Altieri, in which the
long poem is tasked, via different means, to recuperate elements of social organicism. It is
significant, then, that the sections of Dictee set in Korea or Manchuria contain references not
only to nationalism, but to a nationalism that must be seen as organicist in its orientation. An
analysis of Cha’s representations of nationalism and the degree to which they may be seen to
constitute an epic impulse within Dictee will be the focus of this section.
The most explicit presentation of social organicism occurs in the opening pages of
Calliope/Epic, in which the speaker’s mother is introduced as a refugee whose family has fled to
Manchuria in an attempt to escape the Japanese colonization of Korea.
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While much of this
section of the book will focus on the “trials” the mother experiences when she falls gravely ill
and undergoes what can only be described as a hallucinatory spiritual experience, complete with
a vision of Jesus’ temptation by the devil (52-3), it opens with a straightforward description of
the plight of Cha’s mother and her fellow Korean exiles:
Mother, you are eighteen years old. You were born in Yong Jung, Manchuria, and this is
where you now live. You are not Chinese. You are Korean. But your family has moved
here to escape the Japanese occupation. China is large. Larger than large. You tell me that

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This attempt was ultimately unsuccessful, as Manchuria fell to Japan in 1931 (Shih 151).

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the hearts of the people are measured by the size of the land. As large and as silent. You
live in a village where the other Koreans live. Same as you. Refugees. Immigrants.
Exiles. Farther away from the land that is not your own. Not your own any longer. (45)
The clarity and simplicity of the passage impart a child-like tone, which may be a function of its
stylized direct address to the young woman who will become the speaker’s mother or an
imitation of the tone found in the mother’s journals, which are cited as a source for the
chapter.
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Regardless of its rationale, the tone of the passage is notable, especially in work that,
as we have seen, sometimes forsakes conventions of grammar and spelling to powerful effect.
While it could be argued that the opening tone speaks to a simplicity that will overturned by the
speaker’s later experiences, as conveyed at the end of the section, one could also contend that the
tone is appropriate to the existential dilemma faced by the refugees the passage describes.
Marginalized by their status as Koreans, in China, the refugees face a situation that is stark in its
clarity; nothing they do will change their status in China, but they are unable to return to their
now-occupied homeland, where they would also be marginalized, precisely because of their
status as Koreans. In this situation, the simple affirmation of identity, “You are Korean,” stands
as both an explanation of their exile and an affirmation of their persistence.
However one interprets the tone of the opening statements, the simplicity of the paragraph
as a whole should not be overstated, as it becomes more stylistically complex as it develops.

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The penultimate page of Dictee is labeled “Notes” and contains two footnotes that cite bibliographic information
and page numbers for F.A. McKenzie’s The Tragedy of Korea and St. Therese of Lisieux’s autobiography, Story of
a Soul. McKenzie’s text figures prominently in Clio/History and St. Therese’s autobiography in Erato/Love Poetry,
but since these chapters themselves contain no footnotes, it is difficult to know exactly which passages correspond
with the page numbers cited in the notes. Following these citations is an unnumbered note: “Biographical material in
CALLIOPE EPIC POETRY based on the journals of Hyung Soon Huo” (180). Though some commentators have
speculated about the identity of this woman, she is Cha’s mother. In Min’s words, Cha “suppresses the information
that Huo is her mother” (323 n. 2). Kun Jong Lee notes that Huo’s journals were published in South Korea, in 1997,
and provides a quick summary of them: “In the essays published in Korea, Hyung Soon recalls her life as a
colonized woman in Manchuria, a war refugee in Korea, and an immigrant in the U.S. Her essays are shot through
with themes one can find in Dictee: Japanese colonialism, Korean nationalism, national division, the Korean War,
diaspora, immigration, languages, translation, identity, and gender discrimination, etc. And her sorrow and han over
the tragic and untimely death of her daughter” (96 n. 14).

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Gradually becoming more staccato, the passage interweaves relatively simple declarative
sentences (“You live in a village where the other Koreans live”) with fragments that betray an
authorial sophistication: “Same as you. Refugees. Immigrants. Exiles.” These terms, all of which
denote different statuses, technically, constitute a surplus standing in opposition to the singular
denotation, Korean, that leads to their displacement. This proliferation of terms speaks to
ultimate superfluity of each. Not only are the terms interchangeable, but they exist solely in
relation to the homeland left behind and invariably connote its present absence in their
invocation, with the overall effect that the designation “Korean” assumes an essentialized status,
as the (empty) center around which terms of displacement cluster.
This status is reinforced by the paragraph’s early assertion that, even though born in China,
the speaker’s mother is Korean (and not Chinese, or Korean-Chinese). While straightforward on
the surface, this assertion presents a conception of nationality based solely on ius sanguinis, or
blood, rather than ius soli, or land. That this status is of overriding importance to the identity of
the mother and her fellow villagers is implied in the claim that, as Koreans, they are the “same as
[her].” While this statement may point to the discrimination faced by Koreans, in which their
national status is the primary factor for their marginalization, it also intimates the ways in which
nationalism can efface notions of individualism, much as Fanon asserts that “individualism is the
first to go” when colonized peoples embrace nationalism to reclaim their country (47). Such a
conception of nationalism, in which each individual is the same as another—and the overriding
component of this identity is determined by blood—is clearly relevant to the conceptions of
genre formulated in this study, in which notions of the autonomous, singular individual form the
foundation of the lyric and novel, while conceptions of an organic whole that precludes
individualism per se are associated with epic. Cha’s presentation of an organicist, blood-based

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nationalism in the section Calliope/Epic Poetry seems no accident, then, and this presentation
forms part of the basis for the claim that the sections of the work set in Korea or Manchuria
constitute an epic impulse within the larger work.
While the implications of blood-based conceptions of identity will be considered in more
detail, it should be noted that this initial presentation of the identity of the speaker’s mother also
relates that identity to land. As the close of the paragraph makes clear, however, the mother’s
identity is formed through the loss of the land that has led to her exilic condition: “Farther away
from the land that is not your own. Not your own any longer” (45). The temporal dimension of
this loss is reversed in the next paragraph, which continues to focus on the lost land: “You did
not want to see. You cannot see. What they do. To the land and to the people. As long as the land
is not your own. Until it will be again” (45). While the opening of this paragraph hints at the
brutality of the Japanese colonizers, which extends to the both the Korean people and their land,
it concludes with a forceful claim of the future reclamation of the land.
If an association with land or territory is an important component of national identity, as
it’s constructed in the opening section, the loss of that land may be seen to reinforce the
emphasis on blood or other innate factors as the basis of the claims for identity. This paragraph
in the opening of Calliope/Epic points to precisely such an innate factor, asserting that the
mother’s “MAH-UHM, spirit has not left.” This assertion of the ongoing presence of the
mother’s Korean spirit appears immediately after another acknowledgment of the loss of the
land, this time extended beyond the mother’s generation (“Your father left and our mother left as
the others”), as well as an assertion of psychological trauma caused by the loss: “You suffer the
knowledge of having to leave” (45). The paragraph concludes with extended affirmation of the
endurance of the mother’s spirit that moves, stylistically, far beyond the straightforward

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declarations of the section’s opening: “Never shall have and never shall will [leave]. Not now.
Not even now. It is burned into your ever-present memory. Memory less. Because it is not past.
It cannot be. Not in the least of all pasts. It burns. Fire alight enflame” (45). While the initial
context in which the term “MAH-UHM” appears indicates that the mother’s spirit has not left
Korea, thus staking a claim, of sorts, to the land that has been physically lost, the paragraph’s
impassioned elaboration of the term seems to move beyond the physical landscape and to speak
to the ongoing vitality of the spirit within the mother.
The actual terms by which the mah-uhm’s endurance is rendered are quite complex, of
course. The passage’s presentation of an “ever-present memory” that is “memory less … because
it is not past” may call to mind Benjamin’s messianic notion of Jetztzeit, or “‘time of the now’”
(“Theses” 263), in which history may be redeemed in the present, but the conceptual complexity
of this notion is amplified by appearance of an “it,” whose antecedent is uncertain, but may be
Korea, that is both burned into the mother’s memory and that actively burns. Regardless of how
this conceptual complexity is parsed, the apocalyptic overtones of the paragraph’s conclusion are
unmistakable and will be reinforced later in the chapter, when the speaker asserts that the “only
regret” of her mother’s parents is “not to have witnessed the purging by sulphur and fire. Of the
house. Of the nation” (47). While the conclusion of Calliope/Epic will complicate notions of
nationalism, arguments, such as that of Timothy Yu, that attempt to downplay or even erase the
nationalist narrative that appears in the opening pages of Calliope/Epic both overlook such
aggressively nationalist statements and disregard the extent to which exile may increase, rather
than diminish, nationalist sentiment.
101
As Said notes, nationalism maintains an “essential

101
Against Elaine Kim’s comment that Calliope/Epic presents a “nationalist narrative,” Yu argues that “a closer
reading reveals that ‘Korea’ as homeland cannot be understood in merely national terms” (127). Apparently
substituting notions of “homeland” with those of “home,” he analyzes the ways in which the latter term can be
understood within the text, arguing that “‘Korea’ is continually deferred” in the text, replaced by a series of

234
association with exile,” so much so that “the interplay of nationalism and exile is like Hegel’s
dialectic of master and servant, opposites informing and constituting each other” (359).
If exile and nationalism are constitutive of one another in the opening pages of
Calliope/Epic, it is important to note that Cha is invoking not only a distinctly Korean form of
nationalism—as all forms of nationalism must, by definition, be particularistic—but one that is
intrinsic or innate to the figure of the mother. Both of these aspects of the nationalism presented
at the start of Calliope/Epic are important to understanding the function nationalism plays in
Dictee. That a form of nationalism that is organic and blood-based may be seen as particularistic
is no surprise, but a strong degree of particularism also inheres within forms of nationalism seen
as “civic” or “liberal,” as Craig Calhoun and Anthony D. Smith both contend. While this
particularism may be masked, in part, by a voluntaristic structure that allows individuals (or
some of them, at least) to “choose” citizenship within a country, that choice itself is necessitated
by a construct that is inherently particularistic and exclusive. As Calhoun notes, the “need to
account for the particularity of belonging” constitutes “the fundamental paradox of liberal
nationalism” (136). Such belonging, moreover, often comes at the cost of the effacement of
one’s previous identity, a function Smith dubs “ethnocide” (Nationalism and Modernism 212). If
Cha’s work “creates the stain of difference that resists absorption by an American identity,” as
Wong contends (136), it is not surprising that it does so, in part at least, by invoking a different
form of particularism that is seen to be ineradicable and internal.

provisional homes—in memory, in language, in the family—so that to identify Korea as the ultimate source, or
destination, of the text becomes increasingly difficult” (128). Yu’s analysis of the ways in which notions of “home”
appear in the text may not be objectionable, but his avoidance of the passage’s overtly nationalistic content and his
conflation of ideas of “nationalism” with those of “home” seem misguided, if not mystifying. As Said, Clifford, and
numerous writers on diaspora have attested, the loss of a national space as “home” can often spur stronger feelings
of nationalism, as is clearly the case in the opening of Calliope/Epic.

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The interiorized nature of this assertion of national belonging may be more important, in
fact, than its inherent particularity. In one sense, the turn to the interior or spiritual, as
represented by Cha’s invocation of the mother’s “MAH-UHM,” may simply be the pis aller of
the exiled nationalist, staking a claim to a territory that is inherent but invisible, and thus
impossible to refute. Much as Aristotle turns to the “soul” when the body proves an unreliable
basis for distinguishing the free man from the slave, Cha turns to an intrinsic quality to assert the
validity of the mother’s status as a Korean born and living in Manchuria.
102
In another sense,
though, her use of the transliterated term “MAH-UHM” to invoke this inherent sense of
particularity is highly significant. Critics such as Wong, Shih, Kang, Park and others have noted
that Hangul, the Korean script, appears only in a grainy reproduction of a photograph that serves
as the book’s frontispiece, but fewer have discussed the significance of “MAH-UHM” as a rare
instance in which the Korean language appears in the book.
103
Cha’s reliance on a transliterated
Korean term here, in a passage that is otherwise composed solely in English, effectively
constitutes a performance of the larger claim of the mother’s Korean nature—one that’s
highlighted by the word’s appearance in capital letters. This performance is underscored,
moreover, by the fact that “MAH-UHM,” which can have range of meanings, from “heart” to
“spirit” and “intention,” is typically considered a “pure” Korean word, one that does not derive
from Chinese roots.
104

While this linguistic “purity” may not be evident to most English-speaking readers of the
work, questions of language use assume a central role in the negotiation of national identity in
the next paragraph of Calliope/Epic. In this passage, the mother is directly associated with

102
See note 46 in chapter 2 for an analysis of Aristotle’s reliance on the soul as means to distinguish free men from
slaves.
103
Park calls attention to the word and notes that it “sounds like ‘mother’ (in Korean, reversing the syllables turns it
into mother” (240).
104
Information about the meaning of mah-uhm comes from a private discussion with Eleana Kim on Dec. 28, 2013.

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notions of the “mother-tongue,” which takes on an increased importance precisely because it is
forbidden under Japanese rule. As if starting again, the passage begins with a direct address,
“Mother,” before continuing into an impassioned examination of language’s relationship to the
mother’s identity:
you are a child still. At eighteen. More of a child since you are always ill. They have
sheltered you from life. Still, you speak the tongue the mandatory tongue like the others.
It is not your own. Even if it is not you know you must. You are Bi-lingual. You are Tri-
lingual. The tongue that is forbidden is your own mother tongue. You speak in the dark.
In the secret. The one that is yours. Your own. You speak very softly, you speak in a
whisper. In the dark, in secret. Mother tongue is your refuge. It is being home. Being who
you are. Truly. To speak makes you sad. Yearning. To utter each word is a privilege you
risk by death. Not only for you but for all. All of you who are one, who by law tongue
tied forbidden of tongue. You carry at the center the mark of red above and mark of blue
below, heaven and earth, tai-geuk; t’ai-chi. It is the mark. The mark of belonging. Mark
of cause. Mark of retrieval. By birth. By death. By blood. You carry the mark in your
chest, in your MAH-UHM, in your MAH-UHM, in your spirit-heart. (45-6)
I have quoted this passage at length because of its significance to claims that sections of the work
set in Korea or Manchuria can be seen to constitute an epic impulse within Dictee.
While a great deal could be said about this passage, critics who have discussed it have
tended to see it as simply extending Cha’s condition back in time, to her mother’s generation,
and complicating any link between the figure of the mother and the notion of the mother tongue.
In Josephine Nock Hee Park’s assessment, “when Cha recounts her mother’s experience, she
turns the mother into another exile and seeker, thus converting the longed-for figure herself into

237
a subject who longs for her mother tongue” (240). Nicole Cooley argues that “Cha links
‘Mother’ and ‘mother tongue,’ yet she undermines the association as soon as she offers it
because even the ‘mother’ has no claim to the ‘mother tongue,’ a language she must speak ‘in the
dark. In the secret’” (133). These assessments are no doubt valid, as far as they go, but they also
leave out much in the passage that seems central to any understanding of the larger dynamics at
stake in the work.
A simple comparison of the scene above with one of those addressing or dramatizing the
difficulty of speech in sections set in the West calls out some of these dynamics. Rather than an
apparently isolated figure who stops, starts, and stutters with a “broken tongue,” or one who
“mimicks the speaking,” badly, on her own account, but who feels, nonetheless, an
overwhelming, physical compulsion to speak, the mother figure is depicted as fluent in multiple
languages (“You are Bi-lingual. You are Tri-lingual”). Her first language is forbidden, as the
passage clearly indicates, but this prohibition doesn’t stop her from her speaking it, even if she
must do so “very softly … in a whisper.” The ability to do so, moreover, is presented as a form
of “refuge” for the mother, one that allows a stable, authentic identity: “It is being home. Being
who you are. Truly” (45-6).
Without intending to discount or diminish the hardships suffered by the mother in
Manchuria, it is clear that the mother, while suffering under authoritarian rule, is represented as
having access to a type of existential security—the knowledge of who she is and the ability to go
“home.” This ability to go home, in fact, is further reinforced later in the section, when the
mother is able to return home to her parents after a harrowing illness (53). Such security, it
should be noted, is a never an option for the speaker of Dictee, who depicts herself as struggling
to speak correctly in the sections set in the West and scrutinized critically upon her return to

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South Korea. Even if one considers Cha’s representation of the mother as a romanticization of
her life in exile, the existential security she depicts still stands in stark contrast to the speaker’s
descriptions of her own situation.
This existential security comes at price, of course, as the passage makes clear. Speaking in
the native tongue makes the mother “sad” and causes “yearning,” but this emotional distress,
which is depicted quite simply, seems out of proportion to the actual risk she faces in speaking
the language. “To utter each word is a privilege you risk by death” (46). Such a risk, moreover,
extends to all of the Koreans in her village, who could apparently be killed if one of the
inhabitants defied the Japanese (“Not only for you but for all”). This expression of extreme
vulnerability, however, leads to an assertion of solidarity grounded in prohibition: “All of you
who are one, who by law tongue tied forbidden of tongue” (46). If a communal identity was
implicit earlier in the opening pages of this section, it is explicit here, as the mother is subsumed
within the “all of you who are one” (46). Not only does the mother tongue, then, allow the
mother to actualize her identity, to be who she is, “Truly,” it also immerses her within a larger
group whose identity seems equally unquestionable.
Acknowledging this direct expression of communal identity by no means implies that the
condition described should be seen as favorable, as it clearly results from oppression. Not
acknowledging it, however, and simply equating the mother’s exile and relation to speech as
equivalent to the speaker’s, as Park does, overlooks the profound differences in their respective
situations. The mother’s relationship to her native tongue is depicted as existential threat, but it is
also one that creates existential security and an inalienable sense of belonging. The speaker, on
the other hand, never faces such a threat, but also never evinces any hope of belonging, let alone
any situation in which such belonging could be a reality.

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With the emphasis this passage puts on language as a fundamental component of both
individual and group identity, it is significant that it never specifies any particular language, such
as “Japanese” or “Korean,” as either forbidden or mandated. The larger context in which the
passage appears eliminates any doubt or confusion as to which languages Cha is discussing—the
mandated Japanese and the forbidden Korean—but the passage takes on a broader force because
of the more general terms it uses. These generalized terms give way in the passage’s conclusion,
however, which makes a seamless transition from a discussion of the mother tongue and the
effects of its prohibition to a powerful affirmation of national particularity, one that’s clearly
construed in organic terms.
Any doubt that the opening of Calliope/Epic depicts a form of nationalism that is organic
and blood-based is cast aside by the passage’s invocation of “the mark of belonging” that the
mother carries, which is rendered as a mark of “cause” and “retrieval” and operates “By birth. By
death. By blood.” Here, the terms of belonging are represented as immutable and inherent.
Belonging is not a matter of choice, for the mother, or a condition that’s implicitly contingent on
her ability to master a language or conform to cultural norms dictated by a hegemonic ethnic
group, but one that operates by the universal life processes of birth and death, one that inheres in
the very substance that gives her life, her blood. Not only does this condition grant the mother an
immutable sense of belonging, but it also imparts a sense of purpose, or “cause,” and a sense of
redemption, or “retrieval.” As the passage makes clear, these qualities all stem from the “mark”
that the mother carries. For all the vividness of its description, this mark, which is clearly
modeled on the red and blue yin-yang (t’aegeuk) symbol that appears on the South Korean flag,
is carried within the mother’s “MAH-UHM,” and is thus an internalized symbol of belonging by
blood.

240
More could said about the opening pages of Calliope/Epic, which next present the Korean
folk song Bong Sun Hwa.
105
If the section’s powerful associations of language and national
identity call to mind Romantic forms of nationalism, such as Herder’s, in which “language was
paradigmatic” (Calhoun 140), the appearance of Bong Sun Hwa, a folk song emblematic of
Korean culture, only reinforces them.
106
These forms of nationalism have long been viewed with
suspicion, if not contempt, by liberal theorists who associate them with fascism and genocidal
notions of racial “purity.”
107
It is important to remember, however, that Korean nationalism, as
represented in Calliope/Epic, did not emerge in a vacuum, but in direct relationship to Japanese
aggression.
108
The relationship of this specific form of nationalism to colonization is made very
clear, as well, even in the most explicitly nationalistic passages of the work. Cha, then, is not

105
Elaine Kim summarizes both the song and its significance to colonized and exiled Koreans: “Bong Sun Hwa is
addressed to a flower that once blossomed in a summer field where young girls played, now shivering and forlorn in
the cold autumn winds. Because the flower symbolizes Korea under Japanese colonial rule, the song was
suppressed. … My father once told me that the Japanese colonizers considered the singing of Bong Sun Hwa a
gesture of defiance and, as such, sufficient grounds for an arrest. I seem to recall that Korean exiles always sang the
song with tears in their eyes” (4-5).
106
David Lloyd’s analysis of the importance of language to Romantic theories of nationalism calls out the ways in
which language can be seen as unifying force, at the level of both the individual and the larger community: “The
‘spirit of the nation’ can be identified with its language, since that language, in the speech of the individual as in the
continuous relations that bind together a linguistic community actually and historically, can be taken to represent
ideally the medium through which those unifications are enacted” (66).
107
As Clifford Geertz notes, in 1963, “in modern societies the lifting of such [primordial] bonds to the level of
political supremacy … has more and more come to be deplored as pathological. To an increasing degree national
unity is maintained not by calls to blood and land but by a vague, intermittent, and routine allegiance to a civil state”
(260). More recently, Anthony D. Smith remarks that “The ethnic version [of nationalism] remains profoundly
suspect. It is widely equated with the exclusiveness of ‘blood’ associated with the organic version of nationalism”
(The Nation in History 16). Without defending the staggering amount violence that has been perpetrated in the name
of the nation—be it ethnic or civic in its orientation—it is important to keep in mind that the modern conceptual
taxonomy of nationalism came into being shortly after World War II and, like epic itself, can be seen as master
narrative told by the victors. Scholars typically attribute the division between civic or voluntary nationalism and
organic or ethnic nationalism to Hans Kohn, whose work was widely influential in the post-War era. As Calhoun
notes, “Hans Kohn was the most influential source both of the opposition of civic to ethnic nationalisms and of its
association with a parallel opposition between Western and Eastern versions of modernity” (117). As this “parallel
opposition” makes clear, Kohn’s theory, while perhaps well-intentioned, is implicitly Orientalizing and deeply
ethnocentric. While such biases may be understandable in the traumatic aftermath of World War II, the extent to
which Kohn’s binaristic terms and conceptual scaffolding have been repeated by later scholars of nationalism is less
so. For more information on Kohn and the emergence of modern conceptions of “organic” and “civic” nationalism,
see Calhoun (117-46) and Smith (The Nation in History 6-7).
108
The history of the Korean peninsula is nothing if not complex. For a concise overview of Korea’s involvement in
regional and larger international conflicts in the 20
th
century, see Lowe (44-45). For a more detailed account of the
emergence of Korean nationalism in the 20
th
century, see Shin, Ethnic Nationalism (passim).

241
simply rehearsing an organic form of nationalism that the speaker of the work has lost, but
presenting the context in which it arose and accounting for the importance it held for those, such
as her mother, who suffered in exile.
In doing so, moreover, she is again denaturalizing the significance of what it means to
possess logos and introducing the very real operations of power into any conception of language
use. The valences of this denaturalization are quite different from those found in the work’s
opening section or other sections not set explicitly in Korea or Manchuria, but Cha is addressing
different forms of power in these different sections. The differences in these forms of power can
perhaps best be seen in the representations of blood found in Calliope/Epic and, even more, in
Melpomene/Tragedy.
“Further than their own line of blood”
The reference to belonging “by blood” in Calliope/Epic constitutes what may be the most
explicit avowal of the organicist thought that informs the opening of Calliope/Epic. While
important to any discussion of organicism in Dictee, this reference expresses only one of the
meanings that are often attached to blood—that of inherent, immutable belonging to a larger
social or kinship-based group. Other important valences of “blood” are found, however, in other
sections of the work, especially those set in Korea and Manchuria.
Indeed, of the 16 instances in which the noun “blood” or forms of the verb “to bleed”
appear in Dictee, eleven are found in the three sections set in Korea and Manchuria; eight appear
in Melpomene/Tragedy alone. While it may not be surprising that a section associated with
tragedy constitutes the “bloodiest” section of the book, it is significant that many of the
references to blood found in this chapter carry meanings that are quite different from the one
found in Calliope/Epic. Whereas the reference to blood in Calliope/Epic stands as a powerful

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instantiation of a sense of belonging rendered as inherent and immutable, despite (or because of)
the mother’s exilic condition, the references that proliferate in Melpomene/Tragedy often serve
as indexes of suffering, evoking a powerful sense of sacrifice or martyrdom, rather than one of
immutable inclusion.
Taken as whole, the references to blood found in these two sections can be seen to mirror
or exemplify key aspects of the discussion that Foucault provides on the symbolic significance of
blood in the final chapter of vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality. This chapter, which provides the
most direct exposition of biopolitics in Foucault’s oeuvre, counterposes what he terms “a
symbolics of blood” with “an analytics of sexuality” (148; italics in original).
109
With these
phrases, Foucault essentially distills the primary differences that he believes distinguish pre-
modern societies based on “juridico-sovereign” forms of power from modern ones driven by
biopolitical concerns. This distinction, in turn, is important to an analysis of Dictee because it
makes clear the ways in which the numerous references to blood found in Melpomene/Tragedy
speak to the dynamics of these “juridico-sovereign” regimes, in which both organic social
systems and the “noble deed[s]” and “trials of bravery” that can be associated with epic are more
prevalent. The epic impulse that drives sections of the work set in Korea and Manchuria, then,

109
Though Foucault’s lecture course for 1978-79 at the College de France is titled The Birth of Biopolitics, he
spends little time discussing biopolitics or biopower per se, focusing instead on the economic rationale that he
believes underpins the emergence of biopolitics. While Didier Fassin is right to note that “Foucault’s theory of
biopolitics … remains largely a promise, an unfinished work he never specifically renounced but which always
eluded him” (45), such a claim foregrounds terminological consistency over conceptual continuity. Foucault, in
other words, abandoned the term “biopolitics” but continued to develop concepts related to it. Just as biopower and
biopolitics emerged from his analyses of disciplinarity, so governmentality and security arise from his
considerations of biopolitics and disciplinarity. As Kim Su Rasmussen notes, “during the 1970s, Foucault’s thought
underwent several changes. … In the lectures at College de France between 1975 and 1979, Foucault gradually
expands and reworks the notion of disciplinary power. Initially, he places the concept of biopower at the centre of
these efforts, but he subsequently replaces it with the notion of governmentality” (35). Terminological consistency
may, in fact, be inherently at odds with Foucault’s methodological emphasis, in 70s, on governmental practices,
which Mariana Valverde aptly dubs “tactical and site-specific conceptual bricolage” (“Beyond Discipline and
Punish” 202).

243
can be understood, in part, at least, through an analysis of the ways in which blood—as a symbol
of larger social and political dynamics—is represented.
A brief overview of the key points of Foucault’s argument will help lay the groundwork for
an examination of the representations of blood in Melpomene/Tragedy. For Foucault, sexuality,
rather than blood, is a key element of many modern and contemporary societies because it unites
the two poles of biopolitical regimes: anatomo-politics, focused on disciplinary apparatuses that
affect the individual body, and biopolitics proper, based on regulatory mechanisms designed to
shape and control the larger population. As Foucault succinctly asserts, “sex was a means of
access to both the life of the body and the life of species” (History of Sexuality 146). In his
discussion of the “the analytics of sexuality,” however, the emphasis falls decidedly more on
notions of “life itself” than on sexuality per se. In his own terms, the phrase speaks to
“mechanisms of power [that] are addressed to the body, to life, to what causes it to proliferate, to
what reinforces the species, its stamina, its ability to dominate, or its capacity for being used”
(History of Sexuality 147). While sexuality, as commonly understood, is largely absent from
Dictee, this chapter has argued that Cha’s emphatic depictions of the body of the struggling
speaker can be understood through the lens of biopolitical thought—as the speaker undermines
presumptions of the autonomous, self-identical subject precisely through her inability “to
dominate” and her lack of a “capacity for being used.” Such depictions, moreover, call out the
Eurocentric limitations of Foucault’s formulations by presenting a body whose disciplinary
travails cannot be understood outside of larger historical forces of colonialism and diasporic
migration.
Against this conception of biopolitical regimes that attempt to make human life
“proliferate,” Foucault argues that earlier societies can best be understood through their emphasis

244
on “the symbolics of blood.” As might be expected, kinship plays a large role in these societies,
but the function of blood in them is not limited to that of “the blood relation.” Rather, blood also
serves, in Foucault’s words, as “an important element in mechanisms of power, its
manifestations, and its rituals” (History of Sexuality 147). These societies, Foucault argues, are
distinguished by rigidly hierarchical structures with sovereign leaders, and they are also
frequently threatened by natural and manmade forces, which greatly increased the likelihood of
death. As a result of these factors, “blood constituted one of the fundamental values” for these
societies (History of Sexuality 147). In Foucault’s view, moreover, the significance of blood
cannot be reduced to a single function or role:
[blood] owed its high value at the same time to its instrumental role (the ability to shed
blood), to the way it functioned in the order of signs (to have a certain blood, to be of the
same blood), and also to its precariousness (easily spilled, subject to drying up, too readily
mixed, capable of being corrupted). A society of blood—I was tempted to say, of
‘sanguinity’—where power spoke through blood: the honor of war, the fear of famine, the
triumph of death, the sovereign with his sword, executioners, and tortures; blood was a
reality with a symbolic function.” (147; italics in original)
Although the chapters set in Korea or Manchuria certainly don’t contain all of the elements that
Foucault lists in his depiction of blood as “a reality with a symbolic function,” they do present
situations where violence at the hands of the state constitutes a real risk. Clio/History, for
example, does not present a grisly torture scene, such as the one that famously opens Discipline
& Punish, but it does state that the young Korean nationalist Yu Guan Soon “is stabbed in the
chest, and subjected to questioning” (37). The mother in Calliope/History, as we have seen, risks
death by speaking Korean against the mandate of the Japanese colonial power, and student

245
protesters are beaten and shot by South Korean police officers and soldiers in Melpomene/
Tragedy. Significant differences exist across the representations of violence found in these
sections, but what unifies them is that the state, whether in colonial Manchuria or U.S.-sponsored
South Korea, perpetrating or threatening violence is essentially an authoritarian regime operating
as the sovereign who “kills or lets live.”
While the presence or threat of violence in a literary work does not, in and of itself, indicate
that the work contains an epic impulse, violence that is represented against the backdrop of
sovereign power clearly places a work closer to Foucault’s symbolics of blood than to his
analytics of sexuality. Although Foucault’s paradigm may be necessarily reductive and implicitly
teleological in its depiction of the emergence of modern biopolitical societies from older,
premodern regimes, it nevertheless serves as a valuable heuristic tool for understanding the
implications of Cha’s representations of violence in the sections of the work set in Korea or
Manchuria. Whether these representations accurately depict the operations of the state in time
periods and locales Cha is discussing is beside the point, of course, as the work has no obligation
to historical or political verisimilitude. While this chapter will take into account select historical
or political works about Korea in the 20
th
century, it will focus much more on analyzing the
significance of Cha’s representations of violence, using Foucault’s notion of the symbolic
function of blood as heuristic device.
Of three main roles that Foucault specifies for blood’s symbolic function in earlier
societies, the second plays an important role in the depiction of organic nationalism in
Calliope/Epic. As we have seen, the mother’s identity and inalienable sense of belonging to the
larger community is clearly represented as inseparable from her “hav[ing] a certain blood” and
“be[ing] of the same blood” as those around her. Within the larger context of the opening of the

246
section, however, blood constitutes just one element of the organic nationalism the chapter
presents. Notions of exile, language, and the mother’s innately Korean “spirit-heart” coalesce
with the section’s invocation of belonging by blood to present a powerful form of organic
nationalism.
Organic nationalism is less prominent in Melpomene/Tragedy, but the representations of it
found within that section occur almost exclusively through notions of blood. It is significant,
moreover, that all three of the functions of blood that Foucault specifies in vol. 1 of The History
of Sexuality appear in Melpomene/Tragedy. As an analysis of the representations of blood found
in Melpomene/Tragedy will demonstrate, Cha relies on the symbolic value of blood to depict the
suffering of the Korean people in a way that opposes, implicitly or explicitly, the Korean nation
against the South Korean state headed by a military dictator. Whereas the organic nationalism
represented in Calliope/Epic was forged in response to Japanese colonialism and the exile of
Koreans, such as the speaker’s mother, to Manchuria, the less emphatic form of organic
nationalism that appears in Melpomene/Tragedy comes into relief against the against the actions
of soldiers representing the state. These soldiers play a prominent role in Melpomene/Tragedy,
which depicts two protests for democracy in South Korea, one that takes place in the early 1960s,
when the speaker was a girl, and another the occurs in the late 70s or early 80s, dates that
effectively bookend the authoritarian Park regime.
110

Nowhere is the opposition of organic nationalism and the civil state seen more clearly than
in Cha’s excoriating description of the soldiers who are policing the 1962 rally. While the
soldiers, as agents of the state, will figure prominently in references to blood that conform to the

110
Park Chung-hee came to power in a 1961 coup d’etat, replacing Syngman Rhee, who had ruled from 1948 to
1960. Park was assassinated by the head of his intelligence agency on October 26, 1979. Chun Doo-hwan
orchestrated another coup in December 1979 and ruled the country until 1987. The governments of all three men
were supported by the U.S. and are typically considered authoritarian.

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first and third functions of blood in Foucault’s scheme (“the ability to shed blood” and blood’s
“precariousness”), this reference, like the one in Calliope/Epic, focuses on blood as a modality of
belonging—one that the soldiers are seen to reject: “The police the soldiers anonymous they
duplicate themselves, multiply in number invincible they execute their role. Further than their
home further than their mother their brother sister further than their children is the execution of
their role their given identity further than their own line of blood” (84). Cha’s repetition of
“further,” while poetically resonant, lends an element of ambiguity to the passage, but it is clear
that the soldiers execution of “their role” somehow takes them beyond not only their homes and
relatives, but “their own line of blood.” This invocation of kinship and the representation of “a
line of blood” as something that individuals possess (“their own”) speak to a conception of social
belonging that is distinctly organicist and squarely within the realm of Foucault’s “symbolics of
blood.”
In their anonymity, however, the menace of which is amplified by their large numbers, or
their ability to “duplicate themselves,” the soldiers speak to social forces associated with
modernity and the quintessentially modern genres, the lyric and the novel. Whereas almost no
soldiers are anonymous in the Iliad and a great many are identified by their (paternal) blood
lines, even if they only appear in the poem to be run through by a hero’s spear, nearly every
soldier is functionally anonymous as a representative of the modern state. In claiming that these
soldiers are betraying “their own lines of blood,” then, Cha is leveraging a notion central to
organic forms of nationalism—that of an immutable sense of belonging bestowed by blood
lines—against the imposition of the modern civil state. In doing so, she doesn’t simply call out
the larger, structural homologies between colonialism and nationalism, as Lowe contends (50),
but depicts a specific form of nationalism as implicitly opposed to the state—be it one run by a

248
foreign power, such as Japan, or one supported by the United States and committed to
“modernization” and “growth” at any cost.
Whereas the agents of Japanese colonial government are not depicted directly in
Calliope/Epic, the agents of the later South Korean state are clearly allied with the forces of
modernity, in Foucault’s paradigm. Not only are the soldiers that Cha depicts in Melpomene/
Tragedy anonymous, they are also highly disciplined, as a later passage makes clear. The
military, of course, is one of the earliest groups to be affected by the development of the
disciplinary techniques strongly associated with modernity, in Foucault’s account, and it is
significant that Cha represents them in terms that speak to the discipline that accompanies their
roles: “You stand on your tanks your legs spread apart how many degrees exactly your hand on
your rifle. Rifle to the ground the same angle as your right leg. You wear a beret in 90 degree sun
there is no shade at the main gate you are fixed you cannot move you dare not move” (86). This
passage clearly represents the disciplinary training, designed to optimize performance by training
the body, that the soldiers have received, with the effect that they now stand with their “legs
spread apart how many degrees exactly” and do not move, regardless of how uncomfortable they
are.
If disciplinary techniques effectively create “individuals,” as Foucault contends, in the
sense that the state collects information about each person who has been trained, so that these
individuals exist as “secret singularities,” where history would have taken little note of them
before, this process of individualization is one that leads to a particularly “normalized”
individual. In Cha’s terms, these trained soldiers become equivalent to one another not through
any identity that might come from familial or other social relations, but through their functions in
the army: “You are your post you are your vow in nomine patris you work your post you are

249
your nation defending your country from subversive infiltration from your own countrymen”
(86). This passage attributes a type of functional identity to the soldiers that is, for all purposes,
equivalent to anonymity (though the soldiers are surely well known, via their files, to the state),
but what is perhaps also notable about the passage is Cha’s extension of this functional non-
identity to the nation (“you are your nation”). With such a claim, Cha effectively shows the
nation to be an ancillary element of the state, or she depicts a nation that is not, in any sense,
organic, but the outgrowth of state power and ideology. In other words, she is describing the loss
of the organic nation, its absorption into larger bodies wholly controlled by the state. That the
representatives of this new “nation” are directed against “their own countrymen,” however,
speaks to a dynamic similar to the one discussed earlier, in which representatives of the state
have forsaken the organic nation represented by “lines of blood.”
Such representations of highly disciplined forces turned against “their countrymen” may
seem to call out a limit of Foucault’s formulation of biopolitics. If the soldiers are highly
disciplined and functionally anonymous, paradoxically, in the individuality the modern state
bestows upon them, they also represent instances in which the techniques that are hallmarks of
modernity are not used to cause life to proliferate, as Foucault asserts is the rationale of
biopolitics, but to subdue or end it. In Melpomene/Tragedy, the brutality of this task is matched
by its bureaucratic nature, as Cha’s succinct description of the violent climax of the 1962 protest
makes clear: “Orders, permission to use force against the students, have been dispatched. To be
caught and beaten with sticks, and for others, shot, remassed, and carted off. They fall they bleed
they die” (83). This matter-of-fact description appears immediately before the passage in which
the soldiers are said to have gone “further than their own line of blood” (84). The close proximity
of the two passages underscores the ways in which the soldiers’ de facto denial of one of the

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functions of blood, that of inherent belonging, is connected to a painful demonstration of what
Foucault calls blood’s “instrumental role,” as the students “shed blood” in their opposition to the
state.
The state-sanctioned nature of this violence is evident in Cha’s account of it, which
specifies that “orders” and “permission to use force … have been dispatched.” The disciplinary
forces of the modern state, then, are clearly relying, in Melpomene/Tragedy, on the older power
of the sovereign to “take life or let live,” rather than the biopolitical power to “foster life.” Such a
scenario may resonate more with Agamben’s conception of biopolitics than Foucault’s, but
Foucault attempts to account for this “thanatopolitical” deployment of disciplinary forces
through his conception of state racism, in which “massacres have become vital” for the survival
of a race (History of Sexuality 137). As Foucault asserts, in the more extended treatment of the
term found in a 1976 lecture, racism allows a state to posit “biological-type caesura” that allows
“a way of separating out the groups that exist within a population” (Society Must Be Defended
255). This type of racism allows a modern state to take up the older role of sovereign and kill
citizens deemed a legitimate threat to others. In a “normalizing society,” he contends, “racism is
the indispensable precondition that allows someone to be killed” (256).
111

Cha seems to point toward a type of “biological-type caesura” among the citizenry in her
statement that the soldier apostrophized in Melpomene/Tragedy is “defending your country from
subversive infiltration from your own countrymen” (86). In the context of demonstration for
democracy in South Korea, this invocation of such a loaded term as “subversive infiltration”
(which is clearly appropriating what Cha posits as a rationale for the soldier’s action) would

111
While provocative within the context of biopolitics, Foucault’s notion of state racism is clearly insufficient as a
freestanding consideration of race and racism. In Rasmussen’s assessment, though “Foucault’s genealogy of racism
deserves appreciation due to the highly original suggestion that modern racism is a form of biopolitical
government,” it is nevertheless “rather incomplete, lacking for example any substantial discussion of European
colonialism or the history of the idea of race” (35).

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almost certainly refer to the Communist threat associated with North Korea. There is no doubt
that being branded a Communist was very dangerous under the Park and Chun regimes, which
deployed a strong anti-Communist rhetoric as part of their own nation-building agendas, but
Cha’s reference, while suggestive, does not constitute definitive evidence of state racism.
112

Without denying that state racism may be a factor in the events Cha depicts in
Melpomene/Tragedy, the violence she represents in the section can be seen, in the broader
context of South Korea’s rush to development in the 60s and 70s, as a combination of the two
regimes of power Foucault presents as distinctly opposed. In what seems an attempt to mitigate
the teleological nature of his formulation, Foucault acknowledges that “the passage from one
[regime of power] to the other did not come about … without overlappings, interactions, and
echoes” (History of Sexuality 149).
113
Such overlappings and interactions are a key part of
Seungsook Moon’s claim that South Korean development in the second half of the 20
th
century
can be understood through the concept of “militarized modernity,” which she develops “to
capture the peculiar combination of Foucauldian discipline and militarized violence that
permeated Korean society in the process of building a modern nation in the context of the Cold
War” (Militarized Modernity 7). As we have seen, Melpomene/Tragedy captures this “peculiar
combination” as well, with effects that are often disarming.

112
Cold War ideologies can also be seen as playing a significant role in the development of the androcentric and
heavily militaristic form of nationalism promulgated by the South Korean state in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. In
Seungsook Moon’s assessment, “anti-Communism plays a significant role in producing an official nationalism that
contains a strong militaristic strand and therefore implications for gender hierarchy in Korean society” (“Begetting
the Nation” 37-8).
113
Mariana Valverde contends that the attribution of a teleological or “epochalist” orientation to Foucault’s works of
the 70s “misses the methodological revolution brought about by focusing on practices of government”
(“Genealogies of European States” 160). She acknowledges, however, that Foucault sometimes “gave the
impression that he was putting forward an alternative theory of modernity” (“Genealogies of European States” 160).
If, as a result, “the ‘epochalist’ misreading [is] not wholly without basis,” however, it becomes difficult to see how it
remains a misreading (“Genealogies of European States” 160).

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Time won’t allow for an extended discussion of the other references to blood found
Melpomene/Tragedy. It is worth noting, however, that several of these references can be
understood through the first and third functions of the symbolic nature of blood that Foucault
outlines in vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality. The third function, blood’s “precariousness” as
something “easily spilled” and “subject to drying up,” can be seen in Cha’s description of the
traumatic aftermath of street protest that has been violently attacked: “I cry wail torn shirt lying I
step among them. No trace of them. Except for the blood. Because. Step among the blood that
will not erase with the rain on the pavement that walked upon like the stones where they fell had
fallen” (82). In this powerful passage, blood has obviously been spilled, but Cha’s assertion that
“no trace” of protestors remains “except for the blood” also speaks to the precarious nature of
blood, precisely because Cha contends that it will not be erased. Such an assertion clearly
presents the blood as an index of the suffering of the Korean people, but it implicitly
acknowledges the precarious nature of blood by denying that this blood will, in fact, cease to
serve such a function. This implicit acknowledgment of the precarious nature of blood, which
speaks to a fear that the sacrifices of the protestors might be forgotten, also occurs later in the
section, in a description of the 1962 protest the speaker witnessed as a girl: “I heard that the rain
does not erase the blood fallen on the ground. I heard from the adults, the blood stains still” (85).
In acknowledging the precariousness of blood, these references operate within the terms of
Foucault’s symbolics of blood, but they also connote a shift in the certitude of the significance
surrounding blood. Whereas the blood of the speaker’s mother constituted an integral aspect of
her identity and guaranteed an immutable sense of belonging, the blood of the Korean protestors
can be seen as vulnerable, open to change, or liable to fade away and be forgotten. Cha’s potent
assertion of the blood’s endurance, as a sign of suffering at the hands of the authoritarian state,

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may be indicative, in fact, of a larger anxiety about the stability of blood and its relation to the
Korean nation. As we have seen, Cha represents the agents of the state, the soldiers, as denying
“their own lines of blood” but as also making a claim to the nation via their assumption of their
“posts” and the “execution of their role their given identity” (84). If this identity has been given
by the state, as seems to be the case, and thus runs counter to one that is inherent in any “mark of
belonging” that operates “by blood,” Cha’s assertions of the enduring significance of the
protesters’ blood not only counterposes an idea of the organic nation against the authoritarian
state, but against that state’s claim to be equivalent to the Korean nation.
Such anxiety about the validity of identity is not limited to depictions of the protestors’
sacrifices, however. This anxiety also extends to the speaker’s consideration of her own identity.
Shortly after her comment, regarding the 1962 demonstration, that “the blood stains still,” the
speaker of Melpomene/Tragedy directly addresses her Mother (“I am here for the first time in
eighteen years, Mother”) and notes her temporal and psychological distance from the original
scene of violence: “I speak another tongue, a second tongue. That is how distant I am. From
then. From that time” (85). While this claim does not invoke blood, as a symbol of belonging or
a sign of sacrifice, it is significant that it expresses the speaker’s distance, her temporal
separation from the scenes described above, in terms of language, “another tongue” (85).
Language, along with blood, is a central component of the mother’s identity in Calliope/Epic, as
we have seen, and in using the acquisition of a new language as a gauge of the speaker’s distance
from the protests of 1962, the speaker may also be expressing an anxiety about separation from
both the figure of the mother and from her stable identity as a Korean whose language and blood
underwrite her sense of belonging.

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Considerations of identity are also evident in Cha’s depiction of a very different type of
blood spill that is depicted in Urania/Astronomy, which appears between Calliope/Epic and
Melpomene/Tragedy. Taking place in a section that is not set in Korea or Manchuria, this scene
calls into relief the different dynamics of belonging that are at stake in the respective locales
represented in Dictee. Urania/Astronomy also contains one of the passages depicting the body
laboring to speak that was analyzed earlier in this chapter, and it is significant that the sections
opens, after a Chinese-language depiction of the human body, with a scene in which the
speaker’s blood is being drawn: “She takes my left arm, tells me to make a fist, then open. Make
a fist then open again, make the vein appear through the skin blue-green-purple tint to the
translucent surface” (64).
If blood is demystified here, so to speak, and appears as a bodily fluid that must be
extracted by a medical procedure (“She takes the elastic band and ties it tightly around the left
arm”), rather than a symbolically resonant substance that confers identity or serves as an index of
suffering, this demystification is only furthered by the passage’s avoidance of the actual term
“blood,” until the appearance of the French sang in the penultimate line. Rather, the passage
represents “blood” through a variety of other terms and phrases. The passage refers to blood, for
example, as a “near-black liquid ink” that spills onto cotton, a euphemism that powerfully
equates blood with writing. Such a formulation no doubt links the body to writing in significant
ways, as Shih has noted (154). As we have already seen, such linkages of the body to the
production of language are an important feature of the sections of the work not set in Korea or
Manchuria. The passage’s description of the blood spill (“Stain begins to absorb the material
spilled upon”) has received critical attention, as well, as it is often seen to express,
metaphorically, the ways in which Cha resists absorption into “an American identity” (Wong

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136). Much less attention has been given, however, to the speaker’s representation of her blood
as “sample extract” and “specimen type,” terms that clearly speak to a biopolitical rationale, in
which blood is not a symbol of belonging, but a substance to analyzed for the preservation and
optimization of life. When viewed against the backdrop of the numerous references to blood as a
potent symbol in Calliope/Epic and Melpomene/Tragedy, this scene’s depiction of blood as an
element of medical procedure calls out the profound differences between the dynamics of
belonging at stake in sections set, respectively, in Manchuria or Korea and those set in the West.
Before concluding this discussion of the symbolic resonance of blood in Dictee, and in
Melpomene/Tragedy, in particular, one final passage needs to be discussed. This passage is
important because it stands as a clear instantiation of the first symbolic function of blood
specified by Foucault, that of its “instrumental role,” or “the ability to shed blood” (147). Indeed,
this passage, which is presented as an italicized paragraph that occurs immediately after the
speaker’s assertion that “no trace” of the protestors remains, “except for the blood,” echoes
Foucault in its powerful direct address to the protestors: “There is no surrendering you are
chosen to fail to be martyred to shed blood to be set an example one who has defied who has
chosen to defy” (83; italics in original). Just as important as this passage’s direct invocation of
blood’s instrumental role, in Foucault’s formulation, is its equation of this role with martyrdom
and its assertion that the protestors will be made “example[s]” because of their defiance. Perhaps
more than any other passage in Dictee, this assertion calls out the logic of the sovereign power to
“kill or let live” that underwrites the epic impulse in the sections set in Korea and Manchuria.
While the soldiers who represent the South Korean state and who stake a claim to a Korean
nation detached from the symbolic power of blood may be disciplined, the punishment faced by
the protesters clearly speaks to the sovereign right to kill. In Foucault’s explications, this power

256
is distinguished from biopolitical power precisely because it is extreme and discontinuous.
Because of its discontinuous nature, this form of power makes “examples” of victims and seeks
to warn others against defying the sovereign, rather than training them through the gradual but
more continuous “normalizing” techniques that mark biopolitical regimes.
As this brief explanation indicates, martyrdom is a concept that is only viable in the context
of sovereign power. While individuals can certainly die in service to a biopolitical or
normalizing regime, such a regime finds it much more difficult, in Foucault’s assessment, to
exercise the sovereign right to kill. It is significant, then, that the notion of martyrdom itself is an
important aspect of the sections of the work set in Korea and Manchuria. The notion is
emphasized through a second appearance of the term in the italicized passage found in
Melpomene/Tragedy, which appears alongside further claims that protestors are being made
“examples”: “one who has chosen to defy and was to be set an example to be martyred an animal
useless betrayer to the cause to the welfare to peace to harmony to progress” (83; italics in
original). This passage is notable for its assertion that the martyred somehow lose their status as
humans, in the eyes of the state, and for its contention that they have betrayed “the cause” of
progress. Such a claim likely echoes the rhetoric of the rapidly modernizing state, and its
invocation of a litany of terms associated with Enlightenment logic (“welfare,” “peace,”
“harmony,” and “progress”) makes it notable in the larger context of Dictee, which clearly
addresses two different regimes of power but rarely engages the rhetoric attendant on the
transition from one to the other.
While this passage clearly operates within the context of South Korean state power, the
book also presents martyrdom within the context of the Japanese colonial government in
Clio/History. The passage in Clio/History, which presents the death of Yu Guan Soon, the young

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Korean nationalist captured by the Japanese, not only underscores the notion that significant
portions of the work can be seen as responding to sovereign power, but it also presents a direct
assertion of Korean nationalism that stands as one of the clearest expressions of the work’s epic
impulse: “Child revolutionary child patriot woman soldier deliverer of the nation. The eternity of
one act. Is the completion of one existence. One martyrdom. For the history of one nation. Of
one people” (37). This passage not only depicts Yu Guan Soon’s death as an act of martyrdom,
but it associates that death with a singular nation and a singular people. Such an association
clearly speaks not only to the sovereign power that exercises its “right” to kill Yu Guan Soon,
but also to the totalizing impulse at stake in notions of the singular people.
While Min and Sakai have both offered provocative analyses of the significance of
martyrdom in Dictee, neither has linked the notion of martyrdom to those of organic nationalism
or the desire to tell “the tale of the tribe.”
114
On the whole, moreover, the passages discussing Yu
Guan Soon’s patriotism and death have received less attention than the sophisticated ruminations
about form, memory, and the construction of history that also appear in Clio/History. These dual
impulses in the chapter, however, need not be separated, as Cha is clearly invoking notions of
martyrdom not only in the context of sovereign power, but in the context of modern theories of
signification and the constructed, discursive nature of historical “truth.”

114
Both critics, however, offer nuanced readings that connect martyrdom to conceptions of the social whole.
Following his assertion that Dictee presents a speaker whose “body refuses disappear and be forgotten” (30), Sakai
argues that the work “manifests an inclination toward the imagined dissolution of the corporal desistance” (38). In
light of this inclination, “we are urged to face the fact that the construction of the social imaginary of the nation is
tied to the issue of the imaginary treatment of one’s own death, of the erasure of the body that resists” (38). Such an
analysis relates the poorly disciplined body, via its dissolution, to the social whole, but does not address the work’s
epic impulse. In a reading that is more relevant to the one offered in this chapter, Min presents a traditional version
of the poet as a mediator between the Muses and the larger community (315). She then links “the figures of the poet
and the martyr,” both of whom, she contends, “privilege models of selfhood that are strongly bound to the past and
to the survival of the (in the case of the martyr, endangered) community; in both, the power of self-representation is
always necessarily related to the power to represent that which is larger than oneself—a past beyond the bounds of
individual memory, the identity of a community” (316). While this analysis clearly speaks to the work’s epic
impulse, it does not take into account the discontinuous nature of this impulse in Dictee, or the ways in which it is
complicated by the work’s emphasis on the body of the speaker.

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Indeed, the phenomenological interjections in the passage presenting Yu Guan Soon’s
martyrdom (“The eternity of one act. Is the completion of one existence”) point toward the
extended examination of history, memory, and fragmentary form that appears later in
Clio/History: “The decapitated forms. Worn. Marred, recording a past, of previous forms. The
present form face to face reveals the missing, the absent. Would-be-said remnant, memory. But
the remnant is the whole” (38). While critics have rightfully used these powerful meditations on
the passage of time and the remnant as “the whole” to assert that Cha does not essentialize
historical figures such as Yu Guan Soon, these readings have also effaced the Korean
nationalism that clearly motivates portions of the work. One can surely acknowledge the
representational sophistication of the work without going so far as to claim, as Kang does, that
“Cha writes not so much about the woman patriot, the experience of colonization or the
demarcation of Korea but the history-making, narrativizing apparatus around these historical
subjects and events” (“The ‘Liberatory Voice’” 80). A more accurate assessment might indicate,
however, that Cha both writes about “these historical subjects and events” and demonstrates a
keen awareness of “the history-making, narrativizing apparatus” around them. This chapter has
focused on the passages of the work that emphasize the former type of writing because these
passages are essential to an understanding of the tension between different modes of belonging
that motivate the work, but also because these passages have received less attention from critics.
“You are one same particle”
Much more could be said about disciplinarity, violence, and nationalism in both Dictee and
in South Korea. Indeed, it is noteworthy that both the authoritarian state and the pro-democratic
Minjung movement, which frequently protested the state’s policies and practices, promoted
strong forms of nationalism in the 60s and 70s. Cha’s method of representing otherwise little-

259
known figures, such as her mother, in the context of larger historical events, along with her
depiction of Yu Guan Soon as a patriotic hero, resembles the Minjung practice of “offering
opposing and alternative meanings to those given by the state and established scholarship,” with
the intent of reshaping “the role of events and persons and the nature of the political community”
(Namhee Lee 6). It is important to note, however, that dissident intellectuals, like those of the
establishment, promoted a nationalism that was deeply androcentric and patriarchal.
115
In its
emphasis on agentive females, then, Cha’s nationalism stands out against that of both the state
and its detractors.
Just as important, for the sake of this argument, is that the militarized violence perpetrated
by the South Korean state against its own citizens in the second half of the 20
th
century allows
Cha to present a form of nationalism that resonates strongly with Foucault’s account of the
symbolics of blood. This nationalism is also evident, as we have seen, in Calliope/Epic’s
depiction of the speaker’s mother and other exiled Koreans residing under a colonial Japanese
government in Manchuria. The nationalism represented in these sections aligns them with
notions of premodern organicism that can be seen as connected to conceptions of epic. These
sections stand in stark contrast, then, to those set in the West and emphasizing the travails of the

115
Moon provides a powerful account of “the androcentric subtext of the official nationalism authored by President
Park,” state officials, and “state intellectuals working in or affiliated with … state-sponsored research organizations”
in the 60s and 70s (“Begetting the Nation” 39). This “official nationalism” emphasizes the “the continuous necessity
to defend the Korean nation” and thus “masculinizes it by linking citizenship to soldiering” (“Begetting the Nation”
43). As a result, the “official nationalism constructs the nation as a community of men in which women are
marginalized as domestic reproducers of heirs and warriors” (“Begetting the Nation” 54). Although the dissident
Minjung movement offered a powerful form of opposition to the sanctioned discourses of the state, Sheila Miyoshi
Jager argues that “a primordial anxiety about paternity” underlies “both student dissident and State discourse” (xiv).
Because the two forms of nationalism share this commonality, “ideas about the loss of fatherhood/manhood and its
idealized ‘recovery’ in the paternalistic image of Kim Il Sung—seen in student dissident nationalist discourse …
[are] matched only by that same concern for ancestors and paternal legitimacy evinced by the State’s preoccupation
with its ancestral national legitimacy” (xiv). As this invocation of “ancestral national legitimacy” intimates, both the
State and the student dissidents also promoted an organic form of nationalism. As Gi-Wook Shin notes, “Although
the government and student dissident intellectuals in Korea disputed the definition of nation, they hardly disagreed
over its ethnic element. All ‘naturalized’ nationhood by claiming that the Korean nation had existed since time
immemorial with its traditions passed down intact” (“Nation, History, Politics” 164).

260
body as a language machine in ways that subvert assumptions of the autonomous subject
associated with the lyric and the novel.
While Dictee is in some ways defined by this tension between two modes of belonging, one
predicated on notions of organic nationalism and the other on liberal individualism, the work
looks beyond this binary in two significant instances. The work moves beyond these modes of
belonging, in both instances, by interrogating and undermining the logic by which identity is
constructed by nation-states, whether they operate by methods and rationales associated with
Foucault’s “juridico-sovereign” regimes, relying on brutality and the symbolics of blood, or by
means of “normalizing” techniques that shape both autonomous individuals and the larger
population they constitute, with an eye on economic productivity. The most extended critique of
the logic of identity is found at the conclusion of Calliope/Epic, when the speaker returns to what
appears to be South Korea, though, significantly, the country itself is never specified. In this
homecoming, of sorts, the speaker engages notions of belonging operative in both the U.S. and
her country of birth. Her powerful meditations on the dynamics of belonging in the latter can be
seen as a response to the organic nationalism presented in the opening of Calliope/Epic, one that
gestures toward a notion of identity based on the body, rather than blood or language, but a body
that is both constructed and complete in its singularity, rather than one that, because of its
difference, is in need of normalization by disciplinary techniques.
The other critique of the logic of identity takes place near the conclusion of the untitled,
opening section, which, as we have seen, links the body to language production in powerful ways
and engages the notion of subjective interiority and autonomy through its subversion of the
confession as a mode of disclosure of the “truth” about oneself. Less emotionally charged than
the passage that concludes Calliope/Epic, but still not disengaged or apathetic, this critique is

261
elegant in its simplicity, listing the terms by which identity is often constructed, before gesturing
toward “a third thing” (“Tertium Quid”) that is not so easily identified:
From A Far
What nationality
or what kindred and relation
what blood relation
what blood ties of blood
what ancestry
what race generation
what house clan tribe stock strain
what lineage extraction
what breed sect gender denomination caste
what stray ejection misplaced
Tertium Quid neither one thing nor the other
Tombe des nues de naturalized
what transplant to dispel upon (20)
This passage resembles a brief, modern or contemporary lyric in its layout and irregular lineation
and meter. Demonstrating none of the interiority frequently associated with lyric subjectivity, the
poem does not rely on the lyric “I” but instead presents a relatively impersonal catalogue of
terms that, nevertheless, builds to an affective crescendo, of sorts, in the final three lines.
These closing lines are powerful because they represent a departure from (and return to) the
anaphoric structure that dominates the opening ten lines, all of which present the interrogative
adjective “what” in conjunction with a noun or nouns freighted with taxonomic meaning. Indeed,

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many of the terms invoked are associated with traditional kinship relations, including three
references to “blood” in the space of two lines: “what blood relation / what blood ties of blood.”
This redundancy of “blood” calls attention to itself and may speak to the importance of blood in
later sections, particularly Melpomene/Tragedy.
Although the poem moves on to other terms, a number of these terms, such as “ancestry,”
“clan, and “tribe,” speak to modes of belonging based on kinship and associated with premodern
social formations. Other terms operate on different planes of social categorization, invoking
“race” and “generation,” or the generation of race, perhaps, as well as “gender” and
“denomination,” which may speak to categorization by religious belief, and “caste.” In a work
that subverts patriarchal norms through the representation of women as vital agents of
nationalism, it is perhaps surprising that this poem contains only one reference to classification
by gender. The absence of any terms speaking to economic or political modes of classification,
such as “class” or “party,” is less surprising, however, in a work that avoids terms such as
“communism” and “capitalism,” as well as any references to economic stratification, even
though much of the work is clearly affected by Cold War geopolitics.
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The term “caste” does speak to a notion of social and economic class, of course, but this
term also invokes a sense of rigid classification by birth right that makes it seem more
appropriate to premodern social formations. If “caste” reinforces the sense that the poem is
addressing modes of classification associated with traditional societies, the term itself also sets

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As Kang notes, Cha’s approach in Dictee can run the risk of “dissolving the specificities” of Korean history:
“Even the deeply moving account of the emigrant’s return to a still divided and violence-filled Korean homeland
and her repudiation by local residents and officials in Dictee tends towards a level of abstraction, wherein the
complicated and unequal international and domestic economy that undergirds the entire return experience is not
considered” (“Re-Membering Home” 279). It is notable, as well, that while Cha is not hesitant to name the Japanese
as colonizers and oppressors in Clio/History and Calliope/Epic, she makes no mention of the U.S. in the depictions
of protests against South Korea’s American-backed governments in Melpomene/Tragedy. The section asserts that
“we are severed in Two by an abstract enemy an invisible enemy under the title of liberators who have conveniently
named the severance, Civil War. Cold War. Stalemate” (81). Such a statement clearly invokes the U.S., and perhaps
the USSR, as well, but its avoidance of proper nouns is conspicuous.

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the prosodic foundation for the poem’s dramatic turn away from these terms of classification, as
“caste” rhymes obliquely but powerfully with “misplaced” in the following line. This strong end
rhyme draws attention to the poem’s tenth line, but its effect is enhanced by the metrically
clumsy pile-up of nouns in line nine (“what breed sect gender denomination caste”) and the
relatively smooth unfurling of the tenth line, which opens with two iambs and closes with an
anapest that suspends the final word, momentarily: “what stray ejection misplaced” (20).
This rhyme and the metrical resolution of the tenth line bring the catalogue of taxonomic
terms to an end, one that’s emphasized by the continued use of the anaphoric structure (“what”)
in conjunction with terms that clearly speak not to categorization, but to its failure (“stray
ejection misplaced”). While the final three lines turn away from this taxonomic logic, they also
represent a departure in terms of the poem’s rhetorical and prosodic effects. While “caste” and
“misplaced” call attention to themselves, as pairs of a masculine end rhyme that appear in
successive lines, the opening ten lines, as whole, can be seen as a single unit that coheres not just
by its use of anaphora and its focus on concepts of taxonomic identification, but also by its sonic
reliance on assonance and half-rhymes among line-ending words (“nationality” / “ancestry”;
“relation” / “relation” / “generation”) (“strain” / “caste” / misplaced”).
The final three lines move away from the sound structure of the poem’s first ten lines, and
this sonic departure reinforces the sense that poem is venturing into new conceptual territory, as
well. This departure is also registered, perhaps even more dramatically, by introduction of two
other “tongues,” Latin and French, in a poem that has thus far been composed in English. These
lines elaborate on the failure of taxonomic logic announced by the “stray ejection misplaced,”
presenting a “Tertium Quid” that falls outside this logic but does so, significantly, by negation,
being “neither one thing nor the other” (20). As such, the term may aspire to the type of

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ontological solidity found in Agamben’s “quodlibet ens,” or “whatever being.” “The Whatever
in question here,” Agamben contends, “relates to singularity not in its indifference with respect
to a common property (to a concept, for example: being red, being French, being Muslim), but
only in its being such as it is. Singularity is thus freed from the false dilemma that obliges
knowledge to choose between the ineffability of the individual and the intelligibility of the
universal” (Coming Community 1, italics in original). The “false dilemma” that Agamben
discusses resonates distinctly with the two modes of belonging interrogated in Dictee, one
deriving from notions of the autonomous, self-identical, “normalized” individual and the other
from ideals of an organic social whole. The negative definition, however, of Cha’s “Tertium
Quid,” which is defined by what it is not, may align it more closely with Derrida’s formulation
of the “new International.” As we have seen, this “new International” is defined by what it
lacks—or is without—rather than what it contains: “without coordination, without party, without
country” (Specters of Marx 107). As such, Derrida’s “new International” evokes a denial of
belonging more than an affirmation of participation.
If this sense of denial is also evident in Cha’s enunciation of the “Tertium Quid,” the final
two lines do little to diminish it, in part because they constitute the most ambiguous and
“difficult” lines in the poem. Though relatively opaque, however, the lines clearly do not evoke
an affirmative sense of singularity released from the “false dilemma” that Agamben describes.
Rather, they convey a sense of loss and displacement, as the poem’s anaphoric structure returns,
not to present another traditional taxonomic term, but a new, perhaps innately hybridic, one, the
“transplant.” Significantly, this new category is the only one attached to the interrogative
adjective “what” that stands as object—as something “to dispel upon.” This phrase itself is
marked by an irreducible opacity, but it carries a powerful sense of dissipation or dispersal that is

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made active by its form as an infinitive linked with the preposition “upon,” as if making the
transplant, perhaps, disappear.
This sense of dark ambiguity is only heightened by the poem’s penultimate line. The
French “tombe des nues” that opens the line “is itself unclear,” in Krista Genevieve Lynes’
assessment, “referencing both the act of being surprised and the join between falling and death”
(np). This vertiginous nexus of associations is, significantly, linked with the concept of
naturalization, though the link itself also unclear, as Lynes notes: “The word “de” can be a
French preposition or a negation of the following English word (hence ‘de-naturalized’)” (np).
While this line and the poem’s final one clearly resist the imposition of any fixed, stable
meaning, taken together, they complicate and perhaps call into question whatever positive
associations might be attached to the “Tertium Quid,” which leads not, it seems, to a liberation
from traditional notions of identity, but to a dissipation of identity per se.
An acknowledgement of the dark overtones of the poem’s conclusion should not detract,
however, from an appreciation of its larger importance in relation to some of the dominant
themes found in Dictee. Indeed, “From A Far” can perhaps best be seen as a performative
enactment of these themes. Mimicking the form and appearance of a conventional modern lyric,
the poem develops by means of recognizable rhetorical and prosodic devices. Rather than
presenting any type of the subjectivity so often associated with the lyric form, however, the
poem catalogues a number of terms (“blood,” “ancestry,” “clan,” “tribe”) that would traditionally
form the basis for an organic totality associated with epic. These terms themselves are
interrogated by the poem, however, presented not as certainties but as questions that receive no
answers and not even the terminal punctuation marks that would verify their status as questions.
In filling the lyric shell with a schematized and estranged version of the concepts often seen to

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underwrite epic, the poem itself performs the subversion of identity categories, on the level of
genre, that it addresses in its content. The poem thus constitutes a bravura distillation of the
book’s larger impulses, presenting a work that engages notions of generic participation at the
level of both form and content.
Whereas “From A Far” makes a lyric out of concepts often seen to form the basis of a
larger social whole, the passage that concludes Calliope/Epic directly engages notions of
belonging at stake in both the U.S. and South Korea. Composed in prose that is relatively
straightforward but frequently quite charged, this passage does not subvert taxonomic logic on
the level of form, as “From A Far” does, but it powerfully represents the obstacles to belonging
faced by the speaker in each respective locale. In doing so, the passage may be seen to represent
the particular subjectivity of the speaker in ways that would typically be associated with the
lyric. It is significant, however, that this subjectivity is not expressed in a vacuum, at the
conclusion of Calliope/Epic, or in a setting implicitly presented as outside of political pressures,
and thus “timeless,” but in relation to the demands of larger social formations.
Although naturalization is an important, if opaque, element of “From A Far,” it figures
even more prominently in the passage that concludes Calliope/Epic. The entire passage can be
seen, in fact, as an extended meditation on the psychological effects of naturalization, for the
speaker, or an exposition, perhaps, of the impossibility of “de[-]naturalization.” If such
denaturalization is impossible, however, the speaker’s confrontation with this impossibility leads
to formulations that resemble the one found in the “Tertium Quid” but that are even more
powerful, offering the possibility of an affirmation of participation that is shorn of modalities of
belonging that are always potentially exclusive.

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It is significant, of course, that this meditation on the impossibility of “denaturalization”
and implicit acknowledgement of the limitations of traditional forms of belonging occurs at the
end of Calliope/Epic. As we have seen, the section opens with an extended and often moving
depiction of the speaker’s mother, whose connections to the larger Korean nation are seen to be
both immutable and indelible. This opening presents the most powerful formulation of organic
nationalism found in Dictee, and the mother is represented as belonging to the larger nation by
means of her blood, language, and mah-uhm.
The conclusion of the section presents the means by which the speaker belongs, as a
naturalized citizen, to the U.S., and the contrast between the respective situations of the mother
and daughter could not be more stark:
I have the documents. Documents, proof, evidence, photograph, signature. One day you
raise your hand and you are an American. They give you an American Pass port. The
United States of America. Somewhere someone has taken my identity and replaced it
with their photograph. The other one. Their signature their seals. Their own image. And
you learn the executive branch the legislative branch and third. Justice. Judicial branch. It
makes the difference. The rest is past. (56)
Rather than “the mark of belonging” that the mother carries and that integrates her into the “all
of you who are one,” the speaker at the end of Calliope/Epic belongs not only to a different
nation-state, but she belongs on very different terms. Whereas the mother’s mark of belonging is
not only immutable—operating “By birth. By death. By blood”—but also internal, carried in her
“spirit-heart,” which is represented by a transliterated Korean term (“MAH-UHM”) that
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identity, the speaker has paperwork, “documents,” that establish her identity and constitute the
basis for a sense of belonging to the U.S.
As the passage makes clear, this sense of belonging is not felt to be very strong. The
passage opens with a first-person declaration, which is significant, as we shall see, because much
of the remainder of the passage, which describes the speaker’s return to South Korea, will rely on
second-person formulations that lend a powerful ambiguity to notions of identity. The first-
person statement in the paragraph above, however, is immediately related not to a “you,” but to a
“they,” in formulations that are, if not antagonistic, implicitly oppositional. Nowhere is this
opposition seen more clearly than in the speaker’s powerful presentation of her own diasporic,
postmodern condition: “Somewhere someone has taken my identity and replaced it with their
photograph” (56). While the opening of this statement evokes the impersonal bureaucracy of the
state, in which decisions that are vitally important to people are made by “someone somewhere,”
the actions undertaken here are presented as leading not just to the loss of the speaker’s identity,
but to its transmutation into something else entirely, a representation, and one that does not
belong to her, but is, instead, “their photograph” (56).
The sense of dispossession is powerful in this formulation. If much of this power derives
from the statement’s transition from the evocation of a vaguely impersonal, bureaucratic
structure, in which “someone somewhere” does something, to one that explicitly opposes
possessive pronouns, so that the “my” is effectively overwritten by the “their,” with no common
ground joining the two, it is important to note that the statement does posit the existence of a
stable “identity” existing before the imposition of not just “their photograph,” but “their
signature their seals. Their own image” (56). In this way, Dictee distinguishes itself from many
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the text itself would seek to demonstrate and perform this destabilization. If Dictee engages in
similar performances, at times, it gains its remarkable affective power from its representation of
this destabilization as one predicated on loss, which cannot be understood outside of larger
historical and political events, rather than one prescribed by the dominant theorists of the
Western metropoles.
To be sure, this notion of a stable identity that has been overwritten by “their own image”
occurs only briefly in the final pages of Calliope/Epic. The speaker’s identity is represented
much more simply, too, than that of the mother in the section’s opening pages, as we have seen.
Yet the section’s invocation of a stable identity, even one that exists only to be effaced by “their
own image,” invariably calls to mind the mother, whose identity is represented as inherently
stable and eminently legible. Indeed, the mother’s identity is figured as not just a function of
language, but as equivalent to it, with the “mother tongue,” even though banned, “being who
[she is]. Truly” (46). The speaker’s situation at the end of Calliope/Epic is far less dire, no doubt,
as she is not at risk of losing her life because of her identity (or loss thereof), but her relative
physical security should not obscure or diminish the profound implications of her situation.
117

Some of these implications are explored in more detail in the following paragraph’s
description of the speaker’s return to South Korea. Clearly set in an airport, likely at a customs
gate, the passage presents the effects of the speaker’s condition as a result of the “papers” by
which her identity has been overwritten: “You return and you are not one of them, they treat you
with indifference. All the time you understand what they are saying. But the papers give you
away. Every ten feet. They ask you identity. They comment on your inability or ability to speak.

117
While these implications, as presented in the chapter, are primarily psychological in nature, Cha’s safety may not
have been absolute in this situation. As Constance Lewallen notes, when Cha made her last visit to South Korea, in
late 1980, martial law had been declared, and “there was a real sense of danger. Cha and her brother were harassed
by suspicious South Korean officials who thought they might be North Korean spies” (10).

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Whether you are telling the truth or not about your nationality” (56). The opening sentence
clearly lays out the speaker’s isolation, as she is again opposed to a collective rendered in the
third person, though she now represents herself in the second person: “You … are not one of
them.” A rift opens up here, as well, in relation to language; the speaker can understand what’s
being said, perhaps about her, but is subjected to comments about her own facility as a speaker.
This distinction calls to mind Aristotle’s qualification about slaves, who are able to understand
logos, but not able to produce it (1254b.22-23), and speaks to the broader power dynamics
inherent in the situation. The guards interrogating the speaker in this passage may not be
reducing her to a non-human status, as Aristotle does with slaves, but the possession of language
is clearly a factor in her reception, contributing to the sense that that she is “not one of them,”
and leading naturally, it seems, to questions about her nationality. Though Cha nowhere specifies
that she has returned to South Korea, it is evident that the language that served as one of the
bases for her mother’s indelible identity is now a decisive factor in her own sense of isolation.
Underlying this rift, of course, is a disjunction between assumptions about ethnic
appearance, linguistic facility, and national identity, which is made clear as the passage
continues. Again, it is a “they” who scrutinizes a “you” in the passage: “They say you look other
than you say. As if you don’t know who you are. You say who you are but you begin to doubt”
(57). The effacement of the speaker’s identity by one “they,” the American one that has replaced
it with “their photograph,” is thus carried further by another “they,” whose questions undermine
whatever remains of it. Though this passage is ambiguous, in its use of pronouns and its
avoidance of proper nouns, it carries the sense that the remnants of the speaker’s original
identity, the one overwritten by American documents, are being effaced as much as her new,
naturalized status. As the passage makes clear in the next few sentences, moreover, the members

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of this “they” who isolate the speaker and undermine what remains of her identity are
empowered to do so: “They search you. They, the anonymous variety of uniforms, each division,
strata, classification, any set of miscellaneous properly uni formed. Their authority sewn into the
stitches of their costume” (57). The derisive reference to the “costume[s]” of the officials lays
bare the speaker’s indignation and sense of helplessness.
While the passage does not offer more details about the officials, it makes clear that they
are “authorized” agents of the state. If Melpomene/Tragedy locates a conflict between forms of
nationalism, with one form represented by agents of the state who have moved beyond “their
own line of blood” and the other by those who shed their blood in protest of the state, and can
thus be seen as connected to the organic nationalism that marks the work’s depiction of the
mother in the opening pages of Calliope/Epic, this conflict seems decided, in closing pages of
Calliope/Epic. In Cha’s representation of the speaker’s “homecoming,” the agents of the state
have absolute authority, with the implicit acknowledgement that the state is coextensive with the
nation.
In light of this development, whatever connection the speaker may have still felt for the
“Korea” of her mother is rendered invalid. As a result, it is possible to see a chasm open up
between the two parts of a question the guards present to her, repeatedly: “Every ten feet they
demand to know who and what you are, who is represented” (57). Cha presents the two parts of
this question side by side, without a conjunction, as if they can they can stand in apposition, but
in the larger context of the events depicted at the end of Calliope/Epic, this presentation seems to
call out the extent to which the speaker may, in fact, have wanted to believe that they would
require different answers. Regardless of whether she believes that “who and what she is” should
be seen as different from “who is represented,” however, it is evident that, to representatives of

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the state she encounters upon her return, the second part of the question is the only one that
matters, as it determines the first.
If such a reception is traumatic for the speaker, she does not dwell on it, but launches into
an extended meditation about what she perceives on her return: “You see the color the hue the
same you see the shape the form the same you see the unchangeable and the unchanged the same
you smell filtered edited through progress and westernization the same you see the numerals and
innumerables bonding overlaid the same, speech, the same” (57). What is perhaps most
remarkable about this lengthy, impassioned sentence is that the second person pronoun, which
has appeared frequently in passages describing the speaker’s return, now does double duty, so to
speak, serving as both a subject and object of the clauses strung together in rapid-fire succession.
Appearing four times after the article and adjective “the same,” “you” both starts the next clause
and stands as the object of the preceding one. The ambiguity of these constructions seems
irreducible, a calculated contortion of language to convey both the speaker’s awareness of
herself, in the eyes of others, and to express a continuity with her former identity. Even “filtered”
and “edited” by “progress” and “westernization,” the speaker sees and smells the “same you.”
Such a gesture may seem to indicate that the speaker is redoubling her efforts to be seen as
something other than the photograph on her passport, or “their own image,” but it is important to
note that her assertions of her identity not only allow for change, as her reference to
“westernization” makes clear, but they also do not hinge on the same innate qualities that are
presented as integral to the mother’s identity. “Speech” is invoked, near the sentence’s end, but
not the “mother tongue.” The other qualities specified are also more open-ended, such as “the
color the hue.” While the “color” of a person has long been used in the construction of
oppressive taxonomies, Cha’s lack of specificity in her invocation of the term does not lend itself

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to this type of construction. Perhaps more important, the qualities invoked are not related to the
terms presented in “From A Far” and seem untethered from any conception of identity formed by
“blood relation.”
The passage continues in a similar vein, indicating what the speaker sees, but using
shorter sentences and not relying on the notion of something being the “same,” until the word
returns in a powerful formulation: “You see the will, you see the breath, you see the out of breath
and out of will but you still see the will. Will and will only espouse this land this sky this time
this people. You are one same particle” (57). Whereas the previous statement dealt largely with
observable qualities, such as “color,” “hue,” “shape,” and form,” before moving into more
abstract formulations, such as “the numerals and innumerables bonding overlaid,” this statement
begins by focusing on things that don’t seem readily visible, such as “breath” and “will.” Playing
with the multiple meanings of the term “will,” which stands as a term for intention or desire and
as a modal, future tense verb, the statement then proceeds to make a vow, of sorts, to her present
surroundings.
If the speaker desires to espouse “this people”—who are never explicitly specified—her
desire is located only in its deictic insistence (“this,” “this, “this”), and not in any universal
qualities by which the people, time, or place might be known. Far from simply being an
experimental technique—one that might place her approach in league with Ashbery’s assessment
of Stein as a writer of “a general, all-purpose model which each reader can adapt to fit his own
set of particulars”—her in-descriptive description moves toward a singularity predicated upon no
qualities, much like Agamben’s quodlibet ens (“The Impossible” 251). The very “this-ness” of
her moment is underscored, moreover, by her own participation as “one same particle.” Not even
a person, the category that stands at the head of the most basic taxonomic hierarchy, but a

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part(icle) of “this land this sky this time this people” (57), and one whose participation is not
contingent on any recognized form of belonging.
Coming full circle, in terms of the interpretive paradigm foregrounded in this chapter, the
paragraph closes with a turn to the body. Neither innately Korean by virtue of its blood or mah-
uhm nor struggling to produce language, this body represents an unexpected conflation of the
corporal and the terrestrial, a merging of organs and infrastructure: “To claim to reclaim, the
space. Into the mouth the wound the entry is reverse and back each organ artery gland pace
element, implanted, housed skin upon skin, membrane, vessel, waters, dams, ducts, canals,
bridges” (57). In asserting this reclamation of “the space,” Cha envisions a civic-cyborg body
that is partially organic yet not organicist, that contains water, rather than blood, and that is a part
of “this land” as much as the land is a part of it.
“I have waited to see you for long this long”
In concluding with these passages, I do not mean to imply that they are somehow
representative of Dictee as a whole. Indeed, if Dictee is a text that “defies categorization,” as
Lowe indicates, then nominating any element of it as representative of the larger work seems a
dangerous endeavor. Such a danger may speak, however, to the larger risk of trying to analyze a
work as heterogeneous and complex as Dictee. This chapter has attempted to pull back from
issuing universalizing claims about the entire text, because the text clearly seems designed to
thwart these claims. Rather than attempting to present generalizations about a text that thrives on
particularities and juxtapositions of differences, this chapter has instead isolated two thematic
tendencies that emerge in the work: the poorly disciplined body and the epic impulse.
Concentrating on these tendencies has resulted in a chapter that covers a range of passages and

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reads deeply in a number of the work’s sections, but that also makes no pretense to presenting an
exhaustive overview of the work.
As an indication of the work’s variety and capaciousness, it might be noted that the final
passages discussed above should not even be taken to indicate that Calliope/Epic ends happily,
or with some reciprocity of the speaker’s rousing espousal of “this land” and “this people.”
Instead, the section closes with the speaker nearly in tears, with her mouth “half open,” wanting
to say “I know you I know you, I have waited to see you for long this long,” before she is
dismissed from the customs gate (58). If Cha’s “espousal” is not shared by those whom she
initially encounters upon her return to South Korea, however, such a response does not indicate
that it is somehow less valid. It seems clear, in fact, that the psychological trauma she suffers
upon her return serves as a motivating factor in her bold gesture beyond all categories of
belonging. Much as Oppen is moved, at the height of despair, to “half-hope” that we might find
“draft animals” absolving us or, perhaps better still, indicating that “we do not altogether matter”
(NCP 174-75), Cha moves far beyond the parameters of belonging established elsewhere in her
text only when she is enduring her greatest disappointment.

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Chapter 6: “Not Like” “A Human Woman”: Alice Notley’s Speculative Epic

Suffering, but Without a Trajectory
Critics commonly refer to Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette (1992) as an epic poem.
The book’s publisher, Penguin, certainly encourages this designation for the work: the first line
of the book’s back copy proclaims the work a “feminist epic.” Immediately above this assertion,
a pull quote in a deep ochre ink, evocative of the hues found in cave paintings, deems Notley’s
poem “A rich odyssey of transformation in the tradition of The Inferno,” sneaking in a reference
to Homer while linking the work to that of its more obvious model, Dante. The rest of the jacket
copy also presses the issue of the work’s generic status. A brief but serviceable description of the
book’s content follows, stating that “Alette, the narrator, finds herself underground, deep beneath
the city, where spirits and people ride endlessly on subways, not allowed to live in the world
above,” a synopsis that clearly invokes the Divine Comedy, with its cosmological levels
transferred to the secular, urban landscape. The back copy then concludes with an assertion of
the book’s formal affinity with epic as an oral genre: “Using a new measure, with rhythmic units
indicated by quotation marks, Notley has created a ‘spoken’ text, a rich and mesmerizing work
of imagination, mystery, and power.” If the book’s content, then, evokes a notion of Dante’s
descent into the underworld and eventual movement up to Paradise, its predominant formal
device, the division of lines into poetic feet by means of a liberal sprinkling of quotation marks,
is presented as a way to return to the oral or spoken foundations of Homeric epic. Perhaps
surprisingly, critics have not only supported this claim for the work’s “‘spoken’” quality but
have done so in affirmations that sometimes transcend whatever reservations or qualifications
inhere in the jacket copy’s use of scare quotes to assert the work’s “‘spoken’” qualities.
118

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Zoë Skoulding contends that “the quotation marks used to score the poem’s lines return the poem to speech and
breath, and to the oral traditions from which epic poem stems” (91). Paige duBois asserts that Notley’s use of

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Although jacket copy, driven by a desire for sales more than any sense of critical rigor,
may not be a reliable guide for a literary work, Notley herself seemed to encourage the
categorization of poem as an epic by titling a 1995 talk about the poem “The ‘Feminine’ Epic.”
The actual content of the talk is less definitive, however, than the title itself. While it deals at
length with Notley’s desire to write an epic, the talk opens with a statement that obscures the
issue of the poem’s generic status: “This talk will mostly concern my book-length poem The
Descent of Alette” (171). If “book-length poem” is merely another, equally bland, way of
designating the “long poem” and thus distinguishing a work, as Peter Middleton notes, from the
shorter lyrics that have become associated with “poetry” per se following the rise of the novel, it
is significant that Notley goes to some length to distinguish The Descent of Alette not from the
shorter lyric, but from the long poem itself. In doing so, moreover, she invokes the “epic” as a
genre both related and opposed to the long poem: “I began to move toward the epic first out of a
sense of the twentieth-century ‘Big Poem.’ … But I started to be intrigued by the possibility of
telling a continuous story, not in the manner of Olson, Pound, Williams, but more in the manner
of Dante or Homer. Because it seemed more difficult; and I already knew how to negotiate
pieces. So many people in this century seem to” (“The ‘Feminine’ Epic” 171-72). While the final
element of this statement betrays a degree of long-poem fatigue that is understandable to anyone
who works with 20
th
century poetry, as well as a desire to stake a position, in Bourdieu’s sense,
outside the field constituted by canonical long poems based on the negotiation of “pieces”
(collage), the passage singles out continuous narrative as the element distinguishing epic from
the “Big Poem.”

quotation marks “returns poetry to breath, to the oral, to a poetry of not the page and eye but of the lungs and the
ear” (94). In Julia Bloch’s assessment, “the quotation marks signal the speech-based text of Notley’s epic”; Bloch
quickly qualifies her claim but does so in ways that maintain the poem’s connection to oral poetics: “the marks …
situate the poem within the orality of epic and within the textuality of historiography” (11).

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In a similar way, and echoing the book’s jacket copy, Notley distinguishes her project
from the long poem by means of its reliance on the “prosodic breakthrough” she had made in her
earlier poems Beginning With a Stain and “White Phosphorous,” both of which use quotation
marks to mark off phrases within the line. The opening page of The Descent of Alette provides an
example of how this device works in practice:
“One day, I awoke” “& found myself on” “a subway, endlessly”
“I didn’t know” “how I’d arrived there or” “who I was” “exactly”
“But I knew the train” “knew riding it” “knew the look of”
“those about me” “I gradually became aware—” “though it seemed

as that happened” “that I’d always” “known it too—” “that there was”
“a tyrant” “a man in charge of” the fact” “that we were”
“below the ground” “endlessly riding” “our trains, never surfacing”
“A man who” “would make you pay” “so much” “to leave the subway”

“that you don’t” “ever ask” “how much it is” “It is, in effect,”
“all of you, & more” “Most of which you already” “pay to
live below” “But he would literally” “take your soul” “Which is
what you are” “below the ground” “Your soul” “your soul rides”

“this subway” “I saw” “on the subway a” “world of souls” (3)
As her comments in “The ‘Feminine’ Epic” make clear, this formal device is central to Notley’s
epic aspirations, because she believes that it imparts a “regularity of line”: “With regard to the

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measure part, I don’t think you can write a real epic (as opposed to the twentieth-century Big
Poem) without some, even a lot of, regularity of line” (“The ‘Feminine’ Epic” 173). While one
might ponder how the insertion of quotation marks around quite variable feet, which include as
many four stresses (“I gradually became aware—”) or as few as one (“exactly”) and seem to
chop up the predominantly iambic rhythm of colloquial English (“But he would literally” “take
your soul” “Which is”), leads to “regularity of line,” Notley clearly believes the device to be
integral to the production of epic. Typically arranged in quatrains, the lines themselves, which
contain five to eight stressed syllables, though the majority (10 of 13) have seven or eight, attain
a type of visual regularity that may be striking to readers of modern free verse.
Significantly, she further contends that this regularity, however we construe it, also needs
to be “catchy” and “not some prosy long-line spinoff of what had come before,” flatly asserting
that she “wanted something all [her] own” (“The ‘Feminine’ Epic” 173). Such a desire,
commonplace long after the heyday of high Modernism and the Poundian imperative to “make it
new,” speaks to an attempt to distinguish, on the level of form, the author’s work in a crowded
field of long poems. As such, it enacts a conceptual appropriation of poetic prosody per se, as a
mechanism for generating a “regularity of line” associated with older and, in the case of epic,
communal, forms of poetry, by an individual contemporary author who seeks to distinguish
herself from her peers and forebears. Notley’s use of quotation marks demarcating ad hoc “feet”
within each poetic line can thus be seen to serve as a conceptual reminder of epic’s oral heritage,
rather than as a gesture of return to oral poetics, which would necessarily entail not only a larger
social function for poetry but also the communal (rather than aesthetic) autonomy of the prosodic
device itself, so that it could not be “all [her] own.”

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If the oxymoronic term “spoken text,” printed on the back of a mass-produced paperback
book, speaks to the formal tensions inherent in any modern or contemporary attempt to
appropriate elements of archaic epic, Notley’s further commentary on the prosodic device she
develops for the poem shows interesting methodological affinities with archaic epic. As her
comments indicate, Notley subsumes the prosodic breakthrough itself under the exigencies of
narrative development. In doing so, she not only links her work more closely to archaic Greek
epic than the simple deployment of an ad hoc prosodic device would seem to indicate, but also
aligns her work with the later and vastly influential Aristotelian conception of epic, which is
defined by its use of narrative as much by its reliance on a particular meter.
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“As I worked on
the first part of Alette,” she indicates,
the line of the previous two poems evolved into something I could depend on, not think
about, have to invent while I was inventing the story. I needed more freedom to tell the
story than a constantly changing metrics would allow me. Thus I arrived at, and stuck
with, a four-line stanza, each line of which consists of three to four feet or phrases” (“The
‘Feminine’ Epic” 173).
Conceived as a means to facilitate narrative representation, Notley’s prosodic device
recapitulates what is often seen to be a primary function of dactylic hexameter, which is to allow,
not so much memorization, but rather the fluid “recomposition-in-performance,” to use Nagy’s
term (25), of epic material by an oral poet performing before an audience. Such an affinity in the
function of formal conventions as compositional aids operating in service to the production of a
narrative does not, of course, collapse the written into the oral, even if oral recomposition itself is

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In Poetics 1447b, Aristotle dismisses the idea of classifying poets solely by the meters they use. Comparing
Homer and Empedocles, both of whom write in dactylic hexameter, he argues “but Homer and Empedocles have
nothing in common save the meter, so it is correct to call the one a poet and the other a natural scientist, rather than a
poet” (1447b 17-19).

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sometimes seen as a hybrid of the two approaches, nor does it elide the other primary difference
between Notley’s work and oral epic, which is that the oral poet’s story is already well-known to
both performer and listeners, while Notley’s is, like her prosody, her own distinctive invention.
Notley’s assertion that her prosodic device aids the composition of narrative does, however,
foreground the device precisely by subordinating it to the work’s narrative, which thus implicitly
stands as the primary quality distinguishing it as “epic.”
If Anglo-American modernism has made narrative less than appealing for many poets, as
Brian McHale has argued, there has certainly been no shortage of narratives in the larger field of
modern and contemporary English literature, long dominated by prose fiction. Notley addresses
the novel, as potential vehicle for narrative, only in passing in her talk, stating that she likes
“stories, though not so much in novels; I like them more in poetry, where they’re more
compressed and elegant, where the movement of the story is reinforced by the movement of the
lines” (“The ‘Feminine’ Epic” 174).
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Notley doesn’t contrast the different types of stories
typically associated with the epic, focusing on the “noble deed,” as Foucault notes, and the
novel, which deals in the “secret singularity,” or the equivalent representational approaches
associated with each genre, wherein the epic is seen to be “objective” and “exteriorized,” as
Auerbach contends, and the novel lends itself to more-nuanced and self-reflexive excavations of
the psyche. Rather, poetry is seen as preferable, in her estimation, because of its ability to move

120
Notley’s consistent use of the term “story,” rather than narrative, in her talk on feminine epic is significant and
calls to mind Benjamin’s important essay “The Storyteller,” which contrasts premodern modes of storytelling with
the novel and the even more distressing, for Benjamin, emergence of swiftly traveling journalistic “information.”
“What differentiates the novel,” he contends, “from all other forms of prose literature—the fairy tale, the legend,
even the novella—is that it neither comes form oral tradition nor goes into it” (87). Operating outside of the oral
tradition, the novel speaks to the alienation and atomization that mark capitalist modernity: “A man listening to a
story is in the company of the storyteller; even a man reading one shares this companionship. The reader of the
novel, however, is isolated, more so than any other reader” (100). To be sure, Notley doesn’t contrast “story” and
“novel” in such stark terms, but her frequent use of the term “story” can be seen to carry connotations of communal
longing, and this longing may also underwrite critical assertions of her prosodic return to oral poetics.

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quickly and deftly, a movement that’s heightened by the poetic line, which typically stops before
the right margin of the page.
These statements indicate a preference for poetic narrative that may be seen as personal,
more or less, and not founded on larger ideas regarding politics or aesthetics. Notley also
counterposes the poetic narrative to the novel, however, in ways that are more pointed and speak
to both the larger literary field of modernity and to the sexual politics that are foregrounded in
her notion of the “feminine” epic. Indeed, these gendered associations are inherent or latent in
commonplace conceptions of the epic, typically viewed as objective and masculine, and the
novel, often seen as relatively subjective and feminine.
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“I wanted,” she states, “and still want,
flatly, to write an epic—to take back some of what the novel has stolen from poetry and, further,
to avenge my sex for having ‘greatness’ stolen from it” (“The ‘Feminine’ Epic” 174). If Notley’s
avowal of epic desire is hedged, so that, in its expression of ongoing desire, it is unclear whether
she does not consider The Descent of Alette an epic, and thus “still want[s], flatly to write” one,
or believes the work to stand as an epic and simply desires to write another, the motivations
underlying this desire are quite clear.
Openly agonistic, Notley’s assertion of epic desire expresses an intention to avenge the
wrongs perpetrated against a genre and a gender, both of which have had things stolen from

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Ian Watt and Nancy Armstrong are two of the most influential exponents of arguments linking the novel with
women. Watt’s well-known argument is largely sociological, contending that the novel became prominent in
England, in the 18
th
century, when middle- and upper-class women had greater amounts of leisure but were still
largely restricted from political and business activities. As a result, their leisure was occupied by “omnivorous
reading,” which helped fuel the novel’s commercial popularity (44). In his discussion of Richardson’s epistolary
novels, Watt emphasizes their relation to “an essentially feminine … tradition of letter-writing” (193-94) and
contends that 18
th
century suburban life, “dedicated to an essentially feminine ideal of quiet domesticity and
selective personal relationships,” “could only be portrayed in the novel” and “found its first full literary expression
in the novels of Richardson” (187). If Watt’s second argument is equally sociological and theoretical, Armstrong’s
contains both of these poles as well, though it tilts strongly toward the latter, arguing that “domestic fiction mapped
out a new domain of discourse as it invested common forms of social behavior with the emotional values of women”
(29). This new domain of discourse is linked, then, to broader changes that accompany the decline of premodern
social systems, based on “a complex system of social signs,” and the emergence of the modern individual. In this
transition, she suggests, the novel, linked to new forms of emotional interiority associated with women, “produced a
language of increasing psychological complexity for understanding individual behavior” (253).

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them. As such, Notley’s desire to write an epic may be seen to reify binary divides that were
being questioned in other quarters in the 70s and 80s. Rather than attempt to judge the merits or
liabilities of her approach, however, it is perhaps sufficient to indicate that Notley’s project
clearly reflects an emphasis, often associated with Second Wave feminism, on the creation of
agency for women, rather than a desire to deconstruct gender categories and eliminate what
Wittig, following de Beauvoir, calls “the myth of woman” (268). Similarly, Notley’s interest in
epic runs counter to the roughly contemporaneous efforts of other well-known writers operating
within the Poundian “experimental” branch of American literature, who were actively
interrogating generic distinctions, producing poetic works in prose that subverted traditional
narrative devices. If Notley’s interest in epic runs counter to dominant avant-garde tendencies of
her day, however, this interest itself is inseparable from her concerns regarding women’s agency,
as her comments indicate.
Indeed, it is her realization that women lack agency in the “public” and specifically
martial arenas often associated with epic that inspires Notley to pursue work in the genre, even
though she feels ambivalent about her earlier attempts at larger-scale works. This realization, as
she tells it, is intimately bound up with the death of her brother, who had fought as a sniper in
Vietnam and returned home with “acute post-traumatic stress disorder” and “became heavily
addicted to drugs” (172). As is the case with Oppen and Cha, then, Notley’s epic aspirations are
inseparable from events that are deeply personal:
Then, the year afterwards, as my brother began to move toward his death, I began work
on a poem, “White Phosphorous,” which became his elegy. At this point I began to
grapple with the idea of a female or feminist epic—but not calling it that in my mind,
rather, an epic by a woman or from a woman’s vantage. Suddenly I, and more than

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myself, my sister-in-law and my mother, were being used, mangled, by forces which
produce epic, and we had no say in the matter, never had, and worse had no story
ourselves. We hadn’t acted. We hadn’t gone to war. We certainly hadn’t been ‘at court’
(in the regal sense), weren’t involved in governmental power structures, didn’t have
voices which participated in public political discussion. We got to suffer, but without a
trajectory (“The ‘Feminine’ Epic” 172).
As this quotation makes clear, Notley associates her interest in a feminist epic with a powerful
sense of exclusion from the public sphere, or an inability to have any “say” in large, civic issues,
such as the decision to go to war. While this sense of exclusion is presented via the prism of
gender, one wonders how much “say” her brother, or many of those who fought in the war, on
either side, believed they had. Oppen, as we have seen, fought in World War II, yet he repeatedly
asserts, in “Of Being Numerous,” that he is not able to speak—and thus has no “say”—in the
environment in which the poem is set. As his letters from the time of the poem’s composition
indicate, moreover, the war in Vietnam was precisely the central issue on which he believed
public speech was necessary.
To assert that exclusion from the public sphere may extend to many men in modernity,
who also suffer “without a trajectory,” is not to undermine or discredit the basis of Notley’s
interest in epic. Rather, this qualification of her assertion allows for a broader understanding of
the epic impulse in modern social structures dominated by economic liberalism and biopolitical
methods of control, in which the individual is “free” and enfranchised in a system that manages
“life” but effectively allows little agency, save voting for political candidates who represent
slightly different variations of the same elite corporate interests. In a broader sense, moreover,
Notley is certainly correct in arguing that conceptions of epic exclude women, and her comments

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can be seen to isolate broader gender norms, still prevalent in the West, that have historically
excluded women from the public arena. As Susan Stanford Friedman contended, in 1986, at
roughly the time Notley would have been working on “White Phosphorous,” the elegy for her
brother that stands as important precursor to The Descent of Alette,
[The] central contrasts between epic and lyric norms evoke wider gender codes that
permeate Western culture. The binary contrast between lyric and epic overlaps with the
dualistic patterns of patriarchal ideology. … Epic norms—public, objective, universal,
heroic—coincide with western norms for the masculine. Lyric norms—private,
subjective, personal, emotional—overlap with the concept of the feminine (205).
If these “epic norms” have largely been rendered obsolete in the literary sphere in modernity,
they still map onto “patriarchal ideology,” as Stanford Friedman indicates. Notley’s project, then,
may be seen as an attempt not to undermine the “dualistic patterns” that underwrite this ideology,
but to appropriate qualities long associated with masculinity for the “feminine” epic. In this way,
Notley’s work may be seen to exemplify Lynn Keller’s assertion that epic “lends itself to
revisionary myth-making” and “offers a logical venue for poets who wish to shift the female
subject from margin to center and enlarge their reader’s understanding of women’s agency and
powers” (304). In carrying out this “revisionary myth-making,” however, Notley necessarily
takes her work beyond any traditional, mimetic parameters for epic and, perhaps more
importantly, complicates the gender binaries that her epic intentions may, on the surface, be seen
to reify.
A Speculative Epic
As we will see, in the process of enlarging her “reader’s understanding of women’s
agency and powers,” Notley strongly allies the hero of her work, Alette, with a conception of the

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“natural” world. While androcentric Western worldviews have traditionally presented the
feminine as aligned with “nature”—so that the masculine can be associated with “culture”—
Notley pushes this alignment far enough that it erodes not only androcentrism but also the
implicit anthropocentrism that may be seen to underwrite it. In a text openly hostile to
Enlightenment values of instrumentalizing reason, Notley represents her eponymous hero as not
merely aligned with “nature,” in the form of a nonhuman animal, but as merging with it. This
“renaturalization” of the feminine, however, results not in a regression to the bestial but in the
emergence of a figure capable of destroying the “tyrant” who “owns enlightenment” and
represents instrumental reason itself. The “revisionary myth-making” propounded in The
Descent of Alette succeeds, in other words, because Notley depicts her hero as acquiring, under
the auspices of a totemic owl, powers that transcend those associated with the human. Not only is
her character eventually able to fly, but she also acquires “owl-eyes” and “[her] own talon.”
Perhaps most important, armed with these owl-attributes, she has a license to perpetrate violence
in ways that are seen, by her totemic owl guide, as “natural” and, therefore, morally just:
“‘You now have” “a talon,” “your own talon,’” he said” “‘You have
weapons—” “& your travail—” “with which to face him” “Your

weapons” “are moral” “They were given you” “by an animal”
“Manufactured” “by nature,” “were made by nature” “Not by”
“the human mind” “Not a rational” “device,” “not a vicious” “device”
“You are now part owl’” “He flew up” “& hovered” “before my face”

“Extended” “his bleeding claw” “& smeared” “a drop of blood”

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“on my forehead” “‘When the time come,” “think like me,’ “he said”
“‘Not like” “a human woman” “but like an owl’” (115)
As this passage indicates, Notley’s work clearly enters into the terrain of the post-human. Not
only does the owl itself have the capacity to speak, which complicates any traditional logocentric
basis of anthropocentrism, but the body of the poem’s hero cannot be seen as exclusively
“human.”
In representing a woman who takes on physical and, significantly, cognitive and even
“moral” attributes of a non-human species, Notley’s text exemplifies an imaginative instance of
“the new transversal alliance across species” that post-Deleuzian feminist Rosi Braidotti extols in
her work on post-humanism (103). Later sections of this chapter will investigate the implications
of this “transversal alliance,” reading Notley’s work within a broader tradition of eco-feminism
that denounces attempts, associated with masculinist logic, to transcend and dominate nature, as
well as examining the ways in which Notley’s use of this transversal alliance in opposition to
conceptions of masculine rationality can be read through Horkheimer and Adorno’s seminal
Dialectic of Enlightenment. As is well-known, Horkheimer and Adorno present the Homeric
hero Odysseus as a progenitor of bourgeois individualism and enlightenment rationality, in a
bravura reading that trenchantly flouts traditional historical periodization. Because The Descent
of Alette clearly engages notions of different “forms-of-life” within the context of a sovereign
tyrant, this chapter will also investigate the ways in which Agamben’s formulations of biopolitics
can elucidate Notley’s work.
Before beginning these analyses, however, it is first necessary to discuss briefly the
generic implications of Notley’s representations of talking owls and flying owl-women. Rather
than merely leading to pedantic distinctions, these generic implications are important because

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they affect our understanding of the work in relation to both epic and the long poem and
illuminate the ways in which Notley’s desire to create an epic leads her, paradoxically, into
terrain typically associated with romance, rather than epic strictu sensu. As we will see, however,
the work’s use of tropes and representational strategies associated with romance and the modern
genre of speculative fiction that is often seen to derive from it are precisely what allows her work
to succeed as an epic, of sorts, in a modern environment that is distinctly inhospitable to epic.
Indeed, if epic is impossible after the advent of the modern state, as Moretti claims (12), that
impossibility may stem from the strictures placed on representational verisimilitude that guide
not only Moretti’s considerations of epic but also those of his influential predecessor, Lukács, as
much as from the effects of the modern state itself. Notley’s departure from these strictures, then,
or her turn toward representational strategies associated with romance and “fantasy,” can be seen
as a way to approach epic in a world that, if reflected accurately, would necessitate depictions of
alienation and fragmentation that oppose (and, thus, perhaps underwrite) Lukács’ nostalgic
embrace of epic’s vision of organic totality.
As Notley’s representation of Alette’s encounter with the owl indicates, her work clearly
moves beyond the bounds of what Watt calls “formal realism” or representational verisimilitude
typically associated with the novel but also operative in many canonical long poems (32). While
long poems may include a great variety of materials from different sources, such as historical
writing, newspaper excerpts, and personal letters, that appear alongside writing that can be seen,
at some level, as autobiographical, or dealing with the poet’s physical and psychological
environment (and thus constituting Bernstein’s “collapse into lyric”), they typically don’t include
characters or events that would be designated “fantastic” or “supernatural.” As we will see,
however, the talking owl and Alette’s transformation into a character that is neither fully owl nor

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human woman constitute merely prominent examples of events and characters that operate, in
The Descent of Alette, outside the traditional frame of mimetic realism. Other notable examples
of such fantastic characters in the work include the “first mother” Alette seeks out on her
descent, who is headless but still alive and able to talk, and Alette’s adversary, the tyrant, who
controls nearly all aspects of life in the subterranean world Alette inhabits and has the power to
take on different shapes and appearances. While critics have described the work, in passing, as
“fantastical” and “phantasmagoric,” none have explored the implications of these qualities,
especially in relation to the broader claims regarding the work’s generic status (McCabe 279;
Bergvall np).
In more traditional taxonomies of genre, such as the influential one put forward by
Northrop Frye in the 1950s, fantastic characters and events are traits of medieval romance, which
is distinguished from both epic and the novel. Frye characterizes the epic as representing, along
with tragedy, “the high mimetic mode,” while the novel belongs to “the low mimetic mode” (34).
Deploying a schema based on Aristotle’s seminal comments about moral character of the
respective heroes of tragedy and comedy, Frye asserts that the hero in works belonging to the
high mimetic mode is “superior in degree to other men but not his natural environment” (33-
4).With this degree of superiority, such a hero “has authority, passions, and powers of expression
far greater than ours” but is still “subject to social criticism and the order of nature” (34). A hero
in the low mimetic mode, on the other hand, “is superior neither to other men nor to his
environment,” and is thus “one of us” (34). As Frye notes, in works that operate in this mode,
there can be “difficulty in retaining the word ‘hero,’ which has a more limited meaning among
the preceding modes” (34), and this difficulty itself seems an important component of Roy

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Harvey Pearce’s assessment of the modern long poem, which is marked by its attempt to forge a
“hero” from collaged fragments.
In contrast to these mimetic modes, the romance features a hero who is “superior in
degree to other men and to his environment” (33). While the actions of this hero may be
“marvelous,” the hero “is himself still identified as a human being” (33). This hero, however,
“moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended”; as a result,
“prodigies of courage and endurance, unnatural to us, are natural to him, and enchanted weapons,
talking animals, terrifying ogres and witches, and talismans of miraculous power violate no rule
of probability once the postulates of romance of have been established” (33). With the romance
mode we have moved, as Frye notes, “into legend, folk tale, märchen, and their literary affiliates
and derivatives” (33). While Notley’s work certainly doesn’t include every element that Frye
specifies for the romance mode, it clearly suspends “the ordinary laws of nature,” as we have
seen, and thus bears a strong relationship to romance as well as to epic.
As this chapter will demonstrate, the effects of this relationship are far-reaching. While
Frye’s schema engages primarily historical genres, such as the folk tale, science fiction and
fantasy can be seen as the modern manifestations of the “non-realistic” impulses that mark
romance. Taken together, the two genres are often considered under the rubric “speculative
fiction,” which commonly appears, in abbreviated form, as SF. As Gerry Canavan and Priscilla
Wald indicate, this designation speaks to the capaciousness of the larger rubric: “No category
ever achieves consensus, as is evident in the very term for science fiction and fantasy favored by
its writers, artists, and critics: speculative fiction or SF. The abbreviation in fact captures an
important lack of specificity about what constitutes the genre at all” (238; italics in original). As
open-ended as the genre may be, its primary distinguishing quality is a departure from the

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constraints of mimetic realism that mark what Canavan and Wald deem “the equally
multitudinous amalgam called ‘mainstream’ or ‘literary’ fiction, standing opposite SF with all
the obvious clarity of a hated enemy” (238). That contemporary works of SF derive from the
broader tradition of romance works is made clear by Margaret Atwood, one of the best-known
practitioners of SF, who asserts that “a work of science fiction or speculative fiction or scientific
romance is more likely to find its points of reference in the romance than in the socially realistic
novel” (516).
While both Canavan and Wald and Atwood are speaking about prose fiction, the generic
opposition they highlight—between ‘mainstream’ works that aspire to social realism and those
that explore more imaginative possibilities, be they based, ostensibly, at least, in scientific
possibility or in a realm that includes dragons, magic potions, and updated versions of romance’s
“knight errant”—can be fruitfully applied to work such as The Descent of Alette.
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Indeed,
Notley’s work eschews the constraints of verisimilitude precisely to carry out what Mark Bould
sees as a primary function of fantasy, which is to convey “the dreadful credibility of absurd
things.” In Bould’s estimation, “what sets fantasy apart from much mimetic art is a frankly self-
referential consciousness (an embedded, textual self-consciousness, whatever the consciousness
of the particular author or reader) of the impossibility of ‘real life,’ or Real life” (83; cited in

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This distinction, between works that can be seen as operating on the basis of scientific possibility and those that
rely on more “magical” or scientifically inexplicable events, essentially marks the critical divide between science
fiction and fantasy. This divide, it should be noted, is by no means stable, as definitions of “science” and “magic”
vary among different cultures, religions, and eras. Avoiding these problematic terms, Gary K. Wolfe affirms the
dominant critical approach to the genres, asserting that “it has become virtually commonplace in recent decades to
describe the difference between science fiction and fantasy as the difference between the possible and the
impossible” (217, n. 11). As is often the case in SF criticism, the influence of Darko Suvin’s concept of “cognitive
estrangement” is operative in this distinction. For Suvin, all SF is “estranged” from everyday world, but science
fiction operates on “cognitive” principles, while fantasy does not: “Estrangement differentiates [science fiction]
from the ‘realistic’ literary mainstream extending from the eighteenth century into the twentieth. Cognition
differentiates it not only from myth, but also from the folk (fairy) tale and the fantasy” (27). As this definition may
intimate, Suvin’s work often valorizes science fiction at the expense of fantasy, and this chapter will attempt to read
Notley’s work, which shows greater affinities with fantasy, against the grain of Suvin’s critical construct, examining
the “cognitive” implications of her usage of fantastic devices to create a counter-hegemonic “epic.”

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Canavan and Wald 242). Notley’s work not only represents this impossibility, but it can also be
seen, as this chapter will contend, as a self-conscious quest to restore the possibility of “real life”
for the modern inhabitants of the subterranean world dominated by the tyrant.
As such, the work can productively be read not just as an instance of fantasy or romance,
but, more specifically, as a “quest fantasy” that also presents a “critical dystopia.” These
categories are among the many that scholars of SF and utopian studies have developed with
considerable precision and care and no small amount of disagreement.
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For the purposes of this
study, however, the categories are valuable not because they allow for a more precise
categorization of Notley’s distinctive work—which does not, in fact, map perfectly on to the sub-
varieties of SF—but to the degree to which they allow us to understand how her work’s
incorporation and manipulation of elements of fantasy or romance can be seen as part of its
larger epic impulse. In other words, the ways in which Notley’s work does not conform to
critical notions of fantasy and romance can be as illuminating as the ways in which it does,
provided that the analysis of these aspects of the work is guided by an understanding of the
difficulties faced by any modern or contemporary poet attempting to create an epic.
As we have seen, the essentially Hegelian approach to genre promulgated by Moretti and
Lukács indicates that modern social structures are inhospitable to epic, but this approach is based
on assumptions of literary verisimilitude and is thus guided implicitly by assessments of the
society being represented by a literary work. A literary work that presents a “fantastic” vision of
society may, in fact, use elements of “non-realistic” writing to express notions of a social totality,
which is central to Lukács’ understanding of epic, that are not available to writers who seek to
represent their worlds faithfully. While it would be an overstatement to claim that The Descent of

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As the work of Jameson, Tom Moylan, Raffaella Baccolini, and others demonstrates, the fields of SF and utopian
studies often blur into one another. Such blurring is inevitable, as SF is the literary arena in which varieties of utopia
and dystopia are explored.

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Alette depicts a contemporary social totality, the poem, and particularly its first book, which is
set exclusively on a subway system, offers a sweeping vision of a world inhabited by those who
bear the brunt of the effects of late capitalism and its ideology of individual autonomy at the
expense of communitarian obligation: drug addicts, traumatized veterans, homeless mothers, and
women forced into sex work.
While aspects of Notley’s subway would likely be recognizable to most city-dwellers,
fantastic scenes enhance the power of many of her depictions, such as the appearance of a
mother and child who “were both on fire, continuously,” yet continue to live after the child is
removed by a woman “in a uniform” (10).
124
If Notley’s depiction of the subway can be
understood as an instance of the “world reduction,” or “process of ontological attenuation in
which the sheer multiplicity of what exists, of what we call reality, is deliberately thinned and
weeded out through an operation of radical abstraction and attenuation,” that Jameson finds in
the novels of Ursula K. Le Guin (Archaeologies 271), the “reduced” world that results also
operates outside “that tyrannical ‘reality principle’ which functions as a crippling censorship
over high art” (Archaeologies 270). As a result, the book can be said to represent an attenuated
totality that speaks to the effects of capitalism and its instrumentalizing logic on individuals, and
particularly women, in a modern city, but it does so via “unrealistic” representational strategies
that heighten the work’s dystopian power.
The dystopian qualities of the book are inseparable, in fact, from its departures from
“formal realism.” In this way, The Descent of Alette resembles other feminist dystopias of the
1970s, 80s, and 90s that Ildney Cavalcanti contends “display a more deviant relationship with
their referents when compared with realistic (mimetic) literary forms” (49). Appropriating the

124
For the sake of simplicity and legibility, all quotations of The Descent of Alette that appear in this chapter will
reproduce the text exactly, setting phrases within quotation marks as Notley does, rather than including them within
both double and single quotation marks, as would normally be done to signal a quotation within a primary text.

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linguistic and rhetorical terminology that Foucault analyzes in The Order of Things, in which
language usage conforms to “three fundamental figures: synecdoche, metonymy, and
catachresis” (49), Cavalcanti asserts feminist dystopias of this period are “overtly catachrestic
because they depict fictional realities that are, to different degrees, discontinuous with the
contemporary real (although such realities are drawn in relation to, and as a critique of, the world
as we know it)” (50; italics in original). Such formal discontinuity with “the contemporary real”
for the sake of social and political critique is essentially a type of “satiric exaggeration,” as Tom
Moylan points out (192), though Moylan also maintains, correctly, that literary satires and
dystopias need to be differentiated historically and formally (317, n. 14).
If the nightmarish realities of Notley’s subway scenes, depicting subway cars full of trash
and people on fire, for instance, can be seen as catachrestic critiques of “the world as we know
it,” it is important to point out that these scenes occur primarily in the poem’s first book. The
remaining three books follow Alette through a system of caves that extends beneath the subway,
into a dark lake and the tyrant’s mansion, and back onto deserted sections of subway, where
Alette finally vanquishes the tyrant. While these books contain many scenes as fantastic as those
that appear in the poem’s dazzling first book, the overtly critical, dystopian qualities of the
scenes are largely dissipated. Instead, the books chart the transformations Alette undergoes in
preparation for her final confrontation with the tyrant. Though many of these scenes are
distinctly strange, such as the dissolution of Alette’s body into a “a single small thing” “a cell of
‘I’ afloat” “on the / dark air” before she encounters “a strange mermaid” “a girl child” “with
tangled black hair” “who had a / man’s” “hairy chest” “& a fish’s” “lower body” (64), they
emphasize personal growth and engage or complicate notions of gendered and anthropomorphic
identities, as the hermaphroditic mermaid demonstrates, rather than catachrestic expressions of

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the suffering endured by those on the subway. The idea that Alette must both find the first
mother and kill the tyrant is introduced in the first book (7, 33), however, and remains in the
background as she progresses through the subterranean landscape.
As a result, the work as a whole operates like “quest novels” that, in Farah Mendelsohn’s
words, “almost always proceed in linear fashion with a goal that must be met” (xix). Indeed,
Notley’s work is distinctly linear and episodic, with each page of the text opening onto a new
scene, often beginning with a phrase (such as “I entered a car” or “I entered” “a cavern” (18; 79)
that indicates the speaker’s basic movement—which is always forward. If the work is “divided
into little parcels” rather than freely flowing, as Auerbach says in his description of medieval
chanson de geste (180), this stringing together of scenes, which are often vividly descriptive, as
we have seen, effectively makes the work a type of travel guide, which Mendelsohn contends is
the “purest form” of narration for a portal-quest fantasy. With this narrative technique, she states,
“we ride alongside the protagonist, hearing only what she hears, seeing only what she sees; thus
our protagonist (even if she is not the narrator) provides us with a guided tour of the landscape”
(xix). As we have noted, however, this travel through the landscape is motivated by a telos, and
these types of narratives “lead us gradually to the point where the protagonist knows his or her
world enough to change it and to enter into that world’s destiny” (xix). That Alette is able to
know her world well enough to change it not only marks the work, it should be noted, as a quest
fantasy, but also a critical dystopia, which is defined not only by the critique it levels against
existing social structures but by its portrayal of a way to change them.
125
This impetus toward

125
Lyman Tower Sargent defines the critical dystopia as “‘a non-existent society described in considerable detail
and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as worse than
contemporary society but that normally includes at least one eutopian enclave or holds out hope that the dystopia
can be overcome and replaced with a eutopia” (“U.S. Eutopias” n. 1, cited in Moylan 195). While largely agreeing
with Sargent’s definition, Tom Moylan places the critical dystopia in a broader historical continuum. In Moylan’s
estimation, “the dystopian genre has always worked along a contested continuum between utopian and anti-utopian
positions: between texts that are emancipatory, militant, open, and ‘critical’ and those that are compensatory,

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“imagined change,” in fact, is a central aspect of the function of SF, in Jameson’s estimation, that
stems directly from its ability to evade the “tyrannical reality principle which functions as a
crippling censorship over high art” (Archaeologies 270).
As this brief overview of The Descent of Alette in relation to critical conceptions of the
quest fantasy and critical dystopia indicates, Notley’s work freely incorporates techniques and
strategies that are not typically associated with “high art.” In doing so, the work can be seen to
mirror the hybridic approaches of dystopian works by women who, in Raffaella Baccolini’s
assessment, manipulate “genre conventions” and evince a “rejection of high/low culture
classification” (15). While Baccolini, like many of the critics in this chapter, only considers SF
novels, her analysis certainly holds as—if not more—true for Notley’s work, which seeks to
appropriate traits and techniques of pulp fiction to create epic poetry. Notley’s manipulations of
generic conventions can, then, be seen to participate in the larger “oppositional strategy” that
Baccolini finds in the dystopian novels she analyzes (15).
This strategy rests on the acknowledgement that literary genres are “cultural
constructions” that implicitly contain “a binary opposition between what is normal and what is
deviant—a notion that feminist criticism has attempted to deconstruct because this difference
consigns feminine practice to inferiority” (15). As this statement indicates, Baccolini’s
oppositional strategy may too easily elide generic hybridity with political activism, but her
claims are especially compelling in light of Notley’s desire to recapture, via a “feminine epic,”

resigned, and quite ‘anti-critical’ (188). Orwell’s 1984 would be example of latter type of text, invested more in
representing the nightmarish consequences of totalitarian state than it depicting the possibility of its overthrow.
While positing the historical basis of this “contested continuum,” Moylan also contends, significantly, that most
“critical dystopias” appear quite recently, “aris[ing] out of the emerging sociopolitical circumstances of the late
1980s and 1990s,” or the solidification of neoliberal ideologies associated, in the West, with Thatcher and Reagan.
Perhaps more important, Moylan’s discussion of these works derives largely from the feminist analyses of Baccolini
and Cavalcanti, and all of the work presented by these latter critics as “critical dystopias” are written by women.
Moylan seeks to isolate a more “abstract” critical impulse in these works but concedes the importance of feminism
to this critical category: “while I think a broader critical oppositional base informs such critical dystopias, a feminist
stance and methodology do lie at the heart of the political and formal innovations of this body of work” (191).

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what’s been stolen from both poetry and women. While Notley’s own critical statements evince
little concern with a desire to “deconstruct” anything, her actual practice may be more radical
than that of novelists who appropriate elements of SF or that of poets who attempt to frustrate
generic categorization entirely by writing disjunctive prose poetry.
If Notley’s un-reflexive avowals of epic desire belie a surprisingly transgressive practice,
it remains to be seen whether “imagined change” in such a fantastic landscape constitutes, on a
thematic level, a legitimate oppositional strategy. That such a question can even be asked about
the work speaks to the tensions inherent in Notley’s undertaking, because epic itself has often
been seen as a genre that represents the dominant ethos of a culture and celebrates the
foundational victories that allow this ethos to emerge. A counter-cultural epic, or an extended
poetic work that critiques rather than extols the virtues of its culture and seeks to enact (or
imagine) radical change upon them, goes against the grain of the genre, as it is commonly
conceived.
It is in an extended poetic work’s orientation to the dominant culture that is being
represented, in fact, that David Quint locates the distinction between epic and romance,
contending that epic is the form deployed by historical “victors,” while romance belongs to the
“losers” (9). “Put another way,” he asserts, “victors experience history as a coherent, end-
directed story told by their own power,” while “losers experience a contingency that they are
powerless to shape to their own ends” (9).
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If women can be seen as historical “losers” in a
patriarchal culture, then, Notley’s work would seem fated to become romance, and her comment

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Quint’s language of “victors” and “losers” evokes notions of opposed forces in armed conflict—as would be
appropriate for much epic—but it can easily be applied to a poet’s attitude toward his or her dominant culture, as
well, as Quint himself does when contrasting the pro-imperial Aeneid, which inaugurate the type of overtly
“politicized” epic that Quint analyzes, with Lucan’s bitterly Republican Pharsalia, a poem that contains, he
believes, seeds of romance (7-13).

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that women “g[e]t to suffer, but without trajectory” can be seen as succinct summary of what
Quint contends historical “losers” experience.
Implicit in Quint’s assessment, however, is the assumption of literary verisimilitude, or
the telling of a story shaped by historical events. To appropriate “the capacity to fashion human
history into narrative” that Quint attributes to epic (9), Notley necessarily turns to the realm of
the fantastic, to a subterranean world ruled by a seemingly omnipotent tyrant, which allows her
to shape her own ends and to provide a trajectory to the suffering of her characters, especially
that of her protagonist.
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As we have already seen, moreover, romance is also associated with
the supernatural and can be considered the progenitor of literary fantasy. In turning to the
fantastic to create a cohesive narrative, then, Notley is effectively appropriating one aspect or
inheritance of romance, its ability to operate outside Jameson’s “tyrannical reality principle,” to
add a teleological end to what would otherwise be the unremitting contingency that results from

127
The extent to which Notley’s epic aspirations are counter-hegemonic and thus necessitate a fantastic approach is
what ultimately distinguishes her work most strongly, in terms of genre, from that of the obvious epic predecessors,
Homer and Dante, that Notley herself mentions in “The ‘Feminine’ Epic.” Both the Divine Comedy and the
Odyssey, to be sure, trouble any assumptions about what constitutes “epic” literature. The Odyssey has long been
seen to contain narrative and thematic elements that anticipate romance. As Quint notes, “for Borges and Northrop
Frye, the wandering ship of Odysseus is the virtual emblem of romance” (34). John Dean locates the critical
assertions of the work’s affinities with what is now called romance even further back, with Aristotle and Longinus,
who “inadvertently defin[ed] some of the Odyssey’s romance characteristics” (228-29). However one construes its
relation to romance, Dante’s work is even more problematic in terms of genre, and Lukács effectively designates it,
in John Freccero’s apt summary, as both “the last epic and the first novel” (138). Because of its fantastic content, the
work has been claimed by some contemporary SF critics as a progenitor of science fiction. In Carl Freedman’s
words, Dante, like Milton, “creat[ed] rich, complex, but not ultimately fantastic alternative worlds” and thus “can be
said to write science fiction” (Freedman 15-6). While the fanciful assertion that Dante’s world—complete with a
flying dragon (Geryon) and “celestial rose”—is somehow not “ultimately fantastic” speaks to the desire of some SF
critics, such as Freedman, to brand the work as science fiction rather than fantasy, the larger point is that both the
Odyssey and the Divine Comedy clearly contain “fantastic” elements that conform with Frye’s description of
romance—even if Frye’s canny definitions, based on the status of a work’s protagonist, keep both works out of the
romance camp. Such fantastic elements, however, generally appear in the service of the work’s presentation of what
can be seen as a dominant ideology of their respective cultures. To put it simply, Odysseus doesn’t want Circe to
turn him into a wild boar so that he can kill “morally” and transform his own society, and Dante’s task isn’t to heal a
wounded Beatrice and slay a Satan who is “reality.” Regardless of the manifold tensions that can be found in the
works—between the notion of a larger aristocracy (the suitors) and a single “big man” (Odysseus) in the Odyssey,
for example, and between different strands of Catholicism and Florentine factionalism in Dante—the works
represent and valorize what can be seen as the dominant ideological orientations of their respective cultures, while
Notley’s actively seeks to subvert and transform that of her culture.

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a lack of agency. In such a way, the qualifiers that are sometimes attached to descriptions of her
work are, ultimately, inseparable, and the feminist epic must also be “fantastical.”
“I am reality”
To construct this teleological end and forge a feminist epic, Notley skillfully
counterposes two figures, the tyrant and the first mother, who can both be seen as overtly
totalizing. As such, these figures are central to any consideration of the poem as an epic,
especially as the genre has been understood by the theorists discussed in this study. While the
notion of totality itself, in a literary context, is inherently problematic and probably best regarded
as a deeply romanticized critical construct that can only succeed in vastly attenuated form—one
that takes into account, for example, only the social elite who command such attention in archaic
epic—the concept can still serve as a valuable heuristic, even if loosely formulated. Indeed, it is
worth noting that even Jameson, who has made thoughtful calls for the necessity of maintaining
a conception of totality, doesn’t specify how a literary work might convey or represent a social
totality.
128
Rather, he focuses on the potential benefits that he believes may follow from
continued attention to notions of totality, arguing that “the thinking of totality itself—the urgent
feeling of the presence all around us of some overarching system that we can at least name—has
the palpable benefit of at least the possibility of other alternate systems, something we can now
identify as our old friend Utopian thinking” (Seeds of Time 70). As we will see, Notley’s work,
in presenting figures that can be seen as representing opposed totalities, opens the door, at least,
for this “old friend.”

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In an important talk from 1983, Jameson relates the notion of a social totality to that of “cognitive mapping,”
asserting the “the project of cognitive mapping obviously stands or falls with the conception of some (un-
representable, imaginary) global social totality that was to have been mapped” (“Cognitive Mapping” 356). He
concludes the talk with the claim that “achieved cognitive mapping”—which would seem to entail a totalizing
representation—“will be a matter of form,” but offers no more specific details about this form (356).

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For Jameson, of course, capitalism is what constitutes this “overarching system that we
can at least name.” While Notley’s work is not overtly socialistic, Jameson’s comments resonate
forcefully with it, because it clearly registers “the urgent feeling” of the presence of an
overarching system, but it designates this system not as a system, but as an individual, “the
tyrant.”
129
Indeed, in Notley’s work, the tyrant constitutes a free-standing individual, but one
who also claims to be reality itself: “I told you,” he says to Alette early in the poem’s final book,
“I am reality” (124). While Alette’s actions eventually undermine these claims, the tyrant is, in
more than a figural sense, co-extensive with the subway system and the city above it; his blood
runs in the river from which Alette retrieves a key possession, in the fourth book, and a library in
the city above the subway is described, by a woman Alette encounters, as “more body of the
tyrant” (21). The woman goes on to proclaim that “It is all his body,” because “The world is”
“his mummy” (21), comments that support the earlier statements of a subway busker that the
tyrant is “On exhibit” / “in his mansion” “in his Vatican” “in his Parthenon” “in his” / “admini-”
“strative offices” (6). The tyrant himself confirms these ideas, more or less, indicating not that
the material world constitutes his body, but that the world is inside him. “We’re in my body …”
he says to Alette, when she tours his mansion with him, “It’s all inside me” / “quite literally”
“And outside” “this building” “is inside me too…” “My thoughts are” / “half-material” “& make
a screen in” “the sky” “above the world” (129, ellipses in original).
Perhaps paradoxically, the tyrant, while claiming to constitute reality, is not entirely
“real” himself, as Alette realizes when she encounters him, in book four, and finds him “slightly

129
Notley’s use of a “type name,” “the tyrant,” as opposed to a proper name, such as “Ronald Reagan,” signals her
departure from one of the techniques of what Watt deems “formal realism.” Type names and descriptive names,
such as “the first mother,” are more commonplace in pre-modern literature, and their usage, according to Watt,
“showed that the author was not trying to establish his characters as completely individualized entities” (18). In light
of Watt’s claims, then, we can say that Notley’s naming of “the tyrant” designates both an individual and a system,
or a way of viewing the world.

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marbled” “with air,” “slightly streaked” “with absence,” as if he were beginning to pixilate or
“beam up” on Star Trek (122). As such, the tyrant can be seen as an instantiation of Althusser’s
well-known formulation of ideology: a representation of the imaginary relationship that Alette
and the other inhabitants of the subway have to the real conditions of their existence (162). Even
if not entirely “real,” however, the tyrant is still very present in the work and very powerful; he is
also, as we shall see, mortal. If the quasi-real tyrant effectively incorporates the physical world,
in Notley’s work, he is also depicted as enveloping individuals, in a memorable scene in the
poem’s first book, in which each person on a subway car is encased in a ghostly second image of
themselves, which is said to be the tyrant (12).
Such statements can be seen as a powerful elaboration or extension of Oppen’s notion of
a “city of the corporations” (NCP 163), representing the city as literally incorporated by, and
thus coextensive with, another (incorporated) entity. Just as Notley’s tyrant (or city) can be seen,
in part, at least, as an ideological construct, Oppen’s city is shrouded in ideology, or “Glassed /
In dreams / And images” (NCP 164). While Notley’s tyrant can no doubt be aligned with her
city’s corporations—and thus with capitalism itself, more generally—it is important to
distinguish Notley’s vision of the tyrant from Jameson’s assertions that “capital itself” is the
“totalizing force” that literary or artistic works need, in some sense, to map (“Cognitive
Mapping” 348).
130
Just as Oppen’s presentation of the “city of the corporations” leads to a
sustained interrogation of concepts such as individual autonomy that form the bedrock of

130
Prefiguring his better-known work on postmodernity, Jameson’s argument is premised on the assertion that
postmodernism constitutes “a new and historically original dilemma, one that involves our insertion as individual
subjects into a multidimensional set of radically discontinuous realities, whose frames range from the still surviving
spaces of bourgeois private life all the way to the unimaginable decentering of global capital itself” (351). Another
central premise of his argument is that “the incapacity to map socially is as crippling to political experience as the
analogous incapacity to map spatially is for urban experience. It follows that an aesthetic of cognitive mapping in
this sense is an integral part of any socialist political project” (353).

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liberalism and are thus related to capitalism but not limited to it, Notley presents the tyrant as a
figure whose power extends well beyond the economic sphere.
We have already seen that the tyrant is “on display” in the Vatican and the Parthenon, but
Notley is even more explicit about the extent of the tyrant’s control over areas of life that could
be seen as cultural, but that have exercised tremendous influence over the development of
modernity in the West. More specifically, Alette realizes, near the end of the first book, that the
tyrant owns enlightenment: “He owns enlightenment” “all enlightenment” “that we / know
about” “He owns” “the light” “I must resist it” (37). Notley’s assertion that “enlightenment” can
be owned—as if it were a commodity—conveys a conjunction of the economic and the cultural,
much as early ideas of individual autonomy were bound up with and have been irrevocably
influenced by Locke’s ideas about private property, but it also includes an important caveat, a
spark of utopian hope, in implicitly indicating that there may be other forms enlightenment that
we don’t yet know about.
If Notley’s assertion includes the economic sphere, it also clearly extends beyond it, in
ways that can be illuminated by Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, which
certainly addresses notions of commodification and the modern predominance of exchange value
but focuses more squarely on the rationalizing and instrumentalizing logic that supports
commodification and underwrites a broader “domination over non-human nature” (54). A similar
concern with nature, in fact, motivates much of The Descent of Alette, and the first mother can be
seen as a figurative representation of nature itself, one whose headless condition speaks, with
little subtlety, to its domination. Indeed, it is only after restoring the first mother—by tying her
head to her neck with an axe that is magically transformed into a white scarf when smeared with
blood from the heart of a man who has fathered a child, momentarily, it seems, with Alette—that

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Alette is able to undergo her transformation, under the aegis of the talking owl, into a owl-ish
form capable of conquering the tyrant. Alette’s transformation is every bit as complicated and
fantastic as the scene in which she heals the first mother, and both of these events speak to the
romance elements in Notley’s work.
The appearance of an axe and a headless figure, in fact, seems designed to evoke Sir
Gawain and the medieval trope of the headless knight. If Gawain’s headless green knight speaks
to fertility myths, as is commonly thought, Notley’s appropriation of this mytheme puts her in
terrain more commonly associated with Eliot and his evocations of the Fisher King, though
Notley is clearly adding a potent feminist element to the conventional mythic scenarios. The
figure of the first mother may reach beyond these concerns, however, as her status as the original
creator of humankind shows a deep investment in the notion of social organicism that is central
to modern conceptions of epic, as we have seen, as well as an abiding concern with ideas of epic
as relating tales, in Bakhtin’s conception, “of ‘firsts’ and ‘bests’”(13). As a result, Notley’s work,
for all its investment in continuous narrative as a means of distinguishing itself from the
modernist long poem, can be seen as operating squarely within the thematic concerns of the long
poem—at least as far as the first mother is concerned. Indeed, whereas Pound avers, in a late
Canto, that “the whole tribe is from the body of one man” (722), Notley represents the first
mother, “an Eve / unlike Eve” (76), as an originary source of humankind and a symbol of a time
before men and women alike were dominated by the tyrant.
The obvious feminist impulse in Notley’s work, to be sure, seeks to destabilize traditional
notions of mythic origin and their attendant ideas of social organicism, but the degree of
“metaphysical nostalgia” implicit in the notion of the first mother runs the risk of recuperating
the gesture into a mere variation on the theme of humankind’s fall. Notley’s elaboration of the

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first mother may well stand as the most regressive aspect of the work, but she nevertheless
constitutes an important element in the larger trajectory of Alette’s journey. Alette’s
rehabilitation of the first mother can be seen, if we read the work as quest fantasy, as her
successful navigation of a “first test,” which leads her to a “wisdom figure” who bestows “aid
and knowledge” (Senior 190). Such a schematic overview may well describe the narrative
architecture of the work, in which Alette encounters the “wise owl” immediately after restoring
the first mother, but the details of Alette’s transformation are what lend the work its thematic
potency, especially in relation to the notions of totality and organicism that we have been
discussing.
As may be apparent from the preceding discussions, the notion of an “organic totality”
that Lukács believes distinguishes epic from later forms of narrative is severed in two in The
Descent of Alette.
131
In Notley’s work, the tyrant can be considered a viable representation of a
contemporary, dystopian social totality, and the first mother, the totemic owl, and, eventually,
Alette herself, represent the natural world dominated by the tyrant. As we have seen, the first
mother also clearly evokes ideas of social organicism, and the poem’s sustained attention to the
idea of reclaiming an originary figure speaks to notions of a golden age that could, potentially, be
recuperated, like the mother herself, as well as the implicit inclusion of everyone in the “tribe”
that stems from the mother. In this way, the first mother, who is associated with the snakes that
often appear in the work, serves as a bridge between literal and figural notions of the organic,

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Without seeking to compare Notley’s work with that of Tolstoy, it is worth noting that Lukács finds a separation
of “nature” and “culture” in Tolstoy’s novels. For Lukács, this separation is what distinguishes Tolstoy’s work from
epic: “The natural organic world of the old epics was, after all, a culture whose organic character was its specific
quality, whereas the nature which Tolstoy posits as the ideal and which he has experienced as existent is, in its
innermost essence, meant to be nature (and is, therefore, opposed, as such, to culture) (146; italics in original).
Having diagnosed this approach, Lukács rejects it peremptorily: “A totality of men and events is possible only on
the basis of culture, whatever one’s attitude towards it” (147). The extent to which a conception of nature can form
the basis for a counter-hegemonic, feminist epic will be considered in this examination of Notley’s work.

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and Alette’s restoration of her is the a crucial step on her journey to becoming a hybridic form
capable of killing the tyrant.
132

Alette is able to succeed in this endeavor not simply because she has acquired attributes
of an owl, but because the experiences she undergoes in the acquisition of these attributes align
her with a notion of nature that exists outside the tyrant’s control. The tyrant can be seen as a
“catachrestic” embodiment of a society driven by enlightenment rationality, thus serving as a
postmodern analogue to Moretti’s epic heroes who stand as proleptic embodiments of the state to
come, but the tyrant’s control has its limits, as Alette discovers when she confronts him in his
mansion. The work’s imputation of these limits may be what mark it most strongly as a fantasy,
but as such, they allow Notley to contrast the tyrant’s form of control with conceptions of a
natural life force that exceed his knowledge.
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The tyrant’s power, in fact, is strongly associated with rationalizing, taxonomizing forms
of knowledge. His mansion contains “an immense” “tiered … museum hall,” on every level of
which are “… cases” / “full of animal” “& plant specimens” “full of artifacts” “& dioramas”

132
That Alette’s hybridic form is all organic, all animal, whether human or owl, distinguishes it from the cyborg
hybrids that Haraway extols in her influential “A Cyborg Manifesto,” which appeared a few years before the initial
publication of The Descent of Alette. For Haraway, “the cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary
between human and animal is transgressed” (152), but more modern, and less mythic, conceptions of the cyborg as a
potentially liberatory vehicle for women must take into account the “leaky distinction … between animal-human
(organism) and machine” that obtains in a (post)modern age thoroughly connected, in its forms of domination, with
technological advancement (152). In Haraway’s schema, Notley’s work, with its investment in the organic, would
clearly conform to that of “American radical feminists like Susan Griffin, Audre Lord, and Adrienne Rich” who
“insist on the organic, opposing it to the technological” (174). While Notley’s poem, written on the eve of the
internet’s profound effects on daily life, is decidedly “low-tech” in its depiction of the tyrant’s means of control, it
still squarely opposes the organic and the technological, or even the “scientific,” as means of parsing and controlling
the world. Whatever its ideological implications, such an emphasis on the organic affects considerations of the
work’s genre, in Jameson’s estimation. While science fiction “testifies to the omnipresence of a built environment,”
in his words, “fantasy remains wedded to nature and the organism” (Archaeologies 64).
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The mere notion of face-to-face encounter with a modern-day tyrant also marks the work as fantasy. Even if we
accept that the tyrant is the catachrestic embodiment of a larger, and likely non-totalizable, system and its attendant
ideologies, the idea that the tyrant would not be surrounded by his own version of the Praetorian Guard or Secret
Service strains belief. “The immediacy of a face-to-face conflict between individuals,” however, is a hallmark of
fantasy, as Jameson indicates (Archaeologies 63).

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(122). Touring this hall with the tyrant, Alette walks “… past displays” “of dead animals”
“behind glass” and has “… a grievous” “impression” “of a hallful” of eyes:”
“monkey’s eyes,” “fishes’ eyes” “Eyes of tigers” “& rhinos” “Eyes of”
“falcons,” “of ospreys” “The eyes, even” “of owls:” “a case of owls,”
“all dead-alive” “& affecting” “Were owls’ eyes” “not my own eyes?”
“or the eyes of” “my own—“ “my own,” “my owl?” “It was the same look.” (124)
Alette’s invocation of her own owl and the section’s focus on “eyes” are important, because they
speak to facets of Alette’s experiences, after her restoration of the first mother, that extend
beyond the tyrant’s control. This limit to the tyrant’s knowledge of the world is invoked later in
this passage, after Alette has been shaken by “dioramas” “of groups of humans” that include her,
in both the subway and the caves that exist below it. These dioramas depict, apparently, a range
of peoples “… in ethnic / & historical environments” “In various robes,” “veils & turbans,” but
one represents a subway car on which “one saw stiff figures” “standing,” “holding poles” // “or
sitting” “on metal benches …” (124). Alette “winces” upon recognizing “an exact figure” / “of
[her]self” “unsmiling,” “somber, shadowed—“ “mentally shadowed,” and her dismay causes the
tyrant to smile, “a small smile,” “the smile of” “the self-pleased,” before directing her attention
to another diorama, in which “a bedouin-” “like woman” sits weaving a basket with a single red
stripe, a scene that recalls one of the fantastic events Alette experiences in book two, in which
she is literally woven into a basket. “I was sure,” the speaker notes, “she was the woman—” “the
one from” “the caves—” / “who had woven” “me,” “who had called herself” “my history” “She
was / as still as” “all else here—” (124). Clearly dismayed by the extent of his knowledge about
her, Alette asks the tyrant “How did you know?,” and he responds with a totalizing claim, but
one that Alette believes she can puncture:

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“‘I told you” “I told you” “I am reality,’” he said “‘No you aren’t,’”
“I said fiercely,” “but I wasn’t sure” “‘Were you with me” “when I died?”
“When I died into” “the dark lake?’” “‘Yes,’ he said” “yes, I was’”
“in a slightly stiff,” “slightly false” “intonation” “He was lying” (124)
As this exchange makes clear, Alette has had experiences on her journey beneath the subway that
extend beyond the tyrant’s knowledge—which is synonymous, as the dioramas would indicate,
with his control over the world.
While Alette’s “death” is, clearly, at least partly symbolic, this event marks a major point
in her transformation, as it is in the processing of “dying,” in the talons of the totemic owl, that
Alette acquires many of her owl attributes. Her death itself occurs in an “infinitely” dark lake in
which the “eyes” of the dead seem a type of matter (or anti-matter) (106), and the emphasis on
the eyes of dead animals in the mansion scene clearly invokes, then, Alette’s earlier “death”
scene. More can be said about this “death” scene and the thematic implications of Alette’s
transformation, but the larger point, at this stage of the analysis, is that the work relates both
Alette and the owl to an event that, however mystical it may be, stands outside the tyrant’s
identification with “reality.”
That the tyrant does not control or contain nature is made clear a few pages later in the
text, shortly after Alette sees a display case containing a “mask” of “our first mother” (127). This
mask is part of a larger display in the tyrant’s mansion, and it prompts the tyrant to explain why
the first mother descended to the underworld “long ago.” His version of her departure is much
more schematic than the one the first mother herself provides to Alette shortly before Alette
heals her in book three, and it is significant that it does not include any information about how or
why the first mother became headless. The explanation provided by the first mother for her own

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headless condition, however, provides critical details that stand in stark contrast to the tyrant’s
own representation of his relation to not just the first mother but to the larger natural world.
According to the first mother, her headless condition was the result of “the male”
becoming “… a fetishist” “A thinker” “A war-maker” “& ruler” who exploits her sexually,
making her “… dance naked alone” “before all men—” “any man—” “on a / stage, a” “spotlit
stage” (91). While the spotlit stage is a strangely anachronistic detail for a prehistoric mother, the
larger point is clear, that men became invested in ruling or dominating women and the larger
world, but did so by turning into fetishists and thinkers, terms that evoke notions of
instrumentalized reason. After the male becomes calculating and dominant, “The scales of” “a
serpent” “were painted on” the first mother’s body and she became “Nothing” “but sex,” at
which point her head gradually “disattached from” “[her] body,” “as if / by the will” “of
everyone” (91). Eventually, she walked off, carrying her own head, “down through / darkness
below the earth,” “to this place,” where she is “mostly forgotten,” “above the ground” (91).
Although the first mother does not typically offer emphatic or absolute explanations, she
does speculate that “the male” developed to be “a ruler” because of his reproductive limitations:
“perhaps because he” / “didn’t give birth” “He lost his connection” “to the beginning” / “of the
world,” “to freshness” “of sensation” “To sensation’s / being soul” (91). Such an explanation can
be seen to recapitulate an important tenet of some strains of the “cultural feminism” that
flourished in the 1970s and 80s, in which women’s reproductive abilities were seen as a source
of power that men resent, thus leading them to dominate women, but it is important to note that
the first mother’s explanation invokes not the “fear and insecurity” that exponents of cultural
feminism sometimes attribute to men but, rather, a loss of existential vitality (Alcoff 332).
134

134
Linda Alcoff offers the following summary of one of Mary Daly’s arguments in Gyn/Ecology: “The childless
state of ‘all males’ leads to a dependency on women, which in turn leads men to ‘deeply identify with “unwanted

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Indeed, the final phrase of the first mother’s explanation presents a boldly rendered form of
phenomenology, in which sense perception, “sensation,” effectively constitutes essence (“being
soul”).
Echoes of this phenomenological orientation can be found elsewhere in the book, such as
in the owl’s comparison of his current existence with that of his previous life as a man. Whereas
his head was full of “ghosts of thoughts” when he was a man, as an owl his mind and brain have
“[become] these eyes,” and he now sees, hears, and flies with little regard for past or future
(102). Such an existence, in the pure present of perception, couldn’t be more different from that
of tyrant, who apparently controls reality more than he experiences it. In presenting the work’s
originary female and most important animal as attuned to a sensual reality and opposed to
calculating reason, Notley may be reifying the Aristotelian divide between those who possess
logos and those who are “mere bodies,” but she is clearly doing so to valorize a type of
embodied subjectivity that seeks physical experience, as a part of nature, rather than the
domination of nature per se. In this way, the work resonates with the ecofeminist cosmology put
forth by Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, which “involves rejecting the notion that Man’s
freedom and happiness depend on an ongoing process of emancipation from nature, on
independence from, and dominance over natural processes by the power of reason and
rationality” (6). The work’s rejection of this notion of dominance is critical to its portrayal of the
limits of the tyrant’s control, as we shall see.
As a “thinker” and “ruler,” the tyrant has his own explanation of the first mother’s
departure, asserting that she left of her own volition after having “Found it intolerable” to be an
“empty symbol” (128). Her transformation into a mere symbol, moreover, is the result of her

fetal tissue.”’ Given their state of fear and insecurity it becomes almost understandable, then, that men would desire
to dominate and control that which is so vitally necessary to them: the life-energy of women” (332).

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own limitations: “What she had could not” / “hold its own—” “wit & warmth” “& beauty” “are
weak & exploitable” (128). Perhaps most important, these weaknesses, in the tyrant’s view,
consign the first mother to a subordinate position. “Such qualities,” he contends, “are contrary
to” “Nature’s scheme for” “who holds sovereignty” (128). In effectively designating himself as
“sovereign,” the tyrant falls back on the time-honored tactic of naturalizing his dominance,
imputing it to “Nature’s scheme.” As such, this comment calls out the ways in which The
Descent of Alette can be understood through Agamben’s work, predicated on the notion of
juridico-sovereign forms of power that extend into the present day, and the final section of this
chapter will investigate the extent to which Notley’s work can be seen, in fact, as a fantasy of the
redemption of zōē, or “natural life,” and specifically those forms of life considered “mere
bodies” in Aristotle, as opposed to the qualified forms of life designated by bios.
Such imagined redemption, which entails a powerful concluding vision of “whatever
being,” hinges upon Alette’s ability to conquer the sovereign, thanks to her capacities as an owl
and her experiences in a realm that is beyond the tyrant’s taxonomizing control. After the tyrant
invokes “Nature’s scheme for” “who holds sovereignty,” Alette presses him on the basis of his
control over nature and, in doing so, confirms the limitations of this control:
“You are, I take it,” “Nature,” “contain Nature?” “I said mockingly”
“He modestly inclined his head” “‘As the scientist I am—’” “witness my

house—” I do,’ he said” “‘From the outside, I admit, but” “I do”
“rule Nature” “Understand” “& rule it” “& have increasingly” “since she
“left us” “for the darkness …” “He regarded” “Her mask now” “‘After”
“she left,” “we began” “to forget” “exactly who she was” … (128)

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If the tyrant rules nature “From the outside” and refers to his house, a museum of specimens,
samples, and dioramas, as evidence of his power, his rule does not extend to “the darkness” in
which Alette has found and healed the first mother or to the dark lake in which she has
experienced her “death” and joined forces with a non-human animal. While the tyrant may have
a rational control over elements of nature, he does not have sovereignty over the mysterious and
“dark” forces of life and death, which are represented, in the work, by the first mother and the
owl, respectively, as it is the owl that “kills” Alette and retrieves her transformed body from the
dark lake.
Alette is able to establish that the tyrant rules nature from the outside, but it is important
to stress the extent to which he is seen to contain all forms of cultural life. A memorable scene
early in the work, on the subway, depicts a female artist despairing over her inability to create
anything that is not controlled by the tyrant, who is said to “ow[n] form” (25). In the tyrant’s
mansion, moreover, along with his dioramas of different peoples are models of politicians
participating in the tyrant’s “government,” as well as masks of not just the first mother, but of
various “principles” (vegetation, cities, and sexuality), “warriors” and “conquerors,” and world-
historical religious figures, including Jesus and the Buddha. The tyrant dons a mask of the
Buddha, in fact, and playfully mocks Alette’s desire to kill him, which he had discerned
immediately upon her entrance into his mansion:
“He placed a golden” “Buddha-mask”
“on his face “‘Why would you want to” “kill such as this?’” “he said
playfully” “‘Such a mildness” “as this?” “Am I not this too?” “Or,”
“for that matter,” “am I not you too?” “What would be” “left of you?

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“If you killed me?” (126)
If it’s surprising that the tyrant claims, effectively, to incorporate or somehow contain the
Buddha, the tone he takes in asserting this claim is likely just as unexpected. Such a tone makes
light of both Alette’s desire to determine the limits of the tyrant’s control and the tyrant’s control
itself.
In the larger context of the work, however, the tyrant’s tone is not out of place, and the
speaker herself notes that the tyrant is “almost zany …” (122). The tyrant’s proximity to
zaniness, it should be noted, consistently complicates whatever sense of menace inheres in his
assertions of his own power, with the larger effect that tyrant seems both more likeable and,
perhaps, more frightening. The tyrant is essentially a caricature of a Hollywood villain—
unhinged, daffy, and dominant—in the same way that Reagan seemed a caricature of a president.
Such a depiction of the tyrant is no doubt an important literary strategy for Notley, as it allows
her to represent a totalizing and menacing figure but do so without suffocating the work in
consistently somber scenes that would necessitate a type of high drama that could make the work
the joke. Rather, the work itself jokes as a means of representing what can’t be represented—the
“overall feeling of a system,” in Jameson’s words, or the “dreadful credibility,” in Mark Bould’s
terms, “of absurd things,” such as a world in which a government would spend considerably
more money on weapons than on schools. While time won’t allow a more detailed analysis of the
effects of this literary strategy, it is worth pointing out that this strategy is not limited to Notley’s
depiction of the tyrant. The owl, for instance, frequently turns his head around while speaking to
Alette, a gesture that is cute and kitschy, and the speaker occasionally interjects comments that
add levity to otherwise serious or strange scenes.

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While the tyrant’s playful tone may be seen as a literary strategy that helps to convey the
absurdity of the larger system he embodies, it is important to acknowledge the implications of his
statements. As Alette’s tour of the mansion demonstrates, the tyrant effectively controls all forms
of cultural life and constitutes history as we know it, and the questions he raises about what
would be left after his death are important ones. While Alette never responds to these questions
directly, her desire to ascertain the limits of the tyrant’s knowledge—and his position as one who
rules nature from the outside—can be seen in relation to the tyrant’s statement quoted above. Not
only does Alette confirm that the tyrant doesn’t contain nature, but having descended to the dark
regions of life and death, Alette knows that she has effectively been transformed into a different
entity from one that the tyrant can comprehend. If nothing else, “What would be” “left of [her],”
with the tyrant’s demise, are her experiences outside of the tyrant’s realm. Beyond that, the
prospects of survival after the tyrant’s demise would seem to necessitate the type of “completely
new politics” that Agamben invokes, in Homo Sacer, in his messianic intimations of a world in
which zōē is not severed from bios (11). The conclusion of Notley’s work points in this direction,
invoking the notion of building an entirely new city, rather than continuing “to live in” “this
corpse of him” (148), but this idea is not fleshed out any further in the poem than it is in
Agamben’s theory.
“I had become” “unreason”
Before discussing this closing scene in more detail, it is necessary to look more closely at
Alette’s transformation, which constitutes the more concrete way in which she can exist outside
the tyrant’s domain. To experience this transformation and tap into the darker sources of power
associated, in the work, with nature, Alette undergoes a series of events, sometimes harrowing
and sometimes mystifying, that essentially prepare her “self” for her encounters with the tyrant.

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While such preparation may not be equivalent to a loss of the self, the experiences Alette
undergoes on her journey clearly show her interacting with forces beyond her control, and the
extent of her control over her own body and mind is not always absolute.
This loss of control, in the larger context of a work in which “enlightenment” is
associated with a powerful tyrant, can be understood through Horkheimer and Adorno’s
assertion that the domination of the self is first prerequisite for the domination of nature. “The
activity of the self unifying and individuating itself,” J.M. Bernstein summarizes, “through the
repression of nature within—‘man’s domination over himself … grounds his selfhood’
([Dialectic of Enlightenment] 54)—occurs simultaneously with and is the same action as its
unification of the world through the concept” (33). This conceptual unification of the world
effectively results in nature itself becoming an object, or a set of objects, to be dominated—
killed, organized, and displayed in the tyrant’s mansion—or manipulated for material benefit,
once all forms of value have capitulated to exchange value. For such unification to occur,
however, the self itself must be seen as somehow separate from the nature it surveys, a
movement that is essential for notions of enlightenment reason to become equivalent with reason
itself:
Instrumental reasoning, as the rational expression of and means for securing the desire for
self-preservation, misrecognizes itself when it reifies the process of abstraction through
which it proceeds, when it comes, finally, to think of itself as reason as such. In doing so,
it separates itself from anthropomorphic nature, conceiving itself an independent and
separate, and nature as its alien other—an other whose shape, as a system of objects
governed by mechanical laws, shares nothing with it. In denying the anthropomorphic life
of its other, it liquidates its own life” (J.M. Bernstein 29).

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While modern science may like to believe it has advanced beyond the study of “objects governed
by mechanical laws,” the legacy of this orientation remains evident everywhere in a world beset
by global poverty and climate change. Indeed, it is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the
language of a recent chairman of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, who referred to
“nature” as our “greatest capital” (Black np).
For our purposes, the legacy of this orientation is distinctly evident in Notley’s depiction
of the tyrant, who survey and masters nature “from the outside,” as a scientist. If the tyrant has
“liquidated” his own life by conceiving of nature as “his alien other,” it would help to explain
why he is both less and more than real—or an instantiation of a totalizing concept that exercises
tremendous force over life as we know it and that has become naturalized, as we have seen, as
reason itself, a form of sovereignty that is, paradoxically but ineluctably, per Horkheimer and
Adorno’s formulation, the mythos of modernity. The Descent of Alette effectively conveys the
tyrant’s separation from “anthropomorphic nature” through his exchanges with Alette and
through the contents of his mansion, but it also demonstrates the inversion of this dynamic in a
memorable scene in book one, in which a woman Alette encounters describes a dream she had
the night before.
As she tells it, the woman was very angry in this dream, for reasons she herself didn’t
know, and she turned into a snake, or became “snakelike,” lashing out at “a tall man,” “like the
tyrant,” “who was imp- / passive” “who watched me,” “watched my anger,” “as if I were” “a //
small child” (20). Not only the male gaze, but the detachment of the “rational” observer are
evident here, as is the more obvious thematic association of the woman with a non-human animal
and the reclamation of the snake as a symbol, which the larger work will foreground in ways that
can, at times, seem overly simplistic. More complex is the woman’s realization, in the next

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stanza: “I had become” “unreason” / “And I had become” “despair” “He was reason” “I was
despair” (20). Such a claim clearly counterposes reason, associated with male “objectivity,” and
“unreason,” linked with both the female and with a nonhuman animal. With this display of anger,
moreover, the woman feels that she “had shown [herself]” “estranged from the world,” stating
that “I was anger” “I was other” (20).
In a world that has been wholly rationalized and reified, her display of “passion,” which
cannot be seen as a rational action leading to material gain of any sort, necessarily leads to her
estrangement. In displaying her anger, moreover, the woman effectively loses her identity—
becoming affect itself—in a world in which the self must be marshaled and controlled, driven by
reason, as a mode of self-preservation. As such, the scene can be compared with Horkheimer and
Adorno’s discussion of Odysseus’ hard-fought ability to control his anger when, disguised as a
beggar, he sees his female slaves leaving his house to sleep with the suitors who have been
consuming his household provisions during his return to Ithaca. As Horkheimer and Adorno
note, “the ‘self’—autos—is not spoken of until … the repression of instinct by reason has
succeeded. If the choice and sequence of the words are to be taken as conclusive, the identical ‘I’
of Homer could be seen primarily as the result of a mastery of nature carried out within the
individual” (48, n. 5). Such mastery of nature within the individual is precisely what the woman
Alette encounters does not carry out, with the result that she loses her status as “rational” agent
and becomes a mere object—like the female slaves whose “betrayal” tempts Odysseus to act on
his anger—but one that is estranged from a world defined by objectification itself.
While the woman’s association with “unreason” is magnified by her appearance as a
“snakelike” creature, it is important to remember that the incident itself takes place in a dream,
the locus classicus of “unreason.” Indeed, the irrationality of dreams—a foundational aspect of

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the Freudian-Lacanian decentering of a controlling, self-identical ego, one of the central
displacements of “man” that usher in the anxieties of the late modern world—constitutes an
important aspect of The Descent of Alette, a work whose hero vows to “resist the light” of
enlightenment reason. This vow itself, it should be noted, is made after the speaker realizes—in a
dream—that tyrant owns “all enlightenment” “that we // know about” (37). The work’s fantastic
elements themselves can be seen as “dreamlike,” as Susan McCabe indicates, asserting that
Notley depicts the headless first mother “with the accuracy and seamless dream quality of the
fairy tale” (277), but dreams also function, in the work, as a necessary ingredient for social
change. If “at its base utopianism is social dreaming, and includes elements of fantasy” as
Sargent indicates, Notley’s work links dreams with notions of social change that must be seen as
utopian (“The Three Faces” 4).
That the woman Alette encounters dreams of lashing out at a “tyrant-like” man speaks to
the social aspect of dreaming in the work, even if her dreams themselves are frustrated and lead
to her “estrangement” from the world. More significantly, when Alette finally kills the tyrant,
dreams are invoked in an incantatory manner, as if part of a “spell” to break free from the
tyrant’s control. It is important to note, moreover, that Alette’s invocation of dreams occurs in
response to the tyrant’s dying words, which rephrase his earlier question about how Alette and
the broader culture can survive without him: “‘How could you be” “this cruel?” / “And do you
not” “kill yourself?” “your own culture … “ “soul’s breath?’” (144). Alette’s response uses the
tyrant’s previous statements against him and points toward the dream of different reality:
“‘I’m killing no one” “You are not real” “You said so” “yourself,’ I
said” “‘Forms in dreams …” “forms in dreams…’” “I searched within”
“for the right words” “‘I will change the” “forms in dreams’” “I lifted”

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“the dead plant” “& flung it” “across the grotto” “Starting”

“from dreams,” “from dreams we” “can change,” “will change” “In
dreams,” “in dreams, now,” “you will die” “You will die’” (144; ellipses in original)
Occurring seven times over the space of six lines, “dreams” can be said to constitute a
foundational element of the work’s desire for social change. Alette’s invocation of dreams, in
this passage, moves from the evocative notion of “forms” in dreams to dreams as the basis
“from” which change will come, starting with the death of the tyrant.
This death actually occurs because Alette uproots, with her owl’s talon, a bizarre and
distinctly phallic bush that grows in a “soft & fleshy” grotto she discovers while flying above the
river of blood in the poem’s final book (140). The existence of this plant and grotto—and its
relation to the tyrant’s ability to live—clearly operates in distinction to his claims to stand
outside nature. Indeed, the tyrant asserts, shortly before his death, that “Flesh is not my” //
“nature now” (142), a phrase that nicely encapsulates, with its inclusion of the terms “flesh” and
“nature,” spanning a stanza break, the movement away from an embodied inclusion within the
sphere of the natural world that Bernstein emphasizes in his discussion of the dialectic of
enlightenment. Because the tyrant is an entity that’s not entirely real but that, rather, constitutes
reality as it has been known in Western modernity, flesh may, in fact, not be his nature now, but
he is still, in Notley’s fantasy world, intimately linked with the processes of the natural world,
which are the same processes over which he does not actually exercise control. The tyrant’s
control, then, is based on an exclusive inclusion, in which he can exempt himself from the sphere
that he dominates, but the work countermands this dynamic by insisting on the tyrant’s inclusion
within a realm that is beyond his taxonomizing reach.

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It is significant, of course, that the tyrant’s “unreality” is effectively opposed to “forms in
dreams,” and the work thus counterposes the nightmarish quality of the tyrant’s existence, or the
“absurd credibility of dreadful things,” with a conception of reality based on more benign or,
presumably, egalitarian dreams. If such an opposition seems a less than inspiring blueprint for
social change, it is nonetheless the one that The Descent of Alette holds up. Although “forms in
dreams,” as a tool for sweeping social transformation, may seem a mere shorthand for positive
thinking, or “dreaming of a brighter future,” dreams also play an important and more tangible
role in Alette’s individual transformation into an owl-woman.
“Elegant animals”
As we have seen, after her transformation, Alette is capable of both diagnosing the limits
of the tyrant’s control and his “fleshy” vulnerabilities and of acting on those vulnerabilities in a
way that puts an end to the tyrant’s reign. In the logic of the narrative itself, Alette is able to
think like an owl, not like a human woman, because she has experienced these dreams or, as the
case may be, dream-like states, as the owl itself tells her, in book three, that death is like a dream
that is “no one’s dream” (107). Alette’s transformation, then, may be seen as a way in which
“forms” are changed in dreams, and this transformation, though manifested in the body, occurs
or is enacted on the level of the psyche. If the work effectively represents a 60s countercultural
slogan—“free the mind and the body will follow”—that has long since been reduced to banality
by its implication of sexual liberation, the particularities of this representation are considerably
more compelling, implying that liberation results from the acknowledgement not of sexuality,
but of animality.
Such an acknowledgement forms a prominent part of the work’s first book, in fact, as
animals appear numerous times in the scenes set on the subway. While the poem’s opening page

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invokes the “souls” that are essentially forced to ride on the subway, its second page states that
“there are animals” “in the subway” “But they // are mute & sad,” a qualification that both calls
out the dominant view of animals, as “mute” or incapable of speech, and anthropomorphizes
them, as “sad” (4). Several pages later, Alette and a man she’s encountered enter “a car of”
“suited … animals—” “men, actually,” a locution whose hesitation speaks to an indistinction, on
the subway, between the animal and the human. As the passage makes clear, the figures in the
car have human bodies but the heads of animals, including those of a falcon, lemur, panther, and,
of course, an owl, which stares at the speaker, as she notes: “He stared at me” “But owls stare”
“And then he looked away” (8). Alette also wonders, on this car, if the men-animals are “our
fathers,” and speculates that her own father is “… probably” “an owl” (8). Perhaps not
surprisingly, the next scene opens with “An animal-mother” that “is crying,” and much of the
scene constitutes a transcription of two different voices (neither of which is Alette’s) arguing
over whether animals can show emotion, with one asserting that “Animals / don’t cry,” and the
other making such statements as “Can you see her” “over there? She is showing” “such sorrow”
(9). Like the previous scene with the “suited … animals,” this one clearly calls into question any
clean distinction, in the world of the subway, between humans and animals, but this scene does
so by granting animals affect.
Whether this lack of distinction between human and animal, on the subway, represents an
acknowledgement of the inherent animality of those typically designated “human” or a
constitutes a more critical, in a conventional, anthropocentric sense, assessment of the subway
denizens as reduced to “mere animals” is not entirely clear. Although it is tempting to read the
subway as an exemplification of Agamben’s provocative claim that the camp is the nomos of
modernity—in which case, the animality of the subway riders would represent their debasement,

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or their reduction to animals that can be killed with impunity—such a reading runs the risk of
downplaying the actual brutality of concentration camps. The first page of the work indicates
that the inhabitants of the subway are kept there because of their poverty, having to pay so much
already that they never even ask how much it would cost to leave, in which case the subway
would resemble an urban neighborhood hollowed out by neoliberal economic policies more than
a camp per se. Agamben’s point, of course, is that any such neighborhood would constitute a
camp in modernity. Regardless of whether such an assessment seems catachrestic in its own
right, it is notable that the only person shown leaving the subway is a woman dressed in a
business suit, whose “animal familiarity” has been “powdered over” (13), a claim that implies
that animality is considerably less acceptable in the city above than in subway itself.
While more examples could be brought forward to demonstrate the presence of animals
on the subway and the larger indistinction between humans and animals that often occurs in the
poem’s first book, one scene, in particular, warrants additional analysis. Not only does this scene
combine the notions of sexuality and animality discussed above, but it does so in a way that
pertains to the question of whether the work’s representation of animals in the subway speaks to
an acknowledgement of humans as animals or to a reduction, in a more traditional view, of
humans to animals. The scene opens graphically:
“Two people fucking” “behind the stairs” “that led” “to other
trains” “The woman & man,” “fucking,” “had grown wings” “gray
feathered,” “Subway gray, and” “the wings” “would beat the air”
“or stir the air, slightly” “Pause” “then encircle” “the back of”

“the other lover,” “as arms” “gray wing arms” “The two lovers”

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“were not naked” “They had feathers” “they had grayness” “Though they
had” “pink genitals” “in the midst of” “gray feathers, and”
“heads” “of dark hair” “Had dark hair,” “dark

heads touching” “There’s no place to” make love”
“down here” “in the subway” “except near others”
“near all the others” “Like animals” “elegant animals”
As in the days” “when there were animals” “animals in

the world” Before the tyrant” “became everything” before the tyrant” (28)
Whereas the “suited … animals” had human bodies and animal heads, the two feathered lovers
have human heads, or at least heads with hair. As such, the lovers clearly speak to a blurring of
boundaries between the human and the animal. While the statement that the lovers are “Like
animals” implies, in the context in which it appears, that they have been reduced to a lower status
because the subway is crowded and offers no privacy, the next phrase adds a distinctly positive
valence, deeming them “elegant animals” (28). The adjective “elegant” can certainly be applied
to animals, but it is surprising, to say the least, to find it used to described animals having sex.
The scene’s concluding lines complicate the already complex tone of the passage, which
has moved from the obscene to the euphemistic in describing the sex act depicted. The opening
phrase of the penultimate line, “As in the days,” imparts a distinctly nostalgic tone that stands out
in the first book, and the conclusion of the scene implies that animals no longer exist in the
world, now that tyrant “[has become] everything.” If the world invoked in the scene refers to that
above the subway, the scene’s concluding statements would seem to indicate that all the animals

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have moved to the subway, but if “the world” includes the subway, these statements clearly
contradict the earlier claims that “there are animals” “in the subway.” As we have seen, however,
many of these animals are partly human, and the claim that animals effectively no longer exist
may speak to the blurring of the boundary between human and animal in the subway, which
effectively levels both larger categories.
In a broader sense, of course, the section’s concluding claims set up a stark contrast
between the notion of the animal and that of tyrant. We have already seen the tyrant opposed to a
conception of nature, which he claims to rule “from the outside,” but this scene refines this
opposition somewhat, presenting animals as what cannot exist once tyrant has become
everything. If the boundary between human and animal is blurred, with ambiguous results,
in the scenes set in the subway, that larger opposition between animal—whether human or
nonhuman or some fusion of the two—and tyrant is solidified in the work’s depiction of the bird-
lovers. This distinction, of course, is what the tyrant invokes in his c