That was the question posed in last night's methodology session with Jo Bishton. My initial private thought - 'something sent to you by your teenage daughter just after you've gone to bed, asking you to pick her up from the pub' was probably not a correct or appropriate response. Equally scurrilous - Sarah, my elder daughter commented when she phoned me in the middle of my struggle with the preparatory reading; - Foucault's essay, What is an author? 'Oh. I studied that, it's the one about author function isn't it?' When I agreed, she advised me 'I've just come back from an author function,' then assured me that the author seemed far from dead as he'd bought a nice bottle of Veneto to share with his editors.
So what does this tell you apart from the Turpies' penchant for puerile jokes. Well, it also probably says something about aspects of Britishness - a discomfort concerning grandiose ideas, that far from being some distant, historical theory discussed among the 'Dreaming Spires', empiricism is alive and kicking and hard-wired into, if not our mode of thinking, then at least into our attraction towards notions of 'common sense'. This can, at least in my case, present barriers to fully engaging with post modernist theoretical writing whose purpose is to subvert assumptions and, in Foucault's case, reveal hitherto hidden power relationships within cultures and institutions.
Not that I don't enjoy reading such works, the virtuoso twists and turns of argument, the audacious re-invention or re-definition of commonplace terms such as 'author' or 'text' can seem exciting and does invite a fundamental reassessment of assumptions about art, culture and society. However, it is all too easy to be dazzled by this and fail to ask straightforward questions such as in simple terms, does Foucault's argument stack-up? To my mind, the answer is, not always.
A good example of this occurs where four characteristics of the 'author function' are discussed. According to Foucault the second characteristic is that the 'author function' changes over time and such things as anonymity are regarded differently within different disciplines. He goes on to give the example that before the seventeenth century literary works were put into circulation with no problem being attached to anonymity but scientific works had no validity unless associated with a named, ancient author. He then asserts that subsequently the position reversed. Is that true? Across all of Europe? The assertion is open to all kinds of challenge at a more detailed level, yet the allure of the big idea of 'author function' tempts one to put aside what can seem nit-picking in the grand scheme of his argument.
Overall though, yesterday's session was thought provoking and challenging, which is why I signed up for this in the first place. Over the course of the evening a number of slightly discomforting issues emerged. Firstly, I am spectacularly badly read so far as the novel is concerned. No surprise really, every time I have had the chance to study literature I've always plumped for the poetry option. Added to that, the time pressures of my job over the past ten years or so - 60 hour week norms - reduced time for reading. Since at the same time I was trying to develop my writing to a publishable standard that 'split' time for reading further, to the point where I only read for 'utilitarian' purposes, when it related specifically to what I was writing. It's a process that might be described as part critical reading, part cultural vandalism. So, my reading consisted mainly of twentieth century British and American poetry and the work of the contemporary poets I happened to be hanging out with on the web.
The second discomforting thought is that I have no grasp of literary theory whatsoever. The only time I can make head and tail of things is when I can translate some terms into art-history-speak - so once I'd grasped that the way 'text' was being used by post- modernists was really an amalgam of the way terms such as 'work' or 'millieu' might be used in an art history context, then I started to make headway. This probably means that my starting point is too basic to attempt to do the literature case-study.
That being said, the discussion around polyphony, suppressed voice, feminism and the relationships between author and reader contrasted with reader and text all provide an interesting framework for a research project based on the 're-invention' of M A Griffiths - in some respects its a case study in how a writer becomes 'authored'. At some point when I've formulated my ideas more, then I'll have to speak to Jo.
Finally, since most of the discussion concerned novels - and the emergence of genres such as magic realism, neo-Victorianism, lesbian fiction, post-colonialism and the like, I began to speculate on how all of that played out so far as poetry was concerned. There are some obvious parallels - how post-colonial developments have brought a wider range of 'Englishes' into play and crossover such as rap, dub and slam poetry are becoming mainstream. Feminism too - having a lesbian Poet Laureate is as radical a cultural shift in the UK Arts as having an Black American president is to US politics, though I think it will be a long time before we find a lesbian in number 10!
In other respects poetry is different. As you might expect from an art form which Lewis Turco calls 'the art of written language' (differentiating it from the novel which he defines as 'the art of written narrative') then 'language' poets such as Jorie Graham have been influenced more by linguistics and semiotics rather than the more 'cultural' aspects of post modernism associated with structuralism and post structuralism.
Another difference in poetry is that modernism has persisted, like a comet with a very long tail. Some feminist poets have strong allegiances to the confessional mode associated with Plath, Sexton and Fainlight. In some ways the confessional genre is linked to post-Freudian notions of self, and as such is firmly rooted in the Modernist tradition.
The 'long tail' of landscape and 'nature' poetry stretches back even further and has a continuity right back to Romanticism. Even during the the most rampant decades of Modernism writers as diverse as Elizabeth Bishop and Garry Snyder continued to use place and the natural world as a basis of their work. The burgeoning Green movement during the final quarter of the last century is reflected in the work of poets such as Jane Kenyon and Seamus Heaney, or even, taking an elemental and mythic stance, Ted Hughes.
Another difference with poetry is that in relation to both Modernism and Post Modernism in America it has experienced an attempted counter-revolution in the guise of New Formalism, associated with Wilbur, Nemerov, X J Kennedy and Mark Jarman, among others. Although the early adherents to the movement were academically grounded, often stylistically, and sometimes politically conservative, however, the advent of the internet 'internationalised' the movement and since the millennium it has developed into a broader church. More recently newer associates have been more bold and used received form in a ways akin to the Neo-Victorian novel uses realism, and as such could be seen within rather than in opposition to post-modern developments.
This latter point could be developed into a research proposal for a dissertation if I decide that the creative writing related project appears to be a hazardous enterprise.
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