Reading 1: ‘…the ultimate nothingness or absence of meaning…’

A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients himself with his little song as best he can. The song is like a rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos. Perhaps the child skips as he sings, hastens or slows his pace. But the song itself is already a skip: it jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos and is in danger of breaking apart at any moment. There is always sonority in Ariadne's thread.

(Deleuze and Guattari TP, p.311)

In Enlarging the Temple, the chapter ‘Robert Lowell and the Difficulties of Escaping Modernism’ presents ‘Skunk Hour’ as the culmination of a series of patterns which Lowell employs in an attempt to ‘overcome the intense privacy he associates with the fall into prose’ (Altieri ET, p.69). A central pattern in Altieri’s own work is the use of citation and allusion to weave a self-protective refrain, like the child’s ‘little song’, to find a ‘centre in the heart of chaos’ and this first reading will focus equally on ‘nomadic quotation’ as Lowell’s own self-protective refrain, and on the territorializing refrain through which Altieri traces the boundaries of his modernism.

Altieri’s initial stance is polarising, setting public self against private and poetry against prose, with the equation of privacy and prose (and, indeed, hell) further complicated by incompatibilities in the processes of meaning-making between genres:

For value to emerge in the prose world, the poet must develop a style that can convey its glimpses of meaning within contingency without the aid of allegorical or paradigmatic structures. Poems must appear to remain faithful to the casual flux of experience… (ET, p.63)

He goes on to suggest that Lowell makes his poems seem contingent but provides patterns for their interpretation by ‘appropriating techniques from the prose tradition.’ (p.64). This claim is based on a close reading of the poem’s last three stanzas, preceded by the following gloss on the opening stanzas and particularly the fifth stanza, the speaker’s ‘dark night of the soul’:

The poem first of all embodies the ultimate lucidity, the denial of all imaginative evasions…This then brings him to a dark night of the soul…There he encounters the ultimate nothingness or absence of meaning, which is perhaps the result of all pursuits of sheer lucidity (I am thinking of the nineteenth-century novel, particularly of Flaubert). For Lowell the absence is dual - an emptiness he witnesses in the scene of perverted love among the love cars, mirrored by a horrifying sense of his own inner emptiness, "I myself am hell; / nobody's here." Hell here is the ultimate prose - a profound sense of the absence of all sources of meaning and value in the public world represented by the landscape and in the private realm where one defines his personal identity. (p.66)

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The movement from ‘ultimate lucidity’ to an encounter with the ‘ultimate nothingness,’ the hell of ‘ultimate prose,’ is an early instance of the peculiar hyperbole with which Altieri frames his examples. In the journey from the pursuit of lucidity to the hell of inner emptiness, prose is depicted as both vehicle and destination. Perloff, in a reconsideration that identifies ‘Skunk Hour’ as a point where Lowell falters, praises Life Studies as ‘Chekhovian in its use of detail’ (2004b). The engagement with prose, which other writers have identified as a source of the collection’s richness and strength, is cast by Altieri in infernal terms. This is consistent with his mapping of the poem as a site of Gramscian struggle, but not necessarily fully supported by the text where this struggle is sited.

Robert Duncan’s introduction to a reading by Lowell at the poetry centre in San Francisco in 1957 asserted that ‘All realizations in Art are…dynamic, at once virtuous and vicious, in relation to new necessities which they call into being’ (Bertholf 1999, p.93). This ‘calling into being’ of new necessities is central to ‘Skunk Hour,’ a birth-struggle that takes place in the soul’s dark night, brought about by a realisation that Altieri depicts as a crushing sense of doubled absence: the emptiness witnessed among the love-cars reflecting and amplifying the soul’s own crushed hollowness. However, ‘the ultimate prose’ seems a wilfully limiting epithet to apply to an intertextual refrain that locates ‘Hell’ in an ‘I myself’ that draws in Marlowe’s Mephistopheles, Milton’s Satan and Sartre’s Garcin, anti-hero of ‘No Exit.’ The triggering absence, which Altieri depicts as ‘emptiness he witnesses in the scene of perverted love among the love cars,’ also bears closer scrutiny.

While the voyeurism of this stanza is acknowledged, what is so intriguing is Lowell’s own textual sleight of hand. This effects a hollowing out via the use of allusion to, as Williamson put it ‘lead away from the exclusively personal, towards a shared world of sophisticated discourse’ (1986, p.61). Firstly, nothing is ‘witnessed’ in the stanza: the speaker seeks out ‘love cars,’ protective metal carapaces that provide a synecdoche for the lovers whose antics (only ‘perverted’ in Altieri’s

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formulation) they serve to conceal. Secondly, the urge to seek out and spy on lovers can be read as woven into the stanza’s intertextual refrain at least as much as it is propelled by the mind’s own unrightness. St John of the Cross’s ‘Stanzas of the Soul,’44 _{which provides the line ‘On a dark}

night’, depicts a soul driven from its home by desire, guided by the night to the arms of a waiting lover. This journey provides a textual model for the stanza’s act of kenosis, emptying poetic language of its referentiality through citation (Loevlie 2012, p.91).

Even the most ‘secular, puritan and agnostical’ (Parkinson 1968, p.131) reading of the stanza that follows must find spiritual and psychic impetus, as well as carnal, for its act of thwarted voyeurism. This sense of authorised or prescribed transgression is compounded in the following stanza’s accretion of allusion: Milton’s Satan, in Book IV of Paradise Lost, discovers himself unable to flee the hell that is himself and yet makes his way to Eden, where he is tormented by the sight of Adam and Eve in each other’s arms:

Sight hateful, sight tormenting! Thus these two, Imparadised in one another’s arms,

The happier Eden, shall enjoy their fill

Of bliss on bliss; while I to Hell am thrust (2003, pp.98-9)

Even the mirror-reversal of Sartre’s ‘Hell is other people’ (Sartre 1989, p.45) in the lines ‘I myself

am hell;/nobody's here—’ offers a glimpse of another inferno of tormented, unwilling voyeurs, where Estelle, Inez and ‘the noble pacifist’ Garcin are forced to watch the lives they’ve left continue unfolding, and the play climaxes with Inez, compelled to watch the other two’s love-making, taunting them ‘I'm watching you, everybody's watching, I'm a crowd all by myself’ (p.45). So, to read these stanzas as a depiction of Hell as ‘the ultimate prose’ is to risk misreading, or simply not reading, their dense allusiveness, which David Gewanter has described as a ‘’free-styling’ of prior voices,’ (2005, p.137) through which the poem enacts its gesture of confession. Altieri’s 2006 The

44_{The exposition of John of the Cross’s text glosses the ‘dark night’ as ‘purgative contemplation, which ‘causes} passively in the soul the negation of itself,’ and the entire poem is explicated as ‘the method followed by the soul in its journey upon the spiritual road to the attainment of the perfect union of love with God,’ (St. John of the Cross, Peerson trans., n.p.).

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Art of Twentieth Century American Poetry, to which I will return in the final section, opens with a quote from Pound:

Nine out of every ten Americans have sold their souls for a quotation. They have wrapped themselves about a formula of words instead of about their own centers. (Ezra Pound, “Patria Mia”) (Altieri ATC, p.11)

In Lowell’s poem, and Altieri’s circumscription of it, the centre is itself constructed of a formula of words, a refrain of ‘nomadic quotation’ forming and marking the territory of a self.