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George Oppen and the Public Sphere
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 October 2010
Abstract
This article aims to demonstrate that it is less important to pigeonhole Oppen's poetics within modernism or postmodernism than it is to understand his poetic practice as a mode of critical public discourse participating in social debates concerning the state of democratic society in the 1960s. Adopting the framework of the Habermasian transformation of the public sphere allows us to understand the political impact of Oppen's volumes of poetry in the 1960s much more clearly, if we construe them as part of a distinct political engagement that reaches beyond his earlier modernist allegiances. The main argument here is that Oppen's middle and later poetry straddles a larger paradigmatic shift that occurs within the 1960s from a politics of subjectivity that is focussed upon the autonomy of the self to a politics of the self that stresses community and relational ethics. Within this context, it can be seen that a volume like Of Being Numerous addresses itself to the question of how to live as both a unique and yet a social being, and how to retain one's individuality whilst also participating within a community. The urgency and pressure of that question characterizes all three volumes of his poetry published in the 1960s, and is explored through a comparative analysis of the discourse of individuality and community in Oppen's poems and various documents of the 1960s.
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References
1 George Oppen: Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers, ed. Stephen Cope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 237, hereafter cited in the text as SP. Other abbreviations of the principal primary texts are as follows: George Oppen: New Collected Poems, ed. Michael Davidson (Manchester: Carcanet, 2003) (NCP); The Selected Letters of George Oppen, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990) (SL).
2 Wini Breines, a 1960s activist and now historian of the era, notes, “Nineteen sixty-eight was an amazing year. The sheer number of dramatic political events is staggering. Even at the time activists recognized the year as a turning point of some kind … Because events unfolded so rapidly and dramatically, it was difficult to resist an apocalyptic sense of history changing before one's very eyes.” Wini Breines, “‘Of This Generation’: The New Left and the Student Movement,” in Alexander Bloom, ed., Long Time Gone: Sixties America Then and Now (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 23–45, 35.
3 See Kenneth Cmiel, “The Politics of Civility,” in D. Farber, ed., The Sixties: From Memory to History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 263–90, who charts the emergence of a new informalization in the 1960s, and plots the trajectory of a shift from the old order of civility to the legalization of incivility.
4 See Peter Nicholls, George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Tim Woods, The Poetics of the Limit: Ethics and Politics in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003); Kimmelmann, Burt, “George Oppen's Silence and the Role of Uncertainty in Post-war American Avant-Garde Poetry,” Mosaic, 36, 2 (June 2003), 145–62Google Scholar; Jenkins, G. Matthew, “Saying Obligation: George Oppen's Poetry and Levinasian Ethics,” Journal of American Studies, 37, 3 (2003), 407–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Spinks, Lee, “Oppen's Pragmatism,” Journal of American Studies, 43, 3 (2009), 477–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 See Nicholls, 94–97, where he discusses the complexities of Oppen's key phrases “of being numerous” and “the shipwreck of the singular” and their implications for Oppen's notions of individual responsibility and false ideals of social unity. Nicholls concludes 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 acceptance of ideological variations on ‘e pluribus unum’” (97). These complexities are also discussed in Perloff, Marjorie, “The Shipwreck of the Singular: George Oppen's ‘Of Being Numerous’,” Ironwood, 26 (1985), 159–77Google Scholar.
6 Jim Miller, “Democracy is in the Streets”: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 13.
7 “The Port Huron Statement,” in Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines, eds., “Takin' it to the Streets”: A Sixties Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 61–74, 67. Hereafter referred to in the text as PHS with a page number.
8 Nicholls, 85, n. 13.
9 Doug Rossinow notes the “quasi-religious concept of ‘love’ evident in the Port Huron Statement” in his book The Politics of Authenticity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 11, in which he argues that the communitarian ethos of the SDS and the Port Huron Statement are largely influenced by the civil rights movement (see 83).
10 Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2004), 124.
11 Ibid., 126.
12 Ibid., 139–40.
13 Ibid., 8–9.
14 Howard Brick, Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998), xv.
15 David Chalmers places the upheavals of the decade in the context of an often liberating transformation of consciousness in And the Crooked Places Made Straight: The Struggle for Social Change in the 1960s (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). Historians of the decade tend to be divided between those who emphasize the constructive and liberating aspects of American society and politics and those who stress the disintegration, dissolution and processes of fragmentation. Examples of the latter view are William L. O'Neill, Coming Apart: An Informal History of America in the 1960s (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971); and Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Harper & Row, 1984).
16 Daniel Kane, All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 3, original emphasis.
17 See, for example, the West Coast and Berkeley renaissance explored in Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian, Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance (Hanover, NH and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1998). This preceded the San Francisco “downtown” and North Beach renaissance explored in Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Nancy Peters, Literary San Francisco (San Francisco: City Lights Books, Harper & Row, 1980); and Michael Davidson, The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
18 Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 109–42, 110.
19 Craig Calhoun, “Introduction: Habermas and the Public Sphere,” in Calhoun, 29.
20 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. T. Burger and F. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 161, quoted in Calhoun, 23.
21 Calhoun, 29.
22 Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), xi, original emphasis.
23 Ibid., xi.
24 Fraser, 124.
25 V. N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929), trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Tutinik (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 23.
26 Ibid., 23.
27 Ibid., 23–24.
28 DeKoven, 190.
29 Ronald Reagan, excerpted from a 1968 radio address, in Bloom and Breines, 347.
30 The ghosts of Romanticism lurk in every nook and cranny of Oppen's poetry, as he was clearly greatly influenced by a number of Romantic poets. References to Wordsworth, Blake, Keats, Shelley and Whitman abound in his letters, and there are repeated references to the Romantic poets in his own poems (see, for example, the allusions in the titles of poems like “Ozymandias,” “O Western Wind” and “Myself I Sing,” and more direct references in “Penobscot” (“That burns like a Tyger,” NCP 124) and “Boy's Room” (“Keats and Shelley,” NCP 270). It is clearly the revolutionary Romantics that haunt these lines, providing a basis upon which to question, interrogate and reroute the discussions of truth, beauty and individuality in the face of nameless oppressive structures.
31 This discussion of figures of boats, boat-building and carpentry and their relation to agency echo the earlier concerns raised in relation to Oppen's sense of “the shipwreck of the singular.” However, such maritime figures also resound powerfully with similar imagery in Charles Olson's representation of the nautical foundations of and activities in Gloucester, MA, and provide a useful counterpoint to the ways in which Olson deploys New England in relation both to an idea of Americanness and to an investigation of being/Being in The Maximus Poems. An investigation of this parallel context might lead to important discriminations about the politics of each poet's respective poetics, although the scale of such an exploration is beyond the scope of this article.
32 The intricacies of Heidegger's influence on Oppen's concept of “being” and “ontology” are well documented in Dembo, L. S., “The Existential World of George Oppen”, Iowa Review, 3, 1 (1972), 64–90Google Scholar; Randolph Chilton, “The Place of Being in the Poetry of George Oppen,” in Burton Hatlen, ed., George Oppen: Man and Poet (Orono, ME: National Poetry Fourndation, 1981), 89–112; Naylor, Paul Kenneth, “The Pre-position ‘Of’: Being, Seeing, and Knowing in George Oppen's Poetry,” Contemporary Literature, 32, 1 (Spring 1991), 100–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Nicholls, George Oppen, passim.
33 From the George Oppen papers in the Mandeville Collection, UCSD, quoted in Nicholls, 3.
34 Dembo, L. S., “Interview with George Oppen,” Contemporary Literature, 10, 2 (Spring 1969), 159–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
35 Jean-François Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?”, in idem, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984; first published 1979), 72.