William Carlos Williams and the New World
By Jeff Webb
 
 
There was a maggot in them.  It was their beliefs.

Bits of writing have been copied into the book for the taste of it.

  – William Carlos Williams, In The American Grain

 

1. The Corpses of Dead Indians

“And America?  What the hell do you a bloomin foreigner know about the place?” Ezra Pound asked William Carlos Williams in a letter in 1917.  “You … a “REAL american.!!?  INCONCEIVABLE!!!!” A “REAL american” (Pound cites himself as an example) has “the virus, the bacillus of the land” in his blood (Pound 31). But Williams has “spanish blood,” and his poems are for this reason, in Pound’s view, “unamerican” (31).  “You can idealize the place all you like,” Pound wrote three years later, “but you haven’t a drop of the cursed blood in you” (38).  Williams, to Pound’s embarrassment, later quoted the earlier letter in his “Prologue” to Kora in Hell:  Improvisations (1920).  In doing so he meant to contest Pound’s account of what makes a writer American.  Surely, Williams suggests, Pound’s endorsement of the view that T. S. Eliot’s “La Figlia che Piange” is “the fine flower of the finest spirit of the United States” or that “Prufrock” is “’the soul of that modern land,’ the United States,” illustrates the absurdity of thinking that a poem is American by virtue of the author’s “blood” (Imaginations 25).  “Imagine an international congress of poets at Paris or Versailles,” Williams writes.
 

Ezra begins by reading ‘La Figlia che Piange.’  It would be a pretty pastime to gather into a mental basket the fruits of that reading from the minds of the ten Frenchmen present; their impressions of the sort of United States that very fine flower was picked from. (26).
Obviously, for Williams, “La Figlia che Piange” is not an American poem, even though Eliot has the “cursed blood” in him.  Instead, as Williams argues in the “Prologue,” “the New World is Montezuma or, since he was stoned to death in a parley, Gautemozin who had the city of Mexico leveled over him before he was taken” (24).  Here Williams reverses Pound’s formulation.  Montezuma and Gautemozin are natives of the New World not because the “virus of the land” is in their “blood,” but because their blood is in the land – literally:  they are buried in stones or rubble.  What Williams calls the “New World type” (24) is therefore not defined by “blood” or race.  Rather, it is an identity that ideally depends on the spilling of blood, specifically in resisting assimilation by European culture.
                The fact that dead Indians are the only Indians to have achieved this sort of identity – “primal and continuous identity with ground itself, where everything is fixed in darkness,” as Williams puts it in “The Destruction of Tenochtitlan” from In The American Grain (33) – suggests that the identity of the “New World type” is indeed literal.  For Montezuma and Gautemozin it consists in burial, in being identical with the land.  In “The Founding of Quebec,” for instance, Williams contrasts native identity with the land – emblematized vividly in that chapter by the “corpses” of “dead Indians” in “their graves” (74) – with Samuel de Champlain’s obsessive duplication of the land in “charts, maps, colored drawings” (72). This contrast is crucial.  Dead Indians neither copy the land nor have the land in their blood.  Rather, they are the land (as in “the New World is Montezuma … or Gautemozin”).  Their relation to the land thus surpasses in “authenticity” (74) the relation achieved by representation, either in the case of Champlain’s notetaking or Pound’s blood virus (which reproduces the land).  Montezuma’s and Gautemozin’s relation to the land is authentic because it is not really a relation at all, but an identity.  “If the land were to be possessed,” Williams writes in his chapter on Daniel Boone, “it must be possessed as the Indian possessed it” (137) – or, more precisely, as the dead Indian possessed it.  “Boone saw the truth of the Red Man” (137; “The Discovery of Kentucky”).
                The truth of the Red Man parallels the “truly new” in art that Williams, in the “Prologue,” contrasts to the old, to Pound's and Eliot's “conformist” writing (Imaginations 8, 25).  Pound and Eliot, he says, are “men content with the connotations of their masters” (24).  By contrast, Marcel Duchamp does not reproduce old meanings.  “Duchamp,” Williams explains, “decided that his composition for the day would be the first thing that struck his eye in the first hardware store he should enter.  It turned out to be a pickaxe which he bought and set up in his studio.  This was his composition” (10). (1)   Here, as the magazine The Blind Man put it with respect to Duchamp’s more famous ready-made, the inverted urinal, Fountain by R. Mutt (1917), “an ordinary article of life” is “placed so that its useful significance disappears under the new title and point of view.” The magazine concludes that Duchamp “created a new thought for the object” (“The Richard Mutt Case”).  But Williams appears to view Duchamp's work differently.  He cites with approval Duchamp's opinion that “a stained glass window that had fallen out and lay more or less together on the ground was of far greater interest than the thing conventionally composed in situ” (Imaginations 8).  The window is “truly new” in being accidental:  it avoids producing a new thought (it is not exactly a work of art), just as it avoids reproducing any old thoughts (it is no longer a familiar artifact.)  Ideally, what is “new” about the window, hence “truly new” in art, is the absence of any reproduction whatsoever (including even the reproduction implicit in “a new thought,” which is in a sense already old in being a “thought for that object”).  Thus, Duchamp’s pickaxe is new because the representation, the pickaxe, is identical to the object represented, also the pickaxe.  The representation in this case does not reproduce an independent object because it is that object.
                But Williams calls the pickaxe a “composition.”  Is it not, like the window, merely a new thing?  Referring to Duchamp's Fountain, Arthur C. Danto writes that its “conceptual fulcrum” lies in the “question it poses”:  “why – referring to itself – should this be artwork when something else exactly like this, namely that – referring now to the class of unredeemed urinals – are just pieces of industrial plumbing?” (14-15).  In order for the Fountain to be art, Danto suggests, it must refer to ordinary objects (in this case, the “class” of things to which it is usually thought to belong:  “unredeemed urinals”) and thus establish its difference from them.  The Fountain created a scandal at the time, however, because it did not seem to be referential enough to be considered art. (Williams mentions, for instance, the “amusing controversy … as to whether the porcelain urinal was to be admitted to the Palace Exhibition of 1917 [Imaginations 10]).  Yet by posing this question – hence referring to itself as itself, as Danto notes – the Fountain in fact differs from other pieces of “industrial plumbing” which typically do not pose questions.  The pickaxe similarly differs from its class:  in implicitly asking how it is different from other pickaxes, it is not a pickaxe (or not only a pickaxe) but this.
                In this sense, the pickaxe could be described as a word that refers to only one thing in the world by being that thing.  But to create an identity between word and thing by making the thing into a word obviously requires changing the thing:  the thing that refers to itself as this in Duchamp’s “composition” is different from what “struck his eye” in the “hardware store.” Here the problem with perfect reference or the “truly new” is apparent.  The moment the work refers to itself it is different from itself.  Consequently, what appeals to Williams about Duchamp's ready-mades – their apparent capacity to represent and also to be what he calls “the thing itself” (Imaginations 8) – is not achievable in a work of art.  To be “the thing itself” is to be, as Williams says of identity with the ground, “fixed in darkness,” unrepresentable (American Grain 34).  The corollary of this point is that even when “a work of art means nothing,” it nonetheless means “itself.  Which is of course something” (Embodiment 120).
                If Duchamp’s ready-mades fail to be new, the corpses of dead Indians similarly fail to remain in identity with the ground of the New World.  They do not stay quietly buried.  The Caribs slaughtered by Ponce de Leon are, Williams notes in “The Fountain of Eternal Youth,” “the inhabitants of our souls, our murdered souls that lie … agh” (39). “We kill them but their souls dominate us” (40).  “Their souls dominate us” because as soon as their corpses function as symbols of authenticity, they are no longer actually authentic:  lifted from the grave, they have been taken out of identity with what made them authentic in the first place, the land.  Thus symbolic, they are in a sense brought to life. (2)   Not only are they (inhabiting us) not fully dead but also we (inhabited by them) are not fully alive. The result is the stench that pervades In The American Grain, a stench emanating not only from the corpses of dead Indians lifted from the ground, but also from what has “survived to us from the past” generally (115; “Père Sebastian Rasles”).  The Puritans, for example, are “stinking all about you” (115):  “It is an atrocious thing, a kind of mermaid with a corpse for a tail.  Or it remains a bad breath in the room.  This THING, strange, inhuman, powerful, is like a relic of some died out tribe whose practices were revolting” (115).  Williams says that he wants to “annihilate” this “THING,” this living corpse, but, as we’ve seen, even art that means “nothing” nonetheless means itself, which is “something.”  In this sense, even Duchamp's minimalism lacks what Williams calls “cleanliness,” the capacity to observe the hygiene of burial.  “We are moderns,” he says, “all lacking in a ground sense of cleanliness” (40; “The Fountain of Eternal Youth”).(3)
                Williams's own writing is not clean or new, then, even though he had implied that it was in opposing Pound’s criteria for being a “REAL american” with the assertion “the New World is Montezuma …stoned to death ….”  In a later letter, Pound pointed out to Williams the contradiction of thinking that American writing could be “new.”  “Your ‘representative american’ verse,” Pound wrote in 1920, “will be that which can be translated in foreign languages” and “will appear new to the french or hun or whatever … of course for me to say ‘you’re another’ is no argument” (Pound 44).  Here Pound relaxes his criteria and concedes that Williams's poetry is indeed American.  It is American, though, not because it is new but because, like Pound’s and Eliot’s own writing, it will seem new in being old, in translation.  Clearly, for Pound, “new” refers to a style of writing, and not, as for Williams, to a transcendence of the artifactuality of writing altogether.
                Williams was not interested, however, in being compared to Pound and Eliot (“you’re another”).  In his view Eliot had “rejected America” instead of accepting it.  With “Prufrock,” that is, Eliot had “betrayed” what Williams had “envisaged” as “a new form of poetic composition, a form for the future” (Imaginations 4).  Williams spent the early years of the 1920’s figuring out what made his “new form,” contra Eliot, distinctively American.  His answer in Spring and All (1923) and especially in In The American Grain (1925) is that American writing is characterized not by the author’s racial identity (as Pound had suggested in the letter from 1917) or by the writing’s identity with the ground of the New World (as Williams had implied in the “Prologue”), but by the author’s transformation of texts surviving from the past into words that, like Poe’s, have no “aroma” (American Grain 223; “Edgar Allen Poe”).  Thus, Williams's attitude towards “this THING,” the living corpse of past texts, is by his account quite different from Pound’s or Eliot’s veneration of tradition, for rather than creating more corpses by virtue of “rehash, repetition” (Eliot) or “constant cribbing” (Pound), he seeks to dispose of the corpse altogether by burying it in the ground of the New World (Imaginations 24).  Poe is his model.  What Poe “wanted was connected with no particular place” (American Grain 220; “Edgar Allen Poe”); he “was a man of great separation” (Collected Poems 198; Spring and All). And yet it is nonetheless “a new locality that in Poe is assertive, it is America” (American Grain 216; “Edgar Allen Poe”).  This “new locality” is also assertive in Williams's writing:  it is, as Williams remarks at the end of “The Founding of Quebec,” “here not there” (74).  “Here” does not refer to the “GRAND scene” or “NATURAL landscape” of America (in fact, Poe himself “counsels writers to borrow nothing from the scene, but to put all the weight of effort into the writing”) (227; “Edgar Allen Poe”).  Rather, “here” refers literally to “here,” to itself, to a locality in the text – this locality, the new locality (227). (4)
                The problem, however, is that “here” is not the New World, because even “here” is a version of there.  In this sense, America is not the New World.  It is a “new locality,” but one that – like Poe’s own prematurely buried characters (“in the place of sepulture … the quick among the dead”; Poe 105) – is neither alive nor dead, neither here nor there.  America, Williams says, is a “prolific carcass” (American Grain 175; “Jacataqua”).  “We die – and rot into the magazines and newspapers – and books by the millions – Books” (109; “Père Sebastian Rasles”).  In The American Grain thus constitutes Williams’s recognition that such books – in effect, the animate corpses of the dead – are unfortunately but unavoidably “prolific.”  With this recognition, Williams shifts his focus from the ideal of identity to the legacy of its absence.  Thus, the Indian, rather than functioning in death as a symbol for identity, supplies a model for living with what that symbol sought to elide: the inevitable presence of the past, the living corpse.  Indians, that is, have an exemplary relation to “the cruel beauty they, the living, inherited from the dead”:  the figures of their idols “were of extra-human size and composed, significantly, of a paste of seeds and leguminous plants, commonly used for food, ground and mixed together and kneaded with human blood, the whole being consecrated with a bath of blood from the heart of a living victim” (34; “The Destruction of Tenochtitlan”).  For the Indians, the spirit of the past is material and edible, meant to be eaten and transformed by the body into something new. Williams's own project of consumption and bodily transformation is analogous but not independent:  it requires the example of a racially primitive response to the past (for instance, the Indian, since “we” – “degraded whites riding our fears to market” – are out of touch with racial urges [108; “Père Sebastian Rasles”]), and the notion of race itself, “that resistant core of nature” (105).  The notion of racial descent is essential to Williams's literary descent because it explains how the writer can produce writing that is historically and geographically specific yet nonreferential, writing that attempts to embody America without representing it, without exhuming corpses.  For Williams, it is the racial body that produces the exemplary American book.
 
 

2. The Burial of the Dead
 

“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout?
– T. S. Eliot
Williams regarded Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) as a “great catastrophe to our letters” (Autobiography 146). But, unlike Hart Crane, who envisioned a way “through” Eliot “toward a different goal,” (qtd. in Altieri, “Eliot’s Impact” 191), Williams rejected Eliot’s method altogether   This rejection is perhaps most direct in Spring and All where, as Walter Benn Michaels has noted, Williams's “deployment of ‘ing’” in the book’s first poem, “By the road to the contagious hospital,” “takes up quite literally the distinctive participles of The Waste Land’s opening lines (‘breeding,’ ‘mixing,’ ‘stirring’)” (75).  In The Waste Land, these participles suggest spring’s movement and change, and thus contradict the desire of the speaker – whose voice, as Michael Levenson notes, seems to issue from the earth (172) – to remain dead.
 
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers. (53; I, 1-7)
But here even Winter, in “covering / Earth in forgetful snow,” and presumably protecting the sanctity of the grave, was “feeding / A little life.”  It is not, of course, winter itself but winter as metaphor that quickens the corpse. (5)  “Forgetful snow” – that is, the phrase itself –could in this sense be said to exhume the dead corpse, for in attributing the capacity to forget to something that has no capacity to remember, the phrase animates the corpse. (6)   Indeed, in depicting death at all, these lines render familiar what is (or should be to the living) utterly new and strange.  Animated in this way the corpse is alive, but its life is merely “a little life”:  the poetically resurrected corpse is no more fully alive in language (since its life is a function of the language of the past) than it could be fully dead in language (since its death is imbued by language with the properties of life).  The “distinctive participles” of Eliot’s opening thus enact this problem – what has been described as the central problem of The Waste Land, the problem of being “neither / living nor dead” (I, 39-40) – by making the actions of life (breeding, mixing, stirring, covering, feeding) all a repetition (in a sense, a memory) of the word, “spring.”
                Another way to put this point is to say that The Waste Land, “this stony rubbish” (I, 20), is neither a place to bury the dead nor (for this reason) a place to sustain the living. (7)   Thus, if Hart Crane’s way “through” Eliot was to accept this desolate condition of language – though to a different end (8)  – then Williams's way around Eliot was to question whether language necessarily reproduces the past or, in terms of the burial of the dead, is intrinsically malodorous.  Indeed, Williams's remarks on Marianne Moore’s poetry express his own aims:  to present “each word … crystal clear with no attachments; not even an aroma” (Imaginations 318).  “A word is a word most,” he says, “when it is separated out by science, treated with acid to remove the smudges, washed, dried, and placed right side up on a clean surface.”  This cleaning produces a word that is “scrupulously itself,” “smeared” neither “with thinking” nor with “the attachments of thought” (318). As Williams puts it in Spring and All, the work of art “must be real, not ‘realism,’ but reality itself” (Collected Poems 204).
                Successful cleaning produces the “cleanliness” of burial, since a word “with no attachments” is a thing, no longer referential or representational and thus, like the corpses of dead Indians, in identity with the ground of the New World.  Such a word has no aroma.  In this sense, Williams inverts spring.  What is new or springlike about the New World is not life or “lilacs out of the dead land” (or, as he puts it, “flowers that have an odor of perfume” [318]) but the deadness of the dead:  in Spring and All, spring “shivers” “among the long black trees,” and its “celebrant” is the “peaceful, dead young man” (the “corpse of a suicide”) (Collected Poems 180-81). (9)
                Williams consistently associates spring with the corpse of both the body and the land, in – as two examples among many – “Sub Terra,” a burial poem that introduces Williams’s “undertaking” in Al Que Quiere! (1917), and “The Accident” (1921) in A Novelette and Other Prose, where the death of Williams's patient is simultaneously the beginning of spring:  “It is the end!   It is spring” (Imaginations 307).  In “The farmer deep in thought,” from Spring and All, the beginning is likewise identical with the end, since “blank fields” and “black orchards” (“leaving room for thought”) allow “the artist figure of / the farmer” to have “in his head / the harvest already planted” (Collected Poems 186).  But Williams links spring with the dead corpse perhaps most conspicuously in Spring and All with what he calls “our secret project”:  “the annihilation of every human creature on the face of the earth.” “Then at last will the world be made anew” (179). With this annihilation, the world will be new because when people are corpses, words will in a sense also be corpses – buried corpses:  unused for communication and therefore new, not “hung by usage with associations” (American Grain 221; “Edgar Allen Poe”).  Thus, again, Miss Moore’s “undertaking”:  to remove words “bodily from greasy contexts” and put them in, or, as Williams says, “against the ground” (“there must be edges”; Imaginations 317, 318). (10)  Spring in the New World is therefore literally “spring,” the word buried by the modernist undertaker in the dead land of the page. Williams's project in Spring and All, and particularly in “By the road to the contagious hospital,” is to enact “spring” by burying the stinking corpse of spring (or what might be called, in the context of The Waste Land, the lilac breeding capacity of language, its metaphoric memory and desire).  Thus, as Michaels notes, versions of “spring,” “and” and “all” in this poem
 
are distributed through the opening description of “the waste,” “brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen / patches of standing water / the scattering of tall trees / all along the road.”  “Fallen,” “tall,” “all,” and, elsewhere, “small” and even “hospital” repeat the “reality” of  “all,” an effect that is even more striking with the repetition of “standing” (which produces both “and” and a version of “spring”), then “scattering” and later “upstanding” and “spring” itself. (75)
“There is an important sense in which what these lines do above all is produce the presence on the page of ‘and,’ ‘all,’ and” – apparently as a revision of Eliot’s participles – “’ing’” (75).  However, as Michaels adds in a note, “the point is not that the poem has no meaning but that these elements are foregrounded and yet not part of this meaning” (164 n. 34).
                Despite the “presence on the page” of these words, however, “spring” never quite arrives in this poem.  For “spring” can only arrive by meaning “spring,” by referring to itself as a word, as this word (otherwise it would mean spring, the season, associated with blooming flowers and budding trees); but as soon as it refers to itself or means “spring” it cannot be “spring,” for in referring it is no longer purely material and is no longer buried in the dead land of the page. The moment it arrives is necessarily the moment it disappears.  In effect, Williams's dead “waste” cannot avoid turning into a version of The Waste Land (in which the dead keep coming to life) because “spring” can only be, as Williams puts it in the poem, “lifeless in appearance,” and not actually lifeless (Collected Poems 183).   It is not possible, then, for the poem’s “elements” – “spring,” “and,” and “all” – to be foregrounded without also being part of the poem’s meaning. (11)  Thus, “spring” merely “approaches” in Spring and All.  Williams, for instance, announces on page 186 of The Collected Poems that “SPRING, which has been approaching for several pages, is at last here.”  But not quite here, since the claim that it has “been approaching” undoes previous assertions, for example on page 182, that it has arrived:  “It is spring.  THE WORLD IS NEW.”  Indeed, even on 182, “SPRING is approaching” even after “it is spring.”
                Cleaning the word of its attachments is not possible.  So, for instance, Williams asks “what about all this writing?” (in the poem of that title) and answers a few lines later,
 
O “Kiki”
O Miss Margaret Jarvis
The backhandspring

I:  clean
    clean
    clean: yes . . New-York

Wrigley’s, appendicitis, John Marin:
skyscraper soup –

 
as if to suggest that in the specific context of each of the middle lines the word “clean” is a different word, which is to say, clean – removed, like “Wrigley’s,” “appendicitis” and John Marin’s skyscrapers from the attachments of thought, from familiar contexts (200).  But Williams does not appear to regard this cleaning as successful, for a few lines later he writes, “Pah! / It is unclean / which is not straight to the mark.”  Here Williams could, of course, mean that he has failed to depict, as Barry Ahearn says, “the most vivid aspect of his affair with Jarvis, namely the violence of her reaction.  Williams has proven ‘unclean,’” Ahearn adds, “by refusing to be ‘straight’ and faithful to his memory” (149).   But as Litz and MacGowan point out in the notes to The Collected Poems, these biographical references are, at best, uncertain:   Jarvis is possibly Margaret Purvis (“the name ‘Purvis’ appears in the margin of Thirlwall’s annotated copy” of The Collected Earlier Poems), and “’Kiki’ may have been Margaret Purvis’s nickname” (503).   Indeed, the conspicuous subjectivity of reference or opacity in the second and third lines – “O ‘Kiki’ / O Miss Margaret Jarvis” – makes it seem more likely that the “backhandspring” here (Williams's poetic acrobatics, or backhanded way of achieving “spring”) is away from Ahearn’s biographical mark and to the graphical mark itself. (12) The mark might, in other words, be taken quite literally to refer to the material elements of “clean” – to the horizontal arrangement of c’s, l’s, e’s, a’s, and n’s, an arrangement made particularly noticeable by the columnar repetition of the letters when read vertically (as is hard to avoid doing: c, c, c;  l, l, l; etc.) – and, consequently, to the different identity of the word in each line.  The instance of the word “clean” that is really clean, we might say, is the middle instance, the one severed from all attachments, from being implied (“I: clean”) or from implying (“clean: yes …New-York”).  “Clean” in this sense is clean because it is c, l, e, a, n.
                Why, then, is the writing “not straight to the mark”?  For the same reason that “spring” does not arrive in Spring and All:  because “clean” comes to mean “clean” and therefore cannot also be “clean.”  Meaning “clean,” it is “unclean,” “not straight to the mark.”  “How easy to slip / into the old mode,” Williams remarks early on in Spring and All.  “How hard to / cling firmly to the advance” (191).  But, as it turns out, the old mode is not just “easy”:  it is in fact the necessary (and the necessarily disabling) condition of the new mode.  The new, in other words, will always be a version of the old because it must be old merely to appear new. The burial of the dead will never be entirely successful.  And this is why Williams's description of the clean word – “separated out by science, treated with acid to remove the smudges, washed, dried, and placed right side up on a clean surface” – could also be the description of a corpse, perhaps a medical cadaver, readied for dissection.
                The word, even as a cadaver, has an “aroma” and is thus a figure for the failure of Williams's artistic “undertaking,” at least as conceived in opposition to Eliot’s.  At the same time, however, the figure of the cadaver shifts focus from what the word is to how it may be used.  As Williams approvingly says of Logan Clendening’s The Human Body, “the book presumes knowledge of the body itself as the source of all knowing” (Imaginations 360).  The knowledge implicit in the cadaver for Williams is that the relations between the body and its environment are not mimetic.  The relations are indeed productive, in the sense that (as Williams titles his review of Clendening’s book) “Water, Salts, Fat, etc.” are transformed into the materials of the body (“the human body,” he says, is “an organism for the conversion of food and air into energy and into tissues”) (362).  But the relations are not directly reproductive:  the body does not copy these nutrients.  Instead, in this conversion “it is the body speaking” from “within the hide” (362, 359).  The body’s nonrepresentational “conversion of food and air” is, we might say, the knowledge that informs Williams's own knowing, his relation to tradition.  For if the word cannot be a thing, even in meaning “nothing but itself,” then the figure for the failure to be perfectly local, the cadaver, suggests at least a model for producing words out of an alternative locality, the body.   The point here is that the locality, or in Williams's case, the Americanness, of a word consists not in what it is but in how it is produced.  A word will always be a corpse from the past, but the American writer can be original nevertheless.  As Williams puts it, there is a “usable past … upon which I feed” (Wagner 82).
 
 

3. Descent

De Soto’s men have trouble disposing of his corpse.  First, trying to conceal his death from the Indians (“lest the Indians might venture on an attack when they should learn that he whom they feared was no longer opposed to them”), they put the body “secretly in a house, where it remained three days” (American Grain 58; “De Soto and The New World”).  Then they took it “by night to the gate of the town” and buried it there.  But the Indians, having seen De Soto ill and “finding him no longer, suspected the reason; and passing by where he lay, they observed the ground loose and looking about talked among themselves.”  So Luis de Mososco “ordered the corpse taken up at night, and among the shawls that enshrouded it having cast abundance of sand, it was taken out and committed to the middle of the stream.”
 

Down, down, this solitary sperm, down into the liquid, the formless, the insatiable belly of sleep; down among the fishes:  there was one called bagre, the third part of which was head, with gills from end to end, and along the sides were great spines, like very sharp awls; there were some in the river that weighed from a hundred to a hundred and fifty pounds.  There were some in the shape of a barbel; another like a bream, with the head of a hake, having a color between red and brown.  There was likewise a kind called peel-fish, the snout a cubit in length, the upper lip being shaped like a shovel.  Others were like a shad.  There was one called pereo the Indians sometimes brought, the size of a hog and had rows of teeth above and below. (58)
Williams is more explicit about De Soto’s fate in The Great American Novel (1923): “there at the edge of that mighty river he had seen those little fish who would soon be eating him, he, De Soto the mighty explorer” (Imaginations 204). If, in the passage from In The American Grain, the fish are not “little,” it is perhaps because Williams intends to emphasize the importance of their accomplishment.  For until De Soto’s corpse is consumed by the fishes, it retains its narrative agency: organizing the men, opposing the Indians.  But narrative ceases as the corpse sinks into the “formless”:  the writing becomes almost purely descriptive, wandering among names and fantastic shapes.  However, the fact that the passage does not merely end as narrative ends – which is to say, as the feeding begins – suggests that Williams has adopted the feeding itself as his aesthetic.
                After all, if the passage were organized according to representational or narrative principles, then it would end instead of beginning with De Soto’s descent into the “formless,” into the unrepresentable New World.  The New World is unrepresentable because it is characterized by “diversity.”  Columbus describes the New World’s “bright green trees” as “branches growing in different ways and all from one trunk; one twig is one form and another is a different shape and so unlike that it is the greatest wonder in the world to see the diversity” (26; “The Discovery of The Indies”).  But here “diversity” is not only difference (“one twig is one form and another is a different shape”) but also uniqueness (“so unlike”).  In this sense, Williams's remark (in a different context) that “the locality is the only universal” (qtd. in Tomlinson vii) applies to the New World that Columbus discovers, for if all things are different, as in the New World, then the only characteristic things share is difference.  Things are unique.  Hence also the natives Columbus first encounters:  “They paint themselves some black, some white, others red and others of what color they can find.  Some paint the faces and others the whole body, some only round the eyes and others only on the nose.  They are themselves neither black nor white” (25).   Here “the universal” is apparently uniqueness of skin color. (13)  But the fact that Columbus first perceives the natives as “themselves neither black nor white,” suggests that – even in this first glimpse – they are already seen in terms of black and white (the organizing binary of American racial discourse) and are, for this reason, not themselves. (14)   What Williams says of Champlain could in this sense apply equally well to Columbus:  he carries “his own head about prying curiously into the wilderness” and discovers, consequently, not the wilderness but his own head (73; “The Founding of Quebec”). (15)   Thus the irony implicit in the titles of these chapters that assert discovery –  “The Discovery of The Indies,” “The Founding of Quebec,” “The Discovery of Kentucky” – is that in each case the new or unique is not discovered or found so much as the old is reproduced, substituted for the new.  “For the problem of the New World,” Williams says, “was an awkward one”: “how to replace from the wild land that which … the Old World meant” (136; “The Discovery of Kentucky”).
                Williams took pains to begin the chapter on Columbus at the end of the story, with Columbus’s return to the “home coast” (7).(16)   He meant to emphasize that the New World was, at the moment of discovery, already old, “a predestined and bitter fruit existing, perversely before the white flower of its birth”:  “no more had Columbus landed” than the “flower” was “ravished” (7).  And yet, we should note that, notwithstanding the foreshadowing paint that Columbus mentally applies to them, the natives paint themselves.  Moreover, the New World, even undiscovered, was, Williams says, “marked with its own dark life which goes on to an immaculate fulfillment in which we have no part” (7).  It is not, therefore, by virtue of the absence of paint or marks altogether that the natives are “themselves” and the New World is “immaculate,” but by virtue of the absence of a particular kind of painting or writing – marks that would “replace from the wild land that which … the Old World meant.”  Thus in contrast to Columbus or Champlain (“carrying his own head about prying curiously into the wilderness”) the “souls” of the Caribs “lived in their bodies,” or, as Williams also puts it, referring to “an old Indian woman” who in revenge sends Ponce de Leon on his final voyage, “the book, her soul” (39, 43; “The Fountain of Eternal Youth”).  Here Williams identifies the soul of the New World not in opposition to writing but as a kind of writing:  the writing produced not by culture but by the body.
                 If, then, the soul of the New World cannot be reproduced without misrepresentation, its writing can nevertheless be imitated.  Indians, for instance, do not replace the New World with old meanings because their bodies (or books) transform, rather than merely repeat, textual or objective sources:  “they who fought their enemies, ate them” (39; “The Fountain of Eternal Youth”); “to this party that village is given to be eaten!” (127; “Père Sebastian Rasles”).  The painting or writing that constitutes the New World is thus dictated not mimetically by sources but nonmimetically by the body’s own rules of transformation.  This is a crucial distinction.  It suggests that in a title like The Embodiment of Knowledge Williams is referring not only to the form of writing (knowledge embodied in the text) but also and perhaps more importantly to the practice of writing (knowledge in the body). (17)  Williams is concerned not with what to write on the page but with how to go about writing it.  Moreover, this fundamental shift in orientation from embodied meaning to the body producing meaning explains why the chapter on De Soto does not end as De Soto is consumed by the fishes (or, equivalently, why the chapter on Rasles does not end when Rasles is “swallowed” by “THE INDIAN” [121]).  The writing cannot representationally follow De Soto as he descends into the “formless,” but the chapter continues because Williams substitutes for De Soto’s descent a parallel descent:  his own, towards “that resistant core of nature” in himself, manifest in his body’s transformation of sources (105; “Père Sebastian Rasles”).  Instead of trying to represent nature in the writing, Williams aims to imitate nature, to let nature express itself by, as he says, having “nothing in my head” (Imaginations 289).  Thus, the “dark life” of the New World is “marked” precisely because “we” – that is, our heads, the parts of us that replace the New World with the meaning of the old – “have no part” in that marking.
                And yet, even if the alliterative play “down among the fishes” (for instance, b’s and r’s:  bagre, barbel, bream) could be regarded as the nonrepresentational work of Williams's body transforming source materials by the dictates of its own “dark life,” it turns out that, as Bryce Conrad notes, “the facts as well as the metaphors of De Soto’s descent into the river comes verbatim from the Fidalgo” (65). (18)  “The report of how De Soto’s corpse was wrapped in shawls filled with sand and ‘committed to the middle of the stream’ to conceal the death from the Indians comes verbatim from the record.  Even the catalogue of fish in the river comes verbatim from the record” (65).  De Soto’s burial may be successful, in other words, but Williams’s imitation of the feeding that constitutes that success is not equivalently successful:  he fails to imitate the ways of the New World by copying the words of the old.  This failure illustrates the difficulty of literary descent.  In copying Williams does not transform his sources but merely consumes them; by the terms of his own account, he grows “fatter,” like the “degraded whites” he criticizes, “riding their fears to market” in the “unconscious porkyard and oilhole” of America (American Grain 109; “Père Sebastian Rasles”). “Degraded whites” require the example of the Indian, not because whites should “write of the Indians” or “hog-fill the copied style with a gross rural sap” but because they should write like the Indian in consuming and transforming sources.(19)   Williams thus aims to make literary descent possible for overcivilized and neurotic whites (“riding their fears to market”) by appealing to the notion of racial descent.  Imitating the primitivism of the Indian – and, as we shall see, the Negro – enables whites to discover within their fat copied corpses a living racial body.
 

4. Writing Like an Indian

When we think of the body as the sole source of all our good the return of an attenuated or spent “culture” to that ground can never after be seen as anything but a saving gesture.  (Imaginations 361)
Daniel Boone, Williams tells us, sought with “primal lust” to be part of the New World, “to grow close to it, to understand it and to be part of its mysterious movements ? like an Indian” (137; “The Discovery of Kentucky”).  Williams emphasizes, however, that Boone does not try “to be an Indian,” (“though they eagerly sought to adopt him into their tribes”).  Rather, Boone is “himself in a new world, Indianlike.”  Boone is himself, that is, because he refuses to copy the Indians.  Yet if he is “like” them by virtue of this refusal, then he doesn’t copy their refusal to copy so much as he imitates that refusal.  The difference between copying and imitation (21) is the difference between, as Williams puts it in The Embodiment of Knowledge, writing “in the style of Shakespeare” and writing “in the manner of Shakespeare” (138).  Writing “in the manner of Shakespeare” (and not the style) is to “follow his naturalism to a neglected conclusion – a wholly new literature” (138).  Naturalism is not a “form” that can be copied; for example, “Negro music” has “the form it has because of its naturalism, because it is Negro music” (138).   “To do something similar” – that is, to imitate rather than to copy – “we would have to do something that would be the music of the whites.”  Thus Boone is “Indianlike” precisely because he “stood for his race” (American Grain 137; “The Discovery of Kentucky”).
                 Boone “stood for his race,” but only because the Indian provides him with an example of how to do so.  The Indian is thus “the prototype of it all” (137), the example that enables Poe, through Boone, to be original:  Poe “faced inland, to originality, with the identical gesture of a Boone” (226; “Edgar Allen Poe”).  “American literature is anchored” (226) in Poe not because he has, like Eliot in Pound’s account, the “cursed blood” or, like Pound himself, “the virus, the bacillus of the land” in his blood.  Simply having American “blood” does not guarantee for Williams that you will produce American writing, since you can have the “blood” without having the right relation to it, just as you can be white and not produce “the music of the whites.”  Thus, “American literature is anchored” in Poe because he has, on the model of the Indian, the proper relation to his own blood.  American writing is therefore not merely modernist writing.  To put this point in terms of painting would be to say that American art is not merely modernist – that is, the imitation of nature, or, as for Braque, the painting’s representation of itself as “a surface of paint” (Embodiment 21).  American art – and, by analogy, American writing – is an imitation of our nature, or what Williams calls “our species of ‘naturalism’” (139).  “The old cultures,” Williams says, “cannot, can never without our history, our blood or climate, our time of flowering in history – can never be the same as we,” as America.  “They cannot” (150).
                Thus Braque, Cezanne, and Joyce (who “attacked the words themselves as the material of letters” [17]) may be modernists, but they are not American modernists.  Americans, Williams says, have their own “root” (American Grain 116; “Père Sebastian Rasles”).  Williams explains to Larbaud, his interlocutor in “Père Sebastian Rasles,” that “there was, to the north, another force, equal to the Puritans but of opposite character, the French Jesuits; two parties with the Indians between them, two sources opposite.”  Larbaud asks if he, Williams, is “brimming … with those three things: a puritanical sense of order, a practical mysticism as of the Jesuits, and the sum of those qualities defeated by the savage men of your country by the first two.”  But Williams insists to Larbaud that he speaks “only of sources,” not effects.  “I wish only to disentangle the obscurities that oppress me, to track them to the root and to uproot them.”   For Williams, the Indians cannot be uprooted because theirs is the “root” of race and not culture.  In the Indian therefore is a “basis” (213; “Descent”), an example for how to descend beneath the “the field of unrelated culture” that has been “stuccoed” (212) upon the land, a way to descend to and discover, as in Houston’s case, “the ground, his ground, the ground, the only ground that he knows, that which is under his feet” (213).  Houston “joined the Cherokee Indians of Western Tennessee” (212) and later “rejoined’ them (213); “he was adopted into the tribe” (214).
                But the point for Williams is not to be an Indian but to be, as for Boone, “Indianlike.”  This is why Houston’s adoption into the tribe may have been for him a “saving gesture,” but is nonetheless a “gesture of despair” (213).  Boone refuses adoption.  And thus it is his own “wild logic” that he affirms.  If Poe’s “roots” are “deep,” then, it is because Poe writes out of Boone’s same “wild logic” on the example of the Indian.  Indians, Williams says, are “a natural expression of the place” (137-8; “The Discovery of Kentucky”); what guides their expression is not intention but inborn racial characteristics – in effect, nature itself.(21)   In this model, the work of art represents its nonrepresentationality, but as an American work of art it also represents itself as a particular kind of nonrepresentationality, the sort dictated in America by “our history,” “climate,” “time of flowering in history” and, most importantly, by “our blood” (Embodiment 149-50).(22)   In “Advent of the Slaves” Williams calls this nonrepresentationality the “SOMETHIN” of race (American Grain 209).
                In that chapter, Williams says of  “M.” (the “most loquacious” of “the colored men and women” he has known) that “language grows in the original from his laughing lips” (210).  “His shy crooked smile, weary, slow, topping his svelt figure, his straight, slim six feet of willowy grace, drooping from the shoulders, smiling sleepy eyes.”  Here the alliteration – “language,” “laughing,” “lips,” “svelt,” “straight, slim,” “smiling sleepy eyes” – asserting the primacy of sound over meaning, emphasizes the materiality of the words.  But Williams’s material something here is crucially matched by what he calls “SOMETHIN.”  “When they try to make their race an issue,” Williams says, “it is nothing” – “Bert Williams, author of a Russian Ballet, The Kiss; that’s worse than nothin’.”  But “…saying nothing, dancing nothing, ‘NOBODY,’ it is a quality?.”
 
“Somewhere the sun am shinin’ ? for ME ...”  That’s SOMETHIN’.  Taking his shoes off; that’s SOMETHIN’.... dancing, singing with the wild abandon of being close, closer, closest together; waggin’, wavin’, weavin’, shakin’; or alone, in a cabin at night, in the stillness, in the moonlight—bein’ nothin’ ? with gravity, with tenderness? they arrive and “walk all over god’s heaven” (209).
SOMETHIN is here not only the nothing of materiality that as the subject of the poem is something, it is also what for Williams makes black dialect, like “Negro music,” “Negro” – the fact that it has “the form it has because of its naturalism.”  Bert Williams, that is, speaks out of what Williams calls a “solidity, a racial irreducible minimum” (209). In Williams's account, therefore, the nonsense language of minstrelsy –  “close, closer, closest together; waggin’, wavin’, weavin’, shakin’” – is produced above all by the racial identity of the speaker. Williams would have to reject George Walker’s view of minstrelsy  – “nothing seemed more absurd,” Walker said, “than to see a colored man making himself ridiculous in order to portray himself” (23) – and subscribe instead to accounts that made Negro art racial, a function of “birth.”  As Albert C. Barnes put it in a an essay entitled “Negro Art and America,” included in Alaine Locke’s 1925 collection, The New Negro, “the Negro is a poet by birth; his art and his life are ... one” (20).(24)   Barnes contrasts the “spiritual endowment” of the “Negro” with that of the “white man”:  the “white man” is dominated by his mind; “his art and his life are no longer one and the same as they were in primitive man” (20).  Here the Negro’s “spiritual endowment” is the racial Negro body.  So even if the language of minstrelsy is, from Walker’s perspective, “ridiculous,” from Williams's perspective it is an essential model for how to write, like Poe, from “deep roots” (American Grain 213; “Edgar Allen Poe”).  American writing thus not only represents itself as meaning nothing (hence is something), it also aims to represent itself as meaning nothing by writing “like an Indian” or doing “something similar” to saying “nothing” (hence is SOMETHIN).   American writing is American because its ground is not the modernist ground but, as in Houston’s case, “his ground, the ground” – the ground of “our species of ‘naturalism’.”
                But this ground – the ground of “our species of ‘naturalism’” – is not the ground of the New World.  America and the New World, as we have seen, are not identical.  What is significant about Williams’s writing in the 1920’s is its imagination of what, on the one hand, the New World is, and what, on the other, it must as the “prolific corpse” of America appear to be.  If the New World is an “Eden,” as Williams says in the “Prologue” to Kora in Hell, in which each thing is like another only in being “sufficient to itself and so to be valued” (Imaginations 7), then America cannot avoid the postlapsarian condition in which words fail to be the things they represent – a failure that has as its consequence that of the Fall:  death.  Writing is in this sense always animated by the spirit of the past – there and not “here.”  But what makes American writing distinctively American for Williams is the writer’s attempt, on the racial model of the Indian and the Negro, to “annihilate” the living corpses of past texts by consuming and transforming them according to the “naturalism” of his or her own race.  Something must be their own SOMETHIN.  Of course, identifying the Indian and the Negro as examples of racial primitivism is already evidence of the failure to be new (like Columbus's first glimpse of the New World natives as “themselves neither black nor white”) but it is a failure that is for Williams distinctively American.

 NOTES

1. Apparently Williams is remembering Duchamp's snow-shovel, titled “In Advance of a Broken Arm,” as a pickaxe (Marling 67). (back)

2.  Michael North, in his superb book, The Dialect of Modernism, citing Williams's remark that “in the heart there are living Indians once slaughtered and defrauded,” notes that “the more the Indians are cut down and cut off the more the Indians rise and become the soul of America.  The more thoroughly exterminated the tribe, the more effectively does it resolve Williams's paradox because then it becomes a collective of outcasts, a democracy somehow made up of those rejected by the mass” (158).  The “paradox” North refers to is supposedly generated by Williams's simultaneous advocacy of “touch” or “democracy” (as in “Père Sebastian Rasles) and “separation” or “aristocracy” (as in “Edgar Allen Poe”) (156-57). Apparently “the more thoroughly exterminated the tribe, the more effectively does it resolve Williams's paradox” because Americans can imagine themselves to “touch” (through the agency of the “lost race”) without actually having to touch (because it is a “lost race”).    But this veneration of a “lost race” does not “resolve” the so-called paradox.  North is certainly right that the more “the Indians are cut down and cut off the more the Indians rise and become the soul of America.”  As Williams says:  “Their souls dominate us.”  But, as I go on to argue in detail below, this domination itself is a problem for Williams, and not a solution to a paradox.  (I would argue, moreover, that the paradox is not a paradox anyway, since it is only by separation like Poe’s that touch – in Poe’s case, touching the “new locality” [American Grain 216; “Edgar Allen Poe”] – can be accomplished.)  The problem with such domination is that, possessed by dead Indians, Americans are not able to be in contact with the locality.  Williams’s point is not to make “Indians rise up” out of the ground “and become the soul of America,” but to endeavor to keep Indians in the ground so that America’s soul is its own, not constituted by the living corpses of its murderous past.  Thus even though the Indian indeed functions as a racial example for how to be American, the point for Williams is finally not to be Indian but to be American. (back)

3.  The same phrase – “ground sense” – occurs in Williams's funeral poem “Tract” in Al Que Quiere! (1917). The poem begins “I will teach you my townspeople / how to perform a funeral” (Collected Poems 72).  On cleanliness see Crawford, chapter 6, “An Ideology of Cleanliness.”  Crawford relates Williams's obsession with cleanliness in his poems to the development of antiseptic and aseptic procedures in medicine at the time (98-99).  For Crawford, however, Williams is concerned, by analogy with medicine, with “cleansing words of their accumulated filth – traditional poetic associations – but not their direct instrumental meaning” (111-112).  According to Crawford, transparent reference is what makes the words “clean” for Williams.  At the end of his chapter, Crawford acknowledges that “Williams can desire clean words … and the medical profession  can hold them up as a scientific ideal, but finally their cleanliness is a mirage.”  Williams “must begin in the muck, enjoy it, and ultimately remain there.  Regardless of modern innovations, we cannot live in a sterile world” (112).  While I agree that “cleanliness is a mirage,” I would argue that cleanliness for Williams depends on ridding the writing of, as he puts it (in a passage quoted by Crawford), all “the attachments of thought” (Imaginations 318), including, surely, “direct instrumental meaning.” A word is clean not when it refers directly or transparently but when it stops referring altogether.
                 On corpses as representations of the scene of writing, see Michael Fried’s ground-breaking book, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration.   On the modernist image as corpse, see Daniel Tiffany’s intriguing Radio Corpse. (back)
 
4.  My account of locality departs from both realist and materialist interpretations of Williams's literary nationalism.  Realist critics argue that the poetry is, as the The Norton Anthology of American Literature (1989) puts it, “vigorously American” (1164) because it is vividly representational, devoted above all to depicting the American locality with photographic clarity.  As Charles Altieri notes, even “the poetry establishment of his own time [treated Williams] as a minor, somewhat quirky local-color realist” ? an interpretation that has recently been reproduced in “more sophisticated academic versions” (Painterly Abstraction  224).  A quick survey of the criticism of Williams's poetry proves the truth of Altieri’s claim. For example, The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (1973), stresses Williams’s dedication to presenting the object:  “In a poem like ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ he flouts the great subject and makes clear how any object, rightly regarded, can display its special signature” (286).  And while we might expect such readings in popular anthologies, the following examples – among many other possible examples – show that the realist bias in interpretations of Williams’s poetry is pervasive.  Webster Schott in the “Introduction” to Williams's Imaginations:  “The poems of Spring and All turn from print into the things, the events themselves. Sun streams.  Roses bloom.  ‘Say it, no ideas but in things,’ Williams demanded.  And his writing snaps pictures like a marvelous image machine” (xvi).  Henry M. Sayre:  “Though Williams’s ‘Wheelbarrow’ bows in the direction of the mind in its opening stanza – ‘so much depends/upon’ – it never gives us the kind of verbal image that the second ‘petals’ line Pound’s ‘Station’ gives us.  It would seem, in fact, that Williams willfully refuses to visualize the mind in verbal terms; instead, he seems to concentrate almost exclusively on verbalizing material reality” (45).  T. Hugh Crawford:  “Nearly all [Williams’s] statements regarding the purpose of poetry and the attainment of knowledge return to the direct apprehension of a clear, unadorned object.  First and foremost a poet must be able to see and detail in living language the fragments of everyday life” (28).  Bernard Duffey:  “Virtually everyone knows that what William Carlos Williams called ‘things,’  what we shall here regard as components of ‘scene,’ of an adamant presence, take a large place in his poetry.  He invoked and reinvoked as his own sense of writing his slogan ‘no ideas but in things,’ and he was largely faithful to this formula.  His collected shorter poems can even be likened to a collection of snapshots of things, of unanticipated recordings of minutiae of the landscape, the environment, in which he lived his life.  Trees, birds, buildings, parking lots, rocks, plants, animals, suspended moments of action jostle each other and are mingled with records of momentary feeling and occurrence.  And such components are chiefly regarded for what seems their own sake” (12).
                 In arguing that Williams is committed to “here” and not to “there” – that is, to the text itself and not to what the text might also represent – I depart from such realist interpretations.  But I also depart from materialist interpretations that emphasize the “here” of the text.  Materialist critics have argued, against realist critics, that the poetry is in effect devoted not to representing but to being the American locality.  For instance, Walter Benn Michaels emphasizes that Williams's writing is American “not because it represents American subjects … but because it is American.”  A “materialist poetics,” he says – evident in Williams's “famous attention” to the purely “physical features” of the poem (“what it looked like, what it sounded like, how heavy it was”) – was for Williams a “distinctively American aesthetic” (164 n. 134, 76). (See note 11 for a more thorough survey of the literature of materialist criticism of Williams's poetry.)   I argue that Williams indeed seeks to “annihilate” the corpse whose soul is not “here” but “there.”  But his aim is not to put the corpse back into the ground.  This, as we’ve seen, is not possible.  Consequently, the materialist interpretation of Williams’s writing – equivalent to the claim that he does successfully bury the dead – does not sufficiently account for the complexity of his attitude towards either the past or meaning.  Thus, it is not the poem’s physical features as such but rather the poem’s failure to be purely physical that makes the poem American for Williams.  I argue that what is at issue in assessing Williams's literary nationalism, is not whether the poem has meaning, but whether its meaning derives from what, in The Embodiment of Knowledge, he calls the author’s racial “naturalism” (138). (back)
 
5.  Both winter and spring in these lines produce life.  The agency here is not winter or spring  but metaphor itself  (of which winter and spring are both instances).  I am reading death here as actual and not as a metaphor or figure for a diminished life as many critics of Eliot are inclined to read it.  (See, for instance, Frye 141  and Smith 122.)  I am arguing, in other words, that life in this poem is not metaphorically like death, but that in metaphor death is given a kind of life. Thus, even if it is true, as Frye and others have argued, that Eliot’s more general “theme” in The Waste Land is the “buried life” or “the ‘nightmare life in death’” (140, 141), then one of the causes of this metaphorical death, I would argue, is the inability of language, saturated as it is with old meanings unrelated to the immediate object of representation (or to the poet’s intention), to depict the actual (or the intention). (back)
 
6.  That is, the attempt to represent death inevitably misrepresents it because the language of representation is unavoidably alive with unintended meaning. Indeed, the range of allusions in these lines is, as many critics have noted, broad. (back)
 
7.  It should be noted that just as the presumed opposites in “The Burial of the Dead,” spring and winter, turn out to have the same metaphoric function (that of quickening the corpse into a kind of “buried” life), so also the desert waste and  water turn out to have the same function – a place of death that is not also a place of burial.  In “Death by Water,” for instance, “Phlebas the Phoenician,” though “a fortnight dead,” “passed the stages of his age and youth” (312 ff.).  We might say therefore that language in The Waste Land – or, language inasmuch as it is intrinsically metaphorical – has one meaning:  that of failed presence or, in Lacanian terms, manque d’être.  It is perhaps no coincidence that  Lacan’s 1953 “Discourse at Rome” – the essay in which Lacan announced his  break with the psychoanalytic establishment in France – was filled with references to Eliot’s The Hollow Men and The Waste Land (Davidson 56). (back)
 
8.  Crane, we might say, aims to produce out of the materials of culture (or “stock quotations” in “For The Marriage of Faustus and Helen” [Crane 26]) not a bridge for the dead (for instance, Eliot’s “London Bridge” [55; I, 60-63]) but The Bridge for the living (“instrinsic Myth / whose fell unshadow is death’s utter wound” [Crane 107; The Bridge, VIII, 65-66]). (back)
 
9.  In the “Prologue” to Kora in Hell, Williams notes that the magazine started by Duchamp and Arensberg, The Blind Man – emblematic for Williams, like Duchamp's other work, of the new in art –  was (necessarily it seems) accompanied by the suicide of one of its contributors:  “Together with Mina Loy and a few other, Duchamp and Arensberg brought out the paper The Blind Man, to which Robert Carlton Brown, with his vision of suicide by diving from a high window of the Singer building, contributed a few poems” (Imaginations 10). (back)

  10.  Undertaking occurs also in “Portrait of the Author” from Sour Grapes (1921).  There Williams associates spring – “flares of / small fires, white flowers! – Agh,” – with the destruction of the world:  “The world is gone, torn into shreds / with this blessing.”  The author’s job is to be an “undertaker” and protect  the world (he calls it the “cold world”) by destroying the flowers of spring:  “What have I left undone / that I should have undertaken?” (Collected Poems 172-173).  Flowers, by this reading, are caused by the failure of the literary undertaker to bury the words. (back)
 
11. As Williams notes, “it was a mistake to say, as it was said twenty years ago, that the object of modern painting was to escape representation” (Embodiment 22).  Instead, “painting is representation and cannot be anything else” (22).  But modern painting is not a representation of objects.  In Braque’s case, for example, the representation is of the painting as “a surface of paint” (21).  These observations also apply to modernist writing.  So, for example, the “meaning of Gertrude Stein’s work” is that the materials of language – “words, the spaces between words and their configurations” (17) – are meaningless:  “these materials are and must be understood, in letters, to supercede in themselves all ideas, facts, movements which they may under other circumstances be asked to signify” (17).  The point here is that Stein’s meaning is meaninglessness.
                 Michaels’s inclination to regard the material “elements” of the poem as not part of the poem’s meaning perhaps stems from the idea, in his 1982 essay, with Steven Knapp, “Against Theory,” that “the material condition of language is meaningless” (that, for instance, sounds “become signifiers only when they acquire meanings, and when they lose their meanings they stop being signifiers” (Knapp 22, 23).  With this idea, Knapp and Michaels are, I believe quite rightly, criticizing what they call Paul De Man’s “negative theory” (21) – the notion  that “sounds are signifiers even before meanings (signifieds) are added to them” (22).  De Man, in other words, distinguishes between, and indeed separates, language and speech acts, maintaining that “language is primarily a meaningless structure to which meanings are secondarily added” (22).  Knapp and Michaels dispute this distinction.  They contend that the material condition of language (that is, an instance of language that is not also a speech act) is meaningless not because it is a pure instance of language, as for De Man, but because, without also being a speech act (that is, without intention), it is not language at all.
                I would argue, though, that when “foregrounded” the material condition of language is not meaningless.  Indeed, its materiality can be its meaning, which is only to say that in such cases as “By the road to the contagious hospital” what seems not to be language is in fact functioning as language. I am not here reintroducing the distinction between language (in De Man’s sense of meaningless sounds that are in themselves still signifiers [23]) and speech acts, but merely pointing out that resisting a speech act with a noise or a configuration of marks is itself a speech act.  The issue one of intention.   Knapp and Michaels point out that accidental marks merely resemble language.  And while, on the one hand, it may be reasonable to deny that it is a poem that washes up on the beach in their thought experiment (an experiment designed to refute the possibility of intentionless meaning) – reasonable, in other words, to think that the marks that wash up are accidental and hence meaningless if there is no obvious agent who has produced the marks – it is, on the other hand, unreasonable to think that when those marks appear in a book they are similarly meaningless.  (See 15 ff. for their introduction and discussion of this thought experiment.)  Marks on a deserted beach and marks in a book are not equivalent.  My point is that the “elements” “foregrounded” by Williams in Spring and All are intentionally foregrounded as being meaningless and are, for this very reason, meaningful.   This is to say that as soon as “spring” becomes “spring” by meaning  “spring” it is no longer only “spring.”
                My account of Williams's so-called materialism differs from not only from Michaels’s account but also from accounts like his.  Carl Rapp, for example, argues that Williams's poetry is “devoid of representational or mimetic significance” altogether (81).  Williams’s own excoriations of “realism” – what he also calls “plagiarism after nature” in Spring and All  (Collected Poems 198) or “idea-mongering” (“the gross use of language”) in The Embodiment of Knowledge (141) – are of course largely responsible for critical emphases on his commitment to a “nonreferential theory of language” (Loewinsohn xvii) and his wide acceptance as, in J. Hillis Miller’s title phrase, a “Poet of Reality.”  Miller does not mean, of course, that Williams describes or refers to reality in his poetry but that he creates reality.  In Williams’s “new silence,” according to Miller, “words are first of all things.  A word is its sound and feel in the mouth when spoken, or the way it looks on the page, black marks against a white background, graphite which could be ‘scraped up and put in a tube’ or ink which could be lifted from the page... there is no ‘behind’ or ‘beyond’ in Williams’s world” (292).  My point is that Williams's aesthetic is not entirely materialist, despite his own remarks against “realism,” because when ink signifies ink it functions as its own “behind” or “beyond.” (back)

12.  Williams also uses the failure of biographical reference as a backhandspring into his famous poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” when it was republished in 1933 in Fifty Poets: An American Auto-Anthology, edited by William Rose Benèt.  Benèt, called the book an “auto-anthology” because the poets chosen for inclusion were asked to select the single poem “by which they would like to be remembered” and – so as to afford what Benèt called a “biographical reference” for each poem – “to add, in a brief paragraph, some of their reasons for choosing their particular poem, as well as something concerning the circumstances under which it was written” (viii).  Williams wrote:

The wheelbarrow in question stood outside the window of an old negro’s house on a back street in the suburb where I live.  It was pouring rain and there were white chickens walking about in it.  The sight impressed me somehow as about the most important, the most integral that it had ever been my pleasure to gaze upon.  And the meter though no more than a fragment succeeds in portraying this pleasure flawlessly, even succeeds in denoting an unquenchable exaltation—in fact I find the poem quite perfect. (60)
In beginning with a detailed description of  “the wheelbarrow in question” – an actual wheelbarrow that he reportedly encountered “during a lull in a medical emergency in which one of his young patients lay between life and death” (Rapp 60) – Williams appears to supply a “biographical reference” for the poem.  But, as he goes on to say, it is not the sight of wheelbarrow, pouring rain, and white chickens that the poem “succeeds in portraying.”  Instead, the poem portrays his “pleasure” in gazing upon the sight.  Williams’s “pleasure,” however, is a reference not necessarily equivalent to, or even uniquely evoked by, the elements of the sight itself.  The poem seems to present only an image and not any response to that image. Does the poem also succeed in “denoting” Williams’s “unquenchable exaltation,” as he insists in the paragraph?  To think that it does is to rely on what Marjorie Perloff in another context calls a “still-Modernist faith in the image as analogy” (83.)  Williams, however, does not explain the representational success of “The Red Wheelbarrow” by reference to its image. Instead, it is “the meter,” he says, that “succeeds in portraying this pleasure flawlessly, succeeds even in denoting an unquenchable exaltation.”  But can the meter function representationally?  Perhaps, but it seems far less capable than the poem’s images of determinately conveying Williams’s emotion.  Suppose that the meter of “The Red Wheelbarrow” were realized in different words.  Would the meter alone, “though no more than a fragment,” denote Williams’s pleasure, and moreover denote it, as he says, “flawlessly”?  Probably not.  Williams himself says in the concluding paragraphs of Spring and All that he does not believe “writing would gain in quality or force by seeking to attain the conditions of music,” the conditions in which, as for the “modern Russians,” “there is an identity of sound with something ? perhaps the emotion” (Collected Poems 235).  If the representational burden in the poem is entirely on the meter, then the poem is not representational, for the referent of the meter and hence of the poem itself is undiscoverable. Williams thus supplies the biographical reference Benèt requested but denies its significance for understanding the poem.  In this sense, the paragraph functions much like the poem’s opening, “so much depends upon,” for in resisting any link between the poem and its apparent reference (the biographical occasion, the unstated content of what the speaker thinks “depends”), Williams emphasizes the materials of the poem itself. (back)
 
13.  In Spring and All locality or uniqueness – for instance, the reader’s realization of “what he is at the exact moment that he is” – is also equivalent to a human universal – or, “the human race, yellow, black, brown, red and white, agglutinated into one enormous soul” (Collected Poems 178, 179).  Agglutination is, however, not amalgamation.  Agglutination implies that the whole is composed of fused parts rather than of dissolved parts (amalgamation).  Thus Williams's imagination here of the human race as “one enormous soul” is not one that recruits the logic of the familiar account of Americanization – the “melting pot” – to serve the universal. (For a critical contemporary account of the “melting pot” idea, see Bourne 248-306.)  Williams indeed sometimes uses the language of racial amalgamation.  For instance, Père Rasles, Williams says, was willing to “TO MARRY, to touch … to hybridize, to crosspollenize” with his “beloved savages” (121; “Père Sebastian Rasles”).  But I think it is accurate to say that the confusions generated by Williams's vague pronouns in these passages (“He exists, he is ? it is an AFFIRMATION, it is alive” [121]) suggest not the New World is characterized by the absence of racial distinctions but that it is characterized by the failure of the language based on those distinctions to represent particular individuals. (back)
 
14.  For an insightful account, in another context, of the binarism implicit in American racial discourse, see Hutchison 244, 228. (back)
 
15.  Columbus, we might say, is the first American writer, “on the beach at Santo Domingo, walking up and down” (137; “The Discovery of Kentucky”). The Puritans make explicit the sort of wrterly misrepresentation that is only implicit in Columbus:  “blind to every contingency, mashing Indian, child and matron into one safe mold” (112; “Père Sebastian Rasles”).  In this sense, the very act of writing – at least, in a representational mode – figuratively recapitulates American history, “history that begins for us with murder and enslavement, not with discovery” (39; “De Soto and The New World”).  As Michael North very aptly puts it, “the elemental scene of American creation is also one of racial murder, Cortez slaughtering the Aztecs, or Ponce de Leon exterminating the Caribs” (158). (back)
 
16.  Bryce Conrad notes that Williams used “the reversal of the conventional chronology of historical narrative” as a “structural principle” in this chapter.  He quotes Williams:   “Waldo Frank was the only person who recognized the technical difficulty and wrote me a letter praising the ending.  I had managed after all kinds of rewriting to tell about the three voyages and at the same time to keep the discovery that occurred in the first voyage for a dramatic ending.  It meant turning everything around, ending with the beginning”  (67). (back)
 
17. Loewinsohn appropriately introduces The Embodiment of Knowledge with the example of Bill Russell who, “in every move he made manifested an intelligence, both mental and physical” (ix). (back)
 
18. The Fidalgo is an account of “De Soto’s story” by “an anonymous Portuguese, who identifies himself only as a Fidalgo from Elvas” (Conrad 57). (back)
 
19. I adapt the phrase “writing ‘like an Indian’” from Our America (Michaels 85). (back)
 
20. It may seem eccentric for Williams to distinguish imitation from copying, but his poetics hinge on the distinction.  The following anecdote from the Autobiography helps illustrate the difference.
Alanson Hartpence was employed at the Daniel Gallery.  One day, the proprietor being out, Hartpence was in charge.  In walked one of their most important customers, a woman in her fifties who was very much interested in some picture whose identity I may at one time have known.  She liked it, and seemed about to make the purchase, walked away from it, approached it and said, finally, “But Mr. Hartpence, what is all that down in this left hand lower corner?”  Hartpence came up close and carefully inspected the area mentioned.  Then, after further consideration, “That, Madam,” said he, “is paint.” (240)
Williams concludes that the modern in art consists in “the transition ... from the appreciation of a work of art as a copying of nature to the thought of it as an imitation of nature” (240).  In this anecdote, the work becomes an “imitation” of nature when it fails to copy nature.  Hartpence, for example, notices the paint as paint (“Hartpence came up close and carefully inspected the area mentioned”) when there is a problem in the picture (“what is all that down in this left hand lower corner?”).  This failure changes the work’s relation to nature:  rather than copying specific objects the work imitates nature’s refusal to copy, a refusal that is essentially a consumption and transformation of forms. (back)
 
21.  Franz Boas notes that the Indians do not write “epic poetry.”  They write “lyric poetry in its simplest forms”:  “It may consist of the musical use of meaningless syllables … or it may consist largely of such syllables, with a few interspersed words” (Boas 209).  “There is practically no poetry that is not at the same time song”  (210).  For Boas, the musical base of the poetry is motivated by “pleasure” (495).  But for others – Boas cites Bucher and Wundt – the rhythm is derived from the movement of dance (494).  Indian poetry, by this account, is merely an extension of the body. (back)
 
22. Also from The Embodiment of Knowledge:  “What shall be seen then in America?  Nothing French surely.  What is there to see?  A tree – its been painted a myriad times from the Renaissance background down to Derain.  Well, what does one see?  to paint?  Why the tree, of course, is the facile answer.  Not at all.  The tree as a tree does not exist literally, figuratively or any way you please – for the appraising eye of the artist – or any man – the tree does not exist.  What does exist, and in the heightened intensity for the artist is the impression created by the shape and color of the object before him in his sensual being – his whole body, his mind, his memory, his place:  himself – that is what he sees – And in America – escape it he cannot – it is an American tree” (24).  We might add:  he cannot escape it as long as he has consumed the tree (“the tree does not exist”) and as long as what he represents is the primitive manifestation of this consumption (“himself”). (back)

23. George Walker was Bert Williams's partner  in a “famous black minstrel team” that according to Eric Sundquist was “exemplary of a generation of black performers that threw off the trappings of minstrelsy, in costume and manner alike, in order to broaden the conception of black stage art” (291). (back)
 
24.  The fact that Locke decided to include an essay like Barnes’s that explicitly links the “soundness” of the art of the “Negro” to his “primitive nature” or “birth” (The New Negro 19), and depicts that art as above all an expression of that birth, proves Henry Louis Gates’s oft-repeated claim that, as he puts it most recently, “For Locke and his fellow authors, the function of a cultural renaissance was inherently political:  the production of great artworks, by blacks, in sufficient numbers, would lead to the Negro’s ‘reevaluation by white and black alike’” (Gates 4).   The point for Locke and Barnes is to make the art racial.  Inasmuch as this means that expression must be a function of birth and not anything else, formulations like Barnes’s are standard. (back)

Works Cited

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Bourne, Randolph.  “Transnational America.”  Randolph Bourne:  The Radical Will, Selected Writings 1911-1918.  Ed. Olaf Hansen.  Berkeley: University of California Press:, 1982.

Conrad, Bryce. Refiguring America: A Study of William Carlos Williams’ In The American Grain.  Chicago:  University of Illinois Press, 1990.

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–––.  The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams:  Volume I, 1909-1939.  Eds. A. Walton Litz and Christopher Macgowan.  New York:  New Directions, 1986.

–––.  Imaginations.  Ed. Webster Schott.  New York:  New Directions, 1971.

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