This week’s reading of the New York School’s poetry reminded me of when Ben Hutchinson quoted the Icelandic poet, Jóhann Jónsson’s 1925 proclamation, We have been epigones since the age of the sagas. Epigones of our forefathers to one half, epigones of foreign artists to the other half. … Thus, we have with time become like margarine in a pantry full of butter! in the introduction to his seminal work Lateness and Modern European Literature (2016). Essentially, Jónsson laments the modern poet’s condition of slipping into the manufactured and oblique spaces of modern literature. Hutchinson traces the genealogy of Jónsson’s ‘epigones” back to Nietzsche’s second meditation ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’ (1874), in which he compares the psychological implications of the dialectical tension between past and present to a fever: ‘Modern man suffers from a historical fever, from an ‘oversaturation’ in cultural models of the past that encourages the self-perception of the Moderns as ‘latecomers and epigones.’
What emerges from Nietzche’s theory is a new critical paradigm known as “lateness.” The main premise of “lateness”, as Hutchinson explains, is that modernity can claim no evaluative precedence over previous periods since lateness does not automatically confer legitimacy. A precursor to Hutchinson’s study is Bloom’s The Anatomy of Anxiety (1973), which inspired John Ashbery’s The Problem with Anxiety.
Ashbery wrote The Problem of Anxiety in his collection of poems titled “Can You Hear, Bird,” which was published in 1997. However, “anxiety” as the condition of modern man’s “belatedness” is presominate theme in his earlier works as well. This theme is represented in Ashbery’s liminal spaces, non-spaces, and silences. For example, in The One Thing That Can Save America, the series of binary opposites in line 3, Urban forests/rustic plantations/knee-high hills, creates a “non-space” or, if you will, a nullification of “spaces” in which a poet might find poetic inspiration, but instead contemplates on “civil obscurity.” Binary opposites are also at play in the second stanza, alternating between light and dark imagery and forward and backward motion:
After breakfast crosshatched with
Backward and forward glances, backward into light,
Forward into unfamiliar light,
Was it our doing, and was it
The material, the lumber of life, or of lives
We were measuring, counting?
A mood soon to be forgotten
This dialectic creates an almost dizzying and disorienting effect, underscoring the speaker’s state of liminality. However, the condition of belatedness is most explicit in the final stanza.
Unlike the penultimate stanza in which the tone is more personal and intimate, indicated by the repetition of the pronoun I (I know, I braid, I tell, I mean), the speaker’s mood shifts in the final stanza as the theme becomes more universal. Consider the use of us, we, and our in the second and third verses: That tell us whether we shall be known/ And whether our fate can be exemplary, like a star. And, the “anxiety” over overcoming one’s belatedness dissolves into the imagery of a small quiet county cottage.
The message was wise, and seemingly
Dictated a long time ago.
Its truth is timeless, but its time has still
Not arrived, telling of danger, and the mostly limited
Steps that can be taken against danger
Now and in the future, in cool yards,
In quiet small houses in the country,
Our country, in fenced areas, in cool shady streets.
Hutchinson, Ben, Lateness and Modern European Literature (Oxford, 2016; online edn, Oxford Academic, 20 Oct. 2016), xxxiv and pg.3
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198767695.001.0001, accessed 4 Sept. 2024.
Really fascinating reading, and I’m so glad you brought up the idea of lateness and belatedness that inflects Ashbery’s poetry–perhaps increasingly as he ages, but it was always there. I like how you explore this in empty spaces or non-spaces in the poetry. We could also think of this as the empty spaces between moments of sense, or gaps between tonal shifts. All these suggest that nothing, as he notes, is central. That this seems to echo Yeats’s “the centre cannot hold” suggests that Ashbery is taking on modernism’s own sense of belatedness and uncenteredness into the postmodern era. Some critics find lateness to be a vantage point–a place of stored knowledge and retrospect. What, we might ask, does lateness know? What does Ashbery’s sense of lateness know?
Stef, I really appreciate that you found this source and shared it. That you take us on a journey from Jonsson to Nietzsche to Bloom then to Ashbery via Hutchinson is exciting, and it was fun to go along on this ride with you. Honestly, I would never had considered the idea of “lateness”, nor would I have ever been aware of its legitimacy or lack thereof in terms of modernism.
I really like your take on the liminality in the second stanza of “The One Thing That Can Save America”. I noticed it as well, but couldn’t put my finger on what made me so unsettled about it. I think it’s the transitive nature of it that confounds me. There feels to be so much uncertainty, and the back and forth is not a gentle ebb and flow, but something to which negative feelings are attached. The glancing backward and forward doesn’t feel calm, or even curious, but almost accusatory.
This seems like the NYS way of capturing the reader in the center of an action of which they are not completely aware, and it feels off-putting to me. I don’t like feeling like I walked into the middle of a heated argument, but that’s how this poem makes me feel. It’s too intimate, and also not intimate enough, if that makes sense.
I’m going to be thinking about this concept of lateness, and your suggestion that it can be found in the non-spaces and the silences of some of these works. I can’t wait to see where else this idea might be hiding.