Not Plasir but Jouissance in the Language Poets

Not Plasir but Jouissance in the Language Poets

Unlike the Black Mountain poets and the Black Arts Movement, the Language poets do not unite around a collective manifesto. However, in his eponymous article, Steve McCaffery explains that structuralism, a post-World War II French/Continental “ism,” informs their conceptual framework. For this reason, he further explains that the initial manifestation of the  L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets was set up to be a journal not of primary creative texts but theoretical conjunctures and statements about poems and poetics (144-145). Along these lines, Lyn Hejinian in The Rejection of Closure quotes from Elain Marks, article  “Signs” (Summer 1978) to explain how French feminist writers disrupt the inherently patriarchal construct within the Lacanian psychoanalytical theory, the “Law of the Father,” and produce a new feminine discourse of desire within the symbolic order: 

language and the unconscious, not as separate entities, but language as a passageway, and the only one, to the unconscious, to that which has been repressed and which would, if allowed to rise, disrupt the established symbolic order, which Jacques Lacan has dubbed the Law of the Father.

However, Hejinian ultimately disagrees with Marks: She believes it limits the meaning of desire only to sexuality, suggesting that a feminine language that is limited to sexuality does not represent the feminine body politic.  Moreover, as far as a theory of a feminine language that extends beyond discourses in sexuality, Hejinian draws from Lacan and Barthes’ post-structural theories of the relationship between the reader and the text, particularly their notion of jouissance. 

Roland Barthes, in The Pleasure of the Text, who bases his concept on Lacan (I adopt here the same translation that Richard Miller, Barthes’ translator, approximates for jouissance, which is “bliss”) explains: 

Here, moreover, drawn from psychoanalysis, is an indirect way of establishing the opposition between the text of pleasure and the text of bliss: pleasure can be expressed in words, bliss cannot. Bliss is unspeakable, inter-dicted. I refer to Lacan (“What one must bear in mind is that bliss is forbidden to the speaker, as such, or else that it cannot be spoken except between the lines . . .” and to Leclaire (” Whoever speaks, by speaking, denies bliss, or, correlatively, whoever experiences bliss causes the letter and all possible-speech to collapse to the absolute degree of the annihilation he is celebrating’). The writer of pleasure (and his reader) accepts the letter, renouncing bliss [….] criticism always deals with texts of pleasure and not bliss.   

Essentially, the text of pleasure is canonical, performative, and fixed. In contrast, a text of bliss offers the reader a glimpse of something and leaves the rest unknown, “open” to the reader’s imagination, to his/her bliss. It taps into a realm of our unconscious (Freud) and of infinite possibilities (deconstructivism). Hence Hejinian’s title to her article, The Rejection of Closure. Furthermore, and more importantly, while not explicitly, we can see how Lacan and Barthes’s theories of joussiance inform her ars poetica in her poem The Distance from her collection Saga and Circus. 

Within Saga and Circus, published in 2008, resides the contemporary epic-style poem The Distance, written in free verse. For brevity, I’ll skip to the concluding stanzas (those available in Nelson’s Anthology) to discuss where this post-structural Lacanian/Barthes theory of jouissance manifests itself. 

First, in Canto XXX, the narrator reflects: As words- they are mere estimates, jutting, externalizations, / experts say that the emotions begin / and end in the body…  Here, “words” are insufficient. They are mere estimations of what is experienced—a wholly internal experience; and therefore, exclusive to the bearer of the body, the perceiver of the event. In Canto XXXIII, bliss, jouissance, is the untold adventure, the counternarrative to every traveler’s tale, which unfolds:  Of the tale folded into. We are exposed. There is nothing here/ but exposure/exposure produces the blacks of the map. And, finally, in the poem’s conclusion, We have no Prospero to wreck us/And turn us into mules with dazzling haunches. The role of language is quite significant in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. It is a means of knowing oneself. Prospero, the main character’s language, is mean and dehumanizing. Through language, he employs a series of machinations and manipulations, which he later regrets, pleading to the audience for his redemption.  Thus, as it relates to a discourse on language, Prospero’s absence in this last stanza offers two avenues of interpretation. 

 First, beauty is found in the silences or the spaces between the words, not in the words themselves. This is consistent with Lacan and Barthes’ notion of the pleasure of the text and jouissance.  Secondly, as Hejinian discusses in The Rejection of Closure, words are inherently coded with a body politic.  In this case, Propero ultimately reflects the patriarchal structure of the society in which the dominant male Machiavellian-like figure prevails. Thus, his absence suggests the possibility of the construction of a new language that reflects a new body politic, ideally a feminine one that extends beyond the symbolic code of desire: This single line is dense with meaning. It suggests a tinge of hope for the ability to eradicate from our language construct its inherently “Western” thought paradigm and reconfigure a new construct with a feminine body politic, moving beyond the feminine “mystique.” This scintilla of possibility and hope is also suggested at the poem’s conclusion.

The poem’s conclusion offers another example of Hejinian’s syncretism of the Lacanian/Barthes theory of  bliss and her interpellation (remember the Language poets are pronounced Marxists; thus, it’s not too far-fetched to use an Althusserian term here) of a language construct that reflects a feminine body politic. Recall that bliss is an unspeakable, inter-dicted, forbidden word/event to the speaker—except between the lines. For Hejinian, it is a glimpse into the “openness” of the illimitable / transient form (Lines 111, 112). Notice the enjambement, which reinforces the sense of  “openness.”  Then, we encounter Lines 124-126 an unspoken future has acquired the habit of awaiting to reveal itself./  History should come next, as if it were a wind/That could make us happy.  In these final lines, the possibility of hope is underscored in the use of the conditional “could.” A powerful ending to the poem into which I’d like to slip away again. (This ending, to me, seems more evocative of Eugene O’Neil than Milton)… A discussion for another blog post.