Excerpts from “Spun Puns (and Anagrams): Exchange Economies, Subjectivity, and History in Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge, by MITCHUM HUEHLS
“The worlds within and without the Veil of Color are changing, and changing rapidly, but not at the same rate, not in the same way; and this must produce a peculiar wrenching of the soul, a peculiar sense of doubt and bewilderment. Such a double life, with double thoughts, double duties, and double social classes, must give rise to double words and double ideals, and tempt the mind to pretence or to revolt, to hypocrisy or to radicalism.”
–W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
From the essay itself:
“Language that contains and controls its excess referential value creates the illusion of a linguistic mastery that we might see as structurally similar to the mastery of a slave owner over his slaves.”
“Writerly” texts like Mullen’s Muse & Drudge, then, linguistically resist the easy commodification caused by the specious equivalency of “orality.” Just as the exchange of slavery ignores the irreducible materiality of the body, to ignore text is to ignore the irreducible materiality of the word, which contributes an uneconomizable, referential excess to every act of meaning-making. Mullen writes of “scratched out hieroglyphs / the songs of allusion / and even the motion / changing of our own violins” to represent the violence (“scratching out” and “violins” [violence]) that such textual ignorance does to the African American tradition (12).”
“But why is it important that hue-ing is also hewing, that mules are not just mules and muses are not just muses in Mullen’s work? Although Mullen’s puns do not literally go out into the world and overturn specious exchange equivalencies, they do provide an epistemological model for identifying a nonequivalent surplus in all acts of exchange–a surplus that suggests that a given word, object, or body always exceeds itself. And in addition to representing the excess of material bodies, Mullen’s puns also represent the uneconomizable excesses of the history of slavery as it exists in the form of memory. Just as words haunt each other in Mullen’s puns, slavery echoingly haunts the memory of contemporary black culture like a restlessly present absence. To make slavery’s violence subsumable by and equivalent to the slave’s body, the slave traders and owners needed to suppress a counterexcess, the surplus, living humanity of the body. The material body, however, transforms the physical excess of violence into memory and scars, leaving uneconomizable imprints of that violence. This conflict of excesses, between the violence that exceeds the instrumentalized body and the living, material surplus of the human body resistant to instrumentalization, gives birth to the haunting traces of slavery that are figured by Mullen’s puns.”
“The pun has the capacity to signify with simultaneity, to resist essentialized readings, to reveal suppressed facets of signification, and to demonstrate how an apparently dominant term is always inextricably bound to that which it dominates. As such, puns make Mullen’s poetry theoretical without turning it into theory itself; and by modeling certain doubled epistemologies, they introduce an important dose of critical analysis to a kind of representational politics that too often naively assumes the logic of its own conclusions.”
“Specifically, Mullen employs the pun’s multiplication of meaning to elaborate on three important themes that recur throughout the poem: exchange economies, subjectivity, and history. The structure and content of Mullen’s puns provide an epistemological model for critiquing the surplus value of the body that slave owners suppressed in order to instrumentalize humans; for deploying Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness in a way that maintains the fracture as a constitutive part of black subjective consciousness; and for exposing the formative role of miscegenation (racial doubling) in the making of history, a role that history is invested in repressing.”