Title: Barbara Guest and the Boys at the Cedar Bar: Some Painterly Uses of Language
Abstract: For Mei-mei Berssenbrugge Barbara Guest admitted envying the freedom of painters so much that she began to use some of their methods, especially the method that lends an idea of space the poem. What attracted Guest most powerfully was the painters' capacities articulate spatial relations, for defining space is a paradigmatic exercise in how any artist deploys the power of syntactic relationships. When Guest's The finds herself divided and confused, she embraces the potential of spatial relations: the Poetess riddled her asterisk genial! as space To clarify why space, rather than time, becomes Guest's figure for geniality we should consider how painterly explorations of spatial relations allow concrete modes of identification that are relatively free from the gender hierarchies that haunted Guest's relations with her fellow writers and artists. But first, understand how space fits into a more general picture of writerly possibilities, we have turn a level of abstraction quite alien Guest. I need rehearse Nelson Goodman's distinction between language and painting. Goodman sees language as a system that depends on discrete structured differences, and painting as a system that operates within a syntactic density where there are always an infinite possible set of differences that might bring significance details and relationships. Language divides the world into differences that make a difference and differences that are not registered as significant, like differences in pronunciation or accompanying gestures. Pictures, on the other hand, do not rely on this hierarchical structure of differences. Goodman gives the example of the difference between an electrocardiogram and a Hokusai print of Mt. Fujiyama. Taken as visual material, as linear patterns, these designs might be indistinguishable. But the electrocardiogram reads as a language does: the only differences in the image that matter are those that register semantically because of their contrast with other discrete signifying features. In the Hokusai, meanwhile, every segment of the image can be significant--the shape of the line, the shading of the figure, the textures that gradually rather than discretely modulate into one another. Every difference is in principle divisible into further, significant differences. This explains why, for Goodman, language may be semantically but not syntactically dense, while painting is both semantically and syntactically dense. Guest cannot, of course, avoid the syntactic structures on which language depends. But I think she is distinctive for her work's ability push the differential logic of words toward the continuous replete space of painterly composition. One could elaborate that point psychologically in a poem like Brown Studio, which plays a speaker's ability reconstruct a scene against the scene's capacity subsume agency into the physical atmosphere it constructs. Guest is fond of establishing this tension by stressing the conflict between an elaborate linguistic syntax and an imagination that works in visual terms. This sense of visual engagement provides a strange and uncontrollable otherness that at once frightens and exhilarates our linguistic intelligence. In a kind of reversal, it comes seem that the elaborate syntax itself produces a subject matter that extends beyond what our vehicles for determining meaning can control. But stop with this account of Guest's interest in painterly syntax would not be quite adequate Guest's use of that syntax in her most ambitious and innovative work. In poems like Nebraska, Guest treats surrealism less as a matter of discovering deep truths about the psyche than as a matter of experimenting with how meaning can implode and get redirected into the domain of interlocking visual phenomena. There she seems me not only interested in the tension between meaning and visuality but also between physical and metaphysical (or 'pataphysical) dimensions of continuous space. …
Publication Year: 2008
Publication Date: 2008-06-22
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 2
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