Amatoritsero Ede

Experiments in language are necessary and useful but not in the form of witticisms, which introduces a cultural decadence similar to what ‘the age of Martial’ initiated into 18^th century thought. One way in which witticisms in poetry introduce cultural decadence is that it impacts the language in which it is written in a negative way; more on that shortly. According to Bretts, and as it is common knowledge, Shakespeare influenced the English language by introducing new words into it through his poetic utterances – one thousand and seven hundred new words exactly, one of which is ‘excellence’ or  ‘majestic’. In the same way contemporary poets, depending on their originality – and ‘wit’ in the proper sense or witticisms, as the case might be – may influence any language by introducing not only new words but turns of expressions, which then flow into the general current of a living language. Since language is the medium for expressing cultural thought, subjective reality can be influenced by writers in general and poets particularly. Politics is one area of culture where the accretions from writers and poets, especially poets, may be used or abused by power to shape subjective reality for ill or even for good; but most times for ill.

We can now begin to closely look at the specific ways in which the contemporary avant-garde (with its perverse witticisms) or the poetaster and the lazy poet, may, like Martial in previous centuries, initiate cultural decay, shape and mis-shape subjectivities. The linguistic gestures of the poet in any language, once they flow into the mainstream, are likely to find unconscious replication in the users of that language. This is an age of war, religious belligerence and bigotism; these two areas of cultural life are then very sensitive to such influences from poets or writers generally. The war in Iraq was initiated through the agency of language, first, that is the language of propaganda or perverse rhetoric.  When a powerful leader of the world uses the expression, “the axis of evil” – whether borrowed from a speech writer or not – he is following one of the rhetorical strategies (metonymy in this case) of the poet.

The expression is witty in a negative 18^th century epigrammatic fashion. It takes hold of the naïve subject with the force of the slogan, though based on untruth; it is short, witty and therefore memorable. The metonymy, ‘axis of evil’, neatly cuts the world into two different opposed parts with the certitude of a samurai sword. There are several binaries at work there, good and evil being just one of them. The listener can then go on, depending on their political sway, and imaginatively multiply such binaries: Muslim=bad and Christian =good and so on.  Binaries are dangerous because they leave the mind in a stupor and close all doors to mediating discourses. In this way the war was first fought (and won for propaganda) on the level of language before its physical manifestation. And when a bellicose leader taunts the other and promised him ‘the mother of all battles’, again the rhetorical gesture consolidated by countless poets in ages past is put into a negative use.

Of course it is easy to argue that the metonymy and the prepositional construction exemplified are a standard in any language, are parts of our linguistic unconscious already and available to anyone who would abuse it. Very true, and this is precisely why the poet should not further deploy expressions – heavy on false wit or witticisms, illogic and untruth – which may become mainstream in the future of any language; rather have   truth and reason at the writing elbow, such that there would be no rhetorical precedence   for misappropriation; or that if false wit should occur in utterance, the very structure and character of a language would make it obvious at once.

Contemporary avant-garde’s witticisms – and here one should include not only the verbal but also ‘representational witticisms’ such as drawings, irrational textual form or mixed media – as they are deployed lead to cultural decay by impoverishing what could otherwise be examples of great poetry for tradition and by pushing language inexorably into a dead-end; even if the avant-garde thinks it is doing the exact opposite. Due to false wit there is plenty room for a political misappropriation of rhetoric. Let us take the example of plunderverse’ rhetorical manifesto according to Bretts:

Plunderverse limits its own expression to the source text, but attempts a genuine, divergent expression through the selection, deletion or contortion of it. Plunderverse makes poetry through other people’s words. The constraint is not random, but merely an accelerated variation of the basic fact of language: we already speak in each other’s words. Plunderverse exaggerates the constraints through which we realize and discover our own voice, re-enacting the struggle against influences and cultural histories. It does not try to obscure, bury or overcome influence, but, in fact, celebrates the process by which influences vary into and inform our own voices. It foregrounds the process of language acquisition, reveals the debt of influence and exploits the waste of language.

Underlying the above manifesto is another kind of witticism, non-verbal but equally dangerous, namely that of legitimising theft and destruction– this time literary destruction and theft as distinct from borrowing, allusion or intertextuality – and by extension, any kind of theft and destruction. There is a moral hole at the centre of this ‘plundering’ that is appalling. It seeks to deface an already finished work under the fallacy that we speak in each other words, anyway. Bretts occludes the fact that even if we utter each other’s words, they come out with differing tonal ranges and combinations that do not make any two sentence the exact same thing. It is indeed wastage if someone were to take my poetry and, through cancellation and selection, pretend to have ‘written’ a new ‘original’ poem. Plunderverse exemplifies the laziness that powers the avant-garde, as it is now constituted, by promoting or seeking to atrophy personal imagination and true creative impulse. It celebrates war and despoliation, literally, war on words and, metaphorically, war as a ‘phenomenon’ in itself; and as a means of balance in wasteful and over-producing economies. Listen to him:

As Bataille wrote, economies that depend upon wastefulness must obscure the waste or risk the insurgence of destabilization. The Vikings, in their indelicate raids, pillaged the excesses of communities without destroying the waste-producing structures (allowing them to return and plunder again in the future).

Should one walk into a gallery and begin to take bits and pieces of a painting to create a collage of another painting. The new work would amount to a destruction and theft of the old. Surely one would be flogged out of the gallery as Jesus Christ flogged religious whores out of the synagogues of his youth.

True wit should deploy syntactical brevity, measured cadence, memorable expression, even the pun, but all within an ambience of truthful utterance developed through demonstrable logic and not empty binarisms, antithesis or the maxim; it should not provide wayward moral injunctions in its subtext.

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Further reading

Alderson Simon, J.: “The Augustan Attack on the Pun” in Eighteenth-Century Life 20.3 (1996) 1-19
Bretts, Gregory: “Plunderverse: A Cartographic Manifesto” available http://www.poetics.ca/poetics05/05betts.html
Hunter, Paul, J.: “Couplets and Conversation” in The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth Century Poetry ed. John Sitter (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001) 13.
Lund,  Roger D.:  “The Ghosts of Epigram, False Wit, and the Augustan Mode” in  Eighteenth-Century Life – Volume 27, Number 2, Spring 2003, 79.
Williamson, George: The Proper Wit of Poetry (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1962) 5.

[1] Eighteenth-Century Life – Volume 27, Number 2, Spring 2003, pp. 67-95.

[2] Hunter Paul, J. “Couplets and Conversation” in The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth Century Poetry ed. John Sitter (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001) 13.

[3] Roger D. Lund  Eighteenth-Century Life – Volume 27, Number 2, Spring 2003, 79.

[4] Ibid. 1

[5] Ibid. 80

[6] See “Plunderverse: A cartographic Manifesto” at  http://www.poetics.ca/poetics05/05betts.html

[7] Ibid.80

[8] Hunter 20

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