Objects and How To Survive Them: Several Views of John Wilkinson's 'Saccades'

Journal of British and Irish

ARTICLEVolume 2, Number 1

Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry © Gylphi Limited, Canterbury, UK ISSN 1758-2733 | 02_01 | 2010 (1–00) | http://www.gylphi.co.uk/poetry

Objects and How to Survive ThemSeveral Views of John Wilkinson’s ‘Saccades’

MaTT ffyTcHe

abSTracTThis article concentrates on one of Wilkinson’s longer projects from the 1990s, ‘Saccades’, which is also one of his most complex structural arrangements of material. His writing has often been described in terms of its fleeting and kinetic qualities. This article tests the longer work to see what possibilities of formal development, argument or ideology emerge within it. In particular it investigates references to the psychoanalytic theory of object relations in Wilkinson’s work, including Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott and Christopher Bollas. What light do such theorists shed on Wilkinson’s explorations of psycho-somatic processes in the poetry? What is the view of subjective life which the poetry develops at the interface between psychology, ethics and aesthetics?

KeyWOrdSaesthetic theory • Klein • object relations • poetics • psychoanalysis • Wilkinson

All the time, as we amble about in our worlds, we come across objects . (Bollas, 2009: 80)

The way we use objects will determine our survival . (Wilkinson, 2007: 2)

Introduction

This article originated as a paper on John Wilkinson’s poem ‘Saccades’ for a conference on ‘The Long Poem’ in which the emphasis fell on its problematization of structure (ffytche, 2008a). It was then revised and extended as a paper given at the University of Essex, concentrating more closely on the psychoanalytic dimensions of the poem (ffytche, 2008b). Though these topics might appear to open two quite different

Journal of british and Irish Innovative Poetry | 02_01 | 2010

2

lines of enquiry, they turn out to converge on the issue of objects and object relations. This is because inner and outer dimensions of coherence are thrown up and somewhat confused by the poem’s strange take on the materials of existence. We might ordinarily think of objects as things ‘out there’ that a poem may describe or contain, or a person handle. But here are poems crammed with flurries of real and unreal objects – lin-ing, tongue, a woolly eucharist, a bud, tooth, X-ray, spores, cardboard, flywheels, finger pads, lip-gloss, midget carpet tile –1 that complicate our sense of what it means to structure, contain or cohere. Correspondingly, the work’s own formal structure, its objective partitions, thresholds, or points of arrival, is often hard to determine. Of his poems, Wilkinson suggested that ‘the principle of their integration is far harder to dis-cern than are their various discourses to tease apart’.2 At the same time, Wilkinson has often reflected on such issues of integration and coher-ence via the psychoanalytic theory of object relations.3 The term ‘ob-ject relations’ served in classical psychoanalytic theory to designate the sexual object, or the object of a drive, but under the pressure of various theoretical revisions, particularly in the work of Melanie Klein and then D. W. Winnicott in the British tradition, it has come to indicate a concern with ‘internal objects’. The infant, in the earliest years of its life, inter-nalizes perceptions of its primary care givers, which are invested with its own emotional projections. Not quite self and not quite other, fantasized but indelibly real, such internal objects form the building blocks of later experience.4 Infant development, in this view, depends on the emergence of more complex forms of ‘object relations’, but the perception of ob-jects as simply ‘out there’ in the world, with the subject as a separate and coherent entity, perceiving and responding to them, is arrived at fairly late in this process, and perhaps not ever fully established. Object relations theory typically concentrates on a situation ‘in between’ – on ‘transitional objects’, for instance, which are compounds of things and the fantasies projected into them.

This complication of what an object is, and how it is present for a subject, is one that Wilkinson often makes central both to his statements on poetics, and his critical commentaries on the work of other poets. What kind of reality is reflected in the poem? Can it be objectified or interpreted in any formally coherent way – and where exactly does its coherence lie? The poem with which Wilkinson is critically engaged is ‘difficult’ (Wilkinson, 2007: 195), or it ‘flickers’ (Wilkinson, 2007: 105), it is ‘metastases’ (Wilkinson, 1992: 154), a ‘torus’ (Wilkinson, 2007: 154), ‘misty’ (Wilkinson, 2007: 206), ‘hybrid’ (Wilkinson, 2007: 198), ‘stum-bling’ (Wilkinson, 2007: 254) or ‘transitional’ (Wilkinson, 2007: 196). The poems he writes and reads both solicit and refuse the presence of objects and the presence of themselves as object. As with ‘Case In Point’,5

ffytche | Several Views of John Wilkinson’s ‘Saccades’

3

‘a work that was beside the point and all round the point, a point which would never be spelt out and might resist identification’ (Wilkinson, 2007: 170), ‘Saccades’ is a poem which incessantly questions, blurs and resists processes of objectification, while just as incessantly and disturb-ingly representing them.

What is at stake, then, in considering objects and object relations in the poem, is not simply the particular choices made in terms of poetic form, nor just the description of particular sets of objects within the poem, but the poem as a transgressive beginning on form itself, and a beginning on the experience of subjectivity, in which ambiguity, ambivalence, complexity and possibility precede and perhaps endlessly displace the apprehension of simpler demarcations of objects and subjects in the world.

There is a further rationale for exploring Wilkinson’s engagement with object relations, and this has to do with a deficiency within the psy-choanalytic literature itself. There is a long history of psychoanalysts referring to poetic examples in order to illustrate psychoanalytic ideas, but, curiously, poetic reference points are often quite conservative. Ro-mantic and Victorian writers predominate, and this can give the im-pression that, aesthetically, psychoanalysis prefers to find endorsement through precisely the world it was meant to have terminally dismantled so spectacularly around 1900, rather than the products of modernism contemporary with its own avant-garde psychology. In British psychoa-nalysis the interest in Wordsworth runs incredibly deep. Ernest Jones famously asserted that Freud gave Wordsworth’s phrase, ‘The child is father of the man’, a profounder significance, because he discovered the precise way in which that transition is made (Jones, 1953–7: Vol. 1, 378). Joan Riviere and Marion Milner both used Wordsworth to help convey their notions of inner world and symbol formation in essays of the 1950s (Riviere, 1952; Milner, 1955/1993). Most significantly, British object-relations theorists have continually quoted Wordsworth as a way of giving their own ideas a deeper historical tradition. ‘He seems to have read my books!’ said Winnicott in inter-view (cited in Jacobus, 2005: 148). Likewise, for Ronald Britton (former President of the British Psychoanalytical Society) Wordsworth’s description of the infant’s attachment to the mother in book two of the Prelude ‘makes a conjectural leap into the theories of the middle of the twentieth century’, by which he means the work of Klein, Balint and Winnicott (Britton, 1998: 134).

However, there are some oddities about this ongoing use of Words-worth as a point of reference within psychoanalysis. One is that Wordsworth’s view of the self and infant-development are imbricated in assumptions about the natural growth of form, and the providential influence of nature, which were already criticized in their own time as


4

being idealistic, as giving a chimerical portrait of the condition of human consciousness in human modernity. So there would be an odd split here between the modern urban field within which psychoanalysis practically functions and the now idealised vision of consciousness grounded in na-ture and in the enduring objects and processes of rural labour. Second, it is true that Wordsworth’s poetry gives a special emphasis to the analysis of emotion and to the action of emotion on memory – indeed, he set up some of the coordinates for what one might call the subjectivisation of the moral cosmos within Victorian culture. However, Wordsworth’s key description of poetry as ‘Emotion recollected in tranquillity’ seems to jar with most of what psychoanalysis tells us about the influence of affect in our lives. It is not what we consciously recollect that is necessarily de-cisive, but what is unconscious, and bursts into the frame unannounced; and it is not tranquil. What about those features of unconscious life that are violent, or fractured, or illogical or otherwise disruptive in such a way that we would not want to recollect them, and perhaps could not even if we wanted to?

Emotion recollected in tranquillity would seem to describe the inte-rior life of someone who was beyond analysis; or whose dimensions of subjective depth were temporal, but not psychological in a depth-psycho-logical sense. By temporal depth I mean that memory opens up a vista for self-recollection and self-grounding, as in the following reflections:

Since I am this self, not only by reason of what now severs me from theinner lives of other selves, but by reason of what links me, in significantfashion, to the remembered experiences, deeds, plans and interests of myformer conscious life, I need a somewhat extended and remembered past to furnish the opportunity for myself to find, when it looks back, a long process that possesses sense and coherence. In brief, my idea of myself is an interpretation of my past, – linked also with an interpretation of my hopes and intentions as to my future. (Royce, 1913: Vol. 1, 2, 42, emphasis added)

Such a desire to ground the self via memory, and to view memory as a dimension of coherence, may in fact close down many options for explor-ing other or deeper functions of psychological process – especially those which disturb ‘my idea of myself ’.

I dwell on Wordsworth here, both because of his importance to aes-thetics as theorized by psychoanalysts in the object relations tradition, but also because he will recur in this essay as an example against which to read Wilkinson’s own concern with the integration and disintegration of subjective experience, made through apprehensions of affects, objects and the disturbing mesh of relations between them, as well as the impul-sions of a very differently viewed ‘nature’. The search for coherence, and the way in which what is past – or flies past – might be organized, is an


5

insistent theme of ‘Saccades’, but the reference points through which one might take bearings on the experience of one’s self appear bewilderingly deranged. This is partly because John Wilkinson writes out of a modern-ist tradition whose aesthetic innovations have radically transformed the ways in which experience can be narrated. His poetry thus immediately raises the question of how the experimental poetic tradition (including, in Wilkinson’s case, O’Hara, Wieners, Celan, Raworth, Prynne) might explore affect and memory from points beyond conventional psychology, or conservative or idealized subject positions. As one psychoanalyst, Adam Phillips, has already commented, Wilkinson reminds us ‘that poetry also needs to be pitted against conventional forms of intelligibil-ity – the finding of a “voice”, the satisfactions of narrative’ (Phillips, n.d.). That is, Phillips (himself located in a tradition running through Winnicott and Christopher Bollas) senses a parallel between Wilkinson’s radical questioning of subjective coherence (and the narratives of that coherence) and those developed by psychoanalysis.6

What follows is a gradual explication of aspects of the poem, and as-pects of object relations theory – not wholly in the sequence of the poem itself, but following rather the sequence in which the poem thrust its impressions of order and meaning on this reader. I aim both to read the bagatelle of objects in ‘Saccades’ in a way that is informed by object rela-tions theory, but also to challenge the aesthetic commentaries of object relations by deriving them not from Wordsworth, but from Wilkinson. Ultimately, I am also simply concerned with what the poem’s objects are. This is not necessarily only a question of ‘what is its subject matter’, but also, what kind of experiencing subject do its strenuous contortions of matter assume – what is its world and how can we experience it. The poetic is also that: ‘whereby people contrive a world and its contents in-cluding those around them’ (Wilkinson, 2007: 207).

Saccades

The poem ‘Saccades’ runs to about 64 pages and was first published in its entirety in the volume Contrivances by Salt in 2003. Some individual poems appeared in journals such as Jacket, 3, and from this we can tell that parts of it at least were finished in the late 1990s. It is split into four main sections (‘First Run’, ‘Second Run’, ‘Third Run’, and ‘Pause’) two of which contain individual poems with titles, and two that instead have a series of untitled units, generally in the same seven-line stanzaic pattern in which the even lines are briefer and indented (in contrast, the first four poems of ‘Pause’ are justified and more columnar in shape). Additionally, the series of poetic units within ‘First Run’ and ‘Third Run’ are arranged across the pages in strange descending and ascending runs. There’s some


6

uncertainty here as to whether ‘Saccades’ is a collection or sequence or a single work, and also over what might be implied by the seemingly complex architectonics of the whole. The formal logic of the poem is at any rate hard to ‘take in’ at a glance, but I want to postpone the issue of larger structure and deal first with the more basic question, which is the integration of meaning on the page. How do you read ‘Saccades’? How do you find a linear path through it (rather than experiencing it as a series of interesting fragments, or ‘white noise’ as at least two review-ers have described it)?7 Because as soon as we step into this poem we find ourselves astray:

Stubbed with poker-work a fret line has for business end a Jacob’s anvil, fold-together fistretains a hook connects with negative blur, so will redden. Was that masked by the gouged-away event which up till now had been its spoiler, a ruse found out in its dazzle haloovercomes in overcoming to be incised onto brutal space?

Though jarred by its scaffolding a forearm pestle grinds, clenched round a furled helixhardly glimpsed before intelligence slows output, a scam to put the breaks on productively,throwing tendrils or roots but no pathway it might grip. The ascenders were broken off,rib shears, pain’s locks, its cast of mind for dilucid burial.

Eyes fill with stone. Presently the sediment lingers down, smoothes away the pits &pores disfigure this block of mourning glints covariantly. What shimmered above was no lessgreat to feel, despite the controvertibles of touch & trust thicken in fat soot below;every take calcified by hand which on every count scored. (Wilkinson, 2003: 8)

One of the problems is not that there is no meaning, but that there is too much. To draw an analogy with work on dreams, one is used to beginning the analysis of a text with a simpler manifest content, and then tracing symbolic or referential complexity out of it. But what of a text whose incidents are so thronging with possible lines of association that we find it hard to piece together any subject or object at all? How can something be ‘stubbed with poker-work’? Is stubbed a verb or an adjec-tive? Is it the fret-line that is stubbed? And what is a Jacob’s anvil? It is hard to formulate these phrasal units into a set of objective relations, or even to stabilize their syntax.8

Take, for instance, the third line in the final stanza here: ‘pores disfigure this block of mourning glints covariantly.’: ‘pores’ give us a


7

recognizable starting-point; ‘pores disfigure this block’ could conceivably refer to the surfaces of a block of stone that is disfigured (as sculpture or lithographic plate or kitchen worktop) by being pitted with holes. But ‘pores disfigure this block of mourning’ subverts this in a double way. Suddenly we have a quite different sense of ‘block’ – perhaps an emotion-al block, or a mental block – but then what would a porous block indicate? While we figure this out, we also have to deal with the redirection of the phrasal unit – instead of ‘pores disfigure this block’ we now have ‘this block of mourning glints’, with glints being the operative verb; but then we find that it is glinting ‘covariantly’. How does one piece together such a line, and such an image?

Paradoxically, this impasse does give us a slim piece of ground to stand on, because as you cast your eye back and forth over the phrases on this and the adjacent pages a recurrent problem seems to emerge. This could be stated initially as a concern with how things come into objective relations with other things, and how this objectification is frustrated or resisted, so that nothing emerges in any stable, or dependable, or achieved form. To give some further examples:

Whatever is happening in this poem is often happening too violently or 1 stressfully to appear: things are jarred, or spoiled, they shear or disfigure.There is incompletion: elements are ‘stubbed’, or broken off.2 There is absence and erasure: ‘negative blur’; ‘gouged away event’.3 There are many different ways of not seeing something: ‘dazzle’, ‘hardly 4 glimpsed’, ‘eyes filled with stone’, ‘dilucid burial’.Often in the sequence we find ourselves in fleeting or unstable interstices 5 be-tween things: ‘inter-entity brief ’, ‘twittering receptors’, ‘conditional between the shit-faces’.Or relations are given, but in such obscure or inconsistent forms, that they 6 cannot be integrated: ‘droplets hiss between wraiths interlace’ (Wilkinson, 2003: 13), ‘clip it opaque upliftingly’ (Wilkinson, 2003: 14).

All of these trends are further exacerbated by verbal and syntactical ambiguity.

Something is happening here. There are a surprising number of events (here, and in the surrounding poems, things are pinned down by fire, knocked back by recoil, they redden and rehearse and mesh to-gether), and there are after-effects of events (backflow, after-draughts, ‘presently the sediment lingers down … ’). But we cannot trust or know what we are seeing or have seen, partly because something in the way things themselves are operating conceals, distorts, undermines or resists ob-jectification. Rather than piecing the poem together as we go, we are compelled to experience it on a first read by being ‘Dragged half-conscious through its slats’ (Wilkinson, 2003: 9), as one line has it – or the poem


8

seems ‘concussed into being repetitively’ (Wilkinson, 2003: 5). Though we find ourselves skimming through so many things and textures, noth-ing is centrally ‘there’; rather, there is a window in which obscure and multiple processes are happening and have happened, and in which sub-stance is being continually transmuted – burned, softened, glazed – leav-ing residues, sparking off reprisals.

One other point emerges, and this is that, for all the poem’s disin-tegrative tendencies and impersonality (large dream-like chunks of the opening sections of ‘Saccades’ are pronoun-free) we do seem at times to be in some kind of psycho-somatic realm, one apparently without a centrally-organized subject, but in which there are feelings and occa-sions and reactions. The transitions around events are often mediated by moods or affects: there is mourning; there is a lot of aggression, and pain is mentioned; there are forearms and hands and gripping and clenching; and there are ‘controvertibles of touch and trust’ – all of which at times conjures up a toxic form of intimacy: ‘With my body I thee hybrid we did and died’ (46) ‘the kiss is thickening fiery on a cocked finger’ (28) ‘the caller states that she is touched badly by the men’ (62).

These conditions – distortion, inconsistency, affectivity – make an implied commentary on Wordsworth’s interior subject, or the condition through which ‘my idea of myself takes shape’, because what we have here is a specific impossibility of the kind of distance from physical and emotional events which will allow a perspective to develop. Nothing is properly put behind one (or fully appropriated); the phrases of the poem have not been pre-absorbed by the conscious perspectives of the ego, nor do they help to construct one. In ‘Imperfect Pitch’, an essay published in the early 1990s, Wilkinson suggests of the poem in general that, ‘Its co-herence … gels round moods, whose own coherences are evanescent and of unknown principle’ (Wilkinson, 1992: 156). But here the implied con-nections and perspectives that might unfold outwards from moods, and allow coherence to ‘gel’, seem entirely vitiated. Something in this poetry is attempting to invert, or resist, that movement from chaotic psycho-somatic impulses towards consciousness and reality.

This leads to a further point, which is that the more attention we pay to these seemingly rogue clusters of words, the more we find that they contain various more or less studied forms of critique or satire. What is being satirized, or inflated into a grotesque drama, is the idea that things can be recollected, or transferred, or maintained across the boundaries of moments, without some sort of violence occurring, or at least unaccept-able losses. We find ourselves in a psycho-somatic vortex of experiencing in which there is no good form of apprehension. This is partly because it takes a certain kind of violence to remove oneself from events and view them through the grid of intelligence and its recording devices.


9

Something here is ‘hardly glimpsed before intelligence slows output’; elsewhere ‘a controlled, selective judgment strategy looped / peg to peg latches ever tighter’. Another phase in the sequence begins with this cri-tique of syntactical linking:

Flat against the rhythm track the unified theory advances, each sentence starts ‘and’, & spuriousconnectives reconcile (Wilkinson, 2003: 22)

which blends in turn with the mechanical description of a photocopier:

… will memorize each long enough to copy, slipping between rollers, throughhorizontal gates . . .

At the same time, ‘Saccades’ produces an equally grotesque account of the non-signifying or instinctive chaos – the ‘foam hinterland’ (Wilkinson, 2003: 9) – we might be left with as alternative: ‘Threw off restraint, but the launcher flops piece by piece’ (Wilkinson, 2003: 24). Entities eluding structures of linkage fail to take on shape of their own. Either they are too intensive to maintain their own boundaries – they are ‘stacked, load-ed, saturated’ (Wilkinson, 2003: 4), they swell-up, congeal into thought-less lumps of liquidities, or ‘spew a trail of infected fat’ (Wilkinson, 2003: 11). Or they descend into anaesthesia and inertia: ‘bedded in their fold’, ‘pinged into its anacoustic case’, ‘aporetic on what pillow’ (Wilkinson, 2003: 12).

Flailing impulses and saggy abject spaces are surrounded by intrusive tracking mechanisms or remote receptor sites. In sequence, or out of it, ‘being’ seems equally voided of integrity. Things may be ‘known drawing focus / from their opposite’ (Wilkinson, 2003: 15), but where such focus is not explicitly violent, fixing, or calcifying, it never seems to get far be-yond the automatic and quasi-sexual:

Empty envelopes shake drowsily, wrinkle as on deflating, never mind that they balloonat any thinking twinge (Wilkinson, 2003: 5)

These deflating envelopes could stand in for sexual organs, or they might just be vacuous minds, or messages with no content other than what is projected into them. Rather than generating syntheses or struc-tured life-forms, they tend towards a meaningless pulsation: ‘the same and not the same shall interweave for ripple-effect / then separate like curds and whey’ (Wilkinson, 2003: 15).

Whichever way we ponder these materials, they reflect back at us an unproductive dialectic in which things happen blindly or impulsively, or are forced together by control mechanisms, and built into this is a cri-tique of the reading process itself. Along the way there is a perversion


10

of the Wordsworthian account of the way emotion takes on meaning in time. Instead of emotion recollected in tranquillity, we have: ‘stalls a dream of the day’s finery, mummified in backlash’ (14); ‘the dull brain retards / about a trophy it persists with’ (18); ‘spray-paint its mausoleum’ (38), and so on. Such memory processes have become vacuous, deceptive, or automatic, on a par with reflexes and excretions: ‘Some day a body dragged out/ bequeaths its painful atmospheres that incubate like gas’ (13).

The Infancy of Objects

At this point we could usefully turn back to that love affair between Wordsworth and psychoanalytic theories of object relations. The pas-sage which analysts most like to quote is from Book II of The Prelude about the infant babe (here in the 1850 version):

Nursed in his Mother’s arms, who sinks to sleepRocked on his Mother’s breast; who with his soulDrinks in the feeling of his Mother’s eye!For him, in one dear Presence, there existsA virtue which irradiates and exaltsObjects through the widest intercourse of sense. (ln. 235–240 [Wordsworth, 1926: 55])

Note the complex series of engagements between the child and its environment. It is held in its mother’s arms; it is on her breast; it is drink-ing in her feeling – receiving emotion, along with milk; or it is perhaps metaphorically drinking in the mother’s loving gaze. And this nest of re-lationships (dependable, comforting) irradiates the sensory experience of objects in general. It is a model of non-coercive integration among enti-ties who might, under other circumstance, find themselves falling apart in various anxious or disastrous ways. In the 1805 version this aspect is even clearer: the infant’s mind is eager to combine ‘In one appearance, all the elements / And parts of the same object, else detach’d / And loth to coalesce.’ (ln. 248–10 [Wordsworth, 1926: 54]). For Ronald Britton – this passage anticipates Klein and Winnicott; according to Peter Rudnytsky, ‘Wordsworth was able to internalise his mother as a good object because she nurtured his capacity for illusion in infancy’.

But in ‘Saccades’ what is the ‘feeling of the eye’ one might drink in? Well, at the heart of this work, there seems to be a drama about the frus-tration of ego processes – and hence of perspective, or intelligence, or the constructive possibilities of feeling and willing. And one of the traces of this refusal is the consistent exclusion of ‘seeing’ and of the ‘eye’, which so often functions as a trope for the ‘capital I’ of self-consciousness. We


11

have – ‘eyes filled with stone’; ‘snap those optic fibres’; ‘eyes peeled from their treads’; ‘oubliette each eye’; ‘blowing his eyestalls’, and so on.

In fact, ‘Saccades’ – the title – means brief rapid movements of the eye between positions of rest, as in reading itself. So we could take this as an attempt to unseat the trope of perspective itself, and replace it with a broken and irregular gaze. The English use of the word derives from the French saccade meaning a jerk or violent pull – in the context of its original introduction into English, it was the technical term for a sharp pull on the reins of a horse, so it has had connotations of aggressive con-trol. Other connotations of the adjectival form in French are ‘spasmodic’, ‘halting’, ‘staccato’ (in music), and ‘fitful’ (of sleep). In English in the 1890s it also referred to ‘the involuntary jerking movement in the act of swallowing’. ‘Eyes wide as saucers asking more’ is another phrase from the poem. Saucers, as an indication of width – and thus the extravagance of the gaze – at the same time evokes a craving for food. So here, instead of infants satisfied enough to glance upwards and drink in feeling from the mother’s eye, we have eyes more like insatiable mouths, which merely feed themselves, and in such a way that no whole or steady objects ever could appear. This transposition of eyes into mouths is reflected in an-other image series running through the poem connected with anemones and hydra. Anemones have no eyes, so they cannot see. What looks like an eye is merely an oral disc that ingests and excretes:

Eyes opt for kissing babes they can train on, resolving lost breath of surgical spirit. Smile.Don’t disturb that cousin, your gaze will empty her purse rummaged in gauche warmthlike a puffball a look would rip did straining lips not hold. Touch anemones were minded. (Wilkinson, 2003: 53)

Note the shifts here from eyes, via puffballs, to anemones; and from gaze and look, to straining lips; and from a babe – seen and kissed and objectified – to something more ragged and tactile and inhuman.9

If, for Wordsworth and for Freud, the child is father of the man, one might expect finally to leave or outlive one’s childish father and so be-come an adult and not a child. But here nothing is quite left behind, because nothing fully takes shape. We never even reach history – we are interminably in moments. And we never reach mind – we are intermina-bly in an infantile moment. In this more radical version of The Prelude, nature is reduced to a vortex of primitive and impulsive drives looped between eyes and mouths. It is a world of part-objects that resist stable objectification, though they may recur as tropes or gestures.

What is a part object? For Kleinian psychoanalysis it is most simply a part of the body to which someone relates, instead of to a whole person. A patient has a phantasy of biting off the nose of a girl, or his father’s


12

finger (see Abraham, 1927: 487). Second, it is a manifestation of a very early, oral relation to objects (the breast being the archetypal part-object relation, around which Klein’s theory of internal objects was famously constructed). And third, it could imply an un-mastered ambivalence to-wards objects – to which the ingestion of part-objects is a defensive re-sponse. The very young infant does not yet know, and cannot yet sustain attachment to real, or whole objects or persons. So mothers and others are split up into good and bad parts which are ingested or expelled in phantasy according to the infant’s internal and oscillating cycles of panic and gratification.

It is with such part-objects in various phantasied and sexualized rela-tions, rather than people or a self, that much of ‘Saccades’ is populated: ‘forearm pestle’, ‘pins and nipples’, ‘finger-bundle’, ‘the half-face’, ‘its stiff new thumb got lodged in the chimney’ (16). Interestingly it is also in terms of such a part-object that Wilkinson has described his own relation to poetic writing: ‘Rolling the lines in the mouth, biting and relishing; what were these swollen and papery boluses of feeling, each expanded to a choking limit, swollen to the mouth’s capacity, squeezed hard by the tongue against the palate’ (Wilkinson, 1992: 155). Wilkinson (1992: 170) here suggests that his poetry derives from an ‘infantile urge to keep the mouth crammed comfortably’. It all starts with the ‘lalling infant, suck-ing, spitting and gargling sound’ (Wilkinson, 1992: 156).10

According to Bob Hinshelwood, ‘The infant’s capacity to perceive people as whole objects gradually develops as the visual apparatus comes into use’ (Hinshelwood, 1989: 379). What are the implications for a poem whose cosmos returns to, or has been restricted to, the sucking mouth of the infant? For whom eyes jerk irregularly, in snatches, and suck rather than see? For whom, as another line puts it, ‘Coherence is our snack’ (Wilkinson, 2007: 59). Well, one implication is that we have a world in which nothing can survive as a whole – nothing can be entirely symbol-ized in its relation to other things. To live in such a world would be one definition of psychosis.

Life on the edge Worlds

At this point I want to complicate the whole issue, by broadening the points of reference, and also widening the view of the poem, which from the beginning I have promised to review in stages, rather than taking in as a whole. First, an important qualification: if this poetry is in some way reflecting psychoanalytically on the self, it is also psychoanalytic po-etry. Wilkinson’s poetry is very consciously engaged with a tradition of lyric writing, whose points of influence would include Frank O’Hara and John Wieners, but also Paul Celan, and, at a distance, Shelley. That ebb


13

and flow of line lengths is typical of the lyric ode in the 19th century, while the energy, condensation and incessant shifts of substance at times recall Shelley’s metaphoric series at their most fleeting and atmospheric. What we have to take into account is that Wilkinson may be purposefully playing up the prosodic and non-cognitive aspects of his writing, so that at points, when the language seems to veer away from making sense, it may purposefully be making music, rather than sense. Robert Potts in a review of Effigies Against the Light found the phrasing ‘weirdly beautiful in its sensual cadences and sounds, and its elegant strangenesses’; Adam Phillips listed the same volume in his books of the year for 2001, ‘for its sheer verbal inventiveness and unheard-of melodies’ (Phillips, 2001). This question of ‘aural’ rather than textual coherence (or ‘oral incoher-ence’) is a point I will return to. Wilkinson may also be hyper-inflating those elements of his writing that signal spontaneity, energy, irrational leaps of sense, in order thereby to signal aspects of emotional ‘force’ that are intended to break through our conventional and prosaic expectations of language to give us lyrical poetic language – language that is unusu-ally stressed with affect, desire, exhilaration, or shock.

That’s the first complicating factor; the second is that he may be inflat-ing the indications of trauma and the loss of ego-processes as part of an ideological purpose. That is, rather than randomly exposing the contents of a damaged psyche, he may be allegorizing some wider condition. The regression to an infantile oral cosmology can easily be read, for instance, as a representation of subjectivity under consumer capitalism. Objects – as commodities – come and go according to surges of anticipation (that is another way we could read the fluctuation in line lengths), or they are illusory compensations, or provoke cycles of addiction. Appetites for ‘things’ are hyper-inflated (hence the many sexualized references to fats and sugars in the poem) while production processes break things down into shrink-wrapped bits and pieces so that they can be ingested more quickly. In such a world, people cannot properly appear to us, and we do not appear to ourselves. We are made infantile in our relation to reality. In a lecture given the year after ‘Saccades’ was published called ‘Follow-ing the Poem’ Wilkinson makes this interconnection of infancy and con-sumer capitalism explicit:

How does a child develop from a furious, chewing and excreting bundle of fantasies into a more or less tolerable human being? Klein’s account of the depressive position implies that at best we can achieve a life-long sulk, nourished by more ingenious forms of psychic appropriation. On a large scale this doesn’t seem so improbable: the way we live in the West sustains us in an infantilism of extracting greedily and spewing copiously. This is a kind of use which never knows its objects except as flows of commodities … (Wilkinson, 2007: 197–8)


14

We live in an ‘edge-world materialised between a primary greed and a world of hallucinated and exploited objects’ (Wilkinson, 2007: 198). As one of the later titled poems puts it: ‘so as orectics we tease, smirk & scatter / through carnal ordinances. Pressing round us watch / on drains thick & soft with fat those grasping at entirety’. ‘Orectic’ means relating to desire or appetite, from the Greek ‘to stretch out’.

To develop this point, I want now to emphasize some tendencies that take shape in the latter half of ‘Saccades’, or become more explicit on further reading, as the poem itself ‘takes shape’ – bearing this irony in mind, that by thus giving the poem the shape, the coherence, we crave to find in it, we are implicated in the very same ‘grasping at entirety’ that is being satirized. As one moves through the even-numbered ‘Runs’ with their titled poems there are certainly shifts in the writing style. The poetry becomes (fitfully) more discursive, and more concerned with the translation of experience into information: ‘I spread news through the va-cant boardroom, / breathing on mirror surfaces’; ‘their secretary / wipes the tape between her ear & fingers’ (26). At the same time some clearer sense of contexts does emerge. The world objectified is an office culture, an ‘administered world’ (61). Managerial spin words – ‘Human Capital Programme’, ‘Quality Adjusted Life Years’ – float alongside keyboards and tiltable chairs. And figures begin to consolidate, often women, of-fice temps, who appear in the sightlines of both sexual and managerial gazes.

The scene of interpretation is incredibly complex here, not least be-cause ‘interpretation’ is itself being allegorized in these more ‘objective’ scenes of the poem. On the one hand, ‘Saccades’ now seems to dramatize a shift from chaos towards signification, the drift and blur and jerkiness of ‘First Run’ is hardest to scan, almost wholly impulsive and explo-sive; from later poems we can extract larger statements and wider points of social and economic vantage. We find ourselves moving from infant consumption to adult labour, and from an unobjectifiable flurry of psychosomatic experience to technologies of control and replication – computers, indexes, mobiles and glass partitions. Along the way the fleshy part-objects of the opening are invaded by patterned and syn-thetic structures – ‘microprocessers / operate a withered arm’ (Wilkin-son, 2003: 62); ‘transfix the marshalled muscles along their file-paths’ (Wilkinson, 2003: 22); ‘& does that nylon mesh really / wrap a woman’s tongue?’ (Wilkinson, 2003: 57).

The very last poem of the sequence is both the most concretely ‘scened’ and discursively legible. It pictures a subject (finally) – a damaged female imago, invoked by name as Asi, the Sanskrit for ‘Thou art’. She appears pushed to the edge of the edge-world, at the limits of her being, at the pale of networks of social care:


15

Revisit her in her bedsit in Sheffield, concrete eyebrows on an incline, fire in therubbish bin, paper handkerchiefs, tampons, cotton buds crackled by her stare alights:then to resist. Asi. Asi. Burning away the combed stubble outside Royston.

The fire here could be poetry, or sexual drive, or an indication of psy-chosis, or simply arson. Either way, we appear to have reached a dead-end of subjectivity. A person, named without content, present in her residues, poised vacantly at the limit of a poem whose contents – whose objects – have dissolved somewhere between the irrational drives of the open-ing and the contemporary panopticon of the end. What happens when the middle falls out of living. And this is of course a very Adornoite motif, though it’s a Blakean one too – another prophet of the dissociated psycho-somatic world. Or perhaps Asi is poised to counter a ‘bad’ objec-tivity with conflagration, with ultimate resistance, with annihilation. Or perhaps we orectics at the ‘drain’ of the poem, ‘thick and soft with fat’, are poised to annihilate her, and the poem, as we snack on their respective entireties.

So there are ways of giving the poem a wider dialectical structure, and an overall movement, as well as specific points of reference in the outside world. As intelligence, regularity, or formal processing emerge, a corresponding world of objects, spaces and persons, comes into view, and we are able at the same time to grasp the poem in terms of wider ideo-logical questions. The earlier sections, too, then become retrospectively more coherent. Because the more objectified and administered world is itself an amplified and externalized version of the ego-processes which we encountered early on as the poem’s negative object. Psycho-somatic experience was already dogged by incipient and invasive forms of con-trol, while these more concretely evoked office scenes are threatened by outbursts of violent natural disaster – the revenge of instinct: ‘Flame licks the tiltable chair’, ‘A wedge of mud hiccups from the cleft’ (Wilkin-son, 2003: 57).

Inside and outside then allegorize each other, and this seems appropri-ate given that they are locked into the same system, the edge-world mate-rialized between a primary greed and a world of exploited objects, the cy-clical craving for ingestion and expulsion. ‘In the Special Economic Zone chew hungry behind-faces, / products in their trough.’ (Wilkinson, 2003: 38). But then, rather than an emerging order, a structure or architectonic, we have a bad loop, a bad circuit of impulses. Subjectivity is destabilized and shunted back upon its own internal drives for compensatory gratifi-cation; at the same time the boom in consumption is strengthening and rigidifying the need for ever more violent production controls: ‘3 million


16

migrant workers are ordered home at a flicker’ (Wilkinson, 2003: 60). In this ‘infantilism of extracting greedily and spewing copiously’, distinc-tions between inside and outside are liable to implode, as well as those between meta and micro-levels, objects and excretions, fronts and be-hinds. There would seem to be no ‘end’ to the poem’s bad logic – and ‘no imaginable version of contemporary British or American society’ that did not ‘depend on organised exploitation’11 – unless the system ‘threat-ens to eat itself ’ (Wilkinson, 2007: 31), a possibility picked up by Keston Sutherland’s Hot White Andy, as a leitmotif of the remorselessly tech-nologized, sexualized and gratified polis under consumer capitalism: ‘but what is there / to eat’ (Sutherland, 2008).

What the fire Said

However it would be difficult to make such an interpretation rest com-pletely. First, you would have to work quite hard to extract such a neat overarching narrative from material that – on the ground and in the line – is often far more elliptical or indeterminate than this. The interpretation would bear hardly any relation to the experience of reading the poem, and what you would find reflected back at you in that attempt would be your own implication in the very dialectic of abstraction and control that seems to be causing the world of objective relations to implode.

And second, there is a strange torque in the process of allegorization here that bears closer investigation, and on which I want to concentrate in the final sections of this article – not the least because it touches on an ambiguity in Wilkinson’s use of object relations, and in object relations’ own use of aesthetics. The poem both proclaims and denies resistance. In Wilkinson’s theoretical writings, ‘poetry might offer the best-advantaged sites for work that journeys towards a reality beyond the exploitation of objects’ (Wilkinson, 2007: 198) – and yet the poem appears to dramatize the impossibility of such journey and the absence of any such site.

We can trace this ambiguity by looking more closely at the implica-tions of fire and lyric within ‘Saccades’. Towards the close of the poem, fire breaks into the office environment and as such seems to function as a genuine point of resistance, a saving catastrophe within a techno-logically alienated and ultra-controlled world: ‘the most organised of workstations starts to brown and blister’ (Wilkinson, 2003: 57). And yet, because this world also doubles as an allegory of internal processes, the fire here is also an emblem of instinct (and thus craving) and so internal to the disaster the poem is depicting: when flame ‘licks / the tiltable chair’ (Wilkinson, 2003: 57), it is oral and erotic. In fact we might at points like this view fire as being implicated in a third scale of reference within the poem – not the technologized office, and not the space of deranged,


17

psycho-somatic fantasy, but one of nature in the widest sense: biology, sexual reproduction, bios. This context first emerges, or becomes most apparent, in the middle phase of the poem (such a phase would not co-incide explicitly with any of its formal partitions). In ‘The Blink of an Eye’ (Wilkinson, 2003: 28) a rifle is ‘seeding’, a mace is bloated, there are rubbery stalks and ‘threads of spit were a cream’s horn’, while the kiss thickens ‘fiery on a cocked finger’. In ‘Internal Audit’ (Wilkinson, 2003: 32) we find ourselves in the midst of some kind of plant sex – couplings of nub and spiral and floppy hooks. Here fire, like some kind of post-Dar-winian phusis, will ‘feed its rink to resurrect / the same nodding bunched cherries’. Entities, from a ‘biconic open newel’ and ‘clenched cowrie’ (Wilkinson, 2003: 19), to tulips nodding ‘through the pink diaphragm’ (Wilkinson, 2003: 44), are everywhere primed to fasten onto each other in copulative acts. Whether what is being transmitted is aspic, semen, or information, ‘the residues are scooped up’ while over the ‘splashed gran-ite floor some are fucking by intent’ (Wilkinson, 2003: 44–5).

This evocation of biology seeps into the later office world, where one might ‘milk the corridor or / fertilize the glass partitions’, and where sex-ually differentiated figures are ‘making love with an eye to love making’ (Wilkinson, 2003: 28). The flooding of bios across the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ aspects of the poem is made easily enough because sexuality already me-diates notions of impulse, fantasy and intensity with patterns of replica-tion, ‘animals which tick’ ‘in double twist wound tight’ (Wilkinson, 2003: 3). Just as with the wider cycle of production, ingestion and expulsion, this wider still logic of bios performs a reduction on moral vocabulary. Trust, love or guilt are implicated in sets of natural reflexes and appe-tites, governed by erotic processes of closure, expansion, constriction and release. I suspect a large impact here from J. H. Prynne’s work of the 1970s – both the vocabulary of love ironized by the sexual and techni-cal languages of biology in ‘Of Sanguine Fire’, and the inscription of memory through trauma negotiated in Wound Response.12 In fact, ‘Sac-cades’ at times ingeniously conflates aspects of these works: events leave their traces, the traces demand repetition, the repetitions become points of sexualised attraction for future confrontations with difference. Thus, the processing of information and the matching of bodies merge in one complex sequence of storage, penetration, reflex, flash-point, inward bruising and colourful erotic display. One skims off the remains of a moral vocabulary – love, relationship, forgiveness – but these occur more as rogue graffiti on the surface of a toxic sexual environment.

But if fire is sexualized in the poem, is it possible that it could also come to stand for the opposite of this? For a kind of anti-eros, a restraint, or resistance to wanting or craving itself, somewhat like Freud’s sugges-tion of a nirvana-principle, which became formulated as the death drive?


18

There are frequent references to ash, to calcification, to fire as a force of annihilation and erasure, a ‘burning away’ (Wilkinson, 2003: 63). Early on, ‘a fire-belt discouraged pain from crossing’ (Wilkinson, 2003: 4), the sun itself is fantasized at one point as a giant anti-subject which, ‘can never compile its expression and will fizzle out’ (Wilkinson, 2003: 28). But then fire is called upon to stand for both the riotous destruction of the office world, and a quiescence – instinct turned in upon itself and burnt out, erased. See how complex those lines in the final poem now appear:

… fire in therubbish bin, paper handkerchiefs, tampons, cotton buds crackled by her stare alights:then to resist. Asi. Asi. Burning away …

Her ‘stare alights / then to resist’ – it settles; it lights up (sets alight) and resists. It resists the technology marshalled against it? Or resists its own intensity? Or the observer resists the sexualization of the gaze, gives the body a name?

A very similar set of problems besets the representation of lyric itself within the poem, insofar as it is implicated in the poem’s surges of inten-sity, its musicality, and in more direct invocations of song and birdsong. On the one hand, the prosodic and lyrical aspects of the poem could be seen as those features that are resistant to merely rational process-ing, to the kind of replication performed by the photocopier. Meaning half-heard, or dragged ‘half-conscious’, then, would be positive, a form of resistance. But as with fire, we cannot stabilize the value or function of song within the poem.13 First, lyric is just as much implicated in surge, intensification and infantile craving – ‘dishes swirl with aggressive bird-song’ (Wilkinson, 2003: 5), much as eyes become wide as saucers. And indeed, this was where we found Wilkinson placing the lyrical impulse itself – as the legacy of a primitive orality. At the same time, song can also be a technology, a biological lure – a ‘thin piping, chats of courtship woken with the lark’ (Wilkinson, 2003: 33).

It is here, then, that we might locate the final and most damaging twist in the logic that re-implicates forms of escape (from impulse, instinct, cycles of consumption) in strategies that merely extend or bolster those processes (much as capital reinvents itself through its own disaster). If fire and song are capable of withdrawing or withholding themselves from integration into other processes (interpretation, sexual attraction, consumption), this very withdrawal is capable of intensifying or inflam-ing a fascination with the withheld space (of meaning, of the body, of the object to be consumed). Envelopes, in the poem, are there to be abraded by bristles (55), sheds to be punctured by stabbing crocuses (48); ‘what


19

separates us spreads the sheet on which we couple’. Thus, cessation is liable to become a point of arousal, eros invades nirvana, and the poem continually ‘lifts its song from the dark, back where it yearns to shut’ (40). The more an impulse is restrained, it seems, the more it is internal-ized where it in fact intensifies and expands, running on empty:

deep where the unsingablecannot be swallowed or hoisted to straddle attendant air, catches nothing but self-consumesin panting, bronchial flames billow were sent randomly, continually sounding offunimpeded … (40–1)

The Uses of Obscurity

The question once more, then, is: is the poetry itself wholly absorbed by the disaster it is describing? Or could there be such a thing as aesthetic resistance? Are there dimensions from which experience can come, to which it can go, and within which integration and transaction can happen in ways that cannot be consumed or processed? Are there dimensions of integration which are in some ways fundamentally unintegrable, within the bad logic which the poem depicts, which are perhaps there in the po-etry, but not in what it says? I return to Wilkinson’s remark that a poem’s coherence ‘gels round moods, whose own coherences are evanescent and of unknown principle’ (Wilkinson, 1992: 155). This association between the aesthetic and the unknowable, the unthought, leads across recogniz-able literary critical terrain – not so much the sublime and its unrepre-sentable grounds, but rather the spontaneity and organicism evidenced by art, which – for Kant, for instance – eludes representation in terms of formal principles. Except that Wilkinson’s comments – particularly in ‘Cadence’, ‘Imperfect Pitch’ and ‘Following the Poem’ – draw particularly on the writings of object relations theorists, who have foregrounded con-cepts of the aesthetic in their evocation of deep and pre-cognitive layers of the subject, thus giving it a further specific twist via the concept of the unconscious. What such theorists seek to approach via the notion of the aesthetic is: a core in the person which ‘never communicates with the world of perceived objects’ and is ‘permanently unknown, in fact un-found’ (Winnicott, 1990: 187); or it is the ‘rather mysterious unavailabil-ity’ of ‘the unthought known’ – ‘what we know but may never be able to think’ (Bollas, 1987: 282). It is here, perhaps, that Wilkinson finds a model for the restraint, the withholding, the escape from process, that the poem cannot itself image.

In ‘Imperfect Pitch’ Wilkinson suggests that the motive of develop-ment in his own writing appears, ‘to have been determined by the desire for return to what was both intimate and incomprehensible’, and here


20

he quotes the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas’s essay ‘Moods and the Conservative Process’: ‘A child may undergo an intensely private self experience that defies his representative capacity, so that the being state persists as a conserved rather than a transformed (symbolised) phenom-enon’ (Wilkinson, 1992:155–6; see also Bollas, 1987: 111). The human subject with which Bollas, and before him Winnicott, is concerned, is re-moved from thinking and consuming in a number of ways. First through their emphasis on affect or mood as manifested in the analytic session – the post-Freudian unconscious is increasingly not a repressed or dis-ordered script to be reconstructed, but a mood to be recovered: ‘Exis-tential, as opposed to cognitive, memory is not conveyed through visual or abstract thinking, but through affects of being’ (Bollas, 1993: 40). Such moods characteristically occur as ‘moments’, and are not oriented towards objects. They are states of ‘reverie’ or ‘rapt intransitive atten-tion’, or ‘deep enigmatic privacy’ (Bollas, 1993: 40–3).14 Third, they are considered to exist beyond conscious reconstruction or representation – not because they are sexual and repressed, but because they manifest experiences which pre-date the emergence of cognition and subjectivity: ‘In a sense, we learn the grammar of our being before we grasp the rules of our language’ (Bollas, 1993: 44). Such moments of being also typi-cally reflect experiences of integration – the pre-subjective integration of mother and infant: ‘Her handling and the infant’s state of being are prior to the infant’s processing his existence through mentation’ (Bollas, 1993: 41). It is an integration in the form of care which preserves the child from ‘precocious mental processes that interrupt and dissolve being with mentation and vigilance’ (Bollas, 1993: 42). Again, and throughout such texts, the obliteration of formally representable processes, and of the eye.

See how frequently elements of these assumptions are reflected in Wilkinson’s prose writings on poetry. Moods are the minute-by-minute coherence ‘by which you persist as more than a recipient and emmis-sionary’ (Wilkinson, 1992: 155; i.e. escape to some extent the pure logic of ingestion and expulsion). The productive points for the writing of a poem ‘lie deep in an inadmissible past’, which emerges not as recollec-tion, but is ‘felt as cadence, projecting forward to organise the actual and tenderly enveloping day which will never break’ (Wilkinson, 2007: 143). This cadence is materialized as an ‘obtuse presence’ within the poem, via its non-cognitive ‘dark features’, which are in turn analogized with ‘the dark features of the analytic situation’, theorized by the post-Kleinian Wilfred Bion (Wilkinson, 2007: 144–5). On a short essay on J. H. Prynne’s Not You, Wilkinson writes of ‘the revelatory experience of recognising a thought or sentiment held as a pre-conscious genera (a term usefully coined by Christopher Bolas [sic]’ (Wilkinson, 2007: 11). And again, this


21

time on Wieners, ‘Could the poem interrupt its attentiveness and the attentiveness it has attracted, in favour of a saving obscurity’; could the poem ‘provide the protective cover of a strange intimacy?’ (Wilkinson, 2007: 251) One could compare this attempt to elude a certain kind of at-tentiveness, with Bollas’s desire to protect child and adult, at points, from ‘vigilance and mentation’.

Elsewhere, Wilkinson hears, behind the speech of Shelley’s Prometh-eus, ‘the mother’s murmur shaping the emergence of her baby into the linguistic world’. This is a ‘corporeal condensation through language’ whose journey is not towards ego-resolution, but to nowhere: ‘the physi-cal emerges through breaks and pulses and continuous circulation – po-etry constructs as much through its lapses as its propulsion’ (Wilkinson, 2007: 210). The inadmissible source, relayed through the corporeal and the aesthetic, the felt moods of the poem which retrieve grounds for in-tegration, present in moments of absence – all this in an essay that refers us repeatedly to Winnicott’s writing on the legacy of parent infant rela-tions in ‘The Use of an Object and Relating Through Identifications’. Read in this light, the lines ‘Eyes opt for kissing babes … ’ (53) and their transition from surgical spirit, to rummaging and touch, and anemones may be taking us not through the regressive breakdown of conscious-ness under the pressure of primary greed. Instead it may be taking us from the violence inherent in abstract processing, to the strange and lyri-cal organicism of something felt but not objectified, not consumed, not quite understood.

But now we have an intriguing contradiction about the poem’s own indeterminacy. In one reading, the more disintegrative, fluid stanzas are the psychotic inside face of the disturbed outside, from which there is no escape. And this is also part of the poem’s rigour as political critique: an agonized, vehement, universal j’accuse, running from the body’s en-docrinal bases to the larger movements of global capital. Here even our own intellectual and lyrical pleasure as consumers of the poem is en-meshed in the moving framework of gratification and violence that the poetry spells out – ‘whatever distance from corrupt discourse is asserted by the lyric text, its embedded cadences, its connective tissues, have been cultured in the factories of the human genome project – and patented for use’ (Wilkinson, 2007: 31). Note how even cadence is here implicated, though the poetry under discussion is that of J. H. Prynne. But seen an-other way, we have an escape valve that comes out of nowhere and rolls relief across the whole surface of the poem – because its disjunctions and jerky irresolutions now preserve states of being, states of primary integration and care, instead of relentlessly destroying them. ‘Look after this creature and it will give you joy’ (Wilkinson, 1992: 155).


22

We could follow this contradiction into the very grounds of object relations theory itself, because, to put it simply, what we are coming upon is a conflict between two different traditions of psychoanalytic thought about early infancy – the Kleinian, and the so-called Independent or Middle school (Winnicott, Bollas). From the point of view of the latter, what the split-off and incomprehensible being states in the psyche are being preserved from are not so much their absorption within processes of symbolization and social function – a shield from the Human Capital Programme – but their radical dissolution within the realm of aggres-sive and destructive internal fantasies which Klein made central to the experience of early infancy. Before the emergence of the subject, before the ‘eye’, for Klein, is a world of ‘monsters’ (Wilkinson, 2007: 205); in Winnicott, by contrast, it is a place of deeply buried but experienced wholeness. However, from the other side of the dispute one might ask, ‘when does primordial solitude turn into something more malignant – active hostility to the link of language, thought and emotion’? (Jacobus, 2005: 157).

Bearing these different psychoanalytic tendencies in mind, we can pin-point moments of uncertainty, or transition, in Wilkinson’s writing as he moves over the competing vortices of two kinds of interpretation. ‘Following the Poem’ is a text that stresses the restorative and integra-tive function of the aesthetic. Here ‘a reader unpicks and re-integrates elements of the poem in a felt motion which can restore a healed and full being in the world’ (Wilkinson, 2007: 196). The essay thus backs Win-nicott’s ‘The Use of an Object’, ‘whose subtextual intent is to challenge the narrowness of the Kleinian attention to the whirl of part-objects trafficked between analyst and analysand’ (Wilkinson, 2007: 205). But elsewhere this kind of consolation is refused. Recall the poet ‘Rolling the lines in the mouth, biting and relishing’ in ‘Imperfect Pitch’, a text which flaunts a much more vigorous, aggressive, and ambivalent mode of de-scription, constantly flashing with absolutes, destructions and disinte-grations. The poem, as well as being alive and a joy, putrifies, is garbage, an ‘excrescence’ (a term that has been expelled from the aesthetic in ‘Fol-lowing the Poem’). It arrives, ‘when perfect whiteness and immaculacy bleed through the guarded, wheezing machinery, slam into the stripped weaving-shed, and this light is felt as a dead weight’ (Wilkinson, 1992: 170–1). ‘Cadence’ is intriguingly ambivalent – trying to imagine its way from violence to care, without loss of substance, but refusing at the same time an ‘inert and utopian integration, or achieved personhood’ (Wilkin-son, 2007: 145). What emerges out of the past and into the poem, in this essay, is in fact a very Kleinian ‘love and death tempo … snarled and hooked but ever resuming and urgently’, and yet it projects forward ‘the actual and tenderly enveloping day’, as if love and wholeness were finally


23

to emerge, with great imaginative difficulty and indeterminacy, from the see-saw of ambivalence (Wilkinson, 2007: 143). What should take prec-edence here? Where do we place negativity in the cycle of causation? Should it be theoretically included or excluded from the infant? And on which side of destruction does reality lie?

‘Saccades’, I would say, retrieves much more aggressive tendencies from the heart of psychic life than ‘Following the Poem’ allows (the violence in that essay is figured partly ‘outside’, via the historical expe-rience of Celan). ‘Healing’ cannot be figured in its universe, in its ob-ject world. In fact the kind of deeply displaced and non-communicative core of the person, around which one might construct a preserve of experienced wholeness, is something which ‘Saccades’ as ever antici-pates and ironizes: ‘Self knowledge / then is self seal’ (Wilkinson, 2003: 55); ‘pinged in its anacoustic space’ (Wilkinson, 2003: 19); ‘all collaps-ing in devolves to these shells’; ‘each validates his own imperious shade’ (Wilkinson, 2003: 48); ‘the tinnitus which attends to itself at the roots’.15 Wholeness, restoration, disinterested love and non-coercive piecing to-gether, is something that ‘Saccades’ intensely needs, but cannot yet find. It is too hungry and ambivalent. If there is a Winnicottian–Words-worthian child, which ‘skips from the corpse’, propping ‘a rainbow as prettily / diffracting’ (Wilkinson, 2003: 54), it is shadowed by the corpse of a baby which four pages earlier is ‘dragged from beside the park, mauled by flashlight dogs’ – perhaps our starved and visceral intelligence, vehi-cle for the ‘panting bronchial flames’ that billow from the inside. ‘Lay for a fuse’ and ‘Shut up and deal’ are the poem’s final injunctions, sandwich-ing the enigmatic name of a person (Wilkinson, 2003: 64).

The vehemence of ‘Saccades’, its aggressiveness, the poem as a reflector of and for negations, invoked destructiveness, makes it able to function effectively as political critique – a hyper-spleen, without the idéal, to serv-ice the toxic body of the new millennium. But to turn the poem into critique means forcing it towards an absolutism, an explicit communica-tion, that the poem also dramatizes as a root problem, because that would eviscerate the aesthetic of its inadmissible, non-communicative, intima-cies, its reserved psychic and corporeal hinterland. Political readings, and therapeutic ones – that in terms of the subject’s unsymbolized past, feel-ing its way beyond trauma via slow and unidentifiable mutations – would seem at any rate to traduce each other. And perhaps these dimensions of experience cannot be made to coincide, though they merge as points of reference in the poem, and cannot be clearly demarcated from each other. Ultimately, and ironically, object relations gives us no angle on, and little anger against, the commercial object world so remorselessly chewed over and expelled in the poem, but from which object relations theory so care-fully detaches the interior core of the person. Bollas, in his latest book,


24

reflects on the way associations gather round tangible objects, commodi-ties, which appear, for him, to exist in a neutral space – devoid of anxiety, devoid of labour. He finds evocative and ambient normality by wander-ing through department stores: ‘I love the kitchen sections. Even when I do not need to buy anything, I enjoy the sight and feel of the hefty food processors, or the frivolous popcorn makers’ (Bollas, 2009: 80). The theory touches base in a world for which ‘Saccades’ is the anti-matter. At some point, this aesthetics must endure an awful rending. Perhaps the poem registers this.

Where do we stop this poem? Where does it end? It should be clear by now that one cannot just end at the end of the poem or complete it – ‘Lyric won’t come to the point’ (Wilkinson, 1992: 160). Neither do I think it contains a prior text of experience in scrambled form to be reconstructed or decoded. The processes of affirmation and destruction within it are obscure and spontaneous and self-renewing and deceptive. ‘Saccades’ is a poem that is ambivalent, and ambiguous about that am-bivalence, and possibly even ambivalent about that ambiguity. ‘Inside-out each lining then goes visible, despair & smiles / honeycombed through-out’ (Wilkinson, 2003: 50). Perhaps that’s how a block of mourning can be porous – because it can be a resolution, a transition, an obstacle from the past, a modification of the future, an unidentifiable feeling, depend-ing on the dimension you pursue, or on what you are able to imagine. It ‘glints covariantly’. In ‘Following the Poem’, Wilkinson lights on a phrase of Celan’s – ‘stood firm / in the midst, a / framework of pores’ – and suggests the framework of pores is a ‘we’: the pores proclaim our perme-ability, a ‘porous human universe’ (Wilkinson, 2007: 201); a place, then, in which we might actually live.

Perhaps, what would determine whether particular passages are com-prehended or left unfinished, or links made or broken, or experienced as an erotics, a prosody, or a way of making meaning, would depend on what one is always looking for – on compulsions within the reader, on object relations. If this was an analytic session (rather than an aesthetic-critical one) the work of resolving the many competing domains and tendencies of the language surface – its points of opacity, frustration, arousal – into something more thinkable, would be the work of the analytic session. It would depend on the limits arrived at and finally wanted, or disputed, by analyst and analysand. But, for all its origins in psychological moments, this is a poem, not a patient with a psyche. And this massively opens up the project of meaning-making, and the ways in which that meaning can be formally and informally developed, as well as the kinds of commitments one can make to construing that meaning and its implications publicly. I find this poem enduringly interesting, exciting, disturbing and compel-ling. Phrase by phrase it eludes its own reference frames. It glides very


25

complexly through dimensions of instinct and consumption, administra-tive drives and the sexual gaze, and various ways of suffering experience without understanding it. And it keeps moving, incredibly deftly, without yielding any composed or reassuring ‘idea of myself ’. What it offers in-stead is a field of ambiguous, mobile, pliable transitions – stressed with the sense of social catastrophe; but also with pathos; and with the refusal of pathos; and with a kind of aesthetic grace and an equally lyrical vio-lence. We find ourselves in the midst of a small cosmos, that writhes and breathes, that prods and pains, and invites and frustrates and liberates and crumbles beneath us, and perhaps even informs us – it informs us of the complexity of the world and the objects we live in.

Notes

All from a single page of ‘Saccades’, 1 Contrivances (Wilkinson, 2003: 50).‘Mouthing Off ’ (Wilkinson, 2007: 169). According to Drew Milne, Wilkin-2 son’s writing develops ‘a texture of poetic fragments within larger language frames and serial patterns’, but ‘sustained reading of the book as a “whole”… cannot quite take the book as a “whole”’, ‘Preface’ to the re-edition of Proud Flesh (Wilkinson, 2005: xi–xii). For Andrea Brady (1999) on Reverses, ‘the poems’ cross-logic, their book-logic, refuses to unfold; individual poems seem dispersed into the thousand possible tiny objects and arrangements of a writing spree’.See, for instance, the various references to Klein, Winnicott and also Bollas 3 indexed in Wilkinson (2007).Compare, ‘The dream-creatures are the matrix from which the self has been 4 born’, in a discussion of John Wieners’ ‘Billie’ (Wilkinson, 2007: 158).Also included in 5 Contrivances (Wilkinson, 2003).One might compare this subversion of the satisfactions of subjective ‘voice’ 6 with Wilkinson’s criticism of the alternative idea that ‘I am my body’, which ‘introduces another mystification, a short cut to unity’ (Wilkinson, 2007: 207).Robert Potts, 7 The Guardian, Sat 19 Oct 2002, ‘Some of Wilkinson’s poems still seem to me like white noise, like information rapidly and promiscuously flooding my attention’; and Andrew Duncan, ‘Proud Flesh (published 1986) is white all-over noise, as far as I am concerned’, in ‘Wilko’ (unpublished review), http://www.pinko.org/17.html.

See also Mark Mendoza, ‘Signs of an Intruder: Reading ‘Contrivances’ by 8 John Wilkinson’, Shearsman, 58: ‘Searching contextual clues in the dense im-pactive effects of these poems, we are left baffled, bemused, looking askance at the ‘still-piercing air’. http://www.shearsman.com/pages/magazine/back_issues/shearsman58/mendoza_wilk.html.Compare the similar transition from eye to mouth and ragged lip: ‘seeing is 9


26

what seeing does & the tongue furls like a tulip’ (Wilkinson, 2003: 24).Compare ‘All I want to do now, by reading these poems, is to ask you to con-10

sider their oral unity or incoherence’ (Wilkinson, 2007: 169).A remark Wilkinson (2007: 32) made in relation to the recent poetry of J. H. 11

Prynne.‘Prynne’s attack on body sentimentality has been remorseless’ (Wilkinson, 12

2007: 31).cf. Drew Milne’s comment that Wilkinson’s texts appear ‘both to affirm and 13

to undermine the centrality of lyric impulses’ (Wilkinson, 2005: xiii).Bollas is drawing partly on the aesthetic theory set out in Murray Krieger’s 14

(1976) Theory of Criticism.Compare ‘Imperfect Pitch’ on ‘the fantasy of the independent source’ which 15

‘complements an achieved inner numbness’.

References

Abraham, Karl (1927) Selected Papers on Psycho-Analysis. London: Hogarth Press.

Bollas, Christopher (1987) The Shadow of the Object. London: Free Association Books.

Bollas, Christopher (1993) ‘The Aesthetic Moment and the Search For Moment Transformation’, in Peter L. Rudnytsky (ed,) Transitional Objects and Potential Spaces: Literary Uses of D. W. Winnicott. New York: Columbia University Press.

Bollas, Christopher (2009) The Evocative Object World. Hove: Routledge.Brady, Andrea (1999) ‘Brief notes on Reverses’, Jacket 9(October), http://

jacketmagazine.com/09/brady-r-wilk.htmlBritton, Ronald (1998) Belief and Imagination. London: Routledge.Duncan, Andrew (n.d) ‘Wilko’, http://www.pinko.org/17.htmlffytche, Matt (2008a) ‘John Wilkinson: The Long Poem as Part Object’, paper

presented at Long Poems: Major Forms, University of Sussex, 16–17 May.

ffytche, Matt (2008b) ‘What Could a Psychoanalytic Poetry Mean? Eyes, Cries and Object Relations in the Work of John Wilkinson’, paper presented at Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies, University of Essex, 13 November.

Hinshelwood, R.D. A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought (London: Free Association Books: 1989).

Jacobus, Mary (2005) The Poetics of Psychoanalysis in the Wake of Klein. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jones, Ernest (1953–7) The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 3 vols. New York: Basic Books.

Krieger, Murray (1976) Theory of Criticism. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.


27

Mendoza, Mark (2004) ‘Signs of an Intruder: Reading Contrivances by John Wilkinson’, Shearsman 58, http://www.shearsman.com/pages/magazine/back_issues/shearsman58/mendoza_wilk.html

Milner, Marion (1993) ‘The Role of Illusion in Symbol Formation’ (1955), in Peter Rudnytsky (ed.) Transitional Objects and Potential Spaces, pp. 14–39. New York: Columbia University Press.

Phillips, Adam (2001) ‘Best Books of the Year’, Observer (25 November).Phillips, Adam (n.d.) Unpublished endorsement of John Wilkinson cited on

the publishers web-page for Proud Flesh, http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/smp/1844710653.htm.

Potts, Robert (2002) ‘The Space Between the Halves’, Guardian (19 October).Riviere, Joan (1952) ‘The Unconscious Phantasy of an Inner World Reflected in

Examples from English Literature’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 33: 160–172.

Royce, Josiah (1913) The Problem of Christianity, two vols. New York: Macmillan.

Rudnytsky, Peter L. (1991) The Psychoanalytic Vocation (New Haven: Yale University Press.

Rudnytsky, Peter L. (ed.) (1993) Transitional Objects and Potential Spaces (New York: Columbia University Press.

Sutherland, Keston (2008) Hot White Andy. London: Barque.Wilkinson, John (1992) ‘Imperfect Pitch’, in Denise Riley (ed.) Poets on Writing:

Britain, 1970-1991. Basingstoke: Macmillan.Wilkinson, John (2003) Contrivances. Cambridge: Salt.Wilkinson, John (2005) Proud Flesh, re-edition. Cambridge: Salt.Wilkinson, John (2007) The Lyric Touch: Essays on the Poetry of Excess. Cambridge:

Salt.Winnicott, D. W. (1990) The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment.

London: Karnac.Winnicott, D. W. (1991) ‘The Use of an Object and Relating Through

Identifications’, Playing and Reality. London: Routledge.Wordsworth, William (1926) The Prelude, edited by Ernest de Selincourt.

Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Matt ffytche is a Lecturer in the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex where he works on the history of psychoanalysis and theories of the unconscious. His book The Foundation of the Unconscious: Schelling, Freud and the Birth of the Modern Psyche is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. He has also published on the poetry of J.H. Prynne, George Oppen and Keston Sutherland and his book of poems What Fell Out in Life is issued by Barque Press.

Please address correspondence to: Matt ffytche, Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester CO4 3SQ, UK. [email: [email protected]]

Objects and How To Survive Them: Several Views of John Wilkinson's 'Saccades'

Documents

Transcript of Objects and How To Survive Them: Several Views of John Wilkinson's 'Saccades'