4 - Speech against Power, or Poetry, Love, and Revolution: “A”-9
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2020
Summary
Abstract
This chapter analyses Louis Zukofsky's poem “A”-9 from his major work “A”, a poem published in two parts over eight years. Like the film Moses and Aaron, Zukofsky's work consists of verbatim quotations of pre-existing texts—Karl Marx's Capital and Value, Price and Profit, H. Stanley Allen's Electrons and Waves: An Introduction to Atomic Physics, and Spinoza's Ethics and botanical writings—which are applied to a complex and pre-existing poetic structure, Guido Cavalcanti's “Donna mi priega”. The chapter examines the publication history of the poem as well as the implications and difficulties of such a structure on the poem's reception, the continuities Zukofsky is suggesting by connecting Marx, Allen, and Spinoza, and the poem's politics. Furthermore, it deepens the comparison between Straub and Huillet's work in Moses and Aaron and in general and that of the Objectivists.
Keywords: “A”-9, Zukofsky, Straub-Huillet, Objectivism
“Where there is life, there is soul. Wherever there is soul, there is mind. […] Nothing in the world is devoid of life.”
– Pico della Mirandola“At that time, a tragedy was written with less effort than quarries used to cut cobblestones out of the rocks in Fontainebleau.”
– Théodore de BanvilleThe opposition of Moses and Aaron is not false, but it plays out on a common stage with a shared frame and rules, whose gap will not be crossed. This may be the stage of tragedy: a third term is on the edge of it, a pivot and concern. Tragedy implies a certain state of this axis, an unstable balance or shift: double, choir and people, two tempos never to be confused. Dangerous twists are produced, substitutions as exciting and surprising as in a game of three-card Monte or Catholic theology. The third term—the one hidden by the title beneath the comfort of a duality—is both unique and triple: God, the people, and nothing. And it is possible that the victory will ultimately be for nothing. The threat is to be conjured—a fine word: exorcism or sedition.
In La Fleur inverse, Jacques Roubaud describes another dichotomy that is also disturbed by nothingness: the dichotomy among troubadours between trobar clus and trobar leu.
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- Information
- Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub'Objectivists' in Cinema, pp. 127 - 148Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020