When I was feeling my way into the art of blogging, one of my first posts was a short piece on The Mirror and the Lamp, M.H. Abrams’ critical masterpiece on modern poetics. Although poetics may seem like an arcane subject, what gives Abrams’ book enduring relevance is that he’s really writing about something bigger. He’s writing about how we communicate or, even before that, how we think. Abrams explores the two principal metaphors we have traditionally used to explain to ourselves how we communicate: the mirror and the lamp. Mimesis and expression. On one model, our writing reflects back to the world a view of itself. On the other model, our writing shines from within, giving expression to an inner reality. Shakespeare’s Hamlet (the play held up as a mirror to nature) is an example of the first. Coleridge’s Kubla Khan (the mighty pleasure dome shaped like a womb) is an example of the second. But—and this is the crux of his argument—whether we realize it or not, we use these metaphors as criteria to judge the merit of poetry and, more generally, of all writing (and all art for that matter). We consider how closely writing conforms to one or other of these models and judge it accordingly. For example, as parents, we apply a mimetic evaluation when we praise our five-year-old for getting the eyes right on mommy’s face, then we tack the crayon drawing to the fridge with magnets. Ten years later, we apply an expressive evaluation to the same child—now a teenager—whose poetic angst drips off the pages of high school English assignments.
Toward a new poetics
Abrams was writing in 1953 and a lot has happened since then. If he had been writing even ten years later, maybe a feminist perspective would have leaked into his text. He might have noted “mimetic masculinity” and “expressive femininity” and the fact that our poetics are not gender neutral. Had he been writing twenty-five years later, he might have hopped aboard the postmodern train, noting the contingent nature of our assumptions and offering up a deconstruction of our poetics. So, for example, he might examine the reality reflected in the mirror, challenging its fixity and suggesting, instead, that it is socially constructed. But if Abrams had been writing sixty years later, what would he have come up with?
A poetics for the 21st century deserves a new metaphor. I propose the iPad. In addition, a new poetics deserves a new adjective to describe its governing metaphor. In their time, the words ‘mimetic’ and ‘expressive’ served us well. Now, it’s time to give ‘authentic’ a place at the table. Let me say a little more about authenticity and how the iPad serves as a metaphor to describe what it means for a poetry to be authentic. Treat this as a timid toe-dip into waters that deserve a raw naked cannonball dive.
Authentic Poetry
At first blush, the authentic looks a lot like the expressive. When we first see the word, it suggests integrity, an inner truth that refuses to conform to the false demands of a false world. It suggests an absence of duplicity, a self-effacement, a childlike engagement with the world. An authentic poem is a wysiwyg (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) poem. The words provide a sense of immediacy between the reader and the poet, even if the poet has been dead for a hundred years.
However, when I use the word, I mean something different—something more. I’m not offering a prescriptive statement; this isn’t a manifesto declaring what I think a poem ought to be. Instead, I’m offering a descriptive statement, declaring my observations of what other people think a poem ought to be. It’s empirical. It’s a statement of what is the case. It’s like an anthropological report, documenting the attitudes of readers, critics and poets of the early 21st century.
A good poem is an authentic poem. An authentic poem is real. It’s sincere. It’s an honest representation of the stuff sloshing around inside the poet’s heart. Again, that sounds for all the world like the Romantic mush of Abram’s expressive lamp. In fact, we wouldn’t be able to tell the difference if we didn’t know where all this heartfelt stuff comes from. In the case of a Romantic poet, the stuff of a good poem comes from some innate quality, a natural refinement of the spirit. Even if the poem springs from an opium dream, as is supposed to have happened when Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan, it is nevertheless contingent upon some prior nobility that shines through the fog and transforms it.
We bear a nostalgia for Romanticism, but we can’t believe any more in the nobility of the human spirit. It is impossible to reconcile with all we’ve learned from neuropsychiatry and our daily dose of hi-def images from any one of half a dozen theatres of war. Instead, the stuff we hold in our hearts and which we shine forth in our poetry is stuff we have put there ourselves, and most of it, unwittingly.
Internalization
We are cultural sponges. We soak up Hollywood liberalism with its LiveAid concerts for the less fortunate and its celebrity adoptions, the postcolonial equivalent of Christianizing little brown babies. We get a lump in the throat as we watch socially awkward frumpy men and women stick it to smart-mouthed hosts while scoring major recording contracts and producing viral YouTube videos. We flex our ethical muscles when we text our votes to the producers of reality TV shows, punishing bad behaviour by voting contestants off the island.
The preceding paragraph comprises a string of cultural references. I expect most of you will get those cultural references. I also expect that most of you will engage in a kind of eye-rolling grimace, admitting an awareness of people like Susan Boyle and Simon Cowell, but hoping to distance yourselves from these icons du jour by feigning contempt for the banality of their contexts and the feelings they evoke.
We wring ourselves into a bucket, and while the water looks clear—compassion for the vulnerable, delight at unexpected talents, a desire for order in our moral universe—it smells a bit off. There are any number of ways we could describe this act of wringing ourselves out. We could call it being honest, or digging deep, or being true to our inner selves. But the disturbing fact remains: the water didn’t come from us; we soaked it up from somewhere else. The act of wringing it from ourselves creates the illusion that it comes from within, and this allows us our nostalgia for the Romantic ideal.
The iPad
If our poetics stood in relation to our culture as easily as a sponge to water, this would be a simple post. But it isn’t the sponge that acts as metaphor for a poetics of authenticity. We find our poetics in the illusion the sponge facilitates.
A sponge functions as a container. Like any container, it is indifferent to the water’s source. The water might come from a clear spring, a rusted faucet, or a sewer. This points to the reason why a sponge makes a poor metaphor for a poetics of authenticity. The notion of authenticity includes an element of judgment. It would never do to be indifferent like a sponge. By judgment, I don’t refer to concerns about the quality of the poem’s words, its musicality, the colour of its language, its playfulness, the skill of its execution. I refer, instead, to concerns about the quality of its poet (for which the poem is merely evidence). Is he the sort of man to dig deep into his pocket while watching a benefit concert for starving children in Ethiopia? Is she the sort of woman to be moved to tears when she discovers that a homely woman has a glorious voice? In the face of these questions, the iPad is mightier than the sponge.
As a metaphor for a poetics of authenticity, the iPad already has the advantage that in its technical specifications it can function both as a mirror and as a lamp. In addition, it can function as a sponge, soaking up gigabytes of cultural juices through 3G and wi-fi networks, wringing them into your lap as you ride the subway or sit on a park bench. But there are differences. Where the sponge is indifferent, the iPad is highly selective in the juices it soaks up. The sponge is a natural substance harvested from the sea while the iPad is a bizarre substance manufactured by the world’s largest media conglomerate. Much of the content which reaches the iPad comes pre-filtered at the source. Apps cannot display full frontal nudity, although they can advocate a cure for being gay.
It’s only a metaphor, of course. It’s a metaphor for the way poetry shines forth an inner light that has been irradiated by a light from a wider world, but has been irradiated along specific frequencies or, to stay true to this new metaphor, has drawn on content delivered from specific IP addresses and filtered to produce a certain tone. This is the tone of Apple and Oprah, of Rupert Murdoch and Amazon. This is the tone of authenticity: the paradoxical Romanticism of the 21st century: an inner light kindled from above, not stolen like Prometheus, but set ablaze by a Jovian arsonist with thunderbolts of cultural hegemony.
The ascendancy of the banal
The upshot of this post is simple: under the poetics of authenticity, almost all poetry becomes banal, even the good stuff. It doesn’t want to be banal; but it can’t help itself. Banality is invasive, like the zebra mussel, or better yet, like a virus—not an organic single-celled creature like the human immunodeficiency virus, but a coded creature that chews through your data. It arrives surreptitiously in your iPad, tumbling through your network like any other innocuous piece of data. You may not even notice. If it acts like malware, it will leave the functionality of your hardware intact but reveal personal data that you had never intended to disclose.
Maybe culture has always been invasive in this way, the tiniest incursions assaulting the whole body, turning it feverish and throwing it into convulsions. Maybe, but its DNA has mutated. The virus that attacks now does so with an intentionality that was never there before. Its invasions are more like the coded virus than its organic namesake; we can identify a creator and we can detect the motive for the creation. When a virus infects an iPad, the motive is usually money. The same holds true of today’s culture. Hundreds of years ago, cultural movements like the Reformation and the Enlightenment took hold without an obvious cause and spread organically. Today, the cultural movement we describe as globalization is often assumed in discussions of economic globalization, and although such discussions often carry with them a triumphalist tone, as if a universal and unified culture were the planet’s divinely ordained destiny, there is nothing divine about the wills that manipulate events to bring about this end. They are intentional and orchestrated in ways that present culture as an effete adjunct to robust economic goals.
Some may argue that this is nothing new. The cultural torchbearers of our colonial past—its missionaries—committed the early salvos in conquests which were motivated by the demand for precious metals and other resources. How has anything changed? Quite simply: missionaries believed that what they did had something to do with God, quite apart from the wealth their activities won. Today, the West’s cultural torchbearers have internalized the values of their “secular” counterparts (call them corporate conquistadors if you like) and so their motivations are indistinguishable. An entertainer like David Bowie issues personal bonds while a capitalist like Steve Jobs performs at his company’s AGM.
We don’t know how to think anymore about our cultural activities without drawing upon the language of our economic life. To consider the merit of a poem, we ask: What is its value? We speak of its worth. Where once, visual artists had religious patrons, today, almost all visual artists work in some aspect of marketing, and so the artist cannot help but adopt the goals (and the language) of the entrepreneur. In time, as the application of economic language hardens, its metaphorical roots disappear. We forget that early discussions of a novel’s worth concerned something numinous, and so we go on, without missing a beat, to discuss its marketability, its sales.
Traditional criteria continue to have a role in the discussion; we haven’t forgotten our mirrors and lamps. But talk of distribution and market penetration have elbowed them aside. There is nothing inherently wrong with talk of distribution and market penetration, just as there is nothing inherently wrong with HIV. But live with it long enough and the compromises it wreaks will leave the body vulnerable to other infections. We swallow our international treaties and trade liberalization and economic Darwinism as if we can absorb these things into our bloodstream without affecting our art. But it isn’t true. We see the cancer work its way into our language: the code words of an ideology dropping like spittle with every breath, and a hateful polarization leaking from our spleen. We have come to accept it with a surprising complacency. At times we even forget that things were once different and we embrace our disease.
When we encounter a fresh work, we ask of it, not how closely it mirrors the world, nor how brilliantly it shines forth the artist’s light, but how closely it mirrors the world our artist has swallowed: it must be marketable; it must fit tightly inside the cellophane; and above all, it must not offend, unless, of course, giving offense is part of a calculated marketing strategy.