Saturday, August 05, 2006
(1:58 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Close Reading
In honor of Scott E. Kaufman, I'm going to do a little bit of impromptu "close reading," perhaps more "reader response" than strictly "New Critical." I consider myself to be very good at this activity, and I will prove it by choosing one of the most difficult poems I've ever read, which coincidentally was just e-mailed to me by someone named "friedman@tagsite.com" (line numbers added by me):and Im an admiral, even a temporary one. 1This poem documents one man's struggle to maintain lucidity in a sea of confusion. The thread running through every stanza is the juxtaposition of ideas related to clarity or full consciousness with ideas related to the passage of time, which inevitably -- and often quite suddenly -- disrupts the speaker's feeling of self-presence.
was finding this retarded planet more than she had 2
would have penetrated it by now. With this realization 3
stimulants, but I was still groggy from the banging 4
but clearly. 5
through the files and found them most interesting. 6
reorientation, lobotomyor just plain firing squad? 7
finding Angelina I do believe I could have had the time 8
The poem begins in medias res, with an uncapitalized "and." The dropped apostrophe in "Im" represents the speaker's hurried stumbling to take advantage of his feelings of self-control, symbolized by the rank of "admiral." The speaker wishes to command vessels sailing smoothly over the sea -- the sea here being only implicitly referred to, as the speaker does not want to face the chaos it represents for him -- but equally recognizes that his command post is only "temporary." The usage of "even" in this line is in line with the more archaic emphatic use of this word in the King James Bible and other early modern English literature, setting up the speaker's masterful use of bathos. One would expect "I am an admiral, even a commander of ships" or something similar, but instead one gets, "Im an admiral, even a temporary one." The reader is prompted to supply an "if" and reverse the phrases, producing "Even if a temporary one, I am (nevertheless) an admiral" -- the speaker's choice of word order and phrasing here betray a surface level defiance, which is nonetheless shot through with insecurity.
After several lines of blank space, we get two enigmatic lines, apparently cut from the middle of two separate sentences. The first line contains various indications of extended time: the continuous "was finding" (as opposed to the completed "found"), as well as this "retarded planet," which seems to represent not so much a slur against the mentally disabled as a desire to linger over the feeling of wholeness symbolized by the planet. "More than she had," though perhaps continuing with a past participle or direct object in its original context, here indicates that the speaker "was finding" "more than she had [found]," asserting a competitive streak to match the obvious desire for control in the first line. Line three has our speaker combines the motifs of command and conquest, refering to "penetrating," but objectifying the woman of line two into an "it" -- yet despite his desperate self-assertion, the enigmatic "realization" is gone as soon as it appears, and is separated by a full stop from his brutal attempt at subjecting the woman (and thereby both the "sea" of confusion of which he was temporary admiral and the "retarted planet"). "Penetrating it" comes to appear as a helpless acting out.
The next two lines again present two excisions, presumably from separate sections, but here they are even more closely connected. Having turned to stimulants, the speaker nonetheless finds himself "still groggy." "The banging" here could represent either the act of sexual violence perpetrated in line three or a "banging head-ache" -- or perhaps both. The "but clearly" of line five is meant to modify the act of "banging" itself. The speaker wishes to connect clarity to his act of violent self-assertion, but it is disconnected by a line break, as previously it was separated by punctuation.
The final stanza shows some degree of repentance in our speaker. Line six reverses the previous patterns of exaggeration -- the speaker is content to show himself as an ordinary office worker looking through files and discussing with his coworkers. Line seven shows a certain understanding of the consequences of his acts: "reorientation" represents, on the one hand, simple conversion, but also hints at worries about his sexual potency (leading the reader to wonder if, as in American Psycho, the speaker's acts of terrible violence were mere fantasy). The elision of the space between "lobotomy" and "or" represents an attempt to inscribe his madness within his snippet of rational discourse and at the same time to shove it aside -- not only by quickly moving on to the "or," but also by representing his madness as something that can be removed. Finally, the "just plain firing squad" continues the motif of normality introduced in the previous line, while also indicating that the speaker's (perhaps imagined) crimes were meant to elicit punishment -- that is, official recognition (albeit negative), tying back with his initial assertion that he is an "admiral." Now he has stepped down from his demands for the high honors associated with admiralty and is content to be recognized as a criminal, so long as he is recognized.
Just as lines six and seven refer to the first line, so the final line ("finding Angelina I do believe I could have had the time") refers to the second stanza. (In an interesting bit of chiasmus, the first line is treated at double its original length, where as the two-line stanza is condensed to one.) With the exception of the "planet," all the motifs of the second stanza are duplicated: finding, duration, and woman. The "planet" is implicitly replaced by "belief" -- instead of positing the clarity and unity he seeks as an outside object, the speaker emphatically refers to belief, implicitly in himself, ultimately in his own existence: the line should be read first as "I do believe I....," and only then as "I do believe I could have had the time." The woman who in the third stanza is objectified into an "it" is here replaced by Angelina ("little angel"), this time as the goal of a search rather than a competitor. He finds himself only in finding the other -- and yet the phrasing of this line as a hypothetical shows that it is perhaps too late for him.
Of course I make no claim to completeness -- this challenging poem rewards careful attention from a variety of perspectives.
