[ilds] Gifford's "Late Modernism's Migrations"

[James Gifford]

What kind comments, Bruce!  I wouldn't want to direct anyone's 
responses, but by way of explanation, I can add one piece:

On 2015-04-30 1:55 PM, Bruce Redwine wrote:
> James offers a very different take on the “Heraldic Universe”:  he looks
> at the “politicised context” of Durrell’s poetics (p. 11).  That has to
> do with Surrealism and Anarchism as they pertained to a small but
> interesting “network” of writers:  the Egyptians George Henein and
> Albert Cossery, Herbert Read and Henry Miller, along with others such as
> Robert Duncan, an American poet associated with the San Francisco
> literary scene in the 1940s and 50s.  James draws an analogy between the
> anti-authoritarian concerns of these writers (esp. their emphasis on
> individual freedom) and “Durrell’s resistance to the standardising of
> syntax and social unity implicit in a common syntax” (p. 12).  In other
> words, the obscurity of Durrell’s poetics, as expressed in his
> statements about the Heraldic Universe, owes something to the politics
> of anti-authoritarianism and its response to fascism, Nazism, and
> Communism.  James’s critical approach appears indebted to Marxism,
> possibly the Marxist critic Frederic Jameson, whom James cites in his
> monograph.

I actually work against Jameson quite a bit, but he is very much 
there...  The gist of what I mean about the Heraldic Universe comes from 
the edition of the Henry Miller / Herbert Read letters I put together 
(also partially republished in /Nexus/).  In essence, Durrell's first 
use of the term "Heraldic Universe" came in reaction to Read's 
discussion of communism and the 1936 London International Surrealist 
Exhibition, as well as Miller's anarchist critique of Read.  Read only 
publicly came out for anarchism a year later.

When Durrell's "Heraldic Universe" letter is set beside Read's and 
Miller's, it becomes obvious that it's a point by point response to 
Herbert Read's political commentary (this was how Miller set it when he 
transcribed it to send to Read).  Alas, that's not how it's been 
published in the Wickes and MacNiven editions (since without Read it's 
invisible), so that contextual puzzle piece has remained absent from the 
critical perspective.

When you set the letters side by side, it's explicit.

> I must say,
> however, that I find hard going unusual terms such as “desublimation,”
> “regressive desublimation,” and “interpellations” (p. 16).  I assume
> this terminology is part of current critical or psychoanalytic theory.

Sorry!  It's short hand...

"Desublimation" is the freeing up of some sublimated desire, such as 
releasing the sublimated aggression (or desire) one might have been 
redirecting or revising into exercise, art, or some other activities... 
  Herbert Marcuse argued that "desublimation" is not always freeing and 
can actually be used as a form of social control -- his specific 
critique was of the desublimation of sexual desire in the 1960s, which 
he saw as conducive to social manipulation rather than an increase in 
individual autonomy (via the satisfaction of such desires in media, the 
markets, etc.).

Interpellation is a tricky one from Althusser.  It's the ideological 
call that brings one into a particular form of social being.  Althusser 
used the call of a police officer as his specific example, but this is 
often generalized out in cultural studies to the kind of call 
advertising or propaganda might use, such as calling the subject as a 
heteronormative, white male, and thereby setting this up as a social 
norm (even for homosexual, black women, etc... -- for instance, what 
kind of "gaze" does the typical Hollywood film offer the audience, and 
does the position from which this gaze "gazes" run contrary to the 
audience members' actual lived identities).  It's an essentially 
ideological process.

> My question is exactly what the “unknown I” meant to Lawrence Durrell
> (assuming he himself knew).  James writes about Duncan:  “for Duncan the
> anti-egoic includes the notion that stabilising the ego, through the
> repressive desublimation of desire, is the same force that drives false
> consciousness or makes one desire one’s own repression” (p. 16).  This
> presumably applies to Durrell as well.  I’m not certain what this means,
> but it seems rather dark and sinister to me.  Hence, Duncan’s (and
> Durrell’s) emphasis on Africa and the allusion to Conradian “darkness,”
> however that may be taken.

One of Duncan's grand early poems is "Toward an African Elegy," in which 
"darkness" is very obviously racial.  The homoerotic content of the poem 
made John Crowe Ransom turn it down after accepting it for Kenyon Review 
(a famous event in Duncan's history).  In the dispute, Duncan argued it 
would be silly to say the "darkness" or unconscious (or "unbewusst" lit. 
"unknown") would be homosexual desire since he was quite consciously 
homosexual...  At the same time, Duncan didn't want to set this 
"unknown" (unbewusst, Freud's term for what we typically translate as 
"unconscious") under the authority of the superego.  He saw this as 
anti-ego or authoritarian.

Hence, the "unbewusst Ich" or the "unconscious ego" or the "unknown I." 
  That unknowability or protean nature resists the stability authority 
demands.

Duncan meanders around this in his H.D. Book (beautiful edition finally 
out a few years ago through the U California P collected works).

For Durrell, I see it as deeply tied to his discussion of the "unknown" 
in Miller (his Horizon article).  In much the same way as Duncan, I see 
Durrell arguing against this authoritarian control over the unknown 
(that is, making it "known"), in many respects allowing it to remain 
unknown, and thereby allowing for that previous, transitory, protean "I" 
to float along in between without being predetermined or contained.  In 
that antiauthoritarian sense, Duncan was quite clear in not wanting to 
stabilize (and thereby fix into place) the ego, and I see Durrell at 
this point in his career doing something much the same.

After all, in the later Durrell, the character "become one another"...

Thank-you for such a thoughtful response to the paper.  It was an early 
draft of what became a much shorter chapter section in /Personal 
Modernisms/ -- it was supposed to come out before the book, but the 
journal had other things in mind, and I was also able to add some new 
materials that were too late for the book.

People may disagree with me quite a bit on the interpretations, but I 
think the two take away points that ought to urge some rethinking are 
the "Heraldic Universe" in relation to communism and anarchism, and the 
role Durrell played connecting Georges Henein and Albert Cossery to 
Robert Duncan and Henry Miller.  I see those as urgent areas to discuss 
for Durrell in the 1930s and 1940s.

All best,
James